“I can’t understand her putting you in here. This is my bedroom.”
I said, “Well Lucille should be dressed by this time and we’ll let her make the explanations.”
“Where is she?”
“Down the corridor somewhere,” I said, indicating the end of the house vaguely. “I suppose her room is down there.”
Rosalind was looking at me with startled, frightened eyes. She didn’t know whether to run screaming, or to walk down the corridor.
I moved towards her and that touched off the reaction. She fairly flew down the corridor. “Lucille!” she cried, “Lucille!”
She flung herself at the door of Lucille’s bedroom and opened it, then stood motionless in the doorway.
I grinned and said, “It’s okay, Rosalind. You’ll get to know me better after a while.”
She took one step into the room, then I heard her scream, a shrill knife-like scream of terror. Then she was yelling at the top of her voice. “Help! Police! Police!” The whole neighbourhood could hear her.
I stepped to the doorway so I could look over her shoulder. Lucille had taken the robe off. She’d also taken off the filmy other thing that had been around her when I first saw her. She had on just the bra and black panties.
She’d been choked to death with one of her own stockings. It was knotted tight around her throat and the girl was lying sprawled in death, her body a delicate, graceful, beautiful thing, her face mottled and disfigured.
“Police! Police! Murder!” screamed Rosalind.
A man’s voice from the house across the way called out, “What’s the trouble?”
“Help, police! Murder!” Rosalind screamed.
I heard a door bang, a man’s steps running across cement.
I turned quickly, walked down the corridor, down the half-dozen steps to the living-room, across the living-room to the door on the side of the patio, out into the night and to the sidewalk.
I needed a hell of a lot of time to think and I wasn’t going to get it there in that house, not with the only story I had to tell.
Twelve
It made a swell story for the newspapers. They had it all doped out.
The girl had been standing in front of the mirror, dressing, intent only upon making the best appearance for a date she had that evening. It was a warm night. The french windows were open to the patio and because the bedroom had complete privacy, the girl had neglected to pull the blinds.
A sex maniac, perhaps a Peeping Tom, had been making regular rounds of the neighbourhood. He had looked through the window of the bedroom and saw the half-clad girl in front of the mirror.
He had started across the patio, directly towards the bedroom, but had stepped into the soft loam of a new lawn that had recently been planted. The soil had been thoroughly wet down by the gardener that evening and the man had sunk halfway to his ankles. He had taken a few step, then had turned and retraced his steps to the cement. Then he had walked directly towards the bedroom. The cement retained tracks of the loam-covered feet.
He had tiptoed up the stairs.
The girl had been standing there in her lingerie in front of the mirror, making herself beautiful, planning the clothes she was to wear, putting on face cream, powder and lipstick, fixing her eyebrows and eyelashes.
Suddenly she had become uneasy, conscious of some presence behind her. She had started to turn.
It was too late.
One of her own silk stockings had been thrown over her head and around her throat, twisted tight; a cruel merciless knee had pushed into her back, against her shoulder blades. She had tried to scream but no sound would come. The silk stocking had been twisted tighter, tighter, tighter.
There had been a futile, feeble struggle.
Suffocating, she had tried to flail with her arms and legs, but the cruel knee in her back crushed her to the floor. Sinewy, strong hands twisted the silk stocking tighter and tighter. There had been a few convulsive motions, and then silence.
The silence of death.
And then the murderer had turned her over on her back, had bent over her and had kissed her. The smeared lipstick on her lips told the story of that last kiss.
The kiss of death.
It was a natural for the sob sisters and the tabloids. There were photographs of the woman, photographs of the body in its flimsy underwear sprawled on the floor.
And then the newspapers had gone on from there.
The murderous bandit had gone down to the next room, the bedroom of the sister. He had entered that room, apparently in search of another victim, or perhaps waiting for the younger sister to come to bed.
And while there, he had become engrossed in reading a book.
The literary bandit!
It was a gift for sensational exploitation.
The book was, as it chanced, a favourite of Rosalind Hart, and one which she kept constantly in her room. It was protected from wear by a cellophane cover, and, as it happened, police, knowing that the murderer had handled this book, were able to process it almost immediately upon their arrival at the scene of the crime and had obtained not only a perfect set of fingerprints, but a complete outline of the hand of the man they wanted.
The sister of the murdered woman had stated that, when she entered the door of the bedroom, the man who had been reading the book was wiping his lips with a handkerchief, apparently getting rid of the incriminating lipstick which had come from the lips of the dead girl. The murderer had been so startled by the intrusion of the sister that he had dropped the handkerchief as he jumped to his feet. Police, recovering that handkerchief, had made an analysis of the smears of lipstick which appeared on it, and had proved conclusively that this lipstick came from the murdered woman. There was a laundry mark on the handkerchief which was slightly smudged, so that temporarily the police were not able to trace it, but they hoped to be able to reconstruct that laundry mark and use it as an additional clue.
Reading the papers, I felt as though I were teetering on the brink of a precipice, standing on rotten rock and looking down into a deep canyon.
The memory came back to me of the time, years before, when I’d been taken on a tour through a State’s prison and had been ushered into the execution chamber, shown the square trap of the scaffold, a bit of mechanism which at first glance looked like a part of the floor, but which was precariously balanced so that it only needed the slightest touch of the tripping button to send a heavy trap-door plunging down with that ominous bang that is so hideously familiar to those who have ever witnessed an execution, a reverberating, silence-shattering noise that will for ever after be indelibly impressed upon the mind of the witness — a noise which is synchronized so that the audience watching the execution doesn’t hear the sickening snap of the bone in the neck of the condemned man as he catapults to the end of the rope and the hangman’s knot behind his ear dislocates the cervical vertebra, pulling the spinal cord loose, letting the neck stretch until it is no bigger than a man’s arm, while the rope bites into the quivering flesh.
I felt as though I was standing on one of those insecure square platforms while an executioner slipped a black bag and a rope over my face, tightened it around my neck.
Just as a matter of form I checked the agency parking lot.
Agency car number two, the one I had been driving when I ran out of petrol, the one I had abandoned when I stole the other car, was in its accustomed place.
I turned on the ignition and checked the petrol tank. It was full. The attendant didn’t know when it had been parked there, some time during the night. It had been there when he’d opened up.
I didn’t ask any more questions.