" How fascinating!''
"I've been offered a look at the letters in the hope they might throw some light on all this mess."
"How could they?"
"Everybody's playing wild guessing games," I said. "Mrs. Haven thinks someone may be trying to punish your father, even after his death, by trying to destroy you. That's one of a hell of a lot of guesses we're playing with."
She was silent for a moment, letting that sink in, a tiny frown creasing her forehead.
"If she knew my father down through the years, I can see why she'd make such a guess," Val said finally.
"She never saw him after they split up. They had, I gather, a torrid two years. But he started writing her after a while, once a month for fifty-two years!"
"He must have cared for her."
"She's quite a gal," I said. "Even now, at eighty."
"I told you my father's world wasn't a real world," she said. "As a child I supposed every child was as closely guarded as I was. As I began to grow up I realized we weren't like other people. For Daddy there was a mortal enemy hiding behind every sagebrush. He thought I would be the target. I would be kidnapped and they would gouge him for his whole world." She gave me a bitter little smile. 'There came a time when I decided it wasn't me he cared for, but the things he owned, the things he controlled."
"And so to the hot bath and the razor blade?" I said.
She moved away from me, her eyes wide. "Paul really did talk to you, didn't he?"
"He said it was no secret. Everybody at the Tucson place knew."
She nodded slowly and held out her arm, pulling back the sleeve from her wrist. I could see the little white, crisscrossed scars from long ago.
"My own silly melodrama, played in my own silly way," she said. "Right out of some French novel I'd been reading. But it turned out to be a lucky event."
"Oh?"
"It revealed to me that Daddy really loved me, truly loved me. You see, none of the things he feared evaporated for him. The danger to him through me was still there. But if I was so desperate about the way he'd patterned my life, then he would face it, take the chance, set me free. He cared for me that much, and it made my world over."
"He made you change your name?"
"That was the only precaution he asked me to take. I thought I'd look around and find one of his men dodging me, following me East to college, that he'd try to guard me without my being aware of it. He didn't. He played it dead on the level, and oh how I loved him for it!"
"And nobody ever did make a move against you?" "No. For a while I lived in fear of it, expecting to be grabbed and carried off in a great black limousine by Arab oil sheiks. Nothing ever happened, and the world I found outside Daddy's 'fence' seemed so wonderfully free, and exciting; people my age of both sexes, brilliant intellects like—like Derek Newton, books, theaters, just to walk down the street in the town of Poughkeepsie without anyone keeping tabs on me."
"And the time had come when you had to say yes or no to the young men in your world," I said.
She gave me an almost shy look. "I was so green, Mark. Maybe I said no without even realizing I was saying it. I knew...I knew there was something stirring in me that I had to satisfy. But it wasn't I who said no. It was poor, dear Derek. I was so ashamed, and so turned off, that a whole year went by. And then.. .then I met Richard Summers. There was no saying yes or no. It just happened, wonderfully, magically. It never occurred to either of us that we wouldn't be married, until Dick found out who I really was, the rich Miss McCandless! It almost ended it. But once again my father was an angel. He set aside his anxieties about a 'fortune hunter' and assessed Dick for what his real worth was."
"He knew you were having an affair with Dick?" "He wasn't a fool, Mark. I must have been as transparent as glass. He must have known it would happen when I went East. I was a late-blooming woman." She reached out and touched my hand. "You and Mr. Chambrun keep suggesting someone is out to get me because I said no to them. There was never anyone, Mark, who came close. This seems to be a time for no secrets. I have never made love to any man, or come close to making love to any man, but Dick. The idea of someone else, while Dick was still alive, never even crossed my mind. Afterward ..."
'There was someone?"
"No. I knew, though, that a reasonably attractive widow with no ties would be fair game. I didn't want to face it then, not ever I sometimes think. That's why I came to New York and shut myself away. I didn't want to encounter it in even the most casual way."
"And you didn't?"
"Didn't." She gave me a long, steady stare.
"Do I want for you to ask, or do I ask?" I said.
She stood up and walked quickly over toward the French windows. I had meant what I'd said to be a light kind of crack, something to laugh at but keep in mind! She had evidently taken it quite seriously.
I don't know how Val might have responded because, at that moment, there was the most unwelcome of interruptions. Lieutenant Keegan, the Black Irishman, walked into the room, unannounced.
THREE
Obviously Keegan saw me but he acted as though I wasn't there. His dark, scowling attention was focused on Val who had turned back from the French windows, aware of some new presence behind her.
"We're going to have to talk some more, Mrs. Summers," Keegan said.
I could see Val stiffen. She took an uncertain little step to the right where she could reach out to the back of a chair to steady herself.
"I've told you everything I have to tell you—over and over," she said, her voice unsteady.
"Over and over, if you haven't got it memorized, has a way of bringing up a little something new each time," he said. "I've been going over your statements, taken down by a police stenographer. There are still things that don't check out." He took a notebook out of his inside pocket. In the movement involved I caught a glimpse of the holstered gun under his left arm. He turned a couple of pages in the notebook. "The night before last, when Carl Rogers was shot in your apartment, you say you went to the theater. The name of the show again."
"Sugar Babies, with Mickey Rooney and Ann Miller," she said.
"The theater?"
Val hesitated. "I...I don't recall. It's on Broadway, in the early 50s."
'The Mark Hellinger Theater, Broadway and 51st Street," Keegan said. "You told us you didn't see anyone there you know."
"I don't know a dozen people here in New York, Lieutenant," she said. "Is it so surprising none of them was at Sugar Babies that night?"
He ignored her question. "You don't have a ticket stub to prove you were there," he said. "What happened to that stub?"
"I... I don't know."
"What do you usually do with ticket stubs when you go to the theater?"
She gave him a blank look as though she didn't understand what he was getting at.
"When I go to the theater," he said, coldly quiet, "I hand my ticket to the man at the door, he tears it in half and hands me back my stub. I give my stub to an usher who takes me down the aisle and points out my seat. He hands me back my stub and I put it in my pocket. Why do I keep it?"
She looked flustered. "In... in case..." she said.
"In case someone else claims my seat," he said. "In case, if I go out for a cigarette in the intermission, I'm not dead sure where my seat was. The chances are I don't discard that stub until I empty my pockets before I go to bed that night. What do you do with your ticket stub, Mrs. Summers, after the usher has shown you your seat and handed it back to you?"
"I suppose I... I put it in my purse," Val said.
"You looked in your purse that night when we first questioned you," Keegan said. "No stub."
"I know."
"So what did you do with it?"
"I told you then, and I tell you now—I just don't remember."
'Threw it on the floor in the theater?"
She sounded desperate. "Idon't remember!"
He turned a page on his notebook. "We have a police photograp
h of you, Mrs. Summers, taken the night before last when we were summoned to your apartment. We took that photograph to the Mark Hellinger Theater. Not a single person in the box office, not the ticket taker at the door, not one of the crew of ushers remembers ever having seen you."
"A couple of thousand people every night," I said. I'd had enough of this. "A couple of thousand different people every night. Val isn't a movie star. Why should they remember?"
He turned on me, and his eyes were as cold as two newly minted dimes. "I let you stay here, Haskell, because her lawyer isn't here. I don't want her telling someone I brutalized her. But you keep your mouth shut or out you go." He faced Val again. "Where did you buy your ticket for the show, Mrs. Summers?"
She moved slowly around the chair she'd been clinging to and sat down on it. "I don't think you will want to understand," she said.
"Try me, Mrs. Summers."
"That night... that night I was restless, Lieutenant. I wanted to get out oi my apartment, shake the thoughts I'd been thinking."
"What thoughts?"
"For God's sake, Lieutenant, it's only eight months since my husband was burned to death! Sometimes, thinking about it is almost too much to bear! I went out, with no particular plan, thinking I'd find a movie or perhaps a play that would take my mind off it. I'd seen the movies in the neighborhood theaters. I took a taxi up to the Times Square area, knowing I'd find something to see."
"You take the cab number?"
"No!"
"So we won't be able to find him, will we?" Kee-gan said. "Go on, Mrs. Summers. You still haven't got a ticket to Sugar Babies.' 9
"I paid off the taxi—somewhere in the Times Square area. I just walked, looking at the theater marquees. I found myself outside a theater—you say it's the Mark Hellinger. There was a big picture of Mickey Rooney. I remembered him with pleasure in the movies, so I thought I'd try. It looked pretty hopeless. The lobby was crowded. There was a line to the box office but people seemed to be turned away. I was about to try somewhere else when a man came up to me. Did I want a single ticket? He had one I could buy. Orchestra seats were twenty-two dollars, I think. This man wanted fifty dollars for his."
"And you bought it?"
She nodded.
"What a McCandless wants a McCandless gets," Keegan said. He sounded outraged. "I don't suppose you could identify this ticket scalper if you saw him again?"
"I might," Val said. "I'm not sure."
"So we have a whole evening accounted for, without a shred of proof to back up any single part of it," Keegan said. "I thought going over and over it you might remember something that would check out."
"Where were you a week ago Thursday at two o'clock in the afternoon?'' I heard myself asking Keegan.
"What the hell are you talking about?"
"I just wondered if your memory is any better than Mrs. Summers," I said.
Keegan pointed a finger at me like an angry schoolteacher. "One more smart-ass crack out of you, Haskell, and you're gone!" He turned his back on me as though he needed me out of his sight in order to control his temper. When he finally spoke to Val again I was surprised to hear something that sounded almost like sympathy in his voice. The tough cop and the friendly cop is an old police routine. It involves two investigators, one of them demanding, angry, accusing, and the other playing the "I'm your friend" side of the street. Keegan obviously was going to try to play both sides.
"I have a job to do, a murderer to catch, Mrs. Summers," he said. "I have to play the cards as they fall. If you could remember a single thing about night before last that would check out, verify a single detail of where you were and what you did, I could turn somewhere else. I don't have a passionate desire to prove you guilty. If I could prove you innocent it would do just as well. As it is, I have to keep hammering at you. Do you understand?"
"I...I'm too tired for it to matter," Val said. It was almost a whisper.
"So we have to keep at it. Let's forget about the night before last for now, and go to last night."
Val lowered her head and covered her face with her hands. I wanted to go to her, but I thought Keegan would use that as an excuse for ordering me out.
Keegan turned the pages of his notebook. "After Rogers was murdered in your apartment, Mrs. Summers, your lawyer, Fails, brought you here to the Beaumont. You were set up in suite Five A. That was early afternoon. Two o'clock?"
"It may have been," Val said.
"At six-fifteen Haskell turned up to invite you to dinner. There is a gap of four hours and fifteen minutes about which we know nothing. I want to fill in that gap, Mrs. Summers. You weren't being watched or guarded then. Unfortunately we didn't guess that there was more to come. So let's try to account for that four hours and fifteen minutes. Did you leave Five A during that time? For lunch? For something you may have needed in the drugstore or one of the shops?"
Val shook her head slowly.
"To meet a friend? To make a call on a pay phone you could be sure wasn't monitored?"
"No! I never left the suite."
"Who came in to see you during that stretch of time?"
"No one."
"You just sat there in the suite for four hours and a half?"
"I ... I was exhausted. I tried napping but it didn't work."
"You make any phone calls?"
"No."
"You're positive?"
"If she made any out-calls there'd be a record of them at the switchboard," I said.
Keegan gave me his black stare. "Last warning!" he said. "You look at television, Mrs. Summers?"
"I tried to get news on the TV a couple of times," Val said. "I thought there might be something about... about Tenth Street."
"And did you get news on the TV?"
"Yes. But nothing about Tenth Street."
"What station?"
"I don't understand."
"What station did you tune into?"
She turned her head from side to side, as if she was coming to the end of her endurance. "I...I just switched the set from channel to channel until I found someone with news."
"Man or woman?"
"Man—I think."
"What was the news at that moment?"
"About the hostages in Iran—and something about the Russians in Afghanistan. What does it matter, Lieutenant?"
"If I knew what channel you'd tuned to, I could find out what they were broadcasting at the time you say you were watching. That could substantiate one single statement you've made about key times in the last two days. It's extraordinary, isn't it, that nothing you've told me about night before last and last night can be backed up by a witness, by a material fact like that ticket stub, by anything at all?"
Val stared at Keegan as though he made no sense.
"He slipped and fell," she said.
"Who slipped and fell?** Keegan asked, darkening.
"Mickey Rooney," Val said. "In a dance routine. He covered it up, wonderfully, making it look as though it was intentional. But the audience knew, and they applauded. I'd have to have been there to know that, wouldn't I, Lieutenant?"
"We're talking about last night," Keegan said. He was moving over from being the 'nice guy,' back to the Inquisition. "Tell me one thing I can take hold of that will help me account for four hours and fifteen minutes of your time!"
"If you asked Mickey Rooney he would tell you that he slipped and fell in one of his dance routines," Val said.
"That was night before last!" Keegan almost shouted. "We're talking about two o'clock to six-fifteen yesterdayl ''
Val lifted her hands to cover her face again. She'd had it, I thought—in spades.
"Nobody with your kind of money—fifty dollars to a scalper for a theater ticket!—lives the kind of nothing life you say you've been living, Mrs. Summers," Keegan said. "No friends, you say. People with your kind of dough always have friends, or people who pretend to be friends. You isolated yourself so you could grieve for your dead husband, you say. People like you can affo
rd to go to a shrink when they have troubles. Have you been going to a psychiatrist?"
Val just shook her head, slowly, warily.
"What does a woman in your situation do?" Keegan said. "I thought drugs when I identified the dead man in your apartment. The hotel doctor, Dr. Partridge, says there's no indication that you're a drug user. He had to make sure when he gave you sleeping pills, after we'd found Willie Bloomfield dead in your bedroom in Five A. You could afford to buy it by the bushel from Willie. Willie and Carl Rogers worked together. Not drugs, not sex, you say. So what were they up to, each of them in a place where you lived? I think I have the answer to that, Mrs. Summers. Those two characters had a sideline which they worked very successfully—until night before last and last night. Blackmail! What did they have on you, Mrs. Summers?"
Valerie looked up. It was a final effort, I thought.
"I never saw either of them before," she said. "I never heard of either of them before."
"Maybe you just paid off a messenger boy," Kee-gan said. "What did they have on you?"
She lowered her head again, face covered, and began to cry softly, her shoulders heaving but almost no sound.
"I'm on target, right?" Keegan said, sounding triumphant. "They had something on you, raised the ante, and you shot them both in cold blood. What was it that would drive you to go so far to keep hidden?"
At the opportune moment I heard the front door to the penthouse open and close. I've seen someone move quickly in my time, but Keegan took the prize. The gun under his left armpit came out so fast he'd have made an old-fashioned gunslinger look paralyzed.
The interrupter was Detective Dawson, the cop who'd found that little pearl-handled gun in Valerie's bureau drawer. He gave Keegan a frozen little smile.
"Hey, point that thing some other way, Lieutenant," he said.
Keegan held the gun dead-steady. "What the hell do you mean walking in here?" he demanded. "I'm involved in an interrogation."
"If you'll come outside for just a minute," Dawson said.
"When I'm through!"
"It's your ball game," Dawson said. He gave me a kind of odd look, I thought, and then he turned and went out. I heard the front door close behind him.
"Now, Mrs. Summers," Keegan said, slipping his gun back in its holster, "let's have a little truth for a change."
Murder in Luxury Page 13
