“We’ll have lunch in half an hour, Hilda.” Betty accepted the bottles and passed one to the detective.
“Yes, Miss Betty.” And she vanished into the kitchen.
Betty started the bottle to her lips, and paused.
“Did you want a glass, Jack?”
“No. You should know I drink from the bottle. And my name isn’t Jack.”
“It is now, Jack.”
He groaned. “We’re back to that again!”
“You aren’t going to be allowed to forget it. Well, what’ve you been doing? I’ve had a busy morning.”
“So have I. Busier than hell. Thinking.”
“Oh? That’s interesting.” She pulled up another chair. “Sit down, be comfortable. Now tell me all about it.”
“I suppose,” he commented dryly, “that that’s an order, too.”
“Oh, don’t be stuffy. Of course it isn’t. But I’d like to know what you’ve been doing. And then I’ll tell you what I’ve been doing.”
“I’ve been thinking.”
“You said that.”
“I’ve been thinking about G-388,017. That’s Channy,” he added in explanation. She nodded, her eyes on his face. He continued. “Channy came upstairs to see me that morning and told me a story about wanting a divorce from his wife. He let me know that she was, uh... entertaining other men, and made it plain that I was to catch her in the act.”
“And you refused.”
“I refused. For what it was worth, I outlined my rather thin code of ethics. I’ve never gone in for that sort of work and I don’t intend to. I told him so. Sitting here, now, I realized that I told him exactly what he wanted to know. He wasn’t married — you said so. There wasn’t any woman for me to frame. He simply wanted to know what kind of a detective I was. Whether I was a straight guy or a louse.”
She nodded. “Don’t stop there.”
“If I turned out to be a louse, he would have looked elsewhere. But because I convinced him I was on the level, he decided on me. He would have come back to see me — shortly. I think there was something he wanted to tell me. I think he was in a jam and wanted my help in getting him out. But first, of course, he had to know if I could help him and keep my mouth shut about it afterwards — not bleed him for money.”
“I follow you. And then—?”
He focused his eyes on her. “I think you killed him because he was going to tell me about you.”
“O-h?” she murmured.
“Yes. And I’m ready to believe most of your story. I’m ready to believe that you — they — Channy and these others — had cooked up a plot to collect on insurance policies. You see, I once called upon a nice old lady who owned a cat and dog hospital. She was a very nice old lady who had never before heard the name Channy, except in the Old Country, of course. I believed her, right up until the moment I left her place.”
“And then...?”
“And then she said to me, ‘Good-bye, Mr. Horne. I’m sorry I couldn’t be more helpful.’”
“Is that unusual?”
“It is,” Horne answered, watching the girl narrowly, “when you have neglected to introduce yourself by name, have never before seen the nice old lady, and yet she knows your name.”
Her face was a mask. She said nothing.
“I’ve come to the conclusion,” Horne continued, watching her, “that someone else besides a redheaded girl has been keeping close tab on me. Someone who knew all about me before I called on her to find out if she knew a man named Channy.”
Betty said slowly, “You gave me a bad time yesterday.”
“I did?”
“You talked to her about a redheaded girl. You identified me. That brought everything to a head — last night.”
Horne sank back in the chair. So there it was.
“Who’s the remaining member?” he asked. “Tell me about Papa.”
She shook her head, avoiding his eyes.
“Where’d you pick up Channy?”
“Draft dodger. Oregon. He... he wanted to marry me. I hated him!”
“A draft dodger? He appeared in Boone in 1940. Frightened early, didn’t he? We hadn’t gone to war, yet. But his recent conduct is quite in character. He sat around for a number of years drawing a nice salary, doing nothing much. But it was something else again when he suddenly faced reality and had to kill someone. He found himself in a very disagreeable mess. Something of the same kind of a mess he ran away from in Oregon.”
“He had no guts,” Betty said disdainfully.
“No, he hadn’t. He visited me, thinking I could get him out of it. Why not? I’m handling the insurance account that is involved here. All he had to do was tip me off to what was coming. I think you killed him to keep him from talking. I think you’ve been lying.”
She sipped the beer and eyed him in amusement.
“You shouldn’t talk like that, Jack. I’m your Betty, remember?”
He didn’t answer that one, hoping the silence would provide the words he couldn’t bring to his lips.
“You are a stupid bunny, Jack. Here you are, face to face with a situation you cannot understand and cannot master. I’ve tried to explain it but you insist I’m lying because that conventional, rutted mind of yours refuses to accept a situation it has never before encountered. Now please believe me: I did not know Channy had been to see you. His death had already been decided before that, to save you for me.
“I decided that, and Papa and the old lady agreed, in payment of the hundred thousand dollars. Incidentally, I saw her this morning. Darling, did I catch hell!”
“So now what happens?” he asked casually.
“I don’t know. We’re waiting for Papa. I’ll... I’ll probably have to make up the difference between the forty-five your company will pay, and the hundred I promised them.”
“How?”
She shrugged. “I don’t know — yet. Perhaps in the other room—” The sentence trailed into nothingness. Horne wondered if he could fish for information about that room.
“What,” he inquired, “would have happened if Channy had told me everything? Before you reached him?”
Betty put down the beer and considered him soberly.
“I shouldn’t have liked that, Jack. You both would have died.”
“I don’t own an automobile,” he pointed out.
“You have a desk.” She paused to consider it. “You pull open the drawers. The lower, right-hand drawer, probably. You sometimes keep whiskey there. That would be awful, Jack!”
He opened his mouth and started to ask, what about a battery, a firing charge? Then closed his mouth abruptly. A small amount of knowledge concerning that bomb was public, but he knew it didn’t operate on the battery principle. And yet, in Channy’s car, it had. Could he be mistaken about the kind of bomb? But there had been the man from Chicago with a Geiger counter. Oh, what the hell. Let Wiedenbeck take care of that.
“What,” he asked, “if it hadn’t been necessary for Channy to die? What was his destined role in this?”
“He was to assume control of the animal hospital when the old lady died. She’s in her sixties.”
“Huh! I’ll bet she didn’t know that.”
“Of course not. Papa told her he was a contact man. Papa wouldn’t mention death to her.”
“Just what is the connection between your father and this woman?”
Betty smiled warmly at him. “It’s romantic. Papa stole her from her husband years ago. They ran away together.”
“And you,” Horne said cautiously, feeling his way, “are an offspring of this... this...” He floundered.