“Why, yes,” Genevieve said, meeting my eyes.
I said to Daphne, “Then you knew it had been cleared up earlier?”
“Well — in a way. Nothing I could be sure about. It wasn’t until after I talked with Mr. Ruttling that I knew that — well, you know, that Mr. Ruttling understood it.”
“And when did you talk with him? What time?”
“This evening.”
“Who told you about the New Orleans matter having been cleaned up?”
“Why... why, I don’t know what right you have to cross-examine me on that.”
“Go on,” I said. “Who told you?”
“It’s none of your damn business.”
I looked across at Genevieve, to make certain she was going to get it. I said, “I tried to put a deal across for Daphne. I thought someone in the company might be making her the goat. I knew she wouldn’t get to first base if she went to the president of the company and reminded him that she was the little girl he had taken out in New Orleans on the sneak-away party. He’d brush her off, and tell her to go jump in the lake. Moreover, he’d undoubtedly have turned her over to the police.
“So I went to Ruttling’s house and told him my name was Sabin, that I was a private detective, that Daphne had kept a diary, that her account of what had happened that night when she went out with Ruttling would make very interesting reading, that I had the diary, and that a tabloid newspaper wanted it.”
Genevieve Hotling’s eyes were without expression. “You mean you blackmailed him?”
“You’re damned right I blackmailed him,” I said. “I put it up to him cold-turkey, the theory being that as long as he thought I had Daphne’s diary he would never permit her to be arrested by the New Orleans police on a six-thousand-dollar embezzlement charge.”
“I’m afraid I don’t get you,” Genevieve said.
I said, “It’s simple. No one would care a hang about Daphne Strate’s impressions of going out with her boss on a whoopee party in the French Quarter unless it was tied up with some news story. But if the company of which Ruttling was president had her arrested for embezzlement, and then, as she sobbed out her story of innocence, she referred to a diary she had, and the diary contained some very interesting statements concerning the evening she had spent with the president of the company — well, then it would be news. Do you get me?”
“I get you,” Genevieve said.
Daphne didn’t say anything.
I said, “Therefore, I thought that once I could impress upon Ruttling the fact that such a diary was in existence, he would see to it that nothing was done about apprehending Daphne. I thought he would telephone his New Orleans office, and the New Orleans police would drop the charge.”
Genevieve said, “You mean that you’re the one who’s responsible for Daphne’s exoneration?”
“What I was doing didn’t pan out. Do you know why not?”
“No.”
“Because,” I said, “your dear little friend Daphne sneaked out and telephoned Mr. Ruttling, telling him I was coming out there to see him, but that I didn’t have authority to speak for her. That she wanted to see him personally.”
“How you talk!” Daphne said.
I said, “I’ve been wondering about that ever since I went out there. Now I can put two and two together. The missing fact that I didn’t have is now in my hands and it all fits together to make a perfect picture.”
“I still don’t get it,” Genevieve said.
I said, “I went up to Ruttling’s house. I handed a good jolt to the servant who answered the door. That brought Whitney, Ruttling’s secretary. I handed it to Whitney straight from the shoulder. Whitney went back and told Ruttling. Ruttling was in a panic. He went to his office upstairs in the house and told Whitney to bring me up. Whitney came back to get me and bring me up. They kept me waiting for a few minutes in the outer office. Then, when I went inside Ruttling played with me as a cat plays with a mouse. What brought about the change?”
“Are you certain there was a change?” Genevieve asked.
“Of course, there was a change. Ruttling would never have left his dinner party and gone to his upstairs study to receive me unless he’d been badly frightened. Then something happened to make him get over being frightened. It was something Whitney didn’t know anything about until after he had taken me to the upstairs office. There’s only one thing it could have been. A telephone call.”
Daphne Strate said, “Listen, there are about two million telephone subscribers within a ten-mile radius and...”
I smiled at her. “And how many of them would be smart enough to sit up all night and fake a diary?”
“What do you mean?”
“You know what I mean. You put through a telephone call to Ruttling’s house. You’d been trying to get him off and on all day. You couldn’t get past the barrier of secretaries. But after I had gone and delivered my message to Whitney, and Whitney had in turn taken it to Ruttling, you telephoned, and Ruttling received the call with open arms. He talked with you on the telephone and asked you what you were trying to do, blackmailing him with a diary.”
“Phooey,” she said.
I said, “You are a quick-thinking little girl, Daphne. You listened to what Ruttling had to say, and he let the cat out of the bag. So you told Ruttling that you had the diary, that I didn’t have it; that he had nothing to worry about as long as he was your friend. You asked him if he didn’t remember how friendly you had been in New Orleans, and he handed you a nice little package of hooey over the telephone. You hung up, feeling very, very smart and very, very smug, leaving me holding the sack.”
After that, they let me in to see Ruttling. He was too shrewd to let me see that his attitude had changed while I’d been on the stairs. He talked with me at first as though he were interested, and then, all of a sudden, he changed his entire attitude, trying to make me think I had said the wrong thing somewhere along the line.
“You went down to a stationery store first thing in the morning, got yourself a neat-looking little diary and started in with January first, nineteen hundred and forty-three, faking entries. It didn’t make any difference what you put in the diary, because Ruttling didn’t have any way of checking up on you. Then you came to that fateful evening in New Orleans, when Ruttling had taken you out, and you really went to town. You had found out by that time that Ruttling was afraid of what you might put in the diary, so you confided everything to the diary, everything you could think of that had happened and perhaps something that only might have happened, didn’t you?”
“That’s a lie!”
“Then,” I said, “you began to do some more thinking. You learned that the New Orleans matter had been cleared up, that your name was vindicated. That left Ruttling in rather a peculiar position. As long as he had the threat of prosecution for embezzlement to hold over you, it was sort of a stalemate, but when that blew up, you had the supposedly genuine diary, and Ruttling had a headache. So you telephoned Ruttling again, and Ruttling suggested you come over there tonight. You went out and had a very satisfactory talk. You came back feeling like the two million dollars’ worth of champagne bubbles. Now suppose we see why.”
I made a quick grab for her purse, which lay on the table.
For a moment, she didn’t realize what I was doing, then she screamed and flung herself at me.
It was too late. I had the purse open. It was full of money.
I dumped it out on the table. “You little fool,” I said.