“Why not? Why couldn’t he have two girls?”
“Not Irv Leonard,” she said. “Some men might do that. You could do it, for instance. But not Irv Leonard.”
I didn’t much care for that crack. “If you say so, Sherlock.”
“Oh, and it isn’t Jack Meacher either.” She made another note.
“How do you figure that?”
“I talked with Audrey,” she told me. “Jack was with her that evening, but she hadn’t split with Mort yet, so Jack lied to the police. But if the police ever come back and ask again, he’ll tell the truth this time.”
“Not Sherlock,” I said. “I was wrong. You’re Inspector Maigret.”
“I knew I’d get somewhere, if I could only bring all the suspects together in one place.”
“And now you’ve cut the list to six, out of an original nine. Fast work.”
“Oh, we can cut more than that.” She was scribbling furiously on her sheets of paper now. “Like, it isn’t Jay English or Dave, so that’s two more gone.”
“And what made them go?”
“They got married last month,” she said. “To each other, in San Francisco. Dave showed me their newspaper clipping. The only way either of them could have been a suspect was if Jay was trying to go straight by having an affair with Laura, and he obviously wasn’t.”
“Out of the closet and off the hook.”
But Kit was in no mood for jokes. “That leaves four,” she said. “No, three; it wasn’t Claire Wallace.”
“Not Maigret either,” I said. “Maybe Miss Marple. Why isn’t it Claire Wallace?”
“Because the only reason she would have had for fighting with Laura was over Jerry Fishback, assuming Jerry was the secret lover. But I found out tonight she broke up with Jerry just after New Year’s, and started going with that whatever-his-name-was…”
“Lou. The shooting gallery king.”
“Dreadful man.”
“The last survivor of the sixties,” I agreed.
“They’ve been going together for two weeks. So Claire didn’t have any motive.”
“I stand in awe of you,” I said.
“So that leaves Jack Freelander and Mark Banbury and Perry Stokes.” She gave me a quick look, saying, “You were talking with Jack Freelander. Did you get anything?”
I was in a quandary. I hadn’t actually been engaged in sleuthing tonight, since I knew damn well there was nothing to sleuth about, but wouldn’t it look strange if I had nothing at all to report? So I took the plunge and said, “Well, you can cross him off your list.”
She pounced on that. “I can? How do you know for sure?”
How did I know for sure? “Well,” I said, “you know he’s doing that piece on pornographic movies for Esquire.”
“I think everybody on earth knows that,” she said, “except the people at Esquire.”
“Well, um—He borrowed that Farber book from me, Negative Space. I hadn’t thought of it before, but he borrowed it that afternoon and he called me that night to ask—”
“What night? You mean the night Laura was killed?”
“Right. He borrowed the book from me that afternoon, I gave it to him at the screening I took Laura to.” Which was perfectly true. Everything I’d said so far was true, but the conversation I was about to report as having taken place the night of the killing had actually taken place two hours ago in this room. “So he called that same night,” I said, “and he—”
“But you had your machine on. Remember? You were running a film.”
Damn. Suddenly things were getting complicated, it was hard to remember the safe places to put my feet. “That would have been later,” I said. “Around, uhh, eleven-thirty. Anyway, he called and he’d read most of the book by then, and he had a million questions to ask. You can imagine, reading the collected reviews of Manny Farber. But the thing is, he couldn’t possibly have done that much reading in the Farber book and at the same time have gone off and gotten into a quarrel with a girlfriend and killed her and all the rest of it.”
Kit continued to peer closely at me. She said, “What movie was that you were running?”
“Why? What difference does it make?”
“You told me what it was, and I’m trying to remember.”
So was I. The titles of the twenty-four prints I own blurred together in my mind. “Gaslight,” I guessed. “I think that was it.”
“Ah,” she said.
“Anyway,” I pointed out, “that eliminates Jack Freelander. So all we have left is Mark Banbury and Perry Stokes.”
“No, we don’t,” she said. With a strange little smile on her lips, she drew a big pencil X through the notes she’d just made.
I said, “What’s that for?”
“It was Top Hat,” she said.
I looked at her. I knew what she was talking about, but I couldn’t bring myself to acknowledge it. I said, “What was Top Hat?”
She looked at me, studying me as though trying to guess my weight. “I knew you were the secret lover,” she said. “I knew it all along. But I thought there had to be somebody else besides you.”
“Kit,” I said. “Hold on a minute. Are you accusing me?”
“You were seeing an awful lot of Laura Penney,” Kit said. “And the only reason the police think I’m guilty is because even they know you’re the likeliest one to have been the secret lover.”
“But I’ve been exonerated, remember? I’m the one with the cast-iron alibi.”
“Are you really? Let’s look at that alibi again, why don’t we?”
“Kit,” I said, “this isn’t doing either one of us any good. It’s late, we’re both tired, we’ve both been drinking, we’re both likely to say foolish things.”
“I want to talk about your alibi, Carey.”
“Well, I don’t.” And then I was on my feet, irritated beyond endurance. “What the hell does Laura Penney’s death mean to you anyway?” I remembered the fat girl and her talk of morality and sin, and I said, “You aren’t involved in this out of any moral anguish or anything like that. The cops got down on you, that’s all, that’s the only reason you’re even thinking about the subject or asking the question.”
Kit, very quiet, was watching me pace back and forth. She said, “Meaning what?”
“Meaning you know you’re innocent, and you know they can’t prove you guilty, so leave it alone. Don’t play detective, leave that to the pros.”
“Meaning I might get hurt?”
“Meaning we’re already into B-movie dialogue,” I pointed out. “Don’t complicate things, all right?”
“You killed her, Carey.”
It was said, stated out loud, hanging there in the air between us. I closed my eyes, and when I opened them again she was watching me. I said, “The private detective saw me leave.”
“You bribed him,” she said. “And he’s disappeared. But the police are looking for him, and when they find him maybe he’ll tell a different story.”
So she didn’t yet know that Edgarson was dead. But when she found out—and the way she was poking around, she was bound to find out—she would not make Staples’ mistake. She would draw the lines correctly, and they would lead straight to me.
“Oh, Kit,” I said. “Why did you have to get into all this?” And I took a step toward her.
“I’ll scream,” she said.
“Only once,” I told her.
* * *
What a mess. I hadn’t wanted any of this, and one thing had led to the next, and now I had the death of Kit Markowitz to deal with. And she was the best girlfriend I ever had.
All the way uptown in the cab, dabbing at the new scratches on my face and wrists, I tried to figure out what to do, and by the time I got home I had a plan. It was desperate and dramatic, but under the circumstances I didn’t see what else there was to do.
I left my overcoat on when I entered the apartment, went directly to the kitchen, blew out the two pilot lights on the top of the stove, a
nd switched on all four burners. With gas hissing into the room, I went back to the living room, picked up my heaviest glass ashtray, and prepared to hit myself on the back of the head with it. Which turned out to be very difficult to do. In the first place, I had this automatic tendency to duck, combined with this other automatic tendency to pull my punches. Also, I didn’t want to hit myself hard enough to knock myself out. All I wanted was a bump, a bruise, some indication that violence had taken place, and finally, after three painful glancing blows, I gave myself a good one that hurt like fury. “Ow ow ow ow ow,” I said, dancing around the room, dropping the ashtray and clutching at my head, getting so angry from the pain that I actually went back and kicked the ashtray, and then I hurt at both ends.
Well, anyway, the job was done, and when I touched the sore spot on the back of my head a minute later my fingertips came away a little damp with blood. Fine. Now we give the seeping gas five minutes or so to make some headway in the apartment, and then we throw that rotten ashtray through a window and we stagger out into the hall yelling help help help, and the obvious conclusion is that the murderer of Laura Penney, believing that Kit and I were getting too close to him, had attempted to murder us both, succeeding with Kit and nearly succeeding with me.
If there had only been some point at which everything could have been reversed. Sitting in the black leather director’s chair with my overcoat still on and my head still aching, I kept going over and over the events of the last ten days, trying to find something that could have been done differently, some decision that would have ended with Kit still alive now, and the more I thought about it the more inevitable it all became. From the moment I’d lost my temper and punched Laura and she’d slipped on that shiny floor, every step had followed with the regularity and inevitability of a heartbeat.
Funny smell the gas company adds to their product, so you’ll know when it’s in the air. I’ll wait till it gets a bit stronger, then get up from here and find the ashtray…kicked it under the sofa…throw it out the window…run out to the hall…stagger out to the hall…sleepy…very heavy body in this chair…stagger out to hall soon…be able to relax after this…danger all gone… relax…relax…head doesn’t hurt so much any more…
TEN
Memoirs of a Master Detective
“You were lucky,” Staples said.
“I sure was.”
I sure was. The explosion had saved my life. I’d gone to sleep in that damn chair, overcome by the gas, and if I hadn’t forgotten about the pilot light in the oven Staples would have had two unsolved murders that night. As it was, the explosion knocked out windows and summoned help just as efficiently and much more dramatically than I could have done, and when I woke up I was in a private room in a city hospital with a policeman on the door, and I was swathed in enough bandages to make me qualify as snow sculpture.
The policeman at the door, seeing me awake, summoned a nurse and a doctor and Staples, in that order. The nurse refused to answer my questions; she was there only to take my temperature, pulse and half a dozen other things. The doctor joked away all my questions; he was there only to read the nurse’s report. But Staples was perfectly willing to answer questions: “It’s Saturday,” he said. “Twenty minutes to three in the afternoon.”
“But what happened?”
“Somebody tried to kill you,” he said.
“Tried to kill me!”
“Tell me about last night.”
So I told him about last night, the party, the assembled suspects, the post-mortem that Kit and I had done in which we’d eliminated three names from the list but had come to no other firm conclusions, then my departure, the cab ride home, “and then I don’t know. I can’t remember anything after I went into the apartment.”
“You were hit on the head,” Staples told me. “The killer set your oven to explode, hoping it would look like an accident. You’re lucky to be alive.”
“The oven?” Suddenly I realized what I’d done. Good God! “I might have been killed!”
Staples nodded soberly. “I think that was the general idea.”
I wiggled my various parts under the covers, trying to figure out if they were all still there. “How bad—What hap—How am I?”
“Concussion. Some scratches and bruises, a few minor burns. Nothing serious. You were lucky.”
“I sure was.” Then I realized my distraction was keeping me from getting on with the original scenario. I could brood about exploding ovens later; for the moment, I had a role to play: “But why?” was my first prepared line. “Why would anybody do such a thing?”
Staples looked grim. “It seems,” he said, “you and Miss Markowitz did better than you knew last night. You must have gotten close to the killer without realizing it.”
“You mean, he thought we were onto him? And that’s why he tried—Good God, Kit!” I struggled up off the pillow. “Call her, Fred, she’s in danger!”
His grimness increased, as he rested a hand on my shoulder. “I already thought of that, Carey. I’m sorry, we were too late.”
“Too late? What do you mean? You don’t mean—”
He nodded. “I’m sorry. He must have gone down to her place as soon as he left your apartment last night.”
“Kit,” I said.
He patted my arm. “Don’t worry, Carey. We’ll get him.”
“Kit,” I said.
* * *
I spent nine days in the hospital, and all in all it was very pleasant. I had visitors as often as I wanted, I had as much rest as I wanted, and by the fourth day I had my typewriter and manuscripts and could even get some work done.
Staples visited at least twice a day, sometimes with Al Bray and sometimes alone. On his second visit I gave him Kit’s conclusions about the innocence of Jay English and Dave Poumon, plus the unrevealed alibi of Jack Meacher, and we agreed it was ironic that Kit had proved her own innocence by becoming another victim. He kept assuring me he was making progress, and indicated he was leaning more now in the direction of Irv Leonard. (I hadn’t mentioned Kit’s conclusions in re Irv, feeling the list of suspects was shrinking rather alarmingly as it was.) Staples also had me go over and over and over the events of the party searching for that one small item that had scared the killer, but we never seemed to find it.
Patricia visited several times, with her husband’s knowledge, and once we managed to perform an unnatural sex act together. Honey Hamilton also visited, twice, seeming very warm and sympathetic and eager to console me for my tragic loss. Other friends visited, some smuggling in bottles of bourbon, but most of the time I remembered to keep a long face.
There were only two bad moments. One was when Jack Freelander arrived with a rough draft of his porno article; trapped in bed, I had no choice but to read the damn thing and make comments. The other incident, more serious, was one of the times Staples brought my mail. He was stopping at my apartment every day to see how the reconstruction was coming along—they were putting in a new kitchen and fixing the walls—and was also picking up my mail. On Wednesday when he arrived, the bundle included a large white envelope with a familiar-looking blue logo on the return address. What was it?
Tobin-Global!
The detective agency, Edgarson’s private detective agency!
(I had by now been living a Valium-free existence for nearly a week, and it was astonishing what a difference it made in moments of stress. What did Mankind do before these wonderful pills? Reality is drabber and slower and grayer without them, but the scary moments are suddenly faster and far more terrifying. My three murders had been serious, of course, but they had happened at a pace where I could retain control over myself and events. Now, with only the hospital’s grudgingly dispensed pain killers inside me, a simple matter like this envelope nearly killed me with fright. Consequences seemed more real, dangers more possible. Valium had made it possible for me to walk my tightrope as though there were a net. Now, the chasm yawned plainly beneath me.)
Had Staples seen this re
turn address? Had he made the connection? Should I explain it somehow, make up some story? Should I look in the envelope?
No. No to everything. In a panic situation, the best thing to do is nothing. If Staples had made the connection he’d mention it himself. (But officially I’d never met Edgarson! How could I explain this discrepancy?)
Closing my eyes to that drop, forcing myself to an appearance of calm without the assistance of pills, I casually put the mail on the bed, the Tobin-Global envelope face down, and Staples and I spent ten minutes discussing the latest developments in the case. Karen Leonard had an alibi for her husband for the night of the party, but Staples had taken a dislike to her—an easy thing to do—and therefore thought she might be lying. I can’t stand it, I kept screaming inside my head, but I did stand it, and at last he left, and I clawed my way into that white envelope, and found—
What? Shirley’s papers, the original set that I hadn’t been able to find. Utterly bewildered, I read the accompanying letter:
Dear Mr. Thorpe:
Having been unable to reach you by phone, I have decided to return these documents to you, though of course Tobin-Global stands prepared to assist you in your marital situation in any way we can. Unfortunately, we have no record of your ever having engaged our services.
These documents were found in the desk file of Mr. John Edgarson, a former employee no longer with the firm. If Mr. Edgarson was working for you privately, I must point out that by the terms of Mr. Edgarson’s employment he was required to relay all potential client arrangements to Tobin-Global. The resources of a large organization like Tobin-Global are, of course, much more useful in delicate marital situations than the services, no matter how well-intentioned, of any one individual.
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