«Is your head very bad, Sam?» she asked softly.
Delaguerra said: «No. It’s fine … What I mean is the La Motte girl shot Masters — and she shot Donny. Aage shot her. I shot Aage. All dead, ring around the rosy. Just how Imlay got killed we’ll not know ever, I guess. I can’t see that it matters now.»
Without looking up at him Belle Marr said quietly: «But how did you know it was Imlay up at the cabin? The paper said —» She broke off, shuddered suddenly.
He stared woodenly at the hat he was holding. «I didn’t. I thought a woman shot Donny. It looked like a good hunch that was Imlay up at the lake. It fitted his description.»
«How did you know it was a woman … that killed Donny?» Her voice had a lingering, half-whispered stillness.
«I just knew.»
He walked away a few steps, stood looking at the trees. He turned slowly, came back, stood beside her chair again. His face was very weary.
«We had great times together — the three of us. You and Donny and I. Life seems to do nasty things to people. It’s all gone now — all the good part.»
Her voice was still a whisper saying: «Maybe not all gone, Sam. We must see a lot of each other, from now on.»
A vague smile moved the corners of his lips, went away again. «It’s my first frame-up,» he said quietly. «I hope it will be my last.»
Belle Marr’s head jerked a little. Her hands took hold of the arms of the chair, looked white against the varnished wood. Her whole body seemed to get rigid.
After a moment Delaguerra reached in his pocket and something gold glittered in his hand. He looked down at it dully.
«Got the badge back,» he said. «It’s not quite as clean as it was. Clean as most, I suppose. I’ll try to keep it that way.» He put it back in his pocket.
Very slowly the girl stood up in front of him. She lifted her chin, stared at him with a long level stare. Her face was a mask of white plaster behind the rouge.
She said: «My God, Sam — I begin to understand.»
Delaguerra didn’t look at her face. He looked past her shoulder at some vague spot in the distance. He spoke vaguely, distantly.
«Sure … I thought it was a woman because it was a small gun such as a woman would use. But not only on that account. After I went up to the cabin I knew Donny was primed for trouble and it wouldn’t be that easy for a man to get the drop on him. But it was a perfect set-up for Imlay to have done it. Masters and Aage assumed he’d done it and had a lawyer phone in admitting he did it and promising to surrender him in the morning. So it was natural for anyone who didn’t know Imlay was dead to fall in line. Besides, no cop would expect a woman to pick up her shells.
«After I got Joey Chill’s story I thought it might be the La Motte girl. But I didn’t think so when I said it in front of her. That was dirty. It got her killed, in a way. Though I wouldn’t give much for her chances anyway, with that bunch.»
Belle Marr was still staring at him. The breeze blew a wisp of her hair and that was the only thing about her that moved.
He brought his eyes back from the distance, looked at her gravely for a brief moment, looked away again. He took a small bunch of keys out of his pocket, tossed them down on the table.
«Three things were tough to figure until I got completely wise. The writing on the pad, the gun in Donny’s hand, the missing shells. Then I tumbled to it. He didn’t die right away. He had guts and he used them to the last flicker — to protect somebody. The writing on the pad was a bit shaky. He wrote it afterwards, when he was alone, dying. He had been thinking of Imlay and writing the name helped mess the trail. Then he got the gun out of his desk to die with it in his hand. That left the shells. I got that too, after a while.
«The shots were fired close, across the desk, and there were books on one end of the desk. The shells fell there, stayed on the desk where he could get them. He couldn’t have got them off the floor. There’s a key to the office on your ring. I went there last night, late. I found the shells in a humidor with his cigars. Nobody looked for them there. You only find what you expect to find, after all.»
He stopped talking and rubbed the side of his face. After a moment he added: «Donny did the best he could — and then he died. It was a swell job — and I’m letting him get away with it.»
Belle Marr opened her mouth slowly. A kind of babble came out of it first, then words, clear words.
«It wasn’t just women, Sam. It was the kind of women he had.» She shivered. «I’ll go downtown now and give myself up.»
Delaguerra said: «No. I told you I was letting him get away with it. Downtown they like it the way it is. It’s swell politics. It gets the city out from under the Masters-Aage mob. It puts Drew on top for a little while, but he’s too weak to last. So that doesn’t matter … You’re not going to do anything about any of it. You’re going to do what Donny used his last strength to show he wanted. You’re staying out. Goodbye.»
He looked at her white shattered face once more, very quickly. Then he swung around, walked away over the lawn, past the pool with the lily pads and the stone bullfrog along the side of the house and out to the car.
Pete Marcus swung the door open. Delaguerra got in and sat down and put his head far back against the seat, slumped down in the car and closed his eyes. He said flatly: «Take it easy, Pete. My head hurts like hell.»
Marcus started the car and turned into the street, drove slowly back along De Neve Lane towards town. The treeshaded house disappeared behind them. The tall trees finally hid it.
When they were a long way from it Delaguerra opened his eyes again.
BLACKMAILERS DON’T SHOOT
ONE
THE man in the powder-blue suit—which wasn’t powder-blue under the lights of the Club Bolivar—was tall, with wide-set gray eyes, a thin nose, a jaw of stone. He had a rather sensitive mouth. His hair was crisp and black, ever so faintly touched with gray, as by an almost diffident hand. His clothes fitted him as though they had a soul of their own, not just a doubtful past. His name happened to be Mallory.
He held a cigarette between the strong, precise fingers of one hand. He put the other hand flat on the white tablecloth, and said:
«The letters will cost you ten grand, Miss Fair. That’s not too much.»
He looked at the girl opposite him very briefly; then he looked across empty tables towards the heart-shaped space of floor where the dancers prowled under shifting colored lights.
They crowded the customers around the dance-floor, so closely that the perspiring waiters had to balance themselves like tightrope walkers to get between the tables. But near where Mallory sat were only four people.
A slim, dark woman was drinking a highball across the table from a man whose fat red neck glistened with damp bristles. The woman stared into her glass morosely, and fiddled with a big silver flask in her lap. Farther along two bored, frowning men smoked long thin cigars, without speaking to each other.
Mallory said thoughtfully: «Ten grand does it nicely, Miss Farr.»
Rhonda Fair was very beautiful. She was wearing, for this occasion, all black, except a collar of white fur, light as thistledown, on her evening wrap. Except also a white wig which, meant to disguise her, made her look very girlish. Her eyes were cornflower blue, and she had the sort of skin an old rake dreams of.
She said nastily, without raising her head: «That’s ridiculous.»
«Why is it ridiculous?» Mallory asked, looking mildly surprised and rather annoyed.
Rhonda Farr lifted her face and gave him a look as hard as marble. Then she picked a cigarette out of a silver case that lay open on the table, and fitted it into a long slim holder, also black. She went on: