“No?” I inquired courteously.
“No,” she repeated. “I losed much time today. I will be here all evening with cutters cutting.”
“This is pretty important, Miss Zarella.”
“I do not think so.” She said “zink.” “He was here, he is gone, and we forget it. I told that to the policemen and I tell it to you. Miss Nieder is not dangered. If she was dangered I would fight it off with these hands” — she lifted them as claws — “because she is the best designer in America or Europe or the world. But she is not. No.”
She got up and started for the door. Cynthia, darting to her feet, intercepted her and caught her by the arm.
“I think you ought to wait,” I said, “for Mr. Roper’s vote. Mr. Roper?”
Ward Roper cleared his throat. “It doesn’t seem to me,” he offered, in the sort of greasy voice that makes me want to take up strangling, “that this is exactly the proper step to take, under the circumstances.”
Seeing that Polly’s exit was halted, I was looking at Roper. Getting along toward fifty, by no means too old to strangle, he was slender, elegant, and groomed to a queen’s taste if you let him pick the queen. His voice fitted him to a T.
“What’s wrong with it?” I asked him.
He cocked his head to one side to contemplate me. “Almost everything, I would say. I understand and sympathize with Mr. Daumery’s desire to think it over. It assumes that we, the five of us, are involved in this matter, which is ridiculous. One may indeed be involved, deeply involved, but not the other four. Not the rest of us.”