we took sips of our drinks. It was excellent Scotch and this did not much surprise me.
“Nice place you’ve got here.”
“Oh, this? I borrowed it from a friend.”
“Still live at the same spot? Where we met?”
“Oh, yes. Nothing’s changed.” She sighed. “I want you to know I’m sorry about all this,” she said, sounding apologetic if not devastated. “I never expected to get you involved in anything so complicated. I thought you’d do a very simple job of burglary for me. I remembered how skillfully you opened our locks that night—”
“That was skill, all right. Hitting the place with you two in it.”
“Accidents do happen. I thought you’d do perfectly, though, and of course you’re the only person I know who could possibly do the job. I remembered you, of course, your name, and I just glanced through the telephone book on the chance that you might be in it, and there you were.”
“There I was,” I agreed. “They charge extra for an unlisted number and I’ve always considered it a waste of money. The idea of paying them for an unperformed service. Goes against the grain.”
“I never thought Fran would be home that night. There was an opening downtown.”
“An opening?”
“An experimental play. He was supposed to be in the audience and at the cast party afterward. Carter and I were there, you see, and when Fran didn’t turn up I got very nervous. I knew you were going to be burgling his apartment and I didn’t know where he could be, whether he’d gone somewhere else or stayed home or what. Wesley says you didn’t kill him.”
“He was dead when I got there.”
“And the police—”
I gave her a quick summary of what had happened in Flaxford’s apartment. Her eyes widened when I mentioned how I’d arranged to buy my way out. Here her husband was battling police corruption and she didn’t seem to know that cops took money from crooks. I guess civilians just don’t understand how the system works.
“Then someone else actually killed him,” she said. “I don’t suppose it could have been accidental? No, of course it couldn’t. But you did look in the desk before the police came? I saw Fran put the box in the desk. It was a deep blue, a little darker than royal blue, and the box itself was about the size of a hardcover novel. Maybe larger, perhaps as big as a dictionary. And I saw him put it in the desk.”
“Where in the desk? Under the rolltop?”
“One of the lower drawers. I don’t know which one.”
“It doesn’t matter. I went through those drawers.”
“Thoroughly?”
“Very thoroughly. If the box was there I would have found it.”
“Then someone else got it first.” Her face paled slightly beneath her make-up. She drank some more of her drink, sat down in a straight chair with a needlepoint seat. “Whoever killed Fran took the box,” she said.
“I don’t think so. That desk was locked when I found it, Mrs. Sandoval. Desk locks are always easy to open but you have to know what you’re doing.”
“The killer could have had a key.”
“But would he have bothered to lock up afterward? With a corpse in the bedroom? I don’t think so. He’d have thrown things all over the place and left a mess behind him.” I thought of my own ravaged apartment. “Besides,” I went on, “somebody’s still looking for the box and you don’t go on looking for something you already have. I went back to my own place a couple of hours ago and it looked as though Attila had marched his Huns through it. You didn’t have anything to do with that, did you?”
“Of course not.”
“Well, you could have hired someone. No hard feelings if you did, but you’d better tell me or we’ll be wasting our time chasing wild geese.”
She assured me she had had nothing to do with looting my place and I decided she was telling the truth. I hadn’t really figured she’d been involved in the first place. It was more logical to assume it had been tossed by the same person who had scrambled Flaxford’s brains.
“I think I know where the box is,” I said.
“Where?”
“Where it’s been all along. Flaxford’s apartment.”
“You said you looked.”
“I looked in the desk, but that’s as far as I got. I’d have kept on looking if the Marines hadn’t landed and I think I probably would have found it. It could have been anywhere in the apartment. Just because you saw him put it in