Flamboyant, that’s what she was, and terribly bizarre from the effect of a shingled ripple of bleached blonde hair above her Spanish night-filled eyes.
“You have put yourself in my way, Lieutenant”—her voice was as disagreeable as the clash of dishes in a cheap restaurant—“and I am going to kill you and escape.”
“I see,” Lieutenant Valcour said politely, “that you believe in threes.”
“How?”
“Your husband, Mrs. Endicott’s husband, and now myself. One—two—three. For the sake of symmetry it is a pity that I am a bachelor.”
She enjoyed for a full moment of silence—luxuriated in it, really—the sense of power which she held over this man. She had always enjoyed the power exerted by her body, and it was refreshing to drink quietly for a while of this different sort of power, which, through the medium of the pistol held unwaveringly in her hand, controlled the services of life and death. She would shoot him soon. …
Lieutenant Valcour hoped that Hansen would not blunder.
He could see Hansen quite clearly now, all but pressed against the outside of the window just behind Marge Myles. So Hansen, he reflected, had found that there was a way to climb up onto the balcony from the garden down below. What a handy thing it was, at times, to have been a sailor. Lieutenant Valcour fervently hoped that—the usefulness of the rule having been accomplished—Hansen would promptly stop being a sailor and become a policeman. He couldn’t, and didn’t, expect that Hansen would shoot a woman down in cold blood, nor would Hansen dare to startle her by throwing open the window or crashing through its glass. Could Hansen shoot through the glass and