“No. You don’t get it. The friend wanted to know where I was living. I had to tell her. I knew that she’d tell her friends, and the first thing I knew, everybody would know that I was in New Orleans, and be looking me up. I didn’t want to see people who knew anything at all about my old life, but I did want to have a place in New Orleans that I could come back to. Then I met Rob. She was having troubles of her own. She wanted to escape from her identity. I asked her how she’d like to trade identities. She said she’d like it swell. I told her to find a suitable apartment that would be something I could live in later on when I got ready to come back to New Orleans, and about what I was willing to pay for it.”
“What name did you take?” I asked.
“Rob’s.”
“For how long?”
“For not more than two or three days.”
“Then what?”
She said, “I suddenly realized what damning evidence I was manufacturing. If my husband’s lawyers found out about it, they would show that I had gone away and started living under an assumed name. That would have been a confession of guilt, so I took my own name back. That simply meant there were two Edna Cutlers. One of them was Rob who was living in New Orleans, and the other was the real Edna Cutler.”
I said “Very, very interesting. It would make even the most hard-boiled judge cry into his law books.”
“I’m not asking for sympathy. I’m only asking for justice.”
I said, “All right, now let’s cut out the comedy. You didn’t think this up.”