“Call me up and yell at me,” I said. “That’s what she’d do.”
“Did she call you up and tell you about her date book?”
“No. So what?”
“So she’s maybe a little more secretive than you think.” Satisfied with himself, he leaned back on the sofa, putting the letter away again as he said, “Tomorrow we’ll get hold of that private detective who was watching Mrs. Penney’s building, and we’ll run Kit Markowitz through a lineup and see if he recognizes her.”
Oh, you will, eh? And good luck to you, too. Aloud I said, “I just don’t believe any of it.”
“We’ll see.” Staples nodded, and sipped at his coffee. “We were making too quick an assumption,” he told me. “Assuming it had to be a man.” He patted the pocket containing Edgarson’s troublemaking letter. “This tip may have put us on the right track after all.”
“Not if it makes you believe Kit Markowitz killed anybody,” I said. “Is that really what you’ve been working on all day?”
“We started with half a dozen possibilities, but pretty soon they narrowed down to her. For one thing, she doesn’t have an alibi.”
“Why? Where does she say she was?”
“At home, alone. No witnesses.”
“Didn’t anybody call her? Didn’t she talk to anybody on the phone?”
“She tried calling you, she says,” Staples told me, “but she got your answering machine and she didn’t leave any message.”
“That’s right,” I said. “She told me that the next day. I was home, but I was screening a film.”
Staples finished his coffee, then said, “I’ll tell you something else, Carey. You’re an absolutely brilliant natural detective, the most fantastic I’ve ever seen. You’ve got a real knack for it. But you can’t get anywhere with this case, and do you know why?”
I did know, as a matter of fact, but it would be interesting to hear what he thought so I said, “No. Why?”
“You’re too close to it. You’re emotionally involved.”
“You may be right,” I said.
I phoned Kit and she said, “Is he gone?”
“Staples? Just left.”
“I’ll be right there,” she said, and hung up, and arrived fifteen minutes later, looking angry and determined. Taking off her coat, she said, “He thinks I did it.”
“Slow down,” I advised her. “You want a drink?”
“I will not slow down.” She hung up her coat and marched into the living room. “That damn fool thinks I killed Laura Penney. Over you!” And she turned to glare at me as though it were my fault. (Well, I suppose it was, at that.)
“Absurd on the face of it,” I said.
“There’s only one thing to do.”
I didn’t like her glower. “And what would that be?” I asked.
“We have to find the killer ourselves.”
“What?”
“That idiot Staples is out there right now,” she said, waving an arm at the window and the cold dark snowy world beyond it, which as it happened did not at this moment contain Staples, who had gone home for dinner with his Patricia, “and all he’s trying to do is find evidence to convict me.”
“Which he’ll never find.”
“Don’t be so sure of that,” she said. “I have no alibi.”
“Millions could say the same.”
“He could build up a case against me.”
“Staples? I don’t see how. You didn’t do it, so where’s his proof?”
“Circumstantial evidence,” she said, in the manner in which people in Victorian novels used to say “madness in the family.”
“What circumstantial evidence?”
“How do I know?” She was pacing around my room, waving her arms. “Remember The Wrong Man?”
“The Hitchcock film, with Henry Fonda?”
“He was convicted of murder, and he didn’t do it.”
“That was a mistaken identification.”
“How about Call Northside 777? Jimmy Stewart as the reporter. And both of those movies were based on real life cases.”
“You need a drink,” I decided, because I needed a drink, and headed for the kitchenette.
She followed me, still waving her arms. “And while he’s spending all his time trying to railroad me, who’s looking for the real killer? Nobody! And he’ll get away.”
Amen. I said, “Kit, you’re making a mountain out of a molehill. This is just another one of Staples’ brainstorms, he gets one a day, like rain in Mexico City. The other day he thought Laura was having an affair with her father, and the father killed her.”
“Well, now he’s convinced that I killed her. And it’s up to us to prove him wrong.”
I made the drinks while she raved on, and carried them back to the living room. Kit wasn’t prepared to sit, but I was, and when she paused briefly to deal with her drink I said, “Life doesn’t work like the movies, Kit. The innocent person getting off the hook by finding the real killer, that doesn’t happen.”
“Well, it’s going to happen this time.” She stood in front of me, straddle-legged with determination. “And you’re going to help.”
“How? There isn’t even anything to do.”
“Of course there is. For one thing, we’ll go to the funeral.”
“Funeral?”
“Laura’s funeral, tomorrow morning at ten.”
Laura’s funeral. She’d been dead almost a week by now, and I’d taken it for granted she’d already been dispatched to her final resting place, but probably the coroner had delayed things. In any event, I certainly didn’t want to go to the funeral. “What on earth do you want to go there for?”
“We’ll see who shows up.” She plopped down beside me on the sofa, eager and intent. “And you’ve been talking with Staples, you know what’s been done in the investigation so far. Have they definitely eliminated anybody? I mean, besides you.”
“Well, they were hot on the idea of the secret lover for a while,” I said. “And they narrowed that down to five.”
“Five? Terrific! Just a minute, let me get pen and paper.” And up she jumped.
Gloomily I watched her cross the room to rummage through my desk. This was ridiculous, but what could I do about it?
Back she came, bristling with pen and paper. “I’ll stay here tonight, all right?”
“Wonderful,” I said, with less than my usual enthusiasm.
“Then we can go to the funeral together in the morning.” She readied the pen. “Now, who are these five?”
Eight
The Secret of the Locked Door
Oddly enough, all five were at the funeral. And so were Kit and I, and so was Staples.
It was quite a large turnout, in fact, mostly with faces I was used to seeing at cocktail parties. Laura’s father was in the front row with a heavy-faced black-haired gent I took to be the husband from Chicago. There appeared to be no other family members in attendance.
This funeral was taking place in some Croatian or Ukrainian chapel on East 9th Street. The style of the place was early Frankenstein, and so were the huddled old charladies intermixed with the mourners, mumbling to themselves like so many Madame Khrushchevs in a bad mood. These people had been ethnic since before the word was popular.
And Laura, it turned out, had been one of them. She had introduced her father to me once as “Frank Ward,” but now I learned another seven or eight Eastern syllables had been lurking behind that Anglo brevity all the time. And what about that husband, the alleged Penney? Did those flat cheekbones look Wasp? They did not.