“That announcement King made at the beginning, huh?” Sergeant Trimble asked casually.
“Yes. Hubert was terribly disturbed. He kept walking around the house and looking at his watch — poor dear, he didn’t know what that young man was going to say. Finally — oh, it must have been twenty minutes to four or so — I heard him go into the kitchen and start rummaging around, banging cupboard drawers — I’ve never known Hubert to be so upset — and when I went into the kitchen and asked him what he was looking for, he shook his head and said he’d just found it — whatever it was — and he had to get over to the station. And he took the car and left.”
“Drawers in the kitchen,” Sergeant Winterman said. “I’d never have said Mr. Stander was the poke-around-in-the-kitchen type, would you, Harry?”
Trimble chuckled. Mrs. Stander looked doubtful, as if she were not quite sure where the humor lay. Layton glanced at Trimble, and he felt a sudden chill.
The one-eyed detective took a huge handkerchief out of his pocket and swabbed the back of his neck. “Say, Mrs. Stander, while we’re waiting for your husband, would you mind if I went up the house and got a glass of water? Talking about kitchens reminded me.”
“How thoughtless of me,” Mrs. Stander said. She began to struggle to her feet. “I’ll go right in and make you some mint juleps.”
“I wouldn’t think of disturbing you,” Sergeant Trimble said firmly. “You sit right back down there, Mrs. Stander! What’s your maid’s name again?”
“Helga?” Mrs. Stander giggled. “Oh, dear, don’t let Helga hear you call her a maid. She runs everything! I’m just a parasite.”
“I guess she must be in the kitchen getting dinner,” Winterman remarked.
“Oh, yes. On Sundays we eat promptly at one. You’re sure you don’t want me to make you some juleps?”
“We’re not allowed to drink on duty, Mrs. Stander,” Trimble said. “You’re thirsty, Ed, aren’t you?”
“Yeah,” Winterman said.
“Excuse me, Mrs. Stander,” Layton said. “I think I’d like some water, too.”
“Oh, dear,” the stout woman said again; but she sank back.
At the rear of the house there was a broad concrete apron separating the garage — it looked as if it might have been converted from an old carriage house — from the back porch. Trimble, Winterman, and Layton trudged up onto the porch and Trimble rapped on the screen door.
“Yah, yah?” A fat and buxom blond woman of Mrs. Stander’s age, in a spotless white housedress was perched at a kitchen table deftly chopping raw cabbage with a big chef’s knife. She did not look up until they had filed into the kitchen and the screen door banged. Then she inspected them briefly and returned her attention to the cabbage. “What is?”
“Police,” Trimble said. The woman dropped the knife as if it had sliced off her finger. He flipped open his wallet and showed her his badge. Layton thought she was going to topple from the stool.
“I... do something?” she asked faintly.
“You’re Helga what?”
“Helga Braunschweiger. I got already my first papers—”
“Relax, Helga,” Trimble said. “We just want some information. Do you have an ice pick?”
“Ice pick?” Her thick lips remained parted. “Yah?”
The two detectives exchanged glances.
“We’d like to see it.”
“Ice pick, ice pick,” Helga said, raising her leviathan bottom from the stool and looking around in a panic. “Where do I see the ice pick?” She trundled over to the cabinets and began pulling drawers open. “I got to think where is it. Today everything is freezers with ice cubes...”
“Here, lemme help you look,” Sergeant Winterman said.
“Wait!” Helga panted triumphantly. “I remember. In this one I see it. Yah.” She pulled a drawer open. It was a mess of small tools and miscellaneous hardware items, “Ach, that Mr. Stander! A thousand times I tell him from my kitchen to stay out...” She glanced up at the men with a frightened look. “It is not here now. Mister Policemen, with my own hands I put it here—”
“When?” Trimble said. Winterman was going through the drawer like a petty thief on the run. He shook his head at Trimble and went to work on the other drawers.
“Long, long time. For what do I need an ice pick? In here I put it so I do not stick myself—”
“When did you see it last, Helga?”
The woman moaned. “When... when...?” She looked up eagerly. “Now I remember! What today is? — Sunday... Saturday, Friday, Thursday — three days ago I see it! In the drawer, Mister Policeman. The drawer I open a thumbtack to get, and almost I stick myself on the verdammte ice pick — it is so sharp, the point—”
“Yeah,” Sergeant Trimble said. “That’s fine, Helga. You’re going great. Now tell me: What did that ice pick look like? Describe it.”
“Was here when I come work for Mrs. Stander. Four years already. But like new. Like never used it was.”
“But what did it look like? The handle, for instance?”
“Like? Like wood, plain wood. No paint. But with varnish over.”
“No ice pick, Harry,” Ed Winterman said. Every drawer in the kitchen was open, the contents a hopeless jumble.
“Thanks, Helga,” the one-eyed detective said, and he nodded curtly at his partner. “Let’s go.”
“What’s going on here?” a voice demanded.
Hubert Stander, carrying the small overnight bag, was glaring through the screen door.
“You better come in, Mr. Stander,” Trimble said slowly. “We have some talking to do.”
The chairman of the board of Station KZZX seated himself carefully in the fine old morocco-leather wing chair behind the hand-carved walnut desk. He had led them in silence through a spacious living room filled with what Layton suspected were show pieces of antique furniture to the tall, walnut-paneled, book-lined study.
Layton gently shut the door. Mrs. Stander was still sunning herself on the lawn. He could see her through the narrow opening in the brown velvet drapes.
Under other circumstances Layton would have quailed under Stander’s pale, contemptuous glance. “I suppose,” the distinguished-looking man said to the two detectives, “this Peeping Tom of a so-called newspaperman had told you all about Lola and me.”
“Why, no, Mr. Stander,” Sergeant Trimble said, and Stander’s pallor deepened. “What’s all this, Layton?”
“I didn’t get a chance to tell you,” Layton said. “Thanks, Mr. Stander, for doing it for me. Stander wasn’t in Las Vegas last night, Sergeant, and the only talent he was scouting was in Lola Arkwright’s apartment. He spent the night there.”
“And I was going to throw the book at you for leaving town without permission,” Trimble said to Stander.
“Well, I didn’t,” Stander said through compressed lips. “And since I didn’t, I can’t see that where I spent the night is anyone’s concern but mine.”
“You can’t?” Trimble said. There was the thinnest edge of triumph to his voice. “It just about rounds out one of your two possible motives for killing King.”
Stander placed his large, square hands flat on his desk. “I’ve already discussed both of them with Layton. It’s absurd for you or anyone else to think that either would make me take a human life. Anyway, motives hardly constitute evidence. Is there anything else, Sergeant?”
“Yes,” Trimble said. “Where’s the ice pick that was in your kitchen tool drawer as recently as the day before King was found with one just like it in his heart?”