Al Bray wasn’t along, which I took as another hopeful sign. He came up the stairs, we smiled at one another, and said hello and shook one another’s hands, and then he came on in without apparently noticing anything about anything. I poured coffee for both of us, he sat on the sofa where Patricia lately had lain, and I settled tensely into the director’s chair.
“I called Patricia before I came over,” he told me. “She said she had a terrific time.”
“That’s good,” I said. “It was my pleasure.”
“She asked me to tell you she really loved Gaslight.”
In my own recent conversation with Patricia, the word ‘gaslight’ had become a kind of double entendre private joke. Was she deciding to play a dangerous game? Hoping she wasn’t, I made some sort of conventional response and then said, “But you’ve got to tell me why you went to see Kit. I’m burning with curiosity.”
He said, “Well, she did know Mrs. Penney, of course.”
“Not all that well.”
Was he being evasive? He said, “When a case doesn’t break right away, you tend to reach out farther and farther, hoping to pick up one end of the string.”
“Kit’s only relationship with Laura was through me,” I pointed out.
“That’s right. And you’re from Boston.”
Good God; was he suspecting me? Carefully I said, “I don’t think I follow.”
“Here’s the anonymous letter.” He extended it toward me.
A sheet of ordinary white paper, with a typewritten message and no signature:
Laura Penney died in New York while her husband was in Chicago. He doesn’t know anything about it. Look the other way. Think about the Boston connection. If A got too close to B, what would C do?
I cleared my throat. “That’s the least intelligible letter I’ve ever seen in my life,” I said, noticing that that bastard Edgarson had even managed to use my own first initial in the right place. “C,” indeed.
Taking the letter back, putting it away inside his jacket, Staples said, “You and Kit Markowitz have been going together for five or six months, haven’t you?”
“That’s right.”
“But you’ve been keeping it quiet, because you’ve got this divorce under way with your wife.”
“Right again.”
“That’s why you’d go out with other women sometimes, Laura Penney and different other women.”
“Sure.” I shrugged, being casual if it killed me. “Kit knows all about that. The idea was, if I went out with a number of different women it would make less trouble in dealing with my ex-wife. But if I seemed to be heavily involved with just one girl, then Shirley might start to act like a woman scorned, if you know what I mean.”
“Shirley. That’s your wife.”
“Right.”
Nodding, thinking things over, Staples said, “The other day, you told me you missed Laura Penney more than you’d thought you would. She was closer to you than you realized.”
“Yes?”
Staples leaned forward, his face much more serious than usual. “Women understand emotions a lot more quickly than men. I’ve noticed it time and again.”
“You’re probably right. But I don’t know where you’re heading.”
“Kit Markowitz understood more than you did about your feelings for Laura Penney.”
“She did?”
“What if,” he said, and he was watching my face as though he expected to see words form on it, “what if Kit thought you were even closer with Laura Penney than you were?”
“I don’t know. What if she did?”
But he had another hypothetical question to ask: “What if I told you she went through her date book for the last four months, and she’d seen you less than one-quarter of those days?”
“Well, we both work, we both have lives of our own.”
“But she did that with the date book before I ever talked with her,” Staples said. “She was thinking about it, you see what I mean?”
Which was an insight into Kit I could have lived without. I said, “Maybe she feels neglected.”
“I think she does.”
“She never let me know about it.”
“Well, she’s an independent woman, isn’t she? She wouldn’t, uh, what’s that saying? Wear her heart on her sleeve.”
“I suppose she wouldn’t.”
Back he went to his hypothetical questions: “But what if she looked around,” he said, “to see what you were doing that three-quarters of the time you weren’t with her? Wouldn’t she see that you were spending a lot of time with Laura Penney?”
“Oh, not that much.”
“As a matter of fact, yes. Al Bray went through Laura Penney’s calendar again this afternoon, and she saw a lot of you, Carey. A lot of you. Over a four month period, you had dates with Kit Markowitz forty-three times and with Laura Penney forty-five times. That’s two more.”
I coughed, and cleared my throat, and said, “What’s all this building up to, Fred?”
He said, “Maybe we’ve been making a mistake all this time, Carey. We’ve been concentrating on men friends, but it doesn’t have to be that way.”
Now what in hell was he talking about? “I’m just not following you, Fred.”
So he explained: “Laura Penney died when she hit her head on the glass coffee table in her living room. It was the fall that killed her, and it didn’t necessarily have to be a very strong punch that knocked her down. A little struggle, she loses her balance, it could happen just like that.”
“Meaning what? Come on, Fred, for God’s sake what are you driving at?”
“A woman could have done it,” he said.
He suspected Kit! Kit!
I stared at him. Relief washed through me like sunrise, and I barely restrained myself from laughing in his face.
He said, “Think about it. Here’s a woman thinks Laura Penney is taking her man away. She goes over to have it out. They argue, they fight, Laura falls and is killed. The other woman is frightened, she’s going to run away, but then she looks around and finds male clothing in the bedroom. Either she thinks the clothing belongs to her boy friend, or she decides to confuse the issue. In either case, she takes the clothing away with her. Or there’s Al Bray’s theory that she just leaves and then the boy friend shows up, finds the body, and clears his stuff out himself. But in any case, the woman did the killing.”
I said, “You mean Kit? Kit wouldn’t kill anybody, that’s just ridiculous.”
“Not on purpose, maybe. But an accident, in the middle of a fight? She has a pretty good temper, doesn’t she?”
“She isn’t violent, for God’s sake.”
“Nevertheless,” Staples insisted, “of all the Boston connections, that’s the one that shows the most promise.”
“But there isn’t any Boston connection,” I told him. “Kit’s a New Yorker.”
“The Boston connection is you.” Pulling out the anonymous letter again, he said, “Listen to this, if we put your names in here instead of these letters, making Laura Penney ‘A’ and you ‘B’ and Kit Markowitz ‘C.’ Then it reads, ‘If Laura Penney got too close to Carey Thorpe, what would Kit Markowitz do?’”