“Oh, I think it was a burglar did it,” Jack said. “Do these little sandwiches come from Smiler’s?”
I didn’t listen to Kit’s response, since Jack Freelander was gliding toward me again, but several times later that evening I heard her deliver the same old-movie line to several other guests, and the responses ranged from Karen Leonard’s jaded, “Well, I’m never surprised by anything anybody does,” to Jay English’s avid, “Who?”
“One of them. One of the people in this room is a murderer.”
Well, it was true, wasn’t it? I danced with Honey Hamilton while her date, Mark Banbury, was busy dancing with Karen Leonard, and Kit just kept hacking through the underbrush. And the party, despite its origins, became a party.
My flight from Jack Freelander made me unwary in other directions, and I abruptly found myself in conversation with Madge Stockton, the pudgy girl brought by Jay English and Dave Poumon. “I understand a friend of yours was murdered recently,” she said.
“Most of us knew her,” I admitted, nodding my head to include the other party goers.
“It’s so hard to keep track of an individual death, isn’t it?” she said. “There are so many deaths, so many injustices, they all blend together.”
“Well, that depends how closely they affect you.”
She smiled; she had bad teeth. “That’s right,” she said. “It isn’t morality at all, it’s personal convenience, personal emotions. None of us really care how many strangers get killed.”
Well, if you’re going to a cocktail party you have to expect cocktail party conversation. I said, “Naturally, it affects you more if it happens to somebody you know.” And even as I was saying it, I knew I was giving this girl an irresistible opportunity to quote John Donne.
Which she took. I received the tolling of the bell with my best glazed smile, and she said, “But the point really is morality, isn’t it? People are liberal or conservative these days, they believe in women’s rights or property rights or whatever, some of them are even still ethical, but nobody’s actually moral any more. Nobody hates sin.” Then she nodded, looking amused at herself, and said, “See? People smile if you even use the word sin.”
Was I smiling? Yes, I was. Wiping it off, I tried another catch phrase: “The only sin is getting caught.”
But I wasn’t to get off so lightly. “Not even that,” she said. “That was twenty years ago, when people were much more naive. Now we know what happens if you get caught. A lecture tour and a best-seller.”
“And Laura Penney’s killer?”
“He probably regrets it,” she said. “Because of the inconvenience. But I don’t suppose he’s ashamed of himself, do you?”
“Ashamed?” What an odd word.
She gave me another flash of her bad teeth. “Nobody’s ashamed of anything any more, are they?”
“Well, there’s a lot in what you say,” I said. “Woops, looks like I need a new drink. Excuse me.” And I fled.
While I was making that new drink, which in fact I did need, Grace Stokes, extremely drunk, got into a sudden unintelligible loud argument with her husband Perry and then stormed out, thumping her right shoulder against the doorpost on the way by. Jack Meacher, the Don Juan of East St. Louis, kept his attentions firmly fixed on his current date, Audrey Feebleman, until Perry Stokes also left, following his wife’s trail but not repeating the shoulder-doorpost thump.
Time passed. I made a date with Honey Hamilton for lunch and an afternoon screening next Tuesday. Jay English and Dave Poumon shook everybody’s hand and left, taking their moral fruit fly with them. Lou, the apparent train robber, shot up in the John, an action of which we all disapproved; Claire Wallace apologized for him and took him away. Feeling mellow after my successful gambit with Honey Hamilton, I gave Jack Freelander fifteen minutes of my valuable time and the son of a bitch actually took notes. He and Ellen Richter left shortly afterward, and I heard Kit trying to talk about Laura’s murder with Mark Banbury, whose reaction was to tell her how he was coming along with his analysis: “Doctor Glund says I’m very nearly ready to start dealing with my repressed hostilities.”
Repressed hostilities; the world could use more of those.
“We’ll clean up in the morning,” Kit said.
“Good,” I said, and yawned. Mark Banbury and Honey Hamilton, the last of our guests, had just departed, and the old clock on the wall read two-fifteen.
“What we’ll do now,” she went on, “is put down on paper everything we got.”
“Everything we got?” Then I remembered; we were investigating a murder. “Have mercy, Kit,” I said. “We’ll do that in the morning, too.”
“No, we might forget things.” She was already opening her secretary-desk, sitting down, gathering pencils and sheets of blank paper. “One thing I know for sure,” she said. “It isn’t Irv Leonard.”
Intrigued despite myself, I drew up a chair and said, “Why not?”
“If the killer was a man,” she explained, “then it follows that he was the secret lover, and Irv wasn’t the secret lover.”
“How can you be so sure? He and Karen both play around on the side, you know that as well as I do. They’re the biggest marital hypocrites in New York.”
“Yes,” Kit agreed, “and each of them always knows exactly what the other one’s doing. Neither of them ever admits it, but they always know who the other one is hanging around with. So I had a little chat with Karen, and I just kept mentioning names until she froze up, and she froze up when I mentioned Susan Rasmussen. Remember the New Year’s party at Hal’s place? Irv was hanging around with Susan then, so if he’s still hanging around with her he definitely wasn’t involved with Laura.”
“Why not? Why couldn’t he have two girls?”
“Not Irv Leonard,” she said. “Some men might do that. You could do it, for instance. But not Irv Leonard.”
I didn’t much care for that crack. “If you say so, Sherlock.”
“Oh, and it isn’t Jack Meacher either.” She made another note.
“How do you figure that?”
“I talked with Audrey,” she told me. “Jack was with her that evening, but she hadn’t split with Mort yet, so Jack lied to the police. But if the police ever come back and ask again, he’ll tell the truth this time.”
“Not Sherlock,” I said. “I was wrong. You’re Inspector Maigret.”
“I knew I’d get somewhere, if I could only bring all the suspects together in one place.”
“And now you’ve cut the list to six, out of an original nine. Fast work.”
“Oh, we can cut more than that.” She was scribbling furiously on her sheets of paper now. “Like, it isn’t Jay English or Dave, so that’s two more gone.”
“And what made them go?”
“They got married last month,” she said. “To each other, in San Francisco. Dave showed me their newspaper clipping. The only way either of them could have been a suspect was if Jay was trying to go straight by having an affair with Laura, and he obviously wasn’t.”
“Out of the closet and off the hook.”
But Kit was in no mood for jokes. “That leaves four,” she said. “No, three; it wasn’t Claire Wallace.”
“Not Maigret either,” I said. “Maybe Miss Marple. Why isn’t it Claire Wallace?”
“Because the only reason she would have had for fighting with Laura was over Jerry Fishback, assuming Jerry was the secret lover. But I found out tonight she broke up with Jerry just after New Year’s, and started going with that whatever-his-name-was...”