Her breast rose and fell irregularly. Like any pretty woman with mussed hair, blood on her face, she had a waiflike appeal, which the steady gun destroyed. I thought of Speed, and saw how easy it was to wilt in a gun’s shadow. Though I had faced them before, single and multiple, each time was a fresh new experience. And a single gun in the hands of a woman like Galley was the most dangerous weapon. Only the female sex was human in her eyes, and she was its only really important member.
“What truth?” I said. “You’ve changed your story so often I doubt if you know what really happened.”
“Don’t you believe me?” Her face seemed to narrow and lengthen. I had never seen her look ugly before. An ugly woman with a gun is a terrible thing.
“I believe you partly. No doubt you shot Dalling. The circumstances sound a bit artificial.”
The blood from her cut cheek wriggled like a black worm at the corner of her mouth. “The police will believe me, if you’re not there to deny it. I can turn Gary round my little finger.” It was a forlorn boast.
“You’re losing your looks,” I said.
“Murders take it out of a woman. You pay so much for them that they’re never the bargain they seem to be.” I heard a noise from the back of the house, and was talking to cover it. It sounded like a drunk man floundering in the dark.
She glanced at the gun in her hands and back to my face, imagining the flight of the bullet. I saw her knuckles tense around the butt.
And I leaned forward a little without rising, shifting my weight to the balls of my feet, still talking: “If you shoot me, I’ll get to you before I die, I promise. You’ll have no looks left, even if you survive. Even if you survive, the police will finish the job. You’re vulnerable as hell.” The back door creaked. “Vulnerable as hell,” I repeated loudly. “Two murders, or three, already, and more coming up. You can’t kill everybody. We’re too many for one crazy girl with a gun.”
The floundering footsteps moved on the kitchen floor. She heard them. Her eyes shifted from me to the door on her right, came back to me before I could stir. She stepped sideways out of the chair, retreating with her back to the window, so that her gun commanded my side of the room and the kitchen doorway.
Mario came into the doorway and leaned there for an instant with one raised hand gripping the frame. His chin had been smashed by something heavier than a fist. Blood coursed down his neck into the black hair that curled over his open shirt-collar. There was death in his face. I wasn’t sure he could see until he advanced on Galley. His smashed mouth blew a bubble in which the room hung upside down, tiny and blood-colored.
She yelped once like a dog and fired point-blank. The slug spun Mario on his heels and flung him bodily against the wall. He pushed himself away from the wall with his hands and turned to face her. She fired again, the black gun jumping like a toad. Still her white hands held it firm, and her white devoted face was watching us both.
Mario doubled forward and sank to his knees. The indestructible man crawled toward the woman, leaking blood like black oil on her rug. Her third shot drilled the bandaged top of his head, and finished Mario. Still she was not content. Standing over him, she pumped three bullets into his back as fast as she could fire.
I counted them, and when the gun was empty I took it away from her. She didn’t resist.
Chapter 35
When I set the telephone down, she was sitting in the chair I had pushed her into, her closed eyelids tremorless as carved ivory, her passionate mouth closed and still. From where I stood on the other side of the room, she seemed tiny and strange like a figurine, or an actress sitting on a distant stage. Mario lay face down between us.
A shudder ran thrugh her body and her eyes came open. “I’m glad I didn’t kill you, Archer. I didn’t want to kill you, honestly.” Her voice had the inhuman quality of an echo.
“That was nice of you.” I stepped over the prone body and sat down facing her. “You didn’t want to kill Mario, either. Like Dalling, you killed him in self-defense.” I sounded strange to myself. The fear of death had made a cold lump in my throat which I was still trying to swallow.
“You’re a witness to that. He attacked me with a deadly weapon.” She glanced at the metal knuckles on the dead man’s fist, and touched her cheek. “He struck me with it.”
“When?”
“In the garage a few minutes ago.”
“How did you get there?”
“He came into George’s Cafe and forced me to leave with him. I had no gun. He’d got the idea that I knew where his brother had left the money. I knew there was a gun out here, in the garage where Joe had hidden it. I told Mario the money was here, and he made me drive him out.” Her voice was clear and steady, though the words came out with difficulty. “He was almost crazy, threatening to kill me, with that awful thing on his hand. I got hold of Joe’s gun and shot him with it, once. I thought he was dead. I managed to get into the house before I fainted.” She sighed. With the emotional versatility of a good actress, she was slipping back into the brave-little-woman role that had taken me in before, and wouldn’t again.
“You might get by with a self-defense plea if you’d only killed one man. Two in a week is too many. Three is mass murder.”
“Three?”
“Dalling and Mario and Joe.”
“I didn’t kill Joe. How could I? I can’t even swim.”
“You’re a good liar, Galley. You have the art of mixing fact with fantasy, and it’s kept you going for a week. But you’ve run out of lies now.”
“I didn’t kill him,” she repeated. Her body was stiff in the chair, her hands clenched tight on the arms. “Why should I kill my own husband?”
“Spare me the little-wife routine. It worked for a while, I admit. You had me and the cops convinced that you were shielding Joe. Now it turns my stomach. You had plenty of reasons to kill him, including thirty thousand dollars. It must have looked like a lot of money after years of nurse’s work on nurse’s pay. You probably married Joe with the sole intention of killing him as soon as he was loaded.”
“What kind of a woman do you think I am?” Her face had lost its impassivity and was groping for an expression that might move me.
I touched the dead man with the toe of my shoe. “I just saw you pump six .45 slugs into a man who was dying on his feet. Does that answer your question?”
“I had to. I was terrified.”
“Yeah. You have the delicate sensitivity of a frightened rattlesnake, and you react like one. You killed Mario because he figured out that you murdered his brother. Joe probably warned him about you.”
“You’d have a hard time proving that.” Her eyes were like black charred holes in her white mask.
“I don’t have to. Wait until the police lab men have a look at the deep-freeze unit in your kitchen.”
“How–?” Her mouth closed tight, an instant too late. She had confirmed my guess.
“Go on. How did I know that you kept Joe in cold storage for three days?”
“I’m not talking.”
“I didn’t know it until now. Not for certain. It clears up a lot of things.”
“You’re talking nonsense again. Do I have to listen to you?”
“Until the sheriffs car gets here from Palm Springs, yes. There’s a lot of truth to be told, after all the lies, and if you won’t tell it I will. It might give you a little insight into yourself.”
“What do you think you are, a psychoanalyst?”
“Thank God I’m not yours. I wouldn’t want to have to explain what made you do what you did. Unless you were in love with Herman Speed?”