She had given Bricky the chance herself. The chance to find whatever there was to find, if there was anything. It was only good for thirty seconds. For the space of time it would take to receive a whispered instruction in there on how to proceed. And it wouldn’t occur again. Almost before the knob had fallen still in the door behind her, she was up out of the chair. She only had time to go for one thing. She made it the open handbag atop the dresser. It was the obvious place. More than that, it was the only accessible one, within the limitations of time and space granted her. The bureau-drawers were presumably empty, their position implied that. The Gladstone bag was presumably locked already, its fullness indicated that.
She darted across the intervening room-space, aimed her hand at the gaping bag, plunged it in. Outright evidence she knew she couldn’t expect. That would have been asking too much. But something, anything at all. And there was nothing. Lipstick, powder-compact, the usual junk. Paper crackled against her viciously probing fingers from one of the side pockets. She drew it hastily out, flung it open, raced her eyes over it. Still nothing. An unpaid hotel-bill for $17.89, from this place they were in. A man would have left it there. Of what value was it? It had no connection with what she was here after.
And yet some inexplicable instinct cried out to her: “Hang onto it. It might come in handy.” She flung herself back into her original seat again, did something to one of her stockings, and it was gone.
An instant later the door reopened and the Bristol woman came out again, her instructions set. She sat down, fixed Bricky with her eyes, evidently to keep her attention from wandering.
“What’d you do, go up there to Graves’ place alone? Or’d you have somebody with you?”
Bricky gave her the knowing look of someone who is over seventeen. “Sure. You don’t suppose I take my grandmother along at times like that, do you?”
Her interlocutor got what she’d wanted her to out of it. “Oh, times like that, that’s it.”
“That’s it.”
“Well, uh—” She nibbled some more at her lip-rouge. “Somebody stop you at the door and tell you, that how you found out? Were there cops outside, people hanging around, lots of excitement, that how you knew he was dead?”
Bricky was answering these questions on instinct alone. Until they came out, she didn’t know herself how they were going to come. It was like walking a tight-rope — without a balancing pole and with no net under you.
“No, no one was around. No one knew it yet. Think I’d have walked in? I was the first one found him, I guess. See, I had a key to the house; he’d given it to me. I went in and all the lights were out. I thought maybe he hadn’t got home yet, so I’d wait for him. I went up, and there he was, plugged.”
Joan Bristol kneaded her hands together with feverish interest in the recital. “So then what’d you do? I suppose right away you beat it out and hollered blue murder, brought them all down on the place.”
The demi-mondaine sitting in Bricky’s chair gave her another of those worldly-wise looks. “What d’you think I am, sappy? I beat it out all right, and fast, but I kept the soft-pedal on. I put out the lights and locked up the door after me, and left the place just the way I found it. Sister, I didn’t breathe a word. Think I wanted to get mixed up in it? That’s all I need, yet.”
“And how long ago was it you were up there?”
“Just now.”
“Then I guess nobody knows yet but you—”
“You and me.”
She had a slight sense of motion taking place behind her. The air may have stirred a little. Or something may have creaked.
“Did you come down here alone?”
“Sure. Everything I do, I do alone. Who’ve I got?”
The mirror on the dresser, aslant toward her, showed her the hinged end of the door behind her slowly bending outward. The surface of the glass wasn’t wide enough to encompass the other end, the actively-turning end, show her that.
She didn’t have time to turn her head. She only had time to think: The door has opened behind me. There’s somebody about to— That shows they did it. I’ve hit the jackpot. My trail was the hot one, Quinn’s the cold.
That knowledge wasn’t going to do her any good now. She’d asked for it, and she was about to get it.
Bristol asked her one more question; more to hold her off-guard a split moment longer, than because she needed to have it answered any more. “And how’d you come to tie me up in it? Where does your coming around here figure in?”
There was no need for her to worry about the answer; none was expected. Two and two had already been put together quite successfully without her further aid.
