The house was utterly silent. The Parson saw Blue stop short at the threshold of the room in which the shooting had taken place that afternoon. The Dutchess also stopped. Only her profile was visible but he could see her lips tighten, her face muscles grow rigid. Clancy stepped closer, cried out bitterly:
“It’s the Chief. He’s been killed!”
The man the Parson had called Linny lay on the floor on his side with a hand pressed to his ribs. The Parson began to see that the copper screening had been removed from the window, which stood open. The Dutchess caught her breath as she looked down at the figure on the floor, exhaled slowly, said:
“Isn’t that District Attorney Lew Linton?”
The Parson nodded. “Come in, everyone. Keep ’em covered, Clancy.” The Parson knelt down beside the inert figure. Very faintly he could hear breathing. His eyes flicked up at the others. “He’s been stabbed. Just as Tex Kent was stabbed. But he’s still alive. Knife didn’t touch his heart. There! He’s coming to.”
Linton’s eyes opened slowly. Slowly recognition came into them. “Hello, Parson,” he whispered.
“Are you hurt bad?”
“S-scratched. Hit my head on the floor when I fell. I’ll be O.K.”
“Who did it, Linny?”
Linton tried to speak. But the words did not come. Again his eyes closed. The Parson felt his heart. The pulse was regular, strong enough.
He straightened. “He’ll be fine in a little while. Sit down, folks.” His voice dropped lower: “Sit down, Dutchess. You too, Cig.”
The Dutchess broke in. “You can’t—”
“Button up,” the Parson silenced her dryly. “I’m talking to Cig. Cig Wolfe. How about it. Blue? You’re Cig Wolfe, aren’t you? Aren’t you?” Again his voice lowered: “You see, Cig, the masquerade is over.”
Carl Blue turned his face to the Parson, his eyes wide, pupils dilated, but still his face was cold, expressionless, without movement of a muscle. He looked at the Parson without fear. His voice was quiet. “How did you know I was Cig Wolfe?”
“I knew almost at once. Your face. Always calm. Never a smile, never a frown. Lifeless, cold. And the too perfect features. No nerves in it. I remembered what Tex Kent had told me. The chopper was good. Twenty dumdums went through the face of the man they thought was Cig Wolfe. Twenty dumdums so that no one could recognize it. You were that chopper, weren’t you, Cig? Who was the man you killed so that they could bury him under your name?”
“Just a guy off a park bench. No good to anyone, not even himself. I sent his mother ten grand. That’s the way he wanted it. He looked enough like me — hair, features, build — to pass, if the face wasn’t examined too closely.”
The Parson nodded, eyes lowered for a minute. “And then you got this new face. Plastic surgery. It’s a beautiful job. But you can’t smile or grin or look angry or show any other expression. They cut up your nerves to make over the face. They gave you not a new face but a mask. A perfect mask. Why did you do it, Cig?”
The man’s head jerked back. A light flamed in his eyes, then instantly died away. He glanced sidewise at the Dutchess and it seemed, almost it seemed, that he smiled. But actually his features were as rigid as ever. His words, though, showed his intention.
“Don’t take it so big, honey. This isn’t the end yet.” He looked back at the Parson. “Why did I do it? Alice. There’s your answer. When the Dutchess had that kid, everything changed for us. We hid her from the world on a little farm in the White Mountains. But that couldn’t keep up forever. Someone would have found out, hit out at us through her. And I couldn’t quit as Cig Wolfe. There were too many — committments. So we thought up this plan. I didn’t want to be in the rackets any more. We had some dough. I wanted to live like other people, do things like other people, have my daughter grow up to be proud of me.”
The Parson looked keenly at the impassive face of Cig Wolfe. He suddenly felt sorry for him. Cig was just a man who wanted to be a husband and a father. There was something touching in the way his voice broke, in the way his eyes strained, darted about; but something terrible, awesome in the way his face remained cold, expressionless.
The Parson said, “But you didn’t break clean enough. Your kickback was when the Dutchess sold the numbers racket to Frankie Moore. Two weeks later Linton cracked down and Frankie never got to see any profits. He was dumb but not dumb enough not to know he’d been tricked into buying something worthless. That’s why he followed the Dutchess here.”
Cig Wolfe nodded diffidently. “We needed more money. We had to take the chance on Frankie. Listen, I never begged for a break in my life. But I’ve handed them out in my time. Look, I’m not a tough gunman now; I’m just a guy who’s a father. I’m begging for a break. Not for me. For the Dutchess and the kid.”
“You should have thought of that before you killed Frankie and his stooge, Tobe Hugg. The Cariba cops want you and the Dutchess now. You didn’t have to come here and do a lot of typewriter work.”
Cig shook his head. “That’s where you’re wrong. When a guy, who has no business in the mix-up, hooks up with a mugg like Frankie, knifes your best pal and then, when the shooting starts, sneaks off your little girl — what would you do? Exchange a bag of money for the kid and forget it?”
“You got the dough and this guy got the kid in that mix-up in the Puerto,” the Parson interrupted. “Is that the way it went?”
Cig nodded.
“Then why didn’t you pay out the sugar if the kid means so much to you?”
“We intended to. That was supposed to be the deal Judge North wanted to swing. The money for the kid. Then we saw Frankie and his gun and we knew it was no go. So we took the kid the hard way.”
The Parson moved across the room to where the bags had been deposited, knelt before Kent’s bag, unstrapped and snapped the lid open. The money was there in neat little piles as he had seen it last.
“Tex Kent brought this with him from the States, eh?” he said. “And the Judge brought the kid.”
The Dutchess said, “Yes!” Her handsome face was very lovely, grave, stoical. “Maybe it’s no use, but we’ve lived hard, we’ve tried to live it down, make a new life. You’ve got to give us our chance. You can’t snatch our chance away from us. Here! We don’t care about the money any more. It was the last of the numbers money cached away. We should never have touched it. You take it. It’s yours. Let us go. There’s still a few minutes to make that plane.”
The Parson looked at her. “O.K.,” he said quickly. “You can go and take the kid with you. Cig and the money stay here. I’ll help you but I wouldn’t lift a finger for him, even though I think he’s a right guy.”
“No! No! Oh, you can’t do that! I won’t leave him. You think I’ve gone through all this just to run out on him?”
“He’s right, honey,” Cig said. “I’ll take my dose. After all, I can’t kick. I guess I got this coining. You blow with the child.”
There was no abjectness in his manner and no heroics. Perhaps the abnormal passivity of his face lent particular dignity to his bearing. The Parson could not be sure.
“I won’t go!” the Dutchess said with a quietness to match his own. “Nothing you can say will make me.”
“Well, if that’s that, Clancy,” the Parson said, “you’d better get a move on. Linny needs help fairly fast.” He snapped shut the lid of the bag of money. “Take this down to police headquarters. No, don’t phone,” he added as Clancy made a move in that direction. “Go there yourself and bring back a squadron of cops with you.”