Marion sighed. "Have you got a bed?"
"Yes."
"Okay. I'll have to put a guard on the door. This man is under arrest. But look. Just let him look in the door at Ruth. Maybe he earned that much. I don't know."
They let me look. She was in a private room. Her father sat near the bed. He didn't look toward the doorway. He watched her face. She was no one I would have ever recognized. She was puffy, discolored. She breathed heavily through her open mouth. There was an odor of sickness in the room. I looked at her and I thought of the movie heroines. They go through terror and capture and violence, yet four minutes after rescue they melt, with glossy hair and limpid eyes and gown by Dior, into the arms of Lancaster, or Gable, or Brando. This was reality. The pain and ugliness and sickness of reality.
They took me away.
The formalities were complicated. I had to appear and be questioned at the joint inquest. I told all I knew of the deaths of Antoinette Christina Rasi and Earl David Fitzmartin. I signed six copies of my detailed statement. The final verdict was justifiable homicide. I had killed in defense of my life.
Both the money found in Fitzmartin's car and the money in the cave became a part of George Warden's estate. A second cousin and his wife flew in from Houston to protect their claim to the money and whatever else there was. They arrived on Sunday.
George and Eloise Warden were buried in the Warden family plot. Fulton, identified through his dental work, was sent to Chicago for his third burial. No relative of Fitzmartin could be found. The county buried him. Grassman's body was found. His brother flew down from Chicago and took the body back on the train.
I had told them about Antoinette's clothes and jewelry and the money, the precise amount, that Fitzmartin had taken. The court appointed an executor for Antoinette Rasi's estate, and directed that the clothing and furs and jewels be sold, and made an informal suggestion to the executor that the funds be used for the Doyle children.