Do your own dirty work.”
“Don’t be such an ass.
It’s a perfectly simple thing I want, Elizabeth Jane. I want to get into Florence Gunther’s room.”
“The answer is just as simple, Judy,” I said shortly. “You’ll do nothing of the sort.”
But she was argumentative and a trifle sulky.
“Oh well, if you must have it.
I want to look for something.
That’s all.”
“For what?”
“I don’t know.
But now listen to this; I don’t know why poor Sarah was killed, or Florence either.
But I do know why their shoes were taken off.
One or the other of them had something; I don’t know what, but she had.
It might have been a paper—”
“Give me the papers and take the child!” said Dick.
She ignored that.
“Now Dick has struck up an acquaintance with a blonde out there at the house on Halkett Street.
She’s named Lily, and he’s quite fond of her; he’s even had her out to lunch.”
Dick groaned, and she grinned maliciously.
“Her name is Sanderson, Lily Sanderson, and she’s rather a mess.
But she likes to talk, and she’s got something she hasn’t told the police.
She won’t even tell him, but she might tell us.”
“Who are ‘us’?”
“You and I, Elizabeth Jane; you to give staidness and respectability to the excursion, I to use my little wiles to wheedle her if necessary.
Dick says she’s afraid of the police, but once she sets eyes on you she’ll open up like a flower.”
I declined at once, but she has her own methods, has Judy, and so in the end I reluctantly consented to go.
The appointment was made for the next night, Friday.
Evidently Miss Sanderson was uneasy, for she made it Friday because the colored woman would be off for her afternoon out.
And it was she herself who admitted us when, having left the car at the corner, Judy and I presented ourselves on the following evening.
She opened the door with her finger to her lips.
“Now how nice!” she said, in a loud clear tone.
“Here I was, afraid I was to have an evening alone, and this happens!”
All the time she was urging us in with little gestures, and Judy’s face was a study.
Miss Sanderson was a large blonde woman with a slight limp, and she was evidently prepared for company.
She was slightly overdressed, and her room when she took us up to it was very tidy.
Suspiciously tidy, Judy said later, as if she had just finished with it.
When she had closed the door she lowered her voice.
“You never know who’s around in a place like this.
It’s all ears.
And since poor Miss Gunther’s awful end—” She looked at me with her pale blue eyes, and they were childish and filled with terror.
“I haven’t slept much since.
If there is a homicidal maniac loose, nobody can tell who’ll be next.”
“I wouldn’t worry,” said Judy.
“There’s no maniac loose.
Whoever killed her knew what he was doing.”
That seemed to relieve her.
She was, for all her clothes, a singularly simple woman, and I am glad here to pay my bit of tribute to Lily Sanderson. She had her own small part in the solving of the mystery, and of the four major crimes which it involved.
She liked Judy at once, I think. There is something direct about Judy, for all her talk about using her wiles; and Judy, I think, felt the compassion of youth for her, for the narrow life that one room typified, for the loneliness of soul which was feeding on this one great excitement.
I saw her looking about at the dreadful reach at beauty which the room revealed, the tea table at which nobody obviously ever had tea, at the silk shawl draped over the bed, at the imitation shell toilet set, the gaudily painted scrap basket, and at the screen which concealed the washstand in its corner, and behind which, I had no doubt, Miss Sanderson had dumped a clutter of odds and ends.
“You are very comfortable here, aren’t you? It’s quite homelike.”