She laughed, though her eyes did not change. “You’re such a bastard. You always think the worst of me, don’t you?”
I took my hand away from her wrist and she rubbed the marks my fingers had left on it.
“Who was the woman who threw the skillet?” she asked. “Anyone I know?”
“It wasn’t Nora, if that’s what you mean. Have they arrested SidneyChristian Kelterman-Jorgensen yet?”
“What?”
I believed in her bewilderment, though both it and my belief in it surprised me. “Jorgensen is Kelterman,” I said. “You remember him. I thought you knew.”
“You mean that horrible man who–?”
“Yes.”
“I won’t believe it.” She stood up working her fingers together. “I won’t. I won’t.” Her face was sick with fear, her voice strained, unreal as a ventriloquist’s. “I won’t believe it.”
“That’ll help a lot,” I said.
She was not listening to me. She turned her back to me and went to a window, where she stood with her back to me.
I said: “There’s a couple of men in a car out front who look like they might be coppers waiting to pick him up when he–”
She turned around and asked sharply: “Are you sure he’s Kelterman?” Most of the fear had already gone out of her face and her voice was at least human again.
“The police are.”
We stared at each other, both of us busy thinking. I was thinking she had not been afraid that Jorgensen killed Julia Wolf, or even that he might be arrested: she was afraid his only reason for marrying her had been as a move in some plot against Wynant.
When I laughed–not because the idea was funny, but because it had come to me so suddenly–she started and smiled uncertainly. “I won’t believe it,” she said, and her voice was very soft now, “until he tells me himself.”
“And when he does–then what?”
She moved her shoulders a little, and her lower lip quivered. “He is my husband.”
That should have been funny, but it annoyed me. I said: “Mimi, this is Nick. You remember me, N-i-c-k.”
“I know you never think any good of me,” she said gravely. “You think I’m–”
“All right. All right. Let it pass. Let’s get back to the dope on Wynant you found.”
“Yes, that,” she said, and turned away from me. When she turned back her lip was quivering again. “That was a lie, Nick. I didn’t find anything.” She came close to me. “Clyde had no right to send those letters to Alice and Macaulay trying to make everybody suspicious of me and I thought it would serve him right if I made up something against him, because I really did think–I mean, I do think–he killed her and it was only–”
“What’d you make up?” I asked.
“I–I hadn’t made it up yet. I wanted to find out about what they could do–you know, the things I asked you–first. I might’ve pretended she came to a little when I was alone with her, while the others were phoning, and told me he did it.”
“You didn’t say you heard something and kept quiet, you said you found something and hid it.”
“But I hadn’t really made up my mind what I–”
“When’d you hear about Wynant’s letter to Macaulay?”
“This afternoon,” she said, “there was a man here from the police.”
“Didn’t he ask you anything about Kelterman?”
“He asked me if I knew him or had ever known him, and I thought I was telling the truth when I said no.”
“Maybe you did,” I said, “and for the first time I now believe you were telling the truth when you said you found some sort of evidence against Wynant.”
She opened her eyes wider. “I don’t understand.”
“Neither do I, but it could be like this: you could’ve found something and decided to hold it out, probably with the idea of selling it to Wynant; then when his letters started people looking you over, you decided to give up the money idea and both pay him back and protect yourself by turning it over to the police; and, finally, when you learn that Jorgensen is Kelterman, you make another about-face and hold it out, not for money this time, but to leave Jorgensen in as bad a spot as possible as punishment for having married you as a trick in his game against Wynant and not for love.”