“Wait a minute, wait a minute—” Wanger started from his chair, made a hasty gesture of dissuasion. “Don’t touch it. We may still be able to get her prints off it. Have you handled it much yourself since she picked it up?”
Corey’s arrested hand hung like a claw over it. “No, only to put it back in. But I haven’t finished telling you what she did with it afterward—”
“All right, but first let me wrap it up. I want to have it checked — with your permission.”
“Help yourself.” He stood aside while Wanger took out a handkerchief, dipped into the drawer with it and transferred it to his pocket.
“I’ll see that you get it back,” Wanger promised.
“No hurry. Only too glad to be of some help.” The performance resumed. “So then, she doodles around with it. I go over and give her the old branding iron and” — he looked genuinely outraged all over again, even though this was only a recapitulation — “it didn’t take.”
Wanger nodded with masculine understanding. “She wasn’t having any.”
“She wasn’t having any. She says, ‘I don’t want love, I don’t want kisses,’ and she goes over to the door, gun and all. I follow her, and she’s left it lying there inside the sill, and she’s already halfway down the stairs. So I called down after her that I’d figure out who she was if it took me all the rest of the night, and she calls up to me, ‘Better be thankful you haven’t.’ ”
He got white around the mouth with virtuous indignation. “The little so-and-so, I’d like to give her a biff across the snout! I don’t mind a jane standing you off as long as she’s scared about it. But one thing gripes me is a jane standing you off and being fresh about it at the same time!”
Wanger could see his point perfectly. He’d been led on for some reason best known to herself by the murderous little trickster and then dished out of what he had a right to expect was coming to him. As far as Wanger’s personal feelings entered into it — and they didn’t at all — he liked this guy.
He drummed nails on the chair arm. “As I see it, there are three possible explanations for her coming up here with you like she did, before going back and killing the guy she had in mind to all along. One, she intended getting rid of you first, before you had a chance to warn Ferguson and throw a monkey wrench into the main business at hand. After she got here with you, you still hadn’t remembered who she was, so she changed her mind. She’d got you away from the party, and that was the most important thing. She figured she’d have time enough to get back there and finish up before it finally dawned on you where you’d seen her before. Two, she came up only to get the weapon and use it on him. No, that won’t hold up. My brain’s hitting on two cylinders. She left it behind her, inside the door. Well, three is you were pestering her at the party and she was afraid you would stay on after the others and gum the works up, so she took the easiest way of eliminating you. Gave you a tease treatment and then left you flat.”
Corey looked as though this last suggestion didn’t do his self-esteem any too much good, but he swallowed it.
“I think a combination of one and three is as close as we can get to it at the first sitting,” Wanger went on, getting ready to leave. “She came up here with you because you were getting in her hair. She intended giving you the gun if you came through with who she was, but if you didn’t, she was going to let you go. You didn’t, and she let you go. Come in tomorrow, will you? I want to go over the whole thing with you again. Just ask for me, Wanger’s the name.”
Day was breaking when he got back to headquarters, and daybreak wasn’t lovely around headquarters, inside or out. He was tired, and it was the hour when human vitality is at its lowest. He went into his superior’s untenanted office, slumped into a chair at the desk and let his head plop into his pronged fingers.
“Why the hell did that woman have to be born?” he groaned softly.
After a while he raised his head, took out the gun she’d handled at Corey’s place, put it in a manila folder, sealed the flap, scrawled across it almost illegibly: “See if you can get anything on this for me. Wanger, — the Precinct Div.”
He picked up the phone. “Send me in a messenger, will you?”
“There’s no one around out here right now,” the desk sergeant answered.
“Try to find someone, anyone’ll do.”
The rookie that showed up about ten minutes later was green enough to have fooled a grazing cow.
Wanger remarked, “Where’d they dig you up from?” But he said it well under his breath. After all, everyone has feelings.
“What took you so long?”
“I got in a couple of the wrong rooms. This building’s kind of tricky.”
Wanger looked at him through blurred eyes. “Take this over and give it in for me. It’s a gun. They’ll know what to do.” Then, with a touch of misgiving, “Will you be able to get there, d’you think?”
The rookie beamed proudly. “Oh, sure, I been sent over there twice already since I been detailed around here.”
He turned, came up against the wrong side of the door, where there was no knob, only hinges, looked up and down the seam as though it had played a dirty trick on him. Then he got what the trouble was, shifted over to where the knob was, grabbed it and still couldn’t get out right.
“Get your feet out of the way,” Wanger coached him with angelic patience. “They’re holding it up.”
He was too tired even to get sore about it.
“You’re still sure of what you told me the other night?” Wanger began, on his second and more detailed questioning of Corey, at headquarters forty-eight hours later.
“Positive. She had the same eyes, mouth, everything, in fact, but the hair, of that girl in black who was at Marjorie Elliott’s engagement party the night Bliss met his death two years ago. I could swear it was the same one!”
“Your testimony’s doubly welcome to me; it’s not only important in itself but it bears out what my own private theory has been in these cases all along: that the woman is one and the same. A theory that, I might add, isn’t shared by anyone else.”
Corey clenched his fist, bounced it on the tabletop. “If I’d only gotten it sooner, figured out who it was the portrait reminded me of! But I didn’t get it in time.”
“Undoubtedly you could have saved his life if you’d only made the discovery even an hour earlier that same night. But the breaks fell her way. As it was, you only succeeded in hurrying the thing up, bringing it on all the faster, by insisting you’d seen her somewhere before. She identified you and recognized the danger, realized she had a deadline to work against. And made it — maybe only minutes ahead of your first warning phone call! He died at twenty-one past three in the morning; his wrist-watch stopped with the fall.”
“And I phoned him at 3:22 or 3:23; I saw the time there in my room!” Corey grimaced anguishedly. “The arrow must have been still vibrating through his heart, he hadn’t even toppled to the floor yet!”
“Don’t let it get you.” The detective tried to brace him up. “It’s over now and it’s too late. What interests me is that you can be invaluable to me; you’re what I’ve been crying for all along in this, and now I’ve got it. At last there’s a link between two of these four men. You didn’t know Mitchell, did you?”
“No, I didn’t.”
“Moran?”
“Him, either.”
“But at least you did know two of them, if not the others. You’re the first witness of any sort we’ve turned up who is in that position, who overlaps two of these episodes, bridges them. Don’t y’see what you can mean to us?”