The Woman Who Knew Too Much

by Thomas Gifford

  “Looks like a case for Ms. Thurston,” she said.

  “Mmm,” Celia said, shoveling in a mouthful of chicken in garlic sauce.

  “Unless it’s just a plot from the perverse mind of some other would-be mystery writer—”

  “In the form of a letter to M.M.? Read it again. Those are directions to M.M. from Z. Not notes for a novel. I’ve made notes in every imaginable form, but nothing like that.”

  “So someone’s going to kill the Director,” Hilary mused.

  “Well, I’d say M.M. and Z are going to kill the Director—”

  “Two out of work actors plotting to kill—let’s see, a director so important he gets a big D—Mike Nichols maybe?”

  “Actors only talk about killing the director. They hardly ever do it. And then only in fits of pique. Extreme, aggravated pique. Never, ever in the study with Dan Rather.”

  “That shows how much you know,” Hilary said. “If Colonel Mustard can do it in the library with a candlestick, then an actor could do it in Mike Nichols’s study with Dan Rather doing a live remote—”

  “Come on! That’s ridiculous and this is no joke—”

  “Ed’s ridiculous but there he is. Definitely no joke.”

  “Okay, okay, let’s get serious. First, we don’t know who M.M. is and we’re not going to find out tonight. And there’s no way yet to figure out who the Director is either—all we know about him is he’s the victim. Now, what about leaving the door unlocked? Maybe the Director always leaves the door unlocked.”

  “Or maybe Z is going to leave it unlocked for M.M. Look, we’re just treading water here, Celia.”

  “Let’s just stick with it. Someone is working in the west wing. While the door is unlocked. The Director? West wing. Sounds awfully grand—”

  “No, the Director—that is D, if that’s the Director—is in the study with Dan Rather. Could there be some other Dan Rather?”

  “Somehow one doubts it, wouldn’t you agree?”

  “I suppose,” Hilary conceded, tangling with the chicken now.

  “Now there’s the Prowler—is that a third murderer or what?”

  “I wonder. Could be M.M., I suppose. I mean, Z wouldn’t be reminding M.M. if Z is the Prowler. Would he? Well, I don’t think we can tell, really.”

  “Trunk makes no sense. Maybe there’s something in the trunk they want. Treasure of some kind. Rolls? Wouldn’t need arsenic in the rolls if you’ve got a gun. Trunk and rolls. Maybe they’re planning to work up an appetite. It’s gibberish. At least Clean getaway is self-explanatory.”

  “The next one makes you think Z doesn’t find M.M. the brightest guy around—”

  “Agreed.”

  “But 21 and 7 baffle me—”

  “Could be the date written in the English manner,” Hilary said. “Twenty-first day of the seventh month. That’d be July—”

  “But this is only May nineteenth. Why the big note to M.M., all this checking up on details? Sounds like it’s urgent last minute stuff—”

  “Dan Rather,” Hilary reflected, wiping orange beef from the corner of her mouth. “God, I wish you’d let me use a fork!”

  “Dan Rather what?”

  “The evening news comes on at seven here. That’s Dan Rather. He’s not in the study with the Director. The Director’s in the study at seven o’clock watching Dan Rather. And he’s always there at seven because the Director is a creature of habit. The more habitual your routine, the easier you are to kill. So …”

  “You’re saying—look, that means the murder takes place on the twenty-first of this month at seven o’clock!”

  “And today’s the nineteenth …”

  For the second time that evening Celia said: “Holy shit.”

  “We know something else,” Hilary said once the plates had been rinsed and stacked in the sink. The wine was running low. “You didn’t look at the title page.”

  “What do you mean? I was so amazed at the letter—”

  “Well, there’s another connection. The title page is signed by the author.” She reached for the book and handed it to Celia.

  Celia looked. Written in ballpoint pen, slanted across the page above and below the title itself, were the words: For MM with love and other things, “Miles.”

  “So M.M. knows Z and Miles Warriner,” Celia said. “Would one man write ‘with love and other things’ to another man?”

  “Probably. In the Village, anyway.”

  “Mmm. I suppose. I wonder why someone would sell an autographed copy at the Strand?”

  “Well, that’s obviously a mistake,” Celia said. “M.M. didn’t mean to sell that book. Not autographed. Not with a plan to commit a murder included. All this is a big mistake.”

  Hilary pointed a finger at Celia, cutting her off.

  “Now we have a name! Miles Warriner must know who MM. is! So all we have to do is find Miles Warriner and ask him—”

  Celia was shaking her head. “That might not be so easy. Look at the quotation marks Warriner put around his first name—what does that mean to you?”

  Hilary shrugged. “A nickname?”

  “A pen name,” Celia said. “I’ll bet Miles Warriner is a pseudonym.” She flipped to the back cover, which was taken up by newspaper quotations about the Littlechild series. The inside dust-jacket flap contained no author photograph but merely the listing of the Littlechild titles, seven of them, and the enigmatic sentence: Miles Warriner lives in New York City but is intimately acquainted with the villages of England about which Inspector Littlechild seems to know everything.

  Hilary read it and looked piqued. “Cute. Smarmy bastard. So if it’s a pseudonym, where does that leave us?”

  “Depends on how seriously the secret is kept. Sometimes it’s common knowledge, maybe the leisure writing of a heavier weight literary type. Could be a professor somewhere who fills his holidays with mystery writing. Or it could be a dark secret for a million reasons. But the thing is, whoever it is, he knows M.M. I wonder if Miles Warriner knows Z?”

  “How can we get the real name?”

  “Just ask,” Celia said. “The publisher, the Mystery Writers of America … maybe Otto would know—”

  “Otto?”

  “Otto Penzler up at the Mysterious Bookshop. He knows funny things sometimes. Like where the bodies are buried, so to speak.”

  Celia had turned the lights low and lit a couple of candles. Rockford’s gold Firebird spun wildly around a mountain road, the bad guys in hot pursuit through the clouds of dust. Hilary sat at the other end of the couch. The magnitude of the letter was just beginning to sink in. A man was going to be murdered, and the sheerest of accidents had let them in on the secret. Now there was a moral question involved. It was none of Celia’s business. She was the perfect Hitchcockian innocent bystander—the Jimmy Stewart character, stumbling over a body. The woman who knew too much… But could she ignore the fact that she knew? Wasn’t there an obligation to do something? To try and save the man’s life?

  Celia’s first reaction had been to take the letter and their story to the police. Hilary, who was fascinated by police procedures and had been an auxiliary volunteer patroling the Village and hanging around with cops for five years, just laughed.

  “They’d think we were totally crazy,” she said, “and nothing would happen. There’s nothing for them to go on. It’s too off the wall. No crime has been committed, there aren’t names and addresses, nothing. If the murder had already been done, then the letter would be evidence, which we’ve screwed up by playing with it… Nope, not a chance.” Her arguments were persuasive.

  Now Hilary was sighing. “I’m going to regret this next part, let me make this absolutely clear right at the outset. What, I wonder, would Linda Thurston do? I ask only because I once had a therapist who was always suggesting that we put ourselves into a third-party point of view—she kept telling me I should use a role model, try to think what the role model would do. She said fictional role models were as good as real ones,
better actually, because their personalities were often clearer. Anyway, you’re supposed to think like Linda Thurston—”

  “I feel foolish.”

  “Linda wouldn’t. So you mustn’t. Okay, look at it this way. If you were writing a Linda Thurston story, what would come next? She finds the letter and … what?” Hilary lit a True and took a deep drag, which she’d convinced herself couldn’t harm a fly.

  “Well, that’s different because Linda—in the first one I want to write—is having an affair with an actor in the company who’s playing Sherlock Holmes, who’s made a career of playing detectives on TV and in the movies. She takes the problem to him and they sort it out very romantically, you know, like in a movie. But I don’t have a boyfriend, and if I did he wouldn’t be an—”

  “But,” Hilary interrupted, turning to grin maniacally, “I had a boyfriend who was a cop. He still is a detective—wait, no, he isn’t actually. But he counts as a detective even though he’s retired—”

  “He’s old?”

  “No. But he’s … disabled. Only has one eye.”

  “Wonderful.”

  “Smart guy, though. I’d say he’s your best bet.”

  “Does he have a name?”

  “Greco. Peter Greco. I’ll call him right now.”

  But he was out so she left a message on his machine that practically assured she’d get a call back.

  Once Hilary had gone, Celia lay in bed, listening to the faint, steady hum of the city. She heard Ed banging around in the other room, climbing back into his cage and locking up for the night.

  Alone in the darkness she wondered what in the world she was getting into. It had seemed like a titillating game at first, but as the somber facts of a murder plot grew clearer, its appeal was fading. Murder was desperate, serious, brutal, not the stuff of games.

  Yet she was dabbling in it. As if she were only Linda Thurston, safe in the pages of a book, with a benevolent creator looking out for her.

  Who would be looking out for Celia Blandings, who had always taken a certain pride in admitting her physical cowardice? Where was the fun in doing something that could wind up with you dead?

  And what did she think she’d do about the murder plan anyway? Did she think she was going to keep the murder from happening? She had a couple days, and she didn’t really know anything about the impending murder. Maybe the time. Probably the means. But surely that wasn’t enough…

  Still, there was one big unknown that hadn’t been in the letter.

  Peter Greco.

  Chapter Five

  THE GAME HAD GOTTEN out of hand along about ten-thirty, when the one-eyed guy had blown an easy shot and narrowly missed a three-rail nine ball that would have left him in a position to run the table and climb back to within a couple hundred bucks of even. Instead he’d gone four bills down, then five, and with the growing deficit, he seemed increasingly determined to wipe himself out. Some guys are like that, pushing a losing streak as far as it will go, hoping it will turn around, maybe hoping it will teach them a lesson.

  A tall black guy called Slick was calmly, deliberately taking him to the cleaners, smiling all the time, keeping everything nice and friendly. Slick was bankrolled by a couple of greaseballs in Italian suits that might have fit them fifteen, twenty pounds ago. Slick was their boy, and while the score was being clicked up and the balls racked, they chatted together—Slick, his backers, and the guy who held all the money. The thickset, one-eyed guy didn’t seem to mind losing. He had all the confidence of a man who thought he was a whole hell of a lot better than he was. A born mark.

  He was five-nine maybe, and his thick, curly black hair was receding on a rounded forehead that wore a couple of scarred dents. Where his hair wasn’t receding it was speckled with gray. His shoulders sloped confidently beneath his gray sweatshirt. The sleeves were pushed up almost to the elbow. There was a lot of wiry black hair growing out of the muscles. He’d pumped a little iron in his time.

  He shot pool erratically, brilliant and creative one moment, blowing an ordinary shot the next. A born mark. And on top of all that misplaced confidence and the inconsistency, he was actually blind in one eye, wore a black patch with a black elastic band sunk into a groove across his forehead and on into his hair. Slick got a kick out of the mark’s sweatshirt: IN THE LAND OF THE BLIND, THE ONE-EYED MAN IS KING. Slick thought that was pretty good, and said so.

  The mark said: “Can’t afford to lose your sense of humor, man. Never take anything too seriously. Particularly your own misfortune.”

  “Right on,” Slick said, his thick pink tongue sliding along his lower lip. Slick wore a purple suit, a black shirt, and a lemon-colored tie. The one-eyed guy thought Slick was pretty funny, and the four of them were getting along just fine as Slick kept rolling up the score.

  It was a second-floor poolroom on the Lower East Side. It reeked of smoke and chalk and flop sweat. It had been there a long time, and it didn’t look like much, but it was the kind of dreary, dark place where a lot of money changes owners. Half of the tables were in use, and there were some of the usual creeps and rummies hanging around watching the action, ready to bet the rent on guys like Slick, guys on hot streaks.

  The one-eyed guy came back from taking a leak and said, “Shit, I got five bills left. Might as well lose it all and go home to bed. Honest and poor.” He handed the money to the old crock with the dead cigar stuck in the corner of his rubbery mouth. Christ, the one-eyed man thought, it’s a low budget, off-the-books version of The Hustler. Now I’d better turn into Fat Jack Gleason. “Let’s shoot some pool, Slick,” was what he said. Slick handed five hundred to the holder.

  Slick ran four balls, then missed a tough shot he’d been making all night, smiled like a piano keyboard, and gave the table to the mark.

  He didn’t have much to work with, but sneaked the seven ball into a corner pocket. Then he ran the table without having anything tougher than your grandmother could handle. That was about eleven-thirty.

  Funny thing, but he didn’t have a tough shot for the next hour and a half. In that time he missed only three shots, three of the very easiest. Whenever old Slick missed one, the one-eyed guy ran the table. Always easy shots. It was like watching Bernard King turn Madison Square Garden into a basketball clinic. “My lucky night,” he said, as if he couldn’t believe his good fortune.

  It was all very quick. Click, click, click, plop, plop, plop. Slick was looking very tired by one o’clock, which was funny because he hadn’t been doing much for quite a while but standing around chalking his cue, watching.

  At one-thirty the one-eyed guy was $3600 ahead and the guys in the bad suits were dry. They were going to have to borrow carfare home. The game was over. The guy with the one bad lamp had all the money.

  Slick was sitting in a heavy, smooth chair, looking at the table, realizing what had happened. The two suits were whispering at each other, nobody listening. The mark put on a beat-up old Yankee warm-up jacket over his sweatshirt. He peeled off a hundred and gave it to the holder.

  “Thanks for the game, Mr. Slick,” he said, then nodded to the two fashion plates. “Just one of those nights, gentlemen. I was due.”

  They frowned, muttered. He went down the creaking stairway to the street, looked at the night, saw that it was good, took a deep breath and told himself he’d been a very bad boy. The thought rather pleased him. He grinned. With the thick, slope-shouldered body, the neck like a fire hydrant and the rounded dome, he looked like a mortar shell out for a walk.

  They came at him with a minimum of subtlety, as he knew they would. They weren’t up to much more. He heard them panting along behind him. Amateurs. Punks who leaned on you for the love of leaning on you, anybody. He stopped beside a junky free-lance parking lot. The bums who lived there might enjoy this. He turned around and watched them come.

  Slick was doubtless still contemplating the playing field of his defeat. The suits had traded him in on a hulking pile of muscle who trotted heavily beside the
m.

  “Look,” the one-eyed man said, taking his hands out of the pockets of his Yankee jacket, “you’re not going to get your money back. You lost it fair and square. That’s a fact. Your friend in the purple suit choked and you got stuck with the tab. That’s life. Go home, learn from the experience, reflect on your mistake. It’ll be easier that way, believe me.” He had a nice, low voice. Reassuring. Take my advice, it seemed to say.

  One of the suits said: “You gotta gun, man? Better show it if you do.”

  The man shook his head sadly. “Don’t need a gun, to tell you the truth. I’m that tough.”

  The other suit laughed. “Yeah, you gonna wish you had a piece, man.”

  He pulled a switchblade. It made the faint clicking sound the one-eyed man had been hearing for years.

  “Last chance to get home in one piece, guys,” he said.

  “Fuck you, blind man.”

  They were a sorry lot. He almost felt badly about what was coming next. Almost but not quite.

  The one with the knife nodded to the hulk, who came wading in like a side of beef looking to be lots of steaks.

  The one-eyed man took the hulk’s arm and broke it with a swift blow that nobody quite remembered afterward. Then he spun him all the way around and rammed him into the guy with the knife. The knife tore through the fabric of his clothing with a faint ripping sound, and the big man sagged to his knees, then lay down in a puddle of stagnant, gravelly water.

  The guy with the knife left it sticking in the big man, and while he stared down at his empty hand, the one-eyed man broke his jaw with a forearm like a crowbar. The other suit grabbed a brick from the rubble by the parking-lot fence.

  “Why not just call an ambulance for your pals?”

  The guy with the brick took a swipe at him. The one-eyed man drove a fist into the man’s chest and felt a rib break. He took the brick from the weakening fingers. The man tried to kick him, missed, and sat down. The one-eyed man dropped into a squat like a catcher and broke the nearest kneecap with the brick. The night was full of howling and gurgling and faraway sirens.