They’d been one of the happiest, most devoted couples Malone had ever known. They’d kept close touch with him, and he with them, and his one sure cure for the blues was an evening with George and Kathy.
Malone glanced sideways at George. “You feel like going back now?”
“In a minute,” George said.
“We’ve got to call the police.”
“Yes, I know. In just a minute.”
“About these guests of yours,” Malone said. “I got their first names when you introduced me, and that’s about all. Give me a quick run-down on them.”
George stopped walking. He sat down on a stone bench and shook a cigarette out of a crumpled pack. He rolled it around in his fingers absently, then suddenly broke it in two and flicked it away.
“There are four guys and three women in there,” Malone said. “Who are they, and what are they?”
“None of them did it,” George said.
“Never mind. What about them?”
“There’s Eddie Marcheck. He’s the short one with the crew cut. He was a talker with the carny at the same time we were with it. His wife is the tall blonde. The guy with the freckles is Del Esterly. He’s in insurance. He and his wife — that’s the girl with the glasses — have an agency.” He shook his head. “But there’s no point in this, Malone. None of them—”
“Go on,” Malone told him.
“I don’t feel much like talking.”
“I know, and I’m sorry. But this is important. What about the others?”
“Well, the other couple are Mark and Jen Stevens. They’re neighbors, and Mark is sales manager for a sporting goods firm down near the Loop.”
George’s voice was thin and tired, and Malone was beginning to dislike himself a little for putting him through the paces at a time like this. But — it had to be.
“And the solo guy?” he asked. “Who’s he?”
George hesitated a moment. When he spoke, his voice was scarcely audible. “His name’s McJanet,” he said. “Les McJanet. He’s a guy I used to know — from school.”
Malone took a fresh cigar from his pocket and began, very slowly, to unwrap it, his eyes on George Weston. There had been a subtle change in George’s voice when he spoke of McJanet, something quite apart from its sudden softness. Malone put the cigar in his mouth, unlit. Around it, he said, “Is there something special about this guy McJanet?”
“No. Why?”
“I think there is,” Malone said. “I think there’s something special about him. What is it?”
George looked up at Malone, and then moved away again hesitantly.
“He’s an ex-con. He’s out on parole now. I hadn’t seen him in years, and then, this afternoon, I ran into him on State Street. I invited him to our anniversary party. He said he’d come, but that there was something he wanted me to know first.”
Malone bit the tip from his cigar and spat it out and glanced toward the house. “And that’s when he told you about being out on parole?”
George nodded. “I told him it didn’t make any difference. And it didn’t.”
Malone stared up at the window of the bedroom where Kathy Weston lay with her neck broken and a sheet across her naked body.
“What was McJanet in for?”
George stood up and started walking back toward the house. Malone fell into step beside him.
“I didn’t hear what you said,” Malone prompted.
“Assault and rape,” George said. “He swore it was a frame-up.”
“And you believed him?”
“Yes, I believed him. I’ve known him most of my life. He couldn’t do anything like that.” His tone was flat. “And now let me alone, Malone.”
Malone drew in deeply on his cigar and said nothing.
They went in through the side door, and George started walking through the hallway to the living room. “Everybody seems to be in the kitchen,” he said. “I’m going to try to call the police right now,”
“Wait a minute,” Malone said. “I want to take one more look in that room.”
“Why?”
“Just a hunch. Maybe we can save the police a little work.”
George turned to look at him. His eyes were level, his voice steady. “It isn’t McJanet, and it isn’t anyone else here. I know you think so, but you’re wrong. Kathy went upstairs for a minute, and somebody had either sneaked in and was in the bedroom, or they got in through the side entrance while she was up there. I know that—”
“You don’t know anything,” Malone said sharply. “You’re in something pretty close to shock, and you can’t even think. It was somebody at this party, and I know it, even if you don’t.”
He caught himself. This was a hell of a way to talk to a good friend, a man whose wife had just been murdered. He knew how much George had always worshipped Kathy, how he had worked like a dog to build up his real estate business. And he knew, beyond any question, that George had never so much as looked at another woman — no more than Kathy had looked at another man. George had loved his wife with an intensity that was rare in Malone’s experience, and worshipped was the only word to describe the way he’d felt about her.
He had loved her so much that her death had temporarily deranged him. All this talk about innocent guests came from the part of George’s mind that was trying desperately to catch on to something, anything, that it could deny. His mind couldn’t deny Kathy’s death, but the need for denial was so great that George had somehow channeled it toward something else.
Malone tried to manage a grin for his friend, but it wouldn’t stay on his lips. If I’d told George that this wasn’t Chicago, instead of that one of his guests had murdered his wife, Malone thought, he’d have denied that too. Right now, his mind can’t accept things. The poor lug...
George studied Malone’s face a moment, his eyes cloudy and remote. He shrugged. “All right, Malone.” He turned and started up the back stairs. “But I can’t go in. I—”
“I know,” Malone said. “It’ll only take me a minute — and then we’ll call the cops.”
At the door to Kathy’s bedroom, George suddenly put his hands up to his face, his head bent, his shoulders shaking.
It hurt Malone to see George this way, but there was nothing he could do.
“I... I think I’m going to be sick,” George said. He turned in the direction of the bathroom and half ran toward it.
Malone wiped the sweat from his forehead with the back of his hand and went into the bedroom. From the direction of the bathroom, he could hear George Weston being very sick. He closed the bedroom door and walked slowly around the bed and stood looking down at Kathy.
Any one of those men down there could have done it, he thought. Not the women, because only a man could break someone’s neck quickly enough to avoid getting clawed and bitten. It took a lot of strength to break a neck; a hell of a lot of strength.
And motive? That would come out later. It always did. Right now he wanted the personal satisfaction of having a hand in finding the man who had killed a woman he loved dearly. His own deep reaction — the thing George was going through now — would come later, he knew.
He circled the room several times, and each time his eyes missed nothing. His brain was in high gear now, and his thoughts came quickly and clearly, the way they had before in similar situations. He looked for the obvious thing, the thing that seemed slightly wrong somehow. There was nothing. He came back to the sheet-covered body, and then, with the strongest reluctance he had ever felt toward anything, he bent and pulled away the sheet.
He looked down at Kathy Weston a full minute, his eyes covering every line and curve of her body. He stood wholly without movement, his face as devoid of expression as if it had been a wooden mask.