“What do you mean?” he’d said.
“Why don’t we get someone to do it? Stab me. Not too seriously. Just seriously enough to focus attention on me. As the victim.”
Well, they’d discussed this for a while, back and forth, and she finally agreed with his opinion that if you ever hired somebody to do something like that, it always carne out in the wash. Whoever did the job always came clean for one reason or another, and it would all lead right back to them and have the opposite effect from the one intended.
“Why can’t it be someone we know real well?” Michelle said. “Who does the stabbing, I mean.”
So they batted this around for a while, back and forth, trying to think of anyone they knew who could be trusted first to stab her not too seriously and then to keep his mouth shut afterward…
“Or even hers,” Michelle offered.
… but they couldn’t come up with anyone, male or female, who they felt they could absolutely, positively trust to pull this off and not implicate them later on.
“How about you?” Michelle suggested.
The idea of him stabbing her did not immediately appeal to him. He wasn’t sure, first of all, that he could succeed in stabbing her “not too seriously,” as she kept putting it, because he was not a surgeon, after all, and he had no idea what arteries or veins might be inside her chest or her shoulder that could rupture and cause her to bleed to death if he hit one of them by accident. So she lowered the strap of the sheer purple baby-doll nightgown she’d been wearing that night, and showed him her shoulder, and together they started poking and probing, trying to figure out how to stab her without doing too much harm. They finally figured that he could just cut her rather than actually stab her, and they decided to do it the following night, when the cast broke for dinner.
“But it was her idea,” Milton said.
“To focus attention on her.”
“Yes. First to go to the cops and tell them she’d been threatened…”
“Which she did.”
“Yes. It was also her idea to say the person calling her sounded like Jack Nicholson.”
“I see,” Nellie said.
“Yes. Because Nicholson sounds very menacing even when he isn’t trying to be. The whole idea was to get media attention.”
“Which is exactly what happened,” Nellie said.
“Yes. We got a lot of attention.”
“So why’d you kill her?”
“Now, now, Counselor,” O’Brien said.
“Why’d you kill her, Mr. Milton?”
“I didn’t.”
“When’s the last time you saw her, Mr. Milton?”
“When I left the house yesterday morning.”
“Do you have your own keys to the apartment, by the way?”
“I do, yes.”
“What time did you leave yesterday morning?”
“Around nine.”
“Lock up after you?”
“No. Michelle was still in the apartment.”
“Where’d you go?”
“To my office. These detectives came to see me there around eleven o’clock.”
“What time did you leave the office?”
“I went out for lunch around twelve-thirty, I guess it was.
“Who with?”
“Producer named Elliot Michaelman.”
“Did you go back to the office after lunch?”
“I did.”
“What time would that have been?”
“A little after three.”
“When did you see Michelle again?”
“I didn’t,”
“You didn’t see her from when you left the apartment at nine that morn…?”
“That’s right.”
“Well, didn’t you go back to the apartment, Mr. Milton? Isn’t that where you live?“
“Yes, but I didn’t go there last night.”
“Why not?”
“Because we had a fight on the phone.”
“Oh?” Nellie said, and saw the warning glance O’Brien shot Milton. “When was this?” she asked at once.
“I guess around six o’clock. I tried the theater as soon as I got back from a meeting, but they’d already stopped rehearsing for the day, so I kept calling the apartment every ten minutes till I reached her.”
“And you say this was around six o’clock.”
“Yes. She’d just come in.”
“What’d you fight about, Mr. Milton?”
“I told her the detectives here had come to my office, and she was worried they might be getting suspicious.”
“That doesn’t sound like a fight to me.”
“Well, she finally said that if they came to the apartment asking questions, she would say she didn’t know anything about it, that I must’ve dreamt up the whole thing on my own, without telling her about it. She told me she wasn’t going down with me, she was going to be a star.”
“Then what?”
“I told her she was the one who’d planned the damn thing, for Christ’s sake! So she said `Prove it’ and hung up.
“How’d you feel about that?”
“Rotten.”
“In addition to feeling rotten, did you also feel angry?”
“No, I just felt rotten. I thought we were supposed to love each other. I wouldn’t have gone along with her scheme if I hadn’t loved her. I did it for her. So she really could become a star. I’ve known her since she was ten, I’ve been grooming her all that time.”
“And now she tells you you’re on your own, right?”
“In essence, yes.”
“If they catch you…”
“Yeah.”
“… she knew nothing about it.”
“Yeah.”
“She gets her shot at stardom…”
“Well, yeah.”
“…while you go to jail for assault.”
“I wasn’t thinking about jail. I was thinking we were supposed to love each other.”
“So you decided to kill her.”
“No, I didn’t kill her.”
“You had nothing to lose anymore…”
“No…”
“So you went back to the apartment…”
“No, I didn’t. I never left the office. I. sent out for a sandwich and a bottle of beer…”
“When? What time?”
“Around six.”
“It was delivered at six?”
“Six-fifteen, six-twenty.”
“Who delivered it?”
“Some black kid. I ordered it from a deli on the Stem.”
“Name of the deli?”
“I have it in the office. On one of those menus they slide under the door.”
“But you don’t know the name of the deli offhand.”
“I don’t.”
“How about the kid who delivered your order? Know him?”
“By sight.”
“You don’t know his name?”
“No.”
“And you say he delivered your sandwich and beer…”
“And some fries.”
“… and some fries at six-fifteen, six-twenty.”
“Yes, around then.”
“Then what?”
“I ate.”
“Then what?”
“I went to sleep.”
“You went home to sleep?”
“No. I slept in the office.”
“Anyone see you sleeping there?”
“No. But I was there when Lizzie came in this morning. My secretary. Elizabeth Campieri.”
“Found you sleeping, did she?”
“No, I was awake by then.”
“Is there anyone who can say with certainty that you were in that office all last night?”
“No, but…”
“Is there anyone who can say with certainty that you didn’t leave the office after your sandwich was delivered at six-twenty, and go to Michelle Cassidy’s apartment, and open the several locks with your keys, and stab…”