“Yes.”
Very quiet now, very cool, “And you put his prints on the gun?”
“Yes.”
He thought in the silence. “Probably won’t fool them,” he said. “It’s almost impossible to get a dead man’s prints on a gun in a convincing way. However. What else did you wipe off.”
“N-nothing. Oh Alex. Please don’t be so brutal.”
“Stop it. Stop it! Show me how you did it, how you were standing, how you held the gun.”
She didn’t move.
“Never mind about the prints,” Morny said. “I’ll put better ones on. Much better ones.”
She moved slowly across the opening of the curtains and I saw her. She was wearing pale green gabardine slacks, a fawn-colored leisure jacket with stitching on it, a scarlet turban with a gold snake in it. Her face was smeared with tears.
“Pick it up,” Morny yelled at her. “Show me!”
She bent beside the chair and came up with the gun in her hand and her teeth bared. She pointed the gun across the opening in the curtains, towards the space of room where the door was.
Morny didn’t move, didn’t make a sound.
The blonde’s hand began to shake and the gun did a queer up and down dance in the air. Her mouth trembled and her arm fell.
“I can’t do it,” she breathed. “I ought to shoot you, but I can’t.”
The hand opened and the gun thudded to the floor.
Morny went swiftly past the break in the curtains, pushed her out of the way and with his foot pushed the gun back to about where it had been.
“You couldn’t do it,” he said thickly. “You couldn’t do it. Now watch.”
He whipped a handkerchief out and bent to pick the gun up again. He pressed something and the gate fell open. He reached his right hand into his pocket and rolled a cartridge in his fingers, moving his fingertips on the metal, pushed the cartridge into a cylinder. He repeated the performance four times more, snapped the gate shut, then opened it and spun it a little to set it in a certain spot. He placed the gun down on the floor, withdrew his hand and handkerchief and straightened up.
“You couldn’t shoot me,” he sneered, “because there was nothing in the gun but one empty shell. Now its loaded again. The cylinders are in the right place. One shot has been fired. And your fingerprints are on the gun.”
The blond was very still, looking at him with haggard eyes.
“I forgot to tell you,” he said softly, “I wiped the gun off. I thought it would be so much nicer to be sure your prints were on it. I was pretty sure they were—but I felt as if I would like to be quite sure. Get it?”
The girl said quietly: “You’re going to turn me in?”
His back was towards me. Dark clothes. Felt hat pulled low. So I couldn’t see his face. But I could just about see the leer with which he said:
“Yes, angel, I am going to turn you in.”
“I see,” she said, and looked at him levelly. There was a sudden grave dignity in her over-emphasized chorus girl’s face.
“I’m going to turn you in, angel,” he said slowly, spacing his words as if he enjoyed his act. “Some people are going to be sorry for me and some people are going to laugh at me. But it’s not going to do my business any harm. Not a bit of harm. That’s one nice thing about a business like mine. A little notoriety won’t hurt it at all.”
“So I’m just publicity value to you, now,” she said. “Apart, of course, from the danger that you might have been suspected yourself.”
“Just so,” he said. “Just so.”
“How about my motive?” she asked, still calm, still level eyed and so gravely contemptuous that he didn’t get the expression at all.
“I don’t know,” he said. “I don’t care. You were up to something with him. Eddie tailed you downtown to a street on Bunker Hill where you met a blond guy in a brown suit. You gave him something. Eddie dropped you and tailed the guy to an apartment house near there. He tried to tail him some more, but he had a hunch the guy spotted him, and he had to drop it. I don’t know what it was all about. I know one thing, though. In that apartment house a young guy named Phillips was shot yesterday. Would you know anything about that, my sweet?”
The blond said: “I wouldn’t know anything about it. I don’t know anybody named Phillips and strangely enough I didn’t just run up and shoot anybody out of sheer girlish fun.”
“But you shot Vannier, my dear,” Morny said almost gently.
“Oh yes,” she drawled. “Of course. We were wondering what my motive was. You get it figured out yet?”
“You can work that out with the johns,” he snapped. “Call it a lover’s quarrel. Call it anything you like.”
“Perhaps,” she said, “when he was drunk he looked just a little like you. Perhaps that was the motive.”
He said: “Ah,” and sucked his breath in.
“Better looking,” she said. “Younger, with less belly. But with the same goddamned self-satisfied smirk.”
“Ah,” Morny said, and he was suffering.
