“Did he leave enough to make half of it, say, worth sending an innocent person to the gallows for?”
“He left about half a million, roughly; two hundred and fifty thousand dollars isn’t a mean inducement.”
“Do you think it would be enough for the first wife – from what you have seen of her?”
“Candidly, I do. She didn’t impress me as being a person of many very active scruples.”
“Where does this first wife live?” I asked.
“She’s staying at the Montgomery Hotel now. Her home is in Louisville, I believe. I don’t think you will gain anything by talking to her, however. She has retained Somerset, Somerset and Quill to represent her – a very reputable firm, by the way – and she’ll refer you to them. They will tell you nothing. But if there’s anything dishonest about her affairs – such as the concealing of Dr. Estep’s letter – I’m confident that Somerset, Somerset and Quill know nothing of it.”
“Can I talk to the second Mrs. Estep – your client?”
“Not at present, I’m afraid; though perhaps in a day or two. She is on the verge of collapse just now. She has always been delicate; and the shock of her husband’s death, followed by her own arrest and imprisonment, has been too much for her. She’s in the city jail, you know, held without bail. I’ve tried to have her transferred to the prisoner’s ward of the City Hospital, even; but the authorities seem to think that her illness is simply a ruse. I’m worried about her. She’s really in a critical condition.”
His voice was losing its calmness again, so I picked up my hat, said something about starting to work at once, and went out. I don’t like eloquence: if it isn’t effective enough to pierce your hide, it’s tiresome; and if it is effective enough, then it muddles your thoughts.
Two
I spent the next couple of hours questioning the Estep servants, to no great advantage. None of them had been near the front of the house at the time of the shooting, and none had seen Mrs. Estep immediately prior to her husband’s death.
After a lot of hunting, I located Lucy Coe, the nurse, in an apartment on Vallejo Street. She was a small, brisk, businesslike woman of thirty or so. She repeated what Vance Richmond had told me, and could add nothing to it.
That cleaned up the Estep end of the job; and I set out for the Montgomery Hotel, satisfied that my only hope for success – barring miracles, which usually don’t happen – lay in finding the letter that I believed Dr. Estep had written to his first wife.
My drag with the Montgomery Hotel management was pretty strong – strong enough to get me anything I wanted that wasn’t too far outside the law. So as soon as I got there, I hunted up Stacey, one of the assistant managers.
“This Mrs. Estep who’s registered here,” I asked, “what do you know about her?”
“Nothing, myself, but if you’ll wait a few minutes I’ll see what I can learn.”
The assistant manager was gone about ten minutes.
“No one seems to know much about her,” he told me when he came back. “I’ve questioned the telephone girls, bellboys, maids, clerks, and the house detective; but none of them could tell me much.
“She registered from Louisville, on the second of the month. She has never stopped here before, and she seems unfamiliar with the city – asks quite a few questions about how to get around. The mail clerks don’t remember handling any mail for her, nor do the girls on the switchboard have any record of phone calls for her.
“She keeps regular hours – usually goes out at ten or later in the morning, and gets in before midnight. She doesn’t seem to have any callers or friends.”
“Will you have her mail watched – let me know what postmarks and return addresses are on any letters she gets?”
“Certainly.”
“And have the girls on the switchboard put their ears up against any talking she does over the wire?”
“Yes.”
“Is she in her room now?”
“No, she went out a little while ago.”
“Fine! I’d like to go up and take a look at her stuff.”
Stacey looked sharply at me, and cleared his throat.
“Is it as-ah – important as all that? I want to give you all the assistance I can, but -“
“It’s this important,” I assured him, “that another woman’s life depends on what I can learn about this one.”
“All right!” he said. “I’ll tell the clerk to let us know if she comes in before we are through; and we’ll go right up.”
The woman’s room held two valises and a trunk, all unlocked, and containing not the least thing of importance – no letters – nothing. So little, in fact, that I was more than half convinced that she had expected her things to be searched.
Downstairs again, I planted myself in a comfortable chair within sight of the key-rack, and waited for a view of this first Mrs. Estep.
She came in at 11:15 that night. A large woman of forty-five or fifty, well-dressed, and carrying herself with an air of assurance. Her face was a little too hard as to mouth and chin, but not enough to be ugly. A capable-looking woman – a woman who would get what she went after.
Three
Eight o’clock was striking as I went into the Montgomery lobby the next morning and picked out a chair, this time within eye-range of the elevators.
At 10:30 Mrs. Estep left the hotel, with me in her wake. Her denial that a letter from her husband, written immediately before his death, had come to her didn’t fit in with the possibilities as I saw them. And a good motto for the detective business is, “When in doubt – shadow ‘em.”
After eating breakfast at a restaurant on O’Farrell Street, she turned toward the shopping district; and for a long, long time – though I suppose it was a lot shorter than it seemed to me – she led me through the most densely packed portions of the most crowded department stores she could find.
She didn’t buy anything, but she did a lot of thorough looking, with me muddling along behind her, trying to act like a little fat guy on an errand for his wife, while stout women bumped me and thin ones prodded me and all sorts got in my way and walked on my feet.
Finally, after I had sweated off a couple of pounds, she left the shopping district, and cut up through Union Square, walking along casually, as if out for a stroll.
Three-quarters way through, she turned abruptly, and retraced her steps, looking sharply at everyone she passed. I was on a bench, reading a stray page from a day-old newspaper, when she went by. She walked on down Post Street to Kearney, stopping every now and then to look – or to pretend to look – in store windows, while I ambled along sometimes behind her, sometimes almost by her side, and sometimes in front.
She was trying to check up the people around her, trying to determine whether she was being followed or not. But here, in the busy part of town, that gave me no cause for worry. On a less crowded street it might have been different, though not necessarily so.
There are four rules for shadowing: Keep behind your subject as much as possible; never try to hide from him; act in a natural manner no matter what happens; and never meet his eye. Obey them, and, except in unusual circumstances, shadowing is the easiest thing that a sleuth has to do.
Assured, after a while, that no one was following her, Mrs. Estep turned back toward Powell Street, and got into a taxicab at the St. Francis stand. I picked out a modest touring car from the rank of hire-cars along the Geary Street side of Union Square, and set out after her.