Page:Keeban (IA keeban00balm).pdf/90

 "When was it, father?" I asked.

"Less than an hour ago. The police roused your mother who woke me."

He was in pajamas and dressing gown, was father, with bedroom slippers on. He was tall and gray and gaunt-looking in the glow of my reading lamp which he'd lit. He shook a little and bent a little more; he believed that Jerry did it.

"Where was it?"

"Jerry killed him at home."

"How?"

"He shot him, I said; he shot him down in cold blood."

I began at this time to feel it; and what I felt was not that Jerry had shot Win Scofield; no, not Jerry who'd grown up beside me as my brother in this house. That duplicate of Jerry, whom I myself had mistaken for Jerry when I found him in that basement room, that man and his Christina, who then was with him, had "got" Win Scofield; and my rage rose against her. She was his wife and, if she had not fired the shot, she'd been in the plot. I thought how I had seen her last night singing and exultant. I clenched my hands and shook.

My father was going on. "He was seen and