“No. It seems Mrs. Almore’s parents hired a private detective. He was a man who ran a night watchman service down there and he was actually the second man on the scene that night, after Chris. Brownwell said he must have had something in the way of information but he never got a chance to use it. They arrested him for drunk driving and he got a jail sentence.”
I said: “Is that all?”
She nodded. “And if you think I remember it too well, it’s part of my job to remember conversations.”
“What I was thinking was that it doesn’t have to add up to very much. I don’t see where it has to touch Lavery, even if he was the one who found her. Your gossipy friend Brownwell seems to think what happened gave somebody a chance to blackmail the doctor. But there would have to be some evidence, especially when you’re trying to put the bite on a man who has already cleared himself with the law.”
Miss Fromsett said: “I think so too. And I’d like to think blackmail was one of the nasty little tricks Chris Lavery didn’t quite run to. I think that’s all I can tell you, Mr. Marlowe. And I ought to be outside.”
She started to get up. I said: “It’s not quite all. I have something to show you.”
I got the little perfumed rag that had been under Layery’s pillow out of my pocket and leaned over to drop it on the desk in front of her.
19
She looked at the handkerchief, looked at me, picked up a pencil and pushed the little piece of linen around with the eraser end.
“What’s on it?” she asked. “Fly spray?”
“Some kind of sandalwood, I thought.”
“A cheap synthetic. Repulsive is a mild word for it. And why did you want me to look at this handkerchief, Mr. Marlowe?” She leaned back again and stared at me with level cool eyes.
“I found it in Chris Lavery’s house, under the pillow on his bed. It has initials on it.”
She unfolded the handkerchief without touching it by using the rubber tip of the pencil. Her face got a little grim and taut.
“It has two letters embroidered on it,” she said in a cold angry voice. “They happen to be the same letters as my initials. Is that what you mean?”
“Right,” I said. “He probably knows half a dozen women with the same initials.”
“So you’re going to be nasty after all,” she said quietly.
“Is it your handkerchief—or isn’t it?”
She hesitated. She reached out to the desk and very quietly got herself another cigarette and lit it with a match. She shook the match slowly, watching the small flame creep along the wood.
“Yes, it’s mine,” she said. “I must have dropped it there. It’s a long time ago. And I assure you I didn’t put it under a pillow on his bed. Is that what you wanted to know?”
I didn’t say anything, and she added: “He must have lent it to some woman who—who would like this kind of perfume.”
“I get a mental picture of the woman,” I said. “And she doesn’t quite go with Lavery.”
Her upper lip curled a little. It was a long upper lip. I liked long upper lips.
“I think,” she said, “you ought to do a little work on your mental picture of Chris Lavery. Any touch of refinement you may have noticed is purely coincidental.”
“That’s not a nice thing to say about a dead man,” I said.
For a moment she just sat there and looked at me as if I hadn’t said anything and she was waiting for me to say something. Then a slow shudder started at her throat and passed over her whole body. Her hands clenched and the cigarette bent into a crook. She looked down at it and threw it into the ashtray with a quick jerk of her arm.
“He was shot in his shower,” I said. “And it looks as if it was done by some woman who spent the night there. He had just been shaving. The woman left a gun on the stairs and this handkerchief on the bed.”
She moved very slightly in her chair. Her eyes were perfectly empty now. Her face was as cold as a carving.
“And did you expect me to be able to give you information about that?” she asked me bitterly.
“Look, Miss Fromsett, I’d like to be smooth and distant and subtle about all this too. I’d like to play this sort of game just once the way somebody like you would like it to be played. But nobody will let me—not the clients, nor the cops, nor the people I play against. However hard I try to be nice I always end up with my nose in the dirt and my thumb feeling for somebody’s eye.”
She nodded as if she had only just barely heard me. “When was he shot?” she asked, and then shuddered slightly again.
“This morning, I suppose. Not long after he got up. I said he had just shaved and was going to take a shower.”
“That,” she said, “would probably have been quite late. I’ve been here since eight-thirty.”
“I didn’t think you shot him.”
“Awfully kind of you,” she said. “But it is my handkerchief, isn’t it? Although not my perfume. But I don’t suppose policemen are very sensitive to quality in perfume—or in anything else.”
“No—and that goes for private detectives too,” I said. “Are you enjoying this a lot?”
