haunting him now.
'I've been very stupid, Peggy,' he said. 'But the case is closed now, as you heard Condor say, and it's all right the way it is. I just lose sleep over loose ends. Tell me why you killed Byron Ufferlitz.'
11
SHE COULDN'T ANSWER at first. It was as if all the answers were there in her mind, but she couldn't talk.
He helped her after a little while, and his voice and body were very lazy and peaceful, without any urgency or eagerнness. They had a hypnotic quality, unassumed and unthinkнably comforting.
'It was for Trilby Andrews, wasn't it?' he said.
Her eyes drew all their life from his face.
'Andrews-Warden,' he said. 'It's practically an anagram. But I almost missed it. And then the signed photograph in his study. I knew it was familiar-it kept worrying me. But I was looking at it the wrong way. I kept thinking it had to be someнbody; and so I never could place it. It took a long time before I realised that it was just like somebody. Like somebody else ... What was she?'
'My sister,' she said.
It was as if speech were a strange thing, as if she had never spoken before.
He nodded.
'Yes, of course.'
'When did you know?' she asked, still with that curious preciseness, as if the forming of words was a conscious perнformance.
'It sort of came gradually. I was all wrong most of the time. Eventually I knew it must have been a woman, because all the ashtrays were emptied. So there wouldn't be any cigarette-ends with lipstick on them. But then I had the wrong woman. It all hit me together when I found out that you'd never said anything about that scene in the office that I walked in on-when Flane told Ufferlitz he was going to fix him. Naturally that should have been the first thing you'd think of, if you were just an ordinary person. But you never said a word about it.'
'How could I?' she said. 'I'd done it, and I didn't want to be caught, but I didn't want anyone else to get in a jam because of me.'
He drew again at his cigarette.
'Do you want to tell me the rest of it?'
'There isn't much else. She was younger than me, and . . . maybe she was stupid. I don't know. But she thought she could go places. She might have. She was really beautiful. . . . She came out here, and she met Ufferlitz. I got that from her letters, when she wrote sometimes. But she met a lot of other people too. She never said who it was. But. . . when she was in trouble, it sounded like Ufferlitz. And then she was dead ... I had to find out. I came out here, got a job at MGM, and made contacts and waited until I could get with Ufferlitz. Then I waited. I had to be sure. And I still didn't know what I could do. But I went to his house once, and there was a picture . . . After that I bought a gun. I still didn't know what I'd do with it. But I had it with me last night. . . Then he came in, and-I suppose I'd been thinking too much. It just ran away with me.'
'You were sure then?'
'He'd been drinking,' she said. 'He wasn't drunk, but he'd been drinking. Enough for him to let down his hair. He'd never been like that with me before. He tried to make love to me. He said 'You remind me of somebody.' I asked him if it was the girl in the photograph. He said 'She was a dumb cluck.' I asked him why. He said 'She didn't know what it was all about, and she lost her head.'. . . That was when I lost my head. I went around behind him and pretended I was still making up to him, and said 'Was she just a little bit pregнnant?'-as if I thought it was funny. He said 'Yeah, the damn fool. I'd have taken care of her. But she lost her head.' . . . Then I picked up my bag and took the gun out. It was just like being drunk. I said 'She was probably making a sucker out of you. How did she know it was you?' He said 'Jesus Christ, it was me all right, but she didn't have any sense. I never let a girl down in my life, baby'-and then I knew it was him, I didn't think any more, but I knew it was him, and he'd let anybody down, but he had his line off by heart, and she might have listened to the same words I was listening to, and I just didn't think any more, but I put the gun against the back of his head and pulled the trigger and I was glad about it.'
Simon moved his glass after a while, and she lighted a cigaнrette and shook the match out, and it was as if her mind had been washed clear at last as a shower washes the sky.
'So,' she said, 'then I knew what I'd done, but I didn't feel any different about it. I just tried to be very careful. I gathнered up the papers I'd been working on, and emptied the ashнtrays because they were so obvious- though I didn't stop to think then that I was supposed to have been there anyway- and I dug the bullet out of the panelling. And all the time it didn't seem like me. I'd done something and I thought it was right, but I knew it was dangerous, and I didn't see why I should be punished. I just tried to think of everything. I even drove home all the way round by Malibu Lake, and threw the gun and the bullet in ... Now you know it all.'
'I've forgotten already,' he said.
She still seemed to be wondering where she really was.
'Do you-do you think Condor was really satisfied?'
'I believe him,' said the Saint. 'The case is closed. Flane shot himself. So he had a gun. His gun could have killed Ufferlitz, and if he'd dug out the bullet and got rid of it there wouldn't have been any more evidence.'
'But I still don't know why Flane shot himself.'
'I drove him into it,' said the Saint. 'I was just blundering on, annoying everybody and waiting for a fish to rise. Well, Orlando rose. I knew Ufferlitz must have had something on him, since that seems to have been Ufferlitz's technique with almost everybody, and I just bluffed it out of him. It was someнthing quite ugly, so we don't need to feel sorry for him. But I let him think that Ufferlitz had pretty well broadcast it with one of those voice-from-the- grave messages. It was something that would have sold him out of pictures for good and all. So-he just rang his own curtain down. It was a big help, though, because then I was able to come out with a nice solution and make Condor happy and make sure that the case was all tied up and put away.'
She got up and went to the window and looked out; and presently when she came back he knew that the world had begun again for her as if it had never stopped moving.
'There's no reason why you should do all that for me,' she said.
'I didn't do it for you,' he said brutally. 'I just did it. I like to see puzzles worked out to the right solution. I don't mean the correct solution. That's dull pedantic stuff. I mean the right one. Which means the right one for all concerned, as well as I can see it. Don't try to put too many haloes on me.'
'You've already got one, haven't you?'
He finished his drink, and peeled himself out of the chair, the whole whipcord length of him, and stretched himself with the physical luxury of a cat, so that suddenly it seemed as if his world also began again; only this was a world which beнgan again every day, and would never cease to begin again, and everything in the past was only a holiday. She saw his face dark and debonair in the shaded lamplight, and the ageнless amusement in his blue eyes; and already she had the feeling that he was only a legend that had paused for a few hours.
'Don't ever be sure of it,' he said.
He thought about her some more as he drove west again on Sunset; but there was someone else on his mind too, so that his thought became somewhat confused. Only a little while ago he had been falsely accusing April Quest, and he realised now that once she recovered her poise she had been quietly leading him on-for mischief, or because she had to know what he would propose to do about his belief? Or perнhaps some of both . . . Well, he'd still given the right answer ... So now there was a threat of another unwanted halo hanging over his head, and a few more pitfalls between them. But nothing, he hoped, that the drink he had asked her to save for him wouldn't cure. Or at least the drink after that.
