“Go back to San Francisco, Dick. I’ve got enough to do without having to watch you.”
He put his hat on very carefully and very carefully closed the door behind him when he went out.
At four o’clock I had some lunch, cigarettes, and an Evening Herald sent up to me.
Dinah Brand’s murder, and the newer murder of Charles Proctor Dawn, divided the front page of the Herald , with Helen Albury connecting them.
Helen Albury was, I read, Robert Albury’s sister, and she was, in spite of his confession, thoroughly convinced that her brother was not guilty of murder, but the victim of a plot. She had retained Charles Proctor Dawn to defend him. (I could guess that the late Charles Proctor had hunted her up, and not she him.) The brother refused to have Dawn or any other lawyer, but the girl (properly encouraged by Dawn, no doubt) had not given up the fight.
Finding a vacant flat across the street from Dinah Brand’s house, Helen Albury had rented it, and had installed herself therein with a pair of field glasses and one idea—to prove that Dinah and her associates were guilty of Donald Willsson’s murder.
I, it seems, was one of the “associates.” The Herald called me “a man supposed to be a private detective from San Francisco, who has been in the city for several days, apparently on intimate terms with Max (‘Whisper’) Thaler, Daniel Rolff, Oliver (‘Reno’) Starkey, and Dinah Brand.” We were the plotters who had framed Robert Albury.
The night that Dinah had been killed, Helen Albury, peeping through her window, had seen things that were, according to the Herald ,