“Yes,” said Barham, “she is.”
“Will you go with me to interview her?”
But this Andrew Barham couldn’t bring himself to do. He begged to be let off from such an unpleasant undertaking, and the two detectives went away without him.
Reaching the Sayre house, they succeeded in obtaining an interview with the lady.
“I don’t know what you can have to talk to me about,” she said, a little nervously as she appeared in her living room and greeted the two men.
“Perhaps nothing of importance, Mrs. Sayre,” Lane said, “and perhaps it is. Will you detail your movements the night of the studio party in Washington Square—when Mrs. Barham was killed.”
Whereupon Mrs. Sayre glibly told of her visit to her dressmaker, and afterward the party at Mrs. Gardner’s.
“All very well,” Lane said, “but your dressmaker says you were not there at all.”
Rosamond Sayre turned white, but she declared the woman had forgotten her visit, or for some reason of her own preferred to tell a falsehood about it.
“No, Mrs. Sayre, she is not telling an untruth, but you are. You did not go to your dressmaker’s that night, you went to the studio party. You wore the costume of ‘Winter’, and you left the house just a few moments after Mr. Locke did. You were seen by a neighbor. And before you went—just before, you had a discussion with Mrs. Barham regarding”
“I did! She blackmailed me! She had made my life a burden for weeks! She knew a secret which I would rather have died than let it come to the ears of my husband. She knew a secret that would have ruined me if it had become known. And she had already extorted hundreds of dollars from me which I paid her to keep silent about it.
