She pushed hack from the typewriter, followed me into my private office. I closed the door and said, “Elsie, we have only a few minutes. We’re going to have to work fast. You’re a woman who has gone to an auto camp with her lover. The door has been closed. You’re in the privacy of the auto camp. What would you do?”
She blushed.
I said, “No, no, now get down to earth. You’d start taking off your clothes. What would you do with them?”
“Hang them up, of course.”
I said, “Take a look at this suitcase. You can’t tell much about the way it’s been packed, because things have been changed around, but let’s take a look at the order of the garments. There’s a bullet hole through some of these. Here’re some underthings and some stockings, with a bullet hole through them. Here’re some handkerchiefs. Now, we come to this blouse. It’s a problem. Can you fold it so that the bullet hole matches up after the blouse has been folded? You can see the bullet went through the blouse four or five times.”
“On account of the way it was folded,” she said.
“Fold it back the way it was, then.”
Elsie spread the blouse out on my desk, started folding it, trying to get the bullet hole to line up when the blouse was folded. She couldn’t do it.
Elsie studied the blouse closely, raised the place where the arms joined the blouse to her nostrils, put the blouse down, started folding it again, then shook her head and said, “It wasn’t packed. It had to be folded like this.”
She took it and folded it into a crumpled, disorganized package, then, using the pen-holder from my office pen set, just as I had done in Bertha’s office, worked around until she had the holes all lined up.