But always the dead one was the center of the scene, the hub around which the prowling took place, the subject of all the questions.
That flat, droning voice which had been speaking with Lew spoke again: “Charlie Markham is out of town. So the autopsy will have to wait. Of course Mrs. Townsend’s own doctor came over as soon as the servant called. We have plenty already to establish the time of death. The shot, heard by Shoffner at about eleven. The wound still oozing blood when Mrs. Townsend came in. The body still warm when the doctor got here. The doctor hoped for a second that Doug was still alive. But there was no heartbeat, no response of his eye pupils to light. Death must have been instantaneous.”
“All right,” Lew sighed. “Send the body on over to the funeral home. Markham will be back early in the morning, in a few hours. We’ll do the autopsy then.”
There was a tired finality in Lew’s voice, a deep touch of sadness. The case was closed as quickly as it had begun. His friend was gone. In two or three days the funeral would be held. The rains would wash the grave and the massed flowers would wither to nothing. Would there be rest for me then?
That reasoning part of me which refused death was overcome with bitterness and despair that bordered on madness. He was safe. His plan had been successful. Only a little while now and he would have to meet her in the darkness over a terrace no longer. Let the rains wash the face of the grave and the seasons change, and he would be able to call openly on Doug Townsend’s widow.
My mind writhed in agony. To know that he bad not only robbed me of life, but of everything else that had given that life significance as well—even Vicky—the very completeness of his triumph was the most refined torture of all.
Soon he would know how complete his triumph had been. He could stop his restless pacing, his sweating, his watching the clock and hearing it tick, wherever he was waiting for. He had made one mistake, I knew now. He hadn’t meant for me to catch him in the upper hall. He would have preferred to arrange it better. He’d had to fire before he was ready. But his luck had held. He had been close enough to me so that there must be powder burns on the torn flesh of my temple. His quick examination of me had shown him there was still a slender chance his plan for making it suicide would succeed.
Yet he wasn’t sure that his luck had held, and during these present long minutes he must be enduring an agony akin to my own.
They must have moved me. I was aware of no movement, no sensation in any part of me. Light came and went, fuzzy, distorted. A voice said, “Watch that end of the stretcher. You almost dropped him.”
“Hell, he wouldn’t feel it. It wouldn’t matter to him.”
An engine came to life. An ambulance, I supposed. The purring of the engine stayed close to me, and I guessed that I was taking a ride. To the city morgue…
I wondered what he was like. Tall, good-looking. It would take somebody like that to attract Vicky. A good dancer. Not necessarily a smooth talker, but a good one. Vicky was always fastidious in her conversation. He would have a good face, too, and a smile open and honest. A mask, shielding the workings of his mind and the morbid plotting in his heart.
My thoughts whirled back to Vicky. A thousand memories of her came through to me. She’d been working for a living when I’d met her, a secretary in a lawyer’s office. Her employer had been defense counsel on a case to which I’d been attached. Vicky and I had met over a dry mass of legal briefs. But she had been almost illegally beautiful and I’d taken her to lunch, and after that the world was a different place for me.
I’d looked at her with eyes that made everything about her perfect. She’d grown up right here in Santa Maria. Her mother had never been well and her father had never made quite enough money out of his trio of fishing boats. Yet it had been a wonderful life, she’d said. A barefoot kid in jeans and T-shirt, a kerchief binding the mass of gold that was her hair. More tomboy than girl when she was small, scampering about her father’s boat with sun and spray in her face.
She’d finished school and worked part time to get her business course. Then her job for a couple of years before I’d met her.
“Really a very dull and uninteresting life,” she said once with a smile. “I wish I were made for better things.”
“You are!” I’d told her fervently.
And she had been. She had a good mind. She never ceased bettering it by good reading. She had a natural sense of good taste—a flair for clothes. She took to an ever higher mode of life with simplicity and a naturalness that was amazing.
Could this woman have been a part of a plot to kill me? Had some foreknowledge of the plan caused her immediately to label
