“Those were little fibs,” I said. “This is going to be different. You’ll be lying to a lawyer.”
She said, “No. Mr. Ellis will believe me. That’s what’s going to make it so hard, but he’ll have confidence in me. He’ll take anything I say as gospel truth. He’s awfully nice. I think he likes me, Donald.”
I said, “He may be nice, but he’s a lawyer. Once you arouse his suspicions, he’ll pounce on you like a terrier pouncing on a rat. Now what are you going to tell him?”
“That when I went to the apartment house the first time, I saw this other man coming out, that I hadn’t thought it was important before, but now I’ve been trying to think of everything, and there was something about this man — about the way he acted that aroused my suspicions.”
“What did he look like?”
“He was a big man with broad shoulders and thick bushy, black eyebrows. His eyes were sort of close together, and there was a cleft in his chin. There was a mole on one of his cheeks. I think it was the right.”
“What aroused your suspicions?”
“Well, you can’t exactly call it that. I noticed him at the time just because I thought there was something unusual about him. Then the shock of finding the body gave me such a mental jolt that it’s taken me some time to put things together again. I think this man just slipped my mind.”
“You had no idea that a murder had been committed?”
“No, of course not.”