“Is that what put you onto me?” she asked quietly.
“Your hurry to leave my apartment tonight and get to him clinched it,” I said. “There were other things. The size of the garments in McJunkin’s hotel room. The fact that Jean Putnam kept a diary, a fact a co-worker of Jean’s would know and could relay to McJunkin.
“I know now it was you, Myrtle, trying to call him right after I slipped into his room. You weren’t able to warn him; so you tipped his principal, Fred Eppling, that I’d located McJunkin’s address. Only you could have done that, Myrtle. Only you knew I’d discovered where McJunkin was staying. I’m sure you thought Eppling would head McJunkin off, warn him. Instead, Eppling had no choice but to start shooting at me through McJunkin’s window.
“Then there was a statement you made in my apartment, Myrtle, when I told you the fingerprint on my doorknob belonged to a man named McJunkin. Almost immediately, you used the full name. Ben McJunkin. It went over my head at the time. When the parts shaped up, I remembered.”
She had the attitude of listening for a cry from some great distance or a whisper in the nearby darkness. After a long, long moment, she seemed to remember I was there. She made a little motion toward the open suitcases. “All my things, Ed. None of his.”
“Where is he, Myrtle?”
She looked through the window to the endless dark skies. The Gasparilla stars had all quit falling. The party was over. The skies were totally black.
“Where?” she said. She looked at the floor. I followed her glance, saw the still-damp places where she had tried to scrub the traces of blood from the carpet.
I turned my head to look at the bedroom door. My hand dropped to the gun beneath the blue pirate’s sash.
“No, Ed...” she said in a tone beyond grief. “You can open the door. You won’t need the gun. He managed to get here, but he was beyond help. You killed him, Ed... back there at the San Salvador Hotel.”
I looked at her, and I believed her. I felt empty and slightly defeated. My lips were very dry. I touched them with the wetness of my tongue, and said “Ben McJunkin, Myrtle... when you could have had any man. After all these years, still Ben McJunkin... Why?”
She looked past me, thinking of the years, picking out and recalling the individual hours that lived in her memory. For the barest fraction of a second, Myrtle Higgins wasn’t incomplete. The power of her feeling changed her. And I glimpsed beyond the two dimensional physical surface that she had always presented to me or any other man — except one.
I would remember what I had seen for a long time.
The longhairs with degrees papering their walls can study it a lifetime and write a library of books about it. They’ll never have her knowledge of it. To Myrtle Higgins it was very simple. Right or wrong, for good or for evil, she expressed it all and told the whole tale in three words.
“I loved him,” she said.