“Smart of you,” I said. “Well, keep an eye on her. She don’t like us much.”
“I’m to do that?” Mickey grinned. “My idea would be for everybody to look out for himself, seeing that you’re the lad she dog-eyes most, and it’s most likely you that’ll get whittled on. What’d you ever do to her? You haven’t been dumb enough to fool with a Mex lady’s affections, have you?”
I didn’t think he was funny, though he may have been.
Aaronia Haldorn arrived just before dark, in a Lincoln limousine driven by a Negro who turned the siren loose when he brought the car into the drive. I was in Gabrielle’s room when the thing howled. She all but jumped out of bed, utterly terrorized by what must have been an ungodly racket to her too sensitive ears.
“What was it? What was it?” she kept crying between rattling teeth, her body shaking the bed.
“Sh-h-h,” I soothed her. I was acquiring a pretty fair bedside manner. “Just an automobile horn. Visitors. I’ll go down and head them off.”
“You won’t let anybody see me?” she begged.
“No. Be a good girl till I get back.”
Aaronia Haldorn was standing beside the limousine talking to MacMan when I came out. In the dim light, her face was a dusky oval mask between black hat and black fur coat–but her luminous eyes were real enough.
“How do you do?” she said, holding out a hand. Her voice was a thing to make warm waves run up your back. “I’m glad for Mrs. Collinson’s sake that you’re here. She and I have had excellent proof of your protective ability, both owing our lives to it.”
That was all right, but it had been said before. I made a gesture that was supposed to indicate modest distaste for the subject, and beat her to the first tap with:
“I’m sorry she can’t see you. She isn’t well.”
“Oh, but I should so like to see her, if only for a moment. Don’t you think it might be good for her?”
I said I was sorry. She seemed to accept that as final, though she said: “I came all the way from the city to see her.”
I tried that opening with:
“Didn’t Mr. Andrews tell you . . . ?” letting it ravel out.
She didn’t say whether he had. She turned and began walking slowly across the grass. There was nothing for me to do but walk along beside her. Full darkness was only a few minutes away. Presently, when we had gone thirty or forty feet from the car, she said:
“Mr. Andrews thinks you suspect him.”
“He’s right.”
“Of what do you suspect him?”
“Juggling the estate. Mind, I don’t know, but I do suspect him.”
“Really?”
“Really,” I said; “and not of anything else.”
“Oh, I should suppose that was quite enough.”
“It’s enough for me. I didn’t think it was enough for you.”
“I beg your pardon?”
I didn’t like the ground I was on with this woman. I was afraid of her. I piled up what facts I had, put some guesses on them, and took a jump from the top of the heap into space:
“When you got out of prison, you sent for Andrews, pumped him for all he knew, and then, when you learned he was playing with the girl’s pennies, you saw what looked to you like a chance to confuse things by throwing suspicion on him. The old boy’s woman-crazy: he’d be ducksoup for a woman like you. I don’t know what you’re planning to do with him, but you’ve got him started, and have got the papers started after him. I take it you gave them the tip-off on his high financing? It’s no good, Mrs. Haldorn. Chuck it. It won’t work. You can stir him up, all right, and make him do something criminal, get him into a swell jam: he’s desperate enough now that he’s being poked at. But whatever he does now won’t hide what somebody else did in the past. He’s promised to get the estate in order and hand it over. Let him alone. It won’t work.”