“He’d quit being a gay blade. He beat it and went fishing. He didn’t come back until she’d left.”
Bertha Cool said, “Pickle me for a herring, Donald. You may be right. If you are, it’s blackmail.”
“Bigger stake than that,” I said. “Dr. Lintig starts running for office on a reform ticket in a rich little city that’s honeycombed with graft. He’s too innocent and unsophisticated to know what the opposition would be certain to do — dig back in his past trying to find something sour.
“Naturally, the first thing they looked up was his professional standing. When they started digging into that, they found he’d changed his name from Lintig to Alftmont, so naturally they started looking up Dr. Lintig. They found that Lintig had been registered in Oakview. They went to Oakview and made an investigation. That was when the first man showed up on the job. That was about two months ago, a chap who gave the name of Cross. He was the one who made the original investigation.”
Bertha Cool nodded.
“That gave them everything they wanted right there,” I went on, “but they couldn’t be certain that Mrs. Lintig hadn’t died or secured a divorce. They could throw the old scandal in Dr. Alftmont’s teeth, but it had all the earmarks of mud-slinging for political purposes. What they wanted to do was to have Mrs. Lintig enter the picture. Then they could play it in either one of two ways. First, they could have her write to the doctor and tell him to withdraw from the campaign. Secondly, they could have her show up and make a statement to the newspapers — not in Santa Carlotta, but in Oakview.
“You can see what would happen then. By showing up in Oakview, it certainly wouldn’t look as though it was a case of political mud-slinging. The Oakview papers would publish the statement that she had located Dr. Lintig living under the name of Dr. Alftmont in Santa Carlotta and residing with the co-respondent in the divorce action as man and wife. The Oakview newspaper would telephone Santa Carlotta asking them to verify the tip before they ran it as news. Then Santa Carlotta would let the Oakview paper run it first, and then they’d publish it as an exchange item.”
“Then why didn’t she tell you that story when you contacted her there in the hotel, Donald?”
“Because she wasn’t ready,” I said. “She didn’t intend to tell the story at that time. That appearance was just for the purpose of laying the foundation. She wanted the people around the hotel to see her and get accustomed to regarding her as Mrs. Lintig.”
“Then you think she wasn’t Mrs. Lintig?”