Conway had listened with increasing incredulity and relief to this elaborate scenario. So long as she’s that far off the track, he thought, I don’t have to worry. “Have you done much writing, Betty?” he asked. “Because what you’ve dreamed up is the damnedest fiction I’ve ever heard.”
“U-um,” she said noncommittally. “Well, after I’d figured this all out, I realized that my coming and staying with you was the luckiest thing that could have happened to you. Because as long as I was in the house, she couldn’t come here, and you couldn’t go to see her, so there was a good deal less chance of your throwing suspicion on yourself. So then I decided that the best thing would be for me just to stay on here with you — and tell you why, of course.”
“Then why did you get the apartment?”
“That’s just it — I didn’t. I went to Grauman’s Chinese, and two broadcasts, and did some window-shopping, and came home. And then that detective talked to me.”
“What did you tell him?”
“I didn’t tell him anything. I said he talked to me.”
Conway breathed a sigh of relief. “Thank heaven you didn’t tell him about these pipe dreams — that’s all he’d need. What did he have to say to you?”
“He was very apologetic about his insinuations of yesterday. And then he said he liked you, and my being here made it very tough on him and the police department. Because if the neighbors or anybody found out about it, and it got to the papers, it would throw suspicion on you right away, and then the police would have to do a lot of investigating, which would be very unpleasant for you, even though they knew you were innocent. And then I suddenly realized that it had just been my own conceit that made me think there was another girl, and that you had a perfectly good reason for wanting to get rid of me. So I knew I’d better get out of here — and quick.”
“That, unfortunately, makes sense,” he said. “And it’s the first thing you’ve said that does,” he added. “It’s not that I have anything to hide, and I’m not worried about the police. But the newspapers would have a field day if they found out that an attractive — to say the least — young woman had moved in with me the day after my wife’s body was found. I don’t know what they’d make of the fact that she was my half-sister-in-law, but you can be sure it would be something nasty. So, much as I’d like you to stay here, now that I’ve gotten to know you, I think it would be a lot better for both of us if you got a place of your own — at least for a while.”
“Shall I go to a hotel tonight?”