“It just happened,” Melanie said at the desk nearby. “I remember exactly when. We were sitting outside the studio in Carl’s car one night, waiting for Stan to take off his makeup so the three of us could go to dinner together. Carl’s hand touched mine, and the next thing we knew we were kissing. We fell in love shortly afterwards. I guess we fell in love.”
“We fell in love,” Nelson said. “We tried to stop ourselves. We knew it wasn’t right. But when we saw we couldn’t stop, we went to Stan and told him about it, and asked him for a divorce. This was immediately after the incident at his party, when he tried to hit me. Last month, September. We told him we were in love and that Melanie wanted a divorce. He flatly refused.”
“I think he’d known about us all along,” Melanie said. “If you say he revised his will, then that’s why he must have done it. He must have known that Carl and I were having an affair. He was a very sensitive man, my husband. He must have known that something was wrong long before we told him about it.”
“The idea to kill him was mine,” Nelson said.
“I agreed to it readily,” Melanie said.
“I began drawing strophanthin from the hospital pharmacy last month. I know the pharmacist there, I often stop in when I’m short of something or other, something I need in my bag or at my office. I’ll stop in and say, ‘Hi, Charlie, I need some penicillin,’ and of course he’ll give it to me because he knows me. I did the same thing with the strophanthin. I never discussed why I needed it. I assumed he thought it was for my private practice, outside the hospital. At any rate, he never questioned me about it, why should he?”
“Carl prepared the capsule,” Melanie said. “At the breakfast table that Wednesday, after Stan had taken his morning vitamins, I switched the remaining capsule for the one containing the poison. At lunch, I watched while he washed it down with water. We knew it would take somewhere between three and eight hours for the capsule to dissolve, but we didn’t know exactly how long. We didn’t necessarily expect him to die on camera, but it didn’t matter, you see. We’d be nowhere near when it happened, and that was all that mattered. We’d be completely out of it.”
“And yet,” Nelson said, “we realized that I would be a prime suspect. After all, I am a physician, and I do have access to drugs. We planned for this possibility by making certain that I was the one who suggested foul play, I was the one who demanded an autopsy.”
“We also figured,” Melanie said, “that it would be a good idea if I said I suspected Carl. Then, once you found out what kind of poison had been used—how fast it worked, I mean—and once you knew Carl had been home all during the show, well then you’d automatically drop him as a suspect. That was what we figured.”
“We love each other,” Nelson said.
“We love each other,” Melanie said.
They sat still and silent after they had finished talking. The police stenographers showed them transcripts of what they had separately said, and they signed multiple copies, and then Alf Miscolo came out of the Clerical Office, handcuffed the pair, and led them downstairs to the detention cells.
“One for us, one for the lieutenant, and one for Homicide,” Carella told his stenographer. The stenographer merely nodded. He, too, had heard it all already. There was nothing you could tell him about love or homicide. He put on his hat, dropped the requested number of signed confessions on the desk nearest the railing, and went out of the squadroom. As he walked down the corridor, he could hear muted voices behind the closed door of the Interrogation Room.
“Why’d you beat her up?” Kling asked.
“I didn’t beat up nobody,” Cookie said. “I love that girl.”
“You what?”
“I love her, you deaf? I loved her from the first minute I ever seen her.”
“When was that?”
“The end of the summer. August. It was on the Stem. I just made a collection in a candy store on the corner there, and I was passing this Pokerino place in the middle of the block, and I thought maybe I’d stop in, kill some time, you know? The guy outside was giving his spiel, and I was standing there listening to him, so many games for a quarter, or whatever the hell it was. I looked in and there was this girl in a dark-green dress, leaning over one of the tables and rolling the balls, I think she had something like three queens, I’m not sure.”
“All right, what happened then?”
“I went in.”
“Go ahead.”
“What do you want from me?”
“I want to know why you beat her up.”
“I didn’t beat her up, I told you that!”
“Who’d you think was in that bed tonight, you son of a bitch?”
“I didn’t know who was in it. Leave me alone. You got nothing on me, you think I’m some snot-nosed kid?”
“Yeah, I think you’re some snot-nosed kid,” Kling said. “What happened that first night you saw her?”
“Nothing. There was a guy with her, a young guy, one of these advertising types. I kept watching her, that’s all. She didn’t know I was watching her, she didn’t even know I existed. Then I followed them when they left, and found out where she lived, and after that I kept following her wherever she went. That’s all.”
“That’s not all.”
“I’m telling you that’s all.”
“Okay, play it your way,” Kling said. “Be a wise guy. We’ll throw everything but the goddamn kitchen sink at you.”
“I’m telling you I never laid a finger on her. I went up to her office to let her know, that’s all.”
“Let her know what?”
“That she was my girl. That, you know, she wasn’t supposed to go out with nobody else or see nobody, that she was mine, you dig? That’s the only reason I went up there, to let her know. I didn’t expect all that kind of goddamn trouble. All I wanted to do was tell her what I expected from her, that’s all.”
John “Cookie” Cacciatore lowered his head. The brim of the hat hid his eyes from Kling’s gaze.
“If you’d all have minded your own business, everything would have been all right.”
The squadroom was silent.
“I love that girl,” he said.
And then, in a mumble, “You lousy bastard, you almost killed me tonight.”
Morning always comes.
In the morning, Detective Bert Kling went to Elizabeth Rushmore Hospital and asked to see Cynthia Forrest. He knew this was not the normal visiting time, but he explained that he was a working detective, and asked that an allowance be made. Since everyone in the hospital knew that he was the cop who’d captured a hoodlum on the seventh floor the night before, there was really no need to explain. Permission was granted at once.
Cindy was setting up in bed.
She turned her head toward the door as Kling came in, and then her hand went unconsciously to her short blonde hair, fluffing it.
“Hi,” he said.
“Hello.”
“How do you feel?”
“All right.” She touched her eyes gingerly. “Has the swelling gone down?”
“Yes.”
“But they’re still discolored, aren’t they?”
“Yes, they are. You look all right, though.”
“Thank you.” Cindy paused. “Did…did he hurt you last night?”
“No.”
“You’re sure.”
“Yes, I’m sure.”
“He’s a vicious person.”
“I know he is.”
“Will he go to jail?”
“To prison, yes. Even without your testimony. He assaulted a police officer.” Kling smiled. “Tried to strangle me, in fact. That’s attempted murder.”