People went back to their tables, leaving Lydia alone with her dead. She stood over the body, a serviette held to her bleeding nose. She was still drunk enough not to realize that the man in the white dinner-jacket was dead. She kept stirring him with her foot, saying, “Get up, you swine. You can’t scare me,” but she was beginning to sense the jam she was in, and her voice was going off-key.
It took the police six minutes by my watch to arrive. They came in: three plain-clothes men, four in uniform, a doctor, a photographer and the D.A.’s man.
They went to work in the usual efficient way policemen go to work. It was only when the doctor signed to a couple of the uniformed men to cover the body with a table-cloth that the nicklc dropped in Lydia’s befuddled mind. As they draped the cloth over the body, she let out a screech that set everyone’s teeth on edge.
“Okay, sister,” the Homicide man said, tapping her arm. “Take it easy. It won’t get you anywhere.”
She looked wildly around the room: saw me.
“It’s all your fault, you—” she screamed. “It was you who spoilt my lovely car.”
People stood on chairs to look at me. The Homicide man gave me a hard stare. I sat there, looked back. There was nothing else I could do. It was a pretty nasty moment.
Lydia suddenly made a dive at me, but the cops grabbed her.
“Get her out of here,” the Homicide man said as she began to curse. Even his face registered disgust.
Things quieted down when she had gone. The Homicide man came over to me, asked where I figured in this.