Rebecca suddenly sucked in her breath as though she had been about to make some exclamatory statement.
Tragg turned to her. “Well?” he asked after a moment as she failed to speak.
Rebecca said, “I was just wondering if...”
“I don’t think Lieutenant Tragg is interested in any of your wild theories, Rebecca,” Mrs. Gentrie cautioned.
Tragg kept smiling affably. “What were you thinking, Miss Gentrie?”
“Well,” Rebecca said, “I suppose it’s nothing, but my darkroom door opens into the basement, and there’s a curtain hanging just inside that door, so that when you open the door to come into the darkroom, you don’t let light in.”
“You mean the curtain is far enough behind the door so you can open and close the door before you go through the curtain?” Tragg asked.
“That’s right.”
Tragg said, “It’s a very nice darkroom you have.”
Rebecca beamed with pride. “It has the finest equipment! And we’ve made it ourselves. I have a daylight enlarger, so I can use diffused daylight in enlarging my pictures and...”
“But there was something about the darkroom itself you were going to tell me?” Tragg asked.
“That’s right, there was.”
“What was it?”
“Well,” she said, “I had some cut film lying in a box on the darkroom shelf. I hadn’t developed some exposed film in the other plate holders, and I was going to put this new film in...”
Mrs. Gentrie interposed to say to Lieutenant Tragg, “She thinks that the officers were careless. They opened the door of her darkroom, and then pulled the curtain all the way back. That let light into the darkroom, and fogged...”
“No, that isn’t what I was going to say,” Rebecca said. “I’m quite capable of doing my own talking, thank you, Florence.”
“What were you going to say, Miss Gentrie?”
“Simply that those films might not have been fogged during the daytime by the police, but might have been fogged the night before by someone who struck a match. I found a burnt match stub on the floor of my darkroom. I thought at the time one of the officers had lit a cigarette, but I’m just wondering now if it mightn’t have been someone who was looking for something in my darkroom and struck a match. Lots and lots of people don’t realize that striking a match in a darkroom is just the same as turning on a light. It can cause just as much damage as though you’d switched on an electric light.”
Tragg said, “That’s very interesting. You keep a pretty fair stock of materials in your darkroom, Miss Gentrie?”
“Well, no, I don’t. I don’t have the money to buy them.”
“It’s rather an expensive pastime,” Mrs. Gentrie said.
“Well, you don’t need to talk. It pays its own way.”
“You do work for others?”
Rebecca said, “Occasionally.”
“A few of the neighbors,” Mrs. Gentrie supplemented.
“Not much developing and printing,” Rebecca said. “There’s no money in that, but I do do enlargements occasionally. I do wish I had enough money so I wasn’t always worrying about expense. I could really turn out marvelous work if I had enough money to get myself a little car so I could get out and...”
“She does very fine work,” Mrs. Gentrie explained to Tragg. “I’ve often told her that if she’d specialize in taking pictures of children and...”
“Children!” Rebecca flared. “That’s the mother complex of yours. You want pictures of the little darlings taken on their birthdays, pictures when they first put on long pants, pictures in their new suits. Those sort of pictures clutter up the house and don’t mean a blessed thing.”
“They mean a lot to Arthur and me,” Mrs. Gentrie said.
“Well, they mean nothing to me. They simply are a waste of good photographic material. You find family albums filled up with that sort of junk.” She turned to Lieutenant Tragg and said, “What I want are pictures of unusual cloud effects, of trees against the sky, of flowers. I could win prizes if I just had enough money to get myself a car and didn’t always have to use photographic material which had expired.”
“What do you mean by material that has expired?” Tragg asked.
“Oh, you know, films are only good while they’re fresh. They’ll keep for a certain length of time. You must have noticed that whenever you buy film, there’s an emulsion date on it.”
“You mean the little rubber-stamped date which says develop before a certain date?”
“That’s right,” Rebecca said.
“But you can use it after that date?”
“Oh, yes. It depends on the sort of care the film has had, the place where it’s been stored. You can use it very nicely for as much as six months after the expiration date, and if it’s been in a cool, dry place, you can use it for years afterwards.”
“And you buy this film and paper which has expired?” Tragg asked.
“That’s right. You can get it at certain places at a very great discount.”
Tragg thought that over for several moments, then said, “What happens, however, when it finally gets too old?”
“Well, then, of course, it does different things. Usually it fogs.”
Tragg said, “Then these films which were in the box were old films — that is, the expiration date had passed?”
“Yes.”
“And couldn’t the fact that the films had fogged been due to the age of the emulsion?”
“Well, I guess it could,” Rebecca said hesitatingly, “but I’ve never had any trouble before with films I’ve got from this particular source. This person handles only the best.”
“But they were fogged?”
“Oh, yes, very definitely.”
Tragg said, “That’s very interesting. But it’s rather a definite change of subject from the thing I was trying to impress upon Mrs. Gentrie. That is the fact that her son is in a very dangerous position. He’s seen fit to try and confuse the issues in a murder case. It’s quite possible that he’s protecting the guilty party.”
“I don’t know what makes you say things like that,” Mrs. Gentrie said indignantly. “Junior’s a good boy. He...”
“The reason I’m saying that,” Tragg interrupted firmly, “is that I’m satisfied your son is a good boy. I’m satisfied, however, that he’s very young, very romantic, and inclined to carry gallantry altogether too far. He’s trying to protect someone in a murder case, and that’s a particularly dangerous thing to do. Now I think your boy’s a mighty good kid, Mrs. Gentrie, but I think Opal Sunley is a woman who is older, more experienced, and knows her way around. I’m not satisfied the companionship would have been a good thing under any circumstances. And now that a murder has been perpetrated, I’m absolutely satisfied something about that companionship is causing your son to withhold information from us, and put himself in a very questionable position with the law.”
Mrs. Gentrie averted her eyes, said almost under her breath, her voice choking in a sob, “He wouldn’t do anything wrong.”
Tragg said, “That’s not it. If he doesn’t tell the truth, we’re going to take steps to get the truth. I felt I should come to you and talk frankly, since you’re so deeply concerned and so fond of him.”
Rebecca said, “You see how it is, Florence. You wouldn’t listen to me. I hope you’ll listen to the lieutenant. When a boy starts trying to conceal things from his own mother...”
“What did Junior ever try to conceal?” Mrs. Gentrie demanded angrily.
“Plenty,” Rebecca said with a disdainful sniff. “He and that girl started making all kinds of surreptitious dates. You know as well as I do they didn’t make them over the telephone. He never called her — at least not from here, and yet they were having their dates, dates he never told you about. I tried to warn you about it and...”