“He had been drinking gimlets.”
“It looked for a while, however, as if things might go wrong after all. It looked as if the consort might escape suspicion, and so I wrote the note to the police, and now everything is working out beautifully as I wanted it to and as the Voice said it would.”
“Is it? Perhaps you are too optimistic.”
“Because of you? Oh, no. It was a mistake for you to come here, or to meddle at all, for now I must kill you, as you must surely see.”
“How? Is there a gun in one of your pockets? Is that why you keep your hands there?”
“Not a gun. I know nothing about guns, and they’re noisy besides. A knife. I can use a knife quite well. There is no use for you to scream, because there is no one to hear you, nor to run, because I can run faster, nor to struggle, because I am far stronger.”
“If you kill me, you will surely be caught.”
“No, no. Never. The Voice has assured me that I will not. The Voice comes to me and tells me what to do, and it is always right. It is a great advantage, having the Voice. Maybe it’s the Voice of God. Some day it will tell me if it is or not, and in the meanwhile it has told me that you must be killed, and there’s nothing you can do to prevent it, nothing at all.”
“As to that,” Sid said, “it seems to me that I have already done more than my share, and in my opinion it is high time that Cotton McBride begins doing his.”
Cotton came out from behind the mausoleum then, on the run, and began doing his share to the best of his ability. Sara shrieked and clawed and fiercely struggled, and it looked for a while as if Cotton would need the assistance of Sid and Millie, but then, all at once, Sara became perfectly quiet, orally and bodily, and stood looking with an air of abstraction across the clustered headstones as if she were listening again to the Voice, which may have been telling her to give up.
“Damn it, Millie,” Sid said, “I told you that Cotton was not to be in on it, but you brought him in anyhow, in spite of all my instructions.”
“Fortunately for both of us, I did,” Millie said. “The more I thought about it, the more I was convinced that it would be helpful to have some muscles present, even of an idiot.”
“I admit that you were right,” Sid said, “and I, for a change, was wrong.”
CHAPTER 15
A few evenings later, we had a little party on the back terrace to celebrate my getting out of jail.
We had gimlets to drink because Sid said it was important that I not develop a thing about them.
In addition to Sid and me, Millie was there with her engineer, who was still trying desperately with a kind of restrained frenzy.
Hec Caldwell was there with his wife, just to show that there were no hard feelings, much.
Even Cotton McBride was there, a limp and lonely stag because he had never had any luck with the girls and still wasn’t having any.
The Jack Handys were not invited, but they drifted around the hedge and got into it.
Everything is clear up to a point, and then nothing is, and what I remember most clearly is Sid saying that I had become much more interesting to her since she had discovered that I was once a whore’s consort.
Another thing I remember pretty clearly is someone saying that he or she wondered what would become of Sara Pike, and Sid saying in response that she would probably plead crazy and be sent for a while to an institution and then be released in due time as all right again.
Which she did and was and probably will be.
BONUS SHORT STORY: THE INVISIBLE GAUNTLET
It was exactly eight o’clock one Thursday evening when Detective-Lieutenant Joseph Marcus rang the front doorbell of Conrad Vail’s house on Dryden Road. It was after work hours, and Marcus made a point of being punctual; he had arranged his visit by telephone earlier in the day.
The door was opened by Vail himself. This was a nice personal touch that Marcus vaguely appreciated, but his appreciation was not excessive. He took the gesture, quite correctly, as simple recognition of his worth. The business on which he had come was something that might have pulled higher rank than his, but there was no one at headquarters who could handle it better, or even as well.
Vail, after an exchange of greetings, took him immediately down the hall and into the library. There was a small blaze in the fireplace at one end of the room, more for cheer than for comfort, and Marcus, relieved of his topcoat and hat, was put into a chair in front of the fire.
“I assume from the time that this visit is unofficial, Lieutenant,” Vail said. “Will you have a drink?”
“No, thanks,” Marcus said. “You have
