I nodded.
Dr. Alftmont shook out the match, handed me a cigarette, took one himself, and we both lit off the same match. He turned to her and said, “Mrs. Cool was at my office, dear. Mr. Lam didn’t come with her. He came—”
“On my own,” I interrupted.
Dr. Alftmont nodded.
The woman had kept her eyes on me in steady appraisal. She said, “Go ahead, Mr. Lam.”
I said to Doc Alftmont, “I presume Bertha Cool did most of the talking.”
He nodded.
I said, “Bertha wanted to convince you you were in a jam, so you’d kick through with some more money. Is that right?”
“Well,” he said, after a moment, “it amounted to that.”
“All right,” I said. “That’s her end of it. That’s taken care of. My end is to do the actual work. It’s up to me to get you out of this jam. I want you to talk with me.”
“What,” he asked, “do you want to talk about?”
“I want to know what you’re up against, and I want to know what I’m up against.”
He glanced at his wife.
She said, “I’m Vivian Carter. We have no children. We’re not married legally, although a ceremony was performed in Mexico about ten years ago.”
I said to Alftmont, “Tell me about that divorce case.”
“What about it?”
“All about it,” I said.
He placed the tips of his fingers together and said, “To begin with, my first wife, Mrs. Lintig, was swept into the hectic swirl of social change which came with the war. There was an emotional backwash which resulted in a breakdown of the conventions. There were—”
I held up my hand, palm outward, giving him a traffic officer’s stop signal, and said to the woman, “Suppose you tell me.”
She said, easily and naturally, “I was an office nurse for Dr. Lintig. I fell in love with him. He didn’t know anything about it. I made up my mind he’d never know. I was perfectly willing to let Amelia — Mrs. Lintig — have the position of wife and the affection of her husband. I asked only crumbs — the chance to be near him, and I kept very much in the background.”
Dr. Alftmont nodded vigorously.
“I wanted to serve him, to be where I could help. I was young and foolish. I know the answer to that one now, but I didn’t twenty-one years ago. Oakview was in the throes of a boom. New people were coming in. Money was plentiful. There was, as Charles has said, a period of hectic change. Amelia went for it in a big way. She started drinking heavily and became a leader of the younger set. The standards of that social set were different from anything which had ever been known before. There was drinking, petting, and — and brawling. Charles didn’t like it. Amelia did.
“Amelia started to play around. The doctor didn’t know that, but he was fed up. He told her he wanted a divorce. She agreed and asked him to get it on grounds of mental cruelty. He filed suit. Amelia didn’t play fair. She never did. She waited until I went to San Francisco on some business for the doctor, and then filed a cross-complaint naming me as co-respondent, apparently because she thought by beating him to the punch and hitting at me she could get all the doctor’s property, and marry the man with whom she was infatuated at the moment.”
“Who was that?” I asked.
Her glance asked permission of Dr. Alftmont.
He nodded. She said, “Steve Dunton, a young chap who was editing the Oakview Blade.”
I held expression from my face and asked, “Does he run it now?”
“I think so, yes. We’ve pretty much lost track of Oakview, but I believe he’s still there. His niece was working with him on the paper the last I heard.”
Dr. Alftmont said. “That was the niece who met me in the corridor of the apartment house, you know.”
I dropped ashes from my cigarette into an ash-tray, and said, “Go ahead.”
“At that time,” Mrs. Alftmont said, with just a trace of bitterness in her voice, “there had never been the slightest indiscretion, and Charles had no idea of how I felt towards him. I think Amelia was hardly herself. Her temperament, her irrational mode of living, and the liquor she was drinking made her exceedingly erratic.
“When she filed that cross-complaint, Charles rushed to San Francisco to explain things. I saw right away that he was in an awful spot. Oakview would seethe with gossip. The person who was really the most interested in Mrs. Lintig’s divorce was employed on the paper. He was going to see that any circumstances which could be tortured into evidence against Charles were given plenty of publicity. His trip to San Francisco was, of course, the worst move he could have made. At that, we would have returned and fought things out if it hadn’t been—” She became silent.
Dr. Alftmont said simply, “I made a discovery. As Amelia had developed those tendencies which were so distasteful to me, I had been gradually falling out of love with her and in love with Vivian. I made the discovery when I met Vivian in San Francisco. After that, I couldn’t go back, drag her name through the mud, and — well, we knew we loved each other then. We only wanted to be together. We were young. I wanted to go away and begin all over again. Probably it was foolish of me, although as events have turned out, it was for the best.
“I telephoned Amelia and asked her what she wanted. Her terms were simple. She wanted everything. She’d give me my freedom. I could clear out and begin all over again. I had some travellers’ cheques, several thousand dollars. She didn’t know about those. I’d been afraid of the boom activities of Oakview and had distrusted the bank.”
“Then what?” I asked.
He said, “That’s virtually all there is to it. I took her at her word. She said she’d go ahead and get the divorce, that I could change my name and start practicing somewhere else, that as soon as the decree was final, I could marry Vivian. I accepted her terms.”
“Do you know exactly what happened?” I asked.
“No,” he said. “I understand Amelia and Steve Dun-ton had a falling out. I don’t know. She left Oakview and vanished.”
“Why didn’t you quietly sue for a divorce somewhere else?” I asked.
“She found me,” he said. “I received a letter from her stating that she would never let me cast a mantle of respectability over Vivian, that if I ever tried to marry Vivian she would appear and make trouble, that if I ever filed a divorce suit she’d expose the whole thing — by that time, living with Vivian as man and wife, she could have made a perfect case — and a scandal.”
“She knew where you were?”
“Yes.”
“Why didn’t you go ahead anyway?”
“I couldn’t,” he said. “In the year that we had been living here as husband and wife. I had built up a fairly good practice among the respectable, conservative people. If it had come out that Vivian and I were living together without benefit of clergy, it would have been fatal.”
“Then what?” I asked.
“Years passed,” he said. “We heard nothing more. I tried to trace her and couldn’t. I felt certain that she’d either died or divorced me and remarried. Some ten years ago, Vivian and I quietly slipped across to Mexico and were married. I thought the ceremony would give her a legal standing in the event it should become necessary.”
“All right,” I said. “Tell me about the political angle.”
Dr. Alftmont said, “This city is standing in its own light. Our police force is corrupt. The city administration is honeycombed with graft. We have a wealthy city, good business, and a fine tourist trade. Those tourists are forced to nib elbows with every form of racket. The citizens were tired of it. They wanted a clean-up. I had been instrumental in getting some of the citizens organized. They insisted I should run for mayor. I thought that old scandal was dead and buried, so I agreed to run.”