“Perfect casting,” I said, and put a card somewhere.
“You’d be surprised how difficult some of that Mozart is,” he said. “It sounds so simple when you hear it played well.”
“Who can play it well?” I asked.
“Schnabel.”
“Rubinstein?”
He shook his head. “Too heavy. Too emotional. Mozart is just music. No comment needed from the performer.”
“I bet you get a lot of them in the confession mood,” I said. “Like the job?”
He moved another card and flexed his fingers lightly. His nails were bright but short. You could see he was a man who loved to move his hands, to make little neat inconspicuous motions with them, motions without any special meaning, but smooth and flowing and light as swans down. They gave him a feel of delicate things delicately done, but not weak. Mozart, all right. I could see that.
It was about five-thirty, and the sky behind the screened window was getting light. The roll top desk in the corner was rolled shut. The room was the same room I had been in the afternoon before. Down at the end of the table the square carpenter’s pencil was lying where somebody had picked it up and put it back after Lieutenant Maglashan of Bay City threw it against the wall. The flat desk at which Christy French had sat was littered with ash. An old cigar butt clung to the extreme edge of a glass ashtray. A moth circled around the overhead light on a drop cord that had one of those green and white glass shades they still have in country hotels.
“Tired?” he asked.
“Pooped.”
“You oughtn’t to get yourself involved in these elaborate messes. No point in it that I can see.”
“No point in shooting a man?”
He smiled the warm smile. “You never shot anybody.”
“What makes you say that?”
“Common sense—and a lot of experience sitting here with people.”
“I guess you do like the job,” I said.
“It’s night work. Gives me the days to practice. I’ve had it for twelve years now. Seen a lot of funny ones come and go.”
He got another ace out, just in time. We were almost blocked.
“Get many confessions?”
“I don’t take confessions,” he said. “I just establish a mood.”
“Why give it all away?”
He leaned back and tapped lightly with the edge of a card on the edge of the table. The smile came again. “I’m not giving anything away. We got you figured long ago.”
“Then what are they holding me for?”
He wouldn’t answer that. He looked around at the clock on the wall. “I think we could get some food now.” He got up and went to the door. He half opened it and spoke softly to someone outside. Then he came back and sat down again and looked at what we had in the way of cards.
“No use,” he said. “Three more up and we’re blocked. Okay with you to start over?”
“Okay with me if we never started at all. I don’t play cards. Chess.”
He looked up at me quickly. “Why didn’t you say so? I’d rather have played chess too.”
“I’d rather drink some hot black coffee as bitter as sin.”
“Any minute now. But I won’t promise the coffee’s what you’re used to.”
“Hell, I eat anywhere. . . Well, if I didn’t shoot him, who did?”
“Guess that’s what is annoying them.”
“They ought to be glad to have him shot.”
“They probably are,” he said. “But they don’t like the way it was done.”
“Personally I thought it was as neat a job as you could find.”
He looked at me in silence. He had the cards between his hands, all in a lump. He smoothed them out and flicked them over on their faces and dealt them rapidly into the two decks. The cards seemed to pour from his hands in a stream, in a blur.
“If you were that fast with a gun,” I began.
The stream of cards stopped. Without apparent motion a gun took their place. He held it lightly in his right hand pointed at a distant corner of the room. It went away and the cards started flowing again.
“You’re wasted in here,” I said. “You ought to be in Las Vegas.”
He picked up one of the packs and shuffled it slightly and quickly, cut it, and dealt me a king high flush in spades.
