my chest, with me. My right shoulder and arm were out of whack―dead. The girl was making whimpering noises in her chest, but I couldn't see any marks on her except a shallow scratch on one cheek. I had been her cushion, had taken the bump for her. The soreness of my chest and belly told me how much I had saved her.
People helped us up. Collinson stood with his arms around the girl, begging her to say she wasn't dead, and so on. The smash-up had shaken her into semi-consciousness, but she was still too full of narcotics to know whether there had been an accident or a wedding.
I went over and helped Collinson hold her up—though neither needed help—saying earnestly to the gathering crowd: "We've got to get her home. Who can—?"
A pudgy man in plus fours offered his and his car's services. Collinson and I sat in the back with the girl, and I gave the pudgy man her address. He said something about a hospital, but I insisted that home was the place for her. Collinson was too rattled over the girl's various troubles to say anything.
Twenty minutes later we were taking the girl out of the car in front of her house. I thanked the pudgy man profusely, giving him no opportunity to follow us indoors, and Collinson and I led the girl up the blue brick walk and up the front steps.
VI
The girl was now nearly enough awake to answer "No" when I asked her if she had a key. I rang the bell. The door was opened, after a little delay, by Owen Fitzstephan. There was no sleepiness left in his gray eyes; they were hot and bright, as they always got when he found life interesting. Knowing the sort of things that interested him, I wondered what had happened.
"What have you been doing?" he asked, looking at our clothes, at Collinson's scraped face, and at the girl's scratched cheek.
"Automobile accident," I explained "Nothing serious. Where's everybody?"
"Everybody," he said, stressing the word, "is up in the laboratory. Come here."
He took me across the reception hall to the foot of the stairs, leaving Collinson and the girl standing together by the door, put his mouth to my ear, and whispered:
"Leggett's committed suicide."
"Where is he?" I was more annoyed than surprised.
"In the laboratory. Mrs. Leggett and the police are up there, too. It happened not more than half an hour ago."
"We'll all go up," I decided.
"Isn't that," he protested, "rather unnecessarily brutal—taking the girl there?"
"Maybe," I said irritably, "but it can't be helped. Anyway, she's coked up and better able to stand the shock than she will be later, when the stuff's dying out in her." I turned to Collinson. "Come on, we'll all go up to the laboratory."
I went ahead, letting Fitzstephan help Collinson with the girl.
There were six people in the laboratory; a uniformed policeman, a big man with a red mustache, standing beside the open door; Mrs. Leggett, sitting on a wooden chair in the farther end of the room, her body bent forward, her hands holding a handkerchief to her face, sobbing quietly; O'Gar and Reddy, standing by one of the windows, close together, reading a sheaf of papers that the bullet-headed sergeant held in his thick fists; a gray-faced, dandified man in dark clothes, standing beside the zinc table, twiddling eye-glasses on a black ribbon in his hand; and Edgar Leggett, seated on a chair at the table, his head and upper body resting on the table, his arms sprawled out.
O'Gar and Reddy looked up from their reading as I came in. Passing the table, to join them at the window, I
