“Davis did it, no doubt in my mind.”
“Why?”
“Because Stefan Norman told him to.”
“Why?”
“I think because Janet had something on the Normans. Maybe something she ran across back when she was working on Richard Norman’s campaign team.”
“What about Harold?”
She flipped the question out casually, lightly, like the rest of her conversation, but unlike the rest of it, this didn’t float: it was a leaden lump in her throat even after spoken.
I said, “Don’t worry. Your brother’s in the clear. I’m as sure of that as I am of Stefan’s guilt.”
She couldn’t hold back her sigh of relief, but she tried to cover it by sipping her coffee right after.
“You know,” I said, “your brother’s a nice man.”
“I could’ve told you that.”
“You did. Several times.”
“Now that you’ve ruled my brother out, I suppose you’re through with me. Won’t be needing my services anymore. Shove my black butt right out your door.”
“Oh, I don’t know. I could use a sleep-in maid around here.”
“Oh, typecasting, is it?”
“Maybe. Only I think of you more as the French maid type.”
She smiled and flicked a crumb of coffee cake at me and it landed on my nose. I brushed it away and leaned over and kissed her.
We were lying together kind of half asleep on the couch when the phone rang.
“Yeah?”
“Mal?”
“John, why in hell are you still up? Are you all right?”
“I went back to bed for a while, couldn’t sleep. Then the phone rang.”
“So who called?”
“The nightwatchman at the Maxwell Building.”
“The nightwatchman at the Maxwell Building. Well, what did the nightwatchman at the Maxwell Building have to say?”
“Nothing to me, Mal. It was Brennan’s call.”
“What about?”
“Swing by the jail and pick me up, will you? We’ll go over there and you can see. Brennan’s there with the cops now.”
“What the hell is it?”
“Stefan Norman’s been shot.”
TWENTY-THREE
“Suicide,” Brennan said.
I said nothing.
I looked at the desk where a few minutes prior the husk of Stefan Norman had been sitting. Stefan’s desk was big and black and metallic, with a small white blotter in its center, a throw rug on a ballroom floor. The blotter where Stefan’s head must have rested had a wine-color stain that had blossomed out, suggesting hidden shapes and meanings in Rorschach fashion. Otherwise the desk was bare, except for the blood-red push-button phone, and a small black automatic, responsible for the smell of cordite in the air.
Stefan’s office was large and the lack of furniture made it seem larger. The desk with one brown leather chair behind it and another opposite and a couch along the draped window-wall were like the last props waiting to be cleared off the set of a play that had closed. Not that this indicated the Norman Fund was a dummy operation: the outer office had rows of file cabinets and all the standard equipment, including a photocopy machine and the work-heaped desks of two full-time secretaries. And beyond that was a reception area complete with stacks of old U.S. News amp; World Reports. The Norman Fund had indeed been functioning at something or other.
I was feeling a little bit shook: deaths aren’t an everyday thing for me, not yet anyway, not even after everyday contact with them, which I’ve had from time to time, everything from typing obits all morning for a newspaper to tromping through some poor Asian guy’s rice crop with a rifle in my hands.
Also, I felt cheated: I didn’t have a chance to know Stefan Norman, let alone understand him. He was just a guy I talked to once for a few minutes; yet a guy who was important to me, a guy whose head I wanted to climb inside of to find the answers to some questions. A port of entry was there now, all right, but not for climbing in-for seepage only. The things in there, the man in there, were lost.
And, too, I had the spooky feeling that I was walking through a slightly altered replay of the events of Tuesday evening past. First off, John showed up in the yellow fringed buckskin jacket, blue shirt and black leather pants he’d worn then, but there was a logical reason for that: now that he’d soured on his stepfather, John was digging out his most outlandish outfits to make Brennan as uncomfortable as possible. Then at the Maxwell Building we were momentarily stopped by Oliver DeForest, the same guy who stopped us out at Colorado Hill Tuesday night. Next, John and I stood waiting for the elevator to come down and who should the doors open up on but Tuesday night’s ambulance boys, only this time it wasn’t Janet’s body they were cheerfully hauling out, but Stefan’s. I looked at John and said, “Deja vu,” and he said, “Gesundheit.”
Brennan said, “Don’t touch anything.”
I motioned to the couch. “Mind if I sit down?”
“Be my guest.”
I walked over to the couch and John followed. We sat and watched Brennan and a cop in uniform and another in a baggy gray suit wander around and try to find something to do. The uniformed cop asked Brennan if somebody ought to take fingerprints and Brennan said why bother. The guy in the baggy suit said what about the gun and Brennan said he was sure it was Stefan’s but check it out anyway and go ahead and take it down and get it checked for prints. Gray suit went over to the desk and shoved a pencil down the automatic’s barrel and walked to the door carrying the gun on a pencil like a boy scout carrying Old Glory in the parade. As he opened the door, the gun started to slide off the pencil and he instinctively guided it back in place with his free hand; he passed the torch to a cop who for no particular reason was standing watch in the outer office and told him what to do and came back and wandered around some more. The uniformed cop said anybody see the shell casing and Brennan said he already picked it up. It went on like that for fifteen minutes.
Finally I said, “Can I talk to you for a second, Brennan?”
Brennan said, “I’m kinda busy.”
“Are you?”
“Okay, okay, go ahead and talk.”
“Can we have some privacy?”
“Jesus, Mallory!”
“Brennan?”
“Let’s go on out in the hall, then.”
I looked at John and said, “Coming?”
He shook his head no. “You talk to him.”
Brennan and I walked out through the two outer offices and stood by the elevators, no one else around. “Private enough?” he said.
I said, “Suicide?”
“That’s right. Cut and dried.”
“Now isn’t that convenient?”
“What? Just what do you mean?”
“Just that it’s a nice, safe way to end the affair. For all concerned.”
“What are you implying, Mallory?”
“Am I implying something?”
“Okay, mystery writer,” Brennan said, punching the down button, “you come with me, I wanna show you something.”
We rode down in the elevator without a word, walked quickly past DeForest and went directly to Brennan’s Buick, parked in front of the building. Brennan unlocked the car door and reached in the front seat for a manila folder. He took a sheet of paper from the folder, carefully holding it by one corner with thumb and middle finger, and gave it to me, instructing me to hold it the same way.
“Read it,” he said.
“What is it?”
“What do you think it is?”
I read it over quickly, then said, “This is supposed to be a suicide note?”
“Not supposed to be. Is.”
“Have you checked the handwriting out?”
“I know Stefan Norman’s handwriting, and that’s it.”
“But you are going to have an expert check it, aren’t you?”
“The P.D.’ll handle that end of it. That’s up to them. I suppose they’ll check it out, but just as a formality. Take my word, that’s Stefan Norman’s handwriting all right. You wanna hand that back now?”
“No, give me a second, I want to reread it.”
I went over it again, more slowly this time. It was written out longhand, in a style tight, cramped and somehow delicate. It said: