She darted across the intervening room-space, aimed her hand at the gaping bag, plunged it in. Outright evidence she knew she couldn’t expect. That would have been asking too much. But something, anything at all. And there was nothing. Lipstick, powder-compact, the usual junk. Paper crackled against her viciously probing fingers from one of the side pockets. She drew it hastily out, flung it open, raced her eyes over it. Still nothing. An unpaid hotel-bill for $17.89, from this place they were in. A man would have left it there. Of what value was it? It had no connection with what she was here after.
And yet some inexplicable instinct cried out to her: “Hang onto it. It might come in handy.” She flung herself back into her original seat again, did something to one of her stockings, and it was gone.
An instant later the door reopened and the Bristol woman came out again, her instructions set. She sat down, fixed Bricky with her eyes, evidently to keep her attention from wandering.
“What’d you do, go up there to Graves’ place alone? Or’d you have somebody with you?”
Bricky gave her the knowing look of someone who is over seventeen. “Sure. You don’t suppose I take my grandmother along at times like that, do you?”
Her interlocutor got what she’d wanted her to out of it. “Oh, times like that, that’s it.”
“That’s it.”
“Well, uh—” She nibbled some more at her lip-rouge. “Somebody stop you at the door and tell you, that how you found out? Were there cops outside, people hanging around, lots of excitement, that how you knew he was dead?”
Bricky was answering these questions on instinct alone. Until they came out, she didn’t know herself how they were going to come. It was like walking a tight-rope — without a balancing pole and with no net under you.
“No, no one was around. No one knew it yet. Think I’d have walked in? I was the first one found him, I guess. See, I had a key to the house; he’d given it to me. I went in and all the lights were out. I thought maybe he hadn’t got home yet, so I’d wait for him. I went up, and there he was, plugged.”
Joan Bristol kneaded her hands together with feverish interest in the recital. “So then what’d you do? I suppose right away you beat it out and hollered blue murder, brought them all down on the place.”
The demi-mondaine sitting in Bricky’s chair gave her another of those worldly-wise looks. “What d’you think I am, sappy? I beat it out all right, and fast, but I kept the soft-pedal on. I put out the lights and locked up the door after me, and left the place just the way I found it. Sister, I didn’t breathe a word. Think I wanted to get mixed up in it? That’s all I need, yet.”
“And how long ago was it you were up there?”
“Just now.”
“Then I guess nobody knows yet but you—”
“You and me.”
She had a slight sense of motion taking place behind her. The air may have stirred a little. Or something may have creaked.
“Did you come down here alone?”
“Sure. Everything I do, I do alone. Who’ve I got?”
The mirror on the dresser, aslant toward her, showed her the hinged end of the door behind her slowly bending outward. The surface of the glass wasn’t wide enough to encompass the other end, the actively-turning end, show her that.
She didn’t have time to turn her head. She only had time to think: The door has opened behind me. There’s somebody about to— That shows they did it. I’ve hit the jackpot. My trail was the hot one, Quinn’s the cold.
That knowledge wasn’t going to do her any good now. She’d asked for it, and she was about to get it.
Bristol asked her one more question; more to hold her off-guard a split moment longer, than because she needed to have it answered any more. “And how’d you come to tie me up in it? Where does your coming around here figure in?”
There was no need for her to worry about the answer; none was expected. Two and two had already been put together quite successfully without her further aid.
Something thick and pimply, full of tiny little knots, suddenly blanketed itself around her face from behind. A Turkish bath-towel wound into a bandage-arrangement, most likely, although she had no leisure to identify exactly what it was. She reared up galvanically, and lost one hand behind her, secured at the wrist by some powerful grip. The Bristol woman had jolted to her own feet in time with her, and she secured the other. The two were brought together at her back, crossed over, and tied crushingly with long thin strips of something, perhaps a dismembered pillow-case or linen face-towel.
She couldn’t draw free breath for a moment, the rough-spun towelling muffled her whole face. The horrible thought that she was about to be smothered to death then and there occurred to her — but she realized dimly that they wouldn’t have gone to all the trouble of tying up her hands if that had been their purpose. That alone kept her from going into an unmanageable paroxysm of struggle that might have brought about the very result it was trying to evade, as has happened in so many countless cases before.
Then a rough hand, heavier and larger than the other woman’s, fumbled a little with the towel, brought it down half-face, freeing her eyes and nostrils. The remainder was tied far more tightly than the whole had been, with such constriction at the back of her head that she had a feeling as though her entire skull was going to be crushed with the pressure. But at least she could get air into her lungs and relieve the bursting coughing that had already started in.
Bristol was still in front of her eyes, as they came clear, addressing someone unseen behind her back. “Watch her mouth now, Griff. You can hear everything through these walls.”
A man’s voice growled: “Get her feet — them high heels are barking my shins.”
The woman crouched down out of sight — the snowy mantle of the towel prevented acutely downcast vision — and Bricky felt her ankles knock together and some more thin strips whip dexterously in and out around them, lashing them together. She became a helpless sheaf, tied at both ends.
Joan Bristol came up into sight again. “What’s the play now?” she asked.
The man’s voice said: “Don’t you figure we ought to—?” He didn’t finish it. Bricky got the uncompleted meaning by indirection, via the suddenly-taut look on the woman’s face. Her blood ran cold. He’d said it as calmly as though they were talking about lowering a shade or putting out a light.
The woman was scared. Not for Bricky’s sake, just for their own. She must have known him better than anyone, whoever he was; known just how capable he was of doing it.
“Not here in the room with us, Griff,” she said bleakly. “They know we were in this room. That’s begging for it!”
“Naw, you don’t get me,” he argued matter-of-factly. “I don’t mean chop-chop, that kind of stuff.” He went over to the window, drew the sash up carefully, like one of those men who are handy to have around the house, suggesting an improvement. A patch of electric-lighted mold was revealed, on blank brickwork opposite. He edged his head forward a little and looked speculatively downward. Then he turned and spoke to the woman quietly. “Four floors ought to be enough.” He motioned expressively with one hand. “The three of us get drinking up here, she goes over to the window to try and open it, get a little air in, it jams and— How many times does that happen?”
Bricky’s heart was burning its way out through her chest like a blow-torch.
“Yeah, but there’s always a follow-up. That’s no good for us this time, Griff. We’d get hooked here for hours, answering all kinds of police questions, and they’re liable to work their way back a little too far — and before you know it, other things’ll come into it.”