“Yes, if you want to put it that way.”
“With whom?”
She didn’t say anything.
“Where do you think the letters are?” I asked.
“Honest, Donald,” she said, “I don’t know. Jed walked to the hotel with me. He was a little afraid that something might happen, and he’d get pinched in a blackmail racket. He had been tipped off that Ashbury was going to get a detective to find out what his daughter had been doing with her money.”
“Where did that tip come from?”
“I don’t know, but Jed knew it. I suppose it came from Crumweather. Anyway, Jed didn’t want to have the letters in his possession until the last minute. He walked up to the hotel with me, and I was carrying the letters under my coat. I handed them to him just before I went in behind the cigar counter. I know he had them when he went up in the elevator and— Well, he never came down, that’s all. The murderer must have got them.”
I’d walked around to open the car door and help her out. Now I stood there, thinking. “Jed Ringold wasn’t his real name?”
“No.”
“How long had he been going under that name?”