ired
that there'd been an accident here at the plant. That wasn't strictly
so. The fact is, I'd gotten mixed up with a girl----"

He paused, shivering. In the darkness a picture of Dot swam before
him. The oval face, framed by gleaming swirls of lemon-tinted hair,
had pouting scarlet lips, and eyes whose allure was intensified by
violet make-up. The full-length picture of her included a streamlined,
full-blossomed and yet delectably lithe body. A costly, enticing,
Broadway-chorus orchid! As a matter of fact, that was where he'd found
her.

"I won't make any excuses for myself," Asa Gregg said harshly. "I
might point out that you were always in Florida or Bermuda or France,
and that I was a lonely man. But it wasn't just loneliness, and I
didn't seek companionship. I thought I was making a last bow to
Romance. I was successful, sixty, and silly, and I did all the damn
fool things--I even wrote letters to her. Popsy-wopsy letters." The
dictaphone couldn't record the grimace that jerked his lips. "She
saved them, of course, and by and by she put a price on them--ten
thousand dollars. Dot claimed that one of those filthy tabloids had
offered her that much for them--and what was a poor working-girl to
do? She lied. I knew that.

"I told her to bring the letters to the office after business hours,
and I'd take care of her. I took care of her, all right. I shot her,
Jeannette!"

He mopped his face with a handkerchief that was already damp.

"Not on account of the money, you understand. It was the things she
said, after she had tucked the bills into her purse ... vile things,
about the way she had earned it ten times over by enduring my beastly
kisses. I'd really loved that girl, and I'd thought she'd cared for me
a little. It was her hate that maddened me, and I got the gun out of
my desk drawer----"

* * * * *

Asa Gregg reached through the darkness for the switch. He fumbled for
the bottle which stood on the desk. His hand trembled, spilling some
of the liquor onto his lap. He drank from the bottle....

This part of the story he'd skip. It was too horrible, even to think
about it. He didn't want to remember how the blood pooled inside Dot's
fur coat, and how he'd managed to carry the body out of the office
without leaking any of her blood onto the floor. He tried to forget
the musky sweetness of the perfume on the dead girl, mingled with that
other evil blood-smell. Especially he did