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.