A. “I don’t recall, to be exact, your honor. I remember I heard the young lady screaming and that it was Mr. De Medici holding her in his arms and telling me to call the police.”
“That will be all, thank you,” the coroner nodded.
De Medici’s eyes narrowed and a derisive smile passed over his wide, thin mouth. He had followed the questions and answers with rigid attentiveness.
“A terrible dolt, this man. Or in on the trap,” he mused. “But it isn’t over. They’ve got something hidden. Yet he didn’t ask Donovan the question. The answer would have started things. How long after she came in from the street did he see her in my arms? Thirty or forty minutes later.... He would have remembered if asked. And what was she doing in the apartment those thirty or forty minutes?”
Five days had passed since the death of his friend and a curious change had come over De Medici. His hand trembled as he dropped it furtively on the gloved fingers of the girl at his side. She ignored the caress. A laceration passed through his heart.
“Cold, aloof and defiant,” he mused with a shudder. “She sits next to me like an image of stone. This little hand I touch is the hand that murdered. Yet it lies calmly in a snug glove under my fingers. It is I who tremble. This thing grows in me. The feeling of her guilt overwhelms me. Her cruelty is like the promise of a caress. I bow before it.”
Again a shudder stirred him.
“Incredible,” he went on silently. “There is a mystery. She could not sit like this if there was a memory of guilt in her. And yet she lies. She avoids me. If it was I who had killed him ... yes, I could sit like this. Calm, amused and cold.”
De Medici sighed. He had for the week followed the circle of his thoughts. The shuddering and exultant thing that had risen in him on the night before the locked door had obliterated, almost, his curiosity concerning the crime. Shrinking from himself, despising the evil infatuation that the conviction of her guilt was developing in him, he had felt himself being slowly dragged into a dark region of himself. Alone in his rooms he had sat through the nights musing:
“Ah, I’m changing. I feel myself losing the identity of Julien De Medici. The phantoms come closer to my brain. They knock warily at my heart....”