The girl smiled, not a nice smile. «Bright boy, eh? You sure stick your neck out all the time, don’t you? Made a beef, shamus. Didn’t frisk your skinny pal. He had a little map in one shoe.»
«I didn’t need one,» I said smoothly, and grinned at her.
I tried to make the grin appealing, because Mrs. Sype was moving her knees on the floor, and every move took her nearer to Sype’s Colt.
«But you’re all washed up now, you and your big smile. Hoist the mitts while I get your iron. Up, mister.»
She was a girl, about five feet two inches tall, and weighed around a hundred and twenty. Just a girl. I was six feet and a half-inch, weighed one-ninety-five. I put my hands up and hit her on the jaw.
That was crazy, but I had all I could stand of the DonovanMadder act, the Donovan-Madder guns, the Donovan-Madder tough talk. I hit her on the jaw.
She went back a yard and her popgun went off. A slug burned my ribs. She started to fall. Slowly, like a slow motion picture, she fell. There was something silly about it.
Mrs. Sype got the Colt and shot her in the back.
Madder whirled and the instant he turned Sype rushed him. Madder jumped back and yelled and covered Sype again. Sype stopped cold and the wide crazy grin came back on his gaunt face.
The slug from the Colt knocked the girl forward as though a door had whipped in a high wind. A flurry of blue cloth, something thumped my chest — her head. I saw her face for a moment as she bounced back, a strange face that I had never seen before.
Then she was a huddled thing on the floor at my feet, small, deadly, extinct, with redness coming out from under her, and the tall quiet woman behind her with the smoking Colt held in both hands.
Madder shot Sype twice. Sype plunged forward still grinning and hit the end of the table. The purplish liquid he had used on the sick fish sprayed up over him. Madder shot him again as he was falling.
I jerked my Luger out and shot Madder in the most painful place I could think of that wasn’t likely to be fatal — the back of the knee. He went down exactly as if he had tripped over a hidden wire. I had cuffs on him before he even started to groan.
I kicked guns here and there and went over to Mrs. Sype and took the big Colt out of her hands.
It was very still in the room for a little while. Eddies of smoke drifted towards the skylight, filmy gray, pale in the afternoon sun. I heard the surf booming in the distance. Then I heard a whistling sound close at hand.
It was Sype trying to say something. His wife crawled across to him, still on her knees, huddled beside him. There was blood on his lips and bubbles. He blinked hard, trying to clear his head. He smiled up at her. His whistling voice said very faintly: «The Moors, Hattie — the Moors.»
Then his neck went loose and the smile melted off his face. His head rolled to one side on the bare floor.
Mrs. Sype touched him, then got very slowly to her feet and looked at me, calm, dry-eyed.
She said in a low clear voice: «Will you help me carry him to the bed? I don’t like him here with these people.»
I said: «Sure. What was that he said?»
«I don’t know. Some nonsense about his fish, I think.»
I lifted Sype’s shoulders and she took his feet and we carried him into the bedroom and put him on the bed. She folded his hands on his chest and shut his eyes. She went over and pulled the blinds down.
«That’s all, thank you,» she said, not looking at me. «The telephone is downstairs.»
She sat down in a chair beside the bed and put her head down on the coverlet near Sype’s arm.
I went out of the room and shut the door.
TWELVE
Madder’s leg was bleeding slowly, not dangerously. He stared at me with fear-crazed eyes while I tied a tight handkerchief above his knee. I figured he had a cut tendon and maybe a chipped kneecap. He might walk a little lame when they came to hang him.
I went downstairs and stood on the porch looking at the two cars in front, then down the hill towards the pier. Nobody could have told where the shots came from, unless he happened to be passing. Quite likely nobody had even noticed them. There was probably shooting in the woods around there a good deal.
I went back into the house and looked at the crank telephone on the living-room wall, but didn’t touch it yet. Something was bothering me. I lit a cigarette and stared out of the window and a ghost voice said in my ears: «The Moors, Hattie. The Moors.»
I went back up to the fish room. Madder was groaning now, thick panting groans. What did I care about a torturer like Madder?
The girl was quite dead. None of the tanks was hit. The fish swam peacefully in their green water, slow and peaceful and easy. They didn’t care about Madder either.
The tank with the black Chinese Moors in it was over in the corner, about ten-gallon size. There were just four of them, big fellows, about four inches body length, coal black all over. Two of them were sucking oxygen on top of the water and two were waddling sluggishly on the bottom. They had thick deep bodies with a lot of spreading tail and high dorsal fins and their bulging telescope eyes that made them look like frogs when they were head towards you.
I watched them fumbling around in the green stuff that was growing in the tank. A couple of red pond snails were windowcleaning. The two on the bottom looked thicker and more sluggish than the two on the top. I wondered why.
There was a long-handled strainer made of woven string lying between two of the tanks. I got it and fished down in the tank, trapped one of the big Moors and lifted it out. I turned it over in the net, looked at its faintly silver belly. I saw something that looked like a suture. I felt the place. There was a hard lump under it.
I pulled the other one off the bottom. Same suture, same hard round lump. I got one of the two that had been sucking air on top. No suture, no hard round lump. It was harder to catch too.
I put it back in the tank. My business was with the other two. I like goldfish as well as the next man, but business is business and crime is crime. I took my coat off and rolled my sleeves up and picked the razor blade backed with adhesive tape off the table.
It was a very messy job. It took about five minutes. Then they lay in the palm of my hand, three-quarters of an inch in diameter, heavy, perfectly round, milky white and shimmering with that inner light no other jewel has. The Leander pearls.
I washed them off, wrapped them in my handkerchief, rolled down my sleeves and put my coat back on. I looked at Madder, at his little pain and fear-tortured eyes, the sweat on his face. I didn’t care anything about Madder. He was a killer, a torturer.
I went out of the fish room. The bedroom door was still shut. I went down below and cranked the wall telephone.
«This is the Wallace place at Westport,» I said. «There’s been an accident. We need a doctor and we’ll have to have the police. What can you do?»
The girl said: «I’ll try and get you a doctor, Mr. Wallace. It may take a little time though. There’s a town marshal at Westport. Will he do?»
«I suppose so,» I said and thanked her and hung up. There were points about a country telephone after all.
I lit another cigarette and sat down in one of the rustic rockers on the porch. In a little while there were steps and Mrs. Sype came out of the house. She stood a moment looking off down the hills, then she sat down in the other rocker beside me. Her dry eyes looked at me steadily.
«You’re a detective, I suppose,» she said slowly, diffidently.
«Yes, I represent the company that insured the Leander pearls.»
She looked off into the distance. «I thought he would have peace here,» she said. «That nobody would bother him any more. That this place would be a sort of sanctuary.»