She lidded her eyes, touched a hand to her own jet-black hair. “I’m not surprised,” she said huskily. “That would be about his speed.” She got up suddenly. “These jiggers are too small.” She came back with a tumbler, a third full. “Maybe you can still get something on him through her,” she suggested balefully.
He shook his head. “He can go around with ten blondes if he feels like it. He’s within his rights. We can’t hold him just for that alone—”
“What’s the matter with the laws these days?” she said almost savagely. “Here we are, you and I, sitting here in this room. We both know he killed Annie Willis. You’re drawing pay from the police department, and he’s moving around immune and fancy-free only a few blocks away from us at this very minute!”
He nodded as though he agreed with her. “They fail you every once in awhile,” he admitted gloomily, “the statutes as they are written down on the books. They slip a cog and let someone fall through—” Then he went on: “But there’s an older law than the statutes we work under. I don’t know if you ever heard of it or not. It’s called the Mosaic Law. ‘An eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth.’ And when the modern set-up goes back on you, that one never docs. It’s short and sweet, got no amendments, dodges or habeas corpuses to clutter it up. ‘An eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth.’ ”
“I like the way that sounds better,” she said.
“You’re getting a little lit. I shouldn’t be talking like this.”
“I’m not getting lit. I understand every word you say. But more important still, I hear the words you’re not saying.”
He just looked at her, and she looked at him. They were like two fencers, warily circling around each other to find an opening. She got up, moved over to the window, stared grimly out toward the traffic intersection at the corner ahead. “Green light,” she reported. Then she turned toward him with a bitter, puckered smile. “Green light. That means go ahead — doesn’t it?”
“Green light,” he murmured. “That means go ahead — if you care to.” The gin was making him talk a little more freely, although that was the only sign of it he showed. “The man that throws the switch in the deathhouse at Sing Sing, what makes him a legal executioner and not a murderer? The modern statutes. The Mosaic Code can have its legal executioners, too, who are not just murderers.”
She had come over close to him again.
“But never,” he went on, looking straight up at her, “exceed or distort its short, simple tenet. Never repay the gun with the knife, or the knife with the club. Then that’s murder, not the Mosaic Code any more. In the same way, if the State executioner shot the condemned man on his way to the chair, or poisoned him in his cell, then he wouldn’t be a legal executioner any more, he’d be just a murderer himself.” And he repeated it again for her slowly. “ ‘An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth.’ Annie Willis met her death by having something withheld from her that her safety required. No weapon was used on Annie Willis, remember.”
“Yes,” she said with flaming dreaminess. “And I know where there’s a trunk that belongs to me, down in a basement storage room, seldom entered, seldom used. One of these big, thick theatrical trunks, roomy enough to carry around the props for a whole act. I left it behind when I moved out. I was going to send for it but—” She didn’t finish it.
He looked down at his empty jigger, as if he was listening intently to her, but without looking at her.
“And if I came to you, for instance, and said: ‘What’s been bothering you and me both has been taken care of,’ how would you receive me — as a criminal under the modern law or a legal executioner under the old one?”
He looked straight up at her with piercing directness. “The modern law failed you and me, didn’t it? Then what right would I have to judge you by it?”
She murmured half audibly, as if endeavoring to try him out: “Then why not you? Why me?”
“The injury was done to you, not me. A friend is a personal belonging, a professional disappointment isn’t. Nothing was done to me personally. Under the Mosaic Law, a frustrated job can only be repaid by another frustrated job, by making the person who injured you suffer a like disappointment in his work.”
She laughed dangerously. “I can do better than that,” she said softly.
She kept shaking her head, looking at him from time to time as if she still found the situation almost past belief. “The strangest things never get down on the record books! They wouldn’t be believed if they did! Here you are, sitting in my room, a man drawing pay from the police department, with a shield in your pocket at this very minute—” She didn’t finish it.
“I’m a little bit tight on your gin,” he said, getting up, “and we haven’t been talking.”
She held the door open for him. “No,” she smiled, “we haven’t been talking. You weren’t here tonight, and nothing was said. But perfect understanding doesn’t need words. I’ll probably see you again to let you know how — what we haven’t been talking about is coming along.”
The door closed and First Grade Detective Benson went down the stairs with an impassive face.
What followed was even more incredible yet. Or, at least, the surroundings it occurred in were. A cop came in to him, at the precinct house three nights later, said: “There’s a lady out there asking for you, Benson. Won’t state her business.”
Benson said: “I think I know who you mean. Look, Corrigan, you know that little end room on the left, at the back of the hall? Is there anyone in there right now?”
The cop said: “Naw, there’s never anyone in there.”
“Take her back there, will you? I’ll be back there.”
He got there first. She stood outlined in the open doorway first, watching the cop return along the hall to where he’d come from, before she’d come in.
He didn’t pretend to be preoccupied going over papers or anything like that, possibly because there were none to be found in there. It was one of those blind spots that even the most bustling, overcrowded buildings occasionally develop, unused, avoided the greater part of the time by the personnel. He acted slightly frightened. Perhaps startled, taken aback by her unexpected effrontery, would be a better word. He kept pacing nervously back and forth, waiting for her to come in.
When she finally turned away from seeing the cop off, she came in and closed the door after her. He said: “Couldn’t you have waited until I dropped over to see you?”
“How did I know when you’d be around again? I felt like I couldn’t wait another half hour to get it off my chest.” There was something almost gloating in the way she looked around her. “Is it safe to talk here?”
“Sure, if you keep your voice down.” He went over to the door, opened it, looked along the passageway outside, closed it again. “It’s all right.”
She said, half-mockingly, with that intimacy of one conspirator for another: “No dictaphones around?”
He was too on edge to share her bantering mood. “Don’t be stupid,” he snapped. “How did I know you were going to pull a raw stunt like this? This is the last place I ever expected you to—”
She lit a cigarette, preened herself. “You think you’re looking at a cheap ballad singer on a burlesque circuit, don’t you?”