“We were up there, and Max was up there with a girl he used to play around with–Myrtle Jennison. She’s in the hospital now–City–dying of Bright’s disease or something. She was a classy looking kid then, a slender blonde. I always liked her, except that a few drinks made her too noisy. Tim Noonan was crazy about her, but she couldn’t see anybody but Max that summer.
“Tim wouldn’t let her alone. He was a big good-looking Irishman, but a sap and a cheap crook who only got by because his brother was chief of police. Wherever Myrtle went, he’d pop up sooner or later. She didn’t like to say anything to Max about it, not wanting Max to do anything to put him in wrong with Tim’s brother, the chief.
“So of course Tim showed up at Mock Lake this Saturday. Myrtle and Max were just by themselves. Holly and I were with a bunch, but I saw Myrtle to talk to and she told me she had got a note from Tim, asking her to meet him for a few minutes that night, in one of the little arbor things on the hotel grounds. He said if she didn’t he would kill himself. That was a laugh for us–the big false alarm. I tried to talk Myrtle out of going, but she had just enough booze in her to feel gay and she said she was going to give him an earful.
“We were all dancing in the hotel that night. Max was there for a while, and then I didn’t see him any more. Myrtle was dancing with a fellow named Rutgers, a lawyer here in town. After a while she left him and went out one of the side doors. She winked at me when she passed, so I knew she was going down to see Tim. She had just got out when I heard the shot. Nobody else paid any attention to it. I suppose I wouldn’t have noticed it either if I hadn’t known about Myrtle and Tim.
“I told Holly I wanted to see Myrtle, and went out after her, by myself. I must have been about five minutes behind her in getting out. When I got outside I saw lights down by one of the summer houses, and people. I went down there, and– This talking is thirsty work.”
I poured out a couple of hookers of gin. She went into the kitchen for another siphon and more ice. We mixed them up, drank, and she settled down to her tale again:
“There was Tim Noonan, dead, with a hole in his temple and his gun lying beside him. Perhaps a dozen people were standing around, hotel people, visitors, one of Noonan’s men, a dick named MacSwain. As soon as Myrtle saw me she took me away from the crowd, back in the shade of some trees.
“‘Max killed him,’ she said. ‘What’ll I do?’
“I asked her about it. She told me she had seen the flash of the gun and at first she thought Tim had killed himself after all. She was too far away and it was too dark for her to see anything else. When she ran down to him, he was rolling around, moaning, ‘He didn’t have to kill me over her. I’d have–‘ She couldn’t make out the rest of it. He was rolling around, bleeding from the hole in his temple.
“Myrtle was afraid Max had done it, but she had to be sure, so she knelt down and tried to pick up Tim’s head, asking: ‘Who did it, Tim?’
“He was almost gone, but before he passed out he got enough strength to tell her, ‘Max!’
“She kept asking me, ‘What’ll I do?’ I asked her if anybody else had heard Tim, and she said the dick had. He came running up while she was trying to lift Tim’s head. She didn’t think anybody else had been near enough to hear, but the dick had.
“I didn’t want Max to get in a jam over killing a mutt like Tim Noonan. Max didn’t mean anything to me then, except that I liked him, and I didn’t like any of the Noonans. I knew the dick–MacSwain. I used to know his wife. He had been a pretty good guy, straight as ace-deuce-trey-four-five, till he got on the force. Then he went the way of the rest of them. His wife stood as much of it as she could and then left him.