The Woman Who Knew Too Much

by Thomas Gifford

  “After one day? I’m still in the clear—”

  “Exactly my point. Thing is, we’ve been too far out front in all this. You play chess? Well, we’re out here with too damn many things undefended. Like your ass, Slats—”

  “Leave my ass out of this!”

  “Watch my lips. We want to keep you in the clear, whatever these people are up to. They still don’t know who you are, we can drop it and you’re none the worse for it—”

  “While the Director gets killed in the middle of Dan Rather—”

  “What the hell’s the matter with you? What are you trying to prove?” He hailed a cab that slid over to the curb, cutting off two or three hundred cars slogging their way up First.

  They climbed into the cab. Celia gave the driver her address. Greco wasn’t kidding. He thought they should get out of the whole thing. Maybe he was right. She couldn’t get over the shock of seeing Mrs. Bassinetti on the terrace with the white Rolls down below.

  “We gotta talk,” she said.

  “Okay. But I didn’t sign on for night work.”

  “You really going to Yankee Stadium?”

  “Naw. That was just clever repartee.”

  “But you’re busy tonight?”

  “Look, you’re growing on me in sort of a weird way, Slats. But I am tied up tonight.”

  “Got a hot date?”

  “Gotta shoot some pool,” Greco muttered, and looked out the window at the shops and restaurants whizzing by.

  Chapter Eleven

  SPENDING THE ENTIRE DAY alone had put Ed-the-Mean into a crummy mood. A contrary beast, never overly chummy in the best of times, he nonetheless was emotionally delicate, prone to finding the imagined slight. He resented neglect. Combined with his customary aversion to strangers, his resentment by the time he heard the key in the door had gone well off the meter. When Celia opened the door, Ed’s sixth sense warned him of an alien presence. His blood was up. He struck.

  There was a blur of purple blue feathers, a streak of yellow like the arc of a tracer bullet, a terrible beating of feathers, and a strangled cry.

  When she spun to look, helpless to intervene, she saw that the strangled cry had emanated from Peter Greco who, arms semaphoring frantically, was pirouetting back through the doorway. He kicked the door shut at the last moment.

  It was too late for Ed to peel off. He slammed into the door. With the sound of splintering wood his beak sank into the door. For a moment he cast a puzzled eye toward Celia as he hung by his black beak. Then he yanked himself backward, disengaging the beak, spitting out shreds of wood, and flopped with little or no dignity to the floor. Like a cat preserving its self-respect he staggered to his feet and strolled into the bedroom, as if that had been his clever intention all along.

  “What in the name of God was that?” The muffled inquiry came from beyond the damaged door. “Slats? You all right?”

  She opened the door. Greco’s arms flew up again to protect his remaining eye. He spread his fingers and peered through the spaces.

  “Jealous boyfriend. Ed. Should have warned you. It’s okay now, I’ve got him calmed down in the bedroom. Come on in—”

  “You’re sure it’s safe? This is no joke. I’m a guy who worries about his eyesight, right? So cut the crap—”

  “No, it’s safe, really. Come in.”

  “Oh, shit! There he is!”

  Ed had meandered back into the hallway. A bit of the door still hung from his beak. Suddenly he took wing and fluttered back to the living room. He landed atop his cage, pointedly turned his back to them, and began flexing his muscles.

  “Funny, some women you figure for a Rolls convertible. Other women, I’m naming no names mind you, have like, y’know, giant goddamn condors.” Greco snorted. “Look better in a stew pot. You really oughta keep him tied up if you won’t just kill him and get it over with. Really, I’m serious. Somebody could sue you.”

  “You’re just jealous. He’s tougher than you. He’s jealous, Ed.”

  “What’s all this?” Greco asked, gesturing at the box of index cards, the notebooks and folders that were scattered on one end of the couch.

  “It’s a book I’m working on,” Celia said, as she swept the stuff aside and sat down. “A Linda Thurston mystery. Sometimes I use her to help me figure things out.”

  Greco paced the room, watching Ed from the corner of his eye. He was checking out the bookcases and the pool table. He stood back and admired the massive carved legs and the detailing on the sides. He lifted the wooden platform from the top and stood it against the wall. He whistled softly.

  “This baby looks like an Orenstein, pre-World War One. Made in Kansas City. How does it play?”

  “Like a dream.”

  “Mind if I … ?” He nodded toward the rack of cues.

  “Not at all.”

  He looked at the cues, chose a two-tone Bradwell from England and chalked it. “Bird comes at me again, I break the cue on him.”

  “Just shoot pool.”

  “Okay, okay.” He looked at the casual arrangement of balls on the table, stroked a few shots to check the mat, the roll, the tendencies. “So, you think we should talk. The more I think, the more I think. It’s like Zen. So talk to me.” He didn’t show off with the cue, nothing fancy. He’d retrieve the white ball and take the same shot again and again.

  “I keep trying to get it clear. There’s a lot going on here, it’s frustrating.” She grabbed a file card, put it on a book and poised a Bic over it. “Charlie Cunningham is M.M. and he’s involved in Z’s plan to kill the Director. We know he’s lost the written plan Z gave him, because we found it. Right so far?” She watched him lean over the table and smoothly stroke the balls, heard the gentle, precise clicking as they smacked one another.

  “We know he knows he lost it,” Greco said, surveying the table, moving around it calmly and quickly, “because we saw him run to the Strand like a maniac. But he’s too late, the book and letter are gone. He doesn’t know where. So what does he do … and here’s where it begins to come apart. He calls his girlfriend, who is Mrs. Bassinetti, a rich married lady … who is also Miles Warriner, author of the book he mistakenly sold, the book in which he’d stuck the murder plan. Now why the hell did he call her?” He made another shot, then leaned on the cue, staring at her.

  “It’s a puzzlement,” she admitted. Ed rearranged himself on top of his cage, so he could see them. She gave him a warning look.

  “Where does she fit? What does he tell her? That he’s just lost his plan to murder somebody? Unlikely. But still, she runs to him fast as she can, and what does she do? Sympathize with his problem? No, she gives him holy hell about something, and with her feathers ruffled—if you’ll pardon me, Ed, you asshole—she splits. What’s her role? I’m telling you, Slats, once you know where Mrs. Bassinetti fits in, you know what’s going on. She’s the key.”

  “You’re smirking.”

  “I am not.”

  “You think you know where she fits, right?”

  He nodded grinning. “You’re not gonna like it—”

  “I was afraid of that.”

  “It just hit me in the cab. Right when I was beginning to worry about everything … it hit me head on. The obvious solution that fits all the facts and is completely logical.” He finally made a rather flashy shot and turned his back on it before the ball plopped into the leather strap pocket.

  “I’m going to hate this.”

  “It is a plot, all right. For one of her novels. It fits. It fits with his being a mystery critic and her lover. She’d naturally consult him about her plots … particularly with a husband who isn’t all that enthusiastic about her career. Plus—”

  “But—”

  “Plus this whacked-out personality of hers. All sweetness and light when we see her, but a nightmare with Charlie. Why? Because he’s carelessly disposed not only of her notes on the plot, but a book she inscribed for him. Her husband won’t take her work seriously and now her lover pu
lls a dumb stunt … and the lady blows her top, her ego explodes. Face it, Slats! It’s a perfect fit.” He put the cue back in the rack.

  “I don’t know,” Celia said.

  “Think about it. It fits. Well, look, I’ve got to hit the road.”

  She got up and walked him to the door. He frowned at the splintered indentation where Ed had met his match. He pushed his finger into the hole. “That bird is hard to believe. Look, I’ll call you tomorrow.” From the top of the stairs he winked his eye and smiled. “Sleep tight.”

  The thought that he might be right took the wind out of her sails. She sat on the couch as the light outside dimmed. In retrospect the danger seemed fun. Danger! She felt like a fool. What danger? Maybe she really was someone with an overactive sense of the dramatic. An actress. Maybe she had gotten carried away with Linda Thurston and had confused fiction with reality and, well, the fact was Debbie Macadam had called Linda an escape route… Maybe Celia had been using Linda for the wrong kind of escape. She wasn’t Linda. Linda didn’t exist, except in Celia’s imagination. The more she thought, the more foolish she felt. Maybe it came from being a loner. Celia had always been a loner, never happier than when she was lost in a book or a movie or a play.

  Ed went to the kitchen with her when she made coffee. She filled his water cup and feeder and brought a huge mug of coffee back into the living room. She put Double Indemnity on the VCR and there was Fred MacMurray with the Santa Ana blowing, having no idea what he was walking into. Just a guy trying to sell some insurance.

  She curled up at the end of the couch, picked up one of the Linda Thurston notebooks, and began writing down everything that had happened in the last twenty-four hours, since she’d found the murder letter. She held the letter in her hands again, pored over its meager contents trying to see something that had eluded her before.

  Rolls.

  Hmmm. Not a croissant, not a kaiser, not a Parker House. But how about a Rolls? As in Rolls Royce? Mrs. Bassinetti drove a Rolls…

  Trunk. A Rolls had a trunk.

  You could make a Clean getaway in the Trunk of a Rolls.

  If you didn’t do anything STUPID.

  How about M.M. in the Trunk of the Bassinetti Rolls?

  She felt her interest quickening, but she tried to fight it. Forget the dramatic, Celia. She heard Greco’s argument again, all perfectly reasonable. It fit. He was bound to be right, because life was prosaic. A bitchy adulterous wife gets mad at her careless lover. Happens every day, on every block in New York.

  But half an hour before he’d become so reasonable and so wet blankety, Greco had seemed genuinely worried, going on about chess and undefended positions and being too far out front. Mrs. Bassinetti had scared him.

  What was it with him?

  Had he been trying to talk her out of something he felt was just too dangerous for her to play with?

  Well, she was dead sure of one thing: Linda Thurston would never have fallen for Greco’s new theory. She’d have gone with her instincts. Celia knew Linda Thurston better than she knew herself, and no man could have waltzed Linda sideways and out of the picture. No way. Linda wouldn’t let herself be protected … while a man got killed. Linda would know her own mind, would trust her own mind. She’d have listened to Greco and thought it over and said … nonsense!

  Nonsense! She felt it in her guts, and like Linda Thurston, she was going to trust that gut feeling. At least for a few minutes… Just look at things a little differently and what could you find?

  Z, the unknown, is masterminding the murder of the Director, also unknown.

  Charlie Cunningham, for reasons unknown, is important to Z’s plan, may indeed be the lucky lad chosen to do the killing for him. Which means that Z is not an experienced murderer, since Charlie has all the earmarks of a singularly unqualified killer.

  Charlie loses the murder note, tries to get it back, and discovers that it’s fallen into the hands of someone unknown, who is in fact our own Celia Blandings.

  Charlie calls his girlfriend and someone else: Who?

  The girlfriend drops everything, comes to meet Charlie, and blows up at him. Why?

  And the girlfriend turns out to be Mrs. Bassinetti, who is Miles Warriner, mystery novelist.

  So you have Charlie, you have Charlie having an affair—Celia was sure of that, she could tell—with a rich woman married to a rich man with old-fashioned values … and this woman has a temper like a blowtorch.

  Now was that a triangle or was that a triangle?

  Whom do lovers murder?

  Rich, old-fashioned husbands.

  And innocent bystanders who find out too much.

  She was staring at MacMurray and Stanwyck meeting accidentally on purpose in a grocery store.

  God in Heaven! What were they doing? They were planning to kill Barbara Stanwyck’s husband for the insurance!

  Money. Bassinetti’s money? Maybe. Charlie Cunningham didn’t seem very well-heeled. And who knew what was Mrs. Bassinetti’s and what her husband’s?

  But money was one of the reasons for murder. What were the others? Power? Love? Sheer cussedness. If Ed ever killed anyone it would be sheer cussedness—

  The telephone rang.

  It was Claude, her ex-actor pal, now full-time at the Strand.

  “Darling, I hear you came in search of me. So sorry I missed you. Offering free food, were you?”

  “Really just wanted to say hi, Claude—”

  “Well, my dear, it shows you the power of coincidence, that’s what it shows you.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “You want the long dramatic reading or the short facts?”

  “Short, please.”

  “You’re just no fun.” Claude’s lisp was getting worse the further he got from the stage. “But I was upstairs—any more time spent in the dungeon and I’ll begin to look like a gopher—and I was talking to Henry when this regular comes dashing in, apparently sold us a valuable book by mistake, valuable to him I mean, and he wanted it back. Matter of hours was all. Henry says My God, what a small world, she was just in looking for the guy whose book she had. He described you, five-ten, lanky, lovely to look at, delightful to know—”

  “This is the short version?” She felt a cold wind raking across her: fear again. Damn it. This was all too real.

  “Okay, cut to the chase. I heard the description and knew it was you. Lucky girl! And I was able to tell this Charlie Cunningham where he could find his book.”

  She felt her knees start to go a little rubbery. She’d known it was coming. “What are you saying, Claude?”

  “So I gave him your name and address. He said he didn’t want to just drop in on you and, you know, he seemed very nice, your type, Celia. Sort of an intellectual. And utterly hetero.” She could imagine Claude smirking on the other end, as if he knew her nasty little secret.

  “Celia? Celia? You there?”

  “Sure, Claude. Look, I’ve got to run.”

  “The thanks I get!”

  “Thanks a million, really,” and she hung up.

  She stared at Double Indemnity, not seeing it.

  Charlie knows now. Reality was back, and she wasn’t liking it. Maybe Greco had been right after all…

  Suddenly she found herself hoping so.

  The problem was, Linda Thurston didn’t think so.

  She called Hilary Sampson once the movie was over. She’d thought it through again and again, dealing with the various unknowns, substituting a variety of possibilities for each. One scenario after another. They all made sense, none of them made sense. She’d also considered her own resources, as if she were setting up a defense perimeter with herself at the center. Her resources didn’t amount to all that much. But knowledge was important, particularly in light of all the unknowns. And Hilary Sampson made her living as a researcher at the Times.

  She was in luck. Hilary was home. Celia ran through the day’s activities, a recitation satisfyingly accompanied by Hilary’s gasps of e
xcitement.

  “What are you going to do now that he knows who you are? I think you’d better camp over here tonight—”

  “No, it’s okay,” Celia said, wondering if it was. “But you can be a big help—”

  “Anything!”

  “Work your research magic. Get me anything you can on the family Bassinetti. I need to know who her husband is. There’s always the chance he’s not only rich but has some kind of public record. Also, Mrs. Bassinetti or Miles Warriner. Can you do that?”

  “Sure, no problem. Are we looking for anything in particular?”

  “If I only knew—but I don’t. We’ll just have to go with whatever we find. But there are too many blanks in the equations. I’d like to fill any of them. Hilary, we’re really up against it. We’ve only got until Dan Rather comes on with the news tomorrow night—”

  “I know, I’ve been paying attention. So how’d you like Greco?”

  “He’s a real con man, a real smartass, he keeps calling me Slats—”

  “That means he likes you. You like him, right?”

  “I said nothing of the kind—”

  “I can tell, you like him!”

  “Hilary, find out about the Bassinettis, okay?”

  “I knew it! You like him!”

  “Later, Hil. We’ll talk about that later.”

  “For sure!”

  She forced herself to accept the idea that Charlie Cunningham knew where to find her. If Greco’s theory was right, Charlie naturally enough wanted to recover the keepsake-inscribed book as well as the plot notes. If Linda Thurston’s theory was correct, she didn’t want to think about it.

  She was in the shower washing off the accumulated grime of the day. She stepped out and ran naked and dripping to the extension beside her bed. She shook the water out of her right ear and said hello.

  “Miss Blandings?”

  “Yes.”

  “My name is Charlie Cunningham. I believe you have something of mine. I want it back, Miss Blandings.” He coughed into the mouthpiece while she stood rooted to the spot, shivering from the whiff of fear. “Miss Blandings? Are you there, Miss Blandings?”