I went over to her and picked her up and sat her on the edge of the bed. She sat blubbering like a defeated child. I squatted and examined her ankle. It was solid and shapely, and beginning to puff on the outside, just below the anklebone.
“I 1-1-love him!” she said. “That was a… a wicked… a wicked evil thing for you to do. That was… a wicked evil lie.”
Her wig was askew and I reached and plucked it off. She was a sandy redhead with a casual scissor cut. Without the wig her face was in better proportion, but the eye makeup, particularly with much of it making black gutters down her cheeks, look ridiculous.
“Wick-wick-wicked!” she moaned.
“But there’s nothing wicked and evil about picking me up and knocking me out with a Mickey? Go wash that goop off your face, girl. Besides, if I busted it up, maybe I did you a favor. He’ll never leave Janice and marry you.”
I helped her up. She went limping toward the bathroom. She stopped suddenly and stood quite still, then turned and stared at me. “That was right aft-after he came in, that about Jan-Janice! Then you were never… Then you just pretended… all along you knew?”
“Go wash your dirty face, honey.”
When she closed the door, I emptied Rick’s pockets and took the stuff over to the desk and looked at it under the light.
The identification startled and alarmed me. I had thumped and wired up one Richard Haslo Holton, Attorney at Law. He was a county Democratic committeeman, an honorary Florida sheriff, past president of the Junior Chamber, holder of many credit cards, member of practically everything from Civitan to Sertoma, from the Quarterback Club to the Baseball Boosters League, from the Civic Symphony Association to the Prosecuting Attorneys’ Association.
He carried a batch of color prints of a smiling slender dark-haired woman and two boys at various ages from about one year to six years. One does not go about needlessly irritating any member in good standing of any local power structure. I had the feeling he was going to wake up in a state of irritation.
Penny came out of the bathroom with her face scrubbed clean and with the big black lashes peeled off and stuffed away somewhere. She had stopped streaming, but she was tragic and snuffly.
Just then Mister Attorney made a sound of growling and an effort to sit up. It seemed useful to leave a small but lasting impression on both of them. So I went over and scooped him up, slung him, and dropped him in a sitting position in the black armchair. It shocked and surprised him. He was meaty and sizable. I had done it effortlessly, of course. It had given me an ache in all my back teeth, ground my vertebrae together, pulled my arms out of the sockets, and started a double hernia. But, by God, I made it look easy.
“Now let’s all have a nice little chat,” I said.
“– your — — — in — –!” he said.
I smiled amiably. “I can phone Mrs. Holton and ask her to come over and join us. Maybe she can help us all communicate.”
So we all had a nice little chat.
8
SEEMS THAT Miss Penny Woertz was the loyal devoted office nurse for one Dr. Stewart Sherman, a man in the general practice of medicine. He was inclined, however, to get so involved in special fields of interest that he often neglected his general practice.
In early July, three months ago, Dr. Sherman had gone down to his office on a Saturday evening. Penny knew that he had been anxious to get his notes in shape so that he could finish a draft of a paper he was writing on the effects of induced sleep in curing barbiturate addiction.
He was a widower, a man in his middle fifties, with grown children married and living in other states. He lived alone in a small apartment and did some of his research work there and did the rest of it in one of the back rooms of his small suite of offices. The body was not discovered until Penny came to work on Monday morning at ten, as was her customary time.