“Hand that picture over,” the lieutenant ordered the man at his heels. The man hauled a flat photographer’s picture out of his pocket, handed it over. I craned my neck to see it; it was a much-handled, cracked picture of a stout, sequined woman in her forties, hard face, waved hair, sporting. Mrs. Garr, twenty years before, when she hadn’t fallen apart with age.
“This the picture you saw?”
“Yes, sir.”
The lieutenant turned to me.
“This look much like Mrs. Garr as you know her?”
“Hardly at all.” I repeated my description of Mrs. Garr as she had last looked.
“Oh, for God’s sake! You—you—” He turned wrathfully on his underling. “Where’d you get this picture?”
“The Comet, chief. It was the last one they had. You know, from when they was playin’ up the Liberry case. There wasn’t a single picture in the house.”
“If you weren’t at the bottom now I’d have you demoted.”
“Yes, sir.”
“And you.” He turned to the ticket seller again. “When did you say you sold this old white-haired woman a ticket?”
Window five repeated his story. Not later than Wednesday.
“Give me that ticket.”
The flatfoot produced an envelope and from it picked the familiar Memorial Day excursion ticket.
The lieutenant turned it over on its face.
On the back was a square stamp in purple ink.
It had been sold at the Union Station on May twenty-eighth, three forty-five p.m.!
May twenty-eighth! Friday! Three forty-five p.m.! If I’d only known that! Then . . .
“There’s another check you could make,” I offered eagerly. “Someone at the house might know where Mrs. Garr was at three forty-five on Friday afternoon. Mrs. Halloran. She may still be at the house; she was there when I left.”
Lieutenant Strom turned to the man in attendance.
“You do that yet, Bill?”
“No, sir. I was still trying to prove she did buy it, not she didn’t buy it. I hadn’t got around to that yet.”
“Oh, shut up!”
Lieutenant Strom, in turn, left for the phone booths. He was gone quite a while.
“That’s that,” he said when he came back. He thanked the ticket seller.
“There’s one thing more,” I put in. “This man says he sold Mrs. Garr only one ticket.”
Lieutenant Strom had the man repeat that part of his story, then turned his hooded eyes on me.
“By heaven, if you weren’t a suspect yourself, Mrs. Dacres, I’d hire you. What else have you got on your mind?”
“Will Mr. Kistler—”
“Mr. Kistler is even now being removed from durance vile.”
“Then Mrs. Halloran did remember—”
“Yep. She swears up and down she was with Auntie at Auntie’s house Friday afternoon from two o’clock on. Helping her get ready for the trip. And Mrs. Waller backs her up. She was around, too.”
“Oh, thanks! I mean, they needed Mr. Kistler at his paper.”
“Kistler ought to pay you a lawyer’s fee. And what, if I may ask as I asked before, are you intent on doing next?”
“That part about Mrs. Garr buying only one ticket.”
“Well, that may not be important. One person. One ticket. Probably Mrs. Halloran bought her own.”
“But she didn’t. She says Mrs. Garr gave her her ticket. Gave it to her on Thursday afternoon. That would mean—”
“By God, she never meant to go to Chicago!”
“Exactly! You can’t think anything else. The whole thing sounds that way. She bought only one ticket. She wouldn’t have made two trips to buy two tickets; she was slow getting around. And then the way she acted when she was waiting for the train with Mrs. Halloran—she wasn’t used to traveling; she’d have had her ticket out and ready just as early as Mrs. Halloran, if she’d intended to go. No, she just meant to get Mrs. Halloran off!”
He took me by the elbow. People coming up for tickets were bumping me right and left; I’d been too absorbed in what I was saying to notice. But I looked up now and saw stares.
“Let’s go out in the car and talk this over.”
He propelled me out, the uniformed officer following. The police car was parked halfway down the half-moon drive in front of the station.
“Where to, sir?” the driver asked as we got in.
“Stay here awhile.”
“It wasn’t like Mrs. Garr to go to Chicago in the first place,” I began.
“Sh-sh-sh. Be quiet a minute. I want to think this over. I see you can talk and think, but I think much better not listening.”
He sat quiet for a time, his hands clasped between his knees, his face forward. Then he turned to me.
“All right. It fits with everything I know so far. I’ll agree she never intended to go to Chicago. Let’s have your version of why she pulled off this Chicago hoax.”
He hadn’t any more than asked it than I had the answer.
“She wanted to catch someone prowling in her house. Probably Mr. Halloran.”
“Repeat your evidence on what Mrs. Garr said when you told her of the prowler incident. And what she did.”
I repeated. As I looked back, it seemed obvious that Mrs. Garr had recognized my description of the prowler as Mr. Halloran. Afterward she had had that long talk with Mrs. Halloran in the parlor; had broken with her. Then, after weeks had passed, she had suddenly phoned Mrs. Halloran, had proposed this trip to Chicago. Had she done that just to catch Mr. Halloran at his pilfering?
“You’re building up a strong theory in your mind, Mrs. Dacres. Pretty contemptuous of Halloran, aren’t you?”
“Yes, I am.”
“You’d rather, if this was a murder, that it would turn out he did it—rather Halloran than anyone else?”
“Well, I—”
He laughed. “Just a little Sympathetic Susie. Well, I don’t admire Halloran myself. But that doesn’t prove to me he murdered the old lady. There’s a second point to consider. Mrs. Garr may have arranged that Chicago trip for the reason you suggest. But she may have hoped to catch someone entirely different.”
“I can see that.”
“Now I’ll carry your reasoning a little further. If Mrs. Garr was so intensely afraid of pilferers, snoopers, or what have you, one might argue that she was just a timorous old woman.
