“I deserve to die,” she repeated. “Don’t I, Gordon?”
He flushed up darkly. “Leave me out of this.”
“But you said–”
“I said nothing of the sort.” .
“You’re lying, Gordon,” she chided him. Perhaps there was an undertone of malice in her voice. “You told me after all my crimes that I deserved to die. And you were right. I lost your good money gambling and went with another man and now on top of it all I’m a murderer.”
Sable appealed to Howelclass="underline" “Can’t we put an end to this? My wife is ill and hurt. It’s inconceivable that you should let her be questioned. This man isn’t even a policeman–”
“I’ll take the responsibility for what I do,” I said. “Mrs. Sable, do you remember stabbing Peter Culligan?”
She raised one hand to her forehead, pushing back her hair as if it got in the way of her thoughts. “I don’t remember exactly, but I must have.”
“Why do you say you must have, if you don’t remember?”
“Gordon saw me.”
I looked at Sable. He wouldn’t look at me. He stood against the wall, trying to merge with the wall.
“Gordon wasn’t here,” I said. “He was at Mrs. Galton’s house when you telephoned.”
“But he came. He came right over. Peter was lying there on the grass for a long time. He was making a funny noise, it sounded like snoring. I unbuttoned the top of his shirt to help him breathe.”
“You remember all this, but you don’t remember stabbing him?”
“I must have blanked out on that part. I’m always blanking out on things, ask Gordon.”
“I’m asking you, Mrs. Sable.”
“Let me think. I remember, I slid my hand down under his shirt, to see if his heart was beating properly. I could feel it there thumping and jumping. You’d think it was a little animal trying to get out. The hair on his chest was scratchy, like wire.”
Sable made a noise in his throat.
“What did you do then?” I said.
“I – nothing. I just sat for a while and looked at him and his poor old beatup face. I put my arms around him and tried to coax him awake. But he went on snoring at me. He was still snoring when Gordon got there. Gordon was angry, catching me with him like that. I ran into the house. But I watched from the window.”
Suddenly her face was incandescent. “I didn’t kill him. It wasn’t me out there. It was Gordon, and I watched him from the window. He picked up Peter’s knife and pushed it into his stomach.” Her clenched hand repeated its downward gesture, striking her own soft abdomen. “The blood spurted out and ran red on the grass. It was all red and green.”
Sable thrust his head forward. The rest of his body, even his arms and hands, remained stuck to the walclass="underline"
“You can’t believe her. She’s hallucinating again.”
His wife seemed not to hear him. Perhaps she was tuned to a higher frequency, singing like salvation in her head. Tears streamed from her eyes:
“I didn’t kill him.”
“Hush now.” Howell quieted her face against his shoulder.
“This is the truth, isn’t it?” I said.
“It must be. I’m certain of it. Those self-accusations of hers were fantasy after all. This account is much more circumstantial. I’d say she’s taken a long step toward reality.”
“She’s crazier than she ever was,” Sable said. “If you think you can use this against me, you’re crazier than she is. Don’t forget I’m a lawyer–”
“Is that what you are – a lawyer?” Howell turned his back on Sable and spoke to his wife: “Come on, Alice, we’ll put a bandage on that cut and you can get some clothes on. Then we’ll take a little ride, back to the nice place with the other ladies.”
“It isn’t a nice place,” she said.
Howell smiled down at her. “That’s the spirit. Keep saying what you really think and know, and we’ll get you out of there to stay. But not for a while yet, eh?”
“Not for a while yet.”
Holding her with one arm, Howell stretched out his other hand to Sable. “The key to your wife’s room. You won’t be needing it.”
Sable produced a flat brass key which Howell accepted from him without a word. The doctor walked Alice Sable down the hallway toward the court.
Chapter 30
GORDON SABLE watched them go with something approaching relief. The bright expectancy had left his eyes. He had had it.
“I wouldn’t have done it,” he said, “if I’d known what I know now. There are factors you don’t foresee – the factor of human change, for example. You think you can handle anything, that you can go on forever. But your strength wears away under pressure. A few days, or a few weeks, and everything looks different. Nothing seems worth struggling for. It all goes blah.” He made a loose bumbling sound with his lips: “All gone to bloody blah. So here we are.”
“Why did you kill him?”
“You heard her. When I got back here she was crying and moaning over him, trying to wake him up with kisses. It made me sick to death.”
“Don’t tell me it was a sudden crime of passion. You must have known about them long before.”
“I don’t deny that.” Sable shifted his stance, as if to prepare himself for a shift in his story. “Culligan picked her up in Reno last summer. She went there to divorce me, but she ended up on a gambling spree with Culligan egging her on. No doubt he collected commissions on the money she lost. She lost a great deal, all the ready money I could raise. When it was gone, and her credit was exhausted, he let her share his apartment for a while. I had to go there and beg her to come home with me. She didn’t want to come. I had to pay him to send her away.”
I didn’t doubt the truth of what he was saying. No man would invent such a story against himself. It was Sable who didn’t seem to believe his own words. They fell weightlessly from his mouth, like a memorized report of an accident he didn’t understand, which had happened to people in a foreign country:
“I never felt quite the same about myself after that. Neither of us did. We lived in this house I’d built for her as if there were always a glass partition between us. We could see each other, but we couldn’t really speak. We had to act out our feelings like clowns, or apes in separate cages. Alice’s gestures became queerer, and no doubt mine did, too. The things we acted out got uglier. She would throw herself on the floor and strike herself with her fist until her face was bruised and swollen. And I would laugh at her and call her names.
“We did such things to each other,” he said. “I think we were both glad, in a strange way, when Culligan turned up here in the course of the winter. Anthony Galton’s bones had been unearthed, and Culligan had read about it in the papers. He knew who they belonged to, and came to me with the information.”
“How did he happen to pick you?”
“It’s a good question. I’ve often asked myself that good question. Alice had told him that I was Mrs. Galton’s lawyer, of course. It may have been the source of his interest in her. He knew that her gambling losses had put me in financial straits. He needed expert help with the plan he had; he wasn’t clever enough to execute it alone. He was just clever enough to realize that I was infinitely cleverer.”
And he knew other things about you, I thought. You were a loveless man who could be bent and finally twisted.
“How did Schwartz get in on the deal?”
“Otto Schwartz? He wasn’t in on it.” Sable seemed offended by the notion. “His only connection with it was the fact that Alice owed him sixty thousand dollars. Schwartz had been pressing for payment, and it finally reached the point where he was threatening both of us with a beating. I had to raise money somehow. I was desperate. I didn’t know which way to turn.”