I nodded.
“I thought so. I thought you were the law at the time. I saw Nick lying there in the driveway, all bloody, and I put two and two together and got trouble. Bad trouble for me, unless I got out. So I got out. It wasn’t nice to do, after what Nick meant to me, but it was the only sensible thing. I got my career to think of.”
“What career is that?”
“Modeling. Acting. Uncle Nick was gonna send me to school.”
“Unless you talk, you’ll finish your education at Corona. Who shot Nick?”
A thin edge of terror entered her voice. “I don’t know, I tell you. I was passed out in the bedroom. I didn’t see nothing.”
“Why did Harry bring you your coat?”
“He didn’t want me to get involved. He’s my father, after all.”
“Harry Nemo is your father?”
“Yes.”
“You’ll have to do better than that. What’s your name?”
“Jeannine. Jeannine Larue.”
“Why isn’t your name Nemo if Harry is your father? Why do you call him Harry?”
“He’s my stepfather, I mean.”
“Sure,” I said. “And Nick was really your uncle, and you were having a family reunion with him.”
“He wasn’t any blood relation to me. I always called him uncle, though.”
“If Harry’s your father, why don’t you live with him?”
“I used to. Honest. This is the truth I’m telling you. I had to get out on account of the old lady. The old lady hates my guts. She’s a real creep, a square. She can’t stand for a girl to have any fun. Just because my old man was a rummy–”
“What’s your idea of fun, Jeannine?”
She shook her feathercut hair at me. It exhaled a heavy perfume which was worth its weight in blood. She bared one pearly shoulder and smiled an artificial hustler’s smile. “What’s yours? Maybe we can get together.”
“You mean the way you got together with Nick?”
“You’re prettier than him.”
“I’m also smarter, I hope. Is Harry really your stepfather?”
“Ask him if you don’t believe me. Ask him. He lives in a place on Tule Street – I don’t remember the number.”
“I know where he lives.”
But Harry wasn’t at home. I knocked on the door of the frame cottage and got no answer. I turned the knob and found that the door was unlocked. There was a light behind it. The other cottages in the court were dark. It was long past midnight, and the street was deserted. I went into the cottage, preceded by my gun.
A ceiling bulb glared down on sparse and threadbare furniture, a time-eaten rug. Besides the living room, the house contained a cubbyhole of a bedroom and a closet kitchenette. Everything in the poverty-stricken place was pathetically clean. There were moral mottoes on the walls, and one picture. It was a photograph of a tow-headed girl in a teen-age party dress. Jeannine, before she learned that a pretty face and a sleek body could buy her the things she wanted. The things she thought she wanted.
For some reason, I felt sick. I went outside. Somewhere out of sight, an old car-engine muttered. Its muttering grew on the night. Harry Nemo’s rented Chevrolet turned the corner under the streetlight. Its front wheels were weaving. One of the wheels climbed the curb in front of the cottage. The Chevrolet came to a halt at a drunken angle.
I crossed the sidewalk and opened the car door. Harry was at the wheel, clinging to it desperately as if he needed it to hold him up. His chest was bloody. His mouth was bright with blood. He spoke through it thickly:
“She got me.”
“Who got you, Harry? Jeannine?”
“No. Not her. She was the reason for it, though. We had it coming.”
Those were his final words. I caught his body as it fell sideways out of the seat. I laid it out on the sidewalk and left it for the cop on the beat to find.
I drove across town to the trailer court. Jeannine’s trailer still had light in it, filtered through the curtains over the windows. I pushed the door open.
The girl was packing a suitcase on the bunk bed. She looked at me over her shoulder, and froze. Her blond head was cocked like a frightened bird’s, hypnotized by my gun.
“Where are you off to, kid?”
“Out of this town. I’m getting out.”
“You have some talking to do first.”
She straightened up. “I told you all I know. You didn’t believe me. What’s the matter, didn’t you get to see Harry?”
“I saw him. Harry’s dead. Your whole family is dying like flies.”
She half-turned and sat down limply on the disordered bed. “Dead? You think I did it?”
“I think you know who did. Harry said before he died that you were the reason for it all.”
“Me the reason for it?” Her eyes widened in false naivete, but there was thought behind them, quick and desperate thought. “You mean that Harry got killed on account of me?”
“Harry and Nick both. It was a woman who shot them.”
“God,” she said. The desperate thought behind her eyes crystallized into knowledge. Which I shared.
The aching silence was broken by a big diesel rolling by on the highway. She said above its roar:
“That crazy old bat. So she killed Nick.”
“You’re talking about your mother. Mrs. Nemo.”
“Yeah.”
“Did you see her shoot him?”
“No. I was blotto like I told you. But I saw her out there this week, keeping an eye on the house. She’s always watched me like a hawk.”
“Is that why you were getting out of town? Because you knew she killed Nick?”
“Maybe it was. I don’t know. I wouldn’t let myself think about it.”
Her blue gaze shifted from my face to something behind me. I turned. Mrs. Nemo was in the doorway. She was hugging the straw bag to her thin chest.
Her right hand dove into the bag. I shot her in the right arm. She leaned against the doorframe and held her dangling arm with her left hand. Her face was granite in whose crevices her eyes were like live things caught.
The gun she dropped was a cheap .32 revolver, its nickel plating worn and corroded. I spun the cylinder. One shot had been fired from it.
“This accounts for Harry,” I said. “You didn’t shoot Nick with this gun, not at that distance.”
“No.” She was looking down at her dripping hand. “I used my old police gun on Nick Nemo. After I killed him, I threw the gun into the sea. I didn’t know I’d have further use for a gun. I bought that little suicide gun tonight.”
“To use on Harry?”
“To use on you. I thought you were on to me. I didn’t know until you told me that Harry knew about Nick and Jeannine.”
“Jeannine is your daughter by your first husband?”
“My only daughter.” She said to the girclass="underline" “I did it for you, Jeannine. I’ve seen too much – the awful things that can happen.”
The girl didn’t answer. I said:
“I can understand why you shot Nick. But why did Harry have to die?”
“Nick paid him,” she said. “Nick paid him for Jeannine. I found Harry in a bar an hour ago, and he admitted it. I hope I killed him.”
“You killed him, Mrs. Nemo. What brought you here? Was Jeannine the third on your list?”
“No. No. She’s my own girl. I came to tell her what I did for her. I wanted her to know.”
She looked at the girl on the bed. Her eyes were terrible with pain and love. The girl said in a stunned voice: