I shook my head and said, “The Santa Carlotta police couldn’t find her. They found Flo Danzer who used to be Flo Mortinson who roomed with Amelia Sellar in San Francisco. Then they hit a brick wall. Flo knows what it is. They wouldn’t have taken the risk of planting another woman as a ringer unless they’d first decided there was no possibility of getting the real Mrs. Lintig.”
“But look here, lover,” Bertha said, “how did they know Steve Dunton would go fishing. He’d have exposed her.”
I said, “That’s one thing they didn’t know. They didn’t know it either because Mrs. Lintig never confessed it to Flo, or, what’s more likely, because Flo didn’t remember such details as names. She knew Mrs. Lintig had been playing around, and that’s all.”
Bertha Cool smoked for a while in thoughtful silence.
“Now then,” I said, “Dr. Alftmont got a letter recently which purported to come from his wife. He says it’s her handwriting. I examined that last letter, and it looks like a forgery to me.”
Bertha Cool’s face lit. “Well, shucks,” she said, “there’s nothing to it, lover. All we need to do is to prove that Mrs. Lintig is an impostor.”
“What good will that do?”
“It’ll put Alftmont in the clear, and that’s all we want.”
I said, “It would have a short time ago. It won’t now. They’re after Alftmont on a murder charge now. Unless we can find some way of beating it, the case is going to break by tomorrow morning at ten o’clock.”
Bertha Cool said, “Look, lover. You can do anything with Marian. You can make her look Alftmont square in the face and say that he wasn’t the man who came out of that room.”