He laughed. He asked: “It wouldn’t make any difference why I came if I changed my mind after seeing you, would it?”
“No–o–o”—she was suspicious–“but I’d have to be awfully sure you had changed it.”
“And anyway,” he promised lightly, “I won’t be mysterious about anything. Haven’t you really got an idea of what they’re all eating their hearts out about?”
“Not the least,” she replied spitefully, “except that I’m pretty sure it must be something very stupid and probably political.”
He put his free hand up and patted one of hers. “Smart girl, right on both counts.” He turned his head to look at O’Rory and Mathews. When his eyes came back to hers they were shiny with merriment. “Want me to tell you about it?”
“No.”
“First,” he said, “Opal thinks her father murdered Taylor Henry.”
Opal Madvig made a horrible strangling noise in her throat and sprang up from the footstool. She put the back of one hand over her mouth. Her eyes were open so wide the whites showed all around the irises and they were glassy and dreadful.
Rusty lurched to his feet, his face florid with anger, but Jeff, leering, caught the boy’s arm. “Let him alone,” he rasped good-naturedly. “He’s all right.” The boy stood straining against the apish man’s grip on his arm, but did not try to free himself.
Eloise Mathews sat frozen in her chair, staring without comprehension at Opal.
Mathews was trembling, a shrunken grey-faced sick man whose lower lip and lower eyelids sagged.
Shad O’Rory was sitting forward in his chair, finely modeled long face pale and hard, eyes like blue-grey ice, hands gripping chair-arms, feet flat on the floor.
“Second,” Ned Beaumont said, his poise nowise disturbed by the agitation of the others, “she–”
“Ned, don’t!” Opal Madvig cried.
He screwed himself around on the floor then to look up at her.
She had taken her hand from her mouth. Her hands were knotted together against her chest. Her stricken eyes, her whole haggard face, begged mercy of him.
He studied her gravely awhile. Through window and wall came the sound of rain dashing against the building in wild gusts and between gusts the bustling of the near-by river. His eyes, studying her, were cool, deliberate. Presently he spoke to her in a voice kind enough but aloof: “Isn’t that why you’re here?”
“Please don’t,” she said hoarsely.
He moved his lips in a thin smile that his eyes had nothing to do with and asked: “Nobody’s supposed to go around talking about it except you and your father’s other enemies?”
She put her hands–fists—down at her sides, raised her face angrily, and said in a hard ringing voice: “He did murder Taylor.”
Ned Beaumont leaned back against his hand again and looked up at Eloise Mathews. “That’s what I was telling you,” he drawled. “Thinking that, she went to your husband after she saw the junk he printed this morning. Of course he didn’t think Paul had done any killing: he’s just in a tough spot–with his mortgages held by the State Central, which is owned by Shad’s candidate for the Senate–and he has to do what he’s told. What she–”
Mathews interrupted him. The publisher’s voice was thin and desperate. “Now you stop that, Beaumont. You–”
O’Rory interrupted Mathews. O’Rory’s voice was quiet, musical. “Let him talk, Mathews,” he said. “Let him say his say.”
“Thanks, Shad,” Ned Beaumont said carelessly, not looking around, and went on: “She went to your husband to have him confirm her suspicion, but he couldn’t give her anything that would do that unless he lied to her. He doesn’t know anything. He’s simply throwing mud wherever Shad tells him to throw it. But here’s what he can do and does. He can print in tomorrow’s paper the story about her coming in and telling him she believes her father killed her lover. That’ll be a lovely wallop. ‘Opal Madvig Accuses Father of Murder; Boss’s Daughter Says He Killed Senator’s Son!’ Can’t you see that in black ink all across the front of the Observer?”
Eloise Mathews, her eyes large, her face white, was listening breathlessly, bending forward, her face above his. Wind-flung rain beat walls and windows. Rusty filled and emptied his lungs with a long sighing breath.