Clicking red heels

Gruin sipped his cocktail again. Rather, he gulped it for strength. He had at first thought it cute and picturesque of Maria that she carried a little knife in her garter just above her beautiful right knee. He didn't think it was at all cute now. So Gruin sat in the lounge of the sleek, quiet club and knew what had to be done.

He had started something with Maria that would never die while she lived. If he tried to slide out of her life, she would raise a scandal that would ruin him with his righteous grandfather, from whom all monetary blessings flowed. If he tried to leave town, she would follow. If he tried to get it over quickly and finally by marrying some girl of his own class----

The knife at her knee was small, but it was slim and sharp, and it had been flashed more than once before his white face.

Living, Maria, the cobbler's daughter, was a constant menace to Eldon Gruin. So Maria must die.

Gruin shivered a little in the big leather chair in the luxurious lounge. Murder is a large order, even when you're as sure you can get away with it as Gruin was. In addition, there was a dim realization in the back of his mind that the Josés, father and daughter, were not quite as other people were. There was something a little--well, mystic--in their vital black eyes.

The one time when Gruin had consented indifferently to meet Maria's father they had come upon him in the back room of his solitary sweatshop, talking. Talking--with no one else in the room. Talking to her mother, his dead wife, Maria had explained seriously, afterward. And in the man's deep-set eyes had been a flame that killed laughter on Gruin's lips. Something in the spirit and soul of the Josés, father and daughter, that set them a little apart from others--something mystic and unknown....

"Hell," said Gruin, finishing his cocktail and grimacing contemptuously at himself.

He was a fool. He was imagining things. Maria was just a girl--a woman whose ardent infatuation had grown to the point where it threatened a fortune he was to inherit, and his whole future life and good name. He could imagine his grandfather's disinheritance speech if he presented the mercurial cobbler's daughter in the gaudy red heels as his wife!

"It's my life or hers," Gruin told himself, to stifle the gray fear of murder--even so easy and fool-proof a murder as he had in mind.

And with the gray fear lulled by what he chose to call the inevitable, he had dinner at the club and then went to meet Maria....

He met her at Eighth Avenue and Thirty-Fourth Street at a little after half-past eight. She clicked over the sidewalk in her red heels to the curb, glowing and beautiful in a squirrel coat which he had indiscreetly called an "engagement" present when he offered it--because otherwise she would not have accepted it.

"Eldon! My darling! You are late. I have waited and waited."

"I said, eight-thirty," Gruin mumbled.

"I did not want to wait that long. I could not. I have been here since before eight.... Sweetheart, you haven't said you love me...."

Gruin opened the door of his roadster and she got in.

"Eldon, this waiting and waiting--I cannot understand it. When are we going to--to stand before Father Mollé, so I will be with you always?"

"Very soon," Gruin said, sliding into gear. "You will not have to wait for me ever again."

Up Riverside Drive they went, across the Hudson and up the Palisades, to a place where they had parked often at night during the spring and summer and fall--a place that had given Gruin courage to do murder by simplifying it.

There was a spot where you drove off the crowded highway, down half a block of unfinished dirt road with a low wooden rail at the end. The rail barred the street-end from a hundred-foot drop down the cliffside to piles of crushed rock that were to be a new dock soon. And the rail was very flimsy and a little rotten. And there was a great tree that grew at the cliff's edge and flung one branch straight over the road so low that a car's top almost scraped it.

Another car was parked in the road-end when Gruin got there with Maria, in spite of the December cold. Gruin had to wait for this car to leave. He put his arm around Maria, meanwhile gazing upward to be sure that he had stopped the roadster directly under the low branch of the big tree.

"It is cold," said Maria, shivering in spite of her fur. "Would we not be warmer with the top up?"

"The air tastes good," said Gruin hastily. It would ruin his plan if the roadster's top were put up. He had to have a clear space above him.

The other car left. He and Maria were alone in the open roadster under the December stars.

"Are you sick?" said Maria, gazing at him in the dashlight.

"No, no. Not at all," said Gruin, whose teeth showed a tendency to chatter.