work.”
Pete said: “Oke.”
The woman turned to the man beside her. “Was—was Brazil hurt?”
He studied her face for a long moment, then nodded slightly. “Stopped a slug, I hear.”
Her eyes widened. “He was shot?”
He nodded again.
She put both hands on his forearm. “How badly?”
He shook his head. “I don’t know.”
Her fingers dug into his arm. “Did they arrest him?”
“I can’t tell you, miss. Maybe the District Attorney wouldn’t like me to.” He smacked his lips over his gum- chewing.
“But, please!” she insisted. “I must know.”
He shook his head again. “We ain’t worrying you with a lot of questions. Don’t be worrying us.”
Conclusion
It was nearly nine o’clock by the dial on the dashboard, and quite dark, when Luise Fischer and her captors passed a large square building whose illuminated sign said “Mile Valley Lumber Co.” and turned in to what was definitely a town street, though its irregularly spaced houses were not many. Ten minutes later the sedan came to rest at the curb in front of a gray public building. The driver got out. The other man held the door open for Luise. They took her into a ground-floor room in the gray building.
Three men were in the room. A sad-faced man of sixty-some years, with ragged white hair and mustache, was tilted back in a chair, with his feet on a battered yellowish desk. He wore a hat but no coat. A pasty-faced young blond man, straddling a chair in front of the filing cabinet on the other side of the room, was saying, “So the traveling salesman asked the farmer if he could put him up for the night and—” but broke off when Luise Fischer and her companions came in.
The third man stood with his back to the window. He was a slim man of medium height, not far past thirty, thin lipped, pale, flashily dressed in brown and red. His collar was very tight. He advanced swiftly toward Luise Fischer, showing white teeth in a smile. “I’m Harry Klaus. They wouldn’t let me see you down there, so I came on up to wait for you.” He spoke rapidly and with assurance. “Don’t worry. I’ve got everything fixed.”
The storyteller hesitated, changed his position. The two men who had brought Luise Fischer up from the city looked at the lawyer with obvious disapproval.
Klaus smiled again with complete assurance. “You know she’s not going to tell you anything at all till we’ve talked it over, don’t you? Well, what the hell, then?”
The man at the desk said: “All right, all right.” He looked at the two men standing behind the woman. “If Tuft’s office is empty, let ‘em use that.”
“Thanks.” Harry Klaus picked up a brown briefcase from a chair, took Luise Fischer’s elbow in his hand, and turned her to follow the thick-chested, florid man.
He led them down the corridor a few feet to an office that was similar to the one they had just left. He did not go in with them. He said, “Come on back when you’re finished,” and, when they had gone in, slammed the door.
Klaus jerked his head at the door. “A lot of whittlers,” he said cheerfully. “We’ll stand them on their heads.” He tossed his briefcase on the desk. “Sit down.”
“Brazil?” she said. “He is—”
His shrug lifted his shoulders almost to his ears. “I don’t know. Can’t get anything out of these people.”
“Then—?”
“Then he got away,” he said.
“Do you think he did?”
He shrugged his shoulders again. “We can always hope.”
“But one of those policemen told me he had been shot and—”
“That don’t have to mean anything but that they hope they hit him.” He put his hands on her shoulders and pushed her down into a chair. “There’s no use of worrying about Brazil till we know whether we’ve got anything to worry about.” He drew another chair up close to hers and sat in it. “Let’s worry about you now. I want the works— no song and dance—just what happened, the way it happened.”
She drew her brows together in a puzzled frown. “But you told me everything—”
“I told you everything was all fixed, and it is.” He patted her knee. “I’ve got the bail all fixed so you can walk out of here as soon as they get through asking you questions. But we’ve got to decide what kind of answers you’re going to give them.” He looked sharply at her from under his hat brim. “You want to help Brazil, don’t you?”
“Yes.”
“That’s the stuff.” He patted her knee again, and his hand remained on it. “Now, give me everything, from the beginning.”
“You mean from when I first met Kane Robson?”
He nodded.
She crossed her knees, dislodging his hand. Staring at the opposite wall as if not seeing it, she said earnestly: “Neither of us did anything wrong. It is not right that we should suffer.”
“Don’t worry.” His tone was light, confident. “I’ll get the pair of you out of it.” He proffered her cigarettes in a shiny case.
She took a cigarette, leaned forward to hold its end to the flame from his lighter, and, still leaning forward, asked: “I will not have to stay here tonight?”
He patted her cheek. “I don’t think so. It oughtn’t to take them more than an hour to grill you.” He dropped his hand to her knee. “And the sooner we get through here, the sooner you’ll be through with them.”
She took a deep breath and sat back in her chair. “There is not a lot to say,” she began, pronouncing her words carefully so they were clear in spite of her accent. “I met him in a little place in Switzerland. I was without any money at all, any friends. He liked me and he was rich.” She made a little gesture with the cigarette in her hand. “So I said yes.”
Klaus nodded sympathetically and his fingers moved on her knee.
“He bought me clothes, those jewels, in Paris. They were not his mother’s and he gave them to me.”
The lawyer nodded again and his fingers moved again on her knee.
“He brought me over here then and”—she put the burning end of her cigarette on the back of his hand—“I stayed at his—”
Klaus had snatched his hand from her knee to his mouth, was sucking the back of his hand. “What’s the matter with you?” he demanded indignantly, the words muffled by the hand to his mouth. He lowered the hand and looked at the burn. “If there’s something you don’t like, you can say so, can’t you?”
She did not smile. “I no speak Inglis good,” she said, burlesquing a heavy accent. “I stayed at his house for two weeks—not quite two weeks—until—”
“If it wasn’t for Brazil, you could take your troubles to another lawyer!” He pouted over his burned hand.
“Until last night,” she continued, “when I could stand him no longer. We quarreled and I left. I left just as I was, in evening clothes, with…”
She was finishing her story when the telephone bell rang. The attorney went to the desk and spoke into the telephone: “Hello?…Yes…Just a couple of minutes more…That’s right. Thanks.” He turned. “They’re getting impatient.”
She rose from her chair, saying: “I have finished. Then the police came and he escaped through the window and they arrested me about those rings.”
“Did you do any talking after they arrested you?”
She shook her head. “They would not let me. Nobody would listen to me. Nobody cared.”
A young man in blue clothes that needed pressing came up to Luise Fischer and Klaus as they left the courthouse. He took off his hat and tucked it under an arm. “Mith Fither, I’m from the Mile Valley
