If you were under the impression that Mr. Edgarson was taking some action on your behalf, would you get in touch with me?
Sincerely,
Walter Carter, V.P.
I liked the straightforward way in which Walter Carter maligned the dead; apparently his opinion of Edgarson was just as high as mine. And I also appreciated his decision to send these papers back. What an unsuspected little time bomb Edgarson had left in his wake! Undoubtedly he’d stolen those papers during that period when he was occupying my apartment, and I couldn’t begin to guess what smarmy use he’d intended to make of them.
Well. All’s well that ends well. I took from under my mattress a bottle of smuggled bourbon and made do as best I could for the absence of Valium. Shirley’s papers, covering letter and envelope and all, went out with that day’s trash, and on the following Monday I left the hospital and went home.
* * *
The new stove and sink and refrigerator were in, but the wall between the kitchenette and the living room had so far been only partially sheetrocked, leaving some of the raw new studs exposed. The living room windows had been replaced. There’d been some damage in the living room, primarily breakage of small objects like lamps, with the principal casualty being my answering machine. The carpet had also suffered both fire and water damage, and would have to be replaced. But most of these things were insured, and in any event the apartment was certainly livable.
I felt rested and refreshed. In the hospital, I’d finished the Cassavetes piece and now I had “Big John Brant: The Acorn And The Oak” just about ready for its final draft. Patricia was coming over tomorrow afternoon to permit me to worship once more at her shrine, and I had a date with Honey Hamilton for Thursday night. Life, which had been full of turmoil for a while, was at last settling down again.
I also felt utterly safe. Staples had begun to look guilty in my presence the last few days, meaning the investigation was stymied once more; this time, I should think, permanently. He’d suggested as I was leaving the hospital that they keep me under police protection for a while, since the killer might have it in mind to try for me again, but I pointed out the needlessness of that: “Since he hasn’t been arrested by now, he knows he must be safe from me, that I don’t know or didn’t notice whatever it was. It would be much more dangerous for him to try to kill me again than to leave things alone.” Staples agreed at last, reluctantly, and so I was finally again a private citizen. There’d been many a twist and turn in the trail since I’d stupidly lost my temper with Laura Penney that night, but it was all over now. I was home and dry.
* * *
When the doorbell rang at two o’clock Friday afternoon I was on the phone with Honey, the two of us murmuring at one another the way people will on the day after their first night together. “It’s the doorbell, sweetheart,” I said. “I’ll call you back later.” We made kissing noises at one another, and I hung up.
And who was this at the door? Patricia? But she’d said she wouldn’t be able to come around any more this week; not till next Tuesday at the earliest. But I could find out who my guest was before seeing her, or him; as a part of the general renewal and repair around this place, the intercom had been fixed, and it was now possible for me to lean close to the grid in the wall, push the button to the left, and say, “Who is it?”
“Fred Staples, Carey.”
“Come on up.”
I hadn’t seen Staples all week. He’d been avoiding me, I’d assumed, because he had nothing new to report on the Laura Penney-Kit Markowitz murder case. Since I was reasonably sure he still had nothing to report on that case, maybe this meant he had another of his unusual homicides to show me. That would be nice; it had been quite a while since I’d had the chance to flex that muscle.
Nevertheless, the thought of facing Fred Staples still made me sufficiently nervous that I went to the bathroom and popped a Valium before opening my front door. He came thumping up the stairs in his hat and raincoat—an early March rain was drizzling outside—and he had Al Bray with him. “Welcome,” I said. “Come on in. Coffee?”
“No, thanks, Carey.” Staples seemed a little awkward with me, and Al Bray merely nodded his hello.
Was something wrong? They came in, I shut the door, and we all stood in the living room together. I said, “Something wrong, Fred?”
“We got a new development,” he said.
I made myself look eager. “In the Laura Penney case?”
“Another anonymous letter,” Staples told me. “Apparently from the same source.”
“Anonymous letter?” But Edgarson was the source of that first letter, how could he have sent another one now? Postmarked Seattle? Or maybe he’d made some sort of arrangement that the letter should be sent automatically if he didn’t stop it.
Staples had reached down inside his raincoat and his jacket and was now extending the letter toward me. “Same kind of paper, same kind of typing,” he said.
God damn that Edgarson, would he never leave me alone? I took the letter and opened it and read,
He can blow himself up all he wants,
but he should have thrown away the key
to the basement door at Penney’s.
That wasn’t Edgarson. I’d blown myself up long after Edgarson had been removed from the scene. And what was this nonsense about a key? Looking at Staples and Bray, seeing their serious faces, I said, “This thing accuses me of being the killer.”
Nodding, Staples said, “It does read that way, Carey.”
“But you know I’m not the killer. Never mind all this business about blowing myself up, you know I didn’t kill Laura Penney.”
Staples was doing all the talking, while Bray just watched, and now Staples said, “The basement door to that building is around on the side street. The detective wouldn’t have been able to see it, so you could have gone in that way. And I must say, Carey, that if you did go in that way, it suggests premeditation.”
I said, “But I don’t have any such key. I never did have. Why would I have a key to the basement of some building I don’t even live in?”
Staples smiled a little, as though pleased with me. “I’m glad to hear that, Carey,” he said. “If you’d said you did have a key, I would have been a little troubled.”
“Well, I don’t.”
Staples and Bray looked at one another, both still solemn-faced, and then Staples sighed and shrugged and looked at me again and said, “We’ve gotten to be pretty good friends, Carey. I hope this won’t spoil that.”
“No, of course not, why should it?” Handing the anonymous letter back to him, I said, “I guess that must be the same nut that left the message on my answering machine that time. Probably the other anonymous letter was about me, too.”
“Probably was,” Staples agreed. And that should have been the end of it, except that he stood there holding the anonymous letter in one hand, rapping the folded edge of it against his other thumbnail and frowning as though unhappy about something.
I said, “Is there more?”
“I’m afraid there is, Carey. You know we’re pretty much at a dead end in this case, so we have to follow any lead we get. I’m sorry.”
“Well, sure. I understand that.”
Into his jacket he went again, and came out with a folded document that looked vaguely like a lease. “So we went to court,” he said, “and got a search warrant. I’m sorry, Carey, but we have to look for that key.”
I was surprised, and more than a little annoyed. “For God’s sake, Fred, I told you I never had such a key.”
“We’re going to have to search the premises. I’m sorry,” he added, saying that for the fourth or fifth time. He kept being sorry, but on the other hand he was obviously determined to search the apartment.
Patricia. Had she left any little something-or-other that her husband shouldn’t see? No, I didn’t think so, but what a hell of a complication that would make.
Al Bray now finally spoke. “Do you have a key ring, Ca
rey?”
“Yes, of course.” I took it from my pocket and handed it to him. From his own trouser pocket he took an ordinary Yale-type brass key, and compared it with all of mine.
What if one matched? But it couldn’t, I didn’t have any goddam basement key. This whole thing was absurd.
Nevertheless, I felt a surprising rush of relief when at last he shook his head, handed me back my keys, and said, “Not there.”
“Of course not,” I said.
“We’ll want to search now, Carey,” Staples said.
“Go right ahead. Do you want me to help?”
Staples grinned, but not with much humor. “I don’t think so,” he said.
Al Bray said to me, “Why not just sit down on the sofa there? We won’t take very long.”
So that’s what I did. I sat on the sofa, and Al Bray went into the bedroom to conduct the search there while Fred Staples searched in the living room, and I tried to figure out just what the hell was going on around here.
In the first place, who had sent that anonymous letter, and why? And what was all this about a key? What was happening? For the first time, I didn’t feel in control of the situation, and that was frightening.
I understand the police slang word for a search is “toss,” though Staples and Bray hadn’t used that word with me. In any event, they tossed my place for about five minutes before Staples looked up from my bottom desk drawer to call, “Hey, Al? I think I got it.”
I stared at him across the room, and as Bray came hurrying out of the bedroom I got to my feet. But Staples pointed a severe finger at me, saying, “You wait there for just a minute, Carey.”
So I waited. Whatever key Staples had just found in my desk drawer was matched against the key from Bray’s pocket, and I could see by the looks they gave one another that it was a match. I said, “Fred, what have you got there? Let me see it, will you?”
So they brought it over to me, and both of their faces were much harder now. Al Bray had the two keys in the palm of one hand, and he held it out so I could see them.
Two keys. Both Yale-type, both brass. The hills and valleys looked identical. The only difference was that one of them—the one Staples had just found—was shiny and new.
I said, “I never saw that key before in my life.” And even as I was saying it, I could hear what a weak cliché line it was. How many movies had contained that line, and how many times had it been believed?
Also my next remark: “Somebody planted it there!”
“I’m sorry, Carey,” Staples said. But this time he didn’t sound sorry at all.
I said, “Wait a minute. Look at it, it’s brand new.”
Bray said, “Only used once, maybe.”
“But it’s not mine!”
Bray put the two keys away in his pocket. Staples said, “Better get your coat on, Carey.”
* * *
In the car, heading downtown through the pelting rain, I figured it out. Al Bray drove, up front with the police radio intermittently squawking, and Staples rode in back with me. I spent the first dozen blocks trying to get my bearings, trying to understand what had happened and why—had Edgarson planted that key there?—and then I turned my head and saw Staples’ stony profile, saw him looking straight ahead with no expression at all on his face, and all at once I got it.
“Oh, damn it to hell,” I said. I didn’t speak loudly enough for Bray to hear, not over the radio and the windshield wipers and the rain, but Staples heard me all right. A muscle moved in his jaw.
I said, “You were afraid the killer might try for me again anyway, regardless of what I’d said. So you were keeping an eye on me, without letting me know. Being a pal.”
Staples neither moved nor spoke. The hard gray glass of the window beyond him streamed with rainwater.
I could see it, I could see exactly how it had happened. Tuesday afternoon he’d been watching, and Patricia had come into my building, and two hours later Patricia had come out again, and when he’d questioned her casually that evening she’d undoubtedly said she’d been home all day.
In fact… In fact, now that I thought about it, there was that annoying phone call about ten minutes after Patricia’d arrived. Without my answering machine, we’d had to put up with the ringing until the caller had quit. Eighteen rings, I remember counting them.
Staples in a phone booth, counting the eighteen rings.
But what a hell of a revenge. All right, all right, he used to carry on so much about how perfect Patricia was, what a perfect couple they were, so this thing had to leave him with a certain amount of egg on his face, but wasn’t he overreacting just a little? I mean, he was framing me for murder.
He was framing me. For murder.
He had written that anonymous letter himself. He had carried that incriminating key into my apartment in his own pocket.
All right. What man does, man can undo. I had to persuade him, that’s all, I had to convince him that he didn’t want to do this thing. And I only had a few minutes, because once we got downtown and the official business started, there wouldn’t be any way for him to change his mind.
But how? What should I say to him? Tell him that Patricia loves him, that we’d had one brief crazy mistake and—?
No. That expressionless rockbound face told me one thing for sure; I should not mention Patricia’s name. Somehow I had to get him to stop doing this thing without ever saying out loud his reason for doing it.
What, then? Friendship? No; it wasn’t long enough or deep enough. Danger to himself? There wasn’t any, to begin with, and in any event I was sure he didn’t care.
Professionalism. Pride of accomplishment, that was my only chance. Leaning closer to him, speaking softly enough so Bray wouldn’t be able to hear, I said, “You don’t want to do this, Fred. If you do this, the real killer will get away.”
Nothing. No response.
“You don’t want that to happen, Fred. Think of poor Laura Penney, think of Kit. If you do this, their deaths will go unpunished.”
Nothing.
“Fred,” I said, becoming more desperate, “don’t you care who killed Laura and Kit? Don’t you care?”
He looked at me, at last. He studied me for five seconds with his very cold eyes, and then he said, “No.” And faced front.
I couldn’t believe it. “But that’s your job,” I said. “That’s your vocation. Doesn’t it matter to you?”
Apparently he was finished expressing himself. He sat silent, facing front.
I kept trying for another twenty blocks, talking at him every time the radio blare cut Al Bray out of earshot, appealing to Staples’ moral sense, his ethics, his pride in a job well done, and I might as well have been talking to an Easter Island statue. The only time he spoke or moved or did anything at all was when I skirted the subject of Patricia, just hinting slightly at the reason for all this, and when I did that he said, while still facing front, “Better be careful. You could get yourself shot trying to escape.”
He meant it, too.
After that I subsided, casting about in my mind for some other way off this hook, and gradually I became very annoyed. I had done everything right, everything. I had committed three murders and covered myself brilliantly and gotten away with all three of them clean, and now this overly possessive husband, this damned jealous—
Framed for a murder I committed! It isn’t fair, it just isn’t fair.
“Well, I’ll tell you one thing,” I said at last, driven by exasperation. “The wrong one of us is a detective, that’s for sure. The only way you can make an arrest is to frame somebody. Who’s going to solve your crimes for you after I’m gone?”
He didn’t respond to that either, so I gave him some more: “You can’t do anything right, do you know that? No wonder—” But, no; I did not want to be shot trying to escape. So I started again: “You couldn’t even get George Templeton.”
He frowned at that, and turned finally to give me a puzzled look. “Templeton?”
“The fellow whose wife went off the terrace in the snow.”
“I remember him. What about him?”
“I only took your side because I thought you were my friend,” I told him. “But Al Bray was right, Templeton killed his wife.”
Staples squinted, apparently trying to read on my face whether I was lying or not. “You’re just saying that,” he decided. “Because you’re sore.”
“Am I? I’ll tell you the two things that prove it. The frostbitten plants in the window, and the fact that the only disturbances in the snow on the terrace were the footprints.”
“Explain,” he said.
“Templeton hit her and she died,” I explained. “Hours before he threw her out. He kept the terrace doors open and the body nearby to delay rigor mortis, so she’d look as though she died later than she did. He put on her shoes and walked out to the end of the terrace, being very careful not to touch anything, and then walked backwards off the terrace in the same footprints. And then put the shoes back on the body.”
“That’s just a theory,” Staples said. “There isn’t any proof.”
“Not now, not any more. The only way you’ll get Templeton is to frame him. But that morning there was proof, only you were too dumb to see it.”
He was stung, but controlling himself. “What proof?”
“Drunk or sober,” I told him, “there was no way for Mrs. Templeton to leave that terrace without disturbing the snow on top of the railing. And it was untouched.”
“Well, I’ll be damned,” he said.
“She never went off that terrace,” I told him. “Templeton carried her downstairs and threw her out the living room window.”
“You’re right.” He shook his head and looked at me in obvious admiration, and actually smiled at me. “I’m going to miss you, Carey,” he said.
Which was when it finally became real for me. The chill air of prison touched the nape of my neck, and I crouched more miserably inside my coat. Staples meant what he said; he would miss me. He liked me, he was pleased to think of himself as my friend, despite everything. But he would also frame me for Laura Penney’s murder, frame me solid and convincing, and nothing on earth would stop him.
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