“Mr. Easter?”
“Yes.”
“This is Charlotte Keating. I don’t know if you remember...”
“I remember.”
“I’m down at 916 Olive Street. Something pretty bad has happened. I don’t know exactly what. Could you come and have a look around?”
“I’m in bed.”
“You can get out of bed.”
“If I had a reason.”
“One reason is that I’m asking you to.”
He was there in ten minutes. She couldn’t force herself to stay alone in the house, so she was waiting for him on the porch when he arrived.
He crossed the front yard slowly, taking his time, looking up at the windows of the house, the shattered glass on the roof of the porch. In the half-dark his eyes looked peculiar, intensely penetrating, as if they could see more than eyes were meant to see.
“What’s up?”
“I’m not sure, but I think the old man, Tiddles, has been murdered.”
“Why didn’t you call headquarters and tell them instead of me?”
“I couldn’t.”
“Why not?”
“I... well, I didn’t like the way the policeman sounded over the phone.”
“Then you did call headquarters?”
“No — I mean I called earlier. About a different matter.”
Easter leaned against a pillar, attempting to look casual, but his eyes betrayed him. “What matter?”
“It has nothing to do with — with this. Why do you stand there asking me such silly questions?”
“Because I’m getting such silly answers.” He glanced at the front door of the house where the big wooden numbers 916 had been nailed. “This is where Violet O’Gorman lived. What are you doing here?”
Her hesitation lasted only a fraction of a second, but he noticed it. One eyebrow shot up in an amused, skeptical way.
Charlotte said, “I came to see if there was anything I could do for Violet’s relatives.”
“It’s after eleven o’clock. Do you always get your charitable impulses at such awkward times?”
“I get all kinds of impulses at all hours of the day or night.”
“Sounds inconvenient.”
“I didn’t ask you to meet me here so we could discuss my impulses. In fact I’m sorry now that I called you at all.”
“Are you?”
“Naturally. I didn’t expect you to go into that hammy tough-cop routine. I’m not on trial for anything.”
“Then why the lies?” Easter said, gravely.
“Lies?”
“You called the police earlier but on a different matter. You hung up because the policeman’s voice wasn’t pretty enough. Then you came here to offer your help to Violets relatives. I’ve met Violet’s relatives, O’Gorman, and Voss and his wife, and the only kind of help anyone would offer them is help to drop dead. Now let’s be more reasonable, Miss Keating. Whatever’s going on around here, you’re mixed up in, perhaps innocently, perhaps not so innocently. I don’t know much about you. When I came to your office this afternoon I was impressed. I thought you were a remarkable woman. But that may have been simply because you look like my kid sister.”
“You’re very frank.”
“Setting a good example.”
“I don’t know whether I can trust you.”
“You can try,” he said. “I’ve never met anyone I can trust completely, but maybe you’ll be luckier.”
“I came to — because Voss wanted some money from me.”
“What for?”
“He has some information I don’t want generally known.”
“A man.”
“Yes.”
“Married.”
“Yes.”
“How much? Not how much married, how much blackmail?”
“Three hundred dollars.”
“Cheap enough.”
“I wasn’t going to pay him. And my relationship with this man isn’t what you’re thinking, Mr. Easter.”
“It’s pure as the driven snow.”
“Yes.”
“Good.” He smiled at her suddenly, a very warm and friendly smile. “You know, I believe you. Lying doesn’t come natural to you. You have a lot of guts.”
The praise was so unexpected and so sincere that she felt herself blushing. She turned away, annoyed at herself, and at Easter too, for the easy way he’d gotten the information he wanted. Yet there had been nothing else for her to do but tell him. Someone had to know the truth. Better Easter than another policeman less intelligent and less honest.
“All right,” he said. “You came to see Voss and then what?”
“No one answered the door. Mrs. Voss was locked in the attic. She broke the window with her shoe to attract our attention.”
“Our?”
“Mine.”
“Editorial our, eh?”
She didn’t answer.
“When you were a kid,” he said, smiling, “did you ever have to write fifty times on the blackboard, Charlotte Keating told a fib?”
“No.”
The lean, gray cat had returned. Charlotte could see his lustrous green eyes staring at her between the leaves of a hibiscus bush no more than a yard away. He began to wash himself, very fastidiously, as if he was showing his contempt for the squalor in which he lived and meant to rise above it. Both of his paws were black with blood.
“The cat,” Charlotte said.
“Where?”
“Under the bush. He has blood on him.”
“May have caught a rat.”
“He wouldn’t get in such a mess. Just killing a rat.” Easter went to his car and brought back a flashlight A trail of bloody paw prints led to the side of the house, vanished in a clutter of broken bottles and appeared again across the top of the discarded wardrobe with its bulging sides.
She saw then what she had missed before. Behind the wardrobe, half-hidden by weeds, was the foot and part of the leg of a man. The shoe was black, newly polished but split across the instep, the sock striped with yellow, the trouser leg green splattered with red; gay Christmas colors.
She thought of Tiddles in all his borrowed finery, anxious to show the police that he was no bum, but a solid, respectable citizen. Tiddles was dead now. It no longer mattered to him what he had been in life and what people thought, or that he was lying in a foul pile of rubbish and a cat had walked in his blood. Charlotte picked her way through the rubbish and leaned over. Tiddles. He was lying on his back staring up at the sky, his eyes fixed in terror, though the terror had long since passed. He was covered with blood, so much blood that it was impossible at first glance to tell where he had been wounded or how. It had squirted from his nose and gushed from his open mouth, smelling sour of vomit.
Easter lifted one of the old man’s hands; the fingers were cold and already beginning to stiffen. “It’s going to be hard to fix the time of death.”
“Mrs. Voss knows. She heard the argument Tiddles was having with the other two men, and then the sudden quiet.”
“Argument about what?”
“A purse.”
“Where’s Mrs. Voss now?”
“I sent her out to the County General. She’s ill, perhaps very ill, I don’t know yet.”
“What happened to your friend?”
“He drove her there. I don’t want him to be...”
“And Voss and O’Gorman?”
“They went away in O’Gorman’s car.”
Easter turned the flashlight on the old man again. “There are no head wounds and none of his clothing is torn. All the blood seems to have come from his nose and mouth. Notice the smell?”
“Yes.”
“Damn funny.” The flashlight moved restlessly up and down the body, across the wardrobe with its bloody cat prints, and down to the tarnished picture frames lying on the broken bedsprings. Under the bed-springs, a yard or so beyond the reach of Tiddles’ left hand, was a brown lizard purse with a gold clasp. Charlotte recognized it as her own.