It shook, but held. We hit it again. Wood we couldn’t see tore.
Again.
The door popped away from us. We went through—down a flight of steps—rolling, snowballing down—until a cement floor stopped us.
Pat came back to life first.
“You’re a hell of an acrobat,” he said. “Get off my neck!”
I stood up. He stood up. We seemed to be dividing the evening between falling on the floor and getting up from the floor.
A light-switch was at my shoulder. I turned it on.
If I looked anything like Pat, we were a fine pair of nightmares. He was all raw meat and dirt, with not enough clothes left to hide much of either.
I didn’t like his looks, so I looked around the basement in which we stood. To the rear was a furnace, coal-bins and a woodpile. To the front was a hallway and rooms, after the manner of the upstairs.
The first door we tried was locked, but not strongly. We smashed through it into a photographer’s darkroom.
The second door was unlocked, and put us in a chemical laboratory: retorts, tubes, burners and a small still. There was a little round iron stove in the middle of the room. No one was there.
We went out into the hallway and to the third door, not so cheerfully. This cellar looked like a bloomer. We were wasting our time here, when we should have stayed upstairs. I tried the door.
It was firm beyond trembling.
We smacked it with our weight, together, experimentally. It didn’t shake.
“Wait.”
Pat went to the woodpile in the rear and came back with an axe.
He swung the axe against the door, flaking out a hunk of wood. Silvery points of light sparkled in the hole. The other side of the door was an iron or steel plate.
Pat put the axe down and leaned on the helve.
“You write the next prescription,” he said.
I didn’t have anything to suggest, except:
“I’ll camp here. You beat it upstairs, and see if any of your coppers have shown up. This is a Godforsaken hole, but somebody may have sent in an alarm. See if you can find another way into this room—a window, maybe—or manpower enough to get us in through this door.”
Pat turned toward the steps.
A sound stopped him—the clicking of bolts on the other side of the iron-lined door.
A jump put Pat on one side of the frame. A step put me on the other.
Slowly the door moved in. Too slowly.
I kicked it open.
Pat and I went into the room on top of my kick.
His shoulder hit the woman. I managed to catch her before she fell.
Pat took her gun. I steadied her back on her feet.
Her face was a pale blank square.
She was Myra Banbrock, but she now had none of the masculinity that had been in her photographs and description.
Steadying her with one arm—which also served to block her arms—I looked around the room.
A small cube of a room whose walls were brown-painted metal. On the floor lay a queer little dead man.
A little man in tight-fitting black velvet and silk. Black velvet blouse and breeches, black silk stockings and skull cap, black patent leather pumps. His face was small and old and bony, but smooth as stone, without line or wrinkle.
A hole was in his blouse, where it fit high under his chin. The hole bled very slowly. The floor around him showed it had been bleeding faster a little while ago.
Beyond him, a safe was open. Papers were on the floor in front of it, as if the safe had been tilted to spill them out.
The girl moved against my arm.
“You killed him?” I asked.
“Yes,” too faint to have been heard a yard away.
“Why?”
She shook her short brown hair out of her eyes with a tired jerk of her head.
“Does it make any difference?” she asked. “I did kill him.”
“It might make a difference,” I told her, taking my arm away, and going over to shut the door. People talk more freely in a room with a closed door. “I happen to be in your father’s employ. Mr. Reddy is a police detective. Of course, neither of us can smash any laws, but if you’ll tell us what’s what, maybe we can help you.”
“My father’s employ?” she questioned.
“Yes. When you and your sister disappeared, he engaged me to find you. We found your sister, and—”
Life came into her face and eyes and voice.
“I didn’t kill Ruth!” she cried. “The papers lied! I didn’t kill her! I didn’t know she had the revolver. I didn’t know it! We were going away to hide from—from everything. We stopped in the woods to burn the—those things. That’s the first time I knew she had the revolver. We had talked about suicide at first, but I had persuaded her—thought I had persuaded her—not to. I tried to take the revolver away from her, but I couldn’t. She shot herself while I was trying to get it away. I tried to stop her. I didn’t kill her!”
This was getting somewhere.
“And then?” I encouraged her.
“And then I went to Sacramento and left the car there, and came back to San Francisco. Ruth told me she had written Raymond Elwood a letter. She told me that before I persuaded her not to kill herself—the first time. I tried to get the letter from Raymond. She had written him she was going to kill herself. I tried to get the letter, but Raymond said he had given it to Hador.
“So I came here this evening to get it. I had just found it when there was a lot of noise upstairs. Then Hador came in and found me. He bolted the door. And—and I shot him with the revolver that was in the safe. I—I shot him when he turned around, before he could say anything. It had to be that way, or I couldn’t.”
“You mean you shot him without being threatened or attacked by him?” Pat asked.
“Yes.
