“I didn’t say that.” She sent the deep blue eyes straight at me, and they were much too cold to show sorrow for anyone or anything whatever. “Frankly, Mr. Goodwin, I am not interested in your impressions. I speak with you at all only because Mr. Huck asked us to.”
“And I speak with you, Mrs. O’Shea, only because the man whose father built this house thinks he’s been rooked and has hired me to find out. That doesn’t interest you either?”
“No.” She resumed with the slips of paper.
I eyed her. My trouble with her, as with the rest of them, was that it would take some well-chosen leading questions to jostle her loose, and all the best questions were out of bounds as long as Lewent was supposed to be still breathing.
“Look,” I said, “suppose we try this. It’s been more than two hours since I talked with you ladies up in the sewing room. Have you discussed the matter with Mr. Lewent? If so, when and where, and what was said?”
She sent me a sharp sidewise glance. “Ask him.”
“I intend to, but I want—”
I got interrupted. A door in the kitchen’s far wall was standing open, and through it, rolling almost silently on rubber tires, came a large cabinet of stainless steel. It was more than four feet high, its top reaching almost to the shoulders of Paul Thayer, who was behind it, pushing it. He rolled it across to the neighborhood of Mrs. O’Shea’s chair and halted it.
“It’s okay,” he told her. “Just a bum wire, and I put in a new one. At your service. Invoice follows.”
“Thank you, Paul.” She had clipped the slips of paper together and was putting them in a drawer. “I’m glad you got it fixed. Mr. Goodwin is staying for dinner, so I suppose you’ll bring him up for cocktails. Harriet, don’t forget about the capers. Mr. Huck will not have it without the capers.”