He slowed the car to a conservative thirty miles an hour before we got to the two hundred block on Korreander, then slid to a stop in front of the white stucco house.
We all piled out and trooped up the stairs to the porch. Sellers rang the bell.
Susie, the loose-jointed maid, came striding deliberately down the hallway. She opened the door, and for a moment I thought she recoiled at the sight of Frank Sellers. Then she let her face petrify in expressionless lines of wooden indifference.
“Hello, Susie,” Claire said. “Is Aunt Amelia in?”
The maid hesitated.
Frank Sellers pulled back his coat, showed his star. “She in?” he asked.
“Yes.”
“Come on,” Sellers said, and pushed his way in, without waiting for any announcement to be made.
Susie glowered at him, but stood helplessly where she had been pushed to one side. Just before we got to the living-room her presence of mind reasserted itself and she raised her voice and called in a high, shrill tone, “Oh, Mrs. Jasper! Claire and the police are here to see you.”
Sellers, with one hand gripping my arm, pushed the door open with his left hand and we entered the sitting-room.