… Mental fingers, that’s what they were, plucking at his nerves and forming dissonances that chilled him queerly. He wasn’t alone—but he must be—the room was empty. …
He would think of that Mr. “Smith” who lived with Hollander. Did he fit in—beyond one solid thump on the head? Only as one of the myriad side issues that cling like parasites to the trunk of each major crime. One could suppose (with reasonable assurance that the supposition would later prove to be fact) that Hollander was in some genteelly illicit profession such as bootlegging, and that Mr. Smith drummed up Hollander’s customers for him among the night clubs—incidentally relieving some of the more foolish of them of their jewels. Mr. Smith might well have believed, at that moment when Lieutenant Valcour went to the telephone in their apartment, that if Hollander’s goose was cooked his own might be cooked, too, and a blackjack had then seemed the simplest expedient that would insure his fading swiftly out of the picture.
… The room was empty—the room was empty. …
As for the emotional jungle of warped and sunless growths through which Endicott, his wife, Marge Myles, and Hollander had all groped their illusion-drugged way to this unhappy end—that lay beyond the punishment or acquittal of earthbound law. The proper tribunal for that must be found seated within their separate souls. Lies—evasions—fetid depths …
But had she lied?
Had there truly been no one on the balcony, as Mrs. Endicott had said?
The shot had assuredly been fired from the direction of that window above the large mahogany chest.
Above?
Presentiments were banished before the lash of fact. The lid of that chest was not quite closed. And the object that was holding it open, for the space of perhaps a half of an inch, was the small black muzzle of a gun.
Lieutenant Valcour’s hand moved indolently toward the upper left pocket of his vest, in which there rested a flat, efficient little automatic of small calibre. He knew what had happened—that owing to his stillness for the last five minutes the murderer had thought the room was empty and was attempting to escape. His hand moved more quickly, but not quickly enough. The lid opened wider—eyes—a face—a little shock of alarm, of terror—all ever so much more quickly accomplished than told. The lid slammed up.
“Quit it, Lieutenant, and put your hands down flat on the top of that desk.”
“You’re Marge Myles, of course,” he said.
He flattened his hands on the desk’s mahogany surface and stared curiously at her sultry beauty as she sat on the rim of the open chest. Flamboyant, that’s what she was, and terribly bizarre from the effect of a shingled ripple of bleached blonde hair above her Spanish night-filled eyes.
“You have put yourself in my way, Lieutenant”—her voice was as disagreeable as the clash of dishes in a cheap restaurant—“and I am going to kill you and escape.”
“I see,” Lieutenant Valcour said politely, “that you believe in threes.”
“How?”
“Your husband, Mrs. Endicott’s husband, and now myself. One—two—three. For the sake of symmetry it is a pity that I am a bachelor.”
She enjoyed for a full moment of silence—luxuriated in it, really—the sense of power which she held over this man. She had always enjoyed the power exerted by her body, and it was refreshing to drink quietly for a while of this different sort of power, which, through the medium of the pistol held unwaveringly in her hand, controlled the services of life and death. She would shoot him soon. …
Lieutenant Valcour hoped that Hansen would not blunder.
He could see Hansen quite clearly now, all but pressed against the outside of the window just behind Marge Myles. So Hansen, he reflected, had found that there was a way to climb up onto the balcony from the garden down below. What a handy thing it was, at times, to have been a sailor. Lieutenant Valcour fervently hoped that—the usefulness of the rule having been accomplished—Hansen would promptly stop being a sailor and become a policeman. He couldn’t, and didn’t, expect that Hansen would shoot a woman down in cold blood, nor would Hansen dare to startle her by throwing open the window or crashing through its glass. Could Hansen shoot through the glass and knock the pistol from her hand? Maybe once, Lieutenant Valcour thought unhappily, out of every twenty times. And she certainly wouldn’t refrain from pulling the trigger while Hansen practised twenty times.
“Tell me,” he said, “how you ever managed to breathe inside of that chest.”
“The back of it is broken.” The casualness of the question had startled her into an answer.
“Your own back must be pretty well broken, too.” Was Hansen, the idiot, going to smash the glass after all with the butt of his gun? Hansen was staring very intently at him, seeking advice. He all but imperceptibly shook his head in negation. “And what did you have in the paper bag you carried when you came here and from which you tore that scrap of paper upon which you wrote the misleading note?”
“This gun.”
“You carried the gun in a paper bag?”
“I was smart, was I not? Who would think that in a cheap paper bag there was a gun?”
“Not even a disciple of the fourth dimension.” Hansen was aiming now at her wrist. It was absurd—he faintly shook his head again. No—no! “How did it happen that Mr. Endicott had his overcoat on but you had his hat?”
“I wear it for a better disguise. I have the dust on my face—there is the hat—it fits well over my cloche. The effect is astonishing.”
“I see, and so when Endicott came back into the room to get it he couldn’t find it and thought he must have left it in the cupboard?”
“Yes—yes—you are a smart man, too.”
“And you entered the house with a duplicate key which you had had made from one of Endicott’s?”
“Dear heaven, yes—how else?”
It did not please her that her climax should come at a commonplace moment, when inconsequential questions
