“I’ll refresh your memory,” Wolfe said patiently, “if you want it that way. A quarter to ten last evening, in front of her house, as she got out of her car.”
“It wasn’t in the papers. I should think a thing like that would be in the papers.”
“Only if the papers heard of it, and they didn’t. Naturally you searched for it. I’ve told you why Mrs. Whitten didn’t report it.”
Julie was still making up her mind. “It seems to me you’re expecting a good deal — I mean, even if I did it, and I didn’t. If I had, the way it looks to me, I wouldn’t know whether you were trying to get me to confess to a murder or not. I wouldn’t know whether she were dead, or had just lost some blood as you said. Would I?”
She had him there. He sat and gazed at her a long moment, grunted, and turned to me.
“Archie. Bring that witness down here. Only the one. If the other one is importunate, remind her that I said our talk about Miss Alving must be tête-à-tête.”
X
Phoebe wasn’t importunate. When I entered the South Room on the third floor she was talking on the phone, that extension having been plugged in for an outside line, and her mother was sitting in a chair by the window with a newspaper on her lap. She arose at once, with no need for assistance, when I said Wolfe was ready for their private talk, and Phoebe, having finished on the phone, had no comment on that, but she wanted to know what I had for her. I told her she would be hearing from me shortly, or more probably from Wolfe, and escorted Mrs. Whitten to the elevator, which I never used except when I was convoying casualties, and out at the lower hall and into the office.
I kept right at her elbow because I didn’t want to miss the expression on Julie Alving’s face when she saw her. It was first just plain surprise and then a mixture in which the only ingredient I could positively label was just plain hate. As for Mrs. Whitten, I had only her profile from a corner of my eye, but she stopped dead and went as stiff as a steel beam.
Wolfe spoke. “This is my witness, Miss Alving. I believe you ladies haven’t met. Mrs. Whitten, Miss Alving.”