“Out of this town. I’m getting out.”
“You have some talking to do first.”
She straightened up. “I told you all I know. You didn’t believe me. What’s the matter, didn’t you get to see Harry?”
“I saw him. Harry’s dead. Your whole family is dying like flies.”
She half-turned and sat down limply on the disordered bed. “Dead? You think I did it?”
“I think you know who did. Harry said before he died that you were the reason for it all.”
“Me the reason for it?” Her eyes widened in false naïveté, but there was thought behind them, quick and desperate thought. “You mean that Harry got killed on account of me?”
“Harry and Nick both. It was a woman who shot them.”
“God,” she said. The desperate thought behind her eyes crystallized into knowledge. Which I shared.
The aching silence was broken by a big diesel rolling by on the highway. She said above its roar:
“That crazy old bat. So she killed Nick.”
“You’re talking about your mother. Mrs. Nemo.”
“Yeah.”
“Did you see her shoot him?”
“No. I was blotto like I told you. But I saw her out there this week, keeping an eye on the house. She’s always watched me like a hawk.”
“Is that why you were getting out of town? Because you knew she killed Nick?”
“Maybe it was. I don’t know. I wouldn’t let myself think about it.”
Her blue gaze shifted from my face to something behind me. I turned. Mrs. Nemo was in the doorway. She was hugging the straw bag to her thin chest.
Her right hand dove into the bag. I shot her in the right arm. She leaned against the doorframe and held her dangling arm with her left hand. Her face was granite in whose crevices her eyes were like live things caught.
The gun she dropped was a cheap .32 revolver, its nickel plating worn and corroded. I spun the cylinder. One shot had been fired from it.
“This accounts for Harry,” I said. “You didn’t shoot Nick with this gun, not at that distance.”
“No.” She was looking down at her dripping hand. “I used my old police gun on Nick Nemo. After I killed him, I threw the gun into the sea. I didn’t know I’d have further use for a gun. I bought that little suicide gun tonight.”
“To use on Harry?”
“To use on you. I thought you were on to me. I didn’t know until you told me that Harry knew about Nick and Jeannine.”
“Jeannine is your daughter by your first husband?”
“My only daughter.” She said to the girclass="underline" “I did it for you, Jeannine. I’ve seen too much – the awful things that can happen.”
The girl didn’t answer. I said:
“I can understand why you shot Nick. But why did Harry have to die?”
“Nick paid him,” she said. “Nick paid him for Jeannine. I found Harry in a bar an hour ago, and he admitted it. I hope I killed him.”
“You killed him, Mrs. Nemo. What brought you here? Was Jeannine the third on your list?”
“No. No. She’s my own girl. I came to tell her what I did for her. I wanted her to know.”
She looked at the girl on the bed. Her eyes were terrible with pain and love. The girl said in a stunned voice:
“Mother. You’re hurt. I’m sorry!”
“Let’s go, Mrs. Nemo,” I said.
The Sinister Habit
A MAN in a conservative dark gray suit entered my doorway sideways, carrying a dark gray Homburg in his hand. His face was long and pale. He had black eyes and eyebrows and black nostrils. Across the summit of his high forehead, long black ribbons of hair were brushed demurely. Only his tie had color: it lay on his narrow chest like a slumbering purple passion.
His sharp black glance darted around my office, then back into the corridor. His hairy nostrils sniffed the air as if he suspected escaping gas.
“Is somebody following you?” I said.
“I have no reason to think so.”
I had my coat off and my shirt unbuttoned. It was a hot afternoon at the start of the smog season. My visitor looked at me in a certain way that reminded me of schoolteachers. “Might you be Archer?”
“It’s a reasonable conclusion. Name’s on the door.”
“I can read, thank you.”
“Congratulations, but this is no talent agency.”
He stiffened, clutching his blue chin with a seal-ringed hand, and gave me a long, sad, hostile stare. Then he shrugged awkwardly, as though there was no help for it.
“Come in if you like,” I said. “Close it behind you. Don’t mind me, I get snappy in the heat.”
He shut the door violently, almost hard enough to crack the expensive one-way glass panel. He jumped at the noise it made, and apologized:
“I’m sorry. I’ve been under quite a strain.”
“You’re in trouble?”
“Not I. My sister…” He gave me one of his long looks. I assumed an air of bored discretion garnished with a sprig of innocence.
“Your sister,” I reminded him after a while. “Did she do something, or get something done to her?”
“Both, I’m afraid.” His teeth showed in a tortured little smile which drew down the corners of his mouth. “She and I maintain a school for girls in – in the vicinity of Chicago. I can’t emphasize too much the importance of keeping this matter profoundly secret.”
“You’re doing your part. Sit down, Mr.–”
He took a pinseal wallet out of his inside breast pocket, handling it with a kind of reverence, and produced a card. He hesitated with the card in his hand.
“Let me guess,” I said. “Don’t tell me. Does your name begin with a consonant or a vowel?”
He sat down with great caution, after inspecting the chair for concealed electrodes, and made me the gift of his card. It was engraved: “J. Reginald Harlan, M.A. The Harlan School.”
I read it out loud. He winced.
“All right, Mr. Harlan. Your sister’s in some kind of a jam. You run a girls’ school–”
“She’s headmistress. I’m registrar and bursar.”
“–which makes you vulnerable to scandal. Is it sexual trouble she’s in?”
He crossed his legs, and clasped his sharp knee with both hands. “Now how could you possibly know that?”
“Some of my best friends are sisters. I take it she’s younger than you.”
“A few years my junior, yes, but Maude’s no youngster. She’s a mature woman, at least I’d always supposed that she was mature. It’s her age, her age and position, that make this whole affair so incredible. For a woman of Maude’s social and professional standing, with a hundred virginal minds in her charge, suddenly to go mad over a man! Can you understand such behavior?”
“Yes. I’ve seen enough of it.”
“I can’t.” But a faint, attractive doubt softened his eyes for a moment. Perhaps he was wondering when some long overdue lightning might blast and illuminate him. “I’d always supposed that the teens were the dangerous age. Perhaps after all it’s the thirties.” One hand crawled up his chest like a pallid crab and fondled the purple tie.
“It depends on the person,” I said, “and the circumstances.”
“I suppose so.” He inverted the hat in his lap and gazed down into it. “Now that I come to think of it, Mother’s breakdown occurred when she was in her thirties. I wonder, could Maude be simply reverting to type, impelled by something unstable in her genes?”
“Did Mother have blue genes?”
Harlan smiled his tortured smile. “Indeed she did. You put it very aptly. But we won’t go into the case of Mother. It’s my sister I’m concerned with.”
“What did she do? Elope?”
“Yes, in the most scandalous and disrupting way, with a man she scarcely knew, a dreadful sort of man.”