“There isn’t much else. She was younger than me, and... maybe she was stupid. I don’t know. But she thought she could go places. She might have. She was really beautiful... She came out here, and she met Ufferlitz. I got that from her letters, when she wrote sometimes. But she met a lot of other people too. She never said who it was. But... when she was in trouble, it sounded like Ufferlitz. And then she was dead... I had to find out. I came out here, got a job at MGM, and made contacts and waited until I could get with Ufferlitz. Then I waited. I had to be sure. And I still didn’t know what I could do. But I went to his house once, and there was a picture... After that I bought a gun. I still didn’t know what I’d do with it. But I had it with me last night... Then he came in, and — I suppose I’d been thinking too much. It just ran away with me.”
“You were sure then?”
“He’d been drinking,” she said. “He wasn’t drunk, but he’d been drinking. Enough for him to let down his hair. He’d never been like that with me before. He tried to make love to me. He said ‘You remind me of somebody.’ I asked him if it was the girl in the photograph. He said ‘She was a dumb cluck.’ I asked him why. He said ‘She didn’t know what it was all about, and she lost her head.’... That was when I lost my head. I went around behind him and pretended I was still making up to him, and said ‘Was she just a little bit pregnant?’ — as if I thought it was funny. He said ‘Yeah, the damn fool. I’d have taken care of her. But she lost her head.’... Then I picked up my bag and took the gun out. It was just like being drunk. I said ‘She was probably making a sucker out of you. How did she know it was you?’ He said ‘Jesus Christ, it was me all right, but she didn’t have any sense. I never let a girl down in my life, baby’ — and then I knew it was him, I didn’t think any more, but I knew it was him, and he’d let anybody down, but he had his line off by heart, and she might have listened to the same words I was listening to, and I just didn’t think any more, but I put the gun against the back of his head and pulled the trigger and I was glad about it.”
Simon moved his glass after a while, and she lighted a cigarette and shook the match out, and it was as if her mind had been washed clear at last as a shower washes the sky.
“So,” she said, “then I knew what I’d done, but I didn’t feel any different about it. I just tried to be very careful. I gathered up the papers I’d been working on, and emptied the ashtrays because they were so obvious — though I didn’t stop to think then that I was supposed to have been there anyway — and I dug the bullet out of the panelling. And all the time it didn’t seem like me. I’d done something and I thought it was right, but I knew it was dangerous, and I didn’t see why I should be punished. I just tried to think of everything. I even drove home all the way round by Malibu Lake, and threw the gun and the bullet in... Now you know it all.”
“I’ve forgotten already,” he said.
She still seemed to be wondering where she really was.
“Do you... do you think Condor was really satisfied?”
“I believe him,” said the Saint. “The case is closed. Flane shot himself. So he had a gun. His gun could have killed Ufferlitz, and if he’d dug out the bullet and got rid of it there wouldn’t have been any more evidence.”
“But I still don’t know why Flane shot himself.”