«Not before I’ve said my piece,» I said. «It seems that Mr. Yeager’s driver — they have drivers as well as unusual names, those animals — told Larry Batzel that Mr. Yeager was out this way the night O’Mara disappeared.»
The old army blood had to be good for something in her. She didn’t move a muscle. She just froze solid.
I got up and took the cigarette from between her frozen fingers and killed it in a white jade ashtray. I laid my hat carefully on her white satin knee. I sat down again.
Her eyes moved after a while. They moved down and looked at the hat. Her face flushed very slowly, in two vivid patches over the cheekbones. She fought around with her tongue and lips.
«I know,» I said. «It’s not much of a hat. I’m not making you a present of it. But just look at the bullet holes in it once.»
Her hand became alive and snatched at the hat. Her eyes became flames.
She spread the crown out, looked at the holes, and shuddered.
«Yeager?» she asked, very faintly. It was a wisp of a voice, an old voice.
I said very slowly: «Yeager wouldn’t use a .22 target rifle, Mrs. O’Mara.»
The flame died in her eyes. They were pools of darkness much emptier than darkness.
«You’re his mother,» I said. «What do you want to do about it?»
«Merciful God! Dade! He… shot at you!»
«Twice,» I said.
«But why? Oh, why?»
«You think I’m a wise guy, Mrs. O’Mara. Just another hardeyed boy from the other side of the tracks. It would be easy in this spot, if I was. But I’m not that at all, really. Do I have to tell why he shot at me!»
She didn’t speak. She nodded slowly. Her face was a mask now.
«I’d say he probably can’t help it,» I said. «He didn’t want me to find his stepfather, for one thing. Then he’s a little lad that likes money. That seems small, but it’s part of the picture. He almost lost a dollar to me on his shooting. It seems small, but he lives in a small world. Most of all, of course, he’s a crazy little sadist with an itchy trigger finger.»
«How dare you!» she flared. It didn’t mean anything. She forgot it herself instantly.
«How dare I? I do dare. Let’s not bother figuring why he shot at me. I’m not the first, am I? You wouldn’t have known what I was talking about, you wouldn’t have assumed he did it on purpose.»
She didn’t move or speak. I took a deep breath.
«So let’s talk about why he shot Dud O’Mara,» I said. If I thought she would yell even this time, I fooled myself. The old man in the orchid house had put more into her than her tallness and her dark hair and her reckless eyes.
She pulled her lips back and tried to lick them, and it made her look like a scared little girl, for a second. The lines of her cheeks sharpened and her hand went up like an artificial hand moved by wires and took hold of the white fur at her throat and pulled it tight and squeezed it until her knuckles looked like bleached bone. Then she just stared at me.
Then my hat slid off her knee on to the floor, without her moving. The sound it made falling was one of the loudest sounds I had ever heard.
«Money,» she said in a dry croak. «Of course you want money.»
«How much money do I want?»
«Fifteen thousand dollars.»
I nodded, stiff-necked as a floorwalker trying to see with his back.
«That would be about right. That would be the established retainer. That would be about what he had in his pockets and what Yeager got for getting rid of him.»
«You’re too — damned smart,» she said horribly. «I could kill you myself and like it.»
I tried to grin. «That’s right. Smart and without a feeling in the world. It happened something like this. The boy got O’Mara where he got me, by the same simple ruse. I don’t think it was a plan. He hated his stepfather, but he wouldn’t exactly plan to kill him.»
«He hated him,» she said.
«So they’re in the little shooting gallery and O’Mara is dead on the floor, behind the barrier, out of sight. The shots, of course, meant nothing there. And very little blood, with a head shot, small caliber. So the boy goes out and locks the door and hides. But after a while he has to tell somebody. He has to. He tells you. You’re his mother. You’re the one to tell.»
«Yes,» she breathed. «He did just that.» Her eyes had stopped hating me.
«You think about calling it an accident, which is okay, except for one thing. The boy’s not a normal boy, and you know it. The general knows it, the servants know. There must be other people that know it. And the law, dumb as you think they are, are pretty smart with subnormal types. They get to handle so many of them. And I think he would have talked. I think, after a while, he would even have bragged.»
«Go on,» she said.
«You wouldn’t risk that,» I said. «Not for your son and not for the sick old man in the orchid house. You’d do any awful criminal callous thing rather than risk that. You did it. You knew Yeager and you hired him to get rid of the body. That’s all — except that hiding the girl, Mona Mesarvey, helped to make it look like a deliberate disappearance.»
«He took him away after dark, in Dud’s own car,» she said hollowly.
I reached down and picked my hat off the floor. «How about the servants?»
«Norris knows. The butler. He’d die on the rack before he told.»
«Yeah. Now you know why Larry Batzel was knocked off and why I was taken for a ride, don’t you?»
«Blackmail,» she said. «It hadn’t come yet, but I was waiting for it. I would have paid anything, and he would know that.»
«Bit by bit, year by year, there was a quarter of a millon in it for him, easy. I don’t think Joe Mesarvey was in it at all. I know the girl wasn’t.»
She didn’t say anything. She just kept her eyes on my face.
«Why in hell,» I groaned, «didn’t you take the guns away from him?»
«He’s worse than you think. That would have started something worse. I’m — I’m almost afraid of him myself.»
«Take him away,» I said. From here. From the old man. He’s young enough to be cured, by the right handling. Take him to Europe. Far away. Take him now. It would kill the general out of hand to know his blood was in that.»
She got up draggingly and dragged herself across to the windows. She stood motionless, almost blending into the heavy white drapes. Her hands hung at her sides, very motionless also. After a while she turned and walked past me. When she was behind me she caught her breath and sobbed just once.
«It was very vile. It was the vilest thing I ever heard of. Yet I would do it again. Father would not have done it. He would have spoken right out. It would, as you say, have killed him.»
«Take him away,» I pounded on. «He’s hiding out there now. He thinks he got me. He’s hiding somewhere like an animal. Get him. He can’t help it.»
«I offered you money,» she said, still behind me. «That’s nasty. I wasn’t in love with Dudley O’Mara. That’s nasty too. I can’t thank you. I don’t know what to say.»
«Forget it,» I said. «I’m just an old workhorse. Put your work on the boy.»
«I promise. Goodbye, Mr. Carmady.»
We didn’t shake hands. I went back down the stairs and the butler was at the front door as usual. Nothing in his face but politeness.
«You will not want to see the general today, sir?»
«Not today, Norris.»
I didn’t see the boy outside. I went through the postern and got into my rented Ford and drove on down the hill, past where the old oil wells were.
Around some of them, not visible from the street, there were still sumps in which waste water lay and festered with a scum of oil on top. They would be ten or twelve feet deep, maybe more. There would be dark things in them. Perhaps in one of them — I was glad I had killed Yeager.