“As far as our encouraging the papers at the time goes, it was the other way around. We did everything we could to keep them from mentioning the man-across-the-way angle, deliberately misled them with stories of a stray shot from some rooftop, hoping if we kept quiet about it, if this unknown gunman thought he wasn’t suspected, it would be easier to get our hands on him.”
“I didn’t believe it then, and I don’t believe it now! I saw with my own eyes—”
“What you saw was an optical illusion, then. If you had come to us at the time, asked us how we were progressing, we could have proved it to your satisfaction once and for all. But no, you hugged your vengeance to yourself, nursed your bitterness, wouldn’t interview the police. You deliberately withheld the information that was in your own possession — inaccurate though it was — and used it for murder.”
She flashed him a look that was a complacent admission.
“There were powder bums found on the window curtains in that room opposite the church. There were people in it, on the floor above, who distinctly heard a shot beneath their feet, over and above all the backfiring outside. They were in a better position to judge, after all, than you. We even found a discharged shell, of the same caliber as that taken out of your husband’s body, wedged between a crack in the floorboards. We knew from the start where the death shot had been fired from; that was why we didn’t have to go tracing wild cars all over the city. We knew everything but who the killer was. We only found that out now, recently. Don’t you want to know who he is? Don’t you at least want to hear his name?”
“Why should I be interested in what rabbits you pull from a trick hat to try to mislead me?”
“The proof is in our files right now. It came in too late to save Bliss, Mitchell, Moran or Ferguson. But it’s there today. Scientific proof; proof that cannot be gotten around. Documentary proof; a signed confession — I have a copy with me in my own pocket at this very minute. He’s been in custody down in the city for the past three weeks.”
For the first time, she had no challenging answer to make.
“You’ll meet him face to face when you go back there with me shortly. I think that you’ll remember meeting him before.”
The first superficial crack had appeared on the glaze that protected her. A flicker of doubt, of dread, peered from her eyes. A question forced its way out. “Who?”
“Corey. Does the name mean anything to you?”
She said with painful slowness, “Yes, I remember this Corey. Twice he crossed my path, for a moment only. Once, on a terrace at a party, he brought me a drink. It would have been so easy to— But I sent him away, to clear the decks for—”
“The murder of Bliss, isn’t that right?”
“According to you, someone who had never harmed me, never even seen me before that night.” She held her forehead briefly, resumed: “And the second and last time, I was up in his very room with him, for a few minutes. I went back to his apartment with him as the simplest way of getting rid of him. I remember I even held him at the point of a gun to make sure of getting out again unhindered. His gun.”
“The gun that killed your husband. The gun that fired the bullet into Nick Killeen. Through a slip up on the part of a rookie it was checked by ballistics instead of by the fingerprint department for your prints, which was what he had brazenly turned it over to us for.
“I remember I was sitting there raising cain with the fingerprint bureau for not sending me a report on a weapon that had never reached them, when someone at ballistics telephoned me and said, ‘That gun you sent us to be tested matches the markings on the slug taken out of Nick Killeen; we suppose that’s what you wanted, you weren’t very definite about it.’ I had to see it with my own eyes before I’d believe them. Then just to make the irony all of a piece, Corey comes walking in to find out if we were through with the gun and he could have it back again. He never got out again!
“He’d come forward to help us of his own accord. He had a license for the gun; he was only too willing to let us have it, to see if we could get your prints off it. I suppose by then so many years had passed since the Killeen killing, his sense of immunity had become almost a fetish. He thought nothing could—
“It took a little while, but we finally broke him down. In the meantime I had been working independently on what we all thought was an entirely different matter and came across an obscure item in old newspapers at the library, datelined on one of those Fridays that the Friday-Night Fiends had been on the loose. Just a little human-interest thing, tragic to those immediately involved but not particularly important. A bridegroom had been struck dead by a stray shot, presumably fired from some roof near by, as he was leaving the very church he’d just been married in.
“To me that story offered the only possible reason for the murders of the Friday-Night Fiends, who had already lost three charter members and the bartender they carried around with them on those tears of theirs. I put two and two together. No mention was made of who the bereaved bride was, but after all there must have been one; a man doesn’t marry himself.
“So we soft-pedaled Corey’s arrest, held him practically incommunicado, to be sure you wouldn’t get wind of it and pull your next and last punch. It was easy to figure out where it would land, so I simply got into position under it.
“But what I can’t figure out is what you did with yourself between visitations, so to speak. How you were able to vanish so completely each time, effect all these quick changes of coiffure and personality. I knew you were coming but to the last minute didn’t know from where or how. It was like trying to come to grips with a wraith.”
The woman answered abstractedly, “There was nothing very supernatural about it. I suppose you looked for me in out-of-the-way hiding places, rooming houses, cheap hotels. I came into contact with dozens of people daily who never gave me a second look. I lived in a hospital. I’ll give you the name if you want, one of the biggest in the city. I worked there and lived right there, didn’t have to go out. My hair was kept covered, so no one knew — or cared — what color it was, from first to last. When I was off duty I stayed in my room, didn’t encourage friendship from the staff. When it came time to — strike again, I would get a short leave of absence, go away, return again a few days later.
“All for what? All for nothing.”
She was breathing again with difficulty, as she had in the chair before. As though something inside her were breaking up, clogging her windpipe.
“So I held the very gun he killed Nick with, in my own hands! Had him helpless at the point of it; lowered it and walked out, to go and kill an innocent man.” She began to shiver uncontrollably, as though she had a chill. “Now I can hear that awful cry of Bliss as he went over the terrace. I didn’t hear it then. Now I can hear Mitchell’s groan. I can hear them all!”
She bowed her head as abruptly as though her neck had snapped. Her sobbing was low pitched but intense, even paced as the pulsing of a dynamo.
A long time after, when it had ended, she looked up again. “What did he do it for — Corey, I mean?” she asked. “I must know that.”
Paper rattled under his coat. He took out a copy of the confession, unfolded it, offered it to her.
She glanced only at the beginning and at the signature at the end of the last page. Then she returned it. “You tell me,” she said. “I believe you now. You are an honest man.”
“They were working a racket together, your husband and Corey. A nice, profitable, juicy little racket. The details are here in his confession.” He broke off short. “Did Killeen ever tell you that?” he asked.