“Then I went back and watched Dinah’s house again. Mrs. Willsson came, and then Thaler, and both of them stayed there, watching the house. I was glad of that. With them there I wasn’t so afraid of what I might do. After a while Willsson came out and walked down the street. I looked up at Mrs. Willsson’s car and at the doorway where I knew Thaler was. Neither of them did anything, and Willsson was walking away. I knew then why I had wanted them there. I had hoped they would do something—and I wouldn’t have to. But they didn’t, and he was walking away. If one of them had gone over and said something to him, or even followed him, I wouldn’t have done anything.
“But they didn’t. I remember taking the gun out of my pocket. Everything was blurred in front of my eyes, like I was crying. Maybe I was. I don’t remember shooting—I mean I don’t remember deliberately aiming and pulling the trigger—but I can remember the sound the shots made, and that I knew the noise was coming from the gun in my hand. I don’t remember how Willsson looked, if he fell before I turned and ran up the alley, or not. When I got home I cleaned and reloaded the pistol, and put it back in the paying teller’s cage the next morning.”
On the way down to the City Hall with the boy and the gun I apologized for the village cut-up stuff I had put in the early part of the shakedown, explaining:
“I had to get under your skin, and that was the best way I knew. The way you’d talked about the girl showed me you were too good an actor to be broken down by straight hammering.”
He winced, and said slowly:
“That wasn’t acting, altogether. When I was in danger, facing the gallows, she didn’t—didn’t seem so important to me. I couldn’t—I can’t now—quite understand—fully—why I did what I did. Do you know what I mean? That somehow makes the whole thing—and me—cheap. I mean, the whole thing from the beginning.”