“I didn’t kill him,” Jerry said to me. “I came here to get him; I meant to bag him. Christina came with him but she worked with me. She knew I was here. She meant to kill him. I didn’t know that till after I’d stepped out and went at him. She gave him the steel; she wanted to croak him. She thought he’d get her, if she didn’t.”
Doris said: “He would have. Where’s she now?”
“Gone,” said Jerry; and Doris asked no more.
Jerry ceased to stare down at Keeban. “We were twins, I suppose; that must be it; and he walked the wrong way across Lincoln Park. That was all there was to it.” His mind kept going back to that. “Steve,” he said to me.
“What?” I asked; I thought again he was turned to philosophy; but he said,
“Upstairs, you swung your chair hard, old top. I thought you’d never do it.”
“I see now,” I replied. “You were waiting for me to do that.”
He nodded. “You had to make the move; then I could do the rest. You got to it just in time, old fellow!”
“In time?” I said stupidly. “The pipe wasn’t turned on.”
“Yet you were just in time; in a minute more, they’d got wise that it wasn’t.”