“And you waited till Tutter turned around, and you took the ice pick out of your bag, and you let him have it — face to face.” It came out in a croak, and he cleared his throat.
Nancy nodded. “Face to face, Jim. I wanted him to know that he couldn’t throw a woman’s life away as if she were an old hat — not without paying for it, and I don’t mean money. I told the truth about not knowing anything about his finances. I still don’t, beyond what his lawyer told me over the weekend... No, Jim, let me finish.
“I’d wiped the handle clean before I left home. After that I kept my gloves on. When he was lying on the floor I wrapped his hand around the ice pick in the normal way. It... wouldn’t keep holding on.” For the first time her voice faltered; but it was only for a moment. “I did want it to look like suicide, Jim. I saw no reason why I — or anyone else, for that matter — should have to pay for his worthless life.”
“When did you go back to the studio?” he muttered.
“It must have been just seconds before you did; I’d purposely waited in room 1 till the ten minutes of the intermission were almost over. I was lucky, wasn’t I? Nobody saw me, coming or going, in all that corridor traffic.” She smiled. “And neither of us would be in this position today if that girl fan of Tutter’s hadn’t had to go to the toilet. Which reminds me. Does your honesty extend to expressing your real intentions when most people say, ‘Excuse me, I have to go wash my hands’?” She rose from the chair and came to him, and, very lightly, pressed her lips to his forehead. “Excuse me, Jim, I have to go wash my hands.”
Before he could touch her, or rise, she was going quickly to her bedroom. She turned in the bedroom doorway to smile at him, and then she went in and closed the door.
Layton sat limply, like an old man. What was he to do now?
I can say nothing, nothing at all, about this, he thought. To anyone. Neither Nora nor Wayne had the faintest suspicion of the significance of the girl’s revelation of yesterday.
The case is closed. It’s suicide. The coroner’s jury said so. Closed. And he’s buried.
And then I get to marry the girl, not quite as in the movies. Because I want her, I have need of her, I have need of her love and of mine. And would we live happily ever after...?
He tried to clear his head, shaking it as if there were water in his ears. Happily ever after... Me? Knowing I had, by an act of dishonest omission, sanctioned the taking of a human life...? knowing that the hand I kissed, the hand that caressed me, even though with truest tenderness and deepest love, had plunged a steel blade into a living heart?
Maybe if they knew — maybe if she were tried and at her trial the people on the jury were made to understand what had driven her to murder... Layton shook his head. It was, as she said, cold-blooded, premeditated murder. She didn’t have a chance.
And she knew it.
“And I know it,” Layton said aloud, startling himself. And I know it he said in silence.
Yet how can I turn her in? How can mine be the voice that sends the message of her guilt and pronounces the sentence of her doom over the lines strung between Chapter Drive and downtown Los Angeles? What after all, has she done to have to die for it — at my hand?
She’s committed murder.
What price honesty now?
Layton you honest man, you. Is your honesty so damn precious to you...?
Almost he came to a decision.
Almost.
But trembling on the brink, he heard a sound.
It was the report of a gun, and it came from beyond the bedroom door.
Layton found her on the bed. She had placed the muzzle of a pistol in her mouth and squeezed the trigger. What he saw, on the pillow, on the headboard, on the bed itself, made him totter into the bathroom and fall to his knees over the bowl.
It was Sergeant Trimble, a very long time later, who came up to Layton’s apartment and walked in without knocking and over to where Layton was lying in the dark staring up at nothing, and who said to Layton: “I found this under the pillow where she shot herself. It’s addressed to you, Jim. I have a photostat for the files — it’s okay. You keep this.”
Layton felt something flutter onto his chest.
After a moment Sergeant Trimble went away.
Layton stirred. He had been lying there for so long that his muscles felt atrophied. He stretched; his joints sounded like rusty door hinges.
His hand went groping to his chest. He found it.
Then he got up from the couch and fumbled around in the dark until he located the light switch.
He sank into a chair, blinking at it.
It was a sheet of notepaper of fine quality but an aged look, as if it had been bought a long time ago. There was an embossed NK in gold in the upper left corner, but she had taken her pen and slashed up and down and across it several times.
The letter said:
Dearest, dearest Jim—
There’s only one answer to your problem and to mine, and this is it.
It would be too cruel to make you decide. And in the end, even if you decided for me instead of for what you’ve always believed in, your love would turn to loathing.
I know, Jim. It happened to me.
Please try to explain to my dad and mother, especially my dad. I mean why I did what I did — why I killed Tutter and, much more important, why I killed myself. They won’t understand, but please — try, anyway.
I was saying good-by when I kissed you on the forehead just before going into the bedroom. I wanted so much to kiss you the way we’ve both wanted to, but I knew if I did I wouldn’t have the courage to go through with this.
Good-by, Jim darling, good-by.