“What was that?” Bauer asked, his dinner now entirely forgotten.
The temptation to tease the sergeant along was too great. “She’d withdrawn the money from the bank the day before, as you know, and we were going to open a new account after we’d had lunch. Well, there was a misunderstanding — I thought she’d brought the money with her, and she thought I had. So we had a little tiff about it — nothing serious, and we made it up right away, but now I’d give anything if I hadn’t lost my temper even that little bit. That’s why I’ve still got the money in the house — it was too late, then, to go home, pick it up, and get back to the bank.”
Bauer said “U-um,” and Betty was again looking around the store, seemingly paying no attention to them.
“Well, that’s the kind of thing I mean. We were both a little quick-tempered, and we’d have occasional flare-ups, but they never lasted more than a few minutes.”
“Well, if that’s all—” Bauer said, sounding more disappointed than reassuring. “And anyway you made it up, you say.”
The sergeant was being unusually subtle, and Conway hurriedly decided to take no chances on being left out on a limb without having concluded his recital.
“Yes, we did. But that wasn’t all — we had another spat that night.” He caught a gleam in the detective’s eye. “Oh, we made that up, too. But it makes you feel pretty rotten to realize that on the last day we were ever going to have together—” Conway was tempted to let his voice break the least bit, but decided it was inadvisable in Betty’s presence.
“You don’t have to feel so bad about it,” Bauer said. “Come on, get it off your chest. You’ll feel better.”
“It was even sillier than the other. When we left the house to go to dinner, I asked her if she had some money — I only had a few bucks in my pocket. I guess she thought I asked if she had the money. Anyway, when we found we were early for the picture we went across the street for a cup of coffee. I only had a few cents, so I asked her to let me have a dollar, and she opened her purse and I saw the whole roll of money. Well, I thought it wasn’t very bright to carry that amount of money around at night, and I said so. So she got mad and asked what did I expect her to do, and I said I didn’t expect her to walk around with a red flag — she was wearing that red scarf — asking to be hit over the head. Then she said, ‘Here, you take it if you think I’m apt to get hit over the head,’ but I didn’t want her flashing it around in the drugstore, so we waited until we got into the theatre, and she gave it to me there.” Conway’s voice became almost a whisper. “Then we held hands all through the picture.”
“Why didn’t you tell me this before?” Bauer demanded. “Don’t you see what happened? Some guy saw her with that dough, thought she still had it after the movie, and knocked her off for it.”