Torrant said that he would have coffee after all.
Louise Mallow’s glasses—why in the garage? Granted that Annabelle Blair had chosen that as a temporary hiding place, why hadn’t she taken one of the thousand opportunities to retrieve them before last night? Unless, under the stress of that first twenty-four hours when the full attention of the police and the town was concentrated on the accident, she had forgotten where she put them.
That raised a further question in his mind. From something Paulette Kirby had said he was sure that Louise Mallow had driven the convertible on occasion—but where was her driver’s license? There hadn’t been one in the alligator handbag. Was that because she was licensed “with glasses” and the glasses couldn’t be found?
Torrant frowned over that; a carelessness amounting to stupidity was not. in Annabelle Blair’s technique. On the other hand the glasses, which were obviously betraying in one way or another, had been allowed to languish in the garage until, on a random impulse, Maria Rowan had turned on the light and gone rummaging through the tool chest.
He looked across at her and thought about the night she must have spent, listening for a sound at the door or the windows below her, hardly trusting herself to sleep. Probably looking out, from time to time, at the old house across the road. He said abruptly, “Why on earth didn’t you call me last night?”
“I’m a big girl,” Maria said after a startled glance at him. Her cheeks were pink. “And after all, you did warn me, remember?”
A grudge-bearer, Torrant thought, outraged. He opened his mouth to say something stiff, caught Maria’s eye, thought better of it and walked into the kitchenette alcove, trying to concentrate on the matter at hand.
Louise Mallow’s glasses continued to bother him, because what Maria proposed, and the glasses themselves suggested on the surface, was a very chancy murder method indeed. Even granted that she knew Gerald Mallow’s drinking habits, his secretary might have had to wait forever for the combination of icy road and alcohol, and she could hardly possess herself of his wife’s glasses as a regular thing. And even when the three factors were dovetailed together, the chances were that Gerald and Louise would have ended up in an accident ward with a few broken bones and some new resolutions.
Accident, on the other hand, pure and simple, after she had coaxed or forced Gerald Mallow into writing a new will in her favor . . . Torrant said it aloud, trying it, and Maria 1 gave him a scornful and incredulous look. “Accident—just after he’d changed his will?”
Torrant said neutrally that if all the people who broke a leg the day after they dropped their insurance were laid end to end they would reach to Little Rock and perhaps a little j beyond, but he didn’t argue the point. Because Gerald and Louise had died in the crash, and Louise’s glasses had been removed from the garage.
He wondered for a cold instant what would have happened to Maria Rowan if she hadn’t dropped the glasses, and then he reached for his coat. He said, “Let’s hear what Annabelle has to say.”
On the way down through the garage, Torrant stopped to examine the window in shadow under the stairs, the means I of entrance that Maria had forgotten until she felt the draught from the night outside. He raised it experimentally and it shuddered in its frame, causing the vibration that had sent the saw crashing down from its nail on the same wall to drown the sound of its opening.
He paused again at the tool chest and the window above it. A board had been nailed onto the center joining, wide enough for small flowerpots, wide enough for a pair of glasses that might somehow have dropped down behind the tool chest. Except that he could not imagine the fastidious Louise Mallow tossing her glasses on a garage window ledge.
At some point during the last few minutes Simeon had arrived at the Mallow house; when Torrant opened the doors on the lead-colored morning the gray convertible was parked at the opposite bank. Maria stopped involuntarily when she saw it, and Torrant put a compelling hand on her arm. He said, “They both knew your cousin, and there may be a slip of the tongue somewhere.”
The knocker dropped and echoed over the fields; the door opened as Torrant was about to lift it again. Annabelle Blair, in one of the severe wool dresses that made her startlingly pale-and-dark against the shadowy hall, said, “Oh, Miss Rowan—Mr. Torrant.” The blank, untenanted gaze flicked from one face to the other. “Is it something pressing? Because just at the moment . .
“Come in, come in,” said Simeon, appearing suddenly behind her. A fleeting trick of perspective made him a mischievous parrot perched on her shoulder. “I think this calls for sherry, don’t you, Annabelle? We’ve about wound up those papers anyway—no, stay where you are, I’ll get it.”
Annabelle Blair looked briefly angry—almost, Torrant thought detachedly, vicious. She clearly had no intention of pretending anything more than the barest civility. She glanced coldly from Maria to Torrant and said over a distant clicking of glass from the kitchen, “You wanted to see me about something?”
“As a matter of fact,” Torrant busied himself with cigarettes, offering one to Annabelle, lighting Maria’s and his own, “it’s a small detail about Miss Rowan’s cousin. We thought you might be able to settle it for us,”
Simeon came back with a decanter and glasses, pouring the sherry with a
