Death of a Doxy (Crime Line)

"There will be a trial, of Orrie Cather, unless we can find a way to stop it. Did your sister ever show you her diary?"

She frowned. "She didn't keep a diary."

"Yes, she did. The police have it. But since -"

"What does it say?"

"I don't know. I haven't seen it. Since -"

"She shouldn't have done that. That makes it worse. She didn't tell me. She must have kept it in that drawer she kept locked. Don't I have a right to it? Can't I make them give it to me?"

"Not now. You can later. If there's a trial it will be evidence. It's called an exhibit. Since you never saw it, we'll have to skip it. It looks pretty hopeless, because I don't know of anyone but you who can give me any information. Of course a good prospect would be the man who paid the rent for the apartment, and the car and the perfume and so on, but I don't know who he is. Do you?"

"No."

"That surprises me. I thought you would. You were close with your sister, weren't you?"

"Certainly I was."

"Then you must know who else was. Since you say you couldn't even try to guess who killed her, I'm not asking that, just who knew her well. Of course you have told the police."

"No, I haven't."

I raised a brow. "Are you refusing to talk to them too?"

"No, but I couldn't tell them much because I don't know. It was…" She stopped, shook her head, and turned to her husband. "You tell him, Barry."

He squeezed her hand. "You could almost say," he said, "that Isabel lived two lives. One of them was with my wife, her sister, and to a much less extent me. The other one was with her – well, call it her circle. My wife and I know very little about it, but we sort of understood that her friends were mostly from the world of the theater. You will realize that in the circumstances my wife preferred not to associate with them."

"It wasn't what I preferred," she corrected. "It was what was."

That helped a lot, another whole circle, but I might have expected it. "All right," I told her, "you can't give me names you don't know. Isn't there anyone, anyone at all, that you know and she knew?"

She shook her head. "Nobody."

"Dr. Gamm," Fleming said.

"Oh, of course," she said.

"Her doctor?" I asked.

Fleming nodded. "Ours too. An internist. He's – you might say – a friend of mine. He plays chess. When Isabel had a bad case of bronchitis a couple of years ago I -"

"Nearly three years ago," she said.

"Was it? I recommended him. He's a widower with two children. We have had him and Isabel here two or three evenings for bridge, but she wasn't very good at it."