She said, “I’d do anything for you.”
I said, “This isn’t going to be easy.”
She said, “If it helps you, it’ll be easy.”
I said, “You’ll have to be darned clever to put this across and make it stick. You’ll have to keep your wits about you.”
“What is it?”
I said, “When you see the deputy district attorney this afternoon, tell him you’ve thought of something else.”
“What?”
“When you approached the apartment house the first time, before you’d gone in to see the manager and just as you were parking your car, you saw a man come out. He was six feet tall with broad shoulders. He had thick, black eyebrows and grey eyes that were close together. Because his face was so beefy, it made the close-set eyes more noticeable. It’s rather a flat face. There was a mole on the right cheek. He had a cleft chin, long arms and big hands, and he was walking very, very rapidly.”
“But, Donald, I can’t say that now after—”
“Yes, you can,” I interrupted. “You’ve been thinking this thing over. You’ve been trying to reconstruct it in your mind. You noticed this man at the time because he seemed to be in such a hurry, seemed to be almost running, and it was unusual to see a big man walking so rapidly. Then, of course, the mental shock of finding Evaline Harris chased a lot of things out of your memory. You had to go back and put events together bit by bit so they made a logical sequence.”