Five for silver
Six for gold
Seven for a secret
Never to be told.”
“Four was as much as I could wrangle,” I said. “Of course, I wasn’t sure about that. But if there’d been a birth which might have stood in Lanerd’s way, question was — whose child? And — had there been a wedding and a divorce? Or neither?”
Marge went to Tildy, put her arms around her. Nikky, too, came hotly to the skater’s defense. “There was a wedding. But that pig,” she stared hatred at the doubled-up agent, “told her he’d been divorced from his first wife and he hadn’t. So Tony — well—”
“Yair. And though Walch didn’t have any legal right to the boy, he could hold illegitimacy over Miss Millett whenever he felt like it, could publicly claim fatherhood, mess things up for everybody. Might even sue to take the boy away from her. Emotional blackmail.” It wasn’t necessary to make Tildy admit she’d covered up for Walch, by accusing Yaker, and Nikky’d done the same by throwing the blame on Lanerd, because Tildy couldn’t bear to have her boy grow up to realize his father was a killer. “The blackmail slant was one of the first things I thought about, only in a different way.”
Ruth wanted to know what I meant.
“Walch was an old hand at traveling around the country. He’d have been used to stopping at good hotels. He knew the rules, what he could get away with — and couldn’t. Made me wonder, the first time I saw him with La Eberlein, why he was making a bluff at sneaking con girls into the Plaza Royale.”
Walch raised his head. “You lousy keyholer!”