II
I spent the next couple of hours questioning the Estep servants, to no great advantage. None of them had been near the front of the house at the time of the shooting, and none had seen Mrs. Estep immediately prior to her husband’s death.
After a lot of hunting, I located Lucy Coe, the nurse, in an apartment on Vallejo Street. She was a small, brisk, businesslike woman of thirty or so. She repeated what Vance Richmond had told me, and could add nothing to it.
That cleaned up the Estep end of the job; and I set out for the Montgomery Hotel, satisfied that my only hope for success—barring miracles, which usually don’t happen—lay in finding the letter that I believed Dr. Estep had written to his first wife.
My drag with the Montgomery Hotel management was pretty strong—strong enough to get me anything I wanted that wasn’t too far outside the law. So as soon as I got there, I hunted up Stacey, one of the assistant managers.
“This Mrs. Estep who’s registered here,” I asked, “what do you know about her?”
“Nothing, myself, but if you’ll wait a few minutes I’ll see what I can learn.”
The assistant manager was gone about ten minutes.
“No one seems to know much about her,” he told me when he came back. “I’ve questioned the telephone girls, bellboys, maids, clerks, and the house detective; but none of them could tell me much.
“She registered from Louisville, on the second of the month. She has never stopped here before, and she seems unfamiliar with the city—asks quite a few questions about how to get around. The mail clerks don’t remember handling any mail for her, nor do the girls on the switchboard have any record of phone calls for her.
“She keeps regular hours—usually goes out at ten or later in the morning, and gets in before midnight. She doesn’t seem to have any callers or friends.”
“Will you have her mail watched—let me know what postmarks and return addresses are on any letters she gets?”
“Certainly.”
“And have the girls on the switchboard put their ears up against any talking she does over the wire.”
“Yes.”
“Is she in her room now?”
“No, she went out a little while ago.”
“Fine! I’d like to go up and take a look at her stuff.”
Stacey looked sharply at me, and cleared his throat.
“Is it as—ah—important as all that? I want to give you all the assistance I can, but—”
“It’s this important,” I assured him, “that another woman’s life depends on what I can learn about this one.”
“All right!” he said. “I’ll tell the clerk to let us know if she comes in before we are through; and we’ll go right up.”
The woman’s room held two valises and a trunk, all unlocked, and containing not the least thing of importance—no letters—nothing. So little, in fact, that I was more than half convinced that she had expected her things to be searched.
Downstairs again, I planted myself in a comfortable chair within sight of the key rack, and waited for a view of this first Mrs. Estep.
She came in at 11:15 that night. A large woman of forty-five or fifty, well dressed, and carrying herself with an air of assurance. Her face was a little too hard as to mouth and chin, but not enough to be ugly. A capable looking woman—a woman who would get what she went after.