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“Who handles your husband’s accounts? Does he have an office?”

“No, my husband has no office in the conventional sense of the word. He’s a mining man. His office is under his hat. His accounts are kept by an income tax man — a Mr. Hartley L. Channing. You’ll find him listed in the phone book.”

“Know anything else that could be of help?”

She said, “There’s one thing. My husband is terribly superstitious.”

“In what way?”

“He is a great believer in luck.”

“Most mining men are.”

“But my husband has this one fixed superstition. No matter how many mines he opens and closes, one of them, usually the best one, must be named ‘The Green Door,’ and so carried on the books.”

I thought that over. There was a gambling joint in San Francisco known as The Green Door. I wondered if she knew of that, and I wondered if her husband did. Perhaps he’d been lucky in the gambling house one night and felt the name would bring him luck in connection with his mining companies.

“Anything else?” I asked.

“Well, yes — in a way—”

“Go on.”

“When my husband left Tuesday evening he knew that he was going into danger.”

“How do you know?”

“He was always a little apprehensive about leaving me alone.”

“Why?”

“I’ve tried to figure that one out, too. I think it’s largely because he was an older man and I was so much younger and — Well, I think under those circumstances a man gets a little more possessive than would otherwise be the case, and is — shall we say, a little more apprehensive.”

“So what?”

“So he made it a point to keep a gun in the bureau drawer. He had carefully instructed me how to use it.”

“Go on.”

“When he left Tuesday he took that gun with him. It was the first time he’d ever done that when he went on a trip,”

“But he intended to drive all night?”

“A good part of the night.”

“Then wouldn’t it be natural for him to take the gun?”

“He’d driven all night lots of times before, but had never taken it. He’d always left it here for me.”

“Did your husband tell you he was taking the gun?”

“No.”

“How then do you know it was gone?”

“Because when I looked in the bureau drawer after he had left the gun wasn’t there.”

“It had been there before?”

“A couple of days before. I know that much.”

“You don’t know whether your husband was carrying it with him or whether he put it in a suitcase?”

“No.”

“Now, you identified the contents of the suitcase?”

“Yes.”

“How, when and where?”

“They took me to Petaluma. The car was being held there.”

“It was your husband’s car?”

“Yes.”

“Where do the Berkeley police get in on it?”

She said, “Don’t be silly. They’re investigating all angles. If I’d had a young lover, as you suggested, and had conspired to kill George off, the conspiracy would have taken place here in this county and the lover would be here. Therefore, the Berkeley police are working on it. They’re pretending that it’s a matter of co-operation with the Sheriff of Sonoma County, but I’ve known all along what they were up to.”

“Tell me about the suitcase.”

“It was just exactly as I had packed it.”

“You packed your husband’s things?”

“That was one of the wifely duties I took over when I married him.”

“How long have you been married?”

“About eight months.”

“How did you happen to meet him?”

She smiled and shook her head.

“Was Bishop a widower?”

“No. There was a first Mrs. Bishop.”

“What happened to her?”

“He bought her off.”

“When?”

“After she began to — to get suspicious.”

“There was a divorce?”

“Yes.”

“A final decree?”

“Certainly. I tell you we’re legally married.”

“You wouldn’t have taken a chance otherwise, would you?”

She looked me straight in the eyes. “Would you?”

“I don’t know. I’m asking.”

She said, “I have had my eyes open for a long time, and I went into this with my eyes open. I also went into it with the determination to play square in the event I got a square deal.”

“Did you get a square deal?”

“I think I did.”

“Do you ever get jealous?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“I don’t think there’s anything to get jealous about, and even if there were, I wouldn’t run up my blood pressure over something you can’t help, something that’s — well, unavoidable.”

“Okay,” I said. “I’ll see you later.”

“How much later?”

“I don’t know.”

She said, “For your information I think the police will be having the house watched. They seem to think there’s something pretty shady about the situation. They’ve
handed me a good line and now they’re going to keep a watch and see if George comes back home or if some other man should happen to come here.”

“In that case,” I said, “they’ve probably got me tagged already.”

“Perhaps,” she said.

“Your line will be tapped,” I told her. “You say your husband’s things were just the way you had packed them?”

“Yes.”

“He hadn’t unpacked a thing?”

“No.”

“Then no one else had unpacked them?”

“What do you mean?”

“No one had searched the suitcase or the bag?”

“I don’t think they had.”

“Do the police have any idea you know what they’re up to?”

“I can’t tell.”

“Have they questioned you — about your married life?”

“They’ve questioned me, but not about that.”

“How much money did your husband carry with him?”

“He always carried several thousand dollars in a money belt.”

“You don’t know anything else that would help?”

“Nothing except what I’ve told you.”

“Thanks,” I said, and started for the door.

“You won’t say anything about what I’ve told you — to the police — about Garvanza?”

I shook my head.

“After all, it’s only a hunch, a vague suspicion.”

“That’s all.”

“But somehow,” she said, “I think I’m right.”

“So do I,” I told her, and walked out.

It must have taken John Carver Billings the Second two days of concentrated thought to think up the alibi he had hired us to “discover.”

It took the police less than two hours to bust that alibi wide open.

The last radio news of the evening announced that Los Angeles police, somewhat skeptical of young Billings’s alibi in the Maurine Auburn murder case, had asked San Francisco police to check.

San Francisco police had checked.

The two girls who had been “located” by a private detective agency for John Carver Billings the Second had been sought by police.

One of the young women had purchased a new wardrobe and started on a vacation trip for South America. She was not immediately available. The other one, Sylvia Tucker, twenty-three, employed as a manicurist in a local barbershop, had at first sought to substantiate the alibi, but when police confronted her with proof that she had been in San Francisco on the Tuesday in question, she broke down and admitted that the whole alibi was phony, that she and her girlfriend had been well paid by the banker’s son to concoct an alibi which would protect him for Tuesday night.

She claimed she didn’t know why.

John Carver Billings the Second branded this as a brazen falsehood, an attempt on her part to get him into trouble, but from extraneous evidence police were convinced hers was the correct story and young Billings was caught in a trap of his own devising. John Carver Billings the Second, son of a well-known San Francisco financial figure, had therefore become the number-one suspect in
the Maurine Auburn murder case.

I was in my pajamas preparatory to getting into bed in the stifling closeness of the cheap hotel bedroom, but after hearing the news broadcast I dressed, called a taxicab, and had it cruise past the Billings residence.

Lights were blazing. There were cars in front of the place. They were both police cars and newspaper cars. As I watched the place, from time to time I saw the lighted windows flare into brief oblongs of dazzling white light — newspaper reporters shooting pictures with synchronized flash guns.

I paid off the cab, took up a station in the shadows, and waited for an interminable interval until all the cars had left.

I didn’t know whether there was a police shadow on the place or not. I had to take a chance. I prowled the back alley, got in through a garage, and tried the back door.

It was locked.

The blade of my penknife told me the key was in the lock. There was a good-sized crack under the back door. I had noticed a closet for preserved fruits on the back porch. I opened it and explored the shelves. They were lined with brown paper. I took out the jars of preserved fruit, took the stiff brown-paper lining from one of the shelves, slid this brown paper through the crack under the door, then punched out the key with the blade of my knife.

The key fell down on the paper. I gently slid the paper out from under the door, bringing the key with it.

I unlocked the back door, carefully replaced the key in the lock on the inside, replaced the brown paper on the shelf, put the preserves back into place, and quietly walked through the deserted kitchen toward the lighted part of the house.

There were no lights in the huge dining-room, but
beyond it in a library there were subdued lights and deep, comfortable chairs.

A door was open into a den behind the library. Two men were in there. I could hear low voices.

I stood for a moment and listened.

Evidently John Carver Billings the Second and his dad were holding a low-voiced conference.

I couldn’t hear what they were saying and didn’t try. A sudden impulse made me strive for the highly dramatic.

I sank down into one of the deep, high-backed readingchairs that was turned partially away from the center of the room, and waited.

After a few minutes young Billings and his dad came back into the room.

I heard young Billings say something to his dad which I couldn’t get. The father’s reply was a monosyllable, then I caught the last words of Billings’s closing sentence, “... that damn, double-crossing detective.”

I said without moving, “I told you you were like a patient going to a doctor’s office and ordering penicillin.”

I couldn’t see them but from the sudden silence I knew they were standing rigidly motionless; then I heard the father say, “Who was that? What kind of a trick is this?”

“You’re in a jam,” I told him. “Let’s see if we can’t do something about it.”

They located my voice then.

The son ran around the table so that he could confront me.

“You damn crook!” he blazed.

I lit a cigarette.

Young Billings took a threatening step toward me.

“Damn you, Lam. This much pleasure I’m going to have out of this situation. I’m going to—”

“Wait, John,” his father said with a voice of quiet authority.

I said, “If you folks had put the cards on the table in the first place and asked us to clear you in the Bishop case, we’d have saved a lot of time.”

Young Billings, who had been making with chest and fists, wilted like a punctured tire.

“What the devil do you mean about the Bishop case?” the father asked.

I said, “Bishop disappeared. Your son has been trying to get an alibi. The way I look at it, the answer has to be George Bishop. Now what do you want to tell me about it?”

“Nothing,” young Billings said, recovering something of his poise. “How did you get in here?”

“I walked in.”

“How?”

“Through the back door.”

“That’s a lie. The back door was locked.”

“Not when I walked in,” I told him.

“Take a look, John,” the father said in a low, authoritative voice. “If it’s unlocked, for heaven’s sake lock it. We don’t want any more people dropping in on us.”

The son hesitated a moment, said, “I
know
it’s locked, Dad.”

“Make sure,” the older man said crisply.

The son went out through the dining-room and the butler’s pantry to the kitchen.

I said, “He’s in a lot of trouble. Perhaps I could help him — if there’s still time.”

He started to say something to me, then thought better of it and waited.

After a moment, the son came back.

“Well?”

“The key’s in the door, all right, Dad. I guess I must have neglected to turn it, but I certainly thought I locked that door after the servants left.”

“I think we’d better have a talk, John,” the father said.

“If Lam hadn’t talked to the police we’d have been all right,” John said. “We—”

“John!” the older man snapped crisply.

John ceased talking, as though his father’s voice had been a whiplash.

There were several seconds of silence. I puffed away on the cigarette. Despite anything I could do my hand was trembling. I hoped no one noticed it. It was sink or swim now. If they called the police, I was all finished. This time it would be blackmail. They’d throw the book at me.

“I think you and I had better have a little talk, John,” the father repeated, and led the way back to the den, leaving me sitting there.

I fought back a temptation to walk out. Now that the chips were in the center of the table I began to wonder if I held the right cards. If they decided to call the police, I was licked. If they didn’t, I was going to have to start work on a case that had been so terribly, so hopelessly messed up that it was a thousand-to-one shot.

The comfortable overstuffed chair felt like the hot seat in the death house. Beads of perspiration kept forming on my forehead and hands. I was angry at myself because I couldn’t control my nerves — but the perspiration kept coming just the same.

John Carver Billings the First came back and sat down in the chair opposite me. He said, “Lam, I think we are about ready to confide in you, provided one point can first be clarified.”

“What is that?”

“We would want some assurance that the activity of the police in questioning the alibi of my son was not inspired by any action from your agency.”