“I’m so excited, darling! I just had to rush over! May I have one of your cigarettes?”
With quick, hard hands she patted the pockets of Marceline’s house coat. It had only two pockets; its zippered length was otherwise unrelieved. The two pockets were empty.
“Oh, you’ve got them here, of course.” Sandra picked up Marceline’s bag, unsnapped it, raked inside. A compact, lipstick, gold pencil, rolled away beneath her fingers. Nothing else. Her eyes darted around the room. That damning bit of evidence was here somewhere. Where had she put it? Where? The room was singularly bare of places of quick concealment. The books lining three walls were packed solid, behind glass. There was only a cloisonne jar on the mantel, a tabouret with a red drawer, and the massive bulk of a combination radio and victrola.
Marceline said harshly: “What are you doing here, if you took the gift?”
Sandra crossed to the mantel. “I had to thank you.” She took the cover off the cloisonne jar. It was empty. That left only the tabouret drawer and the radio combination. Once she lifted the lid of the radio, the game was up.
“Thank me? What do you mean?”
“I knew it came from you.” Sandra snapped open the tabouret drawer, looked at blank red wood. Her voice rippled, flute-soft. “You do keep your cigarettes in the most outlandish places.” She crossed to the radio, lifted the lid, saw nothing inside whatever.
Marceline sprang up. The buttons were off the foils now. She cried:
“What are you doing?”
Then Sandra saw it. The sight gave her such a rush of relief she felt for an instant free and giddy as if swept into mountain air. She crossed, almost in a run, to the far end of the sofa. She knelt on the cushions. She leaned over the arm. She said, in the same dulcet, flute-soft voice:
“Why, darling, the fish are all dead.”
The goldfish in the bowl were floating bellies up. Around the little ornamental castle that had been their home the water was colorless, the green fernlike fronds of bladder-wort undisturbed. Only in the sand before the castle something half immersed was gleaming that might have been the polished side of a small shell.
Sandra murmured: “What could have killed them? Poison, do you suppose? Poison, on something that’s been dropped in?”
She lifted her hand to dip into the bowl. Marceline took two wild, darting movements toward a wing chair and came up with a gun from beneath the cushion.
“Put your hand in that bowl and I swear I’ll kill you.”
Her brilliant eyes were like a leopard’s. Sandra took one look at them and knew that she meant exactly what she said. Slowly she let her hand drop by her side, slowly sat down on the sofa.
“Marceline, the game’s up. You don’t think I took that bribe from De Saules, do you?” Sandra talked very rapidly. She held Marceline’s eyes, not letting that dilated gaze escape for a second. She didn’t dare. “I left him lying in my apartment. I called the police before I left the apartment lobby. You see, I was in the Mohican Building last night.”
It was hard to tell, from the wildness of those eyes, whether she heard or not. Sandra drove the words in hard.
“Do you love him very much?”
A quiver went over that face. The brilliant eyes seemed stricken to their depths. Sandra slipped her compact from her pocket. Now her voice was low, soothing, as one speaks to a child.
“Did your father have great hopes for you, Marceline? Would he have disinherited you if he knew what you had done? Is that why you kept the marriage a secret?”
Marceline began to shake. She could not control it. It was all over her body, from her lips to the elbow of the arm holding the gun. The words seemed to jerk out without her volition.
“Marriage? How did you know?”
“It had to be, Marceline. He had to be your husband to have a motive. I know how you feel. You love him. You want to protect him at all costs. He’s going to kill you, Marceline. He has to, now. Because you know. Marceline, he’s standing right behind you in the door.”
Marceline whirled. Sandra was across like a flash, smashed at the gun with her hand. It exploded point-blank into the floor; the recoil knocked it from Marceline’s hand.
Sandra snatched it up, flung it to the far end of the room. She whirled toward the fishbowl. She was too centered, going too headlong, to see the casement swing open. Even the fan of sunlight, leaping like a spear across her path, didn’t warm her. She was two steps from the bowl. She never reached it. Something crashed down on her head. That fan of sunlight seemed to leap up, swallow the whole room in a bursting yellow star.
It didn’t knock her out. She could thank her shako hat, her thick hair, for that. She felt herself hit the sofa, go headlong into its cushions. Strong hands twisted her on her back. Whipsaws of sound were whanging and snapping in her brain. She was staring as through the wrong end of a telescope at the yellow face of Dow.
“Very lucky, dear lady, I remained to overhear.” His voice poured like thin oil from far away. “It would do for the proper party to have it, but never for you. In that case I will take it back.”
She saw Marceline spring at him, a screaming, clawing form. She saw the yellow man tear her from him like a kitten, fling her across the room. He hardly stopped talking to Sandra.
“I see you are not the naïve, child-like little lady I took you for. It was you, then, who were in the Mohican Building last night. I made a mistake not to kill you the last time. This time I most certainly shall.”
Sandra tried to roll off the sofa. She could not. The fishbowl was above her. Dow was holding it, staring into it. She would always see his face, distorted through the curved glass like the flat, prodigiously wide face of a sting ray.
Then he dipped in his yellow hand, took out the bright object.
“So,” he said, “the little item returns to me. The little item that places the murder so exactly. This time it will not leave me.”
The shot seemed to come from nowhere. Dow was still holding the fishbowl. He jammed it into his own face with a convulsive jerk, smashing a great half-moon out of it. He whirled on his heels with a surprised look, cast the bowl like a shot-put at the floor. He kept revolving, his face a horrible gray and stretched with surprise, plunged headlong over Sandra on the sofa.
Sandra did not know if she was screaming or not. Her mind was like a black blind space riven by two forked bolts. One of them was: the murderer! The murderer was in the room! The other was: under the form quivering convulsively above her, the bright object was there on the cushions beside her!
It was a moment of such hideous chaos nothing seemed coherent – not the yellow head, batting blindly at the sofa back, not her own hand jammed into her face, not her frantic animal convulsions to throw off that shuddering body.
Then Marceline’s scream cut through everything.
“Oh, no! Not me! You’re not going to kill me!”
The gun crashed again. She heard Marceline’s scream. Sandra seemed sucked out of reality, her soul yawing and heeling over in blackness. She was free of that twitching form. She was half off the sofa. A new bedlam was awake – a bedlam that was not in her mind. Voices. Pounding feet. Batterings. Yells.
Captain Corrigan! The police!
She was on her knees. A hand got hold of her. It got her under the jaw from behind, a hand like a steel vice. It yanked her completely from the ground, a swooping arc that almost made her swoon. She saw the bright blaze of sunlight rushing toward her, felt her fierce propulsion across the rug. Then she knew – he was going to use her for a shield!