Free The Listening Walls by Margaret Millar

look very queer in the newspapers.”
    â€œIt won’t take long to reach the papers if Gill goes around sounding off that Amy is dead and I’m about to establish a love nest with Miss Burton.”
    â€œSo far he’s sounded off only to me.”
    â€œAnd to the private detective, Dodd.”
    â€œI don’t think he told Dodd much, just enough to make it plausible that he wanted the handwriting in Amy’s let­ter compared to other samples of her writing.” She got up and leaned across the desk. “I’m on your side, Rupert, you know that.”
    â€œThanks.”
    â€œBut you have to make some concessions to Gill for your own protection. If he thought you were really trying to find Amy and get her back, it would help put him straight. So try.”
    â€œAdvertise, you mean?”
    â€œYes.”
    â€œAll right, that’s easy enough.”
    â€œThe library should have the names of all the leading newspapers in the country.” She hesitated. “It might be quite expensive. Naturally, Gill and I will pay for . . .”
    â€œNaturally?”
    â€œWell, it was our idea. It’s only fair that . . .”
    â€œI think,” Rupert said, “that I can afford to advertise for my own wife.”
    Amy, come home. He could already see the letters in print, but he knew Amy never would.

7.
    Elmer Dodd was a brash, bushy-haired little man, who’d been, at various times and with varying success, a carpen­ter in New Jersey, seaman on a Panamanian freighter, military policeman in Korea, bodyguard to a Chinese ex­porter in Singapore, and Bible salesman in Los Angeles. When, at forty, he met a woman who persuaded him to settle down, he found himself experienced in many things and expert in none, so he decided to become a private de­tective. He moved his bride to San Francisco. Here he hung around the Hall of Justice to get the feel of things, attended trials, where he took notes, and haunted the morgues of the Chronicle and the Examiner, where he read up on famous criminal cases of the past.
    All this might eventually have helped, but it was sheer coincidence that set him up in business. He was having a snack one day in a spaghetti joint in North Beach when the proprietor shot his wife and mother-in-law and the mother-in-law’s boyfriend. Dodd was the sole surviving witness.
    During the years that followed, Dodd’s name became familiar to every newspaper reader in the Bay area. It popped up in divorce cases, felony trials, gossip columns and, more regularly, in the personal section of the want ads where he offered his services as an expert in various fields, including handwriting analysis. He owned a cou­ple of books on the subject, which, in his own opinion, made him as much of an expert as anyone else since hand­writing analysis was not an exact science. He knew enough, at any rate, for run-of-the-mill cases like this Amy business.
    Amy sounded like a bit of a nut (Dodd also owned a book on abnormal psychology), but nut or not, she had certainly written all four of the letters Gill Brandon had brought in for comparison. Dodd had known this imme­diately, even before Brandon had left his office. But it would have been impractical to admit it. Experts took time, they checked and rechecked, and were suitably re­imbursed for their trouble. Dodd took a week, during which he checked and rechecked Gill Brandon’s financial standing and decided on a fee. It was just enough to make Brandon squawk in protest, but not so much as to cause him to refuse payment.
    Dodd was satisfied.
    So, in spite of the fee, was Gill. “I don’t mind telling you, Dodd, that this is a great load off my mind. Naturally, I was almost positive she wrote the letter. There was only a small element of doubt.”
    What a liar, Dodd thought. “Which is now dispelled, of course?”
    â€œOf course. As a matter of fact, we heard from her again yesterday.