“But I have to!”
I shook my head. “You believe you have to, and I believe you have to, but the cops won’t. It depends on what his invitation said. If they just want to consult him about sweating horses he may be home in an hour. If they’ve got a hook in him, or think they have, God knows. You’re not a lawyer or a relative.”
She sat and looked at me, sourer than ever. In a minute she spoke, bitterly. “You said yesterday I may be nice.”
“Meaning I should mount my bulldozer and move heaven and earth?” I shook my head again. “Even if you were so nice it made my head swim, the best I could do for you this second would be to hold your hand, and judging from your expression that’s not what you have in mind. Would you mind telling me what you have got in your mind besides curiosity?”
She got up, circled two corners of the desk to reach the phone, put it to her ear, and in a moment told the transmitter, “This is Audrey, Helen. Would you get me— No. Forget it.”
She hung up, perched on a corner of the desk, and started giving me the chilly eye again, this time slanting down instead of up.
“It’s me,” she declared.
“What is?”
“This trouble. Wherever I am there’s trouble.”
“Yeah, the world’s full of it. Wherever anybody is there’s trouble. You get shaky ideas. Yesterday you were scared because you thought they were getting set to hang a murder on you, and not one of them has even hinted at it. Maybe you’re wrong again.”