“Going on?”
“Well, you say he’s a widower, and she’s separated from her husband.”
I was astounded, not at the concept but that Staples should voice it. Apparently he specialized in thinking the unthinkable. I said, “He’s her father! You don’t think — I mean, what do you think?”
He shrugged, his expression as open and cheerful as ever. “I think people have love lives,” he told me. “One way or the other, they make that connection. Now, here’s a woman, she’s thirty-two years old, she’s been married, she’s separated from her husband, all she has is these casual non-sexual dates with a number of different men. She doesn’t seem to have anybody that’s really important to her.”
“That’s possible,” I said. “There are people who prefer to be alone.”
“Not many. And not Laura Penney. It doesn’t feel right, Mr. Thorpe. She had a lover, I’m sure of it.” Gesturing at the photos on the table next to me, he said, “In among all those men in her life was the man in her life. But he was kept hidden. Why?”
“I see what you mean,” I said. “A lover wouldn’t be kept hidden unless there was a reason for it.”
“Right.” He checked off the possibilities on his fingers. “He’s married. He’s homosexual and doesn’t want to make a complete break with the homosexual world. He’s her father.”
“I don’t believe it.”
“Neither do I,” Staples assured me. “But at this stage of the game, I keep an open mind.”
I was beginning to feel a bit wary of that open mind of Staples’. If he was so eager to think the unthinkable, why wouldn’t it occur to him to play with the thought that my guaranteed innocence might in itself be an indication of guilt? I was, after all, the Least Likely Suspect. And as with all Least Likely Suspects, I was in reality the Murderer.
Staples and I talked for half an hour more, with him drawing another three or four names from me of men who knew Laura but whose pictures had not been snapped by the private detectives. Finally he seemed satisfied that he’d squeezed me dry, and he made ready to leave, saying, “I do appreciate your cooperation, Mr. Thorpe. And the coup you pulled in the Wicker killing this afternoon was really beautiful. You made my day.”
“It’d be interesting to find out the rest of that story.”
“Oh, I’m sure Al Bray’s got the whole thing by now.” Then, seeming to be struck by a sudden thought, he said, “Say. That girl friend of yours is tied up tonight, isn’t she?”
Meaning Kit, who had said so on the machine. “Yes, I guess she is.”
“Why not have dinner with us? Patricia and me. She’d love to meet you, she’s as big a fan as I am. And I’ll have the story from Al by then, I can tell it to you at dinner.”
“Oh, I don’t think I should—”
“Listen, you’re not imposing.” He was very eager, very determined. “And Patricia’s a wonderful cook. I tell you what, I’ll call her from here, you’ll see there’s no problem. Okay?”
I was ambivalent. On the one hand, I wanted to be near Staples as much as possible, I wanted to know what he was thinking so I could steer him away from dangerous shallows. On the other hand, his presence made me nervous. As to the grubby details of Jack March and his fatal grudge against Jim Wicker, they interested me not at all.
But Staples was waiting for an answer, all eagerness and bounce. “All right,” I said. “If it’s all right with your wife.”
“Patricia’s gonna flip,” he assured me. “Okay if I use your phone?”
“Go right ahead.”
He did, and though he kept his voice too low for me to hear the exact words — I had politely removed myself to the far end of the room — the syrupy note in everything he said suggested he couldn’t have been a husband more than fifteen minutes. True love birds, icky-wickies together. But it was too late now to back out.
Cradling the phone at last, Staples turned his beaming smile toward me and said, “It’s all set, Mr. Thorpe. I’ll pick you up around seven-thirty, okay?”
“Fine,” I said. “But if I’m going to eat at your table, I think you’d better call me Carey.”
“Terrific.” He stuck out his hand, saying, “And I’m Fred.”
The hunter and the quarry shook hands.
It was like being stuck in one of the sweeter Disney cartoons, one of the early ones where the sentimentality really cloys. Great pink clouds of love floated everywhere, and tiny bluebirds seemed to flutter just beyond my peripheral vision.
Patricia Staples wasn’t at all difficult to look at, but God have mercy if she wasn’t a penance to listen to. Of medium height and weight, with silky blonde hair and clear innocent blue eyes, pert lips and straight nose, she looked like something on a corn flakes box or on the cover of a 1943 issue of Liberty Magazine, and in the course of dinner alone she called her husband “sweetness” and “honey” and “sugar” often enough to produce terminal diabetes. (Even though he did send nearly half of them back.)
Staples had told me that he and his Patricia had been married almost three years, yet they looked and sounded and acted like the most simpering of honeymooners. Staples later claimed this aspect was the result of their decision not to have children, apparently allowing them to be infantile without competition, but I prefer to believe that Staples was attracted to her lavish wholesomeness because of its contrast with the seamier side of his own work.
The gilded cage enclosing this contented canary was a seventh-floor co-op apartment in a grim red-brick building in Corona, Queens, not far enough from the Long Island Expressway. One saw it out there, churning away in the blighted darkness beyond the living room windows like a diorama of life on the planet Jupiter. The apartment itself was warm and yellow and bright, with furniture that must have looked just as flimsy and just as tacky in the various Long Island showrooms from which it had been purchased. A great rectangular green-and-yellow painting of a meadow glade in spring, the grandmother of all jigsaw puzzles, dangled over the sofa like an eavesdropper, while Staples and I sat daringly beneath it, drinking Corona Hills Scotch with club soda and chatting about great murder mysteries of fact and fancy.
Patricia, meantime, bustled about. Queen of her domain, a housewife so utterly satisfied with her lot as to make all the efforts of Women’s Lib seem like an exercise in counting grains of sand, Patricia Staples spent that entire evening, it seemed to me, with a white apron over her pale blue dress, carrying a casserole to the table between two heat-mittened hands. This, by God, was what the boys of Guadalcanal Diary had been fighting for.
Well of course it wasn’t quite that bad. It doesn’t take that long to carry a casserole, nor to cook one, but even when Patricia Staples was sitting in the uneasy chair on her husband’s left hand her mind and heart appeared to be still in the kitchen.
As to her being a fan of mine, I saw early on that she was a fan of no one and nothing but her husband. She gave eager agreement to everything he said, whether sensible or foolish, and he gave her the blind compliment of assuming that all her parrot responses were the product of an independent but wonderfully sympatico mind.
Staples apparently preferred not to talk shop in his wife’s presence, so when we all sat down to dinner-chicken, rice, tomatoes, celery and much much more, all in the same Corning ovenproof bowl — the talk turned to movies, and I’m afraid I found it impossible not to become a pompous bore. But they did keep demanding it; Patricia invariably agreed with Fred, who invariably agreed with me, who had no one to agree with but myself. It would take a far more Calvinist personality than mine to resist such an opportunity for pontification. I spoke in long compound sentences, like an early draft of one of my own articles, and in fact I quoted from my previous works several times. Patricia didn’t mind, since she wasn’t particularly aware of my existence anyway, but Fred for all his eagerness did begin to glaze after a while.