She looked at his face, tried to reconstruct it, tried to fill it in. It was like reading a page on which the writing has already grown faded, blurred, distorted. It was like an ink-written page on which it has rained. Everything was still there yet, but everything had moved a little out of focus. The lines that had been facial characteristics were seams now. The mouth that had been either strong or weak, bitter or good-humored, was a gap now, a place where the face was open. The eyes that had been either kindly or cruel, wise or foolish, they were just glossy, lifeless insets now, like isinglass stuck into yellowish-gray dough.
His hair was well cared-for and full of life and light yet, for it dies last, or rather it doesn’t die when the body does, it grows on afterward. Even the death-shock and the fall had hardly disturbed a blade of it. Just one or two had fallen out of the furrows that his brush had trained them into through the years.
He had fine dark brows, like tippets of sealskin. Not grotesquely thick, but well-emphasized. And they were perfectly straight now, even; death had taken away perplexity and the need for bending them this way or that.
With all this, she couldn’t make out much what he’d been like. He looked as though he’d been about thirty-five or so. But the ages of men are trickier to calculate than those of women; he might have been thirty or he might have been forty. He must have been facially good-looking until an hour ago, or whenever it had happened — the putty mask that was left behind told her that — but then that’s the least important attribute a human being can have. Angels and devils are good-looking, both.
He’d liked life, in its pleasanter recreational aspects. Even in death he was still immaculately attired in evening clothes, the starched bosom of his shirt scarcely rumpled at all, the gala flower in his buttonhole still in place.
The underparts of his shoes were faintly glossy with floor-wax, so he’d danced in them not long ago, and their rims weren’t nicked or marked in any way, so he’d been a competent dancer, avoiding others and seeing that they avoided him on a crowded floor. What good did it do to know that now? He wouldn’t dance any more.
Quinn had come back to her again. She was aware of him standing beside her, without looking, and she was glad to have him there. Their shoulders touched lightly, and it felt good.
“Shouldn’t we close his—? They seem to be watching you when you’re not looking at them, and then when you look, they’re not.”
“No, don’t touch them,” he whispered. “I don’t know how to, anyway, do you?”
“I guess you just squeeze the lids together.”
But neither of them did it.
“Can you tell what it — was?” she asked with bated breath. “What it was done with?” She crouched slowly downward toward the floor, as if drawn by an irresistible compulsion. He remained erect an instant longer, then he crouched with her.
“It must be on him somewhere.”
He saw her hand arch timidly above the button holding the two sides of the jacket together across the form’s middle. Her fingers spread as if trying to undo it without coming into too close a contact with anything but that.
“Wait, let me do it,” he said quickly. He scissored his own fingers deftly, and the two sides of the jacket sprang open.
“There it is.” She drew in her breath.
A small reddish-black sworl was revealed, marring one armband of the white piqué vest. It was a good deal below the armpit, however, almost dead center above the heart.
“It must have been a gun,” he said. “Yeah, bullet. It’s round and frazzled. A knife would make a slit.”
He undid the buttons of the vest and parted that. Underneath it repeated itself, but it was far more spreading in its secondary results. The shirt had absorbed it like a blotter, all down the side, and a little bit over to the front in a random offshoot or two. He tried to keep her from seeing too much of it by holding the vest wings upward like a screen. Then he folded them back over it again.
“Must have been an awfully small one,” he said. “I’m no expert, but it’s a pretty tight little hole.”
“Maybe they’re all that way.”
“Maybe.” Then he admitted, “I never saw one before, so I can’t tell.”
She said: “Then one thing we can be sure of, there was no one staying in the house but him right now, or they would have heard it go off.”
He was scanning the room. “They took it away with them; there’s no sign of one lying around.”
“What’d you say their name was again — the people that live in this house?”
“Graves.”
“Is this the head of the family, the father?”
“There is no father; he’s dead about ten or fifteen years. There’s the mother, she’s a well-known society woman, I think. Then there’s two sons, and a daughter. This is the older son. There’s another one, still a student, away at college somewhere. The daughter’s one of these, what they call, debutantes; you know, they write her up in the papers a lot.”
“If we could figure out why, if we could get at the motive—”
“In a couple of hours. When it takes the police weeks sometimes. And they know all about these things.”
“Let’s start with the easy ones first. He didn’t do it himself, because then the gun would still have to be lying around the room somewhere, and it isn’t.”
“I guess that’s safe enough,” he said hesitantly. But he didn’t sound any too sure.
“Robbery or burglary is about the commonest reason. Was anything taken out of the safe, that had been in it the first time, when you went back to it just now, the second time?”
“I don’t know,” he admitted. “I came in without using any lights, you know. I stumbled over him and went down on my hands and knees.”
She sucked in her breath sympathetically.
“It was like a third rail poking into your heart. So, after I’d lit a match and seen what it was, I just staggered over to the safe — I mean around behind it — tossed the money back into it, and got out fast without stopping to look.”
She struck her uptilted kneecap, poised a foot above the floor. “Then let’s look now. Do you think you’ll be able to remember, if there’s anything gone that was there the first time?”
“No,” he said frankly. “I was pretty steamed up even the first time, don’t forget. But I’ll try, and see if I can.”
They left their crouched positions and turned their backs on the body for the present. They went into the bathroom, Quinn in the lead because he knew where the light-switch was.
It exploded into a dazzling flash of white tiling at his touch. The mirrored surface of a wall cabinet at the other end gave them a disconcerting impression of other people stepping in from there at the same time that they were stepping in from here. Who were those frightened kids, looking so young, so hopeless, so helpless?
She didn’t waste time on that, though.
The most conspicuous thing was the square opening he had hacked into the plaster, to their right as they stepped in and just behind where the safe was in the outside room. It seemed incredible that walls, inner walls in a house, had once been made so thick.
He’d had the shower-curtain arranged the first time to conceal it; artificially draped and panoplied so that it fell over that way. He’d told her all about that. But in returning just now in his fright and haste, he’d cast it aside once more and then left it that way. It was pushed back, “dented” in, you might say, and within this sagging loop was where the wall-fracture lay exposed.
He’d done a neat job, but she took no pride in that, and she knew he didn’t either. She could tell by his face. It was almost as though he’d used a ruler to outline it, it was so straight. No more than a thin pencil-line of the white plaster-fill was exposed around the gums of the aperture. The tinted surface of the wall was scarcely cracked around this, it was so little disturbed. A flake or two threatened to peel off, that was all. He must have scuffed the fill he’d taken out, away from sight under the tub with the edge of his foot. She didn’t ask him, but there was none in sight on the floor, and the tub was one of these old-fashioned kind, raised above floor-level and supported by claw-feet, she saw.