I said, “No. There’s one other explanation.”
“What?” she asked.
“That she never ordered them.”
Bertha Cool frowned. “But I don’t see—”
I said, “She wanted to dismiss that divorce action. She knew her close friends had moved away. But there would be some people left in town who would know her, people she’d be expected to know. They’d be ones who remembered her vaguely, not former intimates, but people who had seen her simply as part of the social background of twenty-one years ago. Twenty-one years is a long time.”
Bertha Cool said, “Phooey! There’s no sense to it.”
“There were no photographs of her available,” I went on. “No one could check back on her appearance. What’s more, they didn’t get a chance. She went to the hotel. From all I can find out, that’s about the only place she went. She registered and put in an appearance so the hotel people would know her. She didn’t recognize any of her old friends. Why? Because she’d broken her glasses and couldn’t see a thing. She put off looking up any of her former friends on that account. She called on a lawyer — a perfectly strange lawyer, by the way — and arranged to have the old divorce case dismissed. She gave me an interview which she hoped would be published in the local press, and she heat it.
“Now get this. This is the significant high light of the whole business. When Dr. Lintig and his wife had their slip-up, the fly in the ointment was a young chap named Steve Dunton who was running the Blade. Steve Dunton was a dashing young gallant, somewhere in the middle thirties. He’s in the middle fifties now. He wears a green eyeshade, has put on weight, and chews tobacco.
“Now then, I told Mrs. Lintig that I was a reporter from the Blade. She didn’t even know the paper, and she never once asked me anything about Steve Dunton.”
“And what was Dunton doing all this time?” Bertha asked.