“But he doesn’t have any possible motive!”
“Correction: He doesn’t have any motive that we’ve found out about yet. Don’t dismiss him as a suspect just because you like his sexist, adolescent-”
“Okay, this isn’t getting us anywhere,” I interrupted. “I’m not writing off anybody as a potential suspect. For instance, Molly Crocker still could have been fooling around with Matheson, even though she is married and three months pregnant.”
Molly had offered that last bit of information unsolicited.
It was easy to see Renata Chalmers with her septuagenarian husband as easy pickings for a handsome, charismatic dude like Matheson. She knew his reputation, but I bet all of his other women did, too. So why should Molly Crocker be any less vulnerable than anyone else just because she was a judge and a tough cookie?
“An affair between Molly and Matheson would give Queensbury a hell of a murder motive,” I said. “Maybe Dr. Q. had just caught on to what his wife was up to and that’s what his argument with Matheson was really about - not some Sherlock Holmes silliness, as Queensbury claimed. And as you just pointed out, Queensbury’s been wearing a deerstalker all weekend. Don’t overlook the obvious.”
Lynda shook her head. “You’re spinning this out of whole cloth and your fiction writer’s imagination. Crocker just gave Queensbury an alibi. I hardly think she’d be protective of him if he’d killed Matheson in a fit of jealousy. Anyway, I believe the judge when she said there wasn’t anything between her and Matheson. As a political figure she had too much to lose.”
“Wait a minute. What do you mean? Politicians get caught with their pants down all the time.”
“Sure, men do. But can you think of a single female governor, senator or U.S. Representative who had to resign because of a sex scandal?”
She had me there. Whether that proved anything was beside the point, because Lynda steamed on:
“You can cross both her and Queensbury off your suspect list. The key to everything, Jeff, is something else Crocker said - bragging rights.”
She tore the gold wrapping off of a Werther’s Original caramel and popped the candy into her mouth.
“Remember how Crocker said she thought Chalmers could live with his wife’s infidelity as long as he maintained bragging rights to her?” Lynda continued. “Well, how long do you think that would last? According to Crocker’s account, Matheson was taunting Chalmers with the knowledge that he’d made time with Renata. That was probably the whole point of the affair for him - to take away, in a sense, another one of Chalmers’s prize collectibles.”
“I had that same feeling.”
“Then do you suppose Matheson could be content to tell only Chalmers about it?” She shook her head. “No way. That was just the first step in humiliating the old man. Next he would have spread the word all around, making Chalmers a laughingstock, a comic opera cuckold.”
“Chalmers wouldn’t put up with that.”
Lynda nodded. “That’s my point.”
“No, no, Chalmers as killer doesn’t work. He couldn’t have gone to the Winfield. Mac was with him during the murder hour, remember?”
“But at a cocktail party. You know how packed those things get and how time flies when you’re talking and drinking, especially drinking. Chalmers could have slipped out for a half hour or forty-five minutes without Mac being any the wiser.”
And Renata wouldn’t have seen it, I thought. She’d been back at Mac’s house, still fixing her hair in that elaborate ’do.
“He must have taken a cab to the Winfield,” Lynda said with building excitement. “We can check that out easily enough through the cab company, or at least Oscar’s troops could. Matheson’s unknown visitor wore a deerstalker cap. How many of those do you suppose Chalmers owns?”
“About enough to outfit the Chinese army, I guess.”
With a sense of exhilaration I was beginning to believe Lynda could be close to the truth, a truth Mac probably didn’t suspect even though he had put Chalmers on the list to be interviewed.
“And what about Chalmers’s precious stolen books?” I said.
“I don’t know why he missed two of them, but I bet he has the one that’s still missing. We need to search his room at the McCabes’ house.”
“I didn’t see anything when I was there with Renata this morning.”
Lynda’s eyes dilated. “What were you doing-”
“I wasn’t looking for the books,” I said. Wait, that didn’t sound right. “I’ll explain later. I guess it would take a really thorough search to find the books if they were hidden, and I can’t do that now. I have to take Nakamora to a live interview on WIJC in” - I looked at my watch - “five minutes.”
“Fine. I’ll do it.”
Applause echoed over the speaker in the hallway. Bob Nakamora apparently had finished enlightening his audience about “Holmes on the Radio.”
“You can’t just go barging into Mac’s house,” I told Lynda.
“Why not? You would if you weren’t tied up.”
“I’m kin.”
“And don’t tell me you’ll do it later,” she said, talking right over me. She pulled a folded-up copy of the colloquium schedule out of her purse. “This is the perfect time because Mac’s talking next. You can bet your sister and both Chalmerses will be hanging on every word. Nobody’s going to go back to the house for anything.”
All of a sudden we had a lot of company in the hallway. People were oozing out of the Hearth Room, taking advantage of the end of Bob Nakamora’s talk to run outside for a smoke, hit the john, or just stretch their legs.
Nakamora himself paused just outside the doorway, straining his neck to look around. Renata Chalmers, standing next to him, tapped him on the arm and pointed at me. He smiled in relief and started coming my way.
“You win, dammit.” I pulled the key to the McCabe household out of my pocket and gave it to Lynda. “Wipe your feet on the hall carpet before you go in.”
“I always do. Meet you back here.”
She snatched the key out of my hand like one of those toy banks that grabs your coins. She was down the escalator by the time Bob Nakamora reached me.
“Are we going to be late for the interview?” he fretted.
“Not if we hurry. Come on.”
As we descended on the escalator, Renata Chalmers peered over the railing at us, her lovely face devoid of any expression that I could read. What did she know about the murder, I wondered, and what did she suspect?
We reached the main level and kept going down. The studios of WIJC-FM, like the offices of the campus newspaper, The Spectator, are located on the lower level of Muckerheide Center. The Spectator was shut down for spring break, but not the radio station, which is college-owned but not exclusively student-run. With impeccable timing, Tony Lampwicke was just finishing his interview with the author of some incredibly obscure (and therefore noteworthy) academic book when we arrived.
The long-time host of the weekly Crosscurrents program nodded to acknowledge our presence and moved smoothly into an introduction of a new topic in his heavy British accent. “Very stimulating indeed,” he said to an invisible conversation partner, apparently a telephone interviewee. “I’m sure your fine book will spark quite a revival of interest in Bulgarian neoclassicism. You know, the medium of radio itself is undergoing something of a revival these days...”
Lampwicke famously has a penchant for analyzing everything beyond the bounds of reason with a humorless intensity. He must be well into his forties, but he somehow seemed younger sitting behind the microphone in his loafers and cable knit sweater. His chin was sharp enough to be a lethal weapon and was covered by a neatly trimmed goatee.
“We have with us in the studio today on Crosscurrents an expert on old-time radio, and particularly the many radio adventures of Sherlock Holmes, the famous...”