“It would?” She was scornful “Or it wouldn’t.”
“If you still think Perrit and Wolfe framed it you’re batty. You don’t know Wolfe.”
“I know Dazy Perrit.” She turned east on Seventy-eighth Street.
“But not Wolfe,” I insisted. “The first chance I get I’ll explain him to you. It’s not only his fat that keeps you from seeing through him. Perrit has met his match twice, first you and now Wolfe.”
She pulled up at the curb on the right, by an awning, and I hopped out and held the door open for her, but she emerged on her own side and came around.
She put a hand on my arm. “We’ll leave the car here. Later I’ll come down and drive you home.”
For the second time that night I was given the job of crawling from under, and this time there was no Morton to give me an assist. I resisted, politely, the pull on my arm and started arranging words, but the words never got spoken. At that instant the question became not whether those words would get spoken, but whether any more words at all would ever get spoken — by me. A car had turned into the street from Fifth Avenue, tearing along in second gear, and slowed down, nearly to a stop, just behind Violet’s coupé. I was aware of it only from noises because my back was to it When Violet’s hold on my arm tightened and her face went stiff and she jerked to the left and tight against me, I reacted fast by whirling around, and the force of my whirl, with her holding my arm, yanked her to one side. The bullets were coming by then. With his gun poked through the open window, the guy in the car had a range of not more than twenty feet.
I think the first bullet got her. Anyhow, the shots came so fast together that that was a minor point. As she went down I went down with her, both because of her drag on my arm, which she held on to, and because my reflexes decided that standing up was a bad idea under the circumstances. Then other reflexes took a hand, and I rolled to the curb and was kneeling behind Violet’s coupé, with the gun from my coat-pocket in my hand, aiming it at the other car, which was on the move again, thirty yards toward Madison Avenue and going fast. I pulled the trigger until the gun was empty. The car was going faster as it crossed Madison.
I was upright by then and I turned to Violet. She was on her hands and knees, trying to get up. As I moved to her she crumpled. I knelt down for a look and saw that one bullet had torn through her cheek, but obviously there were others.