I was running various thoughts through my mind when Darla Sandoval came back with drinks for both of us. Hers was a darker shade of amber than mine. She raised her glass as if to toast, failed to hit on a suitable phrase, and looked slightly less than certain for the first time in our acquaintance. “Well,” she said, which was toast enough, and we took sips of our drinks. It was excellent Scotch and this did not much surprise me.
“Nice place you’ve got here.”
“Oh, this? I borrowed it from a friend.”
“Still live at the same spot? Where we met?”
“Oh, yes. Nothing’s changed.” She sighed. “I want you to know I’m sorry about all this,” she said, sounding apologetic if not devastated. “I never expected to get you involved in anything so complicated. I thought you’d do a very simple job of burglary for me. I remembered how skillfully you opened our locks that night-”
“That was skill, all right. Hitting the place with you two in it.”
“Accidents do happen. I thought you’d do perfectly, though, and of course you’re the only person I know who could possibly do the job. I remembered you, of course, your name, and I just glanced through the telephone book on the chance that you might be in it, and there you were.”
“There I was,” I agreed. “They charge extra for an unlisted number and I’ve always considered it a waste of money. The idea of paying them for an unperformed service. Goes against the grain.”
“I never thought Fran would be home that night. There was an opening downtown.”
“An opening?”
“An experimental play. He was supposed to be in the audience and at the cast party afterward. Carter and I were there, you see, and when Fran didn’t turn up I got very nervous. I knew you were going to be burgling his apartment and I didn’t know where he could be, whether he’d gone somewhere else or stayed home or what. Wesley says you didn’t kill him.”
“He was dead when I got there.”
“And the police-”
I gave her a quick summary of what had happened in Flaxford’s apartment. Her eyes widened when I mentioned how I’d arranged to buy my way out. Here her husband was battling police corruption and she didn’t seem to know that cops took money from crooks. I guess civilians just don’t understand how the system works.
“Then someone else actually killed him,” she said. “I don’t suppose it could have been accidental? No, of course it couldn’t. But you did look in the desk before the police came? I saw Fran put the box in the desk. It was a deep blue, a little darker than royal blue, and the box itself was about the size of a hardcover novel. Maybe larger, perhaps as big as a dictionary. And I saw him put it in the desk.”
“Where in the desk? Under the rolltop?”
“One of the lower drawers. I don’t know which one.”
“It doesn’t matter. I went through those drawers.”
“Thoroughly?”
“Very thoroughly. If the box was there I would have found it.”
“Then someone else got it first.” Her face paled slightly beneath her make-up. She drank some more of her drink, sat down in a straight chair with a needlepoint seat. “Whoever killed Fran took the box,” she said.
“I don’t think so. That desk was locked when I found it, Mrs. Sandoval. Desk locks are always easy to open but you have to know what you’re doing.”
“The killer could have had a key.”
“But would he have bothered to lock up afterward? With a corpse in the bedroom? I don’t think so. He’d have thrown things all over the place and left a mess behind him.” I thought of my own ravaged apartment. “Besides,” I went on, “somebody’s still looking for the box and you don’t go on looking for something you already have. I went back to my own place a couple of hours ago and it looked as though Attila had marched his Huns through it. You didn’t have anything to do with that, did you?”
“Of course not.”
“Well, you could have hired someone. No hard feelings if you did, but you’d better tell me or we’ll be wasting our time chasing wild geese.”
She assured me she had had nothing to do with looting my place and I decided she was telling the truth. I hadn’t really figured she’d been involved in the first place. It was more logical to assume it had been tossed by the same person who had scrambled Flaxford’s brains.
“I think I know where the box is,” I said.
“Where?”
“Where it’s been all along. Flaxford’s apartment.”
“You said you looked.”
“I looked in the desk, but that’s as far as I got. I’d have kept on looking if the Marines hadn’t landed and I think I probably would have found it. It could have been anywhere in the apartment. Just because you saw him put it in the desk doesn’t mean he left it there forever. Maybe he had a wall safe behind a picture. Maybe he stuck it in a drawer in the bedside table. It could even be in the desk but not in a drawer. Those old rolltops have secret compartments. Maybe he put the box in one of them after you left. Anyway, I’ll bet it’s still there, right where he put it, and the killer assumes I’ve got it, and the apartment’s all locked up with a police seal on the door.”
“What can we do?”
An idea began heating up in the back of my mind. I let it simmer there while I took a different tack with her. “This blue box,” I said. “I think it’s time I knew what was inside it.”
“Is it important?”
“It’s important to you and it’s important to the man who killed Flaxford. That makes it important to me. Whatever it is must be pretty valuable.”
“Only to me.”
“He was blackmailing you.”
A nod.
“Photographs? Something like that?”
“Photographs, tape recordings. He showed me some pictures and played part of a tape for me.” She shuddered. “I knew he didn’t love me any more than I loved him. But I thought he enjoyed what we did.” She stood up, took a few steps toward the window. “My life with my husband is quite conventional, Mr. Rhodenbarr. Some years ago I learned that I’m not all that conventional myself. When I met Fran some months ago we learned we had certain, uh, tastes in common.” She turned to face me. “I never expected to be blackmailed.”
“What did he want from you? Money?”
“No. I don’t have any money. I had a hard time raising enough cash to hire you and Wesley. No, Fran wanted me to influence my husband. You know he’s involved with CACA.”
“I know.”
“There’s a man named Michael Debus. He’s the District Attorney of Brooklyn or Queens, I can never remember which. Carter’s spearheading some sort of investigation which threatens to expose this Debus.”
“And Flaxford wanted you to pull the plug on it?”
“Yes. As if I could, incorruptible as Carter is.”
“What was Flaxford’s interest?”
“I don’t know. I can’t figure out how he fits into it all. He and I became involved long before Carter began this investigation, so he didn’t start seeing me with an ulterior motive in mind. And I always understood that he was involved with the theater. He produced some shows off-off-Broadway, you know, and he moved in those circles. That’s how I met him.”
“And that’s how you met Brill also?”
“Yes. He didn’t know Fran or any of my other theater friends, which made me feel safer about using him. But Fran must have been involved with crime in some way that I never knew about.”