The Devil To Pay by Ellery Queen

drawer, “why were you carrying this?” She held up the automatic.
    Walter said contemptuously: “Going through m’ pockets, huh? Gimme!” Val let him take the pistol away from her. He looked at it, snorted, and dropped it into his pocket. “Threat—threat’ning letters. Dozen of ’m. Son of man who ruined thousan’s. So I bought a gun.” His shoulders hunched and he said painfully: “I love you, but min’ y’r own bus’ness.”
    This wasn’t Walter. Not the Walter she had known for so many years. Or was it? Wasn’t it always a crisis like this that showed a man up in the true ugliness of his naked self? “You let that Inspector think my father went to Sans Souci this afternoon,” she cried. “Why didn’t you tell him that you were the one Frank saw sneaking up the drive—that you were wearing pop’s coat?”
    Walter blinked several times, as if he was trying to peer through a week’s collection of Hollywood’s evening mists. “Gotta trus’ me,” he mumbled. “Don’ ask questions, Val. No questions.”
    “Trust you! Why?” flared Val. “After the way you’ve acted? Haven’t I the right to ask questions when your silence implicates my own father?” But then she grasped his sodden lapels and laid her head on his chest. “Oh, Walter,” she sobbed, “I don’t care what you’ve done, if you’ll only be honest about it. Trust you! Why don’t you trust me?”
    It was queer how humble he could be one moment and how hard, how frozen hard, the next. It was as if certain questions congealed him instantly, making him impervious to warmth or reason or appeal. He said, trying to control his lax tongue: “Mu’n’ fin’ out I was in father’s house. If you tell’m… Don’ you dare tell’m, Val, y’un’erstan’ me?”
    Then it was true. Pop! goes the weasel. Val pushed away from him. Faith was all right in its place, which was usually in drippy novels. But a human being couldn’t accept certain things on faith. Appearances might be deceptive in some cases, but usually they were photographic images of the truth. Real life had a way of being harshly unsubtle. “Apparently,” she said in a remote voice, “the fact that Glücke suspects my father of murder, that one word from you would clear him, doesn’t mean a thing to you. Not when your own skin is in danger.”
    Walter was quite steady now. He opened his mouth to say something, but then he closed it without having uttered any sound whatever. “So you’ll please me,” said Val, “by getting out.”
    He did not know, could not know, that Rhys had an alibi for the time the crime was committed.
    “Aw right,” said Walter in a low tone.
    And now he would never know—not through her! If she told him, how easy it would be for him to crawl out, to say he had known about her father’s alibi all the time, that Rhys had never been in real danger and that it was necessary to him to protect himself. When he sobered up, he might even invent some plausible story to account for his damning actions. Walter was persuasive when he wanted to be. And in her heart Val knew she could not trust herself. So she said again, bitterly: “Your secret, whatever it is, is safe with me. Will you get out?”
    Walter plucked violently at his collar, as if he found its grip intolerable. Then he wrenched the door open, stumbled across the living-room, and zigzagged out of the apartment, leaving his hat behind. Val picked the hat up from the living-room floor and threw it after him into the corridor.
    That was that. “Pink, I’m starved,” she called out, going into the kitchen. “What’s on the menu?” But then her eyes narrowed and she said: “Pink, what is that?”
    Pink was guiltily hiding something in his trouser pocket. “Nothing,” he said quickly. And he got up from the chair in the breakfast nook and made for the gas range, where several pots and pans were bubbling. “Is crackpot gone?”
    “Pink, what are you hiding?” Val went over to him