going past in the hot sunlight bumped into me and I moved out toward the curb.
A sedan pulled up into the no-parking zone and stopped. Two men got out, and as I watched in growing horror they walked into the shop. But they’re not in uniform I thought desperately. They’re not police. They couldn’t be! But there was no use trying to kid myself that they looked like the kind of men who frequented beauty shops.
The door opened. She was coming out. I wanted to jump forward and cry out and take her by the arm, but I stopped, rooted where I was. One of the men was right behind her and he had her by the arm, I had to move to get out of their way, for I was standing right in front of their car.
She saw me and I thought she would cry out. The terror was awful in her eyes, but she went past me with no word and no sign of recognition. I could swing and hit him, I thought through the black despair, but she couldn’t run in those high heels, and there’s always the other one. And by now I had seen the shoulder holsters and the guns. One of the men got in the front seat behind the wheel and the other helped her in and then sat down beside her in the back.
Nobody had said a word. The people going by on the sidewalk never knew it. As the car pulled away from the curb her face turned toward me just for an instant through the window and I wanted to die.
Twenty-three
Then I was back at the hotel. I had no idea how I had got there, but I was standing in her room looking around at her clothes and the two alligator bags and her robe and nightgown across the bed and feeling all the emptiness and silence of this place where she had been come crawling up over me like ants across a lidless eye. There was no escaping them, and I wanted to turn and run back out, but there was nowhere else to go and I had enough sense left to know that the emptiness was inside me and that I would take it with me when I ran.
The thing I had to do was sit down and try to think, try to see exactly what had happened. This torturing condemnation running endlessly through my mind like a singing commercial through a radio you couldn’t turn off wasn’t going to do anything except eventually drive me crazy, and then they’d have us both. I had done this to her. I had left the picture there where they had found it, I had been responsible for her going to the beauty shop, and I had stood there like a baby and let the police take her away to jail, but it wasn’t going to help any to go on torturing myself with the knowledge.
I sat down on the bed. The maid had already been here and cleaned the room, so I was safe enough from discovery. And they’re not even looking for me anyway, I thought, struggling to reorient myself. They’re only looking for the people who are supposed to have killed me. Then the terrible irony of it went to work on me again and my head was in a spin. I had done such a good job of erasing myself that they had already arrested her as an accomplice in my murder.
But does she know that? I thought. Does she know that it’s my disappearance she’s been arrested for, or does she, in her terror, think they’ve found out about Shevlin? What would she do? What would she be likely to say, to cry out without knowing where she might trap herself? That was the terrible part of it. I had no way of knowing what she was going to say, and no way to get word to her to tell her what to say. I thought of those “Information, Please” experts at work on her and of all their tricks, and had to tear my mind away from it.
If she saw from the first that they had picked her up only because they were trying to find Shevlin, she would be all right. There were a thousand things she could tell them that would leave her in the clear. And all the time she would be secure in the knowledge that the crime for which