The girl’s eyes balled with dismay. She believed it now. She’d been believing it for some time, but not till now had it come clean in her consciousness.
“All right, Paul,” she said quietly. She walked across the room to a tiny rosewood desk, opened the miniature drawer in its exact center. Then she turned again to face the blond man. Her hand held a .25 caliber revolver. She extended her hand.
“Remember the gun you gave me for my birthday, Paul?”
Paul Barda waved a careless wrist. “Keep it...” he started to say, then looked down at her hand unbelievingly. The revolver was extended muzzle first. The hand that held it didn’t waver, didn’t shake. It looked like the hand of death itself.
“Sherry!” he exclaimed, shocked.
She pulled the trigger. The gun jerked insanely, a thin criss-cross of smoke patterning its movement. It jerked again and again. Then she flung the gun at the davenport. “Goodbye, Paul,” she said.
Paul Barda grabbed at his middle. He almost made it to the door. Almost but not quite. Then he slid down easily and crumpled up in a tight ball on the floor. He tried to get up once after that but his outstretched hand hit against the door casing and remained that way.
Sherry Halloran sobbed once and fainted.
There were two doors leading into this room — one at which Paul Barda had fallen and one other at the back. This latter led to the bright kitchen. Doctor John Halloran had been standing in this second doorway. He had heard and he had seen.
The hair at his temples seemed to glisten from the reflected lights of the Christmas tree in the far corner of the room. He stepped inside and leaned over his wife. She was a buoyant feather in his arms. He carried her to the bedroom, went back for his bag from which he took a hypodermic needle. He injected something into her right arm.
“Sleep tight, honey,” he whispered, “and don’t worry. Maybe I can do something about... that.”
Doctor Halloran stared around the living room. He righted Sherry’s overturned glass, went to the kitchen for a towel and carefully wiped up the spilled liquor.
He took both glasses back to the kitchen and washed them. Then he returned them to the small table with the whiskey bottle on it.
He surveyed the room, straightened a small throw rug. His last job was the unpleasant one.
He knelt on the floor close to the body of Paul Barda. There wasn’t much use in trying anything. Barda was as dead as last year’s good resolutions.
He stood up, went to the front door, opened it and looked up and down the deserted street. The snow had blanketed everything with a soft white mantel and it was coming down now in a thick layer. It made the air smell fresh and clean. At the curb stood Paul Barda’s convertible coupe where he had left it. Doctor Halloran spent some few minutes on the step, thinking. Then he went to the coupe, tried the turtle back. It was unlocked. He lifted it open.
Barda was slim, but solidly built. Doctor Halloran grunted as he carried the body out of the house and stuffed it into the turtle back of the convertible. The deck came down with a little jar, disturbing the snow on the license plate. 40-241, he read. He looked inside the car before he returned to the house. Barda had left the keys in the ignition.
Doctor Halloran carefully picked up the small .25 caliber gun on the davenport. This he meticulously wiped with his handkerchief and dropped it into his coat pocket. The only thing remaining was to wipe up a small smear on the varnished, waxed floor. After that he took his handkerchief to the fireplace and tossed it in. It burned completely in a few minutes. He watched it burn, thinking.
The blackjack dealer at the Marlo Club shuffled the cards, cut the deck, used a small stack of them to sweep a non-existent bit of dust from the green felt and looked out at the almost deserted club.
“Make your bets,” he intoned to nobody.
The croupier at an adjoining roulette wheel grinned and tossed a silver dollar onto the other’s felt.
“Things is mighty rough, pardner,” the dealer husked. He tossed a silver dollar of his own over to the croupier. “Twenty-eight black,” he said.
Then he began to shuffle the cards again. “Your first is a nine,” he announced.
“Hit me,” said the croupier.
The dealer threw down another, face up. “Ten.”
The croupier smiled.
The dealer threw a card of his own. “Five.” He threw a second. “Six.” Another. “Nine.” He held the cards spread widely. He grinned loosely, scooped the silver dollar with a card, stacked it neatly with a hundred others.
The croupier spun the wheel, tossed the ball in the opposite direction, waited. His mustache twitched. He reached up one slender finger and smoothed it. His eyes were impassive. “Seventeen red,” he announced.
The ball lay as he had said.
The dealer shrugged. “Helluva night.”
“It’ll pick up. Me, I go at eleven. Just in time to watch the kids put up the Christmas tree.” He looked at his watch. It was fifteen minutes before. He started to say something else, looked up and cleared his throat instead.
A small woman with a strawberry-red pleated suit and hair the color of an eight ball was coming their way. She made for the blackjack table.
The dealer smiled. “Merry Christmas.”
The woman looked at his eyes briefly, took out a stack of silver dollars from a white plastic handbag, and tossed five on the table. The dealer gave her two cards, one down, one up.
“Again,” she said dully. He tossed it to her.
She turned up her buried card. “Twenty-three,” she said. The dealer smiled politely, scooped up the five dollars.
“Ever hear of a boy called Paul Barda?” the woman asked him.
“Paulie? Sure. Was in here this afternoon. Haven’t seen him tonight.”
“Where’s he live, you know?”
The dealer shook his head and she turned to go.
“Try Joe over at the bar,” he advised. “He might know.”
The girl walked toward the bar.
The bartender finished shaking a cocktail, laid it on the tray at the end of the bar and nodded.
“Yes,” he agreed. “I know Paul Barda. But I never knew where he lived.”
The girl studied him. “Whiskey,” she said. “Soda on the side.”
He placed it before her and rubbed his chin thoughtfully. It gave him a chance to examine the woman. He decided to play it safe. “Haven’t seen Paul in quite a spell,” he offered tentatively.
“He was in here this afternoon.”
The bartender’s face reddened and he leaned over to grab at a bar rag. “That so?” he murmured.
The woman tossed off the whiskey, sipped a little of the soda water and threw a silver dollar on the bar.
“Put the change in the collection plate Sunday if you can spare it,” she told him.
She walked out. A tall, carefully shaven man who was sitting hunched up on a bar stool got up and followed her. He poked his head out of the door. “Lady!” he hissed.
The woman stopped, turned and came back. The man closed the door behind him.
“You’re looking for Barda?”
“Maybe.”
The man grinned a thin grin. “Sure. You come up to a bar, and ask for Paul Barda. But you’re only looking for him ‘maybe’.”
“So I’m looking for Barda. You know where he lives?”
“Sure I know where he lives. But better still I know where he is right now.”
“Talk to me.”
The man looked up at the sky. A snowflake hit him on the nose. He blew it off again. “Let’s say you’re the recording angel and I’m giving you the dope. No motive. What’s it matter if Barda messes around with my girl? He messes with ’em all. No motives, then. Just facts.”