"You're crazy," he said. He took a swallow of rum.
"Then it's up to you. If you tell them about Yeager and that room, they may find out who killed Maria sooner than I would. Mr. Wolfe and I. If you don't tell them, we'll find him, but I don't know how long it will take us. I want to make it clear: If her death had nothing to do with Yeager, it won't hamper the police any not to know about him and that room, so it wouldn't help to tell them. That's that. So the question is, what do you want to do if it did have something to do with Yeager? Do you want to tell the police about him and the house, and probably be charged with killing Yeager? Or do you want to leave it to Mr. Wolfe and me?"
"If we had gone away last night," Mrs. Perez said. "She didn't want to. If I had been strong enough - "
"Don't say that," he commanded her. "Don't say that!"
"It's true, Cesar." She got up and went and poured rum in his glass, and returned to the bed. She looked at me. "She never had anything with Mr. Yeager. She never spoke to him. She never was in that room. She knew nothing about all that, about him and the people that came."
"I don't believe it," I declared. "It's conceivable that an intelligent girl her age wouldn't be curious about what was going on in the house she lived in, but I don't believe it. Where was she Sunday night when you took Yeager's body out and put it in the hole?"
"She was in her bed asleep. This bed I'm sitting on."
"You thought she was. She had good ears. She heard me enter the house Tuesday evening. When I came down the hall the door to this room was open a crack and she was in here in the dark, looking at me through the crack."
"You're crazy," Perez said.
"Maria wouldn't do that," she said.
"But she did. I opened the door and we spoke, just a few words. Why shouldn't she do it? A beautiful, intelligent girl, not interested in what was happening in her own house? That's absurd. The point is this: If you're not going to tell the police about Yeager, if you're going to leave it to Mr. Wolfe and me, I've got to find out what she knew, and what she did or said, that made someone want to kill her. Unless I can do that there's no hope of getting anywhere. Obviously I won't get it from you. Have the police done any searching here?"
"Yes. In this room. The first one that came."
"Did he take anything?"
"No. He said he didn't."
"I was here," Perez said. "He didn't."
"Then if you're leaving it to us that comes first. I'll see if I can find something, first this room and then the others. Two can do it faster than one, so will you go up and tell that man to come - no. Better not. He already knows too much for his own good. What you two ought to do is go to bed, but I suppose you won't. Go to the kitchen and eat something. You don't want to be here while I'm looking. I'll have to take the bed apart. I'll have to go through all her things."
"It's no good," Mrs. Perez said. "I know everything she had. We don't want you to do that."
"Okay. Then Mr. Wolfe and I are out and the police are in. It won't be me looking, it will be a dozen of them, and they're very thorough, and you won't be here. You'll be under arrest."
"That don't matter now," Perez said. "Maybe I ought to be." He lifted the glass, and it nearly slipped from his fingers.
Mrs. Perez rose, went to the head of the bed, and pulled the coverlet back. "You'll see," she said. "Nothing."
An hour and a half later I had to admit she was right. I had inspected the mattress top and bottom, emptied the drawers, removing the items one by one, taken up the rug and examined every inch of the floor, removed everything from the closet and examined the walls with a flashlight, pulled the chest of drawers out and inspected the back, flipped through thirty books and a stack of magazines, removed the backing of four framed pictures - the complete routine. Nothing. I was much better acquainted with Maria than I had been when she was alive, but hadn't found the slightest hint that she knew or cared anything about Yeager, his guests, or the top floor.
Perez was no longer present. He had been in the way when I wanted to take up the rug, and by that time the rum had him nearly under. We had taken him to the next room and put him on the bed. Maria's bed was back in order, and her mother was sitting on it. I was standing by the door, rubbing my palms together, frowning around.
"I told you, nothing," she said. "Yeah. I heard you." I went to the chest and pulled out the bottom drawer.
"Not again," she said. "You are like my husband. Too stubborn."
"I wasn't stubborn enough with these drawers." I put it on the bed and began removing the contents. "I just looked at the bottoms underneath. I should have turned them over and tried them."
I put the empty drawer upside down on the floor, squatted, jiggled it up and down, and tried the edges of the bottom with the screwdriver blade of my knife. Saul Panzer had once found a valuable painting under a false bottom that had been fitted on the outside instead of the inside. This drawer didn't have one. When I put it back on the bed Mrs. Perez came and started replacing the contents, and I went and got the next drawer.
That was it, and I darned near missed it again. Finding nothing on the outside of the bottom, as I put the drawer back on the bed I took another look at the inside with the flashlight, and saw a tiny hole, just a pinprick, near a corner. The drawer bottoms were lined with a plastic material with a pattern, pink with red flowers, and the hole was in the center of one of the flowers. I got a safety pin from the tray on the table and stuck the point in the hole and pried, and the corner came up, but it was stiffer than any plastic would have been. After lifting it enough to get a finger under, I brought it on up and had it. The plastic had been pasted to a piece of cardboard that precisely fitted the bottom of the drawer, and underneath was a collection of objects which had been carefully arranged so there would be no bulges. Not only had Maria been intelligent, she had also been neat-handed.
Mrs. Perez, at my elbow, said something in Spanish and moved a hand, but I blocked it. "I have a right," she said, "my daughter."
"Nobody has a right," I said. "She was hiding it from you, wasn't she? The only right was hers, and she's dead. You can watch, but keep your hands off." I carried the drawer to the table and sat in the chair Perez had vacated.
Here's the inventory of Maria's private cache:
Five full-page advertisements of Continental Plastic Products taken from magazines.
Four labels from champagne bottles, Dom Perignon.
Three tear sheets from the financial pages of the Times, the stock-exchange price list of three different dates with a pencil mark at the Continental Plastic Products entries. The closing prices of CPP were 62 1/2, 61 5/8, and 66 3/4.
Two newspaper reproductions of photographs of Thomas G. Yeager.
A newspaper reproduction of a photograph of Thomas G. Yeager, Jr., and his bride, in their wedding togs.
A newspaper reproduction of a photograph of Mrs. Thomas G. Yeager, Sr., with three other women.
A full-page reproduction from a picture magazine of the photograph of the National Plastics Association banquet in the Churchill ballroom, of which I had seen a print in Lon Cohen's office Monday evening. The caption gave the names of the others on the stage with Yeager, including one of our clients, Benedict Aiken.
Three reproductions of photographs of Meg Duncan, two from magazines and one from a newspaper.
Thirty-one pencil sketches of women's heads, faces, some with hats and some without. They were on 5-by-8 sheets of white paper, of which there was a pad on Maria's table and two pads in a drawer. In the bottom left-hand corner of each sheet was a date. I am not an art expert, but they looked pretty good. From a quick run-through I guessed that there were not thirty-one different subjects; there were second and third tries of the same face, and maybe four or five. The dates went back nearly two years, and one of them was May 8, 1960. That was last Sunday. I gave the drawing a good long look. I had in my hand a promising candidate for a people's exhibit in a murder trial. Not Meg Duncan, and not Dinah Hough. It could be Julia McGee. When I realized that I was deciding it was Julia McGee I quit looking at it. One of the brain's most efficient departments is the one that turns possibilities into probabilities, and probabilities into facts.