"Think, Fred. Think about the dirt on the bathroom floor."
"Smudged footprints." He transferred his bewildered frown from the paper shredder to me. "He stood on the paper shredder?"
"Certainly. Don't you know where he is?" I pointed up. "He's in the ceiling."
* * *
I was right, of course. Dropped ceilings are constructed of a metal gridwork hung by wires from the beams of the original ceiling. The two-foot by four-foot fiberboard rectangles simply lie in this grid, and can be pushed up and out of the way. A space of a foot or more is left below the old ceiling, to leave room for the fluorescent light fixtures and for the fiberboard pieces to be slipped up over the grid.
The gridwork isn't very strong, and wouldn't normally support the weight of a man, but this was a special case. First, the killer had brought in two six-foot lengths of thin lumber and placed them diagonally across the grid, spreading the weight. Second, the killer wasn't a man but a woman, a slender twentyish girl who couldn't have weighed over a hundred pounds.
A hundred very nasty pounds, I might say. When Fred Staples, following my suggestion, climbed up on the paper shredder, lifted the nearest section of fiberboard and stuck his head in between the ceilings to look, she kicked him in the face. He gave a yelp and came catapulting off the shredder and into my arms, the fiberboard rectangle bouncing and careening around us, while at the same time the girl came through another ceiling section and landed feet first on Al Bray's head.
Both cops were yelling, I was falling down from the weight of Fred Staples, and Al Bray was being beaten to the ground by the furious knees, heels, elbows, fists and forehead of the woman wrapped around his neck. She was dressed all in black—shoes, slacks, sweater—and she'd descended more like a demon than a human being.
"Stop her!" Bray yelled from the floor, and I wriggled out from under Staples just in time to snap my fingers around her near ankle as she scurried for the door.
I learned to regret that. She turned back the way a cat does when its hind leg is grabbed. The first thing she did was leave three long fingernail gashes on my right wrist, and the second thing she did was leave four long fingernail gashes on my left cheek. Then Bray arrived, and hit her very very hard with his fist on the side of her head, just above the ear. (He later explained that in all head-punching the target should be an area covered by hair, to minimize visible bruises later. Every trade has its expertise.)
The girl fell down when Bray hit her, and he immediately stepped on her long hair, so she couldn't get up again. When she snapped her head around to bite his ankle he rested his other foot on her throat and said, "Think it over."
She thought it over, glaring up at everybody, and while she was thinking Fred Staples put her wrists in handcuffs behind her back. They stood her up then, and frisked her in a thorough blunt irritable way that had nothing of sex in it at all.
Meantime, my wrist and face were both beginning to sting. I licked my wrist, but couldn't do much about my face. I also went to the nearest vinyl divan and sat down, feeling a bit shaky.
The girl had suddenly become very vocal. She shouted a lot of fierce things, undoubtedly of a political nature, burning with passion and historical ignorance, but since this Nathan Halizing was being done in that k-k-k language I took to be Visarian I remained ignorant of her specific quarrel with the late Mr. Kaklov. Al Bray rapped her with a knuckle in the hair a couple of times and she subsided, but continued muttering and glaring at everybody.
Bray and a uniformed cop then took the girl away, and Fred Staples came over to me with a handkerchief extended in his right hand. "What's that for?" I said. "I'm not crying."
"No, you're bleeding."
"I'm what?" Grabbing the handkerchief, I pressed it to the stinging side of my face, and it came away with diagonal red lines on it. "That's my blood!"
"Better come with me," he said.
NINE
The Death of the Party
After the hospital, where they gave me a shot and a scrub and some gauze bandage on my cheek, I went with Staples back to my apartment and we discussed the Laura Penney murder some more. He assured me they were investigating possibilities other than the guilt of Kit Markowitz, meaning they were still checking into the five original male suspects. I asked him the questions Kit had assigned me, and he said no, they hadn't established solid alibis for Jay English or Dave Poumon, mostly because the initial interview with that pair had seemed conclusive enough. As for Claire and Ellen, Kit's two alternate female suspects, Staples acknowledged they'd studied Claire a bit without establishing much of anything, but Ellen came as a surprise to him. He made himself a note, and I said, "Our investigations overlap."
"The more the merrier," he told me. "I really want to solve this Laura Penney murder, Carey."
"Good," I said.
Next I asked him about the anonymous letter, and he turned out to have a Xerox copy of it on his person. He let me make my own copy, in longhand, and then a phone call from his office summoned him away.
I hadn't wanted to check my messages while he was there, not being absolutely certain Patricia wouldn't be cute in spite of my warning, but it turned out to be just the usual dull band of voices, including Shirley, calling from Boston again about those damned papers she wanted signed: "I know you have them by now, and this time I'm serious. If I don't receive them by tomorrow, my Boston attorney is going to hire a New York attorney. At your expense."
Papers, papers. Yes, I remembered receiving them, but had I ever signed and returned them? With all this other stuff going on, I was pretty sure I hadn't, but when I went through the crap on my desk they weren't there.
Damn. Who needed this annoyance? I spent ten minutes searching the apartment, in every likely and unlikely corner, and finally had to give up and call Shirley, a thing I hate to do. One of the brats answered—until John's voice changes, which I presume it will some day, there's no way to tell them apart, even if I wanted to— but then Shirley came on the line and I said, "Look, I'm not trying to make trouble, but I lost those damn papers."
"You're such a bullshitter, Carey."
"Well, that's all right, you do what you want to do, only if you send me another set I'll sign them right away and send them straight back."
Some snarling followed, until it was agreed I'd be sent another set of papers, and then we both hung up and off I went for the Valium. That, plus the medication I'd been given at the hospital, plus the hectic life I'd been leading recently, combined to knock me out all of a sudden, and I staggered to the bed and slept until seven-thirty, when the phone woke me, being Kit, wondering where I was.
"Sorry," I said. "I'll be right there." And I was, extending the anonymous letter out in front of me as a peace offering.
"Wonderful!" she said, clutching at it. "How did you do it?"
"I have my methods, Watson."
So then dinner, which was already late, had to be delayed further while Kit immersed herself in the anonymous letter, reading aloud its cryptic algebra: "If A got too close to B, what would C do?" With paper and pencil, she proceeded to put columns of names under the letters A and C, reserving B for Laura. Gradually she demonstrated to her own satisfaction that everybody she knew could go in one column or the other, and that most names could go in both. "Oh, really!" she said, at last. "Being anonymous is one thing, but being a smartass is something else. Why didn't she say what she meant?"
"She?"
"This was obviously written by a woman."
"Ah."
"Look at this sentence about the husband. 'He doesn't know anything about it.' That's a woman saying that. A man wouldn't even mention the husband at all."
"I see. Very clever."
Having announced this deduction, Kit went back to studying the columns of names again, and it began to look as though we'd never get to dinner, until I pointed out that Laura need not necessarily be character B, but could also be character C. Kit frowned at the sheets of paper in front of her and said, "How coul
d that be?"
"Well, for instance, what if Laura had a secret yen for Jack Freelander, but—"
"That's ridiculous. Jack?"
"Wait a minute. What if she thought Claire Wallace was the competition? Then that sentence could read, If Claire Wallace got too close to Jack Freelander, what would Laura Penney do?'"
Kit mouthed the words, vertical frown lines in her forehead. "Meaning what?"
"Meaning Laura might have Claire over to her place to talk it out. There's an argument, Claire hits her, and that's it."
"Claire? Is that possible?"
"It could be a lot of people. Let's see." I ran a finger down column A. "Now, what if—?"
"Oh, I've had enough! Let's have dinner." Kit flung down her pencil, got up from her desk, and gave me a puzzled frown. "What happened to your face?"
"You noticed," I said, touching the bandage. "A girl fell out of a ceiling and scratched me."
"What?"
So at last I had her attention away from the anonymous letter, and over dinner I told her my latest exploit, and she was properly impressed. Of course, after dinner we had to play with the names and the columns again for another hour or so, but I didn't mind, now that I'd been fed. This detective business could be rather restful at times.
* * *
The whole week was very restful, in fact, much more so than the preceding seven days. By Tuesday afternoon Kit had finished inviting all her suspects to the Friday night party, and all had agreed to come. (No reason for the get-together was given, the guests being allowed to believe it was simply an ordinary Thank-God-It's-Friday & Isn't-Winter-Awful party.) After I'd delivered to Kit the copy of the anonymous letter, plus Staples' answers to her other questions, she had no further active role for me to play other than as the sounding board who listened every evening to that day's sleuthing and conclusions. At different times between Tuesday morning and Friday afternoon she conclusively demonstrated the guilt of four different people, and subsequently just as conclusively exonerated all four of them again. It was a pleasure to observe all of this deducing and detecting, particularly since I had already peeked at the last chapter.
When I wasn't being Dr. Watson with Kit, I was playing a very different kind of doctor with Patricia Staples. Fascinating woman! My initial impression could not have been more wrong. I had thought of her as the ultimate mousy housewife, totally absorbed in husband and casseroles, when in fact her absorption was totally with Patricia Staples. She was incredible to watch, a woman with no more concept of the world outside herself than a canary. She agreed with everything Fred said—and now with everything I said—not because she was lost in her man but because she was lost in herself. Fred admired her and kept her comfortable, so she responded by being agreeable. If he said a particular movie was wonderful or a particular politician was no good, why not agree with him? Neither the movie nor the politician mattered at all, even existed at all, insofar as she was concerned, so what difference did it make what anybody said about them?
This self-absorption might have been annoying if it had taken some other form—selfishness, for instance, or arrogance. As it was, her pleasure in her own existence kept her sunny in temperament, and left her with no great requirement for anything more. Should someone—Fred, me, whoever it might be—do something to make her happy (give her a compliment, say, or take her out to dinner, or screw her inventively), she accepted it as her due, and with gratitude returned the favor fourfold. Make her happy, she'll make you happy. Gaslight, it turned out, made us both very happy indeed, several times that week.
At the same time, the riskiness of our game—my game —kept me from ever fully concentrating on its rewards. 7 am the quarry, I kept reminding myself, in a murder investigation which is still very much alive. It is insane for me to he cuckolding the primary investigating officer. And yet I could never bring myself to kick Patricia Staples out of bed.
As for her husband and Bray, they came up with no more "interesting" homicides, though Staples did call from time to time with some piece of news about one or another of our recent cases. Jack St. Pierre, for instance, the fellow I'd pegged as the murderer of the copywriter, Bart Ailburg (misplaced island), had run away but had been found staying with a cousin in San Diego, and when apprehended had immediately confessed. As to the Vi-saria murder, the assassin had now been identified as one Kora Haaket, and two of her co-conspirators had been found lurking in a Volkswagen up the block from the mission. Their guilt had been established by their Visarian nationality, their history of anti-government politics, the presence in their Beetle of a woman's coat with Kora Haaket's name sewn in it, and their mistake of not only carrying guns but actually shooting these guns at the police who approached their car to question them. A double mistake, that; one of the guns, a defective American product bought locally, had blown up in its operator's hand. Both co-conspirators were now in the hospital and doing well, though their future was in doubt. Since legally the Visarian mission was considered Visarian territory rather than American, the Visar-ians were asking for extradition of Kora Haaket and the other two for trial in their native land. Since trial in Visaria would inevitably lead to execution, and since execution in Visaria was by flaying, the Legal Aid defense attorney assigned to the trio was trying to obfuscate due process in every way he could. It was likely the three Visarians would remain in jail for the rest of their natural lives, awaiting a final decision on the extradition order.
On the-Laura Penney murder, Staples continued to have no further news, except that he'd followed Kit's idea about Ellen Richter, and had found her to have an unimpeachable alibi for the time of the killing.
Oh, and the matter of Edgarson. He was found, in a TWA storage room at the Seattle airport, sometime Wednesday night, as Staples informed me over the phone on Thursday afternoon. "His office isn't sure what he was going out to Seattle for," he said, "but apparently one of his cases had got him involved with some mob types. He bought the ticket himself, at the airport, three hours before takeoff, but then apparently he got lured to some quiet place and was murdered. Hit on the head. He had one of those big folding suitcase things, and they stuffed his body in it and checked it through to Seattle on Edgar-son's own ticket."
"Mob types, you say?"
"It has all the earmarks. We're putting the question out to some of our informants now."
"This is bad news for Kit," I said. "I know for sure he would have exonerated her."
"Well, it keeps the situation pretty much the way it was," he said. "We'll keep working on it."
That day also I got the substitute set of papers from Shirley—I never had found the first set—and I immediately signed them and sent them back to Boston.
I also got some work done at last. The first several days after Laura's death I'd been so busy with these other things that almost none of my real work got done, but during the course of this week I finished the Cassavetes piece and made major headway in carving a rational interview out of the block of wood left me by Big John Brant.
Then came Friday, and Kit's party.
* * *
I don't much like parties. Too many people in too small a space, drinking too much and talking too loudly and usually creating at least one new set of permanent enemies. No matter how carefully the guest list is assembled, there's usually one social gaffe to start the ball rolling—or roiling—and the discontent breeds like maggots in a dead horse.
This time, the guest list had been compiled with no reference at all to the usual social niceties. Jack Meacher and Perry Stokes were both invited, for instance, even though Perry would naturally bring his wife Grace, who had run away briefly to East St. Louis with that same Jack Meacher three summers ago. But Jack and Perry were among the male suspects, so here they were, willy-nilly, glowering at one another across Kit's living room while Grace sat unobtrusively near the bar, putting away the cheap Scotch with a funnel.
Jack Meacher provided an added fillip by showing up with Audrey Feebleman; the first hint to
anybody that there was trouble between Audrey and her husband Mort. Irv and Karen Leonard, who had managed to keep their marriage green—if not to say gangrenous—for nine wonderful years by combining moral disapproval of others with very tight security on their own peccadilloes, spent most of the party standing in a corner together back-biting everyone else present, until Karen suddenly went off to dance the hustle with Mark Banbury, who had arrived with Honey Hamilton, an absolutely luscious blonde I had always coveted.
Let's see; and who else? Ellen Richter, who had been invited as a suspect but who had since been cleared by Staples, arrived with Jack Freelander, who was still a suspect and who was still determined to pick my brains for that asinine magazine piece of his. He hummed and stuttered at me all evening, like a defective hearing aid.
The other female suspect, Claire Wallace, a tall cool girl of the sort who models long skirts in the women's magazines, showed up with a lurking shifty-eyed fellow introduced as Lou, who had long graying hair and heavy bags under his eyes, who wore dungarees and a flannel shirt and a leather vest, and who looked generally like an unsuccessful train robber. And the representatives of the sexual Third World, Jay English and Dave Poumon, brought along some messy fag hag named Madge Stockton; one of those plump girls who wears forty shawls and combs her hair with barbed wire.
So there we were, eighteen oddly assorted people in one smallish living room, with February taking place outside. Kit had a stack of easy rock music on the turntable, to fill in the sound until conversation should commence, and I served as bartender for the first hour, until the guests were properly lubricated. The secret of a successful party, if there is any such thing, is to get some alcohol into each guest right away, but then slow the liquor and provide some food, to keep them from becoming dysfunctional. Also hide the chairs; if everybody sits down, the party dies. Also have the food and liquor tables as far from one another as possible; that way, the drinkers will cluster in one place, the eaters will cluster in another, and the well-rounded types will circulate. Keep them standing and walking and drinking and eating, and pretty soon they'll act as though they're at a party.
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