“It’s precisely three weeks since I last saw Patty,” she said frigidly. “We are very old friends, Mr. Boyd. That is why I can judge her reactions, and what must be in back of them, with absolute accuracy. I guess I should congratulate you on already achieving one downfall?” “Old friends, eh?” I said, groping blindly for any straw. “The whole bit, like lunch twice a week and a movie the last Friday night of each month?”
“The whole bit!” she snapped. “We are very close, Mr. Boyd. I know almost as much about the internal working of Poolside Plastics as Patty knows about the internal workings of Elmo’s jewelry store!”
“How about that!” I babbled.
“How about getting up on your cloven hooves, so I can get out of this seat and go home?” she said savagely.
“Tamara, honey!” I pleaded. “You’ve got this thing all wrong—honest!”
“No,” she said grimly, “I’ve got this thing all right, and honest is the last word I’d use to describe it!” “You’re jumping to conclusions, doll,” I said, desperately. “Believe me, I don’t have any feelings toward Patty other than—”
“Are you going to let me out of here?” she said in a quiet voice that held undertones of frightening ferocity. “Or do I have to scream for the waiter and clobber you with my purse?”
“Okay,” I said bitterly. “If that’s the way you want it, but you’re making a big mistake!” 1 climbed wearily onto my feet.
“I made that in coming here in the first place!” she snapped, then brushed past me and walked toward the door at a fast clip.
By the time the paralysis wore off, she had disappeared out of sight. I ran like a maniac and caught up with her on the sidewalk outside the hotel, still walking at a furious pace.
“Tamara!” I yelped breathlessly. “Hold it a moment.” “Get away from me or I’ll call a cop!” she said crisp-
iy-
“Please, honey!” I grabbed her arm and forced her to stop for a moment. “Just answer me one question?”
“It had better be good.” Her foot tapped the sidewalk menacingly.
“If you know so much about the internal workings of Poolside, whose idea was it to hold the beauty contest?” She looked at me like I’d finally blown a hole clean through the top of my head, and maybe 1 had. “It was Patty’s idea,” she said. “She was very proud of it.”
“So whose idea was it to combine with Elmo’s jewelry store and use the tiara for publicizing the .contest?” Tamara smiled faintly. “That was Patty’s, too. Only this time she was cute and gave it to her own boss, Machin, to use as his own idea. I’d told her about Mr. Byers making the tiara two or three months before, and the day I mentioned he’d finished it, she suddenly got the idea of—”
“Thanks a lot,” I told her. “You’ve been a big help, Tamara, a big help!”
She looked at me blankly. “Where are you going now?” “I’m not sure,” I said honestly. “Maybe out of my mind.”
chapter ten
“Danny!” There was a delighted smile on Patty’s face as she opened the door of her apartment and saw me standing outside. “You have been quick! I only got here myself about fifteen minutes back. Did you bring Tam along with you. She peered hopefully over my shoulder. “She had other plans,” I snarled.
“Well”—she almost smirked—“I can’t say I’m sorry, darling. That means we can be alone, doesn’t it?”
I stepped past her into the apartment and she closed the door. “It’s stupid,” she chattered on as she led the way into the living room, “but I feel as if I’ve just come back from a long vacation or something, instead of just having been away for one night.”
I stopped for a moment in the center of the room and lit a cigarette, then started on a detailed inspection of the walls. Patty sat on the couch and decorously pulled her skirt down over her knees.
“Did you get your important business finished, darling?”
“I think so,” I said. “You know, I hadn’t realized what close friends you are with Tamara until we got to talking about it after you’d gone.”
“Ever since high school, Danny,” she said gaily.
“She figures she knows as much about Poolside as you do about the jewelry store,” 1 went on. "So just for a gag 103
I asked a couple of questions, to prove it. She scored a hundred per cent with both answers.”
“Sounds like fun.”
“It was a riot. Whose idea was the beauty contest, I asked, and right away she said it was yours.”
“I never told her that it was really Louise’s suggestion,” Patty said in a small voice. “I was so ashamed afterwards when Louise blackmailed Mr. Rutter into letting her enter.”
“Then I asked Tamara whose idea was the promotion gimmick using Elmo’s tiara,” I said. “Right away she told me it was yours, too. But you got real cute that time and gave it to your boss, Machin.”
The silence was just a fraction too long before she answered, her voice elaborately casual. “Tamara always exaggerates wildly, darling. I bet she thought she was being a loyal friend, giving me all the credit!”
“I didn’t have that feeling about it—more like she was telling the simple truth,” I said indifferently.
“Oh—Tam was notorious for it, even at school, darling. I remember once when the seniors were—what are you doing, Danny?”
“Looking for some unique works of art, honey,” I told her truthfully. “You must have saved something from the work you did in those two months at the art academy?” “Are you out of your mind?” she laughed uneasily. “I never had an art lesson in my whole life! Louise did, you said so yourself last night when Estell was here.”
I turned around and looked at her as she sat on the couch. She was sitting in a bolt upright position, her spine like a ramrod, her clasped hands folded neatly in her lap. Her lips parted in a smile, but the dark eyes were cold and watchful.
“A couple of things about last night worried me,” I said. “When I got to Byers’ apartment and Marty Estell was there waiting for me—with a corpse on his hands— how could he be so damned sure I’d be there? How could he be sure I’d get out of those straps in the first place?—or that I wouldn’t have called the cops right away instead of going out there myself.”
She shook her head gently. “I’m sorry, darling, but I don’t understand what it is you’re trying to say.”
“I’ll make it real simple,” I said patiently. “The one big danger to you was Willie Byers, and you wanted him put out of the way. Marty Estell was looking to avenge Louise, and get his hands on the tiara, so you argued that it must have been Willie who killed her, but Marty still wasn’t convinced. So you came up with the bright idea of having me prove it to him, but how could you get me to it? You had a sudden inspiration and rigged that whole scene in here last night. I fell for it just fine. With Pete Ungar playing the heavy about to subject you to indescribable torture, I spilled the whole thing, like how I was convinced it was Byers.
“The only thing was the bathroom scene, honey, when you got out of those straps a little too damned easy. Then you talked me into leaving you here to get a cab to the hotel—and once I’d gone you called Byers’ number, figuring Marty would have done the job by now, and you could tefi him I was on my way alone, and he should try and fake Byers’ death to look like suicide.”
“Danny!” She looked at me, horror-stricken. “It’s not true!”
“You must have hated your sister a hell of a lot,” I said soberly, “to want to destroy her the way you did. It wasn’t the tiara or the hope of whatever money you’d make out of its theft, was it? The only thing that ever mattered was the total destruction of Louise.”
She lifted one hand in front of her face as if to ward off a blow. “I think you’re insane!” she said thickly.
“Louise trying to blackmail Myra Rutter made no sense at all,” I said. “Until I remembered it was only a voice on the phone that said it was Louise calling. So it was awful easy to break up Louise’s affair with Rutter and get her fired at the same time, wasn’t it?”