“I know what I said. I said he may owe it. I’d like to know.”
“And I’d like to know what makes you think he may.”
“Start with that fairy tale about Regis and Constance Markley running off together. Just disappearing completely so they could start a beautiful new life together. Do you believe it?”
“I don’t believe it. I don’t disbelieve it. I’ve got an open mind.”
“Brother, if you’d known Regis Lawler as well as I did, you’d know the whole idea is phony. He just wasn’t the type.”
“I’ve heard that. I’ve also heard that he was in love with Constance. It’s been suggested that he might have done for her what he wouldn’t have done for anyone else.”
“That’s another phony bit. His being in love with Constance, I mean. He wasn’t.”
“No? This is a new angle. Convince me.”
“Maybe I can’t. I don’t have any letters or tapes or photographs. Neither does anyone else, thank God. I could give you some interesting clinical descriptions, but I won’t. Basically I’m a modest girl. I like my privacy.”
“I think I get you, but I’m not sure. Are you telling me more or less delicately that Regis had love enough for two?”
“Two? Is that all the higher you can count? Anyhow, what’s love? All I know is, he went through the motions of what passes for love in my crowd, and he seemed to enjoy it. Whatever you call it, he felt more of it for me than he felt for anyone else, including Constance, and I guess you couldn’t have expected more than that from Regis.”
Her little mouth had for a moment a bitter twist. The bitterness tainted the sound of her words. She did not have the look and sound of a woman who had been rejected. She had the look and sound of a woman who had been accepted with qualifications and used without them. Most of all, a woman who had understood the qualifications from the beginning and had accepted them and submitted to them.
“Excuse me,” I said. “I always have trouble understanding anything when it gets the least complicated. You were having Regis on the side of Silas, and Regis was having you on the side of Constance. Not that I want to make you sound like a chaser or a dish of buttered peas. Is that right?”
“Damn it, that’s what I said.”
“And Silas killed Regis in anger because he found out about it. Is that what you mean?”
“It’s a solid thought. I like it better than the fairy tale.”
“I’m not sure that I share your preference. I don’t want to hurt you, honey, but I doubt like hell that Silas considers you worth killing for. He just gave me permission to try my luck if the notion struck me, but maybe he didn’t really mean it. Anyhow, you’ll have to admit that it doesn’t sound like homicidal jealousy.”
“Who mentioned jealousy?” She shrugged angrily, a small gesture of dismissal. “He’s proud. He’s vain and sensitive. He’s made a hell of a lot out of nothing at all, but he can’t forget that he only went to the fourth grade and got where he is by doing things proper people don’t do. He still feels secretly inferior and insecure, and he always will. The one thing he can’t stand is the slightest suggestion of contempt. He’d kill anyone for that. Can you think of anything more contemptuous than taking another man’s wife or mistress?”
I thought of seventy-five grand. It seemed to me that helping yourself to that much lettuce was a contemptuous act too, and I thought about discussing it as a motive for murder. But I couldn’t see that it would get me anywhere in present circumstances, and so I decided against it.
“So he killed Regis,” I said. “That was a couple of years ago. And ever since he’s gone on with you as if nothing at all had happened. After murder, business as usual at the same old stand. Is that it?”
“Sure. Why not? Laughing like hell all the time. Feeling all the time the same kind of contempt for Regis and me that he imagines we felt for him. Silas would get a lot of satisfaction out of something like that.” She stared down into her glass, swirling what was left of her drink around and around the inner circumference. Bitterness increased the distortion of her mouth. “He’ll throw me out after a while,” she said.
“You’re quite a psychologist,” I said. “All that stuff about inferiority and insecurity and implied contempt. I wish I had as much brains as you.”
“All right, you bastard. So I’m the kind who ought to stick to the little words. So I only went to the eighth grade myself. Go ahead and ridicule me.”
“You’re wrong. I wasn’t ridiculing you. I never ridicule anyone. The trouble your theory has is the same trouble that the other theory has, and the trouble with both is that they leave loose ends all over the place. I can mention a few, if you’d care to hear them.”
“Mention whatever you please.”
“All right. Where’s the body?”
“I don’t know. You’re the detective. Work on it.”
“Where’s Constance? Did he kill both of them? If so, why? He had no reason to hate her. As a matter of fact, they should have been on the same team. You, not Constance, would have been the logical second victim.”
“I know. Don’t you think I’ve thought of that a thousand times? Maybe she knew he killed Regis. Maybe she learned about it somehow or even actually witnessed it. Damn it, I’ve told you something you didn’t know. I’ve told you about Regis and me. I’ve told you he was not really in love with Constance and would never have run away with her for any longer than a weekend. I’ve told you this, and it’s the truth, and all you do is keep wanting me to be the detective. You’re the detective, brother. I’ve told you that too.”
“Sure you have. I’m the detective, and all I’ve got to do is explain how someone killed a man and a woman and completely disposed of their bodies. That would be a tough chore, honey. Practically impossible.”
“Silas Lawler’s been doing the practically impossible for quite a few years. He’s a very remarkable guy.”
“He is. I know it, and I’m not forgetting it. However, I can think of a third theory that excludes him. It’s simpler and it ties up an end or two. You said Regis didn’t love Constance. He just had an affair with her. Suppose he tried to end the affair and got himself killed for his trouble. She was a strange female, I’m told. Almost psychotic, someone said. Do you think she was capable?”
Robin Robbins stood up abruptly. She carried her glass over to the ingredients and stood quietly with her back to me. Apparently she was only considering whether she should mix herself another or not. She decided not. Depositing her glass, she helped herself to a cigarette from a box and lit it with a lighter. Trailing smoke, she returned to her chair.
“Oh, Constance was capable, all right,” she said. “She was much too good to do a lot of things I’ve done and will probably do again and again if the price is right. But there’s one thing she could have done that I couldn’t, and that’s murder. And if you think that sounds like more eighth-grade psychology, you can forget it and get the hell out of here.”
“I don’t know about the psychology,” I said, “but I’m pretty sure that you don’t really think she killed Regis. If you did, you’d be happy to say so.”
“That’s right.” She nodded in amiable agreement. “I wouldn’t mind at all doing Constance a bad turn, but she didn’t kill Regis. That’s obvious.”
“I’m inclined to agree. In the first place, she couldn’t have got rid of the body. In the second place, if she could have and did, why run away afterward? It wouldn’t be sensible.”
“Well, it’s your problem, brother. I guess it’s time you went somewhere else and began to think about it.”
“Yeah. I’m the detective. You’ve told me and told me. You haven’t told me much else, though. Not anything very convincing. You got an idea that Silas killed Regis because you and Regis made a kind of illicit cuckold of him, and you lure me here with free bourbon to tell me so, and I’m supposed to be converted by this evangelical message. It’s pretty thin, if you don’t mind my saying it. Excuse me for being skeptical.”