“I know Tildy killed him.”
How did he know?
“She was coming unstuck when she got to the studio tonight.” He tried to get Mrs. Lanerd away from the piano, but she kept right on pounding those tremendous chords. “I didn’t think she’d be able to do the show at all. She cried, stumbled over chairs as if she’d been in a car accident and was suffering from shock. I couldn’t catch all the things she was moaning while I was trying to calm her. But one thing I did hear, good and clear.”
Marge let her hands drop from the keys. The room still echoed from the thundering piano.
“She cried, ‘I had to do it! I had to do it, Jeff! I couldn’t give him up! I couldn’t!’”
Chapter seventeen:
Fiery femme
In my experience, nobody can dope out dames. But nobody.
Those mass-opinion pollsters who’d tied on the bib and tucker in our Crystal Room might come up with such pithy data as that on winter afternoons five out of seven femmes will prefer the north or sunny side of Thirty-Fourth Street, while in summer it’s the other way around. But they’d never be able to guarantee it in the case of any particular distaffer.
So I had no confidence in my ability to figure out what a girl like Tildy Millett might do under any given set of circumstances. Still it didn’t seem quite rational for her to knife a man guarding her from a killer, wait around for the dead man’s partner to escort her to a studio, rattle off We Won’t Go Home Until Morning — and then elope. Not unless she had Borgian blood in her.