Poor Laura. Born in upstate New York, she’d spent her life as a full-fledged American, only to depart as an immigrant. Remembering her bigotry — I don’t think there were any groups she cared for — I knew this ceremony would only upset her. It was just as well she wasn’t here to see it.
Kit kept whispering and murmuring to me throughout the service, but I paid little attention, since all she was doing was adding to the original list of five suspects. Taking a leaf from Staples’ book, she was casting a critical eye on the women in attendance and finding most of them suspicious. She’d bought a steno pad on the way down, and did a lot of cramped note-taking, as though she’d be writing up this affair for the old home town paper.
The box containing the remains was prominent in the center aisle, on a wheeled bier draped in purple and black. Gazing at it, I did regret my touch of bad temper.
After the ceremony, a dozen cars would follow the hearse out to the graveyard in Queens, but Kit’s detective ardor, I’m happy to say, didn’t extend that far. Nor did Staples’; seeing him move away from the line of mourners shuffling out to the cars, I went over to him and said, “Anything new?”
“Not with me. How about you?”
“Well, you got Kit mad.”
He seemed amused. “I did?”
“She’s decided to find the killer herself, and show you up.”
“Fine. But if Edgarson says he saw her last Tuesday night, it’ll be all over.”
Edgarson? Was I supposed to know that name? Playing it safe, I repeated it with a question mark, and Staples explained he was the detective, etc. “Oh,” I said. “Is that all set up?”
“Not yet. He’s supposed to call me next time he checks in with his office.”
Don’t hold your breath. I said, “Let me know when you switch to a new theory, okay? Kit’s about to drive me crazy.”
Grinning, he said, “Why don’t you come up with something? If you can’t show that somebody else is guilty, at least prove to my satisfaction that your girl is innocent.”
“I’ll work on it,” I promised.
“Come along with me,” he suggested. “If we spend one concentrated day on this case maybe we can crack it.”
“Sorry. I’ve already promised Kit I’d play Mr. and Mrs. North.” I gestured to where she was standing in a corner of the chapel, arms folded as she glowered in our direction.
“Later on, then, Around two?”
At two, Patricia would be dropping by for more Gaslight “I don’t think so, Fred. I’ll be with Kit most of the day.”
“Well, I wish you luck.”
“I believe I’m going to need it.” I left Staples and rejoined Kit, who wanted to know everything that had been said. “Let’s go back to the States first,” I suggested, “and have a cup of coffee.”
Which we did, in a Second Avenue health food restaurant full of heroin addicts. Kit went through her expanded list of suspects and I managed to contract it again slightly by removing three of the women who I knew happened to be a part of the alibis of various former male suspects. Another of the female suspects I eliminated by simply laughing the idea to scorn, but that still left two women and five men on the list. Six men, since she insisted on adding Jay English, the famous homosexual. Seven men; Jay’s boy friend Dave Poumon was swept ashore on the next tide.
“Nine suspects,” I said. “What are you going to do with all those people?”
“Throw a party,” she said. “We’ll get them all drinking and relaxed, and ask some penetrating questions.”
“God help us,” I said. “And when will this overdone scene take place?”
“Today’s Monday. Why not Friday? Everybody spends their weekends in town this time of year.”
“Friday’s a long way off,” I pointed out. “I thought you were feeling a certain urgency about all this.”
“Oh, we have lots to do before the party.” She had this all thoroughly planned, I could see that much. “We’ll want to know which penetrating questions to ask,” she explained.
“Ah, of course.”
She ruminated over her list. “I’ll make some phone calls this afternoon. I can ask Betty about Claire.” She made a note, then another, saying, “And Lucy Fishman used to go with Jack Henderson, so I’ll find out about him from her.” She frowned at her list, made another note, made a question mark, underlined something, and switched her frown to me. “You can start with Staples,” she said.
“I can?”
“There was something about an anonymous letter. See if you can get a look at it.”
“I’ll try,” I promised.
She tapped her list with the pencil point. “There’s a possibility he already checked out Jay English and Dave. Could you find out?”
“Clever questioning might turn the trick,” I said.
“Also Claire and Ellen. See if he has anything on them.”
“Will do.”
“Could you get to him this afternoon?”
An unexpected mobile of deceit suspended itself delicately in my brain. “I think maybe I could,” I said.
“Then come down to my place for dinner and we’ll compare notes.”
“Lovely idea.”
“Around seven?”
“Perfect,” I said.
Between two and three, when Staples thought I was with Kit and Kit thought I was with Staples, I was with Patricia, enjoying Gaslight. At twenty past three, alone and refreshed and energetic from the shower, I popped a Valium and phoned Staples at his office, but he wasn’t there. I left a message and worked on the Cassavetes article until four-thirty, when Staples called. “I thought you were with Miss Markowitz.”
“We laid our plans,” I said, “but then she went off to do some girl-talk type sleuthing of her own.”
“Would you like to do some boy-type sleuthing? We’ve got another one.”
“New York must be on the verge of depopulation.”
“This one’s imported. From Visaria.”
“From what?”
“Visaria.” He spelled it, which didn’t help.
“Is that a country?”
“I don’t know if they’ve got a country,” he said, “but they’ve got a mission at the UN, and the head of it just got himself killed. You feel ready for a locked room mystery?”
Staples had sent a car for me again, which delivered me to a small remodeled brick town house on 46th Street between First and Second Avenues. This entire neighborhood was full of United Nations missions and foreign embassies, each nation putting on as much show as it could afford. At East Side prices, the smaller countries couldn’t afford much, and this narrow four-story architectural nonentity was about par for a modest mission like that from Visaria.
If I’d hoped for some insight into the style and culture of Visaria from the interior of the mission I was doomed to disappointment. The building, probably in advanced disrepair when Visaria bought it, had apparently been purchased as a Handyman’s Special and furnished out of Sears, Roebuck. The floors, which felt spongy and unreliable underfoot, had all been covered with cheap solid-color wall-to-wall carpeting. Dropped ceilings, those fiberboard rectangles in a white metal grid, screened off the no-doubt-hideous original ceilings with clean new hideousness, and the original walls were covered with pale-tone panelings in simulated wood grain. Light was provided by fluorescent panels in the dropped ceilings. It was like being in a real estate office in a shopping center, with furnishing to match; imitation-wood formica desks, imitation-leather vinyl sofas, and real metal square wastebaskets.
The building was narrow, and not very deep, so there was minimal floor-space. One entered from the street into a vestibule with a staircase leading up; the staircase too was covered with cheap carpeting. A sign hanging over the stairs was neatly hand-printed AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY. Another sign, waist-height, standing on its own chrome leg in front of the stairs, said INFORMATION, with an arrow pointing to the right.