Into the Night

But he didn’t. “Shiller the investment broker? We know all about him. We questioned him right at the very beginning and we released him on his own recognizance. He had a complete and perfect alibi. He was host to a dinner party of forty celebrating his wife’s birthday at one of the swellest restaurants in town. Every society photographer on the beat there snapping him.”

“But... but—” she sputtered.

“D’Angelo’s the wrong man?” he queried with a grin.

“He is. He’s got to be,” she cried vehemently.

He gave her not only the old one-two but a one-two-three-four. Left, right, right, left, leaving her groggy and down for the count. “Then what are the strokes from her nails doing on the backs of both his hands, and on his lower forearms?

“Why do the particles of skin embedded under her fingernails match up by lab analysis with samples taken from his?

“Why did he call us up, voluntarily, wait for us at a certain place, namely his home, voluntarily, give himself up to us when we got there, voluntarily, and accompany us back to headquarters, voluntarily?

“And lastly and mostly and mainly, why did he dictate and sign, unforced and of his own free will, a full confession?

“That he killed her, not because he hated her, but because he loved her. Loved her too much to be able to go on living with his own jealousy. Above all, loved her too much to be able to go on living without her after he had killed her.

“D’ja ever read Othello? That’s it, in today’s world.

“He might have had a hundred cheap little loves in his gangster days, but the real thing only hit him at last late in his life, real enough to live for, real enough to die for.”

He sighed, almost as though he understood a thing like that, and how could he, how could anyone except the one who did the loving, lived the loving? Loved what was crass brass to others, loved it as precious imperishable gold.

The mystery of the human heart, that no detective can ever solve.

She sank down dazedly into the nearest chair at hand, still only half comprehending, and the title of the song she had seen on Dell’s piano passed through her mind like a faraway echo. “Heaven Drops Its Curtain Down upon My Heart.”

As she reentered her hotel and walked past the desk, the clerk greeted her and held out a letter toward her. She took it and stared at it with that momentary feeling of unreality which is apt to overcome anyone when they are confronted by their own handwriting. It was addressed: “Walter Shiller Esq., Warren, Shiller, Davis and Norton.” In the upper right-hand corner there was a small glossy patch where the stamp, possibly dried out by too long a confinement in the vending machine, had loosened and dropped off. Beside the glossy patch, a petulant magenta-ink post office rubber stamp chided: “Returned for failure to pay postage.”

“It came back several days ago,” the clerk apologized. “I called up to ask you if you wanted us to put a stamp on it and remail it for you, but you were out. I guess I put it in your box and forgot about it. We’ve been very busy the last few days—”

He stopped short and stared, as she pressed the envelope to her lips, passionately, voraciously, over and over, like a love note from a lover, like a refund from the Internal Revenue Service.

“I thought you wanted it to go,” he remarked uncertainly.

“So did I,” she said. “So did I. Oh, how wrong can you be?”

“Miss Chalmers, please,” he protested mournfully as she tore it into a hundred little pieces and scattered it all about her, “think of the poor porter who has to clean up here later on.”

Upstairs at her desk afterward, she took out the cheap little pocket notebook with the line-ruled pages, and where it said,

1. To get even with a woman.

ran a line through it.

Somebody else really did the job, not I, though, was her inescapable reflection.

“And now to kill a man.”

How simple the words were. How easy to say, or think. And yet how frightful, how fearsome, to put into effect, to carry out. And once carried out, how impossible ever again to undo, to restore as it was before.

To turn someone like that — she let her gaze slowly travel around the hotel dining room, encompassing it and taking in each man in it in turn, but only the men (for it was a man who was to die, not a woman. Though women died too, they were no different):

One was smiling at the girl in front of him, interestedly drinking in her quick flow of words, nodding approvingly, admiringly, eyes glued to her unswervingly in the first head-on impact of youthful love.

One was looking at his watch as her eyes passed over him and telling the other three people at the table (probably) that it was time to start for the theater.

One was sitting alone, but quite complacently, an empty stemglass with a tiny white onion in it before him, thinking of something that pleased him very much, judging by the almost fatuous expression on his face.