“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 could 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 exr ploit, 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. I am the quarry, I kept reminding myself, in a murder investigation which is still very much alive. It is insane for me to be 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 Visaria 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 Visarians 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 ty
pes. 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 Edgarson’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 backbiting 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, seventeen 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.
Which they did. The usual conversations took place, I traveled around trying unsuccessfully to avoid Jack Freelander, and Kit prowled among her suspects like a choirmaster through a chorus in which one voice is singing flat. Her method was fairly direct; she just kept talking with people about Laura Penney’s murder, which was now an event ten days in the past, so it could be discussed as unsolved history, like the John F. Kennedy assassination. Fairly early on, I passed her in conversation with Jack Meacher and heard her say, “One of the people in this room is a murderer.”
“Oh, I think it was a burglar did it,” Jack said. “Do these little sandwiches come from Smiler’s?”
I didn’t listen to Kit’s response, since Jack Freelander was gliding toward me again, but several times later that evening I heard her deliver the same old-movie line to several other guests, and the responses ranged from Karen Leonard’s jaded, “Well, I’m never surprised by anything anybody does,” to Jay English’s avid, “Who?”
“One of them. One of the people in this room is a murderer.”
Well, it was true, wasn’t it? I danced with Honey Hamilton while her date, Mark Banbury, was busy dancing with Karen Leonard, and Kit just kept hacking through the underbrush. And the party, despite its origins, became a party.
My flight from Jack Freelander made me unwary in other directions, and I abruptly found myself in conversation with Madge Stockton, the pudgy girl brought by Jay English and Dave Poumon. “I understand a friend of yours was murdered recently,” she said.
“Most of us knew her,” I admitted, nodding my head to include the other partygoers.
“It’s so hard to keep track of an individual death, isn’t it?” she said. “There are so many deaths, so many injustices, they all blend together.”
“Well, that depends how closely they affect you.”
She smiled; she had bad teeth. “That’s right,” she said. “It isn’t morality at all, it’s personal convenience, personal emotions. None of us really care how many strangers get killed.”
Well, if you’re going to a cocktail party you have to expect cocktail party conversation. I said, “Naturally, it affects you more if it happens to somebody you know.” And even as I was saying it, I knew I was giving this girl an irresistible opportunity to quote John Donne.
Which she took. I received the tolling of the bell with my best glazed smile, and she said, “But the point really is morality, isn’t it? People are liberal or conservative these days, they believe in women’s rights or property rights or whatever, some of them are even still ethical, but nobody’s actually moral any more. Nobody hates sin.” Then she nodded, looking amused at herself, and said, “See? People smile if you even use the word sin.”
Was I smiling? Yes, I was. Wiping it off, I tried another catchphrase: “The only sin is getting caught.”
But I wasn’t to get off so lightly. “Not even that,” she said. “That was twenty years ago, when people were much more naive. Now we know what happens if you get caught. A lecture tour and a best-seller.”
“And Laura Penney’s killer?”
“He probably regrets it,” she said. “Because of the inconvenience. But I don’t suppose he’s ashamed of himself, do you?”
“Ashamed?” What an odd word.
She gave me another flash of her bad teeth. “Nobody’s ashamed of anything any more, are they?”
“Well, there’s a lot in what you say,” I said. “Woops, looks like I need a new drink. Excuse me.” And I fled.
While I was making that new drink, which in fact I did need, Grace Stokes, extremely drunk, got into a sudden unintelligible loud argument with her husband Perry and then stormed out, thumping her right shoulder against the doorpost on the way by. Jack Meacher, the Don Juan of Ea
st St. Louis, kept his attentions firmly fixed on his current date, Audrey Feebleman, until Perry Stokes also left, following his wife’s trail but not repeating the shoulder-doorpost thump.
Time passed. I made a date with Honey Hamilton for lunch and an afternoon screening next Tuesday. Jay English and Dave Poumon shook everybody’s hand and left, taking their moral fruit fly with them. Lou, the apparent train robber, shot up in the john, an action of which we all disapproved; Claire Wallace apologized for him and took him away. Feeling mellow after my successful gambit with Honey Hamilton, I gave Jack Freelander fifteen minutes of my valuable time and the son of a bitch actually took notes. He and Ellen Richter left shortly afterward, and I heard Kit trying to talk about Laura’s murder with Mark Banbury, whose reaction was to tell her how he was coming along with his analysis: “Doctor Glund says I’m very nearly ready to start dealing with my repressed hostilities.”
Repressed hostilities; the world could use more of those.
* * *
“We’ll clean up in the morning,” Kit said.
“Good,” I said, and yawned. Mark Banbury and Honey Hamilton, the last of our guests, had just departed, and the old clock on the wall read two-fifteen.
“What we’ll do now,” she went on, “is put down on paper everything we got.”
“Everything we got?” Then I remembered; we were investigating a murder. “Have mercy, Kit,” I said. “We’ll do that in the morning, too.”
“No, we might forget things.” She was already opening her secretary-desk, sitting down, gathering pencils and sheets of blank paper. “One thing I know for sure,” she said. “It isn’t Irv Leonard.”
Intrigued despite myself, I drew up a chair and said, “Why not?”
“If the killer was a man,” she explained, “then it follows that he was the secret lover, and Irv wasn’t the secret lover.”
“How can you be so sure? He and Karen both play around on the side, you know that as well as I do. They’re the biggest marital hypocrites in New York.”
“Yes,” Kit agreed, “and each of them always knows exactly what the other one’s doing. Neither of them ever admits it, but they always know who the other one is hanging around with. So I had a little chat with Karen, and I just kept mentioning names until she froze up, and she froze up when I mentioned Susan Rasmussen. Remember the New Year’s party at Hal’s place? Irv was hanging around with Susan then, so if he’s still hanging around with her he definitely wasn’t involved with Laura.”
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