I nodded; though God knows there was nothing in this girl’s face, manner, or voice to suggest shock. She might have been talking about the weather.
“Dumbfounded, not knowing what to do,” she went on, “I didn’t even stop. I went on, passing as close to Bernie as I am to you now, and rang Stan’s bell. He let me in. He had been half-undressed when I rang. His rooms are in the rear of the building, and he hadn’t heard the shot, he said. He didn’t know Bernie had been killed until I told him. It sort of knocked the wind out of him. He said Bernie had been there—in Stan’s rooms—since midnight, and had just left.
“Stan asked me what I was doing there, and I told him my tale of woe. That was the first time Stan knew that Bernie and I were so thick. I met Bernie through Stan, but Stan didn’t know we had got so chummy.
“Stan was worried for fear it would come out that Bernie had been to see him that night, because it would make a lot of trouble for him—some sort of shady deal they had on, I guess. So he didn’t go out to see Bernie. That’s about all there is to it. I got some money from Stan, and stayed in his rooms until the police had cleared out of the neighborhood; because neither of us wanted to get mixed up in anything. Then I came home. That’s straight—on the level.”
“Why didn’t you get this of your chest before?” I demanded, knowing the answer.
It came.
“I was afraid. Suppose I told about Bernie throwing me down, and said I was close to him—a block or so away—when he was killed, and was half-full of vino? The first thing everybody would have said was that I had shot him! I’d lie about it still if I thought you’d believe me.”
“So Bernie was the one who broke off, and not you?”
“Oh, yes,” she said lightly.
VI
I lit a Fatima and breathed smoke in silence for a while, and the girl sat placidly watching me.
Here I had two women—neither normal. Mrs. Gilmore was hysterical, abnormally nervous. This girl was dull, subnormal. One was the dead man’s wife; the other his mistress; and each with reason for believing she had been thrown down for the other. Liars, both; and both finally confessing that they had been near the scene of the crime at the time of the crime, though neither admitted seeing the other. Both, by their own accounts, had been at that time even further from normal than usual—Mrs. Gilmore filled with jealousy; Cara Kenbrook half-drunk.
What was the answer? Either could have killed Gilmore; but hardly both—unless they had formed some sort of crazy partnership, and in that event—
Suddenly all the facts I had gathered—true and false—clicked together in my head. I had the answer—the one simple, satisfying answer!
I grinned at the girl, and set about filling in the gaps in my solution.
“Who is Stan?” I asked.
“Stanley Tennant—he has something to do with the city.”
Stanley Tennant. I knew him by reputation, a—
A key rattled in the hall door.
The hall door opened and closed, and a man’s footsteps came toward the open doorway of the room in which we were. A tall, broad-shouldered man in tweeds filed the doorway—a ruddy-faced man of thirty-five or so, whose appearance of athletic blond wholesomeness was marred by close-set eyes of an indistinct blue.
Seeing me, he stopped—a step inside the room.
“Hello, Stan!” the girl said lightly. “This gentleman is from the Continental Detective Agency. I’ve just emptied myself to him about Bernie. Tried to stall him at first, but it was no good.”
The man’s vague eyes switched back and forth between the girl and me. Around the pale irises his eyeballs were pink.
He straightened his shoulders and smiled too jovially.
“And what conclusion have you come to?” he inquired.
The girl answered for me.
“I’ve already had my invitation to take a ride.”
Tennant bent forward. With an unbroken swing of his arms, he swept a chair up from the floor into my face. Not much force behind it, but quick.
I went back against the wall, fending of the chair with both arms—threw it aside—and looked into the muzzle of a nickeled revolver.
A table drawer stood open—the drawer from which he had grabbed the gun while I was busy with the chair. The revolver, I noticed, was of .38 caliber.
“Now,” his voice was thick, like a drunk’s, “turn around.”
I turned my back to him, felt a hand moving over my body, and my gun was taken away.
“All right,” he said, and I faced him again.
He stepped back to the girl’s side, still holding the nickel-plated revolver on me. My own gun wasn’t in sight—in his pocket perhaps. He was breathing noisily, and his eyeballs had gone from pink to red. His face, too, was red, with veins bulging in the forehead.
“You know me?” he snapped.
“Yes, I know you. You’re Stanley Tennant, assistant city engineer, and your record is none too lovely.” I chattered away on the theory that conversation is always somehow to the advantage of the man who is looking into the gun. “You’re supposed to be the lad who supplied the regiment of well-trained witnesses who turned last year’s investigation of graft charges against the engineer’s office into a comedy. Yes, Mr. Tennant, I know you. You’re the answer to why Gilmore was so lucky in landing city contracts a few dollars beneath his competitors’. Yes, Mr. Tennant, I know you. You’re the bright boy who—”
I had a lot more to tell him, but he cut me off.
“That will do out of you!” he yelled. “Unless you want me to knock a corner of your head with this gun.”
Then he addressed the girl, not taking his eyes from me.
“Get up, Cara.”
She got out of her chair and stood beside
