I got out my notebook. “We’d better get some names down,” I said. “Let’s start with your dancing girl.”
“She never told me her name, sir. Not her real name, anyway. When I asked her what it was, she said to just call her Honey. It was the first time I’d ever seen her — and, as it happened, the last.” He paused. “She provided me with one of the most incredible experiences of my life.”
“What happened?” Stan asked.
“It was after she’d done her little dance,” Beaumont said. “I was... ah... understandably aroused. But when I tried to approach her, she kept backing away and laughing at me. Finally, when I’d cornered her, she broke off laughing long enough to announce that she was a virgin.”
“She was what?” Stan said.
“Exactly,” Beaumont said. “At first I thought she was merely trying to add a little spice to the moment, and I joined in the laughter.” He shook his head slowly. “But the remarkable thing about it, gentlemen, was that she was a virgin. When I scoffed at the very possibility, she invited me to verify the fact for myself.”
“And?” Stan said.
“I did,” Beaumont said. “And she was.”
“I’ll be damned,” Stan said.
“I was speechless,” Beaumont said. “She kept laughing at me all the time she was putting her clothes back on. She left as soon as she was dressed, and she was still laughing as she went out the door.”
“How’d she happen to show up at your place to begin with?” Stan asked.
Beaumont looked at Kim with infinite patience. “My dear boy, that was ten long years ago. Surely you can’t expect me to recall a detail like that?”
“And the other people in the film?” Stan said.
“All of them were regulars, one might say.”
“Let’s get the names down,” I said. “Start with the men.”
“Ghosts,” Beaumont said. “That’s what they seem like to me now. Ghosts.”
I waited.
“Well,” Beaumont said, “there was Eddie Willard. Then there was—”
“Hold on,” I said. “We’re going to talk to every one of these people, Beaumont, and we’re going to need more than just their names to find them. As you said, all this was ten long years ago.”
“I understand,” Beaumont said. “And I want to help, believe me. But I knew almost nothing about their personal lives, even then?”
“Do the best you can,” I said. “Besides his name, what can you tell us about this Eddie Willard?”
“He was a student somewhere. I think Columbia.”
I nodded. “We can check the records there.”
“And then there was Bill Marcy. His father was head of the Marcy Electronics Company.” He paused. “And Dave Anders? Dave was studying to be an accountant.”
“Can’t you recall anything else about him?”
“I wish I could,” Beaumont said.
“All right, then. How about the women?”
“The one I recall most vividly is Leda Ellis. She was a lively one, Leda was. She used to tell the most hilarious jokes about her husband, Webster. What made them all the more droll was that she usually told them in the altogether. Her husband was the Webster part of Webster, Macklin & Hughes, the law firm.” He paused. “And then there was Marian Coe. She worked for the telephone company. And Genita Garren. She taught some kind of arts and crafts course, over in the Village somewhere.”
“Very good,” Stan said flatly.
Beaumont sat staring at the floor, his face set in the half-smiling, reflective expression old men get when they think about the long ago.
“It’s so strange about the past,” he said softly. “None of it realty ever dies, does it?”
“At least not in the detective business,” Stan said.
I got to my feet. “Ready, Stan?”
Beaumont sighed to himself, his eyes bleak. “Where are the snows of yesteryear?” he said, his voice suddenly tired and weak. “I wonder, gentlemen — what ever could have happened to them?”
“What the hell?” Stan said. “You feel okay, Mr. Beaumont?”
“I feel old, son,” Beaumont said. “I feel like the oldest man on the face of the earth.”
VI
When Stan and I got back to the station house, I paused at the teletype machine in the muster room long enough to read back through the alarms that had come in since noon, hoping that there might be something I could connect in some way with our homicide, but there was nothing.
“Anything on the chatterbox?” Stan asked as we started up the stairs to the squad room on the second floor.
“No,” I said. “It seems to have been a fairly quiet day.”
“And meanwhile Larry Yeager’s girl friend is sitting over there in the slammer. Man, that Doris Hagen was one mad girl when I sent her over there, Pete.”
“I can believe it,” I said. “She was working up a pretty good mad, even before she knew where she was going.”
I opened the gate in the counter that runs across the forepart of the squad room, held it for Stan, and followed him into the squad room proper.
Except for Barney Fells, the room was empty, which, considering the time of evening, was very unusual. The squad commander was standing by the water cooler, a paper cup in one hand and the stub of a cigar in the other, scowling at us — a tough, wiry, graying man with quick, sharp eyes. A cop’s cop, all the way.
I draped my jacket over the back of my chair, sat down, and gave him a fast recap of the things Stan and I had done so far.
When I finished, he shook his head slowly. “That Larry Yeager must have been one sweet character,” he said. “And so you figure he recognized somebody in that stag film and decided to add a little blackmail to his other accomplishments, eh?”
“There doesn’t seem to be any other answer,” Stan said.
“It’d be pretty hard to come, up with one, at that,” Barney said. “Pete, I took a call for you a while ago, from Ruby Wyman, over at the lab. About that piece of sunglass lens you boys found over at Yeager’s apartment. He says there was enough of it for him to work out the prescription the lens was ground from.”
“Good,” I said. “Ruby’s one of the best.”
“That he is. And another thing he did was to analyze the glass as glass. It seems there’s all kinds of optical glass, and this particular kind is fairly brittle, so it’s not so widely used as some of the others. Ruby says that narrows down the number of places that could have ground it.”
“It was a particular shade of green, too,” Stan said. “Considering that we have the exact prescription, plus the exact kind of glass, plus the exact shade, that idea of Pete’s about putting all the optical houses on the watch-and-wait just might pay off.”
“It all depends on how smart the killer is,” Barney said. “If he’s real smart, he’d never have that lens replaced at all. In any case, Ruby’s data have already been mimeoed and distributed to every optical house in the area.”
“We might even go a step farther,” I said. “Seeing that Ruby’s narrowed things down so well, why not ask the optical houses to check back through their records?”
“Hell, Pete,” Barney said. “There’d be tens of thousands of prescriptions for them to go through. Millions, maybe?”
“Not the way it’s narrowed down now,” I said. “And it just might turn the trick, Barney. If we could come up with the original prescription, we’d probably also come up with our killer.”