“I only saw him for a minute. Across the street.”
“As best you can.”
“Well, I’d say he was in his mid-forties. Wearing a brown topcoat. He seemed heavyset, and I got the impression of a large nose. Sort of a W. C. Fields nose.”
Bray nodded throughout my description, but wrote nothing down. “And you say Mrs. Penney seemed afraid of this man?”
“Well, not afraid, exactly. Upset, I suppose. I offered to come upstairs with her if she was worried, but she said she wanted to phone her husband. I had the idea she wanted privacy for that.”
“Mm-hm.”
“Sergeant Bray, uh — Is it Sergeant Bray?”
“That’s right.”
“Well— Could you tell me what happened?”
“We’re not entirely sure as yet,” he told me. “Mrs. Penney fell in this room and struck her head. She might have been alone here, she might have slipped. On the other hand, it seems likely there was someone with her.”
“Why?” I asked, and movement to my left made me turn my head.
It was another one, in black pea jacket and brown slacks, coming into the room from deeper in the apartment and carrying what I recognized immediately as my socks. As I caught sight of him he said, “Al, I found these and— Oh, sorry.”
“Come on in, Fred. This is Carey Thorpe.”
Fred grinned in recognition. “Right. Dinner, seven-thirty.”
“Mr. Thorpe,” Bray said, “my partner, Detective Sergeant Staples.”
I got to my feet, unsure whether or not we were supposed to shake hands. “How do you do?”
“Fair to middling.” This one was a bit younger than Bray and looked more easygoing. He said, “Would you be the movie reviewer?”
“As a matter of fact, yes.”
“I read you all the time,” Staples told me. “In The Kips Bay Voice. My wife and I both, we think you’re terrific, we swear by you.”
“Well, thank you very much.”
“If you say a movie’s good, we go. If you say it stinks, we stay away from it.”
“I hardly know what to say,” I admitted, and it was the truth. Such extravagant praise had never come my way before.
“Pauline Kael, Vincent Canby, we just don’t care.”
Even praise can reach a surfeit, and I was happy to be rescued by Bray, who interrupted his partner by saying, “What have you got there, Fred?”
“Oh, yeah.” He held them up like a dead rabbit. “Socks.”
Bray seemed to find that significant. “Ah hah,” he said. “I thought so.”
I said, “Excuse me, is that a clue?”
Staples probably would have answered, but Bray asked me a question first: “Was Mrs. Penney involved with any man in particular, that you know of?”
“A lover?” I shook my head, frowning with thought. “I don’t think so. She was usually available for an evening out, and I never heard her talk about any steady boy friend.”
“Well, there was one,” Staples said. “And he looks like our man, doesn’t he, Al?”
“Could be.”
I found myself watching these two as though they were characters in a movie I’d be writing up, noticing with approval the complementary types they offered. Bray was the slower and more methodical, while Staples was intuitive and emotional. Bray, in character, now said, “On the other hand, he could have come in afterward, found the body, and figured he ought to keep himself out of it.”
“I still think it’s the boy friend,” Staples said.
“Except for the glass,” Bray told him. “If he lived here, wouldn’t he have known about that?”
Something trembled in my stomach. Trying to sound no more than ordinarily curious, I said, “Glass?”
This time Staples got to answer the question. “There was one glass in the living room here,” he said, “with a partly-consumed drink in it. But in the kitchen cabinet was another glass that had been washed and put away. So the killer had a drink with her, and then after she was dead he washed his glass.”
“Fantastic,” I said. “How did you know all that? If he washed the glass, how did you find out?”
“He put it in the cabinet right side up. Mrs. Penney stored her glasses upside down, so that one glass was put away by somebody else.”
“By God,” I said, “real-life detectives are just like the movies.”
Staples grinned like an Irish setter. “We get lucky sometimes.”
“No, I can see it’s a special kind of talent,” I insisted, giving him a return overdose of praise while at the same time cursing myself for that stupidity about the glass. Of course she kept her damn glasses upside down, I knew that, but I must have been more rattled than I’d thought. The shelf is high, and the damn glasses look the same right side up or upside down.
Bray said to his partner, “If the guy was living here, he’d know which way the glasses went.”
“Not if he got rattled,” Staples said. “Besides, I don’t think he actually lived here, I think he just stayed overnight sometimes.”
I said, “That’s the significance of the socks?”
Staples grinned again; by golly, this was another chance to dazzle me with his sleuthing. “They’re more significant than that,” he said, and when he went on he addressed himself equally to his partner and to me. “These socks were the only male clothing in the bedroom. Now, the razor and stuff in the bathroom don’t mean much, they could even belong to the victim herself. But these socks mean a man, and one that stayed here often enough to keep some extra clothing around. And you see what else they mean?”
I had to admit I didn’t, but Bray already knew. “He cleaned his stuff out,” he said.
Staples pointed an approving finger at him. “Right! He left the socks because there’s no way to trace anybody from socks like these. But he took everything else because maybe they could be traced. Laundry marks, initials, whatever.” Turning his beaming face toward me, he said, “Now, you see what that means. That means guilty knowledge.”
“Ah,” I said.
Bray, the cautious one, said, “I agree with you, Fred, up to a point. There is a boy friend and he did clear his stuff out after the victim was killed. But I still think there’s a good chance he came in after she was dead, realized he could be in a lot of trouble, and tried to cover his tracks.”
“Maybe so,” Staples said. “Maybe there’s two guys out there in front of us, but I still think there’s only one.”
“And there’s something else,” Bray told him. He then had me repeat my story about the mysterious man across the street, after which he said, “So he could be the killer, too.”
I said, “Excuse me, I’m not trying to play detective with you, but she didn’t know who that man was, so she wouldn’t sit down and have a drink with him, would she?”
Staples now did his finger-pointing in my direction, saying, “Very good, Mr. Thorpe, very good. Of course it’s possible, the guy could have come up and said he had a message from her husband or whatever, she asks him in for a drink and he kills her. That’s possible, but it isn’t very likely.”
I said, “Or maybe the killer did the thing with the glass to throw you off, make you think it was somebody Laura knew socially.”
This time Staples’ smile was condescending. “Mr. Thorpe,” he said, “I hate to say this, but you’ve been seeing too many movies. In real life killers don’t get that cute. Visualize it for yourself; the guy gets in the apartment, kills Mrs. Penney, then he comes into the kitchen and turns over one glass so we’ll think he knows her socially. People just don’t act that way.”