Vega lifted the gun, and the power of speech failed Beth. Nothing was real but the thunder of her pulse in her ears and the stout hard barrel two feet from her.
Vega lifted the gun higher. “I do this for you, Beth,” she said. “All for you.”
Then she shot herself, very suddenly and awkwardly, in the right temple, grimacing like a child expecting a tanning. Her features collapsed and her body relaxed onto the floor before Beth’s eyes.
Chapter Twenty
IN THE SILENCE THAT FOLLOWED BETH LAY WHERE SHE WAS, nailed to the bed. She had neither the courage nor the physical strength nor the desire to sit up and look at Vega. What happened afterward remained forever in her memory as a weird and warped nightmare.
Moments later an elevator boy and two maids rushed into the room, with a couple of guests following them, and found the two women—one dead, the other in a state of near-shock. At first glimpse they took Beth for dead too, and one of the maids gave a little scream when she stirred.
“This one’s alive!” she cried.
They helped her to sit up and besieged her with questions, and though she heard them and understood them she was unable to answer coherently. She began to giggle morbidly when one of the guests referred to Vega as “the poor stiff” and her awful uncontrollable choking laughter struck them all aghast. It changed, as suddenly as it had started, into sobs. Someone forced her back down on the bed and put a cold cloth on her head and she heard a coarse hearty female voice somewhere in the room remark, “Don’t know why we’re taking such fine care of her. She probably did it!”
Very shortly the room was crowded and everyone in the crowd was firing questions at Beth, who had not even the small comfort of her clothes in which to face them. No one touched the body. It was grotesquely dead.
There was much murmurous comment about the arrival of the police, mingled with pleas from hotel officials for clearing the room. Beth struggled to her feet, climbing off the bed on the side opposite that where Vega lay. She collected her clothes from the chair where she had thrown them the night before and went into the bathroom. They made way for her as if none of them wanted to touch her, though they continued to ask her, “Why’d you do it, sister?” “Hey, you did it, didn’t you?” “Look at her face. You can tell she did it.”
In the bathroom she was momentarily alone, and desperately sick for the first few minutes. She wept sobs that were torn from the depths of her. She mourned Vega. Vega had anticipated her curses, her fury, her despair, everything but her pity. And yet pity was all Beth had to give, all she could feel.
When she emerged, washed and dressed, the police were there. Methodically and quickly they emptied the room. Notes were made on the disposition of the body and it was photographed from several sides. The gun had been tenderly separated from Vega’s index finger which had curled around the trigger guard, and rested in a handkerchief on the bed table.
Beth looked high and haughty into the face of the Law. She was not able to look down at the floor. They led her to a chair—the one where Vega had sat all night—and asked her what happened. She was quaking with exhaustion but not with fear. It seemed she had felt all the fear she would ever feel for the rest of her life in the night just past. She answered them with the confidence of truth. She only hesitated once, and that was when a Lieutenant Scopa, who was doing most of the questioning, asked her why Vega would want to kill her.
“Well—she—she was a mental patient. She had gotten it into her head that I hurt her, that I hated her. She thought I was responsible for all her troubles, and she wanted revenge. That’s all I can tell you.”
They held her for two days and she sat in a bare orderly cell with another, fortunately taciturn, woman, and cried most of the time, except when they were interrogating her. Then she made it a point of pride to maintain her composure. She was prepared to have them disbelieve her, finally. At first she thought they would let her go at once, just because she was truthful as far as she went with her story. When they continued to hold her she began to realize that they doubted her. They didn’t understand, they wouldn’t accept her words. The thing looked odd to them. She expected to be told outright that she shot Vega in the head and then wiped the gun clean and put it in the hand of the corpse. They had even intimated this.
“We know she was a mental patient,” Lieutenant Scopa told her. “We’ve checked up on her. Now if you want to plead self-defense and tell us what really happened it’ll easier on you, Mrs. Ayers. Nobody’ll blame you for saving your own life. Vega had threatened other people with the same gun.”
“What?” Beth cried, startled.
“A couple of people,” he said briefly. “We know it was her gun. It’s registered in her name in South Pasadena. Of course, she didn’t shoot the other people. But she might have scared you into thinking she would shoot you. If I had been you and I had a chance to grab that thing, I would have done it myself.”
“If I’d had a chance to grab it, Lieutenant, don’t you think I would have done something with it, too? I could have scared her at least. But I couldn’t have killed her. It’s true, she did threaten my life, and I had to wait there all night thinking she was going to kill me—”
“Without doing anything about it?”
“Doing
