me.”
She bit a knuckle and sneaked a couple of quick looks at me around the side of the knuckle. “Last night—” she said, and stopped and colored.
“Let’s use a little of the old acid,” I said. “Last night you told me you killed Vannier and then you told me you didn’t. I know you didn’t. That’s settled.”
She dropped the knuckle, looked at me levelly, quiet, composed and the hands on her knees now not straining at all.
“Vannier was dead a long time before you got there. You went there to give him some money for Mrs. Murdock.”
“No—for me,” she said. “Although of course it was Mrs. Murdock’s money. I owe her more than I’ll ever be able to repay. Of course she doesn’t give me much salary, but that would hardly—”
I said roughly: “Her not giving you much salary is a characteristic touch and your owing her more than you can ever repay is more truth than poetry. It would take the Yankee outfield with two bats each to give her what she has coming from you. However, that’s unimportant now. Vannier committed suicide because he had got caught out in a crooked job. That’s flat and final. The way you behaved was more or less an act. You got a severe nervous shock seeing his leering dead face in a mirror and that shock merged into another one a long time ago and you just dramatized it in your screwy little way.”
She looked at me shyly and nodded her copper-blond head, as if in agreement.
“And you didn’t push Horace Bright out of any window,” I said.
Her face jumped then and turned startlingly pale. “I—I—” her hand went to her mouth and stayed there and her shocked eyes looked at me over it.
“I wouldn’t be doing this,” I said, “if Dr. Moss hadn’t said it would be all right and we might as well hand it to you now. I think maybe you think you killed Horace Bright. You had a motive and an opportunity and just for a second I think you might have had the impulse to take advantage of the opportunity. But it wouldn’t be in your nature. At the last minute you would hold back. But at that last minute probably something snapped and you pulled a faint. He did actually fall, of course, but you were not the one that pushed him.”
I held it a moment and watched the hand drop down again to join the other one and the two of them twine together and pull hard on each other.
“You were made to think you had pushed him,” I said. “It was done with care, deliberation and the sort of quiet ruthlessness you only find in a certain kind of woman dealing with another woman. You wouldn’t think of jealousy to look at Mrs. Murdock now—but if that was a motive, she had it. She had a better one—fifty thousand dollars’ life insurance—all that was left from a ruined fortune. She had the strange wild possessive love for her son such women have. She’s cold, bitter, unscrupulous and she used you without mercy or pity, as insurance, in case Vannier ever blew his top. You were just a scapegoat to her. If you want to come out of this pallid sub-emotional life you have been living, you have got to realize and believe what I am telling you. I know it’s tough.”
“It’s utterly impossible,” she said quietly, looking at the bridge of my nose, “Mrs. Murdock has been wonderful to me always. It’s true I never remembered very well—but you shouldn’t say such awful things about people.”
I got out the white envelope that had been in the back of Vannier’s picture. Two prints in it and a negative. I stood in front of her and put a print on her lap.
“Okay, look at it. Vannier took it from across the street.” She looked at it. “Why that’s Mr. Bright,” she said. “It’s not a very good picture, is it? And that’s Mrs. Murdock—Mrs. Bright she was then—right behind him. Mr. Bright looks mad.” She looked up at me with a sort of mild curiosity.
“If he looks mad there,” I said, “you ought to have seen him a few seconds later, when he bounced.”
“When he what?”
“Look,” I said, and there was a kind of desperation in my voice now, “that is a snapshot of Mrs. Elizabeth Bright Murdock giving her first husband the heave out of his office window. He’s falling. Look at the position of his hands. He’s screaming with fear. She is behind him and her face is hard with rage—or something. Don’t you get it at all? This is what Vannier has had for proof all these years. The Murdocks never saw it, never really believed it existed. But it did. I found it last night, by a fluke of the same sort that was involved in the taking of the picture. Which is a fair sort of justice. Do you begin to understand?”
She looked at the photo again and laid it aside. “Mrs. Murdock has always been lovely to me,” she said.
“She made you the goat,” I said, in the quietly strained voice of a stage manager at a bad rehearsal. “She’s a smart tough patient woman. She knows her complexes. She’ll even spend a dollar to keep a dollar, which is what few of her type will do. I hand it to her. I’d like to hand it to her with an elephant gun, but my polite breeding restrains me.”
“Well,” she said, “that’s that,” And I could see she had heard one word in three and hadn’t believed what she had heard. “You must never show this to Mrs. Murdock. It would upset her terribly.”
I got up and took the photo out of her hand and tore it into small pieces and dropped them in the wastebasket.
“Maybe you’ll be sorry I did that,” I told her, not telling her I had another and the negative. “Maybe some night—three months—three years from now—you will wake up in the night and realize I have been telling you the truth. And maybe then you will wish you could look at that photograph again. And maybe I am wrong about this too. Maybe you would be very disappointed to find out you hadn’t really killed anybody. That’s fine. Either way it’s fine. Now we are going downstairs and get in my car and we are going to drive to Wichita to visit your parents. And I don’t think you are going back to Mrs. Murdock, but it may well be that I am wrong about that too. But we are not going to talk about this any more. Not any more.”
“I haven’t any money,” she said.
“You have five hundred dollars that Mrs. Murdock sent you. I have it in my pocket.”
“That’s really awfully kind of her,” she said.
“Oh hell and fireflies,” I said and went out to the kitchen and gobbled a quick drink, before we started. It didn’t do me any good. It just made me want to climb up the wall and gnaw my way across the ceiling.
