Which they did. The usual conversations took place, I traveled around trying unsuccessfully to avoid Jack Free-lander, 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 party goers.
"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 catch phrase: "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 Penneys 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 East 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."
"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, urn- 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 girl friend 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 Free-lander. 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 ijou, 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 were 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 girl friend 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, and 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 D
etective
"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 nrnutes 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?"
Westlake, Donald E - SSC 02 Page 14
