He motioned the other two dicks toward the door, and went out after them.
As soon as the door had closed, Billie went over beside Frankie. He was holding his head dejectedly with both hands, even though they were linked. “I’m scared, Sis,” he moaned. “I got a feeling I’ll never be able to get out of this! And I didn’t do it. You gotta believe me!”
“I know you didn’t do it. But that’s why you’ve got to answer me. You’ve got to tell me why you acted so funny this morning, when I caught you behind the bathroom door, hiding up there. You knew about it then, already, didn’t you?”
“Yeah,” he whispered fearfully. “I came down here again after I left the first time. I was full of weed, but my idea was vaguely to wake you up so we could go back to our own flat together. It must have just happened. I thought I saw a shadow duck behind those empty ashcans, at the end of the passage out there. And then when I opened the door, the light was out in here. He was already up there. I didn’t see him, but I stumbled around and went into him face-first. I could feel his legs hanging limp before me. You know how the weed’ll give you the horrors over anything like that. I got ’em bad. I forgot about you being in here. I forgot about calling for help. I only wanted out. I heat it upstairs and hid in that bathtub. That’s all it was, sis, just bad kicks from the weed. But I can’t tell them that. If I tell them, they’ll be surer than ever I did do it. I can’t prove I didn’t, not even to you, but somehow I know it wasn’t me. You see, I wouldn’t have been so scared if I had done it. The mere fact that I was so scared shows I had nothing to do with it. I didn’t turn on any shower. My hair was that wet from my own cold sweat coming out all over me. What am I going to do?”
“You’re pretty badly sewed up,” she admitted worriedly. “And with every move you’ve made, you’ve only made it look worse for yourself. The way you bolted for that door, when he first said murder, and then fainted dead away in the cop’s arms out there.”
“Nerves,” he said. “You don’t know what that weed does to you the day after. And then, knowing that I was the last one down here, and that I’d had that fight with him over you last night when he gave me the black eye—”
The door opened and Lindsey came in again. “Time enough?” he asked the girl. He motioned his assistants. “Take him with you, boys.”
Frankie stumbled to his feet, pale and terrified, as though he were going to be executed instantly. “Pull yourself together, Frankie,” the girl urged. “The truth’ll come out, it’s got to. It looks bad now, but remember it’s always darkest before the dawn.”
Then as the door closed, she turned back to the dick again. “And now it’s you that I’d like to talk to.”
“Shoot,” he consented, eyeing her curiously.
“I know my brother never did that.”
“I do too,” was the unexpected answer.
It took her a half-minute to get her breath back. “What? Well then, why did you have him taken in for it?”
“There are a couple of good reasons. Officially we’ve got a swell circumstantial case against him that I can’t ignore at this stage of the game. I’d be remiss in my duty if I didn’t have him booked for murder, after what’s been brought out. Secondly, it’ll be a good deal easier to catch whoever did do it, if he thinks he’s fooled us, thinks we aren’t still on the look-out for him. He’ll be off his guard this way.”
“How come you’re giving Frankie the benefit of the doubt?”
“Simply my knowledge of human nature. He acted so damned, flagrantly guilty, that he couldn’t be anything but innocent. That may sound paradoxical but it’s true nevertheless. If he’d been guilty, no matter how frightened he was, he’d at least have tried to cover himself up. He didn’t even try. He’s a nervous wreck, his control all shot. That made him do and say the very things he wanted to avoid most. Now was there anything more you wanted to speak to me about?”
“Yes,” she said. “It may be disloyal to Dusty and the boys, it may wash us up as an organization, attach a jinx to us, but I can’t help it. My brother’s life is at stake. Mr. Lindsey, this thing’s happened twice before.”
“What?” His jaw dropped. Then he clamped it decisively shut again. “Let’s hear about it,” he said.
She sat down on the bench, thrust the point of her elbow back on the keyboard. It gave an eery little plink! “You notice not a word was said about it to you. That’s for business reasons. There’s been an unspoken understanding among all of us to soft-pedal it. There’s nothing I hate worse than a stoolie, but I think the time for keeping it quiet is past. It wasn’t written down as murder the first two times, but now that I look back, I think it was. It must have been. The details were too much like today’s. The dicks that investigated were easier to fool, that was all.”
She drew a deep breath. “There’s a murderer among us in the band, and there has been all along. He only strikes at certain unaccountable times.”
He was leaning toward her intently, devouring every word. “Give me everything you can on those first two times it happened. Every little detail that you can remember. Our whole hope of getting the right man, of clearing your brother, may lie in some little detail — repeated three times.”
She contorted her face remorsefully. “If I’d only realized what it was at the time! I don’t think any of us did — except him, of course, whoever he is. It’s so long ago now—”
“Try, try,” he urged, jack-knifing a finger at her chest. “Don’t give up so easily.”
“We all knew each other in school,” she began slowly. “There was Dusty and Armstrong and Frankie and Kershaw — and the two who have gone now — Lynn Deering and Freeman. They were the charter-members. They’d already formed the band in school, helped pay their way by playing at prom dances and things like that. I wasn’t included yet. That was in the early thirties, when crooners were all the rage. This lad Deering used to whisper huskily through a megaphone, and sweet young things would swoon all over the room.
“We all got out of school and went our separate ways, didn’t see each other for about a year and a half. But the depression had hit its full stride just about then, and you can imagine how tough the going was. Then Dusty got in touch with all of us and suggested re-forming the band — professionally this time. Well, we did. That was a little over two and a half years ago. Nothing happened the first six months. Then the summer before last we were playing a resort hotel in Michigan, and we started to hold these jam-sessions down in the basement, just like here. I still wasn’t a member, but I was there with them on account of Frankie being in the band. I was present at the jam-sessions too.
“There was a society girl there that had been carrying the torch heavily for Lynn Deering all summer, and just two days before it happened her old man showed up and hauled her off by the scruff of the neck. Of course that gave them a ready-made motive to slap on — after it had happened. But here’s the thing. I spoke to Lynn about it only the day before, asked him if he felt bad about it, and he told me he was glad to be rid of her, that she’d been a nuisance. And I could see he was telling the truth.
“Anyway, one morning after a session, he was found down there hanging from the rafters. It wasn’t nearly as much of a give-away as you found this one to be. An inquest was held, they handed down a verdict of suicide while of unsound mind, and that was that. The hotel had it hushed up, and the boys took me in to canary in Deering’s place.
“Well, just about a year later, that’s last summer, we were playing the Nautilus Pier at Atlantic City on a season’s contract, and we used to hold our after-work sessions in a little shack across the railroad tracks on Arctic Avenue. One scorching night in August we went over there to hold a session. The heat had gotten Freeman down, he was picking fights with everyone — and there again, you see, they had a plausible motive at hand. There was a rigged-up light-attachment in the shack, just like there is here. I didn’t stay until the end. I got out just before dawn and went over to the Boardwalk to get a breath of air. One by one all the others followed me.”