Much could be gathered about Ailburg from his home. The excessive masculinity of his imitation lion-skin bed throw and all those hoofs and horns scattered about as paperweights, ashtrays, lamps and general decoration, combined with the sloppy pile of male physique magazines under the bed, suggested rather strongly a homosexual tendency. The travel posters on the walls, the two shelves of travel reference books handy to his desk, and the small souvenirs grouped on the mantle over the nonfunctional fireplace indicated that his job was connected with travel advertising. And the three locks on his front door, taken with the fact that he had two medicine chests in the bathroom, both crammed with prescription bottles and all kinds of patent medicines, suggested a timid hypochondriac, a cautious unassertive sort of man.
Staples reconstructed the crime for me. This living room was rectangular, with sofa, TV and so on at the end near the kitchen and with the desk and bookcase at the end by the windows. The desk was centered in front of the windows, and Ailburg had been sitting at it, facing the room, working. Doing a travel ad, in fact, writing out a draft in pencil on a lined yellow legal pad; his writing was spidery, neat, rather small. The killer had picked up a bone-handled letter opener from the desk and had stabbed Ailburg six times in the neck and back. Ailburg, bleeding a terrific amount, had fallen forward onto the desk and had shortly afterward died, leaving most of the desk drenched in blood except for the legal pad, which had been under him.
Judging from stains on the bathroom floor, the killer had become smeared with blood and had next taken a bath. Since it had been necessary for him to take a bath rather than merely wash at the sink, it was a reasonable presumption that he had been naked when he’d done the killing.
The apartment had not been ransacked, nothing appeared to have been stolen.
The ad Ailburg had been working on had been due this morning, for a deadline later today. When Ailburg, invariably a prompt and reliable worker, had failed to show up and also failed to answer his phone, one of the partners in the ad agency sent a messenger, who persuaded the building’s superintendent to enter the apartment. They discovered first that only the door’s regular lock was fastened, leaving both the chainlock and the police lock undone, and then they discovered Ailburg himself.
The report had reached Staples and Bray shortly after ten this morning. All of the normal things had been done, neighbors questioned, movements checked, and nothing interesting had turned up. Ailburg, a man of regular habits, had apparently come home directly from the office yesterday, had spent a quiet evening at home, and had then been murdered sometime between midnight and three in the morning.
“Al Bray,” Staples finished, “is ready to put it down to one of your fag murders. Rough trade. You know, where a fellow goes cruising in Central Park and comes back with some tough young stud who bumps him off.”
“No,” I said. “Not this time.”
Staples grinned at me. “That’s what I say, too.”
“In the first place,” I said, “Ailburg might have gone cruising, but he wouldn’t come back with anybody tough. That wasn’t his style.”
“Well, you can’t say that for sure,” Staples said. “When you get into people’s sex lives, it’s hard to make predictions.”
“Ailburg had a deadline this morning,” I said. “If he was such a conscientious type, he might go out looking for a friend after he got the work done, but not before.”
“There I agree with you,” Staples said. “That was my point exactly with Al.”
“Also,” I said, “a cautious man wouldn’t let a stranger behind him with a sharp letter opener.”
“No, he wouldn’t. But the killer was probably naked, don’t forget that.”
“A lover,” I said. “But someone Ailburg knew, not some pick-up. You don’t go get yourself a brand new sex partner and then sit down calmly to do some work while this new body prances around naked.”
Staples said, “That’s right. The feeling I had in this room was that it was somebody Ailburg was comfortable with, somebody he didn’t have to play host to.”
I said, “I don’t see the problem. It was one of Ailburg’s boy friends. How many did he have?”
Staples held up a well-thumbed black address book. “There are over sixty men’s names in here,” he said. “Homosexuals still tend to be pretty secretive about who their lovers are. We’ve got no fingerprints, no witnesses, no clues, nothing. It would be a long, hard, dull job to check out every one of these guys, and we could still never come up with the right one.”
“Ah,” I said. “That’s why Bray’s content to think it’s a pick-up killing.”
“Sure,” Staples said. “If the job’s tough, we have to do it, but if it’s impossible we can forget it.”
Walking around the room, I said, “I suppose you’ve looked for letters, anything that could give you specific names of boy friends.”
“Nothing,” Staples said.
I’d been avoiding the desk, which was still smeared with caked brown blood. The rough outline of Ailburg’s torso and arms was clear in the center, with the pencil and the legal pad. Going over at last to that part of the room, I saw that both windows were securely locked, that there was no fire escape here, and that we were too high for anyone to have climbed in from the back. Finally I turned my reluctant attention to the desk.
Other than the bloodstains, it was neat, the work space of a methodical man. A small Olympia portable typewriter was pushed to one side, near the beige telephone. And on the legal pad was written:
“St. Martin!
Carefree days, exotic nights!
The peace of the beaches, the thrill of the casinos!
And only a mile and a half away, the charming capital city of Antigua.”
“A very rough draft, apparently,” I said. “There weren’t any other worksheets around?”
Staples shook his head. “From the looks of things, he’d just started to work when he was killed.”
I said, “Which was sometime between midnight and three in the morning. That wasn’t in character for the man, not to start work until so late at night on something that was supposed to be turned in the next morning.”
“That bothered me, too,” Staples said. “But I’m not sure what it means.”
“An argument,” I suggested. “The killer came here probably in the early evening, and they had one of those droning dragged-out arguments that lovers get into.”
“Most lovers,” Staples said, with a big smile, suggesting that he and his Patricia should be exempted.
“Certainly,” I said. “Anyway, Ailburg had this work to do, so finally he just told his boy friend, ‘I’m going to work’ and he sat down here and started writing. And not doing very well, either, probably because he was still troubled about the fight. I mean, ‘The peace of the beaches,’ that’s a terrible line.”
“It does sound funny,” Staples said.
“Now, the boy friend,” I went on, “got really mad when Ailburg started to ignore him. The fight wasn’t settled, and there Ailburg was at his desk, writing away just as though nothing had happened. So the boy friend came over, in a rage, and let him have it.”
“Fine.” Staples waved the address book again. “Which one?”
“I don’t know,” I said.
We spent another five minutes looking at the place, but there was nothing left to see. Staples, who’d been expecting me to come up with another of my little magic turns, watched me with fading hope, but I knew I wasn’t going to repeat my success. Finally I said, “I guess the Wicker case was just beginner’s luck.”