“Why not?” she asked listlessly. “You are in my husband’s confidence, have his permission to question me. If it happens to be humiliating to me—well, after all, I am only his wife. And it is hardly likely that any new indignities either of you can devise will be worse than those to which I have already submitted.”
I grunted at this theatrical speech and went ahead.
“Mrs. Gungen, I’m only interested in learning who robbed and killed Main. Anything that points in that direction is valuable to me, but only in so far as it points in that direction. Do you understand what I mean?”
“Certainly,” she said. “I understand you are in my husband’s employ.”
That got us nowhere. I tried again:
“What impression do you suppose I got the other evening, when I was here?”
“I can’t imagine.”
“Please try.”
“Doubtless”—she smiled faintly—“you got the impression that my husband thought I had been Jeffrey’s mistress.”
“Well?”
“Are you”—her dimples showed; she seemed amused—“asking me if I really was his mistress?”
“No—though of course I’d like to know.”
“Naturally you would,” she said pleasantly.
“What impression did you get that evening?” I asked.
“I?” She wrinkled her forehead. “Oh, that my husband had hired you to prove that I had been Jeffrey’s mistress.” She repeated the word mistress as if she liked the shape of it in her mouth.
“You were wrong.”
“Knowing my husband, I find that hard to believe.”
“Knowing myself, I’m sure of it,” I insisted. “There’s no uncertainty about it between your husband and me, Mrs. Gungen. It is understood that my job is to find who stole and killed—nothing else.”
“Really?” It was a polite ending of an argument of which she had grown tired.
“You’re tying my hands,” I complained, standing up, pretending I wasn’t watching her carefully. “I can’t do anything now but grab this Rose Rubury and the two men and see what I can squeeze out of them. You said the girl would be back in half an hour?”
She looked at me steadily with her round brown eyes.
“She should be back in a few minutes. You’re going to question her?”
“But not here,” I informed her. “I’ll take her down to the Hall of Justice and have the men picked up. Can I use your phone?”
“Certainly. It’s in the next room.” She crossed to open the door for me.
I called Davenport 20 and asked for the detective bureau.
Mrs. Gungen, standing in the sitting room, said, so softly I could barely hear it:
“Wait.”
Holding the phone, I turned to look through the door at her. She was pinching her red mouth between thumb and finger, frowning. I didn’t put down the phone until she took the hand from her mouth and held it out toward me. Then I went back into the sitting-room.
I was on top. I kept my mouth shut. It was up to her to make the plunge. She studied my face for a minute or more before she began:
“I won’t pretend I trust you.” She spoke hesitantly, half as if to herself. “You’re working for my husband, and even the money would not interest him so much as whatever I had done. It’s a choice of evils—certain on the one hand, more than probable on the other.”
She stopped talking and rubbed her hands together. Her round eyes were becoming indecisive. If she wasn’t helped along she was going to balk.
“There’s only the two of us,” I urged her. “You can deny everything afterward. It’s my word against yours. If you don’t tell me—I know now I can get it from the others. Your calling me from the phone lets me know that. You think I’ll tell your husband everything. Well, if I have to fry it out of the others, he’ll probably read it all in the papers. Your one chance is to trust me. It’s not as slim a chance as you think. Anyway, it’s up to you.”
A half-minute of silence.
“Suppose,” she whispered, “I should pay you to—”
“What for? If I’m going to tell your husband, I could take your money and still tell him, couldn’t I?”
Her red mouth curved, her dimples appeared and her eyes brightened.
“That is reassuring,” she said. “I shall tell you. Jeffrey came back from Los Angeles early so we could have the day together in a little apartment we kept. In the afternoon two men came in—with a key. They had revolvers. They robbed Jeffrey of the money. That was what they had come for. They seemed to know all about it and about us. They called us by name, and taunted us with threats of the story they would tell if we had them arrested.
“We couldn’t do anything after they had gone. It was a ridiculously hopeless plight they had put us in. There wasn’t anything we could do—since we couldn’t possibly replace the money. Jeffrey couldn’t even pretend he had lost it or had been robbed of it while he was alone. His secret early return to San Francisco would have been sure to throw suspicion on him. Jeffrey lost his head. He wanted me to run away with him. Then he wanted to go to my husband and tell him the truth. I wouldn’t permit either course—they were equally foolish.
“We left the apartment, separating, a little after seven. We weren’t, the truth is, on the best of terms by then. He wasn’t—now that we were in trouble—as—No, I shouldn’t say that.”
She stopped and stood looking at me with a placid doll’s face that seemed to have got rid of all its troubles by simply passing them to me.
“The pictures I showed you are the two men?” I asked.
“Yes.”
“This maid of yours knew about you and Main? Knew about the apartment? Knew about his trip to Los Angeles and his plan to return early with the cash?”
“I can’t say she did. But she certainly could have learned most of it by spying and eavesdropping and looking through my—I had a note from
