This self-absorption might have been annoying if it had taken some other form — selfishness, for instance, or arrogance. As it was, her pleasure in her own existence kept her sunny in temperament, and left her with no great requirement for anything more. Should someone — Fred, me, whoever it might be — do something to make her happy (give her a compliment, say, or take her out to dinner, or screw her inventively), she accepted it as her due, and with gratitude returned the favor fourfold. Make her happy, she’ll make you happy. Gaslight, it turned out, made us both very happy indeed, several times that week.
At the same time, the riskiness of our game — my game — kept me from ever fully concentrating on its rewards. I am the quarry, I kept reminding myself, in a murder investigation which is still very much alive. It is insane for me to he cuckolding the primary investigating officer. And yet I could never bring myself to kick Patricia Staples out of bed.
As for her husband and Bray, they came up with no more “interesting” homicides, though Staples did call from time to time with some piece of news about one or another of our recent cases. Jack St. Pierre, for instance, the fellow I’d pegged as the murderer of the copywriter, Bart Ailburg (misplaced island), had run away but had been found staying with a cousin in San Diego, and when apprehended had immediately confessed. As to the Visaria murder, the assassin had now been identified as one Kora Haaket, and two of her co-conspirators had been found lurking in a Volkswagen up the block from the mission. Their guilt had been established by their Visarian nationality, their history of anti-government politics, the presence in their Beetle of a woman’s coat with Kora Haaket’s name sewn in it, and their mistake of not only carrying guns but actually shooting these guns at the police who approached their car to question them. A double mistake, that; one of the guns, a defective American product bought locally, had blown up in its operator’s hand. Both co-conspirators were now in the hospital and doing well, though their future was in doubt. Since legally the Visarian mission was considered Visarian territory rather than American, the Visarians were asking for extradition of Kora Haaket and the other two for trial in their native land. Since trial in Visaria would inevitably lead to execution, and since execution in Visaria was by flaying, the Legal Aid defense attorney assigned to the trio was trying to obfuscate due process in every way he could. It was likely the three Visarians would remain in jail for the rest of their natural lives, awaiting a final decision on the extradition order.
On the Laura Penney murder, Staples continued to have no further news, except that he’d followed Kit’s idea about Ellen Richter, and had found her to have an unimpeachable alibi for the time of the killing.
Oh, and the matter of Edgarson. He was found, in a TWA storage room at the Seattle airport, sometime Wednesday night, as Staples informed me over the phone on Thursday afternoon. “His office isn’t sure what he was going out to Seattle for,” he said, “but apparently one of his cases had got him involved with some mob types. He bought the ticket himself, at the airport, three hours before takeoff, but then apparently he got lured to some quiet place and was murdered. Hit on the head. He had one of those big folding suitcase things, and they stuffed his body in it and checked it through to Seattle on Edgarson’s own ticket.”
“Mob types, you say?”
“It has all the earmarks. We’re putting the question out to some of our informants now.”
“This is bad news for Kit,” I said. “I know for sure he would have exonerated her.”
“Well, it keeps the situation pretty much the way it was,” he said. “We’ll keep working on it.”
That day also I got the substitute set of papers from Shirley — I never had found the first set — and I immediately signed them and sent them back to Boston.
I also got some work done at last. The first several days after Laura’s death I’d been so busy with these other things that almost none of my real work got done, but during the course of this week I finished the Cassavetes piece and made major headway in carving a rational interview out of the block of wood left me by Big John Brant.
Then came Friday, and Kit’s party.
I don’t much like parties. Too many people in too small a space, drinking too much and talking too loudly and usually creating at least one new set of permanent enemies. No matter how carefully the guest list is assembled, there’s usually one social gaffe to start the ball rolling — or roiling — and the discontent breeds like maggots in a dead horse.
This time, the guest list had been compiled with no reference at all to the usual social niceties. Jack Meacher and Perry Stokes were both invited, for instance, even though Perry would naturally bring his wife Grace, who had run away briefly to East St. Louis with that same Jack Meacher three summers ago. But Jack and Perry were among the male suspects, so here they were, willy-nilly, glowering at one another across Kit’s living room while Grace sat unobtrusively near the bar, putting away the cheap Scotch with a funnel.
Jack Meacher provided an added fillip by showing up with Audrey Feebleman; the first hint to anybody that there was trouble between Audrey and her husband Mort. Irv and Karen Leonard, who had managed to keep their marriage green — if not to say gangrenous — for nine wonderful years by combining moral disapproval of others with very tight security on their own peccadilloes, spent most of the party standing in a corner together back-biting everyone else present, until Karen suddenly went off to dance the hustle with Mark Banbury, who had arrived with Honey Hamilton, an absolutely luscious blonde I had always coveted.
Let’s see; and who else? Ellen Richter, who had been invited as a suspect but who had since been cleared by Staples, arrived with Jack Freelander, who was still a suspect and who was still determined to pick my brains for that asinine magazine piece of his. He hummed and stuttered at me all evening, like a defective hearing aid.
The other female suspect, Claire Wallace, a tall cool girl of the sort who models long skirts in the women’s magazines, showed up with a lurking shifty-eyed fellow introduced as Lou, who had long graying hair and heavy bags under his eyes, who wore dungarees and a flannel shirt and a leather vest, and who looked generally like an unsuccessful train robber. And the representatives of the sexual Third World, Jay English and Dave Poumon, brought along some messy fag hag named Madge Stockton; one of those plump girls who wears forty shawls and combs her hair with barbed wire.
So there we were, eighteen oddly assorted people in one smallish living room, with February taking place outside. Kit had a stack of easy rock music on the turntable, to fill in the sound until conversation should commence, and I served as bartender for the first hour, until the guests were properly lubricated. The secret of a successful party, if there is any such thing, is to get some alcohol into each guest right away, but then slow the liquor and provide some food, to keep them from becoming dysfunctional. Also hide the chairs; if everybody sits down, the party dies. Also have the food and liquor tables as far from one another as possible; that way, the drinkers will cluster in one place, the eaters will cluster in another, and the well-rounded types will circulate. Keep them standing and walking and drinking and eating, and pretty soon they’ll act as though they’re at a party.
Which they did. The usual conversations took place, I traveled around trying unsuccessfully to avoid Jack Freelander, and Kit prowled among her suspects like a choirmaster through a chorus in which one voice is singing flat. Her method was fairly direct; she just kept talking with people about Laura Penney’s murder, which was now an event ten days in the past, so it could be discussed as unsolved history, like the John F. Kennedy assassination. Fairly early on, I passed her in conversation with Jack Meacher and heard her say, “One of the people in this room is a murderer.”