“You’re destroying a boy’s faith in detective fiction,” Meyer said. “The Means, the Motive, and the Opportunity. Everybody knows that.”
“Except me. I just do my job,” Carella said.
“Yeah,” Meyer said.
“It always comes out in the wash, anyway. One day, all the mysterious pieces click together. And they’re never what you thought they were going to be. To figure out motivation, you have to be a psychiatrist.”
“Still,” Meyer said, “all that equipment. And the thief hit seven times to get it. That’s a big chance to take for a hobby. What does it add up to, Steve?”
“Beats the hell out of me,” Carella said, and he began typing again.
* * * *
3
Diane King was not a beautiful woman.
She was, however, an attractive woman.
Her attractiveness was directly attributable to the bone structure of her face, which, while not adding up to the Hollywood or Madison Avenue concept of beauty, nonetheless provided an excellent foundation upon which to build. Her attractiveness, too, was indirectly attributable to a number of things like: (a) the various concoctions offered by the myriad beauty-preparation firms, (b) a life of comparative ease and luxury, (c) ready access to the hairdresser’s, and (d) an innate good taste in the selection of clothes to complement a figure unendowed with a movie star’s mammillary overabundance.
Diane King was attractive. Diane King, in fact, was damned attractive.
She stood just inside the entrance foyer of her luxurious home, a woman of thirty-two wearing black tapered lounging slacks and a long-sleeved white blouse open at the throat. A towel was draped over the neck and shoulders of the blouse. Her hair echoed the ebony black of the slacks, except for a fresh silver streak which rose from a widow’s peak and spread like mercury to a point somewhere on the top of her head. A silver-studded belt circled her narrow waist. Her green eyes fled from the entrance doorway to Pete Cameron’s face, and again she asked, “What did they do to Doug?”
“Nothing,” Cameron said. He looked at her hair. “What’d you do to your hair?”
Distractedly, Diane’s hand went up to the silver streak.
“Oh, it was Liz’s idea,” she said. “What was all the shouting about, Pete?”
“Is Liz still here?” Cameron asked, and there was an undeniable note of interest in his voice.
“Yes, she’s still here. Why’d Doug come steaming upstairs like the Twentieth Century? I hate these damn high-power meetings. He didn’t even see me up there, Pete, do you know that?”
“He saw me,” a voice said, and Liz Bellew came down the steps and into the living room. Whatever Diane King lacked in the way of beauty, Liz Bellew possessed. She was born with blond hair that needed no hairdresser’s magic, blue eyes fringed with thick lashes, an exquisitely molded nose and a pouting sultry mouth. She had acquired over the years a figure which oozed S-E-X in capital letters in neon, and had overlaid—if you’ll pardon the expression—her undeniable beauty with a polish as smooth and as hard as baked enamel. Even dressed for casual life in Smoke Rise, as she was now, wearing simple sweater and skirt, suede flats, and carrying a suede pouch-like bag, sex dripped from her curvaceous frame in bucketfuls, tubfuls, vatfuls. She wore only one piece of jewelry, a huge diamond on her left hand, a diamond the size of a malignant cancer.
“I’ll be damned if I’ll let any man rush past Liz Bellew without saying hello,” she said, obviously referring to her encounter with King upstairs.
“So hello,” Cameron said.
“I was wondering when you’d notice me.”
“I understand you’ve turned beautician in your spare time,” Cameron said.
“Diane’s hair! Isn’t it stunning?”
“I don’t like it,” Cameron said. “Forgive my honesty. I think she’s quite beautiful without any gilding of the lily—”
“Oh, hush, monster,” Liz said. “The streak gives her glamour. It emancipates her.” She paused. Underplaying the next line, she said, “Besides, she can wash it out if she doesn’t like it.”
“Well, I’ll see what Doug thinks first,” Diane said.
“Darling, never ask a man what he thinks about any part of your body. Am I right, Pete?”
Cameron grinned. “Absolutely.”
Diane glanced toward the steps nervously. “What’s he doing up there?”
“Your beloved?” Liz said. “He’s only making a phone call. I stopped him, and he apologized for ignoring me, and said he had an important call to make.”
“Pete, are you sure he’s not in trouble? That look on his face…”
“Don’t you know that look?” Liz said. “My God, Harold wears it all the time. It simply means he’s about to murder someone.”
“Murder?”
“Certainly.”
Diane turned sharply to Cameron. “Pete, what happened down here?”
Cameron shrugged. “Nothing. They offered Doug a deal, and he spit in their collective eye.”
“My Harold would have kicked them out of the house,” Liz said.
“That’s just what Doug did.”
“Then everything’s under control. Prepare for a homicide, Diane.”
“I’m always prepared for one,” Diane said. A troubled look had come into her green eyes. She turned away from Liz and Cameron and walked to the bar. “But they seem to be getting more and more frequent.”
“Well, Diane,” Cameron said, “that’s business. Dog eat dog.”
“Anyway, murder can be fun,” Liz put in. “Lay back and enjoy it, that’s my motto.” She smiled archly at Cameron, who immediately returned the smile.
If there seemed to be slightly more than ultrasophisticated social palaver between Cameron and Liz, if indeed they seemed to have shared more than a passing acquaintanceship, the impression was probably nurtured by the fact that they had, over the years, and discreetly, to be sure, enjoyed that boat ride up extramarital waters. For whereas Liz Bellew was devoted to her husband Harold, and whereas Pete Cameron was a junior executive whose every waking moment was occupied with thoughts of the company, they had each managed to find the time to be mutually attracted, to arrange a first tentative meeting, and then to fall into a pattern of assignations which bordered on bacchanals.
Liz Bellew was suffering from a disease known to many thirty-five-year-old women and labeled by medical science “itchiness.” It was all well and good to be married to a successful tycoon, and it was marvelous to live in Smoke Rise with an upstairs maid, a downstairs maid and a chauffeur, and it was delightful to be able to wear mink interchangeably with ermine—but when something like Pete Cameron strolled by, the temptation to add another acquisition to the Bellew holdings was not easily put aside. Nor was Liz a person who really struggled too valiantly against the siren calls of everyday living. Lay back and enjoy it, that was her motto. And she’d been doing just that for as long as she could remember. Happily, Pete Cameron satisfied her about as well as any mere thing of flesh and blood could satisfy her, and—thanks to him—she was saved the ugliness of becoming a real wanton. In any case, their public face, a mask they had both agreed to wear, consisted of a light sex play designed to evoke in the viewer and listener the feeling that there could not possibly be any fire where there was so much obvious smoke.