“No,” Matt said automatically, embarrassed. Then he listened for the cock to crow. “Yes.”
“Yes. Of course. Here’s the thing. She called me from some fancy hotel. What hotel in this town isn’t fancy, right? It was … oh, the wee hours of Tuesday.”
“Early Tuesday? What time?”
“I don’t know, exactly. Her call woke me up. Whatever you might be thinkin’, I’m a decent woman and in bed before midnight.”
“Then you don’t listen to my show. Program.”
She looked really embarrassed. Almost blushed. “No, sir. I’d never heard of you or your … program, until Vassar mentioned it during that call.”
“She knew who I was?”
“She was a fan! Before and … um, after the fact.” Matt winced to consider what the “fact” Deborah Ann referred to so blithely might be.
“Anyway … that’s when she told me all about you. She was so excited.”
“She was?”
“Oh, yes. You were a celebrity, but, best of all, you listened to her. I’d never gotten to Page One with her, but you put her on Page Eighteen. She couldn’t wait to see me the next day. She’d made up her mind. She’d start raging in the middle of being ecstatic. Said her last client before you was a prick. A real pig. But you weren’t. That showed her something. You showed her something. She was going to do something with her life. She wasn’t sure just what, but somethin’. She was going to leave.”
“Leave? Las Vegas?”
“No! The Life. You know. Hookin’. She was lookin’ at it in a whole new way. Something you said. Lotta somethin’s you said. I couldn’t get everythin’ she was sayin’. She talked so fast. My, but she was hyped. I’d never heard her so excited.”
“Happy? Are you saying she was happy?”
Deborah Ann sat back to consider, then sipped on her straw. “Don’t know any other way to describe it.”
“She wasn’t in despair?”
Deborah stared at him. ” ‘Despair’? Honey, that girl was so high she must have been wearin’ platform mattress springs. I’d never been able to get beyond that worldly wise attitude of hers. So teenage, really. Anyway—”
“Yes, anyway?” Matt was getting impatient. Blue Norther impatient.
Deborah Ann leaned into the table, closer, so only he could hear her, as if anyone would eavesdrop on them at a Taco Bell.
“It doesn’t make sense. No, sir. The woman I talked to was a happy camper. I don’t see her … killing herself, that’s all.”
“And then what happened?”
“Well, we were cut off.”
“Cut off?”
“Right. Or cut out. Cell phones will do that to you, you know. You have a cell phone?”
“No. I probably should have.”
“You should. A very handy sort of thing.”
“But you had one, and Vassar had one, and the line was cut.”
“It’s not a line, I don’t think. More like … air. There was a lot of echo while we talked, and then … She was gone, that’s all.”
“Never said good-bye?”
“No.”
“Never said anything more?”
“No.”
“Did you hear anything more?”
“No. Just an open line. And … a kind of cackling, cracking on it.”
“Like a person?”
“No!”
“Like what?”
“Like nothing, that’s all. We were cut off.”
“That’s what you came to tell me? She didn’t hang up. You were cut off?”
“No. I came to tell you that you converted Vassar. Sorry, I have a Southern Baptist mentality when I’m not reverting to my Quaker sojourn. She was out of that life. Born again. She was going to talk to me some more. You did it. That’s what I came to tell you. I didn’t know who or what youwere, or why you bothered to talk to her, given the situation, but she said enough that I knew I ought to tell you. It’s not every day a person does a good deed. I’d been trying to good-deed that woman into her senses, and somehow you just cruised along like any ole customer and did it, all by your lonesome. I thought you’d like to know, ought to know, that she’d been a new woman when she died. ‘Cuz she must have died not long after that, accordin’ to the newspaper, if you can believe the newspaper.”
He nodded. Vassar must have been standing in the hall, near the railing. He remembered leaving her there, insisting she didn’t want to go down in the elevator. She wanted to think.
So instead she’d gone down on an invisible downdraft of air.
Apparently.
Converted, she had floated like a butterfly, an angel, to her death twenty-one stories below. Called her counselor and then dived.
It didn’t make sense.
Deborah Walker had come forward because she wanted to make sense of it all.
But everything was only more confused. Nothing was clear.
Except …
Vassar had left him happy. In a good mood. Not suicidal.
And she had been cut off.
Not only in her life, but on a cell phone.
Something had happened.
What?
Or had … someone … happened?
Kitty. Kathleen O’Connor.
Did she watch? See Matt leave, an undefeated Matt? See Vassar euphoric, dialing what passed for a girlfriend, crowing about what had not happened?
Had Kitty then pushed Vassar over the literal edge?
Happiness would madden a killjoy personality like hers. Anyone’s happiness.
So Matt had managed to kill Vassar with kindness. One way or the other.
Chapter 43
Crime Seen
We have returned to the twentieth floor.
Miss Midnight Louise and myself, that is. (She insisted, though she still limps, and I objected.) But we have returned.
Midnight, Inc.
Tonight, call us Murder, Inc., for we are determined to lay all questions to rest, and any spare call girls too. “I am convinced,” Miss Louise says, “that we have missed a key point in this case.”
“We?”
“Well, I do not know where your brain has been on leave, but mine has been very unhappy with our conclusions thus far. Are you not concerned about the testimony of the parakeet?”
“Parakeets are not exactly Supreme Court judges.”
“But they talk, and they listen. Consider the last words heard by the bird on the scene addressed to the victim. `Pretty bird.’ “
“So? That may say something else to me than it does to thee. You, that is. I mean, that ‘keet had a bird brain. It was used to hearing certain phrases. Nothing more natural that it should eavesdrop on humans and hear its own lingo.”
“Or a human lingo as characteristic as its own.”
“Like, for instance?”
“Like, for instance, ‘Pretty bird.’ I recall that ‘bird’ is a pet name for a nubile human female in the British Isles.”
“We are not in the British Isles here, in case you did not notice!”
“But someone else, the perpetrator, might be from the British Isles. After all, what are the British Isles but England and—?”
Miss Louise nods encouragingly at me, as if I am a dull student in need of encouragement. I know my geography, and take pleasure in reciting it for the uppity chit.
“And Scotland, where they favor sheep in plaid clothing,” I grudgingly admit.
“And—?”
“And Wales, which they let maritally unfaithful princes take their lad-in-waiting names from.”
“And—?”
I hate the unremitting logic of the female inquisitor. Thank Bast the Inquisition was more prone to interrogating rogue females than incorporating them. Imagine Joan of Arc as a prosecuting attorney! Miss Louise does a pretty good imitation, and she is only a feline and not at all saintly, not to mention singed around the edges.
“And … northern Ireland,” I concede.
“Exactly! And where does Kitty O’Connor hail from?”
“Northern Ireland. But you cannot believe—”