Ellery Queen’s Anthology. Volume 1, 1960

Charlotte Armstrong All the Way Home

We once predicted that “Charlotte Armstrong is going to make detective-story history.” We think she fulfilled that prophecy, but that, we now predict, is “only the beginning”...

I’d dreamed, so many times, how I would save the man I loved. In a dozen wild plots all would depend on me, my nerve, and my wits. And I’d dreamed how I’d win.

But what happened wasn’t like my dreams at all — nothing like them.

I work in Madame Elise’s Salon de Beauté, on the Boulevard. Tom isn’t crazy about the idea of me working, but we haven’t any children, yet, and we can use the money. It’s a good place. Madame Elise is strict, in some ways, but she runs a smart shop.

I’d combed out my four o’clock patron, that Wednesday, and was deep in the back of the narrow place when this woman came in. Madame Elise came out of a booth and stalked, in her stiff-legged way, down the middle aisle. I turned my head. I saw the woman’s face.

The first thing I thought was, Run! But you can’t get out of the shop at the back. Then I thought, Get sick! Go home sick! But I knew exactly what Madame Elise would do. She’d stand over me and ask all my symptoms, loudly, so the patrons would know this wasn’t Madame’s fault. I couldn’t put myself in that spotlight of attention. That was the very last thing I could do.

I couldn’t walk out. I couldn’t run away. I couldn’t go home sick. It was just like a trap — I couldn’t get out.

And if this woman recognized me when she saw my face, then Tom’s life and my life would be ruined.

I went into the lavatory. I was standing there, looking through the window bars, when Joan put her head in. “Elise is hollering. Mrs. Smith. Shampoo and set. She’s yours, dear.”

“Mine? In the blue coat?”

“New, isn’t she?”

“I guess so,” I said. I took my hands off the bars. Joan couldn’t take her instead of me. Nobody could. Any attempt I made to get out of this would only call attention to me.

That woman wasn’t any Mrs. Smith. She was Mrs. Maybee. What I’d have to do, to save the man I loved, was just what I always do, day after day — shampoo and set a woman’s hair. There was one chance. If I could master my own body, my hands and my voice, my breath and the pump of my heart, she might not realize who I was.

When Tom first got into trouble, I dreamed hard about helping him in some miraculous way. But help finally came out of the blue. They stumbled over the man who had taken all that money from Tom’s office. They found the money, and the man confessed, and there was a hullabaloo, because by this time Tom had served a whole month of his sentence in the penitentiary, on top of all the time they’d held him during his arrest and trial.

Of course, they let Tom go, at once. We were married the next day. What our friends and families back east said of us, now, was just that we had gone “out west” and were “doing well.”

Tom had a pretty good job, here in L.A., as a salesman, and I was working for Elise, and we were buying our little stucco house that was falling apart nearly as fast as we could nail and plaster it back together. Still, I knew we weren’t really doing so well. Tom had been completely cleared and he was supposed to be perfectly free. But he wasn’t free — not yet.

He was bitter. Oh, that was an awful thing to go through — being accused of a crime you had not committed, and being convicted, in spite of all you or your friends could do, and only saved in the end almost whimsically. It shook you, all right. And yet — you mustn’t throw good time after bad. So I dreamed. But all I could do, actually, was stand by, and hope that the days or the years would wash out the bitterness.

Tom was fanatically careful about everything we did. He feared and mistrusted the law, the police, the courts — any part of them. For instance, he drove the car with a tense correctness that hurt us both. But I was the same. I could no more go through a red light than I could kill somebody. We were living like guilty people.

Once I thought that if we could find some doctor who understood these things and go to him... But when I said something like that, one Sunday morning, Tom reacted as if I had hit him.

“How could it be inside of me? They put me in jail, didn’t they? They wouldn’t believe me, would they? I was innocent. I was truthful.”

“Yes, Tom, yes. I know it.”

“Don’t talk as if there’s something wrong with me! Don’t do it, Ellen! A man’s a fool who doesn’t learn from experience,” he added, more quietly.

“I only want us to be — well, easier in mind. Possibly we ought to remember that they did finally get it straightened out. They did let you go.”

“When they let me go, Ellen,” he said drearily, “this was their attitude. A kind of hard stare, they gave me. Not as if they were looking at an innocent man, but just at a lucky man. ‘Looks like we’ve got to let you go this time, Harkness. O.K., brother, but watch your step.’ ”

“Tom, who had that attitude?”

“All of them,” he said. “All of them.” His big fist went up and down, striking his thigh, and I tried to stop it with my two hands.

“All right, then. Let’s sue them! For false arrest or something!”

“Not me,” he said, with that wary, sharp look I had grown to hate. “I don’t get mixed up with Them again.”

I couldn’t argue with him. I wasn’t wise enough. I said, “Skip it. We’d be dumb to drag it up again. We’d better get going on those cupboards.”

Tom’s a good-looking blond beast with brown eyes. He said, “Pig...”

“What?”

“Little pig, that cries, We... we... we...” and there was that light in his eyes.

“I love you, you big mutt,” I said. “Hand me the paint brush. All right, then,” I snuffled. “All the way home.”

Oh, I dreamed up crazy plots, about me rescued from deadly peril by a flock of gallant cops. They were just dreams. All I could do was go along, loving him, and time went along, too, and got in a few good licks — until one Friday night.

We’d gone about twelve miles from home to catch a movie we’d miss and on the way back we got lost. We knew we were going in the right direction, but we didn’t know exactly where we were. So we were creeping along one of those open roads, through a section that hadn’t been built up much. It was pretty dark. There was a tall eucalyptus hedge on our right. We were both squinting for the street sign at the next intersection, when the right front wheel struck something like a soft lump in the road. The car lurched over it.

Tom’s reflexes were quick. We stopped, straddling what I hoped was a sack of some soft stuff. I opened my door and put my foot down. It touched something. I fell out, scrambling. My hand groped in the dark and touched warm skin.

“He shouldn’t have been lying in the road,” I said, and my voice sounded funny to my own ears. “The thing to do is find a doctor.” I got up and my knee cracked. I heard it so clearly — I heard everything, magnified a million times. The car idling, Tom’s breath. I could tell Tom’s muscles screamed to drive like fury away. But I said, “House — back of the hedge. I’ll go. I’ll phone.”

I went up a graveled drive. I don’t know how I knew, but I did know that somewhere inside this dark house there was a light. Everything was so vivid. I could feel each pebble turn under my shoe. I knew, in the dark, each brick of the steps to the door. There was a button to push and I pushed it. I knew there were ears in the house to hear the bell.

I could see through the glass pane when a door opened and let light into a hall. A woman in a housecoat appeared at the far end, put her hand to a switch, and a bulb came on in the ceiling, just inside the door. She walked toward me. I could hear every fall of her foot. She rattled chains. The door opened about five inches, and she put her face near the gap.

The ceiling light was harsh and it came straight down on her face. I could see her hand on the edge of the door. I could see the pink petunias of the print she was wearing. I could hear a clock. I could smell the house-smell. I knew what she’d had for dinner and what she’d been doing when I rang.

I said, “Do you know a doctor? There’s a man hurt in the road. May I use your phone?”

“Hurt?” she said. Her hand was going toward the chain that kept the door from opening any farther, but it seemed to move so slowly.

I said, “Oh, hurry!” Then an arm went around my waist, snatching me almost off my feet. I screamed. For a terrible moment I didn’t even know who it was. He put his hand over my face and shut off the noise I was making. He said in my ear, “Come away!” I heard the woman yelp, the door slam.

Then I knew it was Tom who was making me run down the drive. He dragged me around the car and stuffed me in under the wheel, over to my own side. Then I saw the other car — its big cat eyes, hunting the driveway of a dark house ahead of us. The beams swerved off the road and then jerked back, as if the big eyes had caught sight of us and wanted to look again.

Tom yanked our car into gear and got out of there. We tore past the neighbor’s stopped car. We flew down the dark road, screamed around the next intersection. We nosed into traffic. We settled into line. Tom’s face was wet with sweat, trying to drive as if we were two people coming home from the movies.

He didn’t say a word until we were almost home. Then he said, “Ellen, I’m sorry...”

“He was dead, Tom?”

“Ellen, we hit a corpse. The man had been shot in the head. He was dead before we ever...”

He took his right hand off the wheel and I saw something on his first two fingers. I thought it was blood, but then I saw that it was a purple-red. “What’s that, Tom!”

“I don’t know.” He rubbed the stain. It seemed dry.

We were at home, finally, and we could talk. Tom said the minute I’d left him, he’d taken the flashlight and turned it on the man. Our wheel had gone over his legs. Tom got out and tried for the pulse, but he couldn’t be sure. He said he’d had a lot of vague mixed-up thoughts — better not try to move him, better wait for a doctor. Then he wondered about identity. He’d wiggled his hand under the body to get into the right hip pocket, to see if he could find a name and address. But there was no wallet. Instead, there was a broken bottle, wrapped in paper, leaking this purple stuff. Tom had pulled his hand out, sniffed at the stain. An odor he couldn’t describe — it was gone now. The light had fallen on a wallet lying in the road. Tom said it looked as if it were bleeding that purple stuff.

If the man was drunk, had somebody come along and robbed him while he was helpless? Tom said his mind creaked around to the realization that maybe robbery explained everything. Then he’d looked at the face and head, and he’d seen where the bullet went, and he knew it was murder.

I didn’t blame him. How could I blame him? A man has no business lying on a dark road. We hadn’t broken any laws, any laws at all. The man was dead. There wasn’t anything we could do. We didn’t know a single thing that could help explain what had happened to him. Why should we have stayed? To answer questions with the innocent truth until our faces reddened and our tongues began to stammer. “Harkness, eh? In trouble once before, weren’t you, Harkness? Grand larceny, eh? Just happened along, you say? Well, we know how these things go. So whatja do with the gun? Whatja do with the money?”

They wouldn’t believe what we’d say. That’s what Tom thought.

We pretended to each other that we slept that night. There wasn’t anything in the morning papers, but it was there, that night. Merchant, slain, robbed...

The woman had called the police right away. The neighbor, a man named Keefer, had caught an impression of a man forcing a woman into a car, and, of course, he had seen us run away. He did not get our license number. When the patrol car got there, this Keefer had found the body and identified it. The dead man was Howard Maybee. He lived right there, in the house behind the eucalyptus hedge. The woman was locked in, terrified. When the cops told her who was lying dead in the road, she fainted. It was her husband.

Afterwards, she told them that her husband was in the habit of bringing large sums of money home from his store on Friday nights. He was always late and he had to walk from the bus. Somebody might have known this. That dark spot under the tall hedge was ideal for a hold-up.

And there I was right in the middle of the news! Mystery girl forced from scene. Blonde’s safety feared for...

It was the bizarre note that lifted the whole story out of the ordinary hit-and-rob class. Mrs. Maybee told how I’d been snatched from her doorstep by a sinister figure and dragged away, screaming. The neighbor, Mr. Keefer, had actually witnessed my kidnaping. So the papers feared for my safety.

It was ridiculous. It was also terrifying.

I didn’t think Mrs. Maybee gave the police a dangerous description of myself. Honey-blonde means whatever kind of honey you have in mind; my eyes are more green than blue, and I am an inch and a half shorter than she guessed. Of course, I wouldn’t wear my tan suit or my coral blouse ever again. And at the shop we experiment a lot. So I cut my hair in bangs.

There was one thing the papers didn’t mention. That broken bottle of purple-red stuff in the dead man’s pocket. “They’re setting a trap,” Tom said, grimly. The stain was gone from his fingers now — he’d spent half the night getting it off.

“If that stuff was all over the wallet,” I said, “maybe it’s on the money. Maybe they hope to trace the stolen money.”

We were in for it. We were hiding something now, and we’d have to go on hiding it, and the more we did to cover ourselves up the worse it grew and the guiltier we felt. Tom took all the tires off the car and put on some very old ones. He took the shoes we’d worn that night and destroyed them. It made me sick. What scared him most was that he might have left his fingerprints. He thought that if they did have his prints, they would have them identified by Monday.

In the middle of the night, Sunday night, I woke and he was sitting up in bed. He said to the ceiling shadows when I stirred, “I’ll never go through that again. Ellen — I never will!”

Oh, God, I was frightened!

But Monday came and went. All day nobody bothered us. All evening nobody came. I dreamed of purple money. Tuesday went by. Time was working on it.

But Wednesday... Wednesday, the one person in this world who had seen my face walked into Madame Elise’s Salon to get her hair done.

And I couldn’t get out. I was trapped.

I thought, she won’t know me again. It was such a brief moment. I’m not dressed as I was that night. People in any kind of uniform always look different I’ve got flat heels on. I look even shorter. And I’ve got bangs now.

That I’d seen her face only as long as she’d seen mine and knew her immediately, wasn’t significant. I’d seen her picture in the papers so many times since.

You don’t think out all the details. You just know when it’s danger...

I started to walk towards the third booth where I knew Elise would put Mrs. Smith. There were two Ellens walking in my skin. The frightened one, the real one, was lying low, watching, planning, scheming, hoping; then there was a second Ellen, a false and ordinary one, and she walked down the aisle. She had to. The sweat dried on her palms...

I knew the worst moment would come when I entered the booth and she, facing the glass, saw me behind her. I spoke before I could be seen. “Mrs. Smith? Just a shampoo, Ma’am? Or re-styling?” I stepped in and put my hands on her hair. Sure enough, her glance snapped to her own image.

Sometimes they hardly see you, these women. They come to be beautified, so they tend to look at themselves.

I whipped the covering cloth around her and pinned it around her neck quickly. I slipped out her few bobby-pins. I began to brush and manipulate. My hands were trained, and every bit of their skill was in them now. “You have nice high cheekbones,” I said, “and your skin is good. A little more severe around the temples might be stunning.”

“I’m getting old and gray,” she said.

“That isn’t so. I think an oil shampoo and a tiny rinse will bring out all those reddish lights.”

Her eyes had a little tinge of satisfaction. It was true, what I said. I couldn’t lay all this on with a shovel — it has to be just true enough. She must have been about thirty. Her hands were well-kept, unblemished, not hard-worked housewifely hands at all. Of course she was a bit dowdy. Her clothes weren’t expensive and they weren’t doing anything for her. There was something stiff about her.

I said, “Shall we go back now?” and led the way to the washing booth.

Oh, she’d seen me. Of course, she’d seen me. But she’d only used the tail of her eye. Why should she study me, anyhow? Somebody neat and clean in a white uniform, paid to fuss over her.

As I turned the water on, a feeling, beginning in the stomach, rippled up like a chill, and into my mind came all that depended on this. I worked with my head bent outside her range of vision, and with my arm crossed over her face. I lathered and scrubbed.

I made myself think about her. Funny she made an appointment under a phony name. No, it wasn’t either. She wouldn’t want to be stared at. She came to a strange, new place because she didn’t want to be criticized, either. She just wanted her hair done.

I went back to the supply room and mixed her tint. I could hear Madame Elise shouting to somebody under a dryer, and Joan’s voice in the last booth. When I went back, Mrs. Maybee had her eyes closed. I brushed and scrubbed the color in. And then I had to rinse her for the last time. Now I’d have to put her curls in. There isn’t so much for a woman to look at, while her hair goes into pin curls. Her own image isn’t very attractive.

I toweled her head lightly, tilted the chair, and we paraded back to Booth Three. Her eyes looked sleepy. I met them in the glass... and I smiled. “Shall I try drawing it back at the sides and curling it high?”

Her eyes flew to the mirror. “Not — today,” she said a little lamely.

“Not in the mood?” I said lightly. I felt that thing, like a chill, again. Oh, no, not today. How stupid of me! If there were two Ellens, there were also two women in the chair. Mrs. Smith and the widow Maybee. “Madame Elise is very clever with a henna pack,” I said. “With those red lights in your dark hair, I think it would be very successful. Did you ever think of having your hair brightened?”

“What woman hasn’t,” she said, with her awkward laugh. “Oh, I may... some day.”

“But not today,” I laughed. She was going to look at me now! I’d overplayed my little joke! I reached for a jar on the shelf. “This is with Madame’s compliments,” I told her. “Won’t you try it and tell us whether you like it?”

She read the label. “Hand cream? It’s something a little bit different,” I lied. That kept her busy for a while. She massaged cream on her hands while I worked like lightning.

I’d thought of something! Tom was calling for me at half-past five! But it didn’t matter — she’d never seen him.

She said, “This seems rather nice. Nice fragrance.” We discussed the hand cream, languidly. Sometimes a woman talks about herself and her kids and her troubles. Sometimes she gets curious about you. We kept on the hand cream — the four of us.

When she was getting bored, I put her handbag near her. “You must keep the whole jar.” She was pleased, and she fussed around in her bag a while. I finished the front and sides, and was starting on the back.

“You’re very quick,” she said.

My heart jumped and I commanded it, shouting Down! at it in my mind, as if it were a dog. “We all are,” I said. I put a clip in my teeth and grimaced around it. I was getting that scared feeling. I shut up. I concentrated on the short back hair.

Then she was all pinned. I felt the stirring of jubilation. I beat that down, too. I put the silk net over her set, and the pads of cotton batting at her temples and ears. I led her to a drying booth. I swooped up a big bundle of magazines and dumped them in her lap. I put the cord with the hot-and-cold controls over her shoulder and yanked down the dryer. I touched the curtains.

Then I felt Elise breathing down my neck. I’d been quicker than normal, so of course she had to snoop and see if I’d been cutting corners or something. She brushed past me. “Are you comfortable, Mrs. Smith?” She pretended to adjust the hood of the dryer. “Did Ellen take care of you nicely?”

“Very nicely,” said Mrs. Maybee.

I let the curtain fall between me and her smile. The worst was over. When she was dry, I’d take the clips out and comb her hair. But if she hadn’t recognized me yet, she wasn’t going to. I’d got through it and lived. And it was all right. I went into the lavatory and nearly vomited.

I met Madame Elise, outside the door. “Ellen,” she said briskly, “Mrs. Smith will have a manicure.”

My heart felt like a leaf falling in sick spirals. “Couldn’t — one of the girls please — give Mrs. Smith — a manicure?”

“No one is free,” she said sharply. “Is anything wrong, Ellen?”

I stared at her and felt my skin move in a smile, and why it did I do not know. “My head aches,” I murmured. “But I’ll try, of course.”

“You’ll be all right,” she said, not very sympathetically. “Then you can go home.”

I thought, I wonder. To give a manicure you sit facing the woman under the dryer. You have your little wheeled table with its white cover and its jars and instruments, with its bright goose-neck lamp, between the two of you. She has nothing to do, nothing to look at, but the four hands on the table, or — your face.

In the end I just went, numbly. I thought, she will or she won’t, and so be it. She smiled at me. “My nails are really terrible.”

I said, as I always do, “We’ll soon fix that.” When I had everything arranged, I sat down on my little stool. I switched the lamp on, began.

It hit me in the nerves of my hands. They began to shake. I had to let hers go. I looked up and saw a flicker cross her face. I grabbed the edge of the table. I felt as if I were going all to pieces, but I wasn’t. I was coming together — the two of me.

I said, “Don’t you know who I am, Mrs. Maybee?”

And it felt good — it was a delicious relief to be all in one piece again.

She bent forward as if she’d duck her head out from under the dryer.

“Wait,” I said. “Wait, Mrs. Maybee... please.”

“You... you came to my door...” she whispered.

“Yes. Yes, I’m the one. You’re Mrs. Maybee, and I’m the mystery girl. I’m caught,” I said. “All you have to do is scream. The police are looking for me. But please listen—”

She caught her lip in her teeth and settled back a little.

“Maybe you’re a merciful woman,” I babbled. “Not like Elise. If she had only let me go home quietly, this wouldn’t have happened. She wouldn’t listen. She’d call the cops and wash her hands... Maybe you’ll be kinder.”

“Kinder?”

“We don’t know anything. We can’t help. We had nothing to do with your husband’s death. The newspapers are silly. It wasn’t any killer who took me away. It was only my husband, Mrs. Maybee. How can I make you understand?”

“What is there to understand?”

“We can’t get mixed up with the police. There are reasons.”

“Oh?” she said.

“He was lying in the road and we thought at first we’d hit him with our car. Oh, don’t you see! We couldn’t do any good. But if you tell who I am, now, it won’t help find who killed your husband. It’ll only ruin us.”

“But... why?” Her eyes shifted.

“All right. I’ll tell you. Once, back east, they arrested my husband for something he didn’t do. He was cleared. But he can’t stand... he couldn’t stand it again!”

She moistened her lips.

“Nobody in the world,” I said, “knows about me except you, Mrs. Maybee. Won’t you be merciful?”

“You... certainly...” she said, with long spaces between her words... “scared... me...”

“I’m sorry. We’re sorry. I’ll bring Tom to talk to you. We’ll do anything, Mrs. Maybee. But don’t make us go through all that again!”

She lifted her hands nervously and put them back on the table. “Suppose you fix my nails and let me get out of here,” she snapped.

My head sagged forward. Curtain rings rattled. Madame Elise swiveled her hips around me and the table. She pushed the hood of the dryer up, away from Mrs. Maybee’s head. She turned it off. Mrs. Maybee, looking past me, winced around the eyes. The cop moved up beside me. “You Mrs. Maybee?” he said, just checking.

He was a young cop, a handsome kid. His eyes on me were cool and intelligent. His gun was resting, neat and flat, on his slim hip. “We’ll wait a little minute,” he said. “Somebody will be along who knows about this.” He was neither ruffled nor bored. The four of us were motionless in that tiny pink cubicle. Outside, in the shop, there was whispering.

I sat on my stool, my left arm on the table. I could see my watch. In twenty minutes, maybe sooner, Tom would drive up to the door. There must be a police car...

Mrs. Maybee said, “Can’t I get out of here, please?”

“In a minute, Ma’am.”

Her hand started toward her head. One white cotton pad was slipping over her eye. Madame Elise bent and did things. With the fluffs of cotton gone and the net off, Mrs. Maybee didn’t look quite so ridiculous.

I watched my watch.

When we heard the street door open, Madame Elise sailed out of the booth like a hostess going to greet a guest. The cop shifted his weight.

Mrs. Maybee licked her lips. “I’m sorry,” she said to me, feebly.

The cop said, in a curious voice, “Pardon me, Miss. But didn’t you know you were shouting at the top of your lungs? You could be heard all over the place.”

“Of course,” I said. “I knew it, but she didn’t. They never realize. It’s the dryer, roaring in their ears. They can’t hear a sound unless we scream.”

His eyes changed. Then he said, respectfully, “Sergeant Davis. This is Mrs. Maybee.”

“We’ve met,” the man we’d been waiting for said quietly behind me.

I looked up at him. “Then you’ll know!” I gasped. My watch said the twenty minutes were more than half gone, and now there would be two police cars, maybe a crowd...

I took a big breath. “Ask Mrs. Maybee where she got that purple-red stuff under the right middle fingernail. Please, sir, ask her when!”

He got it at once. He didn’t have to be told one word more. There was that bottle, broken when the man fell down. The man fell down when he was shot. So when had Mrs. Maybee put her hand into her husband’s hip pocket?

The purple stain said — after he was shot! But it wasn’t after we had run away, because the neighbor was out there then. Mrs. Maybee was locked in the house, and when the police came she had fainted, and it was the neighbor who had identified the dead man. When, then?

This detective — he was in plainclothes — picked up her right hand.

“You know what it is?” I said. We had to hurry. I didn’t know what Tom would do.

“Yeah,” he said. “A special woodstain. He had it mixed downtown the same day. He had a hobby. How about it, Mrs. Maybee?”

“I...” She didn’t say more than that single sound.

Sergeant Davis looked thoughtfully at me. “So she was out there and found him before you and your husband did?”

“And didn’t notify us,” the young cop said.

“Sergeant,” I said, “there’s one thing more. When I rang her bell, I knew what she had just been doing. I knew the smell, absolutely, certainly. She’d been painting her fingernails!”

“So she was out there,” he said, “after he died. And she didn’t tell us. Instead, she went back in the house and covered up her nails with some paint. Your idea is that she had a little something to do with that shooting?”

“Don’t you think so?”

He frowned. “So she shoots her husband. And she sits down...” He touched a bottle of polish on my table. “I’ve heard it takes a pretty steady hand to put that stuff on your own nails.”

“It does,” I said. “But she had to. What did she put her hand into his pocket for? She knew him. And somebody was bound to find him soon. The police were bound to come eventually. She could scrub the purple off the skin of her hand, but she couldn’t possibly get it out from between the nail and the quick. She absolutely had to cover it!” Then I told him very firmly, because this I was sure of. “You can be steady when you have to be.”

“Uh-huh,” he said.

Then we heard the street door open again. There were hard, quick footsteps. High, nervous, but very angry, Tom’s voice demanded, “Where is my wife? Ellen, what are they doing to you?”

Now I knew what Tom would do — now and from now on. “They’re listening to me,” I called. “P-pig,” I blubbered, with his hand in mine, “help me explain it to them...”

It was a strange thing that out of all the people in the world she asked me to do her nails. The only person — the only woman, anyway — who could recognize that purple mark.

She’d walked right into a trap.

It wasn’t a very new plot on her part. There was a boy friend, hidden in her life. He’d done the actual shooting. I suppose she had to be out there, supervising, and helping make it look like a robbery. They never would have tried to spend that purple money. There was much more — in the insurance.

All this came out after a while. That day, when Sergeant Davis talked quietly with Tom and me, he didn’t exactly scold us. But he made us understand what a nuisance we’d been, and how we’d wasted his time. For, of course, we’d have to be explained. When he heard how Tom had been mixed up in that old trouble, he said soberly, “Rough deal, Harkness.” But then he laughed a little. “You kids don’t want to be so sure you know what the other guy is going to think. It isn’t easy, you know, to admit you were dead wrong. Believe me, if they had you and let you out, back there, I’d know you were clear.”

I babbled all the way home. But Tom said, “Why the pitch about mercy, Ellen?”

“I was scared she’d take her hand to Canada or somewhere. I was scared she’d cut the finger off and throw it in the garbage. I was so shocked — with hope — once I took her old polish off and saw the purple stain. I knew somebody else had to see it, somebody who’d know, somebody like Sergeant Davis.”

“Nice guy,” said Tom, very offhand.

I swallowed. “And I knew Elise could hear me. She’d yell for the police. In the meantime I had to talk about something! I chose mercy because... well, it was a sort of test. You see, if she’d been right with the world, she’d have had no mercy, Tom! That was s-silly!”

“She ought to have called the cops,” Tom said, nodding, and that was when I finally began to bawl... all the way home.