“Don’t you suppose she got a divorce afterwards?” Mason inquired.
“I don’t know, Perry, but I’m inclined to think she didn’t. You see, she was a resident of California. She couldn’t leave in order to establish a residence elsewhere. If she’d secured a California divorce, she’d have had to wait a year for the interlocutory decree to become final, before she could have married again. That didn’t suit her purpose at all. She had her hooks out for Sabin before she’d been working there three weeks.”
“How about Rufus Watkins?” Mason asked. “Don’t you suppose she could have arranged with him to get a divorce?”
“That,” Drake said, “is the rub. She may have done so, but it looks as though she didn’t do anything until after she’d married Sabin, and by that time Rufus was in a position to do a little fancy blackmail.”
“Is that surmise?” Mason asked. “Or do you have some evidence to support it?”
“I can’t tell just yet,” Drake told him, “but it looks very much as though we had some evidence to support it. We got a tip that Helen Watkins Sabin’s bank account showed quite a few checks payable to a Rufus W. Smith. We’re trying to verify that, and find out about this Rufus W. Smith. We know that he answers the general description of Rufus Watkins, but we haven’t as yet definitely established that they are one and the same.”
Mason said, “That’s good work, Paul. That gives us something to go on.”
“Of course, Perry, there’s quite a bit of stuff shaping up against Helen Monteith,” Drake pointed out. “I understand, now, they’ve found a witness who saw her in the vicinity of the cabin about noon on the sixth.”
“That,” Mason admitted, “would be bad.”
“Well, it may be just rumor,” Drake said. “My operative in San Molinas picked it up.”