In the exact center of the couch, Lorraine Hanlon sat with her knees pressed tightly together, her hands twisted in a large handkerchief. The long blond hair seemed damp and lifeless and painfully artificial in the dimness, and her coral-colored lips were starkly contrasted to the pinched whiteness of a softly round face. She would have been, in other circumstances, attractive in a faintly brassy, too-voluptuous way; hers was the kind of prettiness that would fade rapidly after thirty-five and the inevitable advent of poundage in all the wrong places.
Sheffield and the inspector named Dan were sitting quietly in the two overstuffed chairs, angled to face the couch. I stayed behind them, out of the way, and Eberhardt walked over and stood in front of the girl. She lifted her head to look at him, and there was a kind of dull fear in her violet-shadowed eyes. She had said nothing at all that I knew of since she had been taken into custody, but I had the feeling that she would not be uncooperative. The fear was too obviously strong in her.
Eberhardt said, “You’ve been put under arrest, Miss Hanlon, and it’s my duty to advise you of your personal rights.” He went on to do that, and concluded with, “Do you understand all of your rights as I’ve outlined them?”
In a small voice that was reminiscent of the librarian’s, she said, “Yes, I understand.”
“Are you willing, then, to answer questions without the presence of counsel?”
She sighed softly and nodded.
“All right, Miss Hanlon,” Eberhardt said. He rested one hip against the curved arm of the couch, and looked over at Sheffield; Sheffield had a note pad and a pencil poised on his right knee. “Suppose you tell us your story.”
“Where should I start?” dully, resignedly.
“Start with Kenneth,” Eberhardt said. “Or maybe you knew him as Paul Lockridge.”
“Yes,” Lorraine said, “Paul Lockridge.” There was bitterness mingled with the wooden resignation now — bitterness and something else, too, an emotion perhaps far more basic.
“How long did you know him?”
“About three weeks,” she said. “I met him one night in the Copper Penny, on Union Street. We had some drinks and he asked me out and I accepted. He was a very … very smooth guy. Do you know?”
“Yeah. What did he tell you about himself?”
“Not very much. He said he was from Cleveland or someplace like that in the Midwest, and that he was in San Francisco on business.”
“What kind of business?”
“He never told me.”
“Didn’t you ask him?”
“Sure, but he just made some joke about it being one of those things the world wasn’t quite ready for, and he’d got in on the ground floor. Or something like that.”
“And that’s all he confided in you?”
“About himself, yes,” Lorraine said. “I thought it was a little funny, you know? because he seemed like the kind of guy who would talk about himself a lot, but he always changed the subject when I asked him. He was … sort of mysterious and exciting. Do you know?”
Eberhardt nodded sourly and said, “You dated him regularly the past three weeks, is that right?”
“Yes.”
“Where did he live?”
“The Jack Tar Hotel.”
Eberhardt glanced briefly in my direction, and we were both thinking the same thing: the Jack Tar was a huge downtown hotel, catering to visiting businessmen, and the flow through there was heavy and constant. There was nothing particularly memorable about Lockridge, from the photo I had seen in the paper, and he would have blended perfectly, anonymously, into the milieu-just another average face in a thousand average faces a week. That seemed to explain why there had been no response as yet to the news media’s plea for assistance; he had apparently checked out of the Tar immediately prior to driving up into the San Bruno hills to the ransom drop, which also explained the suitcase he had had in the rented car. Registration cards are filed away quickly in a place like the Jack Tar, and if he had not used his name often, there was no reason why any of the clerks or bellboys would have remembered it.
Eberhardt said, “Where did you go when you went out with Lockridge?”
“Nightclubs, mostly. North Beach and over to Jack London Square in Oakland. Like that.”
“He had plenty of money, then.”
“He seemed to have.”
“Did you always go alone, just the two of you?”
“Yes.”
“Did he have any friends in the Bay Area that you know about?”
“I don’t think so.”
“He never mentioned anyone?”
“Well,” Lorraine said slowly, “just this cousin he said lived down the Peninsula.”
“What was this cousin’s name?”
“He didn’t say, but I think he must have been referring to what he was going to do-the kidnapping, I mean. I don’t think there really was a cousin.” A shudder passed through her, and she twisted the handkerchief into a tight rope between her trembling hands. Her eyes roamed Eberhardt’s face imploringly. “You’ve got to believe one thing: I didn’t know Paul was going to kidnap that little boy until after he’d already done it. I swear to God I didn’t; I wouldn’t have gotten mixed up in it if I had.”
Eberhardt tapped the stem of his pipe against his front teeth and said nothing for a long moment. Then: “What was his story to you in the beginning?”
“He … he said that this cousin of his had a little boy, and Paul was going to take care of him for a couple of days while the cousin went somewhere on a trip. But he said the boy was kind of a problem child and had this big imagination, and he was being punished on account of some kid’s trick he’d pulled. He was supposed to be locked up in his room.”
“And you believed all that?”
She looked at her quaking hands. “I … I wanted to believe him. He said we’d go away together, back East someplace. He said he was coming into a lot of money very soon.”
“Uh-huh,” Eberhardt said.
“It’s the truth, I swear it. He asked me if I would watch over the boy for a couple of days while he attended to some business, and just not to pay attention to what the boy said. He told me to go ahead and quit my job-I worked for this accounting firm as a secretary-and we’d leave as soon as the boy went home to the cousin. It seemed all right, it really did.”
“Who rented this house? Lockridge?”
“Yes, by telephone I think he said. But I didn’t even know about this place until Paul told me the night before he brought the boy.”
“Didn’t you think it was kind of odd? That he had rented a house when he was getting ready to leave the Bay Area? That he was living in a hotel instead of here if he’d had it all along?”
“Yes, a little. But I … liked Paul. I didn’t want anything to be wrong, don’t you see?”
“When did you decide something was wrong?”
“After he brought the boy here,” Lorraine said, “and locked him up in the bedroom so fast.”
“But you didn’t say anything to him then.”
“No.” She kept on twisting the handkerchief. “I did a lot of thinking that night, and I decided that maybe … maybe Paul had kidnapped the boy.”
“Why didn’t you call the authorities right then?”
“I wasn’t sure, that’s why. I wanted to ask Paul. But when I called the hotel, he wasn’t there. So I … I just waited.”
“And when he came the next day, what did you do?”
“I told him what I suspected.”
“Did he deny it?”
“At first he did, but then he just shrugged and admitted it. He said there was a lot of money involved, and some other considerations too, but that there were no risks and I shouldn’t worry.” She laughed humorlessly, bitterly. “No risks-and now he’s dead.”
Eberhardt said, “So you went along with him.”
“What could I do? I was already involved, wasn’t I? And he kept saying nothing could go wrong. I couldn’t … I couldn’t just sit down and call the police. Besides, I … oh, damn it, I loved him. I loved Paul Lockridge! I wanted to be with him, to live the way he said we would live, to have the things I’ve never had before. Do you see, do you know?”