“No, it won’t take long. I want just about five minutes of your precious time to propose to you. That’s all.”
“Oh,” Alix spoke coolly, although her eyes were dancing as she bolted into the elevator. “In that case, come to breakfast. Maybe it will fortify me to bear it.”
Sam watched the ascent of the car for several seconds, then he remembered his obligation to Mrs. Edwards Harris, rejoined her, and dutifully escorted her home, his mind very busy elsewhere.
“Can you credit it? That fool Sing thought he was in love with you,” he confided to her by way of making conversation en route. “I suppose I ought to mop up the floor with him. He had a picture of you, cut from some Sunday paper, stuck up in a sort of shrine in his room. In a way, that turned out to be a good thing for him, because Dolan saw that a man who was that dippy about you wasn’t taking enough interest in another woman to murder her.”
“What did you do with the picture?” Louise asked.
“Don’t you worry about that. I tore it up and threw it away.”
“Poor Sing!” Louise contemplated her uncle out of the corners of her eyes. “He’s the only man who ever enshrined me, and once he’s safely back in China, I think I’ll send him a really good photograph—one taken with the baby, perhaps—just to remember me by. I’ve had plenty of men in love with me whom I didn’t admire so much as I do Sing.”
“I thought you warned me not to trust him.”
“Yes, I believe I did—and that only proves how quickly a woman can change her mind. Probably it was his title. The American love of a title is notorious.”
They had reached the entrance to her apartment as she spoke, and she went on:
“I’m not asking you to come in. I’m tired and so are you, hut the next time I intimate delicately that your niece is expecting an heir, I’ll thank you to show some interest.”
She had dropped a kiss on his cheek and was gone. He rubbed the spot reflectively as he turned to walk home. Women were rum, but he was mighty glad of this news. It would make both Ed and Louise straighten out and settle down.
A taxi passing, he hailed it. After all, he would not walk. He was tired.
On reaching home, he found Sing hovering near the front door.
“Inspector Dolan called up.” He produced the tablet on which he had written out the message.
McCurdy tricked him on the way downtown in the car. “What I don’t see,” says he, “is why yon didn’t stab her in the heart when yon pulled that dagger out of her bosom.”
The prisoner paid no attention, and Knudson butted in: “It wasn’t in her bosom; it was in her hair.”
“All the same,” says McCurdy, “with all the bones back there, I’ll tell the world it was a fool place to stab the dame.”
At that Gorman woke: “God!” he shouted. “Another man teaching me my business. Wasn’t I born in Sicily? If I don’t know anything else, I know where to stab.” And then it came to him what he had said and he knew the game was up. He had poison in a ring, but they were on to him. Might of been better to let him take it. Saved expense, and from what Sing testified I don’t think we can send him to the chair.
“‘Might of’ is incorrect,” Sing said, critically, “but it is the form the Inspector prefers. There is no wisdom in those detectives. It was the man’s right to kill himself. Too bad,” he concluded.
THE END
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Death Wears a Mask Page 21