“Can’t I?” she asked.
I let her question wait while I put my gaze around the room, checking it up item by item, as well as I could. The only change I could put my finger on was Collinson’s coat and hat on the chair. There was no mystery to their presence; and the chair, I decided, was what had bothered me. It still did. I went to it and picked up his coat. There was nothing under it. That’s what was wrong: a green dressing-gown, or something of the sort, had been there before, and was not there now. I didn’t see it elsewhere in the room, and didn’t have enough confidence in its being there to search for it. The green mules were under the bed.
I said to the girl:
“Not now. Go in the bathroom and wash the blood off, and then get dressed. Take your clothes in there with you. When you’re dressed, give your nightgown to Collinson.” I turned to him. “Put it in your pocket and keep it there. Don’t go out of the room until I come back, and don’t let anybody in. I won’t be gone long. Got a gun?”
“No,” he said, “but I–”
The girl got up from the bed, came over to stand close in front of me, and interrupted him.
“You can’t leave me here with him,” she said earnestly. “I won’t have it. Isn’t it enough that I’ve killed one man tonight? Don’t make me kill another.” She was earnest, but not excited, speaking as if her words were quite reasonable.
“I’ve got to go out for a while,” I said. “And you can’t stay alone. Do what I tell you.”
“Do you know what you’re doing?” she asked in a thin, tired voice. “You can’t know, or you wouldn’t do it.” Her back was to Collinson. She lifted her face so that I saw rather than heard the nearly soundless words her lips formed: “Not Eric. Let him go.”
She had me woozy: a little more of it and I would have been ready for the cell next to hers: I was actually tempted to let her have her way. I jerked a thumb at the bathroom and said: “You can stay in there till I come back, if you want, but he’ll have to stay here.”
She nodded hopelessly and went into the dressing-alcove. When she crossed from there to the bathroom, carrying clothes in her arms, a tear was shiny beneath each eye.
I gave my gun to Collinson. The hand in which he took it was tight and shaky. He was making a lot of noise with his breath. I said: “Now don’t be a sap. Give me some help instead of trouble for once. Nobody in or out: if you have to shoot, shoot.”
He tried to say something, couldn’t, grabbed my nearest hand, and did his best to disable it. I took it away from him and went down to the scene of Doctor Riese’s murder. I had some difficulty in getting there. The iron door through which we had passed a few minutes ago was now locked. The lock seemed simple enough. I went at it with the fancy attachments on my pocketknife, and presently had the door open.
I didn’t find the green gown inside. I didn’t find Riese’s body on the altar steps. It was nowhere in sight. The dagger was gone. Every trace of blood, except where the pool on the white floor had left a faintly yellow stain, was gone. Somebody had been tidying up.
XI. God
I went back to the lobby, to a recess where I had seen a telephone. The phone was there, but dead. I put it down and set out for Minnie Hershey’s room on the sixth floor. I hadn’t been able to do much with the mulatto so far, but she was apparently devoted to her mistress, and, with the telephone useless, I needed a messenger.
I opened the mulatto’s door–lockless as the others–and went in, closing it behind me. Holding a hand over the lens of my flashlight, I snapped it on. Enough light leaked through my fingers to show me the brown girl in her bed, sleeping. The windows were closed, the atmosphere heavy, with a faint stuffiness that was familiar, the odor of a place where flowers had died.