Tildy rushed into the room. No fake eye patch or Spanish combs. The black wig was gone; the familiar platinum Dutch bob was back. Crisp white shirtwaist, pale lemon skirt. She was the Queen of Skates as I remembered her. Strictly a knockout.
After rubbing elbows with celebrities for a few years, you get to have a certain contempt for most of them, simply because it’s difficult to understand how they happen to be famous. But there are always a few who command your respect if not admiration. Hard to put your finger on that quality. Whatever it was, she had a lot of it. She would always be the center of attention, no matter how many others were around. She seized my arm frantically.
“They’ve arrested Dow?”
Evidently she’d been where she heard all I said, assumed that I meant I’d been with Lanerd, instead of at his home.
“You realize,” I made it sound exasperated, “half the cops in New York are hunting for you?” It might have been true by that time, for all I knew. “How long’d you think you could get away with this hide-and-seek?”
Nikky glared ferociously; two little white spots showed at her nostrils; I remembered what Lanerd had said about her temperament.
Tildy gripped my arm more tightly. “I did not know about Dow.”
“You knew about the dead man in your closet!” I had to shock her to get her to do what I wanted, but I didn’t dare carry it too far. Nikky was getting madder by the minute. “You knew someone would be arrested for Roffis’s death. So what’d you do! You ran out, leaving someone else—”
“No, no, no!” Tildy shook me, to emphasize her denial. “I was afraid. I knew there was a fight. But I did not know Roffis had been killed. No.”
“You weren’t in any doubt about there having been a fight!” I had to concentrate on Tildy. But out of the corner of my eye I saw the elder Narian come back into the room. “That probably someone had been hurt! But you didn’t bother to look! You didn’t tell anyone about the man who came in your bedroom!”