“But he was also dishonest, wasn’t he?”
“Oh, he was a bastard there’s no question of that.” Nothing changed in her face, but the words were bitter. “Not at first, when the pulps were flourishing and he didn’t have to worry about money. But later-yes.”
I sat down on the couch. “How well did you know him in those days?”
“As well as any of the other Pulpeteers, I imagine.”
“But not intimately?”
Her gaze flicked away from me, down to the beer on the table. Then she leaned forward and began to pour from the bottle into the glass. I couldn’t see her eyes when she said, “What do you mean by intimately?”
“Just that, Mrs. Wade.”
She poured the glass half full, lifted it, and drank until there was nothing but foam left. Foam made a thin white mustache on her upper lip as well; she licked it off. “I never used to like beer,” she said. “I still don’t very much. But once in a great while it tastes good. Do you know what I mean?”
“Yes.”
“There are other things like that,” she said. “Things that aren’t good for you, things that you don’t like or care to do except once in a great while. Then something inside you, some sort of craving, makes you want it. Just once, or maybe twice, and then you don’t want it any more. But that once or twice, you have to have it, no matter what.”
This time I did not say anything.
She crossed her legs, put one hand on her knee. The other hand began toying with the blouse button between her breasts. She said, “You know about Frank and me, don’t you?”
“Yes,“I lied.
“The whole story?”
“Not all of it, but enough.”
“How did you find out?”
“There were some things at Ozzie Meeker’s place,” I said. “Notations he’d made linking you and Colodny.”
“Yes, Ozzie would know if anybody did. I tried to keep it a secret, God knows, and Frank was bound to do the same. But Ozzie was the closest thing to a friend he had during the war; he was always hanging around Frank’s apartment, and he must have seen us together.”
“And now he’s dead.”
“Dead,” she repeated. “How did it happen? Where?”
“At his place up in the Delta. I found him this afternoon, inside a tool shed. His head was split open with an ax.”
She seemed to shiver. And poured more beer and drank it off the way she had before, in one long swallow.
“The police think it was an accident,” I said, “because the shed door was locked from the inside. But I think it was murder.”
“But why? Why would anybody want to kill Ozzie?”
“Maybe because he wrote ‘Hoodwink’ and sent those extortion letters.”
“Ozzie did? But I thought Frank-”
“No, it wasn’t Colodny.”
Pause. “You don’t think I had anything to do with Ozzie’s death?”
“Did you?”
“Of course not. I was out shopping part of the day and at the hotel the rest of it; I certainly didn’t go up to the Delta.”
Which was probably true enough. Meeker had died early this morning, according to the coroner’s estimate, and I had talked to Cybil myself around ten-thirty. I said, “Does your husband know about your affair with Colodny?”
“Ivan? God, no!”
“Are you positive of that?”
“Yes. He’d have confronted me if he knew. He’d have … I don’t know what he’d have done. But he’d never keep it to himself.” Her fingers had opened the blouse button and were trying to get it closed again. You could see her Adam’s apple working in the slender column of her throat. “I was terrified back then that he’d find out. That’s why I paid Frank his filthy blackmail money. He’d have told Ivan if I hadn’t, just as he threatened to do.”
“Blackmail?”
It got quiet for a few seconds. Then her mouth opened and made a little O. “You didn’t know about that? I thought you’d found that out, too.”
“No. You’d better tell me about it.”
“Why? My God, Frank is dead-it’s all ancient history.”
“Is it? Meeker’s dead, too, and Russ Dancer is in jail charged with a crime he didn’t commit, and the real murderer is running around loose. Suppose he decides to go after somebody else?”
“I don’t see how my relationship with Frank could have anything to do with murder …”
I could, if her husband was the person who had killed Colodny. But I didn’t say that to her; I said only, “Maybe it doesn’t. You tell me the truth, all of it, and I’ll take it from there.”
The blouse button opened again, closed again. “You won’t let it go any further than this room, will you? You won’t tell anyone-especially not Kerry?”
“Not if you haven’t done anything criminal.” “No, nothing criminal.” Her mouth turned wry. “Just foolish, that’s all. Very, very foolish.” “Everybody’s foolish once in a while,” I said. “Yes. It’s not a very pretty story, you know.” “I’m not in a very pretty line of work.” “I suppose not. But I feel … cheap. You seem to care for Kerry, and I know she cares for you. And here I am, waving a lot of dirty family linen in front of you.”
“That isn’t going to change how I feel about Kerry,” I said. “Or about you, for that matter. I’m not here to sit in moral judgment, Mrs. Wade. All I’m interested in is finding who killed Colodny and Meeker, and getting Russ Dancer out of jail.” “All right,” she said, and took a breath and let it out with her lips pursed, as if she were blowing out a match. “It happened during the war-World War II, I mean. Ivan was in the Army and stationed in Washington, but there was a housing shortage there, and we decided it would be best if I stayed in New York. My pulp writing career was going well, and all our friends were in Manhattan, and it was just easier all the way around. Ivan used to come home once or twice a month, which was fine; but sometimes his military duties kept him away for months at a time. I was young in those days and … well, warm-blooded. I could stand the short separations but the longer ones were … difficult.”
She was looking past me now, at a spot somewhere beyond my right shoulder. Or maybe she was not looking at anything in this room. Her eyes had taken on a remoteness, as if she might be peering down a long, dark tunnel into the past. I wanted some of my beer, but I was afraid that if I moved I would disturb the confessionary mood she was in. I just sat still and listened.
“I had plenty of opportunities, God knows,” she said. “But I wasn’t promiscuous; I loved Ivan-I’ve never stopped loving him. I turned down all sorts of offers, from all sorts of men. Including Russ Dancer. I had my writing and I had Kerry to take care of, she was just a baby then. I might have stayed faithful except that Ivan was sent out to California for six months, some sort of secret work that didn’t allow me to join him or even to talk to him on the telephone. It got terribly lonely after a while. And I had this craving inside me. I needed someone. I just… needed someone.
“And Frank was there, always there. I found him attractive and he knew that; he’d made passes at me before, and I’d turned him down before, but it was always in a bantering way. Then one night after an editorial meeting, he offered to take me to dinner and I accepted. We had several drinks, we went to his apartment for another one, and it suddenly occurred to me that I didn’t have to go home that night because my mother was looking after Kerry, out in Brooklyn-she did that sometimes to give me a little freedom … I didn’t have to go home. So when Frank made his pass, as I knew he would, I didn’t turn him down; it wasn’t bantering any more. And I slept with him.
“It happened one more time after that, about a month later. Just those two times, never again. If Frank had had his way, it would have become an all-out clandestine affair-he was after me about it all the time. But there was never anything serious between us. He wanted my body and those two times I wanted his. That was all.
“Then Ivan came back to Washington and began to make regular trips home to New York, and Frank stopped pestering me. He had other women, droves of them, so he didn’t need me to bolster his ego. The war ended not long after that and we were all excited and busy with the adjustment to peacetime living. I saw Frank fairly often at Pulpeteer meetings, we stayed friends; there were no recriminations. It had been just one of those brief war romances that didn’t mean anything, that after a while you could pretend never happened at all.