Free Jealous Woman by James M. Cain

I ’ad to warn ’im it was dangerous as ’e could lose ’is balance and fall. Then ’e calmed down a little and I suggested ’e might prefer to wait for ’er alone. So I left ’im there, and left word with him for Mrs. Delavan I would remain dressed a little while if she needed me, and around twelve, as there was no call, I went to bed.”
    “Well, that about clears it up.”
    The sergeant said that to the patrolman, and the patrolman opened a portable typewriter he had beside him and stuck a piece of paper in and started to write. But Jane got up, lit a cigarette, and broke in on it. “Not quite ... Jenkins, why have you let a whole morning go by without telling me this?”
    “Ma’am, ’e asked me not to. ’E gave me a tenner.”
    “Doesn’t it seem to you that under all the circumstances you’ve been carrying discretion a little too far?”
    “I’ve accepted your suggestion, ma’am, to conceal nothing from the officers, but if I may say ’ow I feel, I’m not looking forward at all to my next meeting with Mr. Sperry, and it’ll cost me the tenner, I’ll ’ave you know, in connection with all your fine ethical ideas, for I can ’ardly keep it now I’ve broken the promise I made to him.”
    “... Jenkins, haven’t you heard ?”
    “I’ve not been out, ma’am. I’ve been in my room all morning after making myself a cup of coffee, waiting for your call.”
    “I didn’t ring you—I didn’t want to talk about it. ... Mr. Richard was killed shortly after you left him last night, in a fall from that very window.”
    “Oh, no, ma’am, don’t tell me that!”
    After the cops went and Jenkins quit her bawling, it was Jane that cracked up a little, and it took some little cheek-patting to get her calmed down. But when the phone rang I wouldn’t let her answer. I figured it was the reporters, and if she was that much upset to find out Sperry had had something friendly in mind when he came up there, I didn’t think facing a bunch of buzzards with lead pencils and notebooks would do her much good. We let the phones ring and I put on her coat and zipped her down to the basement and out the side way to my car and headed out of town with her and I had no idea where we were going, but we wound up at Sacramento. We had a swell dinner at the Senator and at last it seemed everything was cleared up and coming back she tucked her hand in mine and said she was falling in love, I said O.K. by me. She said O.K. by her. It’s funny the dumb things you say that mean so much to you you could remember them the rest of your life.
    We got in late, and it must have been after two o’clock when my phone rang and on the line was Keyes. “Ed, have you seen the papers?”
    “About that maid?”
    “That’s what I mean.”
    “No, but I was there when she talked to the cops.”
    “Does it strike you as peculiar?”
    “She hadn’t heard it. She hadn’t been out.”
    “You know anything about English servants?”
    “I don’t keep servants.”
    “Neither do I, but young Norton’s always got three or four of them around, and now and then I go out there. Ed, they’re the most gossipy, curious breed of people I ever saw, and how that maid, with romance waiting upstairs, could sit there in her room without ever once ringing Mrs. Delavan’s phone I simply don’t see.”
    “What romance?”
    “The former husband.”
    “I’m the romance in that household.”
    “Yeah, but does the maid know it?”
    “I wouldn’t be surprised.”
    “Ed, it won’t add up. The former husband shows up, hands her a ten-spot to keep her mouth shut, and on the second trip she leaves him there to wait for his former wife who’s her mistress. I’m telling you, she couldn’t wait to find out what it was all about. Her nose would be quivering for it. And yet she didn’t make one move to go after it—that is, if the papers have got it right. Or have they?”
    “On that point, apparently they have.”
    “Well, thank God it’s not