heard me arguing with her mother. Which was false, and I told her so. I wasn't even in Indian Springs that night. That stopped her cold.'
'Then what?'
'I asked her why she lied about me.' He licked his lips and said in a hushed voice: 'I asked her if she shot her mother herself, maybe by accident, the way Alice kept that revolver lying around loose. It was a terrible question, but it had to come out. It'd been on my mind for a long time.'
'As long ago as your trial?'
'Yeah. Before that.'
'And that's why you wouldn't let Stevens cross-examine her?'
'Yeah. I should have let him go ahead. I ended up crossquestioning her myself ten years later.'
'What was the result?'
'More hysterics. She was laughing and crying at the same time. I never felt so sorry for anybody. She was as white as a sheet and the tears popped out of her eyes and ran down her face. Her tears looked so _pure_.'
'What did she say?'
'She said she didn't do it, naturally.'
'Could she have? Did she know how to handle a gun?'
'A little. I gave her a little training, and so did Alice. It doesn't take much gun-handling to pull a trigger, especially by accident.'
'You still think it could have happened that way?'
'I don't know. It's mainly what I wanted to talk to you about.'
These words seemed to release him from an obscure bondage. He climbed down out of the upper bunk and stood facing me in the narrow aisle. He had on a seaman's black turtleneck, levis, and rubber-soled deck shoes.
'You're in a position to go and talk to her,' he said. 'I'm not. Mr. Stevens won't. But you can go and ask her what really happened.'
'She may not know.'
'I realize that. She got pretty mixed up the other Sunday. God knows I wasn't trying to mix her up. I only asked her some questions. But she didn't seem to know the difference between what happened and what she said in court.'
'That story she told in court--did she definitely admit she made it up?'
'She made it up with a lot of help from Alice. I can imagine how it went. 'This is the way it happened, isn't it?' Alice would say. 'You saw your old man with the gun, didn't you?' And after a while the kid had her story laid out for her.'
'Would Alice deliberately try to frame you?'
'She wouldn't put it that way to herself. She'd know for a fact I was guilty. All she was doing was making sure I got punished for my crime. She probably fed the kid her lines without knowing she was faking evidence. My dear sister-inlaw was always out to get me, anyway.'
'Was she out to get Connie, too?'
'Connie? She doted on Connie. Alice was more like her mother than her sister. There was fourteen-fifteen years' difference in their ages.'
'You said she wanted Connie to herself. Her feelings for Connie could have changed if she found out about Bradshaw.'
'Not _that_ much. Anyway, who would tell her?'
'Your daughter might have. If she told you, she'd tell Alice.'
McGee shook his head. 'You're really reaching.'
'I have to. This is a deep case, and I can't see the bottom of it yet. Did Alice ever live in Boston, do you know?'
'I think she always lived here. She's a Native Daughter. I'm a native son, but nobody ever gave me a medal for it.'
'Even Native Daughters have been known to go to Boston. Did Alice ever go on the stage, or marry a man named Macready, or dye her hair red?'
'None of those things sound like Alice.'
I thought of her pink fantastic bedroom, and wondered.
'They sound more,' McGee was saying, and then he stopped. He was silent for a watching moment. 'I'll take that cigarette you offered me.'
I gave him a cigarette and lighted it. 'What were you going to say?'
'Nothing. I must have been thinking aloud.'
'Who were you thinking about?'
'Nobody you know. Forget it, eh?'
'Come on, McGee. You're supposed to be leveling with me.'
'I still have a right to my private thoughts. It kept me alive in prison.'
'You're out of prison now. Don't you want to stay out?'
'Not if somebody else has to go in.'
'Sucker,' I said. 'Who are you covering for now?'
'Nobody.'
'Madge Cerhardi?'
'You must be off your rocker.'
I couldn't get anything more out of him. The long slow weight of prison forces men into unusual shapes. McGee had become a sort of twisted saint.
chapter 28
He was about to be given another turn of the screw. When I climbed out into the cockpit I saw three men approaching along the floating dock. Their bodies, their hatted heads, were dark as iron against the exploding sunset.
One of them showed me a deputy's badge and a gun, which he held on me while the others went below. I heard McGee cry out once. He scrambled up through the hatch with blue handcuffs on his wrists and a blue gun at his back. The single look he gave me was full of fear and loathing.
They didn't handcuff me, but they made me ride to the courthouse with McGee in the screened rear compartment of the Sheriff's car. I tried to talk to him. He wouldn't speak to me or look in my direction. He believed I had turned him in, and perhaps I had without intending to.
I sat under guard outside the interrogation room while they questioned him in tones that rose and fell and growled and palavered and yelled and threatened and promised and refused and wheedled. Sheriff Crane arrived, looking tired but important. He stood over me smiling, with his belly thrust out.
'Your friend's in real trouble now.'
'He's been in real trouble for the last ten years. You ought to know, you helped to cook it for him.'
The veins in his cheeks lit up like intricate little networks of infra-red tubing. He leaned toward me spewing martiniscented words:
'I could put you in jail for loose talk like that. You know where your friend is going? He's going all the way to the green room this time.'
'He wouldn't be the first innocent man who was gassed.'
'Innocent? McGee's a mass murderer, and we've got the evidence to prove it. It took my experts all day to nail it down: The bullet in the Haggerty corpse came from the same gun as the bullet we found in McGee's wife--the same gun he stole from Alice Jenks in Indian Springs.'
I'd succeeded in provoking the Sheriff into an indiscretion. I tried for another. 'You have no proof he stole it. You have no proof he fired it either time. Where's he been keeping the gun for the last ten years?'
'He cached it someplace, maybe on Stevens's boat. Or maybe an accomplice kept it for him.'
'Then he hid it in his daughter's bed to frame her?'
