Free How Like an Angel by Margaret Millar

suitcase?”
    â€œSuit—oh, I checked it. At the bus depot. So I wouldn’t have to carry it around. It’s heavy, since all my clothes are in it and everything. And it’s a terribly big suitcase in the first place.”
    If she’d simply claimed to have checked the suitcase, he might have believed her, having no reason not to. But she’d elaborated too much, as though she’d been trying to make the suitcase real to herself as well as Quinn.
    The waitress brought Quinn’s check.
    â€œI must be going,” he said, rising. “Nice to have met you, Miss de Vries. And good luck in the big city.”
    He paid the cashier and walked across the street to his motel. The garage belonging to the first unit was open. He stepped inside, watching the door of El Bocado café.
    He didn’t have long to wait. Miss Wilhelmina de Vries came out, stood hesitantly on the curb, and looked up and down the street. A wind had started blowing, brisk but very warm, and she was attempting to hold down her skirt and her turban at the same rime. Modesty finally won out. She unwound the turban, which turned out to be a long blue scarf, and stuffed it into her purse. Under the street lamp her hair, released from its confinement, sprung up in all directions and shone in the light, the color of persimmons. She walked half a block down the street, climbed into a small dark sedan, and drove off.
    Quinn had no chance to follow her. By the time he could get his own car out of the garage and on the road, she would be home, or at the bus depot or wherever else young ladies like Miss de Vries went after an unsuccessful attempt to pump information out of a stranger. She was, obviously, an amateur at the game, and the turban, and probably the spectacles, too, were a crude disguise. Quinn wondered why she’d bothered with a disguise when he didn’t even know her. Then he re­membered sitting in John Ronda’s office at the Beacon and seeing through the glass partition the tops of three heads. One of them had had hair the color of persimmons.
    All right, assume she was there, Quinn thought. Ronda had a loud, distinct voice, and the walls of his office were only six feet high. Miss de Vries could have overheard something of sufficient interest to her to make her assume a disguise and arrange a pick-up in the El Bocado café, maybe with the col­laboration of the waitress. But exactly what had she heard? The only subject he and Ronda had discussed was the O’Gor­man case, the details of which were common knowledge in Chicote, the evidence a matter of public record available to anyone.
    Miss de Vries had made what could be construed as a refer­ence to O’Gorman—”it has to be an old case”—and then practically nullified it by adding, “Does it involve a lot of money?” There was no money connected with the O’Gor­man business except the two one-dollar bills O’Gorman was carrying when he left the house for the last time.
    Ronda’s only mention of a subject unconnected with O’Gorman was his brief remark about a nice little lady embezzler caught with her fingers in the till. Quinn wondered what had happened to the nice little lady, and the money, and who else had been involved.
    He crossed the driveway and went into the motel office to pick up his key. The night clerk, an old man with arthritis-swollen hands, looked up from the movie magazine he was reading. “Yes, sir?”
    â€œThe key to number seventeen, please.”
    â€œSeventeen, yes, sir. Just a minute.” He shuffled over to the key rack. “Ingrid’s not about to make a go of it with Lars any more than Debbie will with Harry. And you can quote me.”
    â€œOh, I will,” Quinn said. “Daily.”
    â€œWhat’s that number again?”
    â€œSeventeen.”
    â€œIt’s not here.” The old man peered at Quinn over the top of his bifocals.