What hit the papers this morning was the discovery of the body of Harry P. Strutt, dead of a blow to the back of the head, in the trunk of his Camaro, left on a country road outside Marlboro, New York.
After handing over my trenchcoat and hat, I was ushered through a black, white and gold deco-appointed foyer with a two-story ceiling and led past an ivory marble staircase with black and gold bannisters into a living room with, oddly, no art moderne touches at all.
This high-ceilinged, marble-floored living room with its golden-brown paneling and overstuffed furnishings — tall, burgundy-swagged windows looking out on Fifth — should have had a welcoming warmth. Despite the lived-in, overstuffed furnishings, a museum-like stuffiness pervaded.
Over a wood-burning, decorative fireplace loomed a large gold-framed portrait of a very beautiful dark-haired woman whose features prefigured her late son’s; judging by the gown, I’d say the painting dated to the 1940s. For some reason I had a sense that when Vincent Colby’s mother died (because this was surely her), she’d taken the warmth with her.
Of course, the fireplace wasn’t lighted, so maybe that had something to do with it.
I was shown to the kind of bulging, tufted sofa you can get lost in, along with the change in your pockets, gold-and-brown brocade and decades old. Plump brown leather chairs at left and right completed a sitting area on an oriental carpet, in front of the not-roaring fireplace with the painting supervising.
And then it hit me — nothing in here had changed since this lovely woman passed. I would give ten-to-one odds on that. This felt not so much like the chamber had been preserved, rather frozen in place, like her warm hovering expression. Either the artist was a liar or that expression conveyed genuine compassion, and a touch of sadness.
Had she died too young to pass her humanity on to her son? Or was he just born that way, blind and crippled to right and wrong?
A voice behind me wasn’t what I expected.
“Mr. Hammer,” a husky female voice intoned, “are you sure this is wise?”
I craned my neck and saw Sheila Ryan, in a black sweater dress that I guess was her idea of mourning weeds. She was walking briskly toward me, her red hair bouncing off her shoulders. She seemed cross. Well, I had killed her boy friend.
She planted herself a ways behind me, as I turned to look at her from the sofa. Her arms were folded on the impressive shelf of her bosom. Her make-up was subdued, but the red lipstick on her bruised Bardot mouth brought to mind blood. The green eyes flashed.
She got some indignation going. “Hasn’t poor Mr. Colby suffered enough? What more would you put him through?”
I stood and moved around to her; we were rather small players in this orchestra pit with sitting areas, paintings worth thousands, and furniture that had been antiques decades ago, when the late lady of the house likely decorated it.
“Mr. Colby knows I’m coming,” I said. “I spoke to him on the phone and he seemed calm enough. Or at least weathering this well, considering. I told him he had a right to face me, if he wished. He said he did. So here I am.”
Her eyes bore into me. “It’s ill-advised.”
“Excuse me, Sheila, but... who are you to be handing out advice, anyway? And what the hell are you doing here? Why is it your place to comfort the father of a dead guy you’d been dating for, what? A few weeks?”
She unfolded her arms and, as they dropped to her sides, something winked at me...
...the rock on her ring finger.
I grabbed her hand, startling her, and had a good look at the diamond, which was ten karats anyway, in its simple four-prong setting. Your classic solitaire-style engagement ring. It said money, all right.
But there was a smaller band that spoke even louder.
I asked, “So you and Vincent tied the knot?”
“We did.”
“When?”
The smile on her lips was barely there, but her eyes were laughing. Her cranky attitude had vanished. A cockiness was in its place.
“Saturday,” she said. “City Hall. No one knew but the two of us.”
“How romantic.”
“We got the license Friday. Did you know it’s just a twenty-four-hour wait in this state? I’m here, since you asked, to look after my grieving father-in-law.”
I grinned, laughed. “So, then — congratulations are in order... Mrs. Colby. And of course condolences, since you’re a widow.”
Her chin came up and her smile was at once mocking and feral. “Maybe you’d like to kiss the bride.”
“I’ll pass. You know, since I killed the groom. But, hey — let’s sit. Catch up a little.” I gestured to the nearby sitting area by the fireplace.
“Why not?” she said and, her gait defiantly sexy, went over and settled her curvy self into the nearest brown leather chair. I sat on the sofa, close by.
She had an arm on either arm of the big chair, and put her feet up on the matching ottoman. Comfy. Cozy by the non-fire.
Her tone light now, the crossness wholly gone — it had been phony, anyway — she said, “I showed up at the door yesterday, in tears, and Vance welcomed me in and we wept together. He’s such a sweet old boy. I’m moving in.”
I stuck a smile onto my frowning face. “He’s a little old for you, isn’t he? And, anyway, you must already have a piece of all this — unless Vincent insisted you sign a pre-nup.”
She shook her head and the red hair flew. “No pre-nup. Vincent was nuts about me, didn’t you know? And it’s going to be strictly platonic between me and the elder Colby. I’m the daughter he never had.”
I nodded toward the choke-a-horse rock on her hand. “What did that bauble set your hubby back?”
She frown-smiled back at me. “That’s the kind of question a person just doesn’t ask.”
“But I bet you did. How much?”
Proud of herself now, she said, “A hundred grand.”
I had to smile. That was my bogus blackmail demand to her late husband.
I said, “How would you like to hear the real story of what went down Sunday night?”
“Sure.”
I gave it to her — the whole megillah, from the charade at the warehouse and all the in’s and out’s of that, to how Vincent had confessed to the killings of Casey Shannon, Roger Kraft, Jasmine Jordan, and Gino Mazzini. And of course how he’d copped to the whole Plan B that the phony hit-and-run had put into play — the Jekyll and Hyde routine, after the faked concussion.
She frowned through some of that.
“It’s awful,” she said, “what you did to him.”
“Yeah. I can be kind of a shit sometimes. Anyway, that’s it. Well, there are a few things I left out.”
She sat forward a little. “What did you leave out?”
I shifted on the sofa. “Funny running into you here. I had it in mind to look you up. Go over a few things. But the truth is, honey, I don’t have a scrap of anything.”
“A scrap of anything what?”
She was staring at me.
I stared back.
“Proof,” I said, “that you were Vincent’s accomplice in this, or anyway much of it. He had several accomplices, of course, but you I think were the key one. And that makes you an accessory to murder. At the least.”
She wasn’t looking at me now. “Does it really?”
I pointed at her and got her attention back. “I bet you were the one who threw off the light switch in that apartment building in Tudor City, when Chris Peters and I were looking for that floppy disk, with Vincent waiting in the hall to intercede. I’d love to have that disk, by the way, because it might clear up the last two murders — the girl your honey raped and strangled, and the broker he ran down in that parking ramp, God knows why. I wonder how long homicide had been his hobby? How many others there are?”