Kept Women Can’t Quit

“And wouldn’t it be funny,” Sellers went on, “if you got real, real smart, found out what was going on, and decided to cut yourself a piece of cake? You could have juggled trunks on the guy. You’re a fast worker.”

Hazel turned wide startled eyes in my direction.

“Now, the question is,” Sellers went on, “how the hell this Standley guy got your trunk if you didn’t get his, and if you got his where is it now?

“Now, I’m going to tell you something, Pint Size. You’ve been up to San Francisco. You came back on the plane and this babe came down to the airport just to meet you. You instructed her to keep running around in her car to see if she was being tailed.”

“You can prove that?” I asked.

Sellers rolled the cigar from one end of his mouth to the other, then reached up with his left hand, removed the cigar from his mouth and laughed, a harsh, bitter laugh. “You damned amateurs,” he said. “You don’t keep up with what’s going on.”

Sellers walked over to the window, looked down and then motioned to me to come to the window.

“Take a look,” he said.

I followed the direction of his finger.

A car in the parking lot had a bright orange cross painted on the top of it.

“Ever hear of a helicopter?” Sellers said. “We’ve had this babe under observation. I can tell you every move she made. We followed her from the air and when we wanted to do some close work we came down close with the helicopter. Most of the time we could use binoculars and get all the information we wanted.

“When she headed for town yesterday we had a helicopter covering her all the way. She did a lot of zigzagging so as to lose any shadows. Then she beat it to the airport and caught a Western jet for San Francisco. Then she went to call on Evelyn Ellis.

“After she’d cussed Evelyn out, she went down and stuck around in the lobby for a while, apparently waiting for Standley to walk in.

“She sat there for two hours. The clerk didn’t want her hanging around the lobby. He knew she was carrying a hatchet for someone. Finally she went to the desk and tried to get a room for the night. The clerk told her he was full up. She hung around a little while longer and then the clerk told her that unescorted women were not permitted in the lobby after ten o’clock at night.

“That’s where the San Francisco police let us down. They let her give them the slip.

“The next time we picked her up was when she took an early-morning plane for Los Angeles. We picked up her car at the airport. She made a lot of fancy maneuvers to make certain she wasn’t being followed, then hightailed it to her apartment. She was there until shortly before your plane came in, then she drove out to the airport to meet you.

“Now then, Miss Clune or Mrs. Downer, or whatever you want to call yourself, I don’t want to jump at conclusions. I’m just telling you that Standley Downer was murdered in San Francisco and I’m asking you where you spent the night.”

Hazel said, “If I thought—” Abruptly she caught herself. “No comment,” she said. “I do not intend to make any statement until I have had an opportunity to talk with my attorney in private.”

“Now, that’s a great way for an innocent woman to do,” Sellers said. “You want us to think you didn’t have anything to do with any murder and yet you won’t even tell us where you were last night until after you’ve talked with an attorney. Is that going to look good in the papers?”

“You tend to your own business in this case,” Ashby said, “and we’ll attend to ours. We’re not trying any case in the newspapers. We’ll try it in court.”

Abruptly Sellers whirled back to me, started to say something, then got another idea, walked over to the telephone, dialed a number and held the receiver so close to his lips that we couldn’t hear what he was saying. He was talking in a low voice which came to us as a rumble of sound but no more.

Sellers said after a moment, “Okay, I’ll hold the line. You find out.”

Sellers waited with the telephone at his ear, the fingers of his right hand drumming on the telephone table, as he sat in frowning contemplation minute after minute.

The silence in the room could have been cut with a knife.

Abruptly the telephone started making little rasping noises. Sellers held the receiver close to his ear as he listened, then began mouthing the cigar.

After a moment he took the cigar out of his mouth, said, “All right,” and hung up the telephone.

There was an expression of shrewd satisfaction on his face.

Another two or three minutes passed.

Sellers went back to the phone and made another call in a low voice, said, “Okay, call me back.”

He hung up and sat in the chair for two or three minutes until the phone rang, then picked it up, said, “Hello... no, she isn’t. However, I’ll take a message for you. Give me your name and—”

It was easy to tell from the expression on his face that the party at the other end of the line had hung up.

Sellers gave an exclamation of disgust, slammed the phone back into the cradle.