DARKNESS SETTLED down over the city, but with its coming the roar simply increased, the tempo set at a faster pace. Lights now in a million windows in addition to the glare of headlamps in those endless streams of traffic. Down in his office McKee was ripping the case apart from the beginning, examining each separate fact with the most minute scrutiny, establishing all these people against their backgrounds, matching them with what they now knew of the dancer and, above all, trying, before he made another move, to solve several important questions. Who were the people who had entered Rita’s flat after her death, and for what weighty reason had they gone there, and which man or woman had abstracted the pocketbook from her dressing room—and why?
He lingered over Mrs. Philip Barcley, with her pinched features and the air of invulnerability which unlimited money bestows. But if she didn’t know of her son’s intrigue with the dancer she couldn’t very well have shot Rita. You couldn’t get behind that at the moment. But Waring knew. Barcley? Quite possible. He had only been out of the city for three weeks in pursuit of his little pots, and the affair had been going on for almost six. He moved on to the Gairs and Judith Pierce.
Meanwhile Telfair returned to the little house in Grove Street after an interminable walk. Late in the afternoon, after forcing himself to sit still at his drawing board, he had flung charcoal aside and had gone out. But physical fatigue didn’t help any. It merely narrowed the circle of those pressing thoughts. Judith, who was as open as the sun, whose reactions were as immediate and spontaneous as a child’s, lying, plotting, scheming. Women were utterly unscrupulous. They fought battles like generals, regardless of any moral code, any ethical responsibility, without caring whom they sacrificed or how many lives they smashed as long as they won.
He couldn’t forget, either, that he had found her drinking champagne with Archer at his table one night when he himself had gone away to telephone. She said at the time that she was bored and wanted to find out what was behind the playboy’s vacuous gaze. That was what she had said! His footsteps rang heavily in the narrow alley.
Crossing the court, he took out a key that would have given him entrance to half a hundred places, so ordinary and standardized was its construction, opened the front door, closed it behind him, took the precaution of slipping the bolt, switched on the lights, and looked aimlessly around. He was stalling and he knew it.
For he had made up his mind to put the thing squarely up to Judith, tell her that he had found the green purse, that he knew she had dropped it in Rita’s bedroom—and turn the thing over to McKee. The little house was very still. A cheap alarm clock on top of the bookcase beat a mechanical rhythm against the chirping of sparrows in the yard. Like a man forcing himself to go over the top of a trench alone and in darkness, Telfair moved slowly across the worn rug, past the Morris chair with broken springs, around the table, and then leaped back, colliding violently with the mantel, a galvanic shock running through him from head to foot. Something had brushed against his leg … something that moved.
The table was mahogany, its drop leaves extended, plenty of cover beneath it for … he drew farther back, doubled his fists, pulled his body into a crouch, stooped, and then laughed aloud, shakily. For he had glared down into green slits glaring back at him. The thing under the table was the janitor’s cat. It must have slipped in somehow or other. His exasperation found expression in a hasty kick that didn’t reach its goal. The cat miaowed, and Telfair went towards the phone. But when he took the receiver off the hook and dialed Judith’s number, she wasn’t there. It was Gair who answered, and the only thing in Gair’s languid drawl that reached the cartoonist was that Judith was being followed. “Why don’t you call your inspector friend off, Telfair? I call it a bit thick, if you ask me.” Telfair slammed the receiver into place and turned away. So the police suspected Judith! His spirits already hovering around zero sank with a thud. That damned green pocketbook was the crux of the whole business. He circled the stand holding the humidor, hands in his pockets, glance fixed. And the old weariness settled down on him again.
Women! As soon as you got mixed up with them you got into trouble. He thought of his wife, a sweet girl with excellent principles (wretched equipment for matrimony) who had divorced him after two intolerable years. She had soft brown eyes, a gentle voice with a whine in it, and insisted on talking political economy over the breakfast table. Her mother stayed with them a lot, a lady full of probity, with an enormous number of teeth and a chin like a coal scuttle. A man ought to look his in-laws over before committing himself.
Judith never talked of her people. This reticence, which he had taken for tact, began to assume a sinister aspect. He kept on walking the floor in widening circles. The room was hot, airless. His feet, padding the carpet, didn’t make any noise against the faint roar of the streets muted by the walls. The stillness began to get on his nerves. He had never seemed so much alone. But when a board overhead creaked, he came to an abrupt halt, shoulders back. It was nothing. The wind, perhaps.
He resumed his pacing. Judith wasn’t like his first wife. She’d never whine. She had a devil of a temper. Strike back at you, perhaps—strike … As though the words were made fact by the sharpness of his reflections, something struck the floor of the bedroom above. Whirling, Telfair scowled at darkness veiling the hollow of the stairs. That damned cat again! Put the beast out. He rounded the table, began a yawn which never completed itself, and stood rooted to the rug.
Not ten feet away on the landing of the stairs, a man was facing him in dimness, figure indistinct against shadows, face and hands blurs of whiteness. The man was a perfect stranger. He was small and thin and dressed in rough clothes such as an artisan might wear. They stared at each other against two ticks of the clock. Then Telfair said coldly: “Who the devil are you and what are you doing in this house?”
The man on the landing spoke, and behind his liquid and unmoving gaze he was astonishingly self-possessed: “Where is it, señor?”
The cartoonist surveyed his visitor steadily. The man was a lunatic. He shrugged. “Sorry, but you’re in the wrong pew. However, as I don’t like people breaking into my house, I’m afraid I’ll have to turn you over to the police.” He began to back towards the phone—and found himself looking along the barrel of a squat piece of steel that was undoubtedly a revolver in good working order.
Sheer astonishment held the cartoonist absolutely motionless. In that first instant he was so appalled by the suddenness of this, there was about his visitor such an expression of calm ferocity, intensified by his economy of movement and his extreme quiet, that he himself didn’t know quite what to do. Certainly the conventional command and reply didn’t occur to either of them. Telfair didn’t throw up his hands, nor did the man on the landing request him to do so. He merely repeated in that monotonous singsong:
“Where is it, the purse you picked up from Rita’s bedroom last night? I have looked—I cannot find it.”
As simple a statement as that—and their positions were at once reversed. The question hit the cartoonist like a deluge of icy water descending suddenly on his head. The shock of the impact left him groggy. He felt numb, helpless, then his brain began to function. There was only one person in a position to know about that quick furtive gesture while the police were out of the room, when, recognizing the green purse, he had thrust it into his pocket: the man hidden in the bathroom. This fact steadied him in the midst of chaos.
“So you’re the chap who was in the dancer’s apartment last night when the police arrived?”
“I am asking a question, señor. Do not waste time. Where is the purse now?”
Telfair didn’t answer at once. He was standing between the two bookcases that lined the walls on either side of the front door. The only illumination in the room came from a bridge lamp some distance away behind a chair. But the connection was plugged into a socket near him, and the long cord snaked along the baseboard at his right. If he could …
“You brought the purse back with you to this house last night.”
The fellow was undoubtedly dangerous. Telfair gazed steadily at the pistol and at the face above it. “You followed me back here and tried to get in?”
“Yes.”
This frankness was disconcerting. The only thing that appeared to interest the man was that damned purse lying at the moment inside the humidor not ten feet away. The muzzle of the gun raised itself the fraction of an inch. Telfair blinked into the small black hole, felt cold all over, thought, “I’ll be damned if I do,” and said languidly, with a discouraged droop of his shoulders: “All right. I guess you’ve got me where the wool is short. Put your pistol away.” At the same moment, under a pretense of turning, he took a step, felt the cord under his toe, gave a quick jerk, and in the sudden and complete darkness dove for his antagonist’s body in an attempt to knock the weapon out of his hand.
The two men met in the middle of the floor. Telfair struck out, connected with flesh, put his fist into it. They pummeled each other, wrestling fiercely between times. The table went down with a crash. A lamp toppled over. After that the stillness within the little room was broken by harsh grunts as each tried to get a stranglehold on the other. Somewhere outside a woman called, “Charlie … Charlie … supper’s ready … CHARLES!”
Blood pounded noisily in Telfair’s ears, sweat dropped into his eyes. Get the —— over against the wall. Trip him up. Teeth clenched, head low, he lunged, felt cloth slide through his fingers, an arm twist out of his grip, and, unable to check himself, took the newel post squarely on his forehead, felt sick, opened his mouth for air, tried to pull himself to his feet, to turn round—and couldn’t. He couldn’t get any air into his lungs, either. Hands were at his throat, squeezing it as if it were a rubber tube. The relentless grip kept boring in. The pain was intolerable. His eyes began to bulge, his ear drums were bursting. Trickles of agony shot through his lungs. It came to him dimly in some withdrawn place that this was the end. His arms were wisps flapping. Then he stopped moving, thinking, feeling. His head was the Graf Zeppelin and it was traveling, released from his body, at an enormous rate of speed into the heart of the murmur you hear inside a shell, a murmur that was growing constantly louder, that was deafening, terrible. His head burst, spattering the stars. Consciousness went like a window being slammed on tumult that filled time and space.
When he came to, he was lying flat on his back on the hardness of wood. His lips were dry and swollen with caked blood, and a sledge hammer banged steadily at the base of his skull, but it was so glorious to breathe again that he lay still for a long time, drawing air sweetly into his lungs, before he summoned fortitude enough to assemble his limbs, get them in the right position, and stumble to his feet. The lamp had been smashed. He located the button in the wall after a half-dozen attempts and switched on the top bulb.
In its sudden glare the room was a wreck—and empty. Even the cat was nowhere around. He called her vacantly, his voice a hoarse cackle: “Here, puss, here, puss …” and listened. No patter of claws on the stairs. Of course, she’d gone out, as she had entered, with his visitor. Who in the name of blazes was the olive-skinned man with the gun and … The purse! He was across the floor to the little stand under the window in three strides. But even before he threw back the lid he knew what he was going to find. Did find it. The cedar-wood compartment was empty except for a few cigarettes. The green suède purse was no longer there.