Man Sinister

“Yes,” he said, speaking like a robot. “I asked her to come to my studio, and gave her the address. I didn’t really expect her to do it, but she came. I started the portrait. I suppose she felt she was entering a brand new world. We — kidded around—”

He glanced at Vera, and a slow flush spread over his pallor. He looked at her, at her lovely blonde beauty, the swelling curves of her beautiful young breasts as emotion quickened her breathing, he looked at her slender waist and the smoothly turned thighs under her clinging frock — and he didn’t know what to say, what he could say. Here was beauty and purity, the woman he wanted always to hold in his arms as he must now be remembering to have held her — how could he go on with a sordid story?

Suddenly he blurted, “Must we go into that, Steve? You’re a man — you know how it is, h-how things can happen. I... I—” My silence was his answer, for he drew a long, hard breath and said, “Well, after that I introduced her to some of the people I knew. She was taken with the idea of being a model, and annoyed two or three artists who gave her an opening. All of them knew — they told me — that she was a wild little thing. Completely primitive, she was, but... but she could grip a man. Sex was her whole existence.”

He stopped, his eyes alive with memories. He deliberately avoided looking at Vera now, though I had a feeling from a glance at her face that all this was no new story to her, though there might be something new in the telling.

“And where does McGinty re-enter?” I prompted.

“He fell in love with the girl. Probably it started for him when he found her there on the dock. He worshiped her. He married her.”

“Is that so bad?”

“She was going to have a baby. My baby.”

In the silence that crimped on the room only Harold’s breathing was audible. I managed words after several seconds.

“And then?”

“She must have told McGinty about us — her and me, I mean. She hated me wildly after she had to tell him. She threatened all sorts of crazy things. Her last phone call was a demand that I see her. I went to the apartment where she and McGinty lived. She had worked herself into a half crazed state. I was there alone with her when she jumped — from a tenth story window.”

His voice choked him. After a moment, he was able to go on.

“I’d been careful not to be seen entering the apartment, walking up all ten flights. I was even more careful when I left. McGinty found a cigarette stub in the apartment. She didn’t smoke, and he smoked cigars. His suspicions fastened on me immediately. When he found out the brand of cigarettes I smoked, he was certain I’d been in the apartment. Of course, he took it to the police and they dragged me in. But the cigarette is a common brand and they had no proof that I’d been near the place. McGinty was different. He decided to force it from me — a confession of murder.”

He brought his haggard gaze up. “Steve, I swear it was suicide, but you see the spot I was in? I thought McGinty would cool off. He showed no disposition to do so, making my life hell with phone calls, following me on the streets. If I pulled the police back into it there was too strong a possibility of their discovering I had been in the apartment. Perhaps some pair of unknown eyes had seen me and would remember if circumstances were arranged just the right way. Perhaps they would call it murder. I thought I had shaken loose of McGinty when we drove down from New York, but he was following, and must have been only an hour or so behind us.”

For an instant fire gleamed again in his eyes. “You see what this has cost me? My work, my peace of mind, everything!”

That blow hit Vera the hardest. It hadn’t cost him entirely everything until this moment when he had voiced the thought, reducing her love to nothing.

He said, “I was no more to blame than the girl from the wharf was. And I was wholly blameless for her death. She was destined for suicide. It was a part of the very fibers of her mind. She had tried it once, hadn’t she?” A long silence followed his words. Then he said, “What will you do now to help?”

“I’ll help you face it. It’s the only way you’ll ever get free of McGinty. Papa Joe’s death was a mistake. The poison was intended for me — to insure my silence. Papa Joe killed himself.”

Harold burst out, “He’d never commit suicide?”

“I didn’t say that. He murdered himself. You and Papa Joe believed that you’d murdered a man in the bungalow last night. You two believed that I was the lone witness who would speak, who did in fact state flatly that he would speak. You believed that I relented and removed McGinty for you. That left only Papa Joe to regard me as highly dangerous, desperately dangerous. He was fighting, remember, for his own flesh and blood, his only son, against a man he considered unspeakably inferior, an outsider.