He stood up in a swift lunge, then became absolutely motionless, staring down at her. He moved his tongue on his lips and after a long time he formed words with it. «Let’s go look at him,» he said in a hushed voice.
SIX
The room was at the back of the house to the left. The girl took a key out of her pocket and unlocked the door. There was a low light on a table, and the venetian blinds were drawn. Steve went in past her silently, on cat feet.
Leopardi lay squarely in the middle of the bed, a large smooth silent man, waxy and artificial in death. Even his mustache looked phony. His half-open eyes, sightless as marbles, looked as if they had never seen. He lay on his back, on the sheet, and the bedclothes were thrown over the foot of the bed.
The King wore yellow silk pajamas, the slip-on kind, with a turned collar. They were loose and thin. Over his breast they were dark with blood that had seeped into the silk as if into blotting-paper. There was a little blood on his bare brown neck.
Steve stared at him and said tonelessly: «The King in Yellow. I read a book with that title once. He liked yellow, I guess. I packed some of his stuff last night. And he wasn’t yellow either. Guys like him usually are — or are they?»
The girl went over to the corner and sat down in a slipper chair and looked at the floor. It was a nice room, as modernistic as the living room was casual. It had a chenille rug, café-au-lait color, severely angled furniture in inlaid wood, and a trick dresser with a mirror for a top, a kneehole and drawers like a desk. It had a box mirror above and a semi-cylindrical frosted wall light set above the mirror. In the corner there was a glass table with a crystal greyhound on top of it, and a lamp with the deepest drum shade Steve had ever seen.
He stopped looking at all this and looked at Leopardi again. He pulled the King’s pajamas up gently and examined the wound. It was directly over the heart and the skin was scorched and mottled there. There was not so very much blood. He had died in a fraction of a second.
A small Mauser automatic lay cuddled in his right hand, on top of the bed’s second pillow.
«That’s artistic,» Steve said and pointed. «Yeah, that’s a nice touch. Typical contact wound, I guess. He even pulled his pajama shirt up. I’ve heard they do that. A Mauser seven-six-three about. Sure it’s your gun?»
«Yes.» She kept on looking at the floor. «It was in a desk in the living room — not loaded. But there were shells. I don’t know why. Somebody gave it to me once. I didn’t even know how to load it.»
Steve smiled. Her eyes lifted suddenly and she saw his smile and shuddered. «I don’t expect anybody to believe that,» she said. «We may as well call the police, I suppose.»
Steve nodded absently, put a cigarette in his mouth and flipped it up and down with his lips that were still puffy from Leopardi’s punch. He lit a match on his thumbnail, puffed a small plume of smoke and said quietly: «No cops. Not yet. Just tell it.»
The red-haired girl said: «I sing at KFQC, you know. Three nights a week — on a quarter-hour automobile program. This was one of the nights. Agatha and I got home — oh, close to half-past ten. At the door I remembered there was no fizzwater in the house, so I sent her back to the liquor store three blocks away, and came in alone. There was a queer smell in the house. I don’t know what it was. As if several men had been in here, somehow. When I came in the bedroom — he was exactly as he is now. I saw the gun and I went and looked and then I knew I was sunk. I didn’t know what to do. Even if the police cleared me, everywhere I went from now on —»
Steve said sharply: «He got in here — how?»
«I don’t know.»
«Go on,» he said.
«I locked the door. Then I undressed — with that on my bed. I went into the bathroom to shower and collect my brains, if any. I locked the door when I left the room and took the key. Agatha was back then, but I don’t think she saw me. Well, I took the shower and it braced me up a bit. Then I had a drink and then I came in here and called you.»
She stopped and moistened the end of a finger and smoothed the end of her left eyebrow with it. «That’s all, Steve — absolutely all.»
«Domestic help can be pretty nosy. This Agatha’s nosier than most — or I miss my guess.» He walked over to the door and looked at the lock. «I bet there are three or four keys in the house that knock this over.» He went to the windows and felt the catches, looked down at the screens through the glass. He said over his shoulder, casually: «Was the King in love with you?»
Her voice was sharp, almost angry. «He never was in love with any woman. A couple of years back in San Francisco, when I was with his band for a while, there was some slapsilly publicity about us. Nothing to it. It’s been revived here in the hand-outs to the press, to build up his opening. I was telling him this afternoon I wouldn’t stand for it, that I wouldn’t be linked with him in anybody’s mind. His private life was filthy. It reeked. Everybody in the business knows that. And it’s not a business where daisies grow very often.»
Steve said: «Yours was the only bedroom he couldn’t make?»
The girl flushed to the roots of her dusky red hair.
«That sounds lousy,» he said. «But I have to figure the angles. That’s about true, isn’t it?»
«Yes — I suppose so. I wouldn’t say the only one.»
«Go on out in the other room and buy yourself a drink.»
She stood up and looked at him squarely across the bed. «I didn’t kill him, Steve. I didn’t let him into this house tonight. I didn’t know he was coming here, or had any reason to come here. Believe that or not. But something about this is wrong. Leopardi was the last man in the world to take his lovely life himself.»
Steve said: «He didn’t, angel. Go buy that drink. He was murdered. The whole thing is a frame — to get a cover-up from Jumbo Walters. Go on out.»
He stood silent, motionless, until sounds he heard from the living room told him she was out there. Then he took out his handkerchief and loosened the gun from Leopardi’s right hand and wiped it over carefully on the outside, broke out the magazine and wiped that off, spilled out all the shells and wiped every one, ejected the one in the breech and wiped that. He reloaded the gun and put it back in Leopardi’s dead hand and closed his fingers around it and pushed his index finger against the trigger. Then he let the hand fall naturally back on the bed.
He pawed through the bedclothes and found an ejected shell and wiped that off, put it back where he had found it. He put the handkerchief to his nose, sniffed it wryly, went around the bed to a clothes closet and opened the door.
«Careless of your clothes, boy,» he said softly.
The rough cream-colored coat hung in there, on a hook, over dark gray slacks with a lizard-skin belt. A yellow satin shirt and a wine-colored tie dangled alongside. A handkerchief to match the tie flowed loosely four inches from the breast pocket of the coat. On the floor lay a pair of gazelle-leather nutmeg-brown sports shoes, and socks without garters. And there were yellow satin shorts with heavy black initials on them lying close by.
Steve felt carefully in the gray slacks and got out a leather keyholder. He left the room, went along the cross-hall and into the kitchen. It had a solid door, a good spring lock with a key stuck in it. He took it out and tried keys from the bunch in the keyholder, found none that fitted, put the other key back and went into the living room. He opened the front door, went outside and shut it again without looking at the girl huddled in a corner of the davenport. He tried keys in the lock, finally found the right one. He let himself back into the house, returned to the bedroom and put the keyholder back in the pocket of the gray slacks again. Then he went to the living room.