I listened. Whenever we talk about someone else we are really also talking about ourselves. If you listen closely enough to what a person says about someone else, you can get a pretty good picture of what that person thinks of himself, what view of life the speaker has. Peggy Brandt was talking about Nancy Driscoll and what the Driscoll girl had wanted, but she was really considering what she, Peggy Brandt, wanted. She was wondering if she was in a hurry, or if she should be in more of a hurry. If, perhaps, she wasn’t missing something, if her career was, after all, that important.
‘Jo-Jo was in no hurry,’ I said, prompted. ‘He had ambitions. He was going to be a racing driver.’
‘Yes, Joseph liked cars,’ Peggy said. ‘Nancy used to tell me how they would live all over the world. But she couldn’t get him to marry her, I suppose. Anyway, she started dating almost anyone. She was something of a tease, I think. Girls who have only marriage on their minds often are. I don’t think they mean to tease, but they just don’t understand that love and marriage do not always go together to all people. Nancy told me of a few nasty scenes with the men she started dating.’
‘Any names?’ I broke in. ‘Someone who might…’
‘No, I told the police I never knew their names. She was bitter about this Joseph, and every day she seemed to get more anxious about getting old and not yet married to the right man to give her the good life. She did foolish things, from the little she told me. I got the impression she was trying with every man she met.’ The Brandt girl stopped. She uncrossed and recrossed her fine legs, absently rubbed her thigh. She was thinking about every man she met. ‘Then there was Walsh.’
‘She was his mistress?’
The Brandt girl nodded. ‘She told me. Walsh had been after her for a long time. I don’t know, Mr Fortune, I think she sort of snapped. Inside, you know? She was in such a hurry. The men she knew were so nothing. Young boys who could give her little and did not want to marry. Walsh couldn’t marry, but he could give her something. One day she just took it, said yes to him. She said she was tired of waiting.’ She looked straight at me. ‘It’s illogical, Mr Fortune, but there is a type of woman who won’t let a potential husband touch her before he makes it marriage, but will sleep, at last, with a man who cannot even think of marriage.’
‘I know,’ I said.
It was an old and sad story. A nice and proper young virgin who is lonely, anxious, in a hurry. She wants not a man but marriage — and she wants a man, too. She is bored, feels empty, cheated. Somehow she cannot make love to a man who might marry her before they are married. It’s a block in her. Then she meets a man who cannot marry her, who only wants her for sex and adventure, and all her desires come out without the check of possible marriage. It becomes a paradox. She has an impregnable barrier deep inside against passion without marriage, and it takes a strange twist because suddenly marriage does not exist, cannot happen, and the need becomes naked without the barrier. Her barrier is against passion before marriage. Without the potential of marriage, suddenly there is only passion.
‘Do you think Walsh killed her?’ I said.
‘I don’t know, Mr Fortune. Who knows what happened between them? He came to her apartment. She went on trips on his boat. She even went on business trips with him sometimes. It was strange, but the way she talked about Walsh I had the feeling that she separated her life with him from her pursuit of a husband. A man might not understand that.’
‘No,’ I said. ‘Can you tell me anything more about that Saturday?’
‘Nothing,’ she said ‘A girl like Nancy doesn’t confide much. She lives in a kind of dream world. Every male was a goal, every female a rival.’
‘What about a woman?’ I said. ‘As the killer?’
‘I think I’m about the only woman she knew.’
‘Mrs Walsh?’
‘I wouldn’t know, Mr. Fortune.’
She stood up and looked at her watch. ‘I have work, I’m sorry.’
I left. I had learned nothing that harmed Jo-Jo Olsen, and nothing that helped him, unless you counted the fact that it did not sound like there was a motive for Jo-Jo. The girl had been after him. Gazzo had not indicated that the girl had been pregnant. It was the kind of killing where the motive and the killer would be discovered at the same time. Sooner or later, one of the men Nancy Driscoll had known would be found without an alibi, with motive and opportunity, and he would be the man. It would take only time. Such cases were the commonplace of police work. Somewhere in the city, or in some other city by this time, a man sweated in a bar and tried to think he would not be caught and tried to remember why he had lost his head and killed a woman he thought he was in love with. He had not been caught yet only because it was amazing how little any of us really know of the lives of our friends when they are not with us. Time, that was all, and the slow routine of the police.
Unless this was one of those one-in-a-thousand killings that was not simple, that tied in with more and bigger crime.
On the chance, I would try Walsh again.
I walked from Park Avenue west to the office of the Trafalgar Travel Bureau. Walsh was not glad to see me. He could tell by my face that I knew more than when I had been in his office this morning. He was nervous. He hurried me into his office as if he felt that all the women in his office were watching him. They were. I guessed that he had had a shot at most of them who he thought would look good in a nightgown and that he knew they all knew about Nancy Driscoll. He was a confused man. He was proud of his conquest of Nancy Driscoll, but terrified of discovery by the wrong people. A nervous lover can be dangerous.
‘I’m sorry about calling the police, Mr Fortune, but…’ Walsh began. He was rubbing his bicep.
‘You thought I was a killer,’ I said. ‘Yes, you did I What happened, Walsh, was she going to blow the whistle?’
Under his tan Walsh was ashen. ‘No! She… she loved me.’
‘You don’t believe that,’ I said. ‘She was bored, she wanted a sugar-baby. How much did she cost you a month?’
Walsh smirked at me. He rubbed at his bald spot. ‘You’re way off, Fortune.’
I noted the disappearance of the ‘mister’. Walsh was being man-to-man, virile.
‘All she wanted was me. I’m pretty good, if you want to know.’
‘I’ll dream about you,’ I said.
He flushed under that fine tan, but his eyes snapped as if in memory of his own prowess. That was what pleased him, his own prowess, not the pleasure of a woman. He was probably pretty good, ego-maniacs often are.
‘I gave her what she wanted, and it wasn’t money.’
‘You gave her what she wanted plus money, if I know women and your kind, Walsh,’ I said.
He flexed his muscles. ‘I gave her some stuff. Why not?’
‘Ask your wife.’
Walsh leaned forward. ‘Leave her out.’
‘What happened? Did Nancy tell you she was running off with Joe?’
‘Joe?’
‘The guy she wanted to marry.’
‘Him? Not unless he changed his mind. Him and his racing cars. Jesus! Can you imagine a guy who’d prefer a motor to the action Nancy could give? These kids, Jesus! She told me once that all they talked about when they came up to her place was racing.’ He smirked again. ‘I didn’t talk about racing.’
‘You knew Jo-Jo?’
‘Who?’
‘Joseph, her boyfriend.’
‘I knew of him, Fortune, no more. Do you think he killed her? Maybe he found out about me and couldn’t take it after all.’
It was a good shot. The thought had occurred to me more than once by now. It had, of course, also occurred to Gazzo. It happened; men are like that. It’s called dog in the manger, and it’s as good a reason for a beating as any; and maybe Walsh was so good in bed the Driscoll girl had been hooked on him. And maybe Jo-Jo had been on the run already and, with his dreams shattered, had changed his mind and tried to take Nancy with him. A sudden shift of power can destroy a man. But I did not want Walsh to get the impression that he had shaken my ideas.