named Rutgers, a lawyer here in town. After a while she left him and went out one of the side doors. She winked at me when she passed, so I knew she was going down to see Tim. She had just got out when I heard the shot. Nobody else paid any attention to it. I suppose I wouldn’t have noticed it either if I hadn’t known about Myrtle and Tim.
“I told Holly I wanted to see Myrtle, and went out after her, by myself. I must have been about five minutes behind her in getting out. When I got outside I saw lights down by one of the summer houses, and people. I went down there, and—This talking is thirsty work.”
I poured out a couple of hookers of gin. She went into the kitchen for another siphon and more ice. We mixed them up, drank, and she settled down to her tale again:
“There was Tim Noonan, dead, with a hole in his temple and his gun lying beside him. Perhaps a dozen people were standing around, hotel people, visitors, one of Noonan’s men, a dick named MacSwain. As soon as Myrtle saw me she took me away from the crowd, back in the shade of some trees.
“ ‘Max killed him,’ she said. ‘What’ll I do?’
“I asked her about it. She told me she had seen the flash of the gun and at first she thought Tim had killed himself after all. She was too far away and it was too dark for her to see anything else. When she ran down to him, he was rolling around, moaning, ‘He didn’t have to kill me over her. I’d have—’ She couldn’t make out the rest of it. He was rolling around, bleeding from the hole in his temple.
“Myrtle was afraid Max had done it, but she had to be sure, so she knelt down and tried to pick up Tim’s head, asking: ‘Who did it, Tim?’
“He was almost gone, but before he passed out he got enough strength to tell her, ‘Max!’