Free Shadow of Guilt by Patrick Quentin Page B

Don Saxby met a friend of yours in Toronto. Who was that friend?”
    I wanted to shout at Connie: For God’s sake, don’t tell him it’s Mal. Don’t let him get on to the Rysons and through the Rysons to Chuck.
    For a moment Connie stood looking most convincingly at a loss. “Now,” she said, “isn’t that silly? I’m sure there was someone. I’m—”
    “It wasn’t by any chance Mr. Malcolm Ryson, was it?” Trant interrupted.
    That was the second time he’d set a trap. Somehow or other, of course, he had already found out about Mal and had slipped it to us that way to see how much he could depend on our truthfulness. Once again Connie recovered admirably. She gave a little rueful shrug.
    “How foolish of me to forget,” she said. “Of course it was Mal.”
    “That’s what Mr. Ellerman thought,” said Trant. “He told me he was almost sure you’d mentioned the fact that Mr. Saxby had known Mr. Ryson in Toronto.”
    “They’d only met,” began Connie. “I don’t think that Mal—” Rut before she could finish, Trant cut in, “I understand, Mrs. Hadley, that your daughter’s engaged to the Ryson boy.”
    “That’s right,” said Connie.
    “The marriage is going to be in about a month?”
    “Yes—on the tenth of December.”
    “I suppose he didn’t go with your daughter and Mr. Saxby to the Greens’? I thought he might have. I mean, well, with their being married so soon…”
    “No,” said Connie. “I don’t think the Greens knew him, but in any case Chuck was in Chicago.”
    “Chicago?”
    “On business.”
    “I see.”
    Once again Trant pulled one of his pauses, and I steeled myself for him to ask whether Chuck had actually been in Chicago yesterday. But he didn’t. He merely glanced down at his nails and up again.
    “Well,” he said, “the thing for me to do now seems to be to have a talk with Mr. Ryson. Let’s hope I’ll have a little more success with him.” He held out his hand to Connie. “Goodbye, Mrs. Hadley. Thank you for being so co-operative.”
    He started for the door. As he did so, a foreboding came to me that this inevitably would be the moment when Ala would dash in and destroy everything. I went with him into the hall and found myself scurrying ahead of him like a butler to open the front door. I glanced up and down Sixty-Fourth Street. There was no sign of Ala.
    Trant reached me at the front door and paused. “This is a bad business, Mr. Hadley.”
    “Yes,” I said.
    “Your wife’s a fine woman and I understand she’s done a lot of good for this city. I’d hate to involve her, however slightly, in something as sordid as this.”
    “It can’t be helped,” I said.
    He was looking at me now as if he hadn’t really seen me before. The ambiguous eyes—blue? gray?—surveyed my face as if it were a rather tricky chart which had to be memorized in a hurry.
    “It’s a great relief to me, Mr. Hadley, that you people knew Don Saxby so casually. There’s nothing I hate more than having prominent people tangled up in a murder case. The D. A. hates it, too. Everybody hates it, in fact.” He paused, looking grave. “You know, when I talked to Mr. Green, I was a little worried.”
    “What about?” I said.
    “You know how people are, how easy it is for them to get the wrong impression.” He paused again. “Mr. Green seemed to feel from watching your daughter and Saxby that she was… well, that she was in love with him.”
    “In love?” I echoed, hoping that my voice had the right inflection of incredulity.
    “That would have been a mess, wouldn’t it?” Lieutenant Trant grinned. To me it was an unnerving grin. “Think of it… if your daughter had got mixed up with Saxby just a couple of weeks before her big, slap-up society wedding to the Ryson boy! Well… I’m glad I don’t have that on my hands.”
    He held out one of those hands to me. I took it, and as his cool, dry fingers touched mine, I had the panicky impression that he hadn’t