The hood, falling over his face, cut the rest of it short.
The current waned, then waxed, then waned again...
They didn’t have the chart on the wall any more. It had done them poor service. The door opened and Mrs. Novak was ushered in. She had her knitting with her again. Only she was making a different article, of a different color, this time. She nodded restrainedly to several of them, as one does to distant acquaintances encountered before.
She sat down, bent her head, the needles began to flicker busily.
Somebody came in, or went out. She didn’t bother looking.
The toecaps of a pair of shoes came to a halt just within the radius of vision of her downcast eyes. They remained motionless there on the floor, as though silently importuning her attention. There wasn’t a sound in the room.
Mrs. Novak became aware of the shoes at last. She raised her eyes indifferently, dropped them. Then they shot up again. The knitting sidled from her lap as the lap itself dissolved into a straight line. The ball of yarn rolled across the floor unnoticed. She was clutching at her own throat with both hands.
There wasn’t a sound in the room.
She pointed with one trembling finger. It was a question, a plea that she be mistaken, but more than anything else a terrified statement of fact.
“It’s him — the man that ran past by my store — from where the police-officer...!”
“But the last time you said—”
She rolled her eyes, struck her own forehead. “I know,” she said brokenly. “He looked like him. But only he looked like him, you understand? This one, it is him!” Her voice railed out at them accusingly. “Why you haf to bring me here that other time? If you don’t, I don’t make such a mistake!”
“There were others made the same mistake,” the lieutenant tried to soothe her. “You were only one of five or six witnesses. Every one of them—”
She wouldn’t listen. Her face crinkled into an ugly mask. Suddenly, with no further ado, tears were working their way down its seams. Somebody took her by the arm to help her out. One of the detectives had to pick up the fallen knitting, hand it back to her, otherwise she would have left without it. And anything that could make her do that—
“I killed him,” she mourned.
“It wasn’t you alone,” the lieutenant acknowledged bitterly as she was led from the room. “We all did.”
They seated Donny Blake in a chair, after she had gone, and one of them stood directly behind it like a mentor. They handed this man a newspaper and he opened it and held it spread out before Blake’s face, as though he were holding it up for him to read.
The door opened and closed, and Storm, the chartered accountant, was sitting there across the room, in the exact place the Novak woman had been just now.
He looked around at them questioningly, still unsure of just why he had been summoned here. All he saw was a group of detectives, one of them buried behind a newspaper.
“Keep looking where that newspaper is,” the lieutenant instructed quietly.
Storm looked puzzled, but he did.
The detective behind the chair slowly began to raise it, like a curtain. Blake’s chin peered below first. Then his mouth. Then nose, eyes, forehead. At last his whole face was revealed.
Storm’s own face whitened. His reaction was quieter than the woman’s had been, but just as dramatic. He began to tremble right as he sat there in the chair; they could see it by his hands mostly. “Oh my God,” he mouthed in a sickened undertone.
“Have you anything to say?” the lieutenant urged. “Don’t be afraid to say it.”
He stroked his mouth as though the words tasted rotten even before they’d come out. “That’s — that’s the face of the man I collided with — on Farragut Street.”
“You’re sure?”
His figures came back to him, but you could tell they gave him no comfort any longer. “One hundred percent!” he said dismally, leaning way-over his own lap as though he had a cramp.
“They’re not altogether to blame,” the lieutenant commented to a couple of his men after the room had been cleared. “It’s very hard, when a guy looks a good deal like another, not to bridge the remaining gap with your own imagination and supply the rest. Another thing, the mere fact that we were already holding Severn in custody would unconsciously influence them in identifying him. We thought he was the guy, and we ought to know, so if we thought he was, he probably was. I don’t mean they consciously thought of it in that way, but without their realizing it, that would be the effect it would have on their minds.”
A cop looked in, said: “They’ve got Blake ready for you, lieutenant.”
“And I’m ready for him,” the lieutenant answered grimly, turning and leading the way out.
The doctor came forward, tipped up one of Blake’s eyelids. Sightless white showed. He took out a stethoscope and applied it to the region of the heart.
In the silence their panting breaths reverberated hollowly against the basement walls.
The doctor straightened up, removed the stethoscope. “Not very much more,” he warned in a guarded undertone. “Still O.K., but he’s wearing down. This is just a faint. You want him back?”
“Yeah,” one of the men said. “We wouldn’t mind.”
The doctor extracted a small vial from his kit, extended it toward the outsize, discolored mass that was Blake’s nose. He passed it back and forth in a straight line a couple of times.
Blake’s eyelids flickered up. Then he twitched his head away uncomfortably.
There was a concerted forward shift on the part of all of them, like a pack of dogs closing in on a bone.
“Wait’ll the doc gets out of the room,” the lieutenant checked them. “This is our own business.”
Donny Blake began to weep. “No, I can’t stand any more. Doc,” he called out frantically, “Doc! Don’t leave me in here with ’em! They’re killing me!”
The doctor had scant sympathy for him. “Then why don’t you tell ’em what they want to know?” he grunted. “Why waste everyone’s time?” He closed the door after him.
Maybe because the suggestion came from an outsider, at least someone distinct from his tormentors. Or maybe because this was the time for it anyway.
Suddenly he said, “Yeah, it was me. I did. I was with Gates and the two of us killed this guy O’Neill. He horned in on us in the middle of this uncut diamond job we were pulling. He didn’t see me. I came up behind him while he was holding Gates at the point of his gun. I pinned him to the wall there in the entrance and we took his gun away from him. Then Gates said, ‘He’s seen us now,’ and he’d shot him down before I could stop him. I said, ‘He’s still alive, he’ll tell anyway,’ and I finished him off with one into the head.”
He covered his face with palsied hands. “Now I’ve given it to you. Don’t hurt me any more. Lemme alone.”
“See who that is,” the lieutenant said.
A cop was on the other side of the door when it had been opened. “The D.A.’s Office is on the phone for you, lieutenant. Upstairs in your own office.”
“Get the stenographer,” the lieutenant said, “I’ll be right back.”
He was gone a considerable time, but he must have used up most of it on the slow, lifeless way he came back. Dawdling along. He came in with a funny look on his face, as though he didn’t see any of them any more. Or rather, did, but hated to have to look at them.
“Take him out,” he said curtly.
No one said anything until the prisoner was gone. Then they all looked at the lieutenant curiously, waiting for him to speak. He didn’t.