"It would be cruel if I did. And pointless."
"I see what you mean. You would have no reason. Unless there's a reason that I can't understand. Is there?"
"No. None whatever. Surely you realize that."
"I suppose I do. I suppose I must believe you after all." She stood up suddenly and walked over to a window and stood there for a minute looking out, slim and erect against the glass, her pale hair catching afire from the slanting light. Then she returned, sitting again, tucking the skirt and folding her hands. "Poor Alex," she said. "Poor little Alex."
He hadn't been so little. Average height, at least, but Marcus skipped it. Miss Sandra Shore was striking him as a remarkable young woman. There was genuine grief in her voice, in her darkened eyes, but her face was in repose, fixed as serenely in shock and grief as it had been in the photograph.
"You are very composed under the circumstances," he said. "I'm relieved and thankful."
"Perhaps I can't quite accept it yet, in spite of knowing that it must be true."
"Sometimes it takes a while for things to hit us hard. Do you feel like talking with me now?"
"What do you want to know?"
"You were a good friend of Alexander Gray's. Is that true?"
"Yes, it's true, but I can't imagine how you know. Unless you've talked with Rufe. Have you?"
"Rufus Fleming? No. I'd like to talk with him, however. I don't know where he is."
"Have you been to the apartment? Alex and Rufe lived together, you know."
"Yes, I know. I've been there. Do you have any idea where Fleming could be?"
"Just out somewhere, I imagine. He'll show up soon."
"His car was in the garage."
"Rufe often walks places. Quite long distances sometimes. He enjoys it."
"There was a photograph of you in their apartment. A very good one. I noticed that it was inscribed to both Gray and Fleming. All your love. Were you an equally good friend to both?"
"Equally? That's so hard to judge, isn't it? I loved them both. I still love them both, even though Alex must be dead, since you say so."
"Did they both love you?"
"Oh, yes. We all loved each other."
"Isn't that a rather unusual relationship to exist among two men and a woman?"
"I don't think so. Perhaps it is. It has been that way for so long that it seems perfectly natural to me."
"Didn't it ever get complicated?"
"Well, it was difficult in certain ways. They both loved me and wanted to marry me, and I loved both of them, which was all right, and wanted to marry both of them, which was not, and that's where the difficulty was."
"I understand. Bigamy is no solution. Besides being illegal."
"Yes. Anyhow, I couldn't bear to marry one of them and not the other, for that would surely have meant giving up entirely the one I didn't marry. If only I could have married one of them and kept the other one around as always, it would have been all right, but it wouldn't have worked, I'm sure, for a husband is different from a friend, no matter how good and tolerant he may be, and will become possessive and insistent upon his rights and resentful of the attentions to his wife of another man."
Marcus didn't quite believe her. Not her words. He believed them, all right. He didn't quite believe her. That she existed. That she was sitting this instant in the chair across from him with her knees together and her skirt tucked in. He was, in fact, more than a little confused by what seemed at once perfectly logical and utterly insane. That was it, he decided. It was logical, but nuts. There was not necessarily any contradiction in that.
"You said this relationship had existed for a long time," he said. "How long?"
"Oh, years and years. Ages. Since we were very young."
"You all knew each other then?"
"Isn't that what I said? Went through school together and have remained close to each other since."
"It's strange, to say the least, that two men should remain such friends in such circumstances."
"Well, they were very sweet and tolerant and understanding, and they kept thinking something could be worked out, but, as I said, there was no way to work it satisfactorily."
"Now, however, the problem has resolved itself."
"You mean, because Alex is dead, that there is nothing to keep me from marrying Rufe? That may be true, but I'll have to think about it. It doesn't seem quite fair to Alex. A kind of unfair advantage for Rufe, you know. I may be compelled by fairness to give him up also."
Marcus slapped a knee sharply and stood up and walked around his chair and sat down again. He closed his eyes and opened them, and she was still there.
"There was a pair of target pistols in the apartment," he said. "The superintendent told me they were bugs about target shooting. Is that so?"
"Oh, yes, and so am I. I have a pistol like the ones you saw. It all started when we were quite young. In the beginning, we used bb pistols. We lived in a small town, only a short walk into the country, and we used to go out together frequently, the three of us, and have matches. Would you like to see my pistol?"
"It would be kind of you to show it to me."
"Not at all."
She got up and went to a desk and returned in a minute with the pistol, which was, as she had said, apparently identical with the two he had appropriated. Clean, recently oiled. He took it and examined it and handed it back to her. She sat in her chair again, the pistol lying in her lap beneath her hands.
"Do you happen to have a photograph of Mr. Fleming?" he asked.
"Of Rufe? No. I'm sorry."
"Not even a snapshot?"
"Not even that. It's rather strange, isn't it, when you come to think about it? Neither Alex nor Rufe were much for having their pictures taken."
"Perhaps you could describe him to me."
"Why?"
"Oh, just in case I happen to see him or something. It might save me some time and trouble."
"Well, he's quite tall. About six-three, I'd say. Rather thin, but quite strong. He has a long face with thick eyebrows that grow across the bridge of his nose and black hair that's wiry and doesn't stay brushed very well. His shoulders are somewhat stooped, and I keep telling him to pull them back, but it doesn't do any good. I think he stoops deliberately to avoid appearing as tall as he is, especially when he's with me. As you can see, I'm rather small."
"Yes. I see." Marcus stood up, holding his hat, and looked around the room. An open entrance to a small kitchen. A door closed upon what must be a bedroom. Off the bedroom, certainly, a bath. No different, basically, from the place shared by Gray and Fleming. "Tell me," he said. "Can you think of anyone at all who might have wanted to kill Alexander Gray?"
"No. No one. Surely it must have been some kind of accident."
"He was in no trouble that you knew of?"
"None. If Alex had any trouble, it must have been minor."
"I see. Well, thank you very much, Miss Shore. If you see Mr. Fleming, please have him contact me at police headquarters."
She followed him to the door and showed him out; the last thing he saw was her grave face and darkened eyes as the door closed between them. It was now well past time for lunch, and so he went on and had a steak sandwich at a small restaurant and went on from there to headquarters, where he read a brief report from the coroner as to the estimated time of Alexander Gray's death, which estimate was, as Marcus had predicted, not much different from Marcus's guess. The coroner thought that Gray had been killed by a.22 caliber bullet, but there had been no time as yet to recover it from the body, due to an accumulation of work, and an autopsy was promised as soon as possible.
Marcus carried the pair of matched pistols to ballistics and left them with instructions for tests, and then returned to his desk and began to clear up some paper work, including his own report of the Gray case. He tried three times without success, during the rest of the afternoon, to reach Fleming at his apartment, and he kept thinking that Fleming might call in, but he didn't. Late in the afternoon, Fuller came in and reported on what had happened at the golf course after Marcus had left, but it didn't amount to much.