Outside on the street she was standing by the car, looking around. It was dark here, she said — scary. And her hand clung to his arm all the way up the stoop — a small hand he could crush in his, a hand that weighed nothing at all.
Mickey Gavegan seemed to feel it there even after they got inside, and he looked at his watch and said maybe she could call now; it was almost eleven. The touch of her hand seemed still on the coat. From the hall he heard her dial.
He went out to the kitchen and nodded silently at Bohannon, and then, when the other man went inside, he lit a cigarette. After a moment, when he heard her voice muted through the walls, he went out to the corridor that ran into the living-room arch.
He didn’t know what he was going to do. Why had he left the kitchen? There was a small room on his right that he looked into absently, his head aching — a tiny, bare pantry with one window high up in it not wide enough for a man. It was odd why he examined the room so very carefully, why he stood there motionless in the hall, listening to Ann Larkin’s voice, panicky and breathless, in the room beside him. You aren’t — this isn’t — her chair pushed back. Where was the policeman?
“Who?” Bohannon said. Mickey Gavegan heard him chuckle — low, not too amused. “I guess the suit fits him pretty good at that, baby; only it ain’t his. He’s no more a cop than I am. Gavegan!”
When he stopped in the archway her eyes watched him with a kind of incredulous horror.
Mickey Gavegan did not look at her at all; he stood there rigidly, in Luke Daly’s uniform, like a statue.
“I guess there ain’t a cop within a mile of here,” Bohannon said, “but at that I guess you could take a gander around from upstairs, Gavegan. See if anybody’s getting nosy about the lights.”
The girl never said a word; she just kept watching him as if she had lost the power to move her eyes. They seemed to stay on him when he went out to the stairs, and her hand, too, remained tangible on his arm. Upstairs, in a dark bedroom, he stood by a window.
A car came down the street, slowing as it passed the house. A cheap black sedan, like the one Luke Daly had, it reached the end of the block, turned around in a driveway there, and passed the house once more. On the boulevard it stopped a moment and then turned left, out of sight. Somebody looking for a number, he thought; there were a million models like Luke Daly’s around. Still his heart began to beat unsteadily, and the quiet around him became an oppressive thing whose weight he could not endure.
So down the stairs again, into the living room, where Jack Bohannon sat on a corner of the table, and the girl, her eyes shaded darkly, moved her head aside as he came in so that she did not have to look at him. “All quiet?” Bohannon asked. Gavegan nodded. It wasn’t Luke Daly; it couldn’t be. For how could Luke Daly know where he was?
But while they sat there, waiting for Joe Larkin, things began to come together in Mickey Gavegan’s mind. There was the paper Bohannon had given him, which he had lost; and there was the bracelet Luke Daly had bought for his girl, Had Gavegan put the paper on the dresser, forgetting it completely after he changed, so that Luke Daly, missing the bracelet before he reached his girl’s house, came back for it and found the paper by its side?
If it was there, Luke Daly would have found it, and he’d have seen Mickey Gavegan’s gray suit rumpled on the bed. He’d have looked in the closet and found the uniform gone, and then puzzled, worried, he’d have driven over to the first address, the landlady’s. And she’d have told him Miss Larkin had gone out some time ago. Yes. With a policeman. Was there any trouble?
He could see Luke Daly, cursing him, perplexed, not wanting to get him into any mess, coming down here to see what it was all about. Impersonating an officer — they could send Mickey Gavegan up for that—
In the house, in the dark kitchen, there was something that might have been the creak of a floorboard, the rasp of a door. Mickey Gavegan coughed and made the chair creak under him to cover it; when Bohannon looked at him he said to smother it entirely:
“I been thinking, Bohannon. A car passed me last night, maybe a minute after the shot; you could have seen me from inside it. Say you did — then you’re the guy who killed the Dingbat.”
“I am?” Bohannon said, in a lazy voice, as if he was just repeating the statement. But his eyes grew watchful — flat and depthless.
“You always used your head,” Mickey Gavegan went on, trying to make himself believe that he only imagined the sound, he was imagining another, fainter, almost indistinguishable, that could have been the scuffle of a shoe on oilcloth. “You always had a sucker — me for that cigar store holdup, and Joe Larkin for this. That’s the way you work, isn’t it?”
“Then maybe it’s a good way,” Bohannon answered softly, regarding him with watchfulness, but no alarm. “I never got picked up, Gavegan. I roped you into that holdup — hell, it’s over and done with now; you didn’t know any more about what was going on than a baby. But you want to remember that they hooked you for it all the way, the way they’d hook you for killing the Dingbat if I talk. Unless—”
He turned his head sharply, as if he heard something now that Mickey Gavegan had not caught. Getting up suddenly and silently from the table, he was past the archway in two strides, peering down the hall. Then he snarled something and the hand in his coat pocket jerked up; sound and smoke rebounded from the wall in a roll of clamorous enormity.
The girl was on her feet. Had she screamed? Mickey Gavegan, not conscious of moving, was in the archway behind Bohannon’s crouching form. “In the pantry,” Bohannon said breathlessly. “A guy.”
Straightening clear of the arch, with his body pressed flat to the wall and the gun extended before him in his right hand, Bohannon moved forward carefully on his toes. Behind him, Mickey Gavegan moved too, one step into the passage, with Luke Daly’s gun in his hand, and Luke Daly’s uniform on his back.
“Bohannon,” Mickey Gavegan said. The band at his temple snapped with the word; his body lost its pain and its shame; it became in an instant supple and careful.
The pale man turned, and they looked at each other, and Luke Daly’s gun was solid and sure in Mickey Gavegan’s hand. For a moment Bohannon just watched him; then in a quiet and persuasive tone he said, “If you’ll use your head, Gavegan, if you’ll let me handle this the safe way—”
His voice was so quiet, his eyes so steady and sensible, that Mickey Gavegan did not watch his gun. The reports came, one, two, three, rapid and wild, even while Bohannon spoke.
The hall was quiet then. Smoke whirled and eddied in it like lazy fog. And Jack Bohannon lay very still, clumsily sprawled out, on the floor...
In the living room Luke Daly made him tell it all — how he got scared and ran at the shot last night because he didn’t want to get mixed up in anything, how Bohannon came to see him, how he thought that if he didn’t do what Bohannon wanted him to...
“You couldn’t tell me,” Luke Daly said bitterly. “You couldn’t do anything as brilliant as that. This mess now—” He went to the window and looked out; coming back he said, “I don’t think anybody heard us; I didn’t see a light for blocks around. Give me the gun, Gavegan. I killed him. I heard him call the girl from a saloon and I followed him here and shot him when he fired at me.”
“What?” Mike Gavegan asked huskily. “You can’t do that. I won’t let you.”
“Who shot Bohannon?” Luke Daly asked the girl. His voice was tight and savage. “You know, sister. You’re the only one who does. They sent him up once for something he never did — you heard Bohannon say that. And now this goes the way you tell it. Who shot Bohannon?”