He stared at me. “Okey, how did you know I was on the Monty?” He had asked me that before. He seemed to have forgotten.
“I didn’t. But the easiest way to get away would be by water. With the set-up they have in Bay City you could get out to one of the gambling boats. From there you could get clean away. With the right help.”
“Laird Brunette is a nice guy,” he said emptily. “So I’ve heard. I never even spoke to him.”
“He got the message to you.”
“Hell, there’s a dozen grapevines that might help him to do that, pal. When do we do what you said on the card? I had a hunch you were leveling. I wouldn’t take the chance to come here otherwise. Where do we go?”
He killed his cigarette and watched me. His shadow loomed against the wall, the shadow of a giant. He was so big he seemed unreal.
“What made you think I bumped Jessie Florian?” he asked suddenly.
“The spacing of the finger marks on her neck. The fact that you had something to get out of her, and that you are strong enough to kill people without meaning to.”
“The johns tied me to it?”
“I don’t know.”
“What did I want out of her?”
“You thought she might know where Velma was.”
He nodded silently and went on staring at me.
“But she didn’t,” I said. “Velma was too smart for her.”
There was a light knocking at the door.
Malloy leaned forward a little and smiled and picked up his gun. Somebody tried the doorknob. Malloy stood up slowly and leaned forward in a crouch and listened. Then he looked back at me from looking at the door.
I sat up on the bed and put my feet on the floor and stood up. Malloy watched me silently, without a motion. I went over to the door.
“Who is it?” I asked with my lips to the panel.
It was her voice all right. “Open up, silly. It’s the Duchess of Windsor.”
“Just a second.”
I looked back at Malloy. He was frowning. I went over close to him and said in a very low voice: “There’s no other way out. Go in the dressing room behind the bed and wait. I’ll get rid of her.”
He listened and thought. His expression was unreadable. He was a man who had now very little to lose. He was a man who would never know fear. It was not built into even that giant frame. He nodded at last and picked up his hat and coat and moved silently around the bed and into the dressing room. The door closed, but did not shut tight.
I looked around for signs of him. Nothing but a cigarette butt that anybody might have smoked. I went to the room door and opened it. Malloy had set the catch again when he came in.
She stood there half smiling, in the highnecked white fox evening cloak she had told me about. Emerald pendants hung from her ears and almost buried themselves in the soft white fur. Her fingers were curled and soft on the small evening bag she carried.
The smile died off her face when she saw me. She looked me up and down. Her eyes were cold now.
“So it’s like that,” she said grimly. “Pajamas and dressing gown. To show me his lovely little etching. What a fool I am.”
I stood aside and held the door. “It’s not like that at all. I was getting dressed and a cop dropped in on me. He just left.”
“Randall?”
I nodded. A lie with a nod is still a lie, but it’s an easy lie. She hesitated a moment, then moved past me with a swirl of scented fur.
I shut the door. She walked slowly across the room, stared blankly at the wall, then turned quickly.
“Let’s understand each other,” she said. “I’m not this much of a pushover. I don’t go for hall bedroom romance. There was a time in my life when I had too much of it. I like things done with an air.”
“Will you have a drink before you go?” I was still leaning against the door, across the room from her.
“Am I going?”
“You gave me the impression you didn’t like it here.”
“I wanted to make a point. I have to be a little vulgar to make it. I’m not one of these promiscuous bitches. I can be had — but not just by reaching. Yes, I’ll take a drink.”
I went out into the kitchenette and mixed a couple of drinks with hands that were not too steady. I carried them in and handed her one.
There was no sound from the dressing-room, not even a sound of breathing.
She took the glass and tasted it and looked across it at the far wall. “I don’t like men to receive me in their pajamas,” she said. “It’s a funny thing. I liked you. I liked you a lot. But I could get over it. I have often got over such things.”
I nodded and drank.
“Most men are just lousy animals,” she said. “In fact it’s a pretty lousy world, if you ask me.”
“Money must help.”
“You think it’s going to when you haven’t always had money. As a matter of fact it just makes new problems.” She smiled curiously. “And you forget how hard the old problems were.”
She got out a gold cigarette case from her bag and I went over and held a match for her. She blew a vague plume of smoke and watched it with half-shut eyes.
“Sit close to me,” she said suddenly.
“Let’s talk a little first.”
“About what? Oh — my jade?”
“About murder.”
Nothing changed in her face. She blew another plume of smoke, this time more carefully, more slowly. “It’s a nasty subject. Do we have to?”
I shrugged.
“Lin Marriott was no saint,” she said. “But I still don’t want to talk about it.”
She stared at me coolly for a long moment and then dipped her hand into her open bag for a handkerchief.
“Personally I don’t think he was a finger man for a jewel mob, either,” I said. “The police pretend that they think that, but they do a lot of pretending. I don’t even think he was a blackmailer, in any real sense. Funny, isn’t it?”
“Is it?” The voice was very, very cold now.
“Well, not really,” I agreed and drank the rest of my drink. “It was awfully nice of you to come here, Mrs. Grayle. But we seem to have hit the wrong mood. I don’t even, for example, think Marriott was killed by a gang. I don’t think he was going to that canyon to buy a jade necklace. I don’t even think a jade necklace was ever stolen. I think he went to that canyon to be murdered, although he thought he went there to help commit a murder. But Marriott was a very bad murderer.”
She leaned forward a little and her smile became just a little glassy. Suddenly, without any real change in her, she ceased to be beautiful. She looked merely like a woman who would have been dangerous a hundred years ago, and twenty years ago daring, but who today was just Grade B Hollywood.
She said nothing, but her right hand was tapping the clasp of her bag.
“A very bad murderer,” I said. “Like Shakespeare’s Second Murderer in that scene in King Richard III. The fellow that had certain dregs of conscience, but still wanted the money, and in the end didn’t do the job at all because he couldn’t make up his mind. Such murderers are very dangerous. They have to be removed — sometimes with blackjacks.”
She smiled. “And who was he about to murder, do you suppose?”
“Me.”
“That must be very difficult to believe — that anyone would hate you that much. And you said my jade necklace was never stolen at all. Have you any proof of all this?”
“I didn’t say I had. I said I thought these things.”
