The Woman in Black by Leslie Ford

Author:Leslie Ford [Ford, Leslie]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Crime, OCR-Editing
ISBN: 9784456024148
Google: AOY-cAAACAAJ
Amazon: 4456024143
Goodreads: 17413122
Publisher: Dell
Published: 1946-12-31T23:00:00+00:00

17

“But… what, Mrs. Stubblefield?” I asked.

She smoothed down the pleat of her gray print dress and brushed a little non-existent fluff from it before she raised her eyes to mine. They looked curiously cold to me just then, cold and rather calculating, as if she were wondering about me as I was most definitely beginning to wonder about her.

“Well, since you ask me that, Mrs. Latham, I’ll tell you,” she said deliberately. “Why did he take Joe Kramer with him when he went out last night? He knows Kramer is supposed to stay in the room next to my husband from the time he goes to bed until the time he wakes up. But Joe Kramer wasn’t there last night. I make a habit of checking on things concerning my husband, and he wasn’t there. Now where was he, do you suppose?”

“At what time?”

Mrs. Stubblefield considered for a moment.

“We left here shortly after you did, and went back to the hotel and to bed. My husband was tired. I looked in Joe’s room about midnight, I guess it was. He didn’t get back until after three. I saw him come in when Ellery Seymour came. They were in the same elevator. And that’s something else I don’t understand. Joe Kramer lied about it when I asked him. He said he’d gone downstairs because he’d run out of cigarettes, and met Ellery in the elevator coming up. He denied he’d been out earlier, and I let it go at that.—I’m having him investigated this morning, without telling my husband anything about it.”

“—Why are you telling me?” I thought. I couldn’t think of any reason in the world that would hold water.

“I wonder why this young Mr. Kent laid into Joe Kramer this morning?” she said. “I wonder if there’s any connection between any of this. I don’t think Joe Kramer would hesitate to use violence himself, and that’s—”

“But I thought you said it was somebody close to your husband, who thought he was doing him a service because he’s been persecuted?”

She was pleating her dress again.

“I think Joe Kramer would take orders if he got them.”

I was beginning at this point, I thought, to see some vague light

“Don’t you like Ellery Seymour, Mrs. Stubblefield?”

“He’s devoted to my husband’s interests, because they happen to be his own,” she said calmly. “I like him for that. I don’t care for him personally. I like men who live ordinary lives and don’t sit up all night doing work they could do in the daytime just as well. I like a man to be a good mixer like my husband. I don’t like these quiet men. You never know what they’re thinking. I like a man who looks well fed.”

Somebody had said that a long time ago, I seemed to remember, and it was a Caesar, not a Caesar’s wife. “Let me have men about me that are fat; Sleek-headed men and such as sleep o’ nights; yon Cassius has a lean and hungry look…”

“Of course, everything I’m saying is in strictest confidence—you know that,” Mrs.

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