Westlake, Donald E - SSC 02 Read online

  The guttural New York voice that answered told me Staples wasn't there, but when I identified myself he gave me a number where Fred could be reached. I jotted it down, hung up, and realized I had just written Kit's phone number.

  Could that be right? Confused notions of swapping, keys-on-the-floor, Fred And Patricia And Carey And Kit, mingled in my mind with the more realistic thought that Staples was at work right now on Laura's murder, and this work of his had apparently brought him to an interview with my girl.

  Which meant I had a choice. I could phone Staples to find out precisely what was going on, or I could use that ticket to Seattle. (Replacing it first, since the original was now in a dozen pieces in as many trash baskets.) So far, though, Seattle was still the alternate; I dialed Kit's number.

  And Kit answered. She sounded, I thought, a little tense. I said, "It's me, honey. I got two messages to call."

  "Oh, hello, Carey." Enunciated with clarity but no warmth; announcing me to Staples, of course.

  Pretending I hadn't a care in the world, I said, "Feeling better, eh?"

  "Yes. I guess it was one of those twenty-four hour bugs."

  "When I get a twenty-four hour bug, it stays a week."

  "Could I call you back, Carey? I'm a little tied up right now."

  "With Fred Staples," I said. "That was my other message, he wants to talk to me."

  "Oh? I didn't- Hold on."

  I held on, and the next voice I heard belonged to Fred Staples. I listened hard for nuances in that voice, changes in his attitude toward me, but he was the same ebullient Fred as ever: "Hey, there, Carey, how you doing?"

  "Just fine," I said.

  "You never told me you had such a terrific girl friend."

  I answered in appropriate mode: "Keeping her for myself, Fred."

  He chuckled, then said, "You going to be around the rest of the evening?"

  "Sure." Some long-winded explanation of my absence from the apartment trembled on my lips, but I forced it down. The guilty man flees, as they say, where no man pursueth. Also, there's the fella that protests too much.

  "I'd like to drop over," Staples was saying. "In half an hour or so, okay?"

  "Coffee or bourbon?" (No drink with potential arrestee. )

  "Mmmm . . . Better make it coffee."

  . Taking comfort from that hesitation, I said, "I'll have it waiting." But I missed the first time, when I tried to cradle the phone.

  * * *

  If you're going to commit a murder—and in the first place, I don't recommend it—one thing you should definitely not do afterward is have sex with the investigating officer's wife. It merely makes for a lot of extraneous complication.

  In fact, generally speaking, it seems to me that all police officers' wives are better left alone. In the first place, their husbands walk around all the time with guns. And in the second place, there are so many other things a cop can do to you if he's annoyed; he carries as much power in his badge as in his pistol. So all in all I would suggest that policemans' wives, like nuns, should be left to Mexican bandits.

  There's nothing like ignoring your own advice. But I hadn't after all intended all that with Patricia Staples; it had just, well, happened.

  Whatever my intentions, though, well-armed police officer Fred Staples was about to walk into the scene of (a) Edgarson's launching, and (b) his own cuckolding. No matter how much Valium or how much bourbon I put away, I remained convinced that something, some small tiny forgotten thing, from at least one of those misadventures would attract Fred's bright eye. Though I ran the vacuum cleaner, though I made the bed, though I went over the apartment half a dozen times, I still didn't feel secure when the doorbell rang nearly an hour later. I wasn't ready, but I let him in.

  Al Bray wasn't along, which I took as another hopeful sign. He came up the stairs, we smiled at one another, and said hello and shook one another's hands, and then he came on in without apparently noticing anything about anything. I poured coffee for both of us, he sat on the sofa where Patricia lately had lain, and I settled tensely into the director's chair.

  "I called Patricia before I came over," he told me. "She said she had a terrific time."

  "That's good," I said. "It was my pleasure."

  "She asked me to tell you she really loved Gaslight."

  In my own recent conversation with Patricia, the word 'gaslight' had become a kind of double entendre private joke. Was she deciding to play a dangerous game? Hoping she wasn't, I made some sort of conventional response and then said, "But you've got to tell me why you went to see Kit. I'm burning with curiosity."

  He said, "Well, she did know Mrs. Penney, of course."

  "Not all that well."

  Was he being evasive? He said, "When a case doesn't break right away, you tend to reach out farther and farther, hoping to pick up one end of the string."

  "Kit's only relationship with Laura was through me," I pointed out.

  "That's right. And you're from Boston."

  Good God; was he suspecting me? Carefully I said, "I don't think I follow."

  "Here's the anonymous letter." He extended it toward me.

  A sheet of ordinary white paper, with a typewritten message and no signature:

  Laura Penney died in New York while her husband was in Chicago. He doesn't know anything about it. Look the other way. Think about the Boston connection. If A got too close to B, what would C do?

  I cleared my throat. "That's the least intelligible letter I've ever seen in my life," I said, noticing that that bastard Edgarson had even managed to use my own first initial in the right place. "C," indeed.

  Taking the letter back, putting it away inside his jacket, Staples said, "You and Kit Markowitz have been going together for five or six months, haven't you?"

  "That's right."

  "But youve been keeping it quiet, because you've got this divorce under way with your wife."

  "Right again."

  "That's why you'd go out with other women sometimes, Laura Penney and different other women."

  "Sure." I shrugged, being casual if it killed me. "Kit knows all about that. The idea was, if I went out with a number of different women it would make less trouble in dealing with my ex-wife. But if I seemed to be heavily involved with just one girl, then Shirley might start to act like a woman scorned, if you know what I mean."

  "Shirley. That's your wife."

  "Right."

  Nodding, thinking things over, Staples said, "The other day, you told me you missed Laura Penney more than you'd thought you would. She was closer to you than vou realized."

  "Yes?"

  Staples leaned forward, his face much more serious than usual. "Women understand emotions a lot more quickly than men. I've noticed it time and again."

  "You're probably right. But I don't know where you're heading."

  "Kit Markowitz understood more than you did about your feelings for Laura Penney."

  "She did?"

  "What if," he said, and he was watching my face as though he expected to see words form on it, "what if Kit thought you were even closer with Laura Penney than you were?"

  "I don't know. What if she did?"

  But he had another hypothetical question to ask: "What if I told you she went through her date book for the last four months, and she'd seen you less than one-quarter of those days?"

  "Well, we both work, we both have lives of our own."

  "But she did that with the date book before I ever talked with her," Staples said. "She was thinking about it, you see what I mean?"

  Which was an insight into Kit I could have lived without. I said, "Maybe she feels neglected."

  "I think she does."

  "She never let me know about it."

  "Well, she's an independent woman, isn't she? She wouldn't, uh, what's that saying? Wear her heart on her sleeve."

  "I suppose she wouldn't."

  Back he went to his hypothetical questions: "But what if she looked around," he said, "to see what you wer
e doing that three-quarters of the time you weren't with her? Wouldn't she see that you were spending a lot of time with Laura Penney?"

  "Oh, not that much."

  "As a matter of fact, yes. Al Bray went .through Laura Penney's calendar again this afternoon, and she saw a lot of you, Carey. A lot of you. Over a four month period, you had dates with Kit Markowitz forty-three times and with Laura Penney forty-five times. That's two more"

  I coughed, and cleared my throat, and said, "What's all. this building up to, Fred?"

  He said, "Maybe we've been making a mistake all this time, Carey. We've been concentrating on men friends, but it doesn't have to be that way."

  Now what in hell was he talking about? "I'm just not following you, Fred."

  So he explained: "Laura Penney died when she hit her head on the glass coffee table in her living room. It was the fall that killed her, and it didn't necessarily have to be a very strong punch that knocked her down. A little struggle, she loses her balance, it could happen just like that."

  "Meaning what? Come on, Fred, for God's sake what are you driving at?"

  "A woman could have done it," he said.

  He suspected Kit! Kit!

  I stared at him. Relief washed through me like sunrise, and I barely restrained myself from laughing in his face.

  He said, "Think about it. Here's a woman thinks Laura Penney is taking her man away. She goes over to have it out. They argue, they fight, Laura falls and is killed. The other woman is frightened, she's going to run away, but then she looks around and finds male clothing in the bedroom. Either she thinks the clothing belongs to her boy friend, or she decides to confuse the issue. In either case, she takes the clothing away with her. Or there's Al Bray's theory that she just leaves and then the boy friend shows up, finds the body, and clears his stuff out himself. But in any case, the woman did the killing."

  I said, "You mean Kit? Kit wouldn't kill anybody, that's just ridiculous."

  "Not on purpose, maybe. But an accident, in the middle of a fight? She has a pretty good temper, doesn't she?"

  "She isn't violent, for God's sake."

  "Nevertheless," Staples insisted, "of all the Boston connections, that's the one that shows the most promise."

  "But there isn't any Boston connection," I told him. "Kit's a New Yorker."

  "The Boston connection is you." Pulling out the anonymous letter again, he said, "Listen to this, if we put your names in here instead of these letters, making Laura Penney 'A' and you 'B' and Kit Markowitz 'C. Then it reads, If Laura Penney got too close to Carey Thorpe, what would Kit Markowitz do?'"

  "Call me up and yell at me," I said. "That's what she'd do."

  "Did she call you up and tell you about her date book?"

  "No. So what?"

  "So she's maybe a little more secretive than you think." Satisfied with himself, he leaned back on the sofa, putting the letter away again as he said, "Tomorrow we'll get hold of that private detective who was watching Mrs. Penney's building, and we'll run Kit Markowitz through a lineup and see if he recognizes her."

  Oh, you will, eh? And good luck to you, too. Aloud I said, "I just don't believe any of it."

  "We'll see." Staples nodded, and sipped at his coffee. "We were making too quick an assumption," he told me. "Assuming it had to be a man." He patted the pocket containing Edgarson's troublemaking letter. "This tip may have put us on the right track after all."

  "Not if it makes you believe Kit Markowitz killed anybody," I said. "Is that really what you've been working on all day?"

  "We started with half a dozen possibilities, but pretty soon they narrowed down to her. For one thing, she doesn't have an alibi."

  "Why? Where does she say she was?"

  "At home, alone. No witnesses."

  "Didn't anybody call her? Didn't she talk to anybody on the phone?"

  "She tried calling you, she says," Staples told me, "but she got your answering machine and she didn't leave any message."

  "That's right," I said. "She told me that the next day. I was home, but I was screening a film."

  Staples finished his coffee, then said, "I'll tell you something else, Carey. You're an absolutely brilliant natural detective, the most fantastic I've ever seen. You've got a real knack for it. But you can't get anywhere with this case, and do you know why?"

  I did know, as a matter of fact, but it would be interesting to hear what he thought so I said, "No. Why?"

  "You're too close to it. You're emotionally involved."

  "You may be right," I said.

  * * *

  I phoned Kit and she said, "Is he gone?"

  "Staples? Just left."

  "I'll be right there," she said, and hung up, and arrived fifteen minutes later, looking angry and determined. Taking off her coat, she said, "He thinks I did it."

  "Slow down," I advised her. "You want a drink?"

  "I will not slow down." She hung up her coat and marched into the living room. "That damn fool thinks I killed Laura Penney. Over you!" And she turned to glare at me as though it were my fault. (Well, I suppose it was, at that.)

  "Absurd on the face of it," I said.

  "There's only one thing to do."

  I didn't like her glower. "And what would that be?" I asked.

  "We have to find the killer ourselves."

  "What?"

  "That idiot Staples is out there right now," she said, waving an arm at the window and the cold dark snowy world beyond it, which as it happened did not at this moment contain Staples, who had gone home for dinner with his Patricia, "and all he's trying to do is find evidence to convict me."

  "Which he'll never find."

  "Don't be so sure of that," she said. "I have no alibi."

  "Millions could say the same."

  "He could build up a case against me."

  "Staples? I don't see how. You didn't do it, so where's his proof?"

  "Circumstantial evidence," she said, in the manner in* which people in Victorian novels used to say "madness in the family."

  "What circumstantial evidence?"

  "How do I know?" She was pacing around my room, waving her arms. "Remember The Wrong Man?"

  "The Hitchcock film, with Henry Fonda?"

  "He was convicted of murder, and he didn't do it."

  "That was a mistaken identification."

  "How about Call Northside 777? Jimmy Stewart as the reporter. And both of those movies were based on real life cases."

  "You need a drink," I decided, because I needed a drink, and headed for the kitchenette.

  She followed me, still waving her arms. "And while he's spending all his time trying to railroad me, who's looking for the real killer? Nobody! And he'll get away."

  Amen. I said, "Kit, you're making a mountain out of a molehill. This is just another one of Staples' brainstorms, he gets one a day, like rain in Mexico City. The other day he thought Laura was having an affair with her father, and the father killed her."

  "Well, now he's convinced that I killed her. And it's up to us to prove him wrong."

  I made the drinks while she raved on, and carried them back to the living room. Kit wasn't prepared to sit, but I was, and when she paused briefly to deal with her drink I said, "Life doesn't work like the movies, Kit. The innocent person getting off the hook by finding the real killer, that doesn't happen, 9 '

  "Well, it's going to happen this time." She stood in front of me, straddle-legged with determination. "And you're going to help."

  "How? There isn't even anything to do."

  "Of course there is. For one thing, we'll go to the funeral."

  "Funeral?"

  "Laura's funeral, tomorrow morning at ten."

  Laura's funeral. She'd been dead almost a week by now, and I'd taken it for granted she'd already been dispatched to her final resting place, but probably the coroner had delayed things. In any event, I certainly didn't want to go to the funeral. "What on earth do you want to go there for?"

  "We'll see who show
s up." She plopped down beside me on the sofa, eager and intent. "And you've been talking with Staples, you know what's been done in the investigation so far. Have they definitely eliminated anybody? I mean, besides you."

  "Well, they were hot on the idea of the secret lover for a while," I said. "And they narrowed that down to five."

  "Five? Terrific! Just a minute, let me get pen and paper." And up she jumped.

  Gloomily I watched her cross the room to rummage through my desk. This was ridiculous, but what could I do about it?

  Back she came, bristling with pen and paper. "I'll stay here tonight, all right?"

  "Wonderful," I said, with less than my usual enthusiasm.

  "Then we can go to the funeral together in the morning." She readied the pen. "Now, who are these five?"

  EIGHT

  The Secret of the Locked Door

  Oddly enough, all five were at the funeral. And so were Kit and I, and so was Staples.

  It was quite a large turnout, in fact, mostly with faces I was used to seeing at cocktail parties. Laura's father was in the front row with a heavy-faced black-haired gent I took to be the husband from Chicago. There appeared to be no other family members in attendance.

  This funeral was taking place in some Croatian or Ukrainian chapel on East gth Street. The style of the place was early Frankenstein, and so were the huddled old charladies intermixed with the mourners, mumbling to themselves like so many Madame Khrushchevs in a bad mood. These people had been ethnic since before the word was popular.

  And Laura, it turned out, had been one of them. She had introduced her father to me once as "Frank Ward," but now I learned another seven or eight Eastern syllables had been lurking behind that Anglo brevity all the time. And what about that husband, the alleged Penney? Did those flat cheekbones look Wasp? They did not.

  Poor Laura. Born in upstate New York, she'd spent her life as a full-fledged American, only to depart as an immigrant. Remembering her bigotry—I don't think there were any groups she cared for—I knew this ceremony would only upset her. It was just as well she wasn't here to see it.

  Kit kept whispering and murmuring to me throughout the service, but I paid little attention, since all she was doing was adding to the original list of five suspects. Taking a leaf from Staples' book, she was casting a critical eye on the women in attendance and finding most of them suspicious. She'd bought a steno pad on the way down, and did a lot of cramped note-taking, as though she'd be writing up this affair for the old home town paper.