“Who?”
“Dave. Because he found out about Jay and Laura!”
“You’re a madwoman,” I told her.
“Then who do you think it is?”
“I haven’t the faintest idea.”
She studied me, as though trying to guess my weight. “You were hanging around her a lot lately,” she said. “Maybe you’re the one.”
“If I am,” I said, “you’re in a lot of trouble right now.”
There was no way to tell from her expression whether she was serious or joking. “You took her to that press screening yesterday.”
“Only because you couldn’t go.”
“What did you do after?”
“We went to dinner, I took her home, I came back here.”
“You weren’t here at ten o’clock.”
“Of course I was.”
“I called at ten and got your machine.”
I put my drink on the bedside table and half-turned to face her. “Are you serious?”
“I called at ten,” she repeated, “and I got your machine.” Yet she didn’t look or act as though she thought of herself as being in bed with a murderer.
I said, “I was running a film, for a piece I’m doing. Top Hat. You know I turn the machine on when I do that.”
“I bet the police suspect you,” she said.
“Do you?”
“What?” She stared at me, startled, and said, “Hey! You’re really upset.”
“Of course I am.”
“I don’t really think it’s you, silly,” she said, thumping me on the belly. “I think it’s Jay’s boy friend Dave.”
“So do I,” I said. “But the big question is, who do you think killed Julia Wolf?”
“Who?”
I nodded at the TV screen, where Asta was finding another body. “In the movie we’re allegedly watching.”
“Oh.” She shrugged, not very interested. “I’ve seen it before,” she said. “It’s the lawyer.”
Three
The Wicker Case
In the morning Kit called her office with some he, and then we went to the screening together; some French ancien vague item called L’Abbé de Lancaster, full of reaction shots and shrugged shoulders. “They smoke a lot in the provinces, don’t they?” Kit said after a while.
Following a quick lunch together, Kit went on to work and I returned to the apartment to put together my review of L’Abbé de Lancaster for The Kips Bay Voice. But before that I had telephone messages to run.
Three of them. The first, from Tim Kinywa, thanked me for the title and told me there were no problems, while the third was from a “friend” of mine, a fellow film critic, saying, “Nothing important, I’ll call again.” I knew what that was; he had a collection of his magazine pieces coming out, and he wanted a plug.
But it was the second call that disturbed me. “That recording sounds exactly like you, Mr. Thorpe,” said the cheery voice of Detective Sergeant Fred Staples. “When you get home, would you give Detective Staples a call? The number is seven seven five, five four nine nine. Thanks a lot.”
Now what? Kit’s casual unsuspicious questioning last night had shaken my confidence, and I was no longer sure I could keep ahead of the team of dour-methodical-Bray and cheerful-intuitive-Staples. Why would he be calling me? What had I forgotten?
So I swallowed a Valium and returned the call. He was in, and he said, “Hi, Mr. Thorpe. You free for a while this afternoon?”
“I, well, yes, I suppose so. Why?”
“I’d like to ask your help,” he said.
The recurring police line from British mystery movies came into my head: “We’d like you to help us with our inquiries.” That line was never spoken to anybody but the murderer. I said, “I’ll be happy to help, if I can. I’ll be in all afternoon.”
“I’ll come over in about, oh, half an hour. Okay?”
“Fine,” I said.
I spent the half hour doing the film review, and I’m afraid I gave the poor Abbé of Lancaster a heavier drubbing than he deserved. I was still pounding away when the bell rang. Taking it for granted this was Staples, I buzzed to let him in and popped another Valium while he came upstairs.
It was Staples; cheerful and bouncy as ever, but puffing a bit from the climb. He shook my hand and greeted me merrily enough, but was there a hint of suspicion deep within his eyes? Remembering the movie lore that policemen don’t drink with people they intend to arrest — wasn’t that from Beat The Devil? — I said, “Care for a drink? A beer? Some wine?”
“No, thanks,” he said, still smiling. “Too early in the day for me.”
Hell and damnation. Hoping only that he would turn out to be another blackmailer, I closed the door and offered him a chair. Taking it, he said, “First off, I might as well tell you you’re off the hook. Not that you were ever on it, at least not very much.”
I looked at him, not sure I understood. “Off the hook?”
“Your innocence has been established,” he said.
I sat down in the director’s chair. “Well,” I said. “Thank you very much.”
“The funny thing is,” he told me, “it was through that fella that Laura Penney told you about. The one she said was following her.”
“It was?”
“We got in touch with the husband last night. Mr. Penney. And darn if he didn’t have private detectives watching his wife. He’d just put them on the case a few days ago.”
“They don’t seem to have helped much.”
“They were supposed to collect evidence for a divorce or something.” Shaking his head, he said, “I can’t understand anybody like that, can you? Sneaking around, putting detectives to watch their wife. Maybe it’s because my own marriage is so good, but I just can’t comprehend a man who’d do a thing like that.”
Nodding, I said, “I know, it doesn’t seem right. But if you look in the Yellow Pages, there’s a lot of agencies specializing in that sort of thing. They must get their customers somewhere.”
“I suppose so.” This insight into a darker corner of human nature had robbed Staples almost entirely of his sunny smile, but now he rallied, saying, “But in this case it did us some good.”
“You found the killer?”
“Not yet, but we’ve narrowed things down. We got in touch with the detective agency this morning, and they gave us their dossier. We have photographs of just about everybody Mrs. Penney saw in the last few days. We even have a picture of you. Want to see it?”
Peter Lorre in M. “I’d be fascinated.”
He took from his jacket pocket a white envelope with a red rubber band around it. First he transferred the rubber band to his wrist, then he opened the envelope and took out a little bunch of photographs; small ones, about two-and-a-half by four-and-a-half. He selected one of these, chuckled at it, and handed it over.
Not Peter Lorre in M. Rock Hudson and Doris Day in Pillow Talk. That was me there, seeing Laura chastely to her door, and this photograph did not suggest that I would next go upstairs with her and commit murder.
“Nice picture,” Staples suggested.
I sighed. “The last time Laura was alive. May I keep this?”
“Well, sure,” he said. “We don’t need it, because you aren’t the killer.”
“This picture tells you that?”
“No, the fellow who took the picture told us. He was on watch outside the apartment building until one in the morning, and he’s willing to swear you never went back into the place during that time.”
Why wouldn’t he swear to it? Never went back in; that was the simple truth. (And how it must have galled Edgarson that he couldn’t put my head in the noose.)