That was silly. I felt sorry for this young man whose wife had killed herself. Apart from that, I had work to do. I tightened the screws.
“We won’t argue, Correll,” I told him. “The point is that I came here to see if your wife could tell me anything about the Banbrocks. She told me less than the truth. Later, she committed suicide. I want to know why. Come through for me, and I’ll do what I can to keep the papers and the public from linking her death with the girls’ disappearance.”
“Linking her death with their disappearance?” he exclaimed. “That’s absurd!”
“Maybe—but the connection is there!” I hammered away at him. I felt sorry for him, but I had work to do. “It’s there. If you’ll give it to me, maybe it won’t have to be advertised. I’m going to get it, though. You give it to me—or I’ll go after it out in the open.”
For a moment I thought he was going to take a poke at me. I wouldn’t have blamed him. His body stiffened—then sagged, and he dropped back into his chair. His eyes fidgeted away from mine.
“There’s nothing I can tell,” he mumbled. “When her maid went to her room to call her this morning, she was dead. There was no message, no reason, nothing.”
“Did you see her last night?”
“No. I was not home for dinner. I came in late and went straight to my own room, not wanting to disturb her. I hadn’t seen her since I left the house that morning.”
“Did she seem disturbed or worried then?”
“No.”
“Why do you think she did it?”