Tilly stared up at me and said, “I thought you were... I thought you were...” She leaned against the wall of the closet, closed her eyes and sank slowly toward the floor.
I turned and saw Lieutenant Cord pulling a man off Arthur Marris. Arthur lay on his back. His face was dark and the breath was whistling in his throat. His eyes were closed.
“Back up against that wall,” Cord said quietly to the other man who had risen to his feet.
Step Krindall blinked his baby-blue eyes. Droplets of sweat stood on his pink bald head. He stared incredulously at Arthur. He said, “I thought I had my hands on Arlin! My heaven, I thought it was Arlin! I was strangling Arthur.” He worked the fingers of his fat pink hands convulsively.
“You were trying to kill Arlin like you killed Carroll?” Cord asked, very casually.
“Sure,” Krindall said. “And the other ones. My heaven, I have to take care of Arthur. He’s not smart you know. He’d let them push him around, Arthur would. I’ve been watching out for Arthur now for a long time.” He looked appealingly at Lieutenant Cord.
“He knew what you’ve been doing?”
“Oh, no! He wouldn’t like it even though it helped him a lot. I never told him. He won’t die, will he?”
Arthur stirred. He opened his eyes. He gagged and rubbed his throat as he sat up.
Krindall took a step forward, ignoring Cord. “Arthur, you’re not sore at me, are you? I knew you wouldn’t be sore. I was helping you. And then when you showed me that story today, I just thought Arlin would make trouble for both of us and it would be better if he was dead.”
He reached down as though to touch Arthur’s shoulder. Arthur pulled himself away, violently, hunching along the floor.
Step looked at Arthur for one incredulous moment and then began to blubber, his eyes streaming, his hands making helpless appealing flapping motions.
“Who was shooting?” Cord demanded.
That reminded me forcibly of Tilly. I turned back to her.
She was sitting on the closet floor staring at me. She wore a curious expression. “I felt myself fainting. I sort of expected to wake up on the couch. Only — I didn’t.”
Cord saw the punctured door, thin plywood splinters protruding. “You were shooting from inside the closet?” he asked incredulously.
“I was locked in,” Tilly said with dignity as I helped her to her feet. “I thought Mr. Arlin was being killed. I wanted to create a diversion.”
“Great diversion,” Cord said dryly, staring at my hand. The blood was dripping from the tips of my index and middle fingers. Tilly looked down. This time I was ready. I caught her and put her on the couch.
Arthur stood up shakily. He said, “Rod, that’s what I wanted to talk to you about. You built such a strong case you got me thinking about Krindall. Little things that I had half forgotten. I still couldn’t believe it.”
Krindall stood, weeping silently. But there was a gleam in his tear-damp blue eyes. I said, “Look at him! Great emotion. Great acting. He’s standing there trying to figure an angle. All this doesn’t actually mean anything to him. This great devotion to Arthur is just a sham.”
The tears stopped as abruptly as though they had been turned off with a pipe wrench. He looked like an evil, besotted child. “I could have got you, Arlin,” he said. “I could have got you good. I rode Rex under the water and towed him out to where it was deep. I got Tod into an argument about guns and slipped a round into the chamber. The argument was whether you could see any glint of light down the barrel.
“I fixed the noose for Ted and got him on the chair to tell me if it was water pipes in the top of the closet. He didn’t see the noose until I slipped it over his head and yanked the chair away. Then I had to keep pulling his hands off the pipe for a little while. I knew about Brad and his wife. When she left, I went in. It didn’t take long. All of them were stupid. All of them. I’ve been smarter than any of you.”
“Yeah, you’re real bright,” Cord said speculatively. “Real bright. We got some mind-doctors who can check on you.”
“Doctors! You think I’m crazy!”
He made a dive to one side. Even as he moved, I saw the butt of the Magnum peeping out around the edge of the chair leg. I needn’t have worried. Cord took one step and swung a fist that was like a bag of rocks on the end of a rope. The fist contacted Step Krindall in mid-flight. It made a sound like somebody dropping an over-ripe cantaloupe. Cord sucked his big knuckles and stared down at Krindall.
“Real bright,” he murmured. He looked over at me. “You worried me, Arlin. I thought it wouldn’t do any harm keeping an eye on this place.”
Tilly revived and Krindall came to enough to be walked out. As I held my punctured epidermis under the cold water faucet, I apologized to a glum Marris.
We were alone again and the night wind still blew, but it was not alien. The sea sighed, but it was a domesticated beast.
Then we had a solemn nightcap together. Tilly said that she thought I ought to drive her back to the campus and I said why of course. We put the top up and I took her back as though we were returning from a very average date.
Ten days later I hit rain as I crossed into Georgia. I took the coast road and the rain stayed with me. The wipers clicked back and forth and the blacktop was the color of oiled sin.
I thought of facing one Mr. Flynn and telling him what had happened, what I had found out. He would have some of the details from the papers. There were others he should know, and others I would spare him. It wouldn’t be pretty, but it was something that had to be done. Krindall would be institutionalized.
Tilly stirred and yawned and stretched like a sleepy cat and smiled at me. Depression went away as though the sun had come out.
“Hungry?” I asked.
“Mmm. Famished. Let’s find a place to eat and then go find a nice court to stay in. We’ll stay there until a sunny day comes along, huh?”
“What’ll thinkle peep, honey? It’s eleven o’clock in the morning.”
“Who cares what they think, huh? Show ’em the license.”
“Hunting, driving or marriage?”
“Hunting, of course. No, I’ll tell ’em we had to get married.”
“Then they’ll ask why.”
“Then I’ll say because you got me expelled from junior high.”
“You don’t look old enough to have been in junior high.”
She curled against me. “Just old enough to know better, hey?”
It was raining like crazy in Georgia and the sun was shining bright.