She pursed her fat mouth, looked intently at me, hesitated, but finally said: “Since last June.”
“What do you know about them?”
She balked at that, raising her chin and her eyebrows.
I gave her my card. That was safe enough; it fit in with the pretext I intended using upstairs.
Her face, when she raised it from reading the card, was oily with curiosity.
“Come in here,” she said in a husky whisper, backing through the doorway.
I followed her into her apartment. We sat on a Chesterfield and she whispered:
“What is it?”
“Maybe nothing.” I kept my voice low, playing up to her theatricals. “He’s done time for safe-burglary. I’m trying to get a line on him now, on the off chance that he might have been tied up in a recent job. I don’t know that he was. He may be going straight for all I know.” I took his photograph—front and profile, taken at Leavenworth—out of my pocket. “This him?”
She seized it eagerly, nodded, said, “Yes, that’s him, all right,” turned it over to read the description on the back, and repeated, “Yes, that’s him, all right.”
“His wife is here with him?” I asked.
She nodded vigorously.
“I don’t know her,” I said. “What sort of looking girl is she?”