“If Martin Crandell arrives while I am in the library,” Neva said, “show him into the living room to wait. Meanwhile, I will do what must be done. Wish me luck, Clara.”
“I wish you luck,” Clara said.
Neva walked down the hall to the library door. She paused for a moment outside, a hand on the knob, her head slightly bowed in an attitude of listening, and then she turned the knob and opened the door and slipped into the room, closing the door quietly behind her. Silence. In the silence, nothing moved. There was the massive leather chair, and there in the chair was Dwight. His head had fallen forward until his chin touched his chest. His glasses had ridden down the bridge of his nose and clung precariously to the tip. In his lap, still held open by a hand that rested flat on the pages across the fold, was the thick volume he had been reading before he fell asleep. The pages, Neva noticed with a sharpened awareness of details, had very fine print and wide margins and the faded, brittle look of age. She watched and listened. She could detect the merest movement of his chest, the shallow pumping of his lungs, and after a moment she could hear, hardly more audible than a drift of smoke, the whisper of his breath between his lips, closer to death than to life.
Hurry. Hurry now. But hurry, remember, with caution.
She knew from experience that Dwight in his naps slept lightly in the dim twilight just below the surface of consciousness, and so, although the pile of the carpet was thick beneath her feet, she stooped over, standing first on one leg and then the other, and removed her shoes. Leaving the shoes by the door, she walked swiftly and directly, without discernible sound, to Dwight’s desk beside the draped windows a little beyond and behind the chair in which he slept. She opened the top drawer to the right of the kneehole, and there was the revolver, just as she expected, where Dwight had always kept it.
She knew, on the whole, very little about revolvers, and she had no notion of the caliber of this one, but she knew that Dwight kept it loaded, even though she had never known him to fire it, because it gave him, apparently, a sense of security. Taking it from the drawer, she made sure the bullets were in place, and then, quiet as a kitten in her stocking feet, she turned and walked to Dwight’s chair and around it from the rear and knelt on one knee on the floor at his right side. He did not move. She could hear clearly now the sibilant sound of his shallow breathing. Holding the revolver so that it just touched the fabric of his jacket, the snub barrel angled slightly up between a pair of ribs, she shot him in the heart.
She stood up and stepped back and watched him die. Afterward, swiftly again, she dropped the revolver and grasped him by the legs between the ankles and the knees and hauled him out of his chair onto the floor and across the floor to a position approximately midway between the chair and the desk. She returned to the chair and picked up the revolver. Lacking a handkerchief, she held the revolver in a fold of her skirt and scrubbed it clean of fingerprints. Still holding the revolver in the fold of her skirt, her skirt raised to her waist, she went back to the body and released the revolver to let it fall onto the floor near the right hand. On her knees, carefully, she took the hand and wrapped the fingers around the butt of the revolver, drawing them off afterward across the butt so as to smudge the prints slightly. Then, standing, with the toe tips of one foot she nudged the revolver away from the body into a position where, being dropped, it might have naturally fallen.
There. It was done. The worst was done. Standing there beside Dwight’s body, her eyes closed and lowered in anomalous effect of obscene prayer, she suffered, in the brief suspension of action between what had been accomplished and what remained to be done, a quite genuine feeling of regret. She had killed in exigency without compunction but not without pity, and she would have preferred it otherwise. She would have chosen, if she could, to have him live out his days in his own way, dull and oppressive to her as his way had been, and to see him die in his bed in his own good time, which would not have been, at the longest, very long. But never mind. She had no choice. Or she had been forced, rather, to a choice she would not willingly have made. Now there was more to do, and little enough time, surely, to do it.
Methodically, in the immediate area surrounding the body, she began to create signs of a struggle. She overturned a table lamp. She pushed askew the table on which it had sat. She swept a brass ashtray onto the floor. She was careful not to overdo the scene. Dwight, attacked, could have managed no more than token resistance.
The scene set, she went to the drapes and parted them and unlocked a sliding glass door that opened onto a terrace outside. She opened the door a couple of feet and left it open, permitting the drapes to close again across it. Her fingerprints were of no concern. Her own would be expected, and it would be assumed that anyone fleeing this way in guilt would take sufficient care to leave none. From the door to the terrace, she crossed directly to the door to the hall. She looked at her watch. It was three minutes until nine. It had taken her about ten minutes to murder her husband and to accomplish the other necessary things. She picked, up her shoes and put them on, standing, as before, first on one foot and then the other. Opening the door, she went put and: walked down the hall to the living room. Clara was waiting there, standing just inside the entrance, her eyes shining, her lips slightly parted, her breasts rising and falling, in a measured cadence of leashed excitement.
“Is it done?” she said.
“Yes, it’s done.”
“Is it all right?”
“Yes, it’s all right.”
Neva poured brandy into her goblet and sat down. The doorbell rang, and Clara; went to answer it. Neva could hear Clara’s voice, and the voice of a man, in the hall. She finished her brandy and set aside her glass.
Martin Crandell came into the room. He was a fairly tall man, just over six feet, with the carefully preserved and tended body of a perennial beach boy prepared to go regularly on display in next to nothing. Now he was wearing a conservative gray suit with a white shirt and maroon tie and burnished black shoes. His shoulders were broad, his waist and hips narrow. His hair was pale blond, brushed smoothly across a narrow skull, and his eyes were a faded blue, restless in their sockets, probing always for secrets. He crossed the room to Neva with a kind of subdued grace, his legs swinging easily, his arms and torso hardly moving.
“Darling,” he said, “how are you?”
“Don’t call me that,” she said.
“Oh. Sorry. I forgot for a moment that things have changed between us. Neva, then, if you prefer.”
“I prefer Mrs. Durward.”
“Well, let it go. I see that this visit is to be strictly business. Fair enough. That being so, are you prepared to settle our little affair?”
“That depends. In what way?”
“Is there more than one way? To put it crassly, do you have the money? Fifty thousand dollars, I believe, was the amount agreed upon.”
She stood up and moved away from him, and then, as if suddenly changing her mind, turned back to face him squarely.
“No,” she said, “I don’t have it.”
“That’s too bad. And not quite honest, if you don’t mind my saying so. When you called and asked me to see you here, you assured me that you would have the money. Could I possibly have come on the wrong night?”
“No. It’s the right night.”
“At the wrong time? You did nine o’clock sharp, didn’t you?”