Then at the very last, when it all seemed clear sailing, everything went wrong again. He had just told me that they were going to draw up a confession then and there and have me sign it, and had already ordered the policeman to take me into the other room and hold me there until it was ready — when he motioned me back again to where I had been sitting and said, “Suppose you run through it in your own words; take this down, George, and don’t miss anything.” Then to me again, “All right — you came up here a little after nine, and you found her all packed and ready for you. And then she said she wasn’t going. Now go on from there.”
I was so tired already; I couldn’t understand what more they wanted! I’d already said I’d done it; over and over I’d said I’d done it. I’d always thought they only questioned you like this when you denied a thing, not when you admitted it. I swallowed to moisten my throat, and said: “She said she wasn’t going. She said I didn’t have enough money. I begged her and she wouldn’t listen to me—” And right while I was speaking, I kept thinking, “Where am I going to say I got the gun? What am I going to say I did with it afterward?” So far, I noticed, they hadn’t asked me a word about that. “So then I told her I was going alone. She said, all right, go ahead. So I went downstairs by the emergency staircase; my bag was in the lobby and the doorman was outside in front of the house. He didn’t see me. I opened the bag and took the gun out. I went running all the way up the stairs again. I had her key, and I opened the door and went in again. I asked her for the last time if she would come with me, and she said no, so I shot her. I threw the gun out of the window right after I’d done it—”
I noticed that they’d all grown very quiet and were staring at me curiously; I saw one or two of them exchange looks with one another.
“How many bullets did you give her?” the man before me asked brutally.
Why hadn’t I thought of that? Why hadn’t I taken a look the whole time I was alone with her, and noticed?
“I don’t remember,” I said. “I think I fired two or three times—”
The man before me turned around and said, “You got that, George?”
“That’s no good,” someone else expostulated. “Why don’t you find out what he’s up to!”
“You lemme do this my own way, Dowlan!” he bellowed back, and glared at him to silence him. “I know what I’m doing!” I heard the door open and shut behind me, and he looked up, over and beyond me, and said, “You bring it with you? Good! Give it to George here.” And a typewriter of the portable variety was brought forward and placed on the vanity table. After which they ordered the policeman to take me outside to the other room, “until we tell you to bring him back again.”
No sooner had the door closed after me than I heard the keys of the typewriter begin to click at breakneck speed. The apartment door still stood wide open, but there was a policeman standing before it, and another one opposite him mounting guard over the elevator door. In the living room itself, a man was going around examining the knobs on the doors and other odds and ends, but evidently not in a professional capacity, for he had no magnifying glass. Yet when he turned my way, I saw that he had some sort of a little thing screwed into his eye. Another was sitting before a drawer that had been removed bodily from some article of furniture and going painstakingly through a cloud of papers it contained. Most of them looked like bills from a distance. She was gone now; she had evidently been taken away while I was inside. It made things a little more bearable for me. I asked the policeman to let me go to the bathroom, and the answer I got was more unpleasant than amusing. I sat down in the chair I had occupied originally.
The typewriter stopped after awhile, and you could hear their voices in the other room, but not what they were saying. I started to light a cigarette, and the policeman snarled, “Who told you to go ahead and smoke?”
The man who had been looking at the doorknobs and things lifted his head and said, “Let him smoke, Sheehan. He hasn’t long to do it in.”
“And it won’t be smoker’s heart that’ll stop him, either,” the policeman agreed.
The typewriter recommenced all at once, as though some point that had momentarily clogged its progress had just been settled. Then, a little while after that, a bulb in one of the lamps burnt out, from overuse no doubt, and went dark.
“She had a nice place here,” the policeman remarked thoughtfully.
“Did you ever know one that didn’t?” the man going over the bills snapped.
I noticed for the first time that the other one, the doorknob fellow, was no longer there, had gone without my even realizing it. But I was so tired; everything was bathed in a mist!
The typewriter stopped again. Then almost at once, this second time, the bedroom door opened, and they motioned to the policeman with their heads.
He brought me in again. “Lock the door,” the one who had asked me most of the questions the time before ordered. The room was already full of smoke; Bernice’s familiar things looked funny through it. Between that and the state my eyes were in, I could hardly see their faces straight anymore.
“Read him what you got there, George,” I heard him say. “His own words. From where she told him she wasn’t going with him.”
The man who had been using the vanity table for a desk all along began to read some typed sheets aloud. “—so I shot her. I threw the gun out of the window right after I’d done it—”
When he was through, the other one gave me a crafty sort of a smile and said, with remarkable (for him) moderation, “You admit you done it in just that way, do you? And you’re ready to sign what he just read to you, are you?”
“Yes,” I said dully.
Someone else said something to him under his breath that I didn’t quite catch, whereupon he whirled around fiercely and burst out: “Tell that to your grandmother! He’s as sane as I am! He’s yellow, that’s what’s the matter with him!”
Then turning back to me, again with unwonted restraint, he continued, “Suppose we were to make a few changes in that — just a coupla things here and there — suppose you were too excited to remember everything just the way it happened, and we were to sort of, now, help it along for you — would you still sign it?”
“I told you I did it,” I murmured, “and I’ll sign anything you want me to, any way you put it.”
He seemed almost more surprised than gratified for a moment, but he didn’t waste any time. The man at the desk handed him several typed sheets: whether they were the same ones he had read or not I couldn’t tell. He patted them into shape and put them down beside him without looking at them, took a fountain pen out of his pocket and held it toward me, saying: “All right, then sign this! This is the way it really happened.”
I took the pen from him, wrote my name where he showed me to on the paper he handed me, and then passed both back to him — or rather the pen alone, for he had never taken his hand from the paper for an instant.
“That’s that!” he said, folding the papers and inserting them into the inside pocket of his coat with an air of ponderous satisfaction. “You didn’t shoot her; you strangled her to death with your hands, like we found her!” And giving those around him the wink, he added, “Now bring on your lawyers!”
They asked me a few desultory questions after that, but more in the manner of horseplay than a serious attempt to find out anything further. Such as: Had I really forgotten I had choked her and imagined I had shot her, or had I deliberately invented the story about running down the staircase and getting a gun out of my grip? And if so, why?