Burgess and the girl exchanged a side glance of unspoken compassion.
“I just came from the District Attorney’s office,” Burgess said. “They finally got the full confession out of him down there. Sealed, signed, and delivered.”
“I still can’t get over it,” Henderson said, shaking his head. “I still can hardly believe it. What was in back of it? Was he in love with Marcella? She’d never met him more than twice in her whole life, as far as I know.”
“As far as you know,” Burgess said dryly.
“You mean it was one of those things on the side?”
“Didn’t you notice she was out a lot?”
“Yes, but I didn’t think anything of it. She and I weren’t living on cordial terms any more.”
“Well, that was it, right there.” He took a turn or two about the room. “There’s one thing I think ought to be made clear to you, though, Henderson. For what it’s worth at this late date. It was strictly a one-sided affair. Your wife was not in love with Lombard. If she had been, most likely she would still be alive today. She was not in love with anyone but herself. She liked admiration and flattery; she was the type that likes to flirt and string people along, without meaning it seriously. That’s a harmless game with nine men. And with the tenth it’s dangerous. To her he was just someone to go out with, and a handy way of getting back at you in her own mind: to show herself that she didn’t need you. Unfortunately, he was the tenth man. He was the wrong type for it altogether. He’d spent most of his life around oil fields in God-forsaken parts of the world; and he hadn’t had much experience with women. He didn’t have any sense of humor about things like that. He took her seriously. And of course she liked that part of it all the better, that made the game more real.
“There’s no question about it, she gave him a raw deal. She led him on until the very last, long after she must have seen where it was leading. She let him arrange his whole future around her, knowing darn well she wasn’t going to be there to share it with him. She let him sign on for five years with this oil company in South America. Why, he even had the bungalow they were going to live in down there picked out and furnished up for them. The understanding was she was to divorce you as soon as they got there, and marry him. After all, when a guy’s that age, and not a kid any more, he takes it hard when you kick his heart around like that.
“Instead of tapering off, breaking it to him by degrees, giving him a sporting chance to get over it, she went about it the worst possible way. She hated to give up her cake any sooner than she had to; his rings on the phone, their luncheon meetings, their dinner dates, his kisses in a taxi. Her ego needed all that. She’d got used to it, and she would have missed it. So she put off and put off. She waited until the very night they were due to sail together to South America; waited until he called for her at the flat — as soon as you’d gone — to take her to the pier with him.
“I’m not surprised it cost her life. I would have been surprised if it hadn’t. He says he got there even before you left, side-stepped you by waiting on the upper flight of stairs past your floor, until after you’d come storming out. It just so happened there was no hallman on duty that night. So no one saw him come in. And as we all very well know, no one saw him leave again either.
“Well anyway, she let him in, went back to her mirror again, and when he asked her if she was all packed and ready, laughed at him. That seems to have been her day for laughing at people. She asked him if he’d really seriously believed she was going to bury herself in South America, place herself at his mercy, to marry or not as he saw fit, once her bridges were burned behind her? Above all, free you to go to someone else? She liked the situation the way it was. She wasn’t giving up a sure thing for a gamble.
“But more than anything else, it was the laughter that did it. If she’d cried when she told him all this, or even if she’d just kept a straight face, he says he thinks he would have let it go at that. Just gone out and drunk himself stone-blind, maybe, but she would still have been alive behind him. And I think so too.”
“So he killed her,” Henderson said quietly.
“So he killed her. Your discarded necktie was still lying there on the floor behind her, where you’d dropped it. He must have absently picked it up at one point or another just before this, been holding it in his hands without noticing it, when the snap came.” He gave an expressive snap of his own fingers.
“I don’t blame him altogether,” Carol breathed, looking down at the floor.
“I don’t either,” Burgess admitted. “But that was no excuse for doing what he did next. For deliberately turning on the man who had been his lifelong friend, going out of his way to see that he was framed for it.”
“What did I do to him?” Henderson asked, without any trace of rancor.
“What it amounts to is this. He didn’t understand then, and he still doesn’t today yet, even this long after, what it really was that made her act the way she did. Jilt him so heartlessly. He failed to see that it was in perfect keeping with her own character to do so, that that was the way she was built. He mistakenly thought it must be because of a renewal of her love for you. Therefore he blamed you for it. You were responsible for his losing her. That made him hate you. He wanted to take it out on you. A distorted form of jealousy, that was only made more insane by the coveted one’s death, is about the closest you can get to it.”
“Whew,” said Henderson softly.
“He came out of there, unseen, and he deliberately set out after you, to try and overtake you. That quarrel which he’d overheard from the stairs was too good an opportunity to be passed up. Too good an opportunity of saddling you with what he’d just done. His original idea, he says, was to join you as if by accident, as if he’d just happened to run into you, and stick around with you long enough to give you a chance to convict yourself out of your own mouth. At least implicate yourself seriously. He would have said, ‘Hullo, I thought your wife was going to be with you. And then, quite naturally, you would have answered, ‘I had a fierce row with her before I left.’ It was necessary for that row to come out. He wanted it to. He couldn’t bring it out, otherwise, without implicating himself as having been within eavesdropping distance out on the stairs. It had to come through your telling him, in the first person, do you understand?
“He would have seen to it that you got quite tanked — if you still needed any additional encouragement — while he was with you. Then he would have accompanied you back to your own door. So that when you made the grim discovery, he’d be there; be on hand to reluctantly repeat to the police what he’d heard you say about having a terrific blowup with her just before leaving. You would have been acting as a shock-absorber for him. That’s a neat little touch there, that idea of accompanying the husband back to where he’s just finished murdering the wife. Automatically relegating himself to the position of innocent bystander at someone else’s crime. It would have been practically foolproof as a suspicion disinfectant.
“All this he tells quite freely — and I’ve got to admit quite unremorsefully even yet — in his confession.”
“Nice.” said Carol somberly.
“He thought you’d be alone. He already knew two of the places you’d said you’d be. You’d mentioned that afternoon, when you ran into him, that you were taking the missis to the Maison Blanche for dinner, and then afterward to the Casino. The bar he didn’t know about, because you didn’t yourself until you turned and went in there on the spur of the moment.