The avalanche of denial, the flood of vituperation and the general hullabaloo that was set up by the four girls at Corson’s accusation reduced the detective to a pulp of bewilderment. The girls saw this and pursued their advantage. They stormed and raged, and then, becoming less frightened they guyed and jollied the poor man until he determined that he must have help of some sort.
Moreover, he felt sure now that these youngsters never committed murder. Even the Mersereau girl, the vamp, as she had been called, was a young thing of nineteen, and her vampire effect was only put on when occasion demanded.
“S’posen I did say I’d like to kill him!” she exclaimed, “that don’t mean anything! S’posen I said I died o’ laughin’, would you think I was dead? Those things are figgers of speech,—that’s what they are!”
She paraded up and down the room with a tragedy-queen air, and rolled her practiced eyeballs at Corson.
And Babe Russell was equally scornful, though her soft, gentle effects were the opposite of Viola’s ways.
“Silly!” she said, shaking her pinkened finger at the detective. “To think us nice, pretty little girls would kill a big grown-up man! First off, we couldn’t do it,—we wouldn’t have the noive! And we’d be too ‘fraid of getting caught. And we, wouldn’t do it anyway,—it isn’t in the picture!”
They seemed so straightforward and so sensible that Corson began to think it was absurd to suspect them, and yet the two he watched most closely were surely afraid of something. They talked gayly, and babbled on smilingly, but they glanced at each other with anxious looks when they thought the detective wasn’t looking.
Whatever troubled them concerned them anxiously, for beneath their gayety they were distinctly nervous.
Corson convinced himself that they had no intention of running away and could always be found if wanted, so he left, with immediate intention of following the advice of Mr Vail and attaching an assistant.
“Not in a thousand years!” was the opinion of the assistant, one Gibbs, after he heard Corson’s tale of the chorus girls. “Those little chippies might be quite willing to kill a man, theoretically, but as for the deed itself, they couldn’t put it over. Still, they must be remembered. You know, the statement that women did it, is surely the truth. Dying messages are invariably true. But it may mean that women caused it to be done,—that it was the work of women, even though the actual stab thrust may have been the deed of a man.”