“Go on,” said Beau hoarsely.
“You were in with this Margo. That’s the way I figure it... Sergeant!” Vi slipped out of the chair and ran from Beau to grab the Sergeant’s beefy arm. From behind him she continued defiantly: “You were Margo’s sidekick. You’d get Kerrie out of the way, the two of you. You and Margo. When your clever attacks didn’t work, you schemed to marry Kerrie and do her out of the money. Then you’d split—”
“I don’t want to hear your poisonous version of it,” growled Beau. “I want to know what Kerrie thinks!”
“And then Margo lost her head and came here last night and was going to squawk that you and she were partners. You were afraid of that, so you followed her and, just before she could blab, you shot her.”
“I said I want to know what Kerrie thinks.”
“She thinks what I think! Only she won’t admit it to me or to herself. There’s one part of her that still believes you’re a right guy. And all the time she’s taking your rap! Don’t you feel proud of yourself?”
Beau drew a deep breath. “Get out of here.”
Vi glared back at him.
Beau began to stalk towards her, and she screeched and retreated completely behind the rampart of the Sergeant’s body.
“Take it easy, son,” rumbled Velie.
“I said scram.”
“You can’t make me!”
“I said scrambo, you forked-tongued copperhead!”
“Kerrie needs me!”
“The way she needs a hole in the head. Are you going to get out of here, or do I have to throw you out?”
He was addressing her over the Sergeant’s shoulder now, in a low and clear voice, completely blind to the mountain of flesh between them.
“Leave you with her?” shrilled Vi hysterically. “So that you can murder her, too?”
“If you were a man,” grunted Beau, “I’d just about break your neck for that.”
“Lay off, I said,” said Velie, and he grabbed Beau’s arm.
They all turned at a clicking sound.
Kerrie was in the bedroom doorway — in her thin nightgown, her hair tumbled about her face, her face as white as the wall.
Beau’s neck turned red. He started to say something. But Kerrie stepped back and slammed the bedroom door. Vi cried out and ran after her. The door slammed again.
Beau started after them.
Sergeant Velie was quicker. He set his broad shoulders against the door. “You’d better take a powder yourself, Beau,” he said mildly.
“I’ve got to talk to Kerrie! I can’t let her think—”
“Isn’t she in a tough enough spot without you making it tougher? Go on home and get some shut-eye. You’ll feel better in the afternoon.”
“But I have to tell her — who I am, Velie! I’ve got to come clean about this name business — I’ve got to clear that crazy idea of hers up — that I’m trying to frame her for a murder she thinks I pulled off—”
“It’s certainly going to convince her,” said Sergeant Velie dryly, “when she hears you’ve been hidin’ under an alias ever since she knows you. That under a phony handle you upped and married her—”
At the word “married” Beau swallowed and stepped back, as if the Sergeant had tried to take a poke at him.
He turned and shambled out without another word.
XVII. Mr. Rummell Becomes Himself Again
When Beau plodded into his apartment he pulled off all his clothes, set the alarm of his ninety-eight cent clock, and threw himself onto the bed.
The alarm went off before noon. He opened his eyes with a groan.
“Sure feels like a hangover,” he muttered. “Only worse.”
He crawled out of bed, danced under a cold shower, shaved, dressed, and went out.
On the corner he stopped in at a cigar store for two packs of cigarets and a nutted chocolate bar. Munching he chocolate, he headed for the subway.
Kerrie awoke from an exhausted sleep just before nine. Vi was tossing and snoring on the other bed.
Kerrie crept out of bed and peeped into the sitting room. Sergeant Velie was gone, but another detective was reading the morning paper in the armchair. When he saw her he quickly hid the headlines. She shivered and closed the door.
When Vi awoke it was noon and Kerrie was fully dressed, seated at one of the bedroom windows staring out into the court, her hands in her lap.
Vi said something, but Kerrie did not reply. The blonde girl yawned, and then made a face, and then joined Kerrie at the window.
“Kerrie!”
Kerrie looked up, surprised. “Oh, you’re up. What?”
“Don’t you see those rubbernecks?”
“What?”
The windows facing their side of the court were densely peopled. Women, men, at least two staring children; and in one window an enterprising reporter was shouting questions across the court as he leaned perilously out.
“I didn’t see them,” said Kerrie indifferently.
Vi yanked down the shade; and after a moment, as if she were just conscious of the reporter’s shouts, Kerrie closed the window, too.
It was a curiously peaceful day. Occasionally the door from the sitting room to the corridor opened and slammed as a detective came in. Men were coming in and out all day. There was some activity in 1726, too; Vi peeped from the window and could see men bustling about in there.
But no one entered the bedroom except a detective; and he came in only because Vi, after trying vainly to rouse the telephone operator, complained that they were starving.
“Okay,” said the detective. “Why didn’t you ask before?”
“Ask!”
“No tickee, no washee.” He went out.
“They’ve cut the line,” said Vi in a scared voice.
Kerrie said nothing.
Fifteen minutes later the detective wheeled a table in which was laden with food. He went out immediately.
“Come on, hon. We may as well stoke up.”
“Yes,” said Kerrie.
She sat down at the table and toyed with a slice of toast. She looked calm enough; only a certain air of abstraction, a deepening of the two lines from her nostrils to the corners of her mouth, pointed to anything unusual inside her.
Vi saw it and said in a small voice: “Kerrie dear, you’ve simply got to eat. You haven’t eaten—”
“I’m not hungry, Vi.”
Kerrie went back to the window.
Vi sighed. She finished her breakfast and, after hesitating, Kerrie’s, too. She took a bath, borrowed fresh underwear and stockings from Kerrie, dressed, and then the two of them sat still, without conversation, all the long afternoon.
By nine o’clock in the evening Vi was ready to scream. Any noise — a cough, a cry, sobbing — would have been relief. But Kerrie just sat with her hands folded in her lap like some female Buddha carved from stone.
And then there was a commotion outside, the noise of many voices, at least one scuffle. Vi jumped up. Even Kerrie turned her head.
The bedroom door opened and Sergeant Velie, accompanied by several strange men, stood there. The Sergeant was carrying a folded paper.
Kerrie rose, pale.
“I’ve got a warrant here,” said the Sergeant in a flat voice, “for the arrest of Kerrie Shawn. Miss Shawn, will you get ready?”
After that, things became confused, like a motion picture run wild. A cameraman managed to pierce the cordon outside, and bulbs began to flash, and detectives shouted, and reporters wormed through, and there was almost a free-for-all. In the tumult Vi got Kerrie into her hat and a light camel’s-hair coat, and Sergeant Velie said Vi couldn’t go along, and Vi clung to Kerrie, weeping, until Kerrie said sharply: “Don’t act like a baby, Vi!” and kissed her goodbye; and after a while Vi found herself almost alone in 1724, in the midst of bulbs and newspapers and articles of Kerrie’s wardrobe, and she sat down on the floor and cried for the benefit of the two female reporters who had remained behind for sinister purposes of their own.