Now Staples was driving me home, crowing all the way, and not sobering till he’d parked again next to the fire hydrant near my building. Then he said, “If you could do the same thing on the Laura Penney killing, it would be a great help.”
I could do the same thing, as a matter of fact, but I wasn’t going to. Young Jack March had been a great lesson to me, had I been in need of a great lesson: he’d demonstrated the folly of quitting. I had made a very nice circumstantial case against him, and no doubt in time the police would have established his true identity and his motive for killing Jim Wicker, but without the confession would it ever have been proved? If the gun couldn’t be traced directly to March — and my guess was that it couldn’t — some small doubt would have to remain, and with a halfway decent defense attorney that small doubt could surely be turned into an acquittal. March, the premeditated murderer, had planned everything up to the crime itself, but then had lost his moorings, his sense of purpose and his nerve. I, the unpremeditated murderer, hadn’t planned anything until after the event, but because I’d retained my nerve and my sense of purpose I was now the only human being on Earth who had been fully cleared in that killing.
But what Staples wanted was an expression of cooperation and sincerity of purpose. I obliged, telling him, “By God, I wish I could just point a finger and say, ‘That’s the killer,’ I was very fond of Laura, you know, I’ve realized that more and more since her death.”
Sympathetic understanding gleamed in Staples’ eyes. “I know what you mean. But we do have those photographs. We could go over them now, and maybe something’ll click for you.”
“Fine.” Then, because hospitality seemed necessary under the circumstances, and also because it was damn cold in Staples’ unheated car, I said, “Want to come up? We can have coffee and be comfortable.”
“Good idea.”
So the two of us climbed the stairs to my apartment and spent a while uncoating ourselves. Then I went to the kitchenette to make coffee, while Staples wandered around the living room, looking at my memorabilia. Seeing him near the desk, I called, “Would you mind switching on the phone machine? I want to hear my messages.”
“Sure.” He hovered over it, willing but unschooled. “What do I do?”
“Turn the switch to playback and press the rewind button.”
He did both, and I went on with my coffeemaking while the machine gibberished itself backward at high speed and then began to unreel my latest messages: “Hi, Carey, it’s, urn, Jack Freelander. Um. It looks as though, um, Esquire, um, might want that piece, um, um, I told you about, um, about the pornographic movie biz. Um. Would you be, um, free some time soon? I’d like to, um, pick your brains. Also, um. Do you happen to know, um, where Laura Penney is? Um. She doesn’t answer her phone. Um. See you later. Um. Um.”
I called, through the final stutters of Jack Freelander’s message, “How do you like your coffee?”
“Regular.” Staples came to the kitchenette doorway, saying, “I feel like I’m eavesdropping, listening to all that.”
“Don’t be silly,” I said. “I’ve got nothing to hide.”
Meantime, the second message had started. “Hi, sweetie, it’s Kit. I’ll be tied up this evening, but give me a call tomorrow. And I still say Jay English did it.”
“Christ,” I muttered. I gave Staples his coffee, and the two of us went back to the living room and message number three:
“Hello, Mr. Thorpe. How does it feel to be a murderer?”
After I put the mop away and made myself another cup of coffee, Staples insisted we listen to that last message another half dozen times, in hopes I’d eventually recognize the voice:
“Hello, Mr. Thorpe. How does it feel to be a murderer? Hello, Mr. Thorpe. How does it Hello, Mr. Thorpe feel to be a how does it Hello, Mr. how does it feel, how does it, Mr. Thorpe, feel to be a murderer? a murderer? a murderer?”
“I just don’t know,” I said. “The voice sounds familiar, but I can’t quite place it.”
Finally Staples gave up, saying, “He called you ‘Mr. Thorpe’, so I guess whoever he is he doesn’t know you all that well.”
“I guess he doesn’t. Excuse me a minute.” And off I went to the John, to pop a Valium. What did humanity do before these wonderful pills?
Back in the living room Staples was reading my movie posters, but his mind was still on the message, because he said, “Would you run it just once more? I’m sorry, I know it upsets you, but I want to record it.”
Turned out he had a cassette recorder in his overcoat pocket. Damn it to hell. I considered accidentally erasing the message but I was afraid I’d trigger Staples’ suspicions, so we played the thing one last time while his little machine turned a beady ear on my little machine, and then at last I could erase the bastard and sit down with my coffee, waiting for the Valium to take hold.
Staples tried to reassure me: “We run into a lot of nuts like that, Mr. Thorpe. They get an idea in their heads, and they don’t want to be distracted by facts.”
I said, “What if you hadn’t already cleared me, what would you be thinking now?”
He chuckled. “I’d be a lot more interested in talking with that particular nut, to tell the truth.” Then he said, “Forget about it, Mr. Thorpe, it’s a closed incident. Let’s look at those photos.”
So we did. Six pictures of Laura, with as many men, all of whom I knew to one extent or another. Going through them one at a time, I gave Staples a name and capsule biography for each, and resisted the temptation to plant suspicion in his mind about any specific one of these prime suspects.
That was a question I hadn’t as yet resolved in my own mind. If I hadn’t killed Laura — and the official line was that I had not — then someone else must have done it. Would it be better to provide that someone else, or could we content ourselves with a simple unsolved murder? There are hundreds of unsolved murders every year, why shouldn’t Laura Penney’s be among them? For the moment, at least, that seemed the better way, so I made none of the leading remarks that occurred to me concerning each of these escorts, but simply provided Staples with basic uncolored information: name, occupation, relationship with the deceased.
And one of them turned out to be that same Jay English whose name Staples had heard Kit mention on my answering machine, in the sentence, “I still say Jay English did it.” He remembered that comment, of course, and asked several questions, with me assuring him the whole thing had been a joke, if not in very good taste, considering the unequivocal homosexuality of its subject. Joke or not, Staples made sure to get the roommate’s name spelled right: David Poumon.
One of the other photos was of Laura with her father, a straight-backed well-preserved old gent I’d met once several months ago, when he was in town from upstate. If Staples was so interested in unusual sexual relationships, how about intimating something incestuous there to keep his busy mind occupied? No; once again I restrained myself and moved on to the next, which happened to be the same stammering Jack Freelander who’d just left, um, a message on my machine.
After I’d done all the pictures once, with Staples making notes in his small pad and giving each suspect his own page, he led me back through all six again, asking leading questions, poking here and there in search of motive, and damn if he didn’t suggest father-daughter incest himself. He led up to it gradually, with questions about whether Laura saw her father seldom or often, what she had to say about him, and so on, and finally he asked the question straight out: “Do you think there was anything going on there?”