She tossed her blonde hair. “I don’t believe he did. He’s so sweet. So kind.”
I hit her. I pushed my fist into her lying face. She’d meant death for Georgie and Tiny, and she would mean death for me unless I stopped her.
She bounced off a chair and fell to the floor and blood trickled from her mouth. I hadn’t come to hit her but to strangle her. But something beside fear possessed me. Maybe, heaven help me, I was still jealous of Oscar. I swooped down on her and grabbed her by her housecoat and yanked her up to her feet. The housecoat came open. I shook her and her breasts bobbed crazily and I slapped her face until blood poured from her nose as well as her mouth.
Suddenly I let go of her. She sank to the floor, holding her bloody face and moaning. At no time had she screamed. Even while I was beating her, she’d had enough self-possession not to want to bring neighbors in on us. She started to sob.
I’d come to do more to her, to stop her once and for all. But I didn’t. I couldn’t. I looked down at her sobbing at my feet, lying there slim and fair-haired, battered and bleeding, feminine and forlorn, and there was nothing but emptiness left in me.
After all, hadn’t we killed her husband? Not only Oscar, but Georgie and Tiny and I as well were in a community of guilt.
I turned and walked out of the apartment. I kept walking to the brownstone house, and there in the room Stella and I shared a couple of plainclothes men were waiting for me.
They grabbed me, and Stella rose from a chair and flung herself at me.
“Honey, are you in trouble?”
I said dully, “Not much with the cops,” and went with them.
For the rest of that night they sweated me in the station house. No doubt they had Oscar there too, but we didn’t see each other. They kept us apart.
Sometimes Brant was there, sucking his pipe as he watched the regular cops give me the business. There was no more fooling around. They still had questions about Wally and about Georgie, but mostly they wanted to know about the murder of my pal Tiny.
Once, exhausted by their nagging, I sneered at them like a defiant low-grade mug, “You’ll never get us.”
Brant stepped forward and took his pipe out of his mouth. “Maybe we won’t get you,” he said gently, “but somebody else is doing it. Three of you already.”
After that I stopped sneering. I stopped saying anything. And by morning they let me go.
Before I left, I asked a question. I was told Oscar had been released a couple of hours before.
I made my way home and Stella was waiting and I reached for her.
But there was no rest for my weariness against her cuddly body. She told me Oscar had been here looking for me with a gun.
“When was this?”
“Half an hour ago,” she said. “He looked like a wild man. I’d never seen him like that. He was waving a gun. He said you’d beaten up Abby and he was going to kill you. Honey, did you really beat her up?”
I had taken my jacket off. I put it on.
Stella watched me wide-eyed. “If you’re running away, take me with you.”
“I’m not running,” I said.
“But you can’t stay. He said he’d be back.”
“Did he?” I said hollowly.
I got my gun from where I’d stashed it and checked the magazine and stuck the gun into my jacket pocket.
She ran to me. “What are you going to do? What’s going on? Why don’t you tell me anything?”
I said, “I don’t want to die,” and pushed her away from me.
I went only as far as the top of the stoop and waited there, leaning against the side of the doorway. I could watch both directions of the cheerful sun-washed street, and it wasn’t long before Oscar appeared.
He looked worse than he had yesterday afternoon. His unshaven face was like a skeleton head. There was a scarecrow limpness about his lean body. All that seemed to keep him going was his urge to kill me.
Maybe if I were living with Abby, had her to love and to hold, I wouldn’t give a damn what suspicions I had about her and what facts there were to back them up. I’d deny anything but my need for her body, and I’d be gunning for whoever had marred that lovely face.
I knew there was no use talking to him. I had seen Oscar Trotter in action before, and I knew there was only one thing that would stop him.
I walked down the steps with my right hand in my pocket. Oscar had both hands in his pockets. He didn’t check his stride. He said, “Johnny, I—”
I wasn’t listening to him. I was watching his right hand. When it came out of his pocket, so did mine. I shot him.
And now we are all dead.
There were five of us on that caper. Four are in their graves. I still have the breath of life in me, but the difference between me and the other four is only a matter of two days, when I will be burned in the chair.
It was a short trial. A dozen witnesses had seen me stand in the morning sunlight and shoot down Oscar Trotter. I couldn’t even plead self-defense because he’d had no gun on him. And telling the truth as I knew it wouldn’t have changed anything. The day after the trial began the jury found me guilty.
I sent for Stella. I didn’t expect her to come, but she did. Yesterday afternoon she was brought here to the death house to see me.
She didn’t jiggle. Something had happened to her – to her figure, to her face. Something seemed to have eaten away at her.
“Congratulations,” I said.
Stella’s voice had changed too. It was terribly tired. “Then you’ve guessed,” she said.
“I’ve had plenty of time to think about it. Oscar didn’t have a gun on him. I know now what he was about to do when he took his hand out of his pocket. He was going to offer me his hand. He had started to say, ‘Johnny, I made a mistake.’ Something like that. Because he still had a brain. When he’d learned that Tiny had been knifed in bed, he’d realized I’d been right about Abby. But the irony is that I hadn’t been right. I’d been dead wrong.”
“Yes, Johnny, you were wrong,” she said listlessly.
“At the end you got yourself two birds with one stone. You told me a lie about Oscar gunning for me, and it turned out the way you hoped. I killed him and the state will kill me. I’ve had plenty of time to think back – how that night at Oscar’s, as soon as we arrived you hurried into the kitchen to give Abby a hand. Why so friendly so quickly with Abby who’d taken your man from you? I saw why. You’d gone into the kitchen to put arsenic in the chopped liver.”
“You can’t prove it, Johnny,” she whispered.
“No. And it wouldn’t save me. Well, I had my answer why you were so eager to take up with me the minute Oscar was through with you. You had to hang around his circle of friends, and you had to bide your time to work the killings so you wouldn’t be suspected. You succeeded perfectly, Stella. One thing took me a long time to understand, and that was why.”
“Wally,” she said.
I nodded. “It had to be. If you’d hated Oscar for throwing you over for Abby, you mightn’t have cared if you killed the others at that party as long as you got those two. But there was Tiny’s death – cold, deliberate, personal murder. The motive was the same as I’d thought was Abby’s. The same master plan – those who’d been in on Wally’s death must die. And so it had to be you and Wally.”
Stella moved closer to me. Her pretty face was taut with intensity.
“I loved him,” she said. “That wife of his, that Abby – she was a no-good louse. First time I ever saw her was when she came up to the apartment to see Oscar, but I knew all about her. From Wally. That marriage was a joke. You wouldn’t believe this – you were crazy over her yourself, like Oscar was – but she was after anything wore pants. That was all she gave a damn for, except maybe money.”