“Well — well, there’s a chance he might squirm out of it on a technicality — just a technicality, you understand. What worries you about him?”
I said, “Let’s look at it this way. Hale came from New York. He hired us in Los Angeles to find a girl in New Orleans. It was absurdly easy to find her.”
“But Hale didn’t know that,” she said.
“The hell he didn’t. Hale knew exactly where she was living. He could have put his finger on her at any moment. He’d been out with her just before he came to see us.”
“That may not mean anything.”
I said, “All right, we’ll pass that and go on to something else.”
She said, “Nix on that stuff, Donald. That’s what Hale said he wouldn’t stand for.”
“Why did he say that?”
“I don’t know. Probably because he didn’t want to be bothered by having us waste our time and his money on a lot of foolishness.”
I said, “We found Roberta. You were to go and see her the next morning. Hale was supposed to be in New York. He wasn’t in New York. He was in New Orleans.”