“Where did you put that envelope?”
“In a safe place.”
“Get it.”
“It’s in a safe place, Donald. It’s too dangerous to—”
“Get it.”
She looked at me for a moment, then said, “Perhaps you know best,” and went upstairs. About five minutes later she came back with a sealed envelope. “I know these are the letters all right. I saw Ringold put them in. Then he sealed the envelope. That was just the way he’d handed me the other letters — showed them to me, then sealed them in an envelope—” I didn’t wait for her to finish. I reached across, took the envelope out of her hand, and tore it open. There were half a dozen envelopes on the inside. I shook those envelopes out into my hand, opened each one in turn. They were filled with neatly folded sheets of blank paper bearing the imprint of the hotel in which Ringold had been murdered.
I looked up at Alta Ashbury. If attendants had been strapping her to the chair in the gas chamber at San Quentin she couldn’t have looked any more ghastly.
Chapter six
Bertha was waiting in the agency car to take me to my jujitsu lesson. She had an afternoon paper on the seat beside her, and was jumpy.
“Donald, this is one time you can’t get away with it,” she said.