I pull up a chair an' sit down.
'Well, Henrietta,' I say, 'I reckon that Maloney has told you about it, an' what are you goin' to do?'
She looks at me an' in the moonlight I can see that her eyes are sorta smilin', as if she was amused at something.
'All right, Mr Caution,' she says. 'I'm going to tell you anything that you want to know. Jim Maloney says that if I tell the truth everything will be all right, an' that if I don't it may go hard with me. Shall I begin?'
'Justa minute, honey,' I tell her, 'an' you listen to me before we get down to cases. I don't know what's been goin' on around here but I guess it's something screwy an' I don't like it, an' I'm goin' to get to the bottom of it. Me - I like workin' along with people nice an' quiet an' no threats an' no nonsens - that is if they come clean. If they don't, well it's their own business if they get in a jam. Now I'm tellin' you this, Henrietta. You're a swell piece an' I'm for you. I think you got what it takes an' maybe you know it, but you're in a jam over this business of that phoney bond as well as the other stuff, an' the thing for you to do is to spill the works an' not forget anyhing. All right, now you tell me what happened the night you went to New York an' saw Granworth - the night he died.'
'That's easy, Mr Caution,' she says. 'It's all quite simple, only I'm afraid that I couldn't very well prove it. I wrote some letters to Granworth telling him I wanted to see him. I'd heard that he was making a fool of himself over a woman and although I'd believed for some time that he was unfaithful I'd never had any actual proof. I was never very happy with Granworth. He drank; he was excitable and often silly, but when he made this money and said that he was going to turn over two hundred thousand dollars' worth of bonds to me I thought that maybe he'd turned over a new leaf. He talked about starting a new life together. He even went so far as to buy some more insurance - an annuity policy payable in ten years' time or at his death - so that, as he said, we should be able to face the future without worry. I remember him joking about the fact that the Insurance Company insisted on having a clause in the policy under which they would not pay if he committed suicide, because, as you may know, he tried to kill himself after a drinking bout two years ago.
'I was actually beginning to feel that maybe he meant what he said for once. I was in Hartford, Connecticut, staying with friends, when I received a letter. It was unsigned and it said that I would be well advised to keep an eye on Granworth who was making a fool of himself with a woman whose husband was beginning to get nasty about things.
'I don't take notice of anonymous letters usually, but I telephoned through to Granworth and told him about this one. He did not even trouble to deny the fact. He was merely rude about it. Then I realised that the letter was true and I wrote him two other letters, asking him what he was going to do about it, and eventually telling him that I proposed to come and see him, and to get tough with him.'
'Justa minute, Henrietta,' I bust in. 'What happened to those letters. What did Granworth do with them?'
'I don't know,' she says. 'After his death, when Burdell telephoned me an' I went to New York, I saw them lying around on his desk with a lot of other papers. I meant to pick them up and destroy them, but I was worried and unhappy at the time and I forgot.'
'OK,' I say. 'Go right ahead.'
'I went to New York,' she went on, 'and arrived early in the evening of the 12th January. I did not go home to the apartment. I telephoned the butler and asked where my husband was. He said that he was in his office. I then called Granworth at his office and he spoke to me. He said that he just received my third letter and that he would talk to me that evening.
'He asked me to meet him at a downtown caf , I went there and after a while he drove up. He was rather excited and seemed a little drunk. We discussed the situation and he told me that he was not going to give up this woman. I said that if he did not do so I would divorce him. Then he said that if I did so he would rather leave the country than pay me alimony. He was furious and his eyes were blazing, and when he tried to drink his coffee he could hardly hold the cup because his fingers were trembling so.
'I told him that I had no need to worry about alimony; that I had the two hundred thousand Dollar Bonds that he had made over to me. For a moment I thought he was going mad, he was so enraged. Then, after a little while he said that I'd better go back to Connecticut for a week or so and that he would think it over and write me and we could come to some decision. But he said definitely that if I divorced him his life would be ruined and he would finish everything.
'I went straight back to the depot and left for Hartford. Two days afterwards Langdon Burdell telephoned me that Granworth had committed suicide. I reproached myself terribly. I thought that perhaps I was responsible for his death; that possibly I should have handled the situation differently.
'I returned to New York immediately, but when I arrived the inquest was over. Langdon Burdell told me that he had instructed the servants to say nothing about my being in New York that day; that if this fact had been mentioned the police would probably be unpleasant and question me. Burdell had said at the inquest that I was in Connecticut at the time. I was grateful for this.
'I stayed in New York for a little while, and Granworth's affairs were settled up. In his will he had said that he wanted Burdell to carry on and to have the business and offices, and there was an instruction that certain debts including the mortgage on the Hacienda Altmira - which Grarnvorth had built years ago - were to be paid out of his insurance.
'But the Insurance Company refused to pay because of the suicide clause, and so Periera who held the mortgage on the Hacienda couldn't get his money. If he hadn't been so unpleasant about the fact I would have paid him - or tried to do so-out of the bonds which had been handed to me and which were my own personal property, because Granworth had given them to me.
'You know the rest of the story. When my banking account ran down here I took one of the bonds down to the bank and tried to collect on it. They told me it was counterfeit, and that the rest of the bonds were too. Then I was in a spot. I had no money at all, and so Periera allowed me to stay on at the Hacienda in return for my services as hostess.
'That's the story, Mr Caution. Some time ago Fernandez - whose real name is Juan Termiglo and who was our chauffeur - asked me to marry him. He seems to have acquired a sort of partnership with Periera. When I laughed at him he told me that it might not be so good for me if the police knew that I had concealed the fact that I had quarrelled with my husband an hour or so before his death, and when I discovered that the bonds were counterfeit he asked me again and practically suggested that the safest thing for me to do would be to marry him in order that the other servants should keep quiet about what they knew.'
'OK, Henrietta,' I tell her. 'If that's the truth it's a good story an' if you made it up it's still good. Tell me one little thing, who was this dame that Granworth was runnin' around with?'
'I don't know,' she says, lookin' out across the desert, 'but I believe that whoever she was, she was the wife of the man who wrote the anonymous letter.'
'How'd you get that idea?' I ask her.
'For this reason,' she says. 'The letter was handwritten, and it was in a manly hand. In one place before the writer used the words 'this woman' I could see that something had been scratched out. I looked at it through a magnifying glass and under the attempt at erasure I could see the words 'my wife'. I guessed he had been going to refer to his wife and thought better of it.'
'Have you got the letter? I ask her.
'I'm afraid I lost it,' she says.
I get up.
'OK, lady,' I tell her. 'I'm believin' your story because I always trust a good-lookin' dame - once! If it's true, well, that's OK, an' if it's not I bet I'll catch you out somewhere. Stick around an' don't worry your head too much. Maybe something will break in a minute, but right now this bezusus looks to me like a mah-jong game played backwards.'
She looks at me and sorta smiles. Her eyes are shinin' an' there is a sorta insolence about her that goes well with me. This Henrietta has got guts all right I guess.
'You've got it in for me, haven't you,' she says. 'Right from the beginning I've felt that everything you say and do is to one end, the pinning of this counterfeit business on me. Maybe you'll accuse me of killing Granworth next. You're tough all right, Mr Caution.'
'You're dead right, honeybunch,' I tell her. 'What's the good of a guy if he ain't tough. Me - I think you're swell. I reckon that I ain't seen many dames around like you. You got class-if you know what I mean, an' I like the way you move around an' talk. In a way I'm sorry that you're so stuck on Maloney because maybe if things was different
