“Well,” Della said, “there is this side to her character. If she had thought that he had been going to do something to hurt her... If she had thought that his ideals were going to... well, not exactly his ideals, either, Chief, but if she had thought that there was something about him which was counterfeit, I think she’d have killed him, in order to keep from discovering it, if you know what I mean.”
“I think I do,” Mason told her. “Go on, what happened?”
“Well, I took her to a little hotel. I went to some precautions to make certain we couldn’t be traced by the police. I gathered that was what you wanted. I got some baggage out of my apartment, and we registered as two sisters from Topeka, Kansas. I asked the clerk a lot of questions that tourists would ordinarily ask, and I think I completely sold him on the idea.
“We had a corner room, in the back, with twin beds and a bath, and quietly, in such a manner that she wouldn’t notice what I was doing, I locked the door from the inside and put the key in my purse.
“Well, we sat down and talked, and she told me all about her romance, and about everything which had happened. I guess we talked for three or four hours. I know it was long after midnight when we went to bed; and I guess it was about five o’clock this morning when she woke me up, shaking me and telling me she couldn’t get the door open. She was fully dressed, and seemed very much upset.
“I asked her why she wanted to get the door open, and she said she had to go back to San Molinas, that she simply had to. There was something she’d forgotten.
“I told her she couldn’t go back. She said she must, and we had quite an argument. Finally, she said she was going to telephone the hotel and have someone come up to open the door. Then I got hard with her.”
“What did you tell her?” Mason asked.
“I told her that you were sacrificing a great deal to help her, and that she was giving you a double-cross; that she was in danger, and that the police would catch her and charge her with murder; that her romance would be written up by every sob sister in the tabloid newspaper game; that she’d be dragged through courts, and the pitiless white light of searching and unfavorable publicity would beat upon her... I told her everything I could think of. I talked like a lawyer working on a jury.”
“What happened?”