“No, I mean apartment 309, the one where the body was found. There can’t be any doubt about it. I’ve gone over and over the thing in my mind.”
“Have you,” I asked, “given the district attorney’s office a written statement yet?”
“They’re preparing one. I’m to sign it late this afternoon.”
I said, “Come over here, Marian. I want to talk with you.” I patted the arm of my chair, and she came over and sat down. I slipped an arm around her waist and held her hand. “Want to do something for me?” I asked.
She said, “I’d do anything for you.”
I said, “This isn’t going to be easy.”
She said, “If it helps you, it’ll be easy.”
I said, “You’ll have to be darned clever to put this across and make it stick. You’ll have to keep your wits about you.”
“What is it?”
I said, “When you see the deputy district attorney this afternoon, tell him you’ve thought of something else.”
“What?”
“When you approached the apartment house the first time, before you’d gone in to see the manager and just as you were parking your car, you saw a man come out. He was six feet tall with broad shoulders. He had thick, black eyebrows and grey eyes that were close together. Because his face was so beefy, it made the close-set eyes more noticeable. It’s rather a flat face. There was a mole on the right cheek. He had a cleft chin, long arms and big hands, and he was walking very, very rapidly.”
“But, Donald, I can’t say that now after—”
“Yes, you can,” I interrupted. “You’ve been thinking this thing over. You’ve been trying to reconstruct it in your mind. You noticed this man at the time because he seemed to be in such a hurry, seemed to be almost running, and it was unusual to see a big man walking so rapidly. Then, of course, the mental shock of finding Evaline Harris chased a lot of things out of your memory. You had to go back and put events together bit by bit so they made a logical sequence.”
She said, “Why, that’s almost exactly what the deputy district attorney told me I’d have to do.”
I said, “Sure it is. They see lots of witnesses who have suffered mental shock, and they understand what has to be done.”
She said, “I don’t want to do that. It seems unfair. They’ve been so nice to me in the district attorney’s office — I’d have to change the story afterwards when I got on the witness stand. You wouldn’t want me to commit perjury, would you?”
I said, “Don’t you see, Marian? If you tell them this, it will give me more time. They don’t want you to sign that written statement until you have everything in it. If you sign it and then something else comes up, a smart criminal lawyer might trap you. He’d ask whether you’d signed a statement and ask you what was in it — demand that it be produced in court. For that reason the district attorney’s office doesn’t want to break the case until they’re sure you’ve thought of everything.”
“Then they’d incorporate this in that statement, and I’d have to sign it?”
“No. You wouldn’t have to sign it,” I said. “I need the time that can be gained while they’re making out a new statement, that’s all. If you sign that statement this afternoon, they’ll break the case tonight, but if you tell them this, they’ll dictate some more stuff to go in the statement and ask you to come back tomorrow to sign it.”
She hesitated.
I heaved an audible sigh and said, “Forget it, if it bothers you. I’m in a jam. I thought perhaps you could help me out. I didn’t realize how it would seem looking at it from your angle. I’ll work out something else.”
I got up and started for the door. I’d made two steps when I heard the sound of quick motion behind me, and her arms were around my neck. “No, no, don’t go away! Don’t be like that! Of course I’ll do it for you. I told you I would.”
I said, “I’m afraid you aren’t the type who could make it stick. You would get trapped somewhere.”
“Nonsense,” she said. “I can do it so naturally and easily that no one will ever suspect. Mr. Ellis likes me. I think he likes me a lot.”
“Do you like him?” I asked.
“He’s nice.”
I said, “If you could do it, Marian, it would be a big help to me.”
“When do I do it?”
“Right now,” I said. “Put on your things, get in a taxi, and go up to the district attorney’s office. Tell this deputy you’ve thought of something else, and tell him about this man. Tell him you thought he might want to put it in the statement.”
She said, “I’ll go right away. Will you come with me?”
“No. I want to keep out of the picture. Don’t say anything about me.”
She ran over to the dresser, patted her hair into place, touched up her lips with lipstick, patted a powder puff over her cheeks, and said, “I’ll go right now. Will you wait here until I get back?”
“Yes.”
“There are some magazines over there and—”
“Never mind the magazines,” I said. “I want to sleep.”
“All right. Donald, what’s happened to your nose? It’s bleeding.
I pulled a fresh handkerchief out of my pocket and said, “It got hurt. It’s been bleeding every hour or two since.”
“It looks all swollen and red — and sore.”
“It is swollen and red,” I said, “and the reason it looks sore is because it is sore.”
She laughed and said, “You must be hard to get along with. First it was a black eye, and now it’s a swollen nose.”
She perched a hat that looked like an inverted flower pot on one side of her head and slipped into a coat.
I said, “How about a taxi? Do you have a phone?”
“Oh, yes, but I can pick one up at the boulevard.”
“Better phone,” I said. “Then the cab will be here by the time you get downstairs.”
She phoned for a taxi, and I pulled up a chair to nut my feet on, and slid down into the cushions of the big chair in which I was sitting.
“Now let’s get this straight,” I said. “Just what are you going to do?”
“Why, tell them exactly what you told me to.”
“And you won’t break down in the middle of it, and get confused, and then when they start questioning you, tell them that you’re doing something someone told you to do, and then start bawling and tell them about me?”
“No, of course not.”
“How do you know you won’t?”
“Because I can lie when I have to.”
“Ever had any experience?” I asked.
“Lots.”
“Those were little fibs,” I said. “This is going to be different. You’ll be lying to a lawyer.”
She said, “No. Mr. Ellis will believe me. That’s what’s going to make it so hard, but he’ll have confidence in me. He’ll take anything I say as gospel truth. He’s awfully nice. I think he likes me, Donald.”
I said, “He may be nice, but he’s a lawyer. Once you arouse his suspicions, he’ll pounce on you like a terrier pouncing on a rat. Now what are you going to tell him?”
“That when I went to the apartment house the first time, I saw this other man coming out, that I hadn’t thought it was important before, but now I’ve been trying to think of everything, and there was something about this man — about the way he acted that aroused my suspicions.”
“What did he look like?”
“He was a big man with broad shoulders and thick bushy, black eyebrows. His eyes were sort of close together, and there was a cleft in his chin. There was a mole on one of his cheeks. I think it was the right.”
“What aroused your suspicions?”
“Well, you can’t exactly call it that. I noticed him at the time just because I thought there was something unusual about him. Then the shock of finding the body gave me such a mental jolt that it’s taken me some time to put things together again. I think this man just slipped my mind.”