“I’m going to this jail tonight if you are the same hard man who has goaded me into whining love into his uncaring ears, but before that, can’t I have one wholehearted assurance that you think me a little more than ‘quite pretty’? Or at least a hint that if I were not a prisoner your pulse might beat a little faster when I touch you? I’m going to this jail for a long while—perhaps to the gallows. Can’t I take my vanity there not quite in tatters to keep me company? Can’t you do some slight thing to keep me from the afterthought of having bleated all this out to a man who was simply bored?”
Her lids had come down half over the silver-grey eyes; her head had tilted back so far that a little pulse showed throbbing in her white throat; her lips were motionless over slightly parted teeth, as the last word had left them. My fingers went deep into the soft white flesh of her shoulders. Her head went further back, her eyes closed, one hand came up to my shoulder.
“You’re beautiful as all hell!” I shouted crazily into her face, and flung her against the door.
It seemed an hour that I fumbled with starter and gears before I had the car back in the road and thundering toward the San Mateo County jail. The girl had straightened herself up in the seat again, and sat huddled within the robe I had given her. I squinted straight ahead into the wind that tore at my hair and face, and the absence of the windshield took my thoughts back to Porky Grout.
Porky Grout, whose yellowness was notorious from Seattle to San Diego, standing rigidly in the path of a charging metal monster, with an inadequate pistol in each hand. She had done that to Porky Grout—this woman beside me! She had done that to Porky Grout, and he hadn’t even been human! A slimy reptile whose highest thought had been a skinful of dope had gone grimly to death that she might get away—she—this woman whose shoulders I had gripped, whose mouth had been close under mine!
I let the car out another notch, holding the road somehow.
We went through a town: a scurrying of pedestrians for safety, surprised faces staring at us, street lights glistening on the moisture the wind had whipped from my eyes. I passed blindly by the road I wanted, circled back to it, and we were out in the country again.
At the foot of a long, shallow hill I applied the brakes and we snapped to motionlessness.
I thrust my face close to the girl’s.
“Furthermore, you are a liar!” I knew I was shouting foolishly, but I was powerless to lower my voice. “Pangburn never put Axford’s name on that check. He never knew anything about it. You got in with him because you knew his brother-in-law was a millionaire. You pumped him, finding out everything he knew about his brother-in-law’s account at the Golden Gate Trust. You stole Pangburn’s bank book—it wasn’t in his room when I searched it—and deposited the forged Axford check to his credit, knowing that under those circumstances the check wouldn’t be questioned. The next day you took Pangburn into the bank, saying you were going to make a deposit. You took him in because with him standing beside you the check to which his signature had been forged wouldn’t be questioned. You knew that, being a gentleman, he’d take pains not to see what you were depositing.
“Then you framed the Baltimore trip. He told the truth to me—the truth so far as he knew it. Then you met him Sunday night—maybe accidentally, maybe not. Anyway, you took him down to Joplin’s, giving him some wild yarn that he would swallow and that would persuade him to stay there for a few days. That wasn’t hard, since he didn’t know anything about either of the twenty-thousand-dollar checks. You and your pal Kilcourse knew that if Pangburn disappeared nobody would ever know that he hadn’t forged the Axford check, and nobody would ever suspect that the second check was phony. You’d have killed him quietly, but when Porky tipped you off that I was on my way down you had to move quick—so you shot him down. That’s the truth of it!” I yelled.
All this while she had watched me with wide grey eyes that were calm and tender, but now they clouded a little and a pucker of pain drew her brows together.
I yanked my head away and got the car in motion.
Just before we swept into Redwood City one of her hands came up to my forearm, rested there for a second, patted the arm twice, and withdrew.
I didn’t look at her, nor, I think, did she look at me, while she was being booked. She gave her name as Jeanne Delano, and refused to make any statement until she had seen an attorney. It all took a very few minutes.
As she was being led away, she stopped and asked if she might speak privately with me.
We went together to a far corner of the room.
She put her mouth close to my ear so that her breath was warm again on my cheek, as it had been in the car, and whispered the vilest epithet of which the English language is capable.
Then she walked out to her cell.
A plump maid with bold green eyes and a loose, full-lipped mouth led me up two flights of steps and into an elaborately furnished boudoir, where a woman in black sat at a window. She was a thin woman of a little more than thirty, this murdered man’s widow, and her face was white and haggard.
“You are from the Continental Detective Agency?” she asked before I was two steps inside the room.
“Yes.”
“I want you to find my husband’s murderer.” Her voice was
