Liddell flipped the glossies back on the desk, turned to the coroner’s report, checked through it, grunted. “Compound fracture of the right frontal.” He looked across the desk at Devon. “You’d think the wheel would be enough to keep him from cracking his head against the windshield, wouldn’t you? A broken neck, or the top of his head crushed in, sure. But the front of his head caved in...” He shook his head.
“Anything could happen in a freak accident like that. When it crashed through the barrier, the car did a flip, landed on its roof twenty feet below.” Devon chewed on the unlit cigar, half-veiled his eyes with the heavily veined lids. “Thing that bothers me is that there was still plenty of alcohol in his stomach.” He pulled the cigar from between his teeth, touched his tongue to a loose strand of tobacco, pasted the cigar back into place. “But it was after four o’clock and there wasn’t a bar open within fifty miles. No sign of a bottle in the car or anyplace near it.”
Johnny Liddell leaned back, nodded thoughtfully. “I read you real clear. Who benefits?”
The fat man screwed his features into a grimace. “Dry run. His wife collects everything. We checked her out real good. She spent the four days up to the accident on the Cape with friends. No phone calls, no letters, never out of sight.”
“But?”
The fat man shrugged his shoulders, spilling his jowls over the side of his collar. “This wife — she’s half his age, stacked. From what I gather, she’s been living it up but good for the past few years.”
“Have a talk with her?”
Devon grunted, shook his head. “She has a real fancy-pants lawyer. The boys upstairs have turned hands down on anything but polite conversation unless we got something concrete. And this we don’t have.”
Liddell got up from his chair, walked over to where a water cooler was humming softly to itself, drew a paper cupful of water. “You say she was young and pretty. Maybe the old man knew about her cutting up and figured that was a small price for rent on the chassis?”
The fat man pulled the cigar from between his teeth, stared at the soggy end, bounced it in the wastebasket. “He wasn’t He wanted out At least, he had a later model he wanted to trade her in on. And from the little we’ve been able to dig, he wouldn’t have had much trouble doing it. If he hadn’t gone and got himself dead.”
“And the model?”
“Gita Ravell, a little redhead who acted as his secretary. She claimed she saw him earlier that night, that he left her about one and that at that point he hadn’t had a drink. A couple of hours later, about fifty miles away, he shows up reeking of alcohol and dead.” He sighed lugubriously. “And that’s all she did have. Suspicion. I let Legal talk to her and they ruled it out But she still insists he wasn’t much of a drinker. Definitely not in that point-three-concentration league. She never saw him take more than two Scotches, she insists.” He raised his hands, palms out “Not much to give you, but that’s the story. Think you can do anything with it?”
Liddell scowled. “Like you say, it’s not much. Where do I find this Gita Ravell?”
“Kyler had an office in the Graybar Building.” He leaned forward, pulled a desk calendar toward him, flipped back a few pages. “She has a pad in the Village. Fifty-one Perry.” He sank back with a sigh. “I think you’re wasting your time talking to her. Our boys pumped her for everything she has. Nothing.” He stared down at his hands clasped across his midsection, dimples where the knuckles should have been. “Our only hope is to break down the wife.” He rolled his eyes upward, shook his head. “And that’s not going to be easy.”
The directory listed Mrs. Abner Kyler’s address as the Cathedral Arms on East End Avenue. It turned out to be an oppressively modem pile of bricks and plate glass towering over the East River at 89th Street.
Johnny Liddell dropped the cab at the curb, headed across the lobby to where a rheumy-eyed old man in a dark jacket stood guard at the desk.
“Mrs. Kyler. Mrs. Abner Kyler,” Liddell told him.
The clerk deigned to consider it, shook his head judiciously. “Mrs. Kyler isn’t receiving. There’s been a loss, you know.”
“Suppose you ask her. Tell her I’m a private detective and I’ve been doing some work for her husband. I thought she might be interested in what I discovered for him.”
The clerk tsk-tsked his annoyance, made a production of picking up the desk phone. He murmured into it, waited, then replaced it on its hook. “Mrs. Kyler will see you,” he told Liddell with no show of enthusiasm. “She’s in Suite Ten F.” He wrinkled his nose, dabbed a handkerchief at his rheumy eyes, followed Liddell’s progress toward the elevator bank with disapproval.
The elevator whooshed gently to a stop at the tenth floor, the doors sighed open. Suite 10F was at the end of the corridor, facing out over the East River.
The woman who opened the door in response to Johnny Liddell’s knock was tall, blond. He ran his eyes appraisingly from the top of her blond head to her sandaled feet with appropriate stops on the way.
“Mrs. Abner Kyler? My name’s Johnny Liddell. I’m a private detective.”
The woman stepped aside, permitted him to enter the large living room, closed the door behind him. In the light of the room, he could see that she was a little older than her silhouette would indicate, but still comfortably on the right side of thirty-five.
“All right, mister,” she snapped. “Now suppose you tell me what this is all about.” The slanted green eyes snapped angrily, the full lips were drawn into a thin red line.
“It’s just like the lilac-scented character on the desk told you—”
“You were working for my husband and wanted to tell me what you’d found out,” she mimicked. “You’re a liar. Look, mister. I don’t have to put up with this. Either you level with me right now, or I call the police. What are you doing here?”
Liddell scratched at the side of his jaw. “Your husband wanted a divorce, lady, and—”
“You’ve got things a little mixed up, haven’t you? I’m the one who wanted the divorce. And if he’d lived a few weeks more, I would have got it.”
Liddell managed to look confused. “Maybe you didn’t know it, but your husband did a complete check of your background.”
The blonde sneered at him. “My husband knew what I was when I married him; he went into it with his eyes wide open. I never tried to hide from him the fact that I hated being married to an old man and that I wanted out. He refused to give me a divorce, even flaunted that red-headed floozy he was keeping in my face. Just a few more weeks...” She brushed past Liddell, picked up a cigarette from a pack on the coffee table, tapped it against her thumbnail. “Who really sent you? The Ravell woman?”
Liddell scratched at his head, found a match, lit the blonde’s cigarette. “Actually I’m checking out a report that your husband wasn’t much of a drinker, that he never would normally have been as boxed out as he was that night”
Lorna Kyler filled her lungs with a deep drag, let the smoke dribble from between parted lips. She turned her back on him, walked to the window. When she turned back, some of the anger seemed to have drained from her face. “Who’d know more of a man’s vices? His wife — or some young floozy he had big eyes for?” She indicated the filled bar at the side of the room. “It was one of Abner’s worst failings. There were days on end he’d just lay here and empty bottle after bottle.”
Liddell held his hands up. “That’s what I wanted to know. I’m sorry if I upset you. I was just trying to earn a fee.”