The Dragon Done It by Mike Resnick, Eric Flint Page B

the cold, maybe not. "May I sit down?"
    I shrugged. "Please yourself. You usually do."
    She sat down, smoothing her soaked sweater over her knees. I tried not to watch her doing this, without much success.
    "I'll come straight to the point," she began. "This man . . ." she pointed to the corpse on the floor, ". . . I mean, this creature , has been blackmailing me."
    I kept my eyes fixed on hers. It wasn't hard. "Looks like he just stopped," I said.
    "Are you going to turn me in?" She leaned across the desk and clasped her hands around mine. Her touch was cold and electric. "Are you?"
    "Is that why you shot your way in here? To plead your innocence before I figured it was you?"
    "How long would it have taken you to find out?"
    I shrugged. "Would have taken me a minute or two to get the slug out of the stiff. As for tracing it—that depends who I went to."
    "Give me a for instance."
    "Deke the Rip could do it in a half hour. Twenty minutes to get to his place and back."
    "So you'd have been knocking on my door within the hour."
    Again I shrugged. "It's what I do."
    "You think I don't know that?"
    "You know it. So why shoot the werewolf on my doorstep? Why not choose somewhere more discreet? And why was he blackmailing you?"
    She pressed her shoulders back in the chair and crossed her legs. Water squeezed from the soaked fabric and puddled beneath the desk. "You're asking a lot of questions—no, you don't need to tell me: it's what you do."
    I raised my eyebrows. "You got that right. So, you want to answer some of them?"
    Lowering her eyes, she began her story.
    "I hooked up with him a couple of months ago. He was kind of mysterious and that fascinated me. He only let me see him two nights a week and never at all around the full moon. I suppose I should have guessed his secret but . . . well, with some folk, just being around them makes you blind to the obvious, you know what I mean?"
    "Yes, ma'am," I murmured, watching what was left of the rain trickling through her hair. "I know."
    "He was big on casinos so we did the strip. He won a lot of dough; he was lucky that way."
    "Not so lucky now," I said, eyeing the corpse. "So, why the blackmail, if he was on such a winning streak?"
    "Because his luck ran out. He ran himself up a tab he couldn't pay off and got the heavies on his back—I'm talking about the real heavies now. He owes a lot of money to a lot of very ugly people. I mean owed, I guess."
    "The Tartarus Club?" I hazarded. She nodded her head and shuddered. The movement did remarkable things to the curves beneath that damned sweater. "Are you telling me the Titans were after him?"
    "Yes. Only I got to him first."
    "So what did you have that he wanted?"
    "Money, what else? I inherited a packet from my third husband."
    "How did he die?"
    "In tragic circumstances."
    "I'll bet."
    "Are you cross-examining me?"
    "Is that an invitation?"
    "Since when did you wait to be invited?"
    "Stick to the story, ma'am."
    By now her eyes were locked back on mine. That was just the way I liked them.
    "I'm a rich widow these days," she went on, "and that's all you need to know. So, the wolfman got wind of my billions . . ."
    "Pardon me—did you say millions ?"
    "No. Now where was I? Oh yes, he found out I was rich and decided I was the one to pay off his debts and buy his ticket out of hell. Only I'd already found out he was cheating on me, so it was no deal. That's when I got the first blackmail note."
    "What did he have on you?"
    She held my gaze and said quietly, "There were two photos taken that day."
    I closed my eyes and all at once I was back in that apartment. Damn it all, I could even smell the gunsmoke and chicory.
    "Why didn't you destroy all the evidence?" I said. "You were quick enough to shoot a hole in the photo I found."
    I could sense this whole thing was getting out of hand, maybe even getting dangerous. The dame still had a gun in her hand, after all. I knew I had to keep her talking. Besides, I was curious: