There was a peculiar sound at the door of the apartment, a rustling noise as though garments were brushing against it.
Butch looked at Slim who moved toward the door. His right hand streaked for the left lapel of his coat, but the blackjack that was looped around the wrist impeded the motion. The door banged open explosively, hitting the wall.
Detective Fred Nelson, looking over the sights of a .38, sized up the situation. “Okay, you punks,” he said, “that’ll be about all.”
He looked at Peggy, sitting there with the strip of tape across her lips. “I guess this time you were on the up and up,” he said. “You got sore and wouldn’t tell me where Bill Everett was living, but it happened one of the boys had done a routine check job on him because he is an ex-con.
“Now you guys line up against that wall, and keep your hands up. You can spend the night in a cell or on a marble slab, and it don’t make a damn bit of difference to me which it is.”
Peggy sat in Detective Fred Nelson’s office. Police Captain Farwell, whose eyes made no attempt to conceal respectful admiration, sat at one end of the big table. Don Kimberly sat at the other end. Nelson asked the questions.
Peggy felt like a tightrope walker, giving them step-by-step conclusions to get Kimberly off the hook of the murder charge; but she was faced with the necessity of glossing over certain clues that she and Kimberly had suppressed and of minimizing the clues Nelson had overlooked. There was no use in making Nelson look dumb before his superior.
“A woman,” Peggy explained, “naturally notices certain things a man would never see.”
“What things?” Nelson asked.
“Well, for instance, a matter of housekeeping.”
“Go ahead,” the Captain said.
“Well,” Peggy went on, choosing her words carefully, “you have to put yourself in the position of a murderer in order to understand how a murder is committed.”
Captain Farwell glanced at Detective Nelson. “It isn’t going to hurt you to listen to this with both ears.” he said.
Peggy said, “Let’s suppose I wanted to murder Stella Lynn by giving her a drink of poisoned whiskey. I’d have to make certain she drank the whiskey and I didn’t. So I’d poison my bottle of liquor and then go call on Stella so I could get rid of her liquor.
“Now, Stella might be fresh out of whiskey, or she might have a bottle that was half full or she might have a full bottle. She was going out on a date. She wouldn’t want to drink too much, and, of course, I wouldn’t want to drink much because I couldn’t afford to be drunk.”
“So what would you do?” Nelson asked, his eyes still cautious.
“Why,” Peggy said, “I’d make it a point to smash her bottle of whiskey so I’d have a good excuse to go out and get another one to take its place. Then I’d want to be sure Stella was the only one who drank out of that new bottle.”
“Go ahead,” the Captain said.
“Well, if you dropped the bottle on the living-room carpet, or on the kitchen floor, which had linoleum, it might not break, and then your murder plan would be out the window. There was only one place you could drop it — on the bathroom tiles.
“A man would have a lot of trouble working out a scheme by which he could take the bottle of liquor Stella had, carry it into the bathroom, and drop it — without the whole business seeming very strange. But a woman could do it easily.
“She’d run in while Stella was dressing. Stella would say to her, ‘I’m getting ready to go out on a date, but come in and talk to me anyway,’ and the woman would have all the chance in the world to carry the liquor to the bathroom, start to pour a drink, drop the bottle, and say, ‘Oh, dear, Stella. I’ve dropped your whiskey. You go right ahead with your dressing. I’ll run down, get another bottle, and then clean up this mess.’
“So the woman went to get the other bottle of whiskey — the bottle that had been poisoned and then resealed. She came back with the package, handed it to Stella, and said, ‘Now, Stella, you just go right ahead with your dressing and I’ll clean up this mess in the bathroom.’
“So she started picking up the pieces of glass, and Stella took the new bottle of whiskey. Stella being Stella, she simply had to open it, pour herself a good-sized drink, and toss it off.”
There was silence for several seconds, then Captain Farwell nodded slowly and again glanced at Nelson.
Nelson said almost defensively, “It’s a damned good theory, but where’s the proof?”
“The proof,” Peggy said, her eyes wide and innocent, “why, there’s plenty of proof. I looked carefully at the bathroom floor to see if there weren’t little pieces of glass that hadn’t been cleaned up. It’s awfully hard to clean up glass slivers, you know. Sure enough, there were several little pieces.”
Nelson took a deep breath.
“Yes,” he said, “we saw them.”
“And then, of course, the broken bottle that was out in the trash can in the back yard. You see, the whiskey had to be mopped up, and the murderer’s hands were sticky and they left a beautiful set of fingerprints on the broken bottle.”
“Where’s that bottle?” Captain Farwell asked.
Nelson’s eyes shifted.
“Oh, Mr. Nelson has it,” Peggy said quickly. “He’s got all the evidence, and it occurred to me that if Mr. Nelson would have his men comb the neighborhood thoroughly to see if someone didn’t leave a package at a nearby drug store or restaurant, or someplace around there where she could go back and get it, and they could identify that woman— Then, of course, there are the fingerprints.”
“Whose fingerprints are they?” Captain Farwell asked Nelson.
Peggy answered the question. “We’ll have to let Mr. Nelson finish the detail work before we know for sure, but they have to be those of Mrs. Bushnell.
“You see. we’ve established that Stella was killed by a woman. We know Bill Everett got Fran to try to arrange a sellout with the insurance company. His only point of contact was Frances, and her point of contact was Stella.
“And Fran was the only one who simply wouldn’t have dared to take that butterfly. If she had, Bill would have known she was so jealous of Stella that she used the opportunity to kill Stella instead of peddling the gems to the insurance company.
“She wrote me that anonymous letter telling me Kimberly and Stella were going to meet at the Royal Pheasant, then planted the poison in his darkroom—”
“How did she know I’d suggest a meeting at the Royal Pheasant?” Kimberly asked.
“She knew that was the most natural spot. Stella had told her she’d arrange a meeting, and Fran must have figured you’d say the Royal Pheasant. If you had named some other place Fran could have tipped me off. But you didn’t.”
Captain Farwell got to his feet. “Well,” he said, “the newspaper boys are out there yelling their heads off, wanting to get in and get some action. I don’t care what the details are, just so—” He paused and looked at Peggy, then looked at Don Kimberly. “Just so the department gets the credit for doing the damned fine job that it did.
“And on this murder,” Captain Farwell went on, “we’re sorry, Kimberly, that we had to take you into custody.”
“Oh, think nothing of it,” Kimberly said.
Captain Farwell left the room.
Peggy got to her feet. “Well,” she said, “we won’t be here when you’re talking with the newspapermen, Mr. Nelson. You can handle that. I’ll get you the broken whiskey bottle with the fingerprints on it. Of course, you understand that E. B. Halsey, president of the company, is very anxious to have a good press for the insurance company—”