Donald Lam a private detective is on the job. -He’s contacted Helen Framley. Helen’s boy friend, man by the name of Beegan, was murdered last night. You aren’t safe in Reno. Hunt a deep hole somewhere else.
The letter was signed simply with the initials “A. W.”
I said, “Let’s be frank with each other and save time. I’m Lam. Arthur Whitewell hired me to find you — and saw that Philip knew all about it, of course. Now suppose you tell me your story.”
She just stared at me, all of the fight had left her. She looked trapped and beaten.
I said, “I have a theory. I can outline it if it would help start the ball rolling.”
She still didn’t say anything, simply stood looking at me as though I was what was left behind after a cyclone.
I said, “I think Arthur Whitewell didn’t want his son to marry you. He thought Philip could make a more advantageous marriage. But Philip was very much in love with you, and Whitewell is something of a psychologist. He knew that, after all, there wasn’t much he could do about it. Philip was inexperienced and callow in some ways, but very much of a man in others. His father had never fully understood him, but he did realize there was a gap he had never been able to bridge. He knew that any attempt to come between you two would bring about a permanent estrangement. And then something happened to play right into his hands. He had the opportunity he’d been looking for. He manipulated things in such a way that you simply stepped out of the picture and left Philip to recuperate as best he could.
“And then,” I said, “Philip took it so much worse than his father had anticipated that something had to be done. It wasn’t just an ordinary heartbreak. Philip is sentimental, sensitive, in his feelings and perceptions. He’s never learned that people sometimes can’t be taken at their face value. It was all too much for him.”
She was crying now, crying quietly. She didn’t try to say anything. She couldn’t have talked.
I walked over to the window, looking down on a drab back yard which was pretty well filled with a litter of old boxes. A clothesline sagged dispiritedly between two poles. Little puddles reflected sunlight. A child’s tin pail and shovel were standing on a pile of damp sand. I kept my back turned to the room so that she could have her cry out and regain her composure without feeling I was watching.