“Why?”
“Philip seems to be very enthusiastic about you. He wanted his father to give you a free hand to go ahead and do anything you wanted to find Corla. His father said that was going to be too expensive, that as soon as you uncovered evidence showing that Corla had left of her own free will, that was all he could afford to do. Then Philip suggested she might have left because she was being blackmailed or something, and his father said that if that was the case, she wasn’t the sort of girl they’d want in the family anyway; and I guess Philip’s nerves were ragged. They had an argument, and his father walked away and left Philip alone in the casino.”
I narrowed my eyes as I thought that over. “That would have been somewhere around eight o’clock, or a few minutes later?”
“I guess so.”
“You didn’t tell the law anything about that?”
“I told the law to mind its own business, and I’d mind mine,” Bertha snapped. “The impertinent ignoramuses! Even wanted to know what proof I could give that I’d been here in the hotel all that time. Here I was waiting for Mr. Whitewell to show up, and because of that fight with Philip, he didn’t come near me—”
“Where did he go?”
“He was very much upset. You know he’s really attached to that boy, really and truly, worships the ground he walks on, and Mr. Whitewell was terribly upset. He even forgot about calling me and telling me he wouldn’t be here. He didn’t—”
“But where did he go?”
“He didn’t go anywhere.”