The gun slid off” the desk top, and she sauntered casually over toward the outside door, with it dangling from her one hooked finger.
“Come back here with that. Where do you think you’re going with it?”
“Only as far as the front door. I don’t know anything about you. I want to be sure that I get out of here. I’ll leave it just inside the door sill.”
His voice shook with masculine outrage. “Go ahead if you want to go that badly. I’m not that hard up.”
He heard the door open, and when he took a quick step out into the little entryway, the gun was lying there mockingly on the threshold. He could hear her going down the stairs — but with deliberation, not with hate. Even that concession to his injured self-esteem was lacking.
“I’ll get who you are yet!” he called down after her wrathfully.
Her answer came back from a floor below. “Better be thankful that you haven’t.”
The walloping slam he gave his door stunned the house like a shrapnel explosion. He picked up his empty whiskey glass and smashed it all the way across the room. He picked up a pottery ashtray and smashed that, too.
He called her every name under the sun but murderer; he didn’t happen to think of that one.
He called her every name but the right one.
Less than an hour later the light flashed on in the pitch-black bedroom with explosive suddenness, like a flashlight photograph, revealing Corey in blazer-striped pajamas, lying in a trough of tortured bed coverings, hand outstretched to the switch of the bedside lamp. He squinted protectively, unable to bear the brightness after the long hours of lying there in the dark. His hair was a briery mass that bespoke repeated digital massaging. A pyramid of cigarette butts topped the tray next to him, and he added one last one to the accumulation with a triumphant downward stab that showed it had finally brought results. “Damn it, I knew I’d seen her someplace be—” he muttered disjointedly.
The clock said 3:20.
Then, as the implications of the discovery hit him fully, his eyes opened to their full extent and he swung his legs to the floor. “The girl that was with Bliss that night! She’s already killed a man! I’m going to warn him right now to look out!”
He pounded outside in bare feet, came back again bringing the telephone directory from the hall, sat down on the bed with it, ran his finger down the column of F’s, stopped at Ferguson.
Then he looked at the clock again: 3:23. “He’ll think I’m nuts,” he murmured undecidedly. “The first thing in the morning’ll be time enough. I wonder if it really is the same girl; the other one was yellow as a buttercup, this one’s dark as a raven.”
Then, with a renewed stiffening of resolution, “I was never yet wrong in my life about a thing like this. He’s got to be told, I don’t care what time of night it is!” He flung the directory aside, barefooted it back to the hall and began dialing the number of Ferguson’s studio.
The call signal at the other end went on interminably; no one came to the phone to answer. He hung up finally, massaged his hair a couple more times. The party must be over by this time. Maybe Ferguson didn’t sleep there in the studio at nights. Sure he did, he must; Corey remembered seeing a bed in one of the rooms.
Well, he’d gone on someplace else then with the rest of them. It would have to wait until morning. He got back in bed, snapped out the light.
Two minutes later it had flashed on again, and he was struggling into his trousers. “I don’t know why I’m doing this,” he tried to reason with himself, “but I can’t sleep until I get in touch with that guy.” He shrugged on his coat, spliced the two ends of his necktie in a sketchy knot, closed the door after him. He went downstairs, drummed up a cab, gave Ferguson’s address.
Rationally, there was no basis whatever for his behavior, he had to admit. He was going to be made the laughingstock of everyone who knew him; their kindest explanation would be that he was drunk and suffering a mild case of the d.t.’s. Chasing down in the middle of the night to tell a guy, “Look out, your model’s going to kill you!” But he was in the grip of something irrational, he couldn’t explain what it was himself. A hunch, a premonition, a sense of impending danger. If Ferguson was out, he’d leave a note under the door: “She’s the girl who was with Bliss the night he died, I remember now. Keep your eye on her.” At least give the guy a chance to defend himself.
A knock at the studio door, when he stood before it presently, brought no more results than the phone call had. He noticed something that confirmed his hunch: Ferguson not only worked here but lived here, as well. A small thing, a slight thing — an empty milk bottle standing to one side of the door.
That finished it. Milk bottles are not put out before you go, but after you come back. He was in there, he was almost certainly in there. Corey had a premonition of doom now that wouldn’t be dispelled.
He went downstairs and roused the building superintendent, unconcerned at the wrathful reception that greeted him.
“Yeah, he sleeps up there in the studio. But he might be out. Them artist fellows are up all night sometimes. What’s all the excitement for?”
“You open that door for me,” Corey panted in a voice that brooked no argument. “I’ll take the responsibility if I’m wrong. But I’m not getting out of here until you come up and open that door for me, understand?”
The super grumblingly preceded him up the stairs, jangled keys, knocked uselessly before fitting one to the door. Corey knew where the switch was, reached around him backhand and plugged it on. The two of them stood there looking down the long vista of light to the far end where the black skylight panes slanted down and the outside night began.
All Corey said, in a strangely anticlimactic, almost subdued voice, was, “I knew it.”
Ferguson was lying face down before the easel. The wicked steel sliver of the arrowhead protruded from his back, over the heart, forced through by the fall itself to that additional penetration. In front, when they turned him over, the feathered end of it had been splintered by the fall, was at right angles to the rest of the shaft. He must have turned full face toward the stand at the instant it winged at him to receive it dead center to the heart like that.
Above him brooded Diana the huntress, Diana the killer — faceless now. The features that had tormented Corey were gone. An oval hole in the canvas, cut by a paint-scraping knife, occupied their place. The bow, cord slack now, balanced mockingly across one corner of the modeling stand.
Corey brooded, “I didn’t tumble in time, she beat me to it. He must have posed her late at night, to finish it up.”
“What d’ya suppose it was?” the super breathed, awestruck, after they’d put in the call and stood there in the open doorway, waiting for the police. “Her grip on the bowstring accidentally slipped and the arrow flew out?”
“No,” Corey murmured. “No. Diana the huntress came to life.”
III
Post-Mortem on Ferguson
“Then she moved over here like this.” Corey was warming up to his reenactment as he went along, as any good actor does when he has a sympathetic audience and is enjoying his role. A cigarette hanging from the comer of his mouth vibrated with animation whenever he spoke. He was in his shirt sleeves, vest unbuttoned. A string of hair had come down over his forehead with the ardor of his movements.
“Go on,” Wanger nodded.
“Then she starts casing the drawers one by one like this, slap — slap — slap. Hell, I didn’t get it. I figured she was just stalling, giving herself something to do with her hands, you know; killing time like they do until the clinch caught up with her. So then she hits the one it’s in and comes up with it—”