“Right. So long.”
I hung up, and Edgarson said, “Let’s see, now, would that be Fred Staples? Detective Sergeant, Homicide South?”
“Excuse me a minute,” I said, and went into the bathroom, where I swallowed a Valium with Alka Seltzer. Then I stood for a long minute looking at my reflection in the mirror.
I knew what I had to do. What choice was there?
I got the hammer from the storage cabinet under the sink, and then I eased open the door just far enough to see him out there. He was on his feet, strolling comfortably around, at home and at ease. He stopped at the bookcases, he browsed, he selected an issue of Third World Cinema and leafed through it. Would he stop at the two-page spread of stills from the porno movie?
He would. Clutching the hammer, I slipped out of the bathroom and across the carpeted living room floor. Remembering how readily he had taken that knife from me, wincingly aware of what he might do if he saw me coming at him with a hammer in my hand, I found myself torn between the needs of speed and silence, and I did a sort of frantic tip-toe plunge across the room, lifting the hammer high over my head.
I was zipping Edgarson into the Valpack when the doorbell rang.
I looked up. The digital clock on my desk read 3:02; Staples, or possibly his wife.
I finished zipping, then ran into the bathroom, turned off the water, dried the hammer, put it away. As I was coming out of the bathroom the doorbell rang again. To stall any longer would be suspicious, so I buzzed my visitor in and then dragged the Valpack into the bedroom, where with great difficulty I managed to hang it in the closet.
Trotting back to the living room, I scooped into a desk drawer the former contents of Edgarson’s pockets, and then just had time to double-check that the bloodstain on the floor was completely cleaned up. Then there came the knock at the hall door, and I opened it to admit Patricia Staples, bundled up like Anna Karenina. “Mrs. Staples. Come in.”
She came in, and we transferred a series of hats, coats, scarves and gloves from her person to the hall closet, during which I told her of her husband’s most recent phone call and she agreed that yes, Fred had told her he might be late, but she was used to that. It was hard to keep to a schedule if you were a policeman’s wife.
While agreeing with all that, I took a few seconds to frown at my breached chainlock. It looked no different from before, it appeared not to have been damaged in any way, and yet Edgarson had come through it as though it were made of grass. How had he done it?
“What a nice place you have here,” Mrs. Staples was saying, moving on into the living room.
So we had a few minutes of chit-chat of the normal type, ending with her deciding to have a bourbon and water if that’s what I was having. It was.
I went off to the kitchenette to mix the drinks, and she made me very nervous by roaming around the living room, looking at this and that. Was there anything left to be noticed?
I brought the drinks out as quickly as possible, and she smiled at me and said, “You know, bachelors aren’t supposed to be good housekeepers, but you keep this place just spick and span.”
“Well,” I said, “I just shove everything out of sight.”
I induced her to sit on the sofa, and sat down beside her. She raised her glass. “Cheers.”
I agreed, and we drank, and I said, “Of course, I’m not really a bachelor.”
She raised mildly interested eyebrows. “You’re married?”
“Separated. My wife is in Boston, getting a divorce.”
“How sad.” She leaned toward me slightly. “Do you have children?”
“Two. A boy and a girl.”
“Do you get to see them?”
What a thought. “Sometimes,” I said. “Not as much as I’d like, of course.”
“Of course.” She sipped at her drink, ruminating. “Divorce is such a terrible thing.”
I could do this conversation from across the street: “And yet, sometimes it’s the only answer.”
She sighed, and sipped, and sighed again, and said, “Did you read that article in last month’s Readers Digest?”
“‘New Hope For Dead People’?”
Big blue eyes blinked slowly. “What?”
“Sorry,” I said. “Which article did you mean?”
“The one by the Monsignor about divorce.”
“No, I missed that one.”
“He felt it was a very serious step.”
“I feel that way, too.”
“Particularly for the children.”
Enough about the damn children. I said, “Well, the grownups feel it too, of course.”
“Oh, of course.” She paused, thinking her goldfish thoughts, sipping away at her bourbon, looking as beautiful and as intelligent as a sunset. Gazing away across the room, she said, “Fred can’t have children.”
“Ah,” I said.
“Not on a Sergeant’s salary.”
“Oh,” I said.
Another sigh, another sip. “It’s difficult to bring a child into the world these days.”
“Sometimes it’s difficult not to.”
Those eyes beamed at me again. “Beg pardon?”
“Nothing. I was just agreeing with you,” I explained, and the sound of the telephone saved me.
It was Fred: “Listen, Carey, I’m terribly sorry, but I’m just not going to get there at all. Al Bray and I are up to our asses in this thing, it looks as though it might be the break we were looking for.”
My back was to Patricia. I closed my eyes and said, “The anonymous letter?”
“It just might do it. Wish us luck.”
“Oh, I do.”
“The problem is, we aren’t going to be able to get away, not for hours.”
I looked at Patricia Staples, sitting on my couch. I would have to go on talking with her, and there would be no search parties to rescue me. “That’s a shame,” I said.
“Well anyway, Patricia’s there, isn’t she?”
“Right here,” I said brightly.
“And the whole point was for her to see the picture. Would you mind? I mean, as long as she’s there.”
“You’re sure you wouldn’t like me to wait?”
“We’ll be hours, Carey. Thanks for the thought, but you and Patricia go ahead, okay?”
“If you say so.”
“Could I talk to her?”
“Of course.”
I turned the phone over to Patricia, and noted that both glasses seemed to be empty. While husband and wife spoke together, I carried the glasses into the kitchen, built new drinks, and fretted over Edgarson’s anonymous damn letter. Was he coming from beyond the grave — or the Valpack — to even the score? Had he revealed more than he’d realized in that first anonymous letter?
And yet, it seemed unlikely Fred Staples would have talked to me the way he had if the trail were leading in my direction. Or that he would cheerfully leave me alone with his wife.
Encouraged by those thoughts, I carried the drinks back to the living room to discover that Patricia was off the phone now and looking at my movie posters. She accepted the new drink with thanks, downed some of it, and said, “Well, I guess we’re supposed to go ahead and see the movie.”
“Right,” I said, and while I got out the print and threaded the first reel into the projector I said, “I want you to know I feel proud that Fred trusts me alone with you.”
“Oh, it’s me he trusts,” she said carelessly. “He thinks if you made a pass at me I’d push you away.”
Was there something ambivalent in that remark? I frowned at her, but her expression was as blank as ever. I went back to threading the film. (I would have had everything set up ahead of time, except for Edgarson dropping in.) With the film ready, I placed the projector, turned the sofa at right angles to the wall, and switched on my telephone machine so we wouldn’t be disturbed. “There we are,” I said. “All set. If you’ll just sit where you were...”