When I came back around to the front two uniformed patrolmen, a uniformed officer in captain’s braid, a civilian carrying a doctor’s satchel, and another civilian with photographic equipment and a field lab kit were being met by the security guy. I walked over and joined them.
The captain, whose name turned out to be Orloff, asked me, “You’re the private detective? The man who found the body?”
“That’s right.” I relinquished the.25 caliber Beretta, saying that I had only handled it by the barrel. Not that it would have mattered if I had taken it by the grip; if there were any fingerprints on it, they would belong to Lauren Speers.
“It was just after the shooting that you arrived?” Orloff asked.
“Not exactly. I was in the vicinity before the shooting. I broke inside after I heard the shot- not much more than a minute afterward.”
“So you didn’t actually see the woman shoot her secretary.”
“No. But I wouldn’t have seen that if I’d been inside when it happened. Ms. Speers didn’t kill Bernice Dolan.”
“What? Then who did?”
“The man standing right over there,” I said. “Joe Craig.”
TEN
There was one of those sudden electric silences. Both Craig and Lauren Speers were near enough to hear what I’d said; he stiffened and gaped at me, and she came up out of her chair on the porch. Craig’s face tried to arrange itself into an expression of innocent disbelief, but he was not much of an actor; if this had been a Hollywood screen test, he would have flunked it hands down.
He said, “What the hell kind of crazy accusation is that?” Which was better-more conviction- but in my ears it still sounded false.
His guilt was not so obvious to Orloff or any of the others. They kept looking from Craig to me as if trying to decide whom to believe. But I was on pretty firm ground; I would not have accused Craig publicly unless I thought so. The fear I’d felt earlier was gone. The Hornback murder still had me wrapped up in the middle, but this one, at least, was going to be resolved in a hurry.
The security guy said, “How could Joe be guilty? The balcony door and each of the windows are locked from the inside; you said so yourself. You also said there was no one else in the cottage except Ms. Speers and the dead woman when you broke in.”
“That’s right,” I said. “But Craig wasn’t in the cottage when he shot Bernice Dolan. And everything wasn’t locked up tight, either.”
Craig said, “Don’t listen to him, he doesn’t know what he’s talking about-”
“The living room smells of gin,” I said to the security guy. “You must have noticed that when you were in there, ft smelled just the same when I first went in. But if you fire a handgun in a closed room, you get the smell of cordite. No cordite odor means the gun was fired outside the room.”
“That’s true enough,” Orloff said. “Go on.”
“I’d been here less than ten minutes when Craig showed up. He claimed he’d come to keep a tennis date with Ms. Speers. But the parking lot attendant told me earlier that she drinks her lunch every day and then comes here to sleep it off until Happy Hour at four o’clock. People on that kind of heavy-drinking schedule don’t make dates to go play tennis at three.”
That also made sense to Orloff and the others; a couple of them cast sidelong glances at Craig.
“He said something else, too-much more damning. When I asked him if he knew the dead woman, he identified her as Bernice Dolan. Then he said, ‘Did Ms. Speers do that to her? Shoot her like that?’ But I didn’t say anything about hearing a gunshot until later, — and the way the body is crumpled on the rug, with one arm flung over the chest, all you can see is blood, not the type of wound. So how did he know she was shot? She could just as easily have been stabbed to death.”
There was not much bravado left in Craig; you could almost see him wilting, like an uprooted weed drying in the sun. “I assumed she was shot,” he said weakly. “I just… assumed it.”
Lauren Speers had come down off the porch and was staring at him. “Why?” she said. “For God’s sake, why?”
He shook his head at her. But I said. “For the money, that’s why. A hundred thousand dollars in extortion payoffs, at least some of which figures to be in his own cottage right now.”
That pushed Craig to the breaking point. He backpedaled a couple of steps and might have kept right on backing if one of the patrolmen hadn’t grabbed his arm.
Lauren Speers said, “I don’t understand. What extortion?”
“From those three men I asked you about a few minutes ago-Huddleston, Boyer, and Rykman. They figure prominently in the book you’re writing, don’t they? Large sections of it are devoted to them, sections that contain material either scandalous or criminal?”
“How do you know about that?”
“Craig told me; he was trying to make it seem like you had a motive for killing Bernice. And you told me when you said those three men were bastards and one of them was an out-and-out thief. This little piece of paper took care of the rest.”
I fished it out of my coat pocket again as I spoke, handed it to Orloff. He looked at it and then said, “What do all these numbers mean?”
“The first series after each name are page numbers-pages in the book manuscript, pages on which the most damaging material about that person appears. The numbers after the dash are the amounts extorted from each man.”
“Where did you get this?”
“It was on the floor between the couch and the coffee table. Right near where Ms. Speer’s bag was. I think that’s where it came from-out of the handbag.”
She said, “How could it have been in my bag?”
“Bernice put it there. While she was out impersonating you this afternoon.”
Now everybody looked bewildered. Except Craig, of course; he only looked trapped and sick, much sicker than Lauren Speers had earlier.
“Impersonating me?” she said.
“That’s right. Wearing a red wig and your white coat, and carrying your bag. You didn’t go anywhere after lunch except back here to bed; it was Bernice who took your Porsche and left Xanadu. And it was Bernice who passed me in the cart, Bernice I saw enter the cottage a couple of minutes before she was shot.”
The security guy asked. “How can you be sure about that?”
“Because Bernice was left-handed.”
“I don’t see-”
“Ms. Speers is right-handed,” I said. “I could tell that a while ago when she started to pour from a decanter into a glass-decanter in her right hand, glass in her left. But the woman who got out of the cart carried the straw bag in her right hand, and when she got to the cottage door she used her left hand to take out the key and to open the door.”
Lauren Speers looked at the lock of her red hair, as if to make sure it was real. “Why would Bernice impersonate me?”
“She and Craig were in on the extortion scheme together, and it was part of the plan. They must have worked it something like this. As your secretary she had access to your book manuscript, your personal stationery, your signature, and no doubt your file of incriminating letters and documents. She also had access to your personal belongings and your car keys, particularly from one to four in the afternoons while you were sleeping. And she’d have known from your records how to contact Huddleston and the other two.
“So she and Craig wrote letters to each of them, on your stationery over your forged signature, demanding large sums of money to delete the material about them from your book and to return whatever documents concerned them; they prob ably also enclosed photocopies of the manuscript pages and the documents as proof. The idea was to keep themselves completely in the clear if the whole thing backfired. You’d get the blame in that case, not them.
“To maintain the illusion, Bernice had to pretend to be you when she collected the payoffs. I don’t know what sort of arrangements she and Craig made, but they wouldn’t have allowed any of the three men to deliver the money personally. An intermediary, maybe, someone who didn’t know you. Or maybe a prearranged drop site. In any event, Bernice always dressed as you at collection time.”