“No, thanks,” said the reporter, rising abruptly. “Anything I can get you outside?”
“You’re cross!” wailed the redheaded girl, her eyes round with panic and contrition. “You are—you are—you’re absolutely furious. Wait, please—please, or I’ll hang on to your coattails and make a scene. The real reason I don’t go out and get soup is because I don’t dare. If I went away even for a minute, something might happen, and then I wouldn’t ever sleep again. Someone might get my seat—didn’t you see that fat, sinful-looking old lady who got the Gazette girl’s place yesterday? She wouldn’t go even when three officers and the sheriff told her she had to, and the Gazette girl had to sit on a stool in the gallery, and she said she had such a rushing of rage in her ears that she couldn’t hear anything that anyone said all afternoon. So, you see—And I would like a ham sandwich and I think that you write better than Conrad, and I apologize, and if you’ll tell me who did the murder, I’ll tell you. And please hurry, because I hope you won’t be gone long.”
“You’re a nice little nut,” said the reporter, and he beamed on her forgivingly, “and I like you. I like the way your nose turns up and your mouth turns down, and I like that funny little hat you wear. … I’ll make it in two jumps. Watch me!”
The redheaded girl watched him obediently, her face pink and her eyes bright under the funny little hat. When the door opened to let him out, she plunged her eyes apprehensively for a moment into the silent, pushing, heaving mob behind the policeman’s broad blue shoulders, shivered, and turned them resolutely away.
“If I were convicted of murder tomorrow,” thought the redheaded girl passionately, “they’d shove just like that to see me hanged. Ugh! What’s the matter with us?”
She eyed with an expression of profound distaste the plump lady just beyond her, conscientiously eating stuffed eggs out of a shoe box. So smug, so virtuous, so pompadoured and lynx-eyed—Her eyes moved hastily on to the pair of giggling flappers exchanging powder puffs and anecdotes over a box of maple caramels; on to the round-shouldered youth with the unattractive complexion and unpleasant tie; on to the pretty thing with overflushed cheeks and overbright eyes above her sable scarf and beneath her Paris hat. The redheaded girl wrenched her eyes back to the empty space where there sat, tranquil and aloof, the memory of the prisoner at the bar.
It was good to be able to forget those hot, hungry, cruel faces, so sleek and safe and triumphant, and to remember that other face under the shadow of the small felt hat, cool and controlled and gay—yes, gay, for all the shadows that beset it. Only—what thoughts were weaving behind that bright brow, those steady lips? Thoughts of terror, of remorse, of bitterness and horror and despair? If you were strong enough to strike down a laughing girl who barred your path, you would be strong enough to keep your lips steady, wouldn’t you?
The redheaded girl stared about her wildly; she felt suddenly small and cold and terrified. Where was the reporter? What a long time—Oh, someone had opened a window. It was only the wind of autumn that was blowing so cold then, not the wind of death. What was it those little newsboys were calling outside, yelping like puppies in the gray square?
“Extra, Extra! All about the mysterious—”
“Well,” said the reporter’s voice at her elbow, tense with some suppressed excitement, “this is the time he did it! No enterprising Filipino and housemaid around this time. Read that and weep!”
Across the flimsy sheet of the Redfield Home News it ran in letters three inches high: Ex-fiancé of Murdered Girl Blows Out Brains. Prominent Clubman Found Dead in Garden at Eleven Forty-five This Morning.
“I’ve got a peach of a story started over the wires this minute,” said the reporter exultantly. “Here, boy, rush this stuff and beat it back for more. I couldn’t get your sandwich.”
“Well,” said the redheaded girl in a small awed voice—“well, then, that means that he did it himself, doesn’t it? That means that he couldn’t stand it any longer because he killed her, doesn’t it?”
“Or it means that he good and damn well knew that Susan Ives did it,” muttered the reporter, shaken from Olympian calm to frenzied activity. “Here, boy! Boy! Hi, you, rush this—and take off the ear muffs. It’s a hundred-to-one bet that he knew that Sue’d done it, and that he’d as good as put the knife in her hand by telling her where, when, and why it should be managed. … Here, boy!”
“He didn’t!” said the redheaded girl fiercely. “He didn’t know it. How could—”
“The Court!” sang Ben Potts.
“How could he know whether she—”
“Silence!” intoned Ben reprovingly.
Mr. Orsini and Mr. Lambert were both heading purposefully for the witness box.
“Now you’ve just told us, Mr. Orsini, that you were able to see Mrs. Ives’s face when you looked down from your window in the garage as clearly as you see mine. Can you give us an idea of the approximate distance from the garage to the house?”
“Positive. The distance from the middle of the garage door to the middle of the front porch step, it is”—he glanced earnestly at a small slip of paper hitherto concealed in one massive paw, and divulged a portion of its contents to his astounded interrogator—“it is forty-seven feet five inches and one half inch.”
“What?”
Mr. Orsini contemplated with pardonable gratification the unfeigned stupor that adorned the massive countenance now thrust
