basement garage. “You go on up,” I said, “so if anybody recognizes me we won’t be together.” I waited five minutes. When I went around to the front door and pressed the buzzer she let me in. I met no one in the corridors. I tapped lightly on the apartment door and she opened it.
She had tossed the fur coat in the bedroom and was wearing a skirt and sweater outfit. The living room and her study were littered with books, notebooks, spread-out maps, and sheets of paper.
“Did you have a cyclone?” I asked.
She shook her head. “I’ve been doing some research. But let’s see how badly you’re hurt.”
We went into the bedroom. I tossed the topcoat on the bed and stripped down to the waist. “Oh, good God, Irish,” she exclaimed. One whole side of my torso, from lower ribs to groin, had turned black. I touched it. It hurt.
“Hadn’t we better get a doctor?” she asked.
“No. He’d have to report me. I think it’s just a bruise, and there’s probably nothing wrong inside.”
“Well, we’ll see, in the morning. But you come lie down in the living room, and I’ll fix you a drink. And some coffee and a sandwich.”
She moved some of the books and maps off the sofa and I stretched out. I felt tired and beat-up and defeated. In a few minutes she brought me a Martini. When I sat up and drank it, life had a little better outlook. She put a sandwich and a cup of coffee on the low table before me and sat on the floor on the other side of it with a cigarette.
“Let’s see where we stand now,” she said thoughtfully. “That girl will never show up for work again, and the chances are she’ll leave town. We don’t have any idea who her boy friend is. It seems almost certain she was in Stedman’s apartment during the fight, she saw you, and she killed Stedman just after you left, and then left herself by the rear entrance just before the police arrived. But even if the police did pick her up now, there isn’t one shred of evidence on which to hold her, and we don’t have the faintest idea why she should want to kill Stedman. Was it jealousy? I mean, she might have heard you accuse Stedman of running around with your wife.”
“No,” I said. I drank some of the coffee. “I don’t think I said a word to him. I just belted him. She must have deliberately picked Stedman up there in Red’s bar because she was going to kill him when she had the chance. But why go to all that trouble? I mean, to play him along for ten days or so? She and that thug could have got him a lot easier than that.”
She drummed her fingers on the table. “There are a couple of possibilities. Maybe she was trying to find out something from him. Or suppose it was revenge? The victim has to know, at the end, and see it coming, or there is no revenge. You follow me? She had to be in a position to tell him, and still do it, and get away with it I think Stedman was being fitted for an eventual ‘suicide,’ on the order of Purcell’s, when you blundered in. Not necessarily that night, but sometime in the near future. You just presented her with the perfect opportunity to do it then. And with you for the goat, the suicide bit wasn’t necessary.”
“Nice crowd,” I said. “I wonder what they do for an encore? But I like the revenge angle. That takes us right back to Danny Bullard and ties it in with Purcell. And that guy with her tonight could very well be Danny Bullard’s brother.”
She nodded. “Except for a couple of things. There’s nothing to indicate she even knew Danny Bullard. Not so far, anyway. And somehow I just can’t see her or this cold-blooded thug declaring war on two policemen merely because they killed him.” She paused, and frowned. “Even if you conceded that she might, in case she was very much in love with him, the brother is definitely out. He hadn’t even seen Danny for years, so far as anybody knows. Criminals may hate all police impartially, but I don’t think they take a personal view of a thing like that; at least, not to the point of endangering themselves for revenge.”
“I agree with you,” I said. “It doesn’t