So close, and yet so out of reach. A minute sooner and they would have been on it. She made a little whimpering noise in her throat, then choked it down. She didn’t ask him what they were to do, nor he her; instead he went ahead and did it.
He wouldn’t give up. He sent the lighter, more maneuverable thing that they were in winging after it. They gained, they closed, they caught up. It slowed ponderously as it neared Tenth to make its turn for the tunnel approaches, and they coasted deftly up alongside of it. A friendly red light did the rest, stopping the big and the little alike with overawing impartiality.
It came to a shuddering elephantine stop, and they to a skittish grasshopper-like one.
They were already out and on the ground before it had quite finished, and pounding pleadingly on the glass inset of its pneumatically-controlled door. And she, at any rate, bobbing up and down in frenzied supplication.
“Open up, let us in! Take us with you! We’re going your way! Ah, let us in! Don’t leave us here, don’t make us stay behind— Show him the money, Quinn; quick, take it out—”
The driver shook his head and scowled and swore at them in pantomime through the glass. And the red light lasted and lasted, and he couldn’t shove off, had to sit there looking at their agonized faces. Anyone with a heart would have had to give in. And he evidently had some such thing inside him that he used to pump his blood with. He gave them a final black look, and he glanced around to see if anyone was noticing, and then he grudgingly pulled the control lever and the door swung hissingly open.
“Why don’t chuz get on where you’re supposed to?” he bellowed. “Whaddya think this is, a crosstown trolley stopping at every corner?” And things like that that drivers say when they’re afraid of being thought soft-hearted.
She went reeling down the aisle, found a vacant double near the back. A moment later Quinn had dropped down beside her, their borrowed car jockeyed over to the curb and left behind, their tickets jealously clutched in his hand. Tickets for all the way, tickets for home.
The bus got started again.
They were well out in the Jersey meadows, the tunnel behind them, New York behind them, before she’d gotten enough breath back to talk at all.
“Quinn,” she said in an undertone, so she wouldn’t be overheard by those around them, “I wonder if we’ll be able to make it stick? What we did back there just now. Do you think those two will be able to talk their way out of it? After all, we won’t be there to give our side of it.”
“We won’t have to. There’ll be others who can put the finger on them so effectively they’ll never be able to wriggle out of it.”
“Others? You mean there are witnesses?”
“Not witnesses to the murder. No one saw that. But there’s one member of his own family, in particular, whose testimony will be enough to convict them.”
“How do you know?”
“There’s a letter from the younger brother, Roger, back there in Graves’ desk, where I told them to look for it. The one I told you was away at college somewhere. It was sent special delivery, he must have gotten it sometime yesterday. I came across it while I was waiting for you to show up. In it the kid tried to tip off the elder Graves, so he wouldn’t come across if the Bristol woman tried to put her hooks into him.”
“How’d he know?”
“He was married to her.”
She held her lips parted for a moment. “Then that explains what had us so stumped in that note from her to Graves. ‘You don’t know me, but I feel like a member of the family.’ ”
“That’s it. One of these undergraduate gin-marriages. Only it wasn’t even a real one at that; it was spiked, phony. She still has a husband at large somewhere, so in order to steer clear of a bigamy rap, she went through a mock ceremony with him. It’s the dirtiest thing I’ve heard of in years.”
“How’d he come to get tangled up with such a bum?”
“She was entertaining at a roadhouse near his college, and he used to go there Saturday nights with his pals, that’s how he first met her. He’s just a kid, what do you expect? The kid fell for her, the kid got high, and the kid proposed marriage. She and this former vaudeville partner of hers looked him up, and they found out he came from a prominent family and meant dough. That made it different. So they rigged this thing up and they took him.”
“But that’s pure corn, that goes back to about 1900.”
“They got away with it. Sometimes the oldest things work the best. Just listen to this. The partner used to do a vaudeville act in which he impersonated a rube justice of the peace. So all he did was do the act over again, for the kid’s benefit, and the kid believed he was really married to her. He planted himself somewhere nearby, she and the kid drove out with their witnesses one Saturday night, and a counterfeit ceremony was performed. I suppose the gin helped a lot.”
“And you mean he didn’t tumble—?”
