Free Shadow of Guilt by Patrick Quentin

complete the sentence.
    For a brief, uninterested moment, Lieutenant Trant glanced at me, then he turned his attention back to Connie. “I’m certainly hoping you will be able to help me, Mrs. Hadley. You see, I’ve just been talking with Mr. Ellerman of the Ellerman Galleries and he tells me that it was as a favor to you that he gave Mr. Saxby a job. He says you had been very interested in the young man and—”
    “That’s rather an exaggeration, I’m afraid,” Connie broke in. “I understood Mr. Ellerman employed him because he thought he’d be suitable for the job. All I did was to arrange an interview. My acquaintance with Mr. Saxby—with Don—was really very slight.”
    “Oh, it was, was it?” Trant’s eyes widened, showing a lot of white around the irises. “I hadn’t realized that.”
    “We just met casually at some private view. He happened to have met a friend of mine in Toronto. We talked. It came out that he needed a job. He seemed very pleasant—and very competent. So I thought of Mr. Ellerman.”
    “And that was the extent of your acquaintance?”
    “Not exactly. I saw him a couple of times—here and there.”
    “But you didn’t know a great deal about him?”
    “Hardly anything, I’m afraid.”
    “Oh,” said Lieutenant Trant again.
    I was torn between alarm at Lieutenant Trant’s soft, unemphasized “oh’s” and grudging admiration for Connie’s remarkable poise. But even the poise alarmed me a little, too. Connie had a way of underestimating people, and I had the uneasy suspicion that Lieutenant Trant was very definitely not someone to underestimate.
    He was in one of the red leather chairs. They had been designed for lolling, but somehow he was managing to sit up very straight in it.
    “I’m disappointed that you didn’t know him better, Mrs. Hadley. At the moment we’re working more or less in the dark. You’re the most promising contact we’ve been able to unearth. He hasn’t been here long from Canada, is that correct?”
    “That’s what I understood,” said Connie.
    “And he didn’t have many friends in this country?”
    “That I wouldn’t know.”
    “You don’t, for example, know some people called Green? Mr. and Mrs. Thomas Green?”
    It had come out so smoothly that it took me a second to realize he was setting a trap. But to my relief I saw that Connie wasn’t shaken at all. She merely wrinkled her brow in concentration.
    “Green,” she said. “They’re not the people who live somewhere in Massachusetts?”
    “They are,” said Trant.
    “Oh, yes, I haven’t met them but I’ve heard of them. Our adopted daughter, Alathea, met them last week at some party. They invited her to visit and she and Don Saxby drove up there to spend the night on Friday. In fact, I believe they were to spend the weekend, but Ala got a little bored with it. She had Don Saxby drive her home Saturday night.”
    There it was, sounding very feeble—our major lie. From now on we were committed.
    “Saturday night,” said Trant.
    “That’s right.”
    “What time did he bring her home?”
    “Oh, I don’t know. I suppose around ten.”
    “Did you meet him? I mean, did he come in with your daughter?”
    “No—as a matter of fact, he didn’t.”
    “Since he wasn’t discovered by his cleaning woman, Mrs. Cassidy, until next morning, the medical examiner can’t be too exact about the time of death. But he knows it was Sunday afternoon. He’s put a deadline either way—two p.m. and five p.m. Unfortunately, although the people in the next apartment were at home at the time, they noticed no sound of shots, and the woman at the back of the floor seems to be away. So—that’s the best we can do. Between two and five on Sunday. That would be the very next day after he brought your daughter home from Massachusetts, wouldn’t it?”
    There again he had managed to make a perfectly self-evident remark quiver with ominous overtones. He waited for Connie to say something in