He stared past me out the window into the audible night, and he seemed to be considering carefully the questions I’d asked. After a while he sighed again, the sibilant weariness with the job he had to do, or thought he had to do. Either way, unless I could prevent it, it would come to the same end for me.
“I guess it won’t hurt to tell you,” he said. “It’ll take a little time, but I’ve got plenty, and you’ve got practically none, and maybe it won’t hurt to allow you a little more.”
“Thanks,” I said. “That’s generous of you.”
“Don’t mention it. And you’d better listen close because I’m only going over it once lightly. The night it happened, I went up to Regis’s apartment to see him about something personal. I punched the bell a couple times, but no one answered, so I tried the door, and it wasn’t locked. I went in, and there they were. Regis on the floor and Constance in a chair. Regis was dead, and she was gone. What I mean, she was in a state of shock. She was paying no more attention to Regis than if he’d just lain down for a nap. She hardly seemed aware that I’d come into the room. I checked Regis and saw that he’d been shot neatly between the eyes. She just sat there and watched me without moving or saying a word, her eyes as big and bright and dry as the eyes of an owl. I asked her what had happened, but she only shook her head and said she didn’t understand. She said she was confused and couldn’t seem to get things clear in her mind. I wanted to help her. I held her hands and kept talking to her, trying to get her to remember, but even a dumb guy like me could see pretty soon that it wasn’t any use. She was gone, not home — and it wasn’t any act. She kept insisting she didn’t understand. She didn’t understand where she was, or why, or who Regis was, or I was, or a damn thing about anything. She said her name was Faith Salem. She said she lived in Amity. She said she just wanted to go home.
“That’s the way it was. Whatever I did to help her, I had to do blind. So it was a big chance. So I was an accessory after the fact. To hell with all that. What I finally did, I took her to my room at the restaurant and made her promise to stay there, and then I got Darcy and went back for Regis. Darcy’s a guy I trust. About the only guy. We got the body out of the building the back way between us. I’ve got a place in the country I sometimes go to, and we took Regis there, and Darcy put him in a good deep hole in the ground with a lot of quicklime, and I went back to the restaurant, and that was all for Regis. It was good enough. I haven’t lost any sleep because of Regis.”
He said all this quietly and easily, without the slightest trace of anger or excitement. He said it in exactly the same manner in which he would kill me in a little while, in his own time when he was good and ready, and I sat and waited for him to finish the story, whatever was left of it. I had a strange and strong sense of revelation — a kind of gathering of loose ends in an obscure pattern.
“She wasn’t there,” he said. “She had simply walked out of the restaurant and was gone. I went looking for her. I beat the whole damn city, but I never found her. It was two weeks later before I saw her again. I remembered what she’d called herself: Faith Salem. I remembered where she’d said she lived: Amity. I went to Amity and tried to find her, but she wasn’t there, and so I waited and kept looking, and finally she came. About two weeks later. I don’t know where she’d been in the meanwhile, or how she got there, but she was dressed differently, in a plain suit, and she seemed to be in perfectly good condition. She’d had money in her purse the night she left. I know because I checked. Almost seven hundred dollars. Anyhow, I let her alone and kept watching after her, the same as I’ve done ever since, waiting to see what she’d do. What she did was rent that little house she lives in and start giving piano lessons.
“She advertised. She called herself Faith Salem. She got along all right, and finally she started teaching at a private conservatory. The point is, she wasn’t acting or consciously hiding. She really thought she was someone named Faith Salem. I’m pretty ignorant about such things, but I did some reading and fished a little information out of a medico who had a debt in my game rooms, and I finally I got an understanding of it. She was in a kind of condition that’s called a fugue. Same name as a kind of musical composition. Unless something happened to shock her out of it, she might go on in this condition for years. Maybe the rest of her life. I figured it was safer for her to leave her as she was. As long as she was in the fugue state, she’d act perfectly normal in the identity she’d assumed and would never give herself away.
“There were obvious dangers, of course. The thing I worried most about was that she’d come out of the fugue. She wouldn’t remember anything since the murder, because the fugue period is entirely forgotten after recovery. But the murder was before the fugue, and she’d remember it as the last thing that happened to her, and if I wasn’t around to help her then, she’d be done for. God knows what she’d do. So I’ve been keeping watch over her the best I can, and everything’s been all right, except now you’ve come along and made like a God-damn detective, and I’ve got to kill you. And now’s the time for it.”
That was Darcy’s cue. He got out of the front seat and opened the door to the back seat on my side, and I was supposed to get out quietly into the road to save the cushions, but I didn’t want to do it. What I wanted to do was live, and in the growing sense of revelation and gathering ends, I thought I could see a faint chance.
“You’re making a mistake,” I said, “and if you go ahead and finish making it, it won’t be your first, but it may very well be your last and worst.”
Darcy stood erect by the open door and waited patiently and politely. Silas Lawler made an abrupt gesture with his gun and then became utterly still and silent for the longest several seconds there have ever been. Finally he sighed, and the tension went out of him.
“All right,” he said. “Another minute or two. What mistake?”
“Assuming that Constance Markley killed Regis Lawler,” I laid.
“She was in the room with him. He was dead.”
“Conceded. But you said you checked her purse and saw seven hundred dollars. Did you see a gun?”
“No. No gun.”
“Was it in the room? Anywhere in the apartment?”
“I never found it.”
“You think maybe she shot him with her finger?”
“I’ve wondered about that. You explain it.”
“I already have. She didn’t shoot him.”
“You’re just guessing.”
“Maybe so. But I’ve got better reasons for my guess than you’ve got for yours. You think she went off the deep end and killed him because he was getting tired of her. Is that it?”
“She’d had troubles. Things had piled up. Regis was more than a lover. He was a kind of salvation.”
“I’ll tell you something I’ve learned. The night Regis died, Constance Markley’s maid helped her dress. According to this maid, she was eager. She wasn’t angry or depressed or particularly disturbed in any way. She was only eager to see her lover. Does that sound like a woman betrayed and ready to kill? It sounds to me more like a woman who was still ignorant of whatever defections her lover was committing.”
“Say she was ignorant. She learned after she got there.”
“Sure. And shot him with her finger.”
Again, for the time it took to draw and release a long breath. Silas Lawler was silent. At the open door, Darcy shifted his weight with a grating of gravel.
“You got anything else to say?” Lawler said.
“Only what you’re already thinking,” I said. “Constance Markley didn’t kill Regis. Neither did you. But someone did. Pretend for a minute that it was you. You murdered a man, and the night of the murder the man’s mistress vanishes. No one knows where she went. No one knows why. In your mind these two things, the murder and the disappearance, are inevitably associated. It’s too big a coincidence. There must be a connection. But what is it? Does she know something that may be placing you in jeopardy every second of your life? Or every second of hers? You must learn this at any cost, and you must learn it before anyone else. You may pretend indifference, but in your mind are the constant uncertainty, the constant fear. They’re there for two long years. Then a garden variety private detective stumbles onto something. Maybe. He makes a trip to a town named Amity where the vanished mistress once lived with the same woman who has hired the detective to find her. Several people, in one way or another, learn of this trip. Including you, the murderer. What do these people do? They stay at home and mind their own business. Except you, the murderer. You don’t stay at home and mind your own business because your business is in Amity. I keep thinking about the Caddy that crawled past the house while I was on the porch. I wonder whose it was?”