«Anybody here besides you?» I asked.
«Just Dave.»
«I had an idea Dave was here.» It wasn’t clever, but it was good for another foot.
«Oh, Dave’s here,» she agreed. «Yes. You’d like to see him?»
«Well — if it isn’t too much trouble.»
«Hee, hee,» she said. «No trouble at all. Like this.»
She jerked the gun up and snapped the trigger at me. She did it without moving a muscle of her face.
The gun not going off puzzled her, in a sort of vague, weekbefore-last manner. Nothing immediate or important. I wasn’t there any more. She lifted the gun up, still being very careful about the black kid glove wrapped about its butt, and peered into the muzzle. That didn’t get her anywhere. She shook the gun. Then she was aware of me again. I hadn’t moved. I didn’t have to, now.
«I guess it’s not loaded,» she said.
«Maybe just all used up,» I said. «To bad. These little ones only hold seven. My shells won’t fit, either. Let’s see if I can do anything?»
She put the gun in my hand. Then she dusted her hands together. Her eyes didn’t seem to have any pupils, or to be all pupils. I wasn’t sure which.
The gun wasn’t loaded. The magazine was quite empty. I sniffed the muzzle. The gun hadn’t been fired since it was last cleaned.
That got me. Up to that point it had looked fairly simple, if I could get by without any more murder. But this threw it. I hadn’t any idea what either of us was talking about now.
I dropped her pistol into my side pocket and put mine back on my hip and chewed my lip for a couple of minutes, to see what might turn up. Nothing did.
The sharp-faced Mrs. Marineau merely stood still and stared at a spot between my eyes, fuzzily, like a rather blotto tourist seeing a swell sunset on Mount Whitney.
«Well,» I said at last, «let’s kind of look through the house and see what’s what.»
«You mean Dave?»
«Yeah, we could take that in.»
«He’s in the bedroom.» She tittered. «He’s at home in bedrooms.»
I touched her arm and turned her around. She turned obediently, like a small child.
«But this one will be the last one he’ll be at home in,» she said. «Hee, hee.»
«Oh, yeah. Sure,» I said.
My voice sounded to me like the voice of a midget.
Dave Marineau was dead all right — if there had been any doubt about it.
A white bowl lamp with raised figures shone beside a large bed in a green and silver bedroom. It was the only light in the room. It filtered a hushed kind of light down at his face. He hadn’t been dead long enough to get the corpse look.
He lay sprawled casually on the bed, a little sideways, as though he had been standing in front of it when he was shot. One arm was flung out as loose as a strand of kelp and the other was under him. His open eyes were flat and shiny and almost seemed to hold a self-satisfied expression. His mouth was open a little and the lamplight glistened on the edges of his upper teeth.
I didn’t see the wound at all at first. It was high up, on the right side of his head, in the temple, but back rather far, almost far enough to drive the petrosal bone through the brain. It was powder-burned, rimmed with dusky red, and a fine trickle spidered down from it and got browner as it got thinner against his cheek.
«Hell, that’s a contact wound,» I snapped at the woman. «A suicide wound.»
She stood at the foot of the bed and stared at the wall above his head. If she was interested in anything besides the wall, she didn’t show it.
I lifted his still limp right hand and sniffed at the place where the base of the thumb joins the palm. I smelled cordite, then I didn’t smell cordite, then I didn’t know whether I smelled cordite or not. It didn’t matter, of course. A paraffin test would prove it one way or the other.
I put the hand down again, carefully, as though it were a fragile thing of great value. Then I plowed around on the bed, went down on the floor, got halfway under the bed, swore, got up again and rolled the dead man to one side enough to look under him. There was a bright, brassy shellcase but no gun.
It looked like murder again. I liked that better. He wasn’t the suicide type.
«See any gun?» I asked her.
«No.» Her face was as blank as a pie pan.
«Where’s the Baring girl? What are you supposed to be doing here?»
She bit the end of her left little finger. «I’d better confess,» she said. «I came here to kill them both.»
«Go on,» Isaid.
«Nobody was here. Of course, after I phoned him and he told me you were not a real cop and there was no murder and you were a blackmailer and just trying to scare me out of the address —» She stopped and sobbed once, hardly more than a sniff, and moved her line of sight to a corner of the ceiling.
Her words had a tumbled arrangement, but she spoke them like a drugstore Indian.
«I came here to kill both of them,» she said. «I don’t deny that.»
«With an empty gun?»
«It wasn’t empty two days ago. I looked. Dave must have emptied it. He must have been afraid.»
«That listens,» I said. «Go on.»
«So I came here. That was the last insult — his sending you to me to get her address. That was more than I would —»
«The story,» I said. «I know how you felt. I’ve read it in the love mags myself.»
«Yes. Well, he said there was something about Miss Baring he had to see her about on account of the studio and it was nothing personal, never had been, never would be —»
«My Gawd,» I said, «I know that too. I know what he’d feed you. We’ve got a dead man lying around here. We’ve got to do something, even if he was just your husband.»
«You — , she said.
«Yeah,» I said. «That’s better than the dopey talk. Go on.»
«The door wasn’t shut. I came in. That’s all. Now, I’m going. And you’re not going to stop me. You know where I live, you — .’ She called me the same name again.
«We’ll talk to some law first,» I said. I went over and shut the door and turned the key on the inside of it and took it out. Then I went over to the french doors. The woman gave me looks, but I couldn’t hear what her lips were calling me now.
French doors on the far side of the bed opened on the same balcony as the living room. The telephone was in a niche in the wall there, by the bed, where you could yawn and reach out for it in the morning and order a tray of diamond necklaces sent up to try on.
I sat down on the side of the bed and reached for the phone, and a muffled voice came to me through the glass and said: «Hold it, pal! Just hold it!»
Even muffled by the glass it was a deep, soft voice. I had heard it before. It was Skalla’s voice.
I was in line with the lamp. The lamp was right behind me. I dived off the bed on to the floor, clawing at my hip.
A shot roared and glass sprinkled the back of my neck. I couldn’t figure it. Skalla wasn’t on the balcony. I had looked.
I rolled over and started to snake away along the floor away from the french doors, my only chance with the lamp where it was.
Mrs. Marineau did just the right thing — for the other side. She jerked a slipper off and started slamming me with the heel of it. I grabbed for her ankles and we wrestled around and she cut the top of my head to pieces.
I threw her over. It didn’t last long. When I started to get up Skalla was in the room, laughing at me. The .45 still had a home in his fist. The french door and the locked screen outside looked as though a rogue elephant had passed that way.
«Okay,» I said. «I give up.»
«Who’s the twist? She sure likes you, pal.»
I got up on my feet. The woman was over in a corner somewhere. I didn’t even look at her.