Bertha said, “You’d better come down to earth and realize you aren’t done with us yet. You’re going to need representation to keep this murder rap off your shoulders.”
“Off my shoulders!” Whitewell exclaimed.
Bertha’s eyes glittered at him, hard and greedy. “You’re damn tootin’,” she said. “Don’t forget that girl who saw you.”
Whitewell began to smile, a slow grin of amused triumph. “Well,” he said, “isn’t it going to be interesting to see what happens. Corla Burke has lost her memory. She doesn’t know anything that happened from the time she finished taking dictation on the day of her disappearance. The next thing she remembers is when Philip walks into the hospital and says, ‘Corla,’ and the emotional shock suddenly brings back her memory. Rather a nice little master of ceremonies, aren’t you, Lam?”
“Go ahead,” I said. “Spill the rest of it.”
“All right, I will. Corla Burke was an adventuress. She’d been married before, and she was concealing that marriage from my son. She’d trapped my son into a love affair. She was going to marry him. Then a few days before the ceremony, her husband makes a very inopportune appearance. Immediately Corla Burke disappears. Shortly thereafter, her husband is murdered. As soon as he has shuffled this mortal coil so that she becomes a widow and therefore perfectly eligible to make an immediate marriage, a private detective finds her in a hospital, suffering from amnesia. And I won’t insult your intelligence by intimating there’s any chance she won’t be promptly cured as soon as she sees my son, and I hope that you won’t insult my intelligence by trying to make me swallow it as a genuine performance. But the point is, she was the one who had a motive for murdering Sidney Jannix. She wanted him out of the way. She had every reason to know that he could be located through Helen Framley. That’s something for you to consider, Lam.”
“Why?”
“Because if she doesn’t know where she has been during the intervening time, she can’t deny that she was in Las Vegas. She can’t deny that she killed him.”
“So what?”
“So,” he said, “you have a plane here. We are getting a plane. If you started now, you could get back to Reno ahead of us. If Corla Burke isn’t there in the hospital when we arrive, so far as I’m concerned, there won’t be any temptation to associate her with the murder of her husband.”