“I guess not! Well, you should’ve seen some of those ‘sometimes.’ The boy was crazy; I seen it!” In her excitement, she was forgetting her “g’s” and the tenses she could speak correctly when she tried to; she was a cabaret Récamier now. “Clean crazy. He kept it under when he was back with his swells and you; but when he was down with us, he blew the lid some distance off, I’m telling you. I made him crazier than most, for he couldn’t get me. He thought I’d fall for money. Not me!
“I was glad to get married to a decent man, if he was a bit old; and glad to get away, believe me! Then we made the mistake of comin’ back. I didn’t want to, as you know; but the boys wanted father and me to cut down expenses. So we had to come. Anyway, with me married and Jerry mixed up with another skirt—and a swell one, too—I figured he’d forget his old grief about me. But you know what he did to his lady friend; well, when he’d made himself all lonely again, he seems to have got me back on his busted brain. Anyway, he sent word to me to come meet him.”
“How did he send word?” This was from me.
“Telephoned.”
“Why didn’t you inform the police?” That was another interjection of mine; and she came back at me through the wide, wide opening I’d left her. “Why didn’t you, when he slipped word to you to meet him?”
Fred failed to interrupt; he was too busy looking and listening. I reserved my reply and she went on:
“He mentioned to me that, if I set a squeal, I’d hear from it; also that I’d better meet him. He wanted money to get away. Of course he couldn’t sell those Crewe diamonds at any sort of price now; there was too much danger in handling them, with everybody watching for ’em; and too much loss if he had ’em cut. He wanted cash money and he thought I could bring it. Remember, a couple a weeks ago,” she said to Fred, “I tried to get some considerable cash from you?”
Fred admitted that.