"Kill her?" said Emery, in a sort of yelp. He jumped in the chair. "My God, I'd never have hurt her! You've got a crazy lot of ideas about justice over here, but why do you have to keep harping on that? Listen, you poor sap, she was my wife."
In the abrupt silence somebody whistled. Emery looked slowly round the group, and a kind of cynical despair came into his expression.
"Yeah. I know what you're thinking. Monkey-face Me. - Nobody. Not fit to get invited to swell houses. All right! Now I'll tell you something. I made Marcia Tait a star." He spoke quietly, and with a sort of fierce triumph. "Ask anybody who put her where she was. Ask 'em, and see what they tell you. I built her up when she was nobody. There's lots of good directors handling good actresses; but if you think that means anything you're nuts. That don't make 'em stars. You need Monkey-face — Me for things like that.
'I'd have done anything she wanted. I always did. One of her conditions was that nobody should know about the marriage, in case it'd hurt her career. Well, I suppose she was right. Fine thing to have it known she was tied up to me, uh? All I could do — now you're gonna think I'm the world's worst sap; I can't help it if you do, and you'll find it out anyway; but that's the way I felt all I could do was invent a wife of mine that I could talk about, and bring into the conversation when I meant Marcia. It was a sort of consolation. I called her `Margarette,' because I’d always liked that name…'
The husky voice trailed off. This last admission seemed to wrench him more with an uneasy sense of shame than anything else. He looked round defiantly. His hand, still in his breast pocket, produced an enormous flat silver flask, which he automatically made a feint of holding out to everybody before he tilted it up to drink. At the end of a long pull he released his breath in a shudder.
"Oh, what the hell?" said Tim Emery with sudden weariness, and sat back.
"You mean," Masters boomed incredulously, "that you allowed… Now, come!"
"Marriage new-style. Uh-huh. I begin to see," said H. M. He blinked drowsily, the glasses sliding down on his nose; but he sat motionless as a great Buddha despite the tired cynicism of his mouth. "Don't mind the feller who's talkin', son. That's Chief Inspector Masters, who's just about on the verge of apoplexy, and he's gettin' suspicious of you already. I know it's not easy to talk; but if you feel like goin' on — well, I've had too much experience with a crazy world to feel very much surprised at anything I hear. You'd still hit me in the eye if I called her a leech, wouldn't you?"
"So far as I'm concerned," said Masters, "and whatever I happen to think about that side of it, I've got only one duty. And that's to find out who killed Miss Tait. So I'll ask Mr. Emery whether he knew, as her husband, that Miss Tait and Mr. Joh — "
H. M.'s grunt drowned it out. "You know what he's goin' to say, son. You got brains enough to answer unspoken questions. And it always makes everybody feel better to pretend that not callin' a spade a spade makes it invisible. Well?"