The D.A. Breaks an Egg

“I’d show you mine if I hadn’t lost my purse.”

“So that now you’re without money?” Selby asked.

“I’m left without money. What’s more, I’m left without lipstick. Fortunately I had some extra cigarettes in my suitcase. As a matter of fact, Mr. Selby, I now find myself broke in a cruel world. I don’t even have money enough to pay my hotel bill, and I understand that’s a crime — beating a hotel bill. Can I count upon your interceding in your official capacity?”

Selby said doggedly, “I want to know what time you got in.”

“Well, if it’s any of your damn business,” she flared, “it was about four-thirty this morning.”

“Wasn’t that rather late?”

“It depends on what you think. It evidently was pretty late for this hick town.”

“And where were you?”

“If you want to know, I met a man. He looked good to me. He had a nice car. We went for a ride. He wanted to show me the lights of the town from up here on the mountain. I presume that’s the local equivalent of showing a girl your collection of etchings.”

“Do you know who this man was?”

“Not a bad chap,” she said. “He said his name was Jim. Anyway, he let me have everything I wanted to drink, including the choice brands of Scotch. He took me where I wanted to go, and he paid the bills.”

“Know his last name?”

“I didn’t ask him his last name and he didn’t ask me mine. When you come right down to it I suppose he’s married and has a family, but he was on the loose for an evening, and I was stuck here in this burg and didn’t want to go to bed with the chickens, so we stepped out and...”

“Could you identify him if you saw him again?”

“Of course I could. I wasn’t blind. I’ll let a man pick me up once in a while if he appeals to me, but I don’t go out with every Tom, Dick, or Harry. In other words, I’m selective.”

“Did you say anything to him about losing your purse?”

She laughed, and said, “Don’t be silly. Why should I spoil a beautiful evening?”

“You mean casually mentioning that your purse had been stolen would have ruined a beautiful evening?”

She said, “I thought for a while you were going to be different, but I can see you’re not. You’re just a sweet, unsophisticated lad from a hick town.”

“What do you mean by that?”

She said, “Suppose you’d picked up a girl right after a movie. You take her out to a couple of night spots. You buy drinks and dance, and begin to look her over carefully, wondering just where she came from, just how sophisticated she is, and just how far she’ll go, and then she suddenly tells you that she hasn’t a cent in the world; that someone just stole her purse while she was sitting in the movie; that she’s lost sixteen hundred bucks in currency and six or seven hundred dollars in travelers’ checks. What happens? I’ll tell you what happens,” she went on, answering her own question. “The guy immediately thinks you’re a professional; that you’re taking a nice way of putting a price tag on yourself and he starts thinking in terms of cold hard cash, and from there on your evening is ruined any way you’ve a mind to take it.”

“Yes,” Selby said thoughtfully, “I can see your point.”

“I can get the travelers’ checks back,” she said. “They’ll replace them when I make an affidavit of loss. I won’t have to wait too long for that. I suppose the hotel will give me credit until then, under the circumstances — although they may get nasty. I don’t suppose I can use you as a reference?”

“Reference to what?”

“To the fact that I lost my purse.”

“The only way I know you lost your purse,” Selby said, “is because you’ve told me you’ve lost your purse. Why don’t you tell the management of the hotel the same story?”

“I can see the skeptical legal mind at work. I guess you’re the district attorney, all right. Oh, well, I’ve been on my own before. I can take it, I guess.”

“So you were out with a man whose name was Jim. You were out until four-thirty this morning. You don’t know his last name.”

“That’s right.”

“Nor the license of his car.”

“It was a slick convertible. I didn’t take the license number. I’m not that kind. Of course, if it had been serious, I’d have found out a little more about him. As it was, it was just an interlude helping pass yesterday into today, and reconciling me to the fact that I’d come to a place where they roll the sidewalks up and put them in mothballs at nine or ten o’clock at night.”

“Why did you come here?” Selby asked.

“I came here because I wanted to. I suppose, Mr. Selby, that if I’d really been murdered, that would have given you a legal right to have asked me a lot of questions which, under the circumstances, I wouldn’t have been in a position to answer.”

She smiled at her own joke.

“And in view of the fact that you haven’t been murdered?” Selby said.

“I certainly don’t have to let you invade the privacy of my bedroom to hold me to account for not having been murdered. And now, Mr. Douglas Selby, District Attorney of Madison County, if you’ll get the hell out of my bedroom, I feel the urge to take a shower, inasmuch as you have disrupted my night’s sleep.”

“But I want to know...”