“Do you know who this man was?”
“Not a bad chap,” she said. “He said his name was Jim. Anyway, he let me have everything I wanted to drink, including the choice brands of Scotch. He took me where I wanted to go, and he paid the bills.”
“Know his last name?”
“I didn’t ask him his last name and he didn’t ask me mine. When you come right down to it I suppose he’s married and has a family, but he was on the loose for an evening, and I was stuck here in this burg and didn’t want to go to bed with the chickens, so we stepped out and...”
“Could you identify him if you saw him again?”
“Of course I could. I wasn’t blind. I’ll let a man pick me up once in a while if he appeals to me, but I don’t go out with every Tom, Dick, or Harry. In other words, I’m selective.”
“Did you say anything to him about losing your purse?”
She laughed, and said, “Don’t be silly. Why should I spoil a beautiful evening?”
“You mean casually mentioning that your purse had been stolen would have ruined a beautiful evening?”
She said, “I thought for a while you were going to be different, but I can see you’re not. You’re just a sweet, unsophisticated lad from a hick town.”
“What do you mean by that?”
She said, “Suppose you’d picked up a girl right after a movie. You take her out to a couple of night spots. You buy drinks and dance, and begin to look her over carefully, wondering just where she came from, just how sophisticated she is, and just how far she’ll go, and then she suddenly tells you that she hasn’t a cent in the world; that someone just stole her purse while she was sitting in the movie; that she’s lost sixteen hundred bucks in currency and six or seven hundred dollars in travelers’ checks. What happens? I’ll tell you what happens,” she went on, answering her own question. “The guy immediately thinks you’re a professional; that you’re taking a nice way of putting a price tag on yourself and he starts thinking in terms of cold hard cash, and from there on your evening is ruined any way you’ve a mind to take it.”
“Yes,” Selby said thoughtfully, “I can see your point.”
“I can get the travelers’ checks back,” she said. “They’ll replace them when I make an affidavit of loss. I won’t have to wait too long for that. I suppose the hotel will give me credit until then, under the circumstances — although they may get nasty. I don’t suppose I can use you as a reference?”
“Reference to what?”
“To the fact that I lost my purse.”
“The only way I know you lost your purse,” Selby said, “is because you’ve told me you’ve lost your purse. Why don’t you tell the management of the hotel the same story?”
“I can see the skeptical legal mind at work. I guess you’re the district attorney, all right. Oh, well, I’ve been on my own before. I can take it, I guess.”
“So you were out with a man whose name was Jim. You were out until four-thirty this morning. You don’t know his last name.”
“That’s right.”
“Nor the license of his car.”
“It was a slick convertible. I didn’t take the license number. I’m not that kind. Of course, if it had been serious, I’d have found out a little more about him. As it was, it was just an interlude helping pass yesterday into today, and reconciling me to the fact that I’d come to a place where they roll the sidewalks up and put them in mothballs at nine or ten o’clock at night.”
“Why did you come here?” Selby asked.
“I came here because I wanted to. I suppose, Mr. Selby, that if I’d really been murdered, that would have given you a legal right to have asked me a lot of questions which, under the circumstances, I wouldn’t have been in a position to answer.”
She smiled at her own joke.
“And in view of the fact that you haven’t been murdered?” Selby said.
“I certainly don’t have to let you invade the privacy of my bedroom to hold me to account for not having been murdered. And now, Mr. Douglas Selby, District Attorney of Madison County, if you’ll get the hell out of my bedroom, I feel the urge to take a shower, inasmuch as you have disrupted my night’s sleep.”
“But I want to know...”
“I daresay you do. I want to take a shower. I’ll see you later.”
“Look here,” Selby said, “is there anyone in town who can identify you, anyone whom you know?”
“Yes, but I hate to call on her.”
“Who?”
“She’s a girl I used to know. She’s married now. I don’t want to bother her.”
“What’s her name?”
“Her name’s Babe, but now she’s married to some attorney, a man by the name of... Let me see... I can’t recall it. I’ll have to look it up. Damn it, and that letter was in my purse, the one that was stolen.”
“What was her name before she was married?”
“Babe Harlan — that is, we called her Babe, but I guess her real name was Eleanor.”
“And you don’t know the name of the man she married?”
“Perhaps I can recall it after a while, but I’ve forgotten it. I don’t suppose you’d be a good scout and ask the hotel to okay my charges for a few days until I can make an affidavit on my lost travelers’ checks? I guess I’ll have breakfast sent up to the room and at least be that much ahead.”
Selby said, “Did you receive a wire from...?”
“Mr. Selby, I’ve told you that I’m going to get up out of bed and take a shower. I’m going to put on a robe and have breakfast in my room. I...”
“I’m interested in knowing whether you came here as a result of a wire you received.”
“You say you haven’t been married,” she said. “In about four seconds you’re going to learn a lot about the way a woman performs her toilette, because I’m going to get up and...”
“I want to know...”
“I presume,” she said, “this being a small town, the local inhabitants would be quite scandalized when the waiter who brings up my breakfast finds you sitting here tête-à-tête with a nude woman.”
“You’re not nude,” Selby said.
She flung back the covers. “But I’m going to be.”
Selby opened the door and walked out.
Mocking laughter followed him into the corridor.
9
Harry P. Elrod, reporter for “The Blade,” the evening paper which was bitterly hostile to the administration, was quite evidently enjoying himself. “My new publisher, Phillip L. Paden, asked me to extend greetings,” he said. “I understand he had a nice chat with the district attorney yesterday.”
Sheriff Brandon, unmistakably ill at ease, looked at his watch, and said, “We haven’t all day to sit here and swap talk with you, Elrod.”
Elrod grinned. “That means you have a live clue, Sheriff? You’ve already got a live corpse.”
“It means I’m busy.”
“Too busy to talk with the press.”
“We’re talking with you, aren’t we?”
“Do you mean to imply there’s some urgent development that...”
“It means we’re working on a murder case,” Brandon said, “and while we’re willing to play ball with the press, even a hostile paper represented by a...”
Selby interrupted suavely to say, “We’ll be glad to answer any questions we can, Elrod. We have several leads that we’re running down. We can’t tell whether any of them are what you might call hot leads until after we’ve investigated them.”
Elrod, a slender, sharp-tongued, skeptical bit of newspaper driftwood from the big city, turned his attention to Selby. His eyes sparkled shrewdly as he developed the background of what he knew was going to be the story of the year so far as The Blade was concerned.