He reared up hopefully. He looked — shadowed already, by what was to come. I guess they do. I’d never seen one before.
He said, “How do I know if she’s the right one?”
I raised the veil and left it up.
“Yeah,” he said, nodding grimly. “Yeah.” He turned to Weill. “Why can’t Scalenza be here?”
Weill reached to take me by the arm. “No, no lawyers or anybody else. Say what you want and be quick about it, or she leaves with me right now.”
He looked at me, this time. “I want to see you alone.”
“He thinks I’ve got you intimidated,” Weill said to me caustically. He looked at me for the answer.
“All right,” I said quietly.
“I’ll be right outside here,” he promised, “so don’t be worried.” He stepped out.
It’s hard, I suppose, to make a plea, when your whole life has to go into it. “Look,” he began awkwardly, “I dunno who you are, but you can save me. You’re the only one.”
“I can? Why do you call on me? I never said you killed Carpenter.”
“I know, I know. But listen to me, only listen to me, will you? Carpenter was killed with a slug from a forty-five. Remember, they brought that out at my trail?”
“I wasn’t at your trial.”
He rushed on without stopping to listen. “I got a forty-five, yes. They caught me with one on me. But they never proved that the slug they dug out of him was fired from my gun!”
“The papers said they couldn’t, from what I recall. That it had gone through, or at least into, a thin cigarette case in Carpenter’s pocket. That it wasn’t the bullet that had pierced his heart, actually, but a fragment of the case, driven into it by the bullet. That the bullet itself had been flattened out, the markings had been destroyed by the case, so that they couldn’t check it by — whatever they call that scientific method of theirs, ballistics or something. Again, why do you call on me? I didn’t say you fired at him.”
“No, but you didn’t say I fired at you. And that’s what can save me, that’s my only chance!”
“I don’t under—”
He didn’t actually reach out and shake me, but he made the motions with his hands. “Don’t you see? Don’t you see? I didn’t have a chance to use my gun at all when they caught up with me; they got me without firing a shot. It was still packed the way it was that night up at Carpenter’s when they took it from me. Only one bullet out of it, five still in it. That proves I only fired one shot that night. That shot at you on the stairs. I only thought of that now, after it was too late. If you’ll only tell them that I fired after you out on the stairs, with only one bullet gone that’ll prove it couldn’t have been my shot that went into Carpenter! If you’ll only tell them!”
“Whether she does or doesn’t, that’s not worth a tinker’s dam!” Weill’s voice suddenly grated in at us from outside the cell-opening. He must have been standing there a little to one side taking in the whole conversation. He came in again, motioned curtly to me. “Go home, Mrs. X. Go home and forget the whole business! He could have reloaded that gun sixty times over between the time Carpenter was killed and the time we got him!”
“But the people in the building only heard the one shot!” Nelson shrilled.
“Because only one was fired on the outside, where they could hear it; the other one was fired inside Carpenter’s flat, where they couldn’t. That’s no good to you at all!” He took me by the arm, politely but authoritatively. “Come on, Mrs. X. Don’t waste any more of your time in here. What a nerve this bird has! He tried to kill you with that very shot he’s speaking of; now he’s trying to turn that very shot around and use it to his advantage with your help!”
Back in his office he said to me, “So he got under your skin with that, didn’t he? I can tell that by looking at you. That’s what he wanted to do.”
“But he did fire at me on the stairs,” I murmured.
“Then why didn’t we come across the bullet imbedded somewhere along them?”
“It may have gone out through the slit of an open window. I passed one, I remem—”
He fanned a hand at me, as if the whole suggestion were ridiculous. “Did you ever deny that he fired at you?”
“No.”
“Were you ever even given a chance to say whether or not he had?”
“No.”
“Then go home and forget about it. I wouldn’t let you destroy your home for that rat if I could. His dirty hide’s been quadruply forfeited to the State. The whole thing’s splitting hairs, in a way, isn’t it? They can’t excuse him, up there where he’s going, more than once for one murder. We already had him down on the books for three others.
“If he’d happened to be acquitted of this particular one he was tried for just now, d’ya suppose that would have meant he would have been let go? Not on your life! He would have simply been tried over again for one of the others, and sentenced to death anyway.”
The execution notice was tiny, and tucked away so far back within the paper you would have missed it a dozen times over unless you happened to be specifically looking for it.
Well, he was gone now. What was the good of wondering if I could have saved him?
And I couldn’t have saved him, I saw that now. My evidence wouldn’t have been enough to get him off. On the contrary, it might have had quite the reverse effect: even added strength to the case against him. For if he had been willing to shoot me down to keep it from being known that he had been there, didn’t that argue that he had far more than just trespassing to cover up? That he had a previous murder to cover up, in fact?
I would only have blackened my whole future, and he still would have been electrocuted tonight.
I went ahead dressing for the evening.
No, no earrings. I didn’t have to be told that there was only one earring left. My heart knew that by heart. I picked it up, and there was something the matter with my eyes. There was still another one lying in the box!
Jimmy was dressed, waiting for me outside in the other room. I came out to him, box and all; very white. Like a statue.
“Who put this left earring back? I thought I’d lost it.”
He looked at it puzzledly himself for a moment. Then I saw his face clear. “Oh, I remember now. Why, I put it back myself. You were out at the time.”
I swallowed. “I haven’t opened the case since that night I was out with the Perrys.”
I could see him trying to think back. “Well, that must have been the time. Whatever night it was, I remember I’d stayed up all night doing my income tax. Then I went out to stretch my legs, get a little fresh air, and just as I got back I ran into the milkman, he was standing there by our door, all excited about something. He came running to me.
“ ‘Mr. Shaw,’ he said, ‘look what I just found inside the empty bottle at your door. There was a note curled up in the neck of it, funnel-shaped, you know, and that caught it and held it’.”
“Then when I went to our room with it, I saw that you hadn’t come back yet, you were still out. So I put it back in the box and went to sleep. You must have lost it right on your way out, as you left the door.”
He stopped and glanced at me. “You’ve got the funniest look on your face. What’re you thinking about?”
“Oh, nothing.”
I was lying awake later thinking about it; living the whole thing through all over again. I remembered now how I’d had to shake my key, trying to get it in the door, the first time I’d come back. That was what had loosened it, made it drop off. And I remembered now, I’d even heard the funny little plink of glass it had made going in the bottle-mouth. Only at the time I thought it was the tip of my shoe that had grazed it. If I’d only taken the trouble to bend down and look!