“Oh, well,” she shrugged her shoulders pettishly, for she was the sort of woman who loved innuendo better than statement. “I don’t know the girls, of course, I’m not in that class of society, but he did have gay looking girls coming to his apartment now and then.”
“Every day?” Belknap looked at her sharply.
“Oh, my land, no, not every day. Just now and then?”
“That’s it, Mr Belknap,” she said. “How you do pin me down. Well, all I can swear to is one time I did see a fly little piece of baggage go in at his door.”
“Daytime.” Mrs Mansfield spoke aggrievedly, as if all the zest had been taken out of her news.
“Humph! And she might have been his lawyer’s stenographer, with an important paper.”
“She might not!” Mrs Mansfield declined to lose her last shred of excitement. “Stenographers are flippy enough, Lord knows! But this little snipjack, now, she was a real little vamp!”
“My land! I guess I don’t! I’m a respectable married woman——”
“And probably she is a respectable unmarried woman——”
“Well, until we know the circumstances we can’t judge her. I say, Prescott, get that photograph, will you. You know, the——”
“I know,” and Prescott went back across the hall. He returned with the picture of the girl Kelly had called Ivy Hayes.
“That’s the one,” said Mrs Mansfield, drawing away from it, “but she’s no lady.”
“Oh, come, now, you don’t know her. She’s a little moving picture actress. She may have had business with Mr Gleason.”
“She may have!” and the disdainful lady sniffed. “But it’s none of _my_ business, and I don’t care to discuss her.”
“You say you saw her go in there, yesterday?”
“Good land, no! I didn’t say yesterday! I said, one day.”
“All right, I’m glad you told us about it. It might mean something and it might not.”
“Of course, it means something!” Mrs Mansfield didn’t want her news scorned as naught. “An actress calling on a man like that—of course it means something!”
“If it does we’ll find it out,” Belknap said. “You don’t think this little thing shot Gleason, do you?”
“I don’t know why she couldn’t. Little women have done such deeds.”
“So they have. Now, you’ve nothing more to tell us?”
But though Mrs Mansfield said quite a bit more, she had really nothing more to tell them that they wanted to hear, and they got away, though with some difficulty, for the lady was of a garrulous type.