“But this is very — personal.”
“Most things said in this room by visitors are. What is it?”
“There is no one I can go to but you.” Dorothy was in one of the yellow chairs, facing him, leaning forward to him. “I don’t know where I stand, and I’ve got to find out. A man is going to tell the police that I forged my father’s name to a check. Tomorrow morning.”
Her face was human again, with her eyes pinched.
“Did you?” Wolfe asked.
“Forge the check? Yes.”
I lifted my brows.
“Tell me about it,” Wolfe said.
It came out, and was really quite simple. Her father hadn’t given her enough money for the style to which she wanted to accustom herself. A year ago she had forged a check for three thousand dollars, and he had of course discovered it and had received her promise that she would never repeat. Recently she had forged another one, this time for five thousand dollars, and her father had been very difficult about it, but there had been no thought in his head of anything so drastic as having his daughter arrested.
Two days after his discovery of this second offense he had been killed. He had left everything to his daughter, but had made a lawyer named Donaldson executor of the estate, not knowing, according to Dorothy, that Donaldson hated her. And now Donaldson had found the forged check among Keyes’ papers, with a memorandum attached to it in Keyes’ handwriting, and had called on Dorothy that afternoon to tell her that it was his duty, both as a citizen and as a lawyer, considering the manner of Keyes’ death, to give the facts to the police. It was an extremely painful duty, he had asserted, but he would just have to grin and bear it.