MacGraw leaned over the banisters.
‘It’s Ferris all right,’ he called.
‘Then where the hell is Dedrick?’ Mifflin demanded.
‘Ask her. She’ll tell you,’ I said, pointing to Serena. ‘It’s my bet he’s the heap of rags and bones in the mine.’
Serena suddenly sat up, her face white and her eyes glittering.
‘I shot him,’ she said in a voice scarcely above a whisper. ‘And I shot Ferris too. Do what you like with me. I don’t care. Do what you like with me.’
III
It was around five o’clock the next afternoon when the office door pushed open and Muffin tramped in.
I was lolling in my desk chair. Paula was standing over Jack Kerman, who lay on the office couch. He had justt returned from Paris, and at this moment was endeavouring to justify an expense sheet that looked like Danny Kaye’s income-tax assessment.
‘Twenty dollars a night for champagne,’ Paula was saying, waving the expense sheet in Kerman’s face. ‘And nothing to show for it. Nothing at all.’