“You said Brookman once mentioned he had a girl friend who was a dancer.”
“Yes, it was just one of those little remarks that stick in the mind.”
“Uh huh. Now I want you to think very hard, because it could be important. Did he say anything else about her, any little thing at all?”
She pondered for a while, then slowly shook her head.
“No. No, I don’t think so. Remember, my conversations with that—that person were not quite what you could call social occasions.”
“I understand. If he’d mentioned a name, you think you might recognize it?”
“I don’t know. I doubt it. In fact, I don’t remember that I ever heard him mention anybody’s name at all.”
I was disappointed.
“So if I said a name, it wouldn’t ring a bell?”
“Sorry. Of course, you could try.”
“How about Shiralee O’Connor. Or he might have called her Pook.”
“O’Connor. No. No, I’m sorry.”
That was half of my stock of dancer’s names. But I still had one left.
“Serena Fenton,” I said.
“Serena? What an unusual name. No, I’d have remembered that—wait a minute.”
I felt quick hope while she searched her memory.
“Serena Fenton,” she repeated slowly. “Isn’t that the name of the girl who fell from a window last night? The one they wrote about in the papers this morning?”
“Yes, it is,” I confirmed.
“But I don’t quite understand. You’re surely not suggesting any connection between that unfortunate girl’s accident, and what happened to him, to that man?”
She seemed quite upset at the idea.
“It’s a possibility, but no more than that. And you can’t think of anything Brookman said that might give me a lead?”
“I doubt it. I’ve been thinking awfully hard after what you said, but mostly he just talked nonsense. I think he was unbalanced you know.”
“Really? Why?”
She made a face.
“Well, you would hardly call our—I was going to say relationship—our connection, you’d hardly call it social. It was a straightforward question of handing over money. And yet he insisted on talking a lot, all about himself, and all nonsense.”
“What kind of nonsense?”
“He used to brag a lot. He was always saying what a great favorite he was with the girls. Women know about things like that, Mr. Preston. That little—er—that man would have been lucky to get any woman to look at him twice.”
“I see. What else did he brag about?”
“He always claimed he was a poet. I never believed him till I read it in the paper. Used to say he was an undiscovered great artist, the kind of thing one hears all the time from frustrated people of little or no talent.”
My drink was getting low in the glass. I didn’t want to order another, because any interruption to the conversation might serve to remind Eve Prince she was due somewhere else. Not that it did me any good, because just then she looked at her watch.
“Heavens, I must fly. I warned you I couldn’t stay long.”
“I’ll walk with you to the car.”
I signalled to let Tom know I’d be back, and walked beside her out into the sudden afternoon heat.
“I have to ask you one more thing, and please believe I don’t want to upset you.”
She gave my arm a quick squeeze.
“I believe that already.”
I took a deep breath, and hoped she’d go on thinking that way.
“The time you told me about, the time those pictures were taken.”
Her face went very straight, and she stared at the ground as we walked towards the car.
“Well?” she asked quietly.
“Do you happen to know the name of the man who— er—who was doing, well, the man who was involved?”
“No.”
“You told me he was big, but that’s all you told me. How big, for instance, as big as me?”
She looked sideways at me appraisingly.
“Bigger. Not taller perhaps, but much broader. He was —ugh—like an ape.”
And I wasn’t going to get any more no matter how hard I dug. I’d experienced that kind of thing before. Eve Prince had blotted him out of her mind as a person, and his place was no more than a large, shadowy, dread.
“And Somerset? Did you ever see him again?”
“Yes,” she said reluctantly. “I met him at an art gallery a month or so ago. There was a private showing of quite a promising painter from San Diego, and I was invited. He was very decent about it when we were introduced. He pretended he’d never seen me before. I was grateful.”
We were standing by her car now, a small red coupe. She held out her hand formally.
“Well good-bye, Mr. Preston. Thank you for the drink. I’m afraid I haven’t been very helpful.”
“One never knows in this business,” I told her. “Maybe in a day or two some quite small thing you told me might help to explain a whole lot of other things I don’t even know about yet.”
“I hope so.”
“Oh, and Mrs. Prince——”
“Yes?”
She paused with her hand on the starter and looked up.
“I was wondering whether we could have another drink sometime, and talk about something more pleasant?”
She nodded and smiled.
“I think I’d like that. So I’ll make it au revoir.”
I watched the little car out on to the highway, then went back inside. I took my glass up to the bar, to find Tom watching me apprehensively.
“Gee Mr. Preston, I never meant no harm. I mean, naturally any friend of yours is O.K. Sometimes when I talk about those other bums I say more than I oughta.”
I looked at him in blank astonishment.
“Tom,” I said carefully. “I know it’s a very hot day, but I don’t have the slightest idea what you’re talking about.”
He didn’t believe me.
“Sure you do, no need to be polite. I mean about the lady. Honest I wouldn’t have said——”
“Tom,” I interrupted firmly. “Just tell me slowly what it was you wouldn’t have said.”
“Why about that crowd that finally took over the Grease-Paint Pot, the crowd that caused me to change my job. I mean they wasn’t all that way. Some of them, one or two anyway, was real nice people.”
Now I
