sa Gregg reached through the darkness for the switch. He fumbled for the bottle which stood on the desk. His hand trembled, spilling some of the liquor onto his lap. He drank from the bottle....
This part of the story he'd skip. It was too horrible, even to think about it. He didn't want to remember how the blood pooled inside Dot's fur coat, and how he'd managed to carry the body out of the office without leaking any of her blood onto the floor. He tried to forget the musky sweetness of the perfume on the dead girl, mingled with that other evil blood-smell. Especially he didn't want to remember the frightful time he'd had stripping the gold rings from her fingers, and the one gold tooth in her head....
The horror of it coiled in the blackness about him. His own teeth rattled against the bottle when he gulped the second drink. He snapped the switch savagely, but when he spoke his voice cringed into the tube:
"I carried her into the storage room. I got the lid off one of the acid tanks. The vat contained an acid powerful enough to destroy anything—except gold. In fact, the vat itself had to be lined with gold-leaf. I knew that in twenty-four hours there wouldn't be a recognizable body left, and in a week there wouldn't be anything at all. No matter what the police suspected, they couldn't prove a murder charge without a corpus delicti. I had committed the perfect crime—except for one thing. I didn't realize that there'd be a splash when she went into the vat."
Gregg laughed, not pleasantly. His wife might think it'd been a sob, when she heard this record. "Now you understand why I went to the hospital," he jerked. "Possibly you'd call that poetic justice. Oh, God!"
His voice broke. Again he thumbed off the switch, and mopped his face with the damp linen.
The rest—how could he explain the rest of it?
He spent a long minute arranging his thoughts.
"You haven't any idea," he resumed, "no one has any idea, of how I've been punished for the thing I did. I don't mean the sheer physical agony—but the fear that I'd talk coming out of the ether at the hospital. The fear that she'd been traced to my office—I'd simply hidden her rings away, expecting to drop them into the river—or that she might have confided in her lover ... yes, she had one. Or, suppose a whopping big order came through and that tank was emptied the very next day. And I couldn't ask any questions—I didn't even know what was in the papers.