“It’s over now, Leonard. I’m afraid I’m not very adequate in the role of a criminal.” She gave him a bright smile, distorted by her wounds, and me the sad vestige of it. “Leonard wasn’t there. He was taking a shower when the woman – when Mrs. Dolphine came to our door. I killed her.”
“Why?”
“It was my fault,” Lister said, “all of it, from the beginning. I had no right to marry Maude, to drag her down into the life I live. I was crazy to bring her back to that apartment.”
“Why did you?”
His white-ringed eyes rolled around, straining for a look at himself. “I don’t know, really. Stella thought she owned me. I had to prove that she didn’t.” His eyes steadied. “I’m a disastrous fool.”
“Be still.” Her fingers touched his hairy mouth. The back of her hand was scratched. “It was an ill fate. I scarcely know how it happened. It simply happened. She asked me who I was, and I told her I was Leonard’s wife. She said that she was his wife in the eyes of heaven. She tried to force her way into the apartment. I asked her to leave. She told me that I was the one who ought to leave, that I should go home with my brother. When I refused, she attacked me. She pulled me by the hair onto the outside landing. I must have pushed her away somehow. She fell backwards down the steps, all the way to the bottom. I heard her skull strike the concrete.” Her small hand went to her own mouth, as if to hold it still. “I think I fainted then.”
“Yes,” Lister said. “Maude was unconscious on the landing when I came out of the shower. I carried her inside. It took me some time to bring her to and find out what had happened. I put her to bed and went down to see to Stella. She was dead, at the foot of the steps. Dead.” His voice cracked.
“You were in love with her, Leonard,” his wife said.
“Not after I met you.”
“She was beautiful.” There was a questioning sadness in her voice.
“She isn’t any more,” I said. “She’s dead, and you’ve been carrying her body around the countryside. What sense was there in that?”
“No sense.” Behind his hairy mask, Lister had the shamefaced look of a delinquent boy. “I panicked. Maude wanted to call the police right away. But I’ve had one or two little scrapes with them, in the past. And I knew what Dolphine would do if he found Stella dead at my door. He hates me.” The naive blue eyes were bewildered by the beginnings of insight. “I don’t blame him.”
“What would he do?”
“Cry murder, and pin it on me.”
“I don’t see how. The way your wife described it, it’s a clear case of manslaughter, probably justifiable.”
“Is it? I wouldn’t know. I felt so guilty about Stella, I wasn’t thinking too well. I simply wanted to hide her and get Maude out of the country, away from the mess I’d made.”
“That’s what the five thousand was for?”
“Yes.”
“You were going by way of Chicago?”
“The plan was changed. Maude’s brother advised me to take her back to Chicago instead. After you tracked us down, I came here to him and made a clean breast of everything. He said leaving the country was an admission of guilt, in case the matter ever came to trial.”
“It will.”
“Does it really need to?” He leaned towards me, the bed squealing under his shifting weight. “If you have any humanity, you’ll let us go to Chicago. My wife is a gentlewoman. I don’t know if that means anything to you.”
“Does it to you?”
He dropped his eyes. “Yes. She can’t go through a Los Angeles trial, with the dirt they’ll dig up about me and throw in her face.”
I said: “I have some humanity, not enough to go round. Right now Stella Dolphine is using most of it.”
“You said yourself it was justifiable manslaughter.”
“The way your wife tells it, it is.”
“Don’t you believe me?” She sounded astonished.
“As far as your story goes, I believe you. But you don’t know all the facts. There are thumbprints on Stella Dolphine’s throat. I’ve seen prints like them on the throats of other women who were strangled.”
“No,” she whispered. “I swear it. I only pushed her.”
I looked at the delicate hands that were twisting in her lap. “You couldn’t have made those marks. You pushed her down the stairs and knocked her out and set her up for somebody else. Somebody else found her unconscious and throttled her. Lister?”
His head sank like an exhausted bull’s. He didn’t look at his wife.
“Stella Dolphine made trouble for you, and she was in a position to make more trouble. You decided to put an end to it by finishing her off. Is that the way it happened?”
“The sinister habit,” he said. “The sinister habit of asking questions, as Cocteau calls it. You’ve got a bad case of it, Archer.”
“Liars bring it out in me.”
“All right,” he said to the floor. “If I admit it, and take the blame, will you let Maude go free, back to Chicago with her brother?”
She pressed her face against his bowed shoulder and said: “No. You didn’t do it, Leonard. You’re only trying to protect me.”
“Did you?”
She shook her head slowly against his body. He turned and held her. I looked past them out the window to the darkening sea. They were fairly decent people, as people go, harried by the future and the past but holding together on the sharp ridge of the instant. And I was tormenting them. The case turned over behind my eyes again, a many-headed monster struggling to be born out of my mind.
Harlan opened the bathroom door and came out shakily. His nose was bleeding. He looked at me with hatred, at the lovers with desolation. Unnoticed by them, he stood like a wallflower against the doorframe.
“I should never have come here,” he said bitterly.
I turned to them. “This has gone far enough.”
They were blind and deaf, alone together on the sharp ridge, held flesh to flesh. A door creaked. I thought it was Harlan closing the bathroom door, and I looked in the wrong direction. Dolphine was in the room before I saw him. A heavy service revolver wavered in his hand. He advanced on Lister and his wife.
“You killed her, you devils.”
Lister tried to get up from the bed. The woman held him. Her back was to the gun.
The gun spoke once, very loudly, its echoes rumbling like delayed thunder. Harlan had crossed to the center of the room, perhaps with some idea of defending his sister. He took the slug in the body. It stopped him like a wall. He fell. I fired across him.
Dolphine dropped his revolver. He spread his hands across his stomach and backed against the wall, where he sat down. He was wheezing. Water ran from his eyes and nose. His face worked, trying to realize his grief and failing. Blood began to run between his fingers. I stood over him.
“How do you know they killed her?”
“I saw them. I saw it all.”
“You were in bed.”
“No, I was in the garage. They threw her down the steps, and came down after and choked her. Lister did. I saw him.”
“You didn’t call the police.”
“No. I–” His mouth groped for words. “I’m a sick man. I was too sick to call them. Upset. I couldn’t talk.”
“You’re sicker now, but you’re going to have to talk. It wasn’t Lister, was it? It was you.”
He choked, and began to cough blood. Great pumping sobs forced red words out of his mouth.
“She got what she deserved. I thought when I told her he’d married the other one, that she would come back to my bed. But she wouldn’t look at me. All she could think about was getting him back. When I was the one that loved her.”
“I can see that.”