I said finally, in a low confidential voice: “What’re you trying to tell me?”
Her face flashed around toward me. She bared her almost toothless mouth in a grin that held frightened supplication in it. “I no tella you noth’. What you hear me say? Do I tella you anything?”
“I’ll do my own telling,” the new voice said.
Someone had come out of the kitchen and was standing right behind my chair. Its back had been turned that way.
I rocketed to my feet, chest going up and down like a bellows. A hand slipped around from behind me and riveted itself to my wrist, steely and implacable. The chair slashed over, discarded.
“Remember me?” was all he said.
The old lady, as if released from a spell, began to jabber now that it was too late: “Signora! This man he come here early tonight, he say he know you make visit every time on firsta month, he’ssa going to wait for you. I not can make him go ’way—”
He chopped the gun butt around horizontally at her forehead, without letting go of me, and she flopped back stunned on the pillow. I never saw anything more brutal in my life.
He gave it a little dextrous flip, then, that brought his grip back to the heft. “Now let’s take up where we left off the other night, you and me.”
I saw he was going to let me have the bullet then and there. He swung me around toward him by my arm, and brought the gun up against my side. He wasn’t taking any chances this time.
He’d maneuvered me out away from the bed — I suppose so there’d be room enough for me to fall. But that had unnoticeably changed our respective positions now. He was between me and the door. His back was to it, and I was toward it. But I couldn’t see it, or anything else, just then. I never even heard it open.
“Drop that gun, Nelson, you’re covered three ways!”
There was an awful moment of suspended motion, when nothing seemed to happen. Then the gun loosened, skidded down my side and hit the floor.
A man’s head and shoulders showed up, one at each side of him, and there was a third one overlapping a little behind him.
They said to me, “You must have seen him the minute you got in, to tip us off so quickly—”
“No, I didn’t. I didn’t see him until just a minute ago.”
“Then how did you manage to—”
“I knew he was here the minute I stepped through the door. I could tell by the frozen expression of her face and eyes she was under some kind of restraint or compulsion. And the air was close with stale cigarette smoke. He’d smoked one or two too many, back there, while he was waiting for me to show up. I knew she never used them herself. But it was too late to back out through the door again, once I’d shown myself; he would have shot me down from where he was. So I stepped over to the window under the excuse of getting some air into the room, and gave that potted plant she kept on it a soundless little nudge off into space.”
The man in charge said, “Hold him up here for a couple of minutes, give Mrs. X. a chance to make her getaway from the neighborhood first, before anyone spots her. You see that she gets home safely, Dillon.”
“Will she be all right?” I asked, indicating Mrs. Scalento.
“She’ll be all right, we’ll look after her.”
“Poor Mrs. Scalento,” I said, going down the stairs with the man delegated to accompany me, “I’ll have to buy her another plant.”
The formal identification was brief, and, as far as I was concerned, of about the same degree of comfort as the extraction of a live tooth without anesthesia. Why they had to have it I don’t know, since, according to my bargain with Weill, my own identity was to remain unrevealed. It took place in Weill’s office, with a heavy guard at the door, to keep pryers — even interdepartmental pryers — at a distance.
“Bring him in.”
I didn’t raise my eyes from the floor until the scuff of unwilling shoe leather dragged against its will had stopped short.
“Mrs. X. Is this the man you saw in the living quarters of one John Carpenter, at two-ten East forty-ninth, at about four-thirty A.M. on the fifteenth day of April?”
My voice rang out like a bell. “That is the same man.”
“Did he have a weapon in his hand?”
“He had a weapon in his hand.”
“Stand up, please, and repeat that under oath.”
I stood up. They thrust a Bible toward me and I played my right hand on it as if we had been in a courtroom. I repeated after the man swearing me in: “...the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.” Then I said: “I solemnly swear that I saw this man, with a weapon in his hand, in the living-quarters of John Carpenter, two-ten East forty-ninth Street, at about four-thirty A.M., April 15th.”
Nelson’s fatigue-cracked voice shattered the brief silence. “You can’t pin this on me! I didn’t do it, d’ya hear?”
“No, and you didn’t kill Little Patsy O’Connor either, did you? Or Schindel? Or Duke Biddermen, in a car right outside his own front door? Take him out!”
“She’s framing me! She done it herself, and then she made a deal with you, to switch it to me!”
They dragged him out, still mouthing imprecations. The closing of the door toned them down, but you could still hear them dying away along the corridor outside.
Weill turned back to me and let his fingertips touch my gloved hand reassuringly for a moment, maybe because he saw that it was vibrating slightly, as an after-effect of the scene of violence that had just taken place. “That’s all. That finishes your participation in the affair. You just go home and forget about it.”
I could carry out the first part of the injunction all right; I had my doubts about the second.
“But you had a stenographic transcription made of my identification of him just now, I noticed,” I faltered uneasily.
“Yes, and I’m also having depositions made out to be signed by those two witnesses I had in the room, regarding what took place here. In other words I’m preparing affidavits of your affidavit, so that it doesn’t have to hang suspended in midair. But that needn’t alarm you. I have the okay of the D.A.’s office on getting around it in this way in your case.”
“But in the courtroom, won’t he — won’t his lawyer, demand that you produce me?”
“Let him. The D.A.’s office is taking that into account, in preparing its procedure. I’m prepared to take the stand in your place, as your proxy, if necessary. And police lieutenant or not, I don’t think I’d make the kind of a witness whose testimony is to be lightly disregarded.”
He seemed to have taken care of every contingency; I felt a whole lot better.
He shook my hand. “I keep my bargains. You’re out of it to stay. All knowledge of you ends with us.”
He said to the detective standing outside the door, “Take this lady to the special departmental car you’ll find waiting for her outside. Go along in it with her and keep everyone at a distance. Take her to the side entrance of the Kay Department Store.”
That was the biggest one in the city. I went in, walked through it on the bias without stopping to buy anything, got into a taxi a moment later at the main entrance, and had myself driven home.
Chapter Five
A Choice of Corpses
The whole town had been talking about it for several weeks past, so I wasn’t surprised when it finally penetrated even to Jimmy’s insulated consciousness. I was only surprised that it hadn’t long before then. But the news of the world, for Jimmy, was only the quotations on a ticker tape.
Carpenter’s metier of preying on respectable and socially prominent women, which had been uncovered during the course of it, and which the defense was as willing (but for different reasons) to play up as the prosecution, was what gave it the fillip of being above just another underworld killing, I suppose. Anyway, half of the men around town kept whispering that it was the next guy’s wife, and the other half looked kind of thoughtful, as though they were doing some mental checking up.