“Thanks for backing up Tom,” she said abruptly.
I glanced up, trying to read the round freckled face. All I could see was reluctance. Jenny didn’t like feeling beholden.
“Just told the truth,” I said, dumping the butts into the garbage bag and wiping out the ashtray. I replaced it with a little clunk on the bedside table. I spied a pencil on the floor, stooped to pick it up, and dropped it in the drawer of the bedside table.
“I know Tom’s story sounded a little funny,” Jenny said tentatively, as though she was waiting for my reaction.
“Not to me,” I said crisply. I scanned the bedroom, couldn’t spot anything I’d missed, and started out the door to the second bedroom, which the O’Hagens had fitted up as an office. Jenny stepped back to let me pass.
I’d tucked the corner of the dust cloth into my belt as I finished the bedroom. Now I whipped it out and began dusting the office. To my surprise, Jenny followed me. I glanced at my watch and kept on working. I was due at the Winthrops’ by one, and I wanted to have something for lunch before I got there.
The glance wasn’t lost on Jenny. “Keep right on working,” she said invitingly, as though I wasn’t already. “I just wanted you to know we appreciate your remembering correctly. Tom was relieved he didn’t have to answer any more questions.”
One had occurred to me during the morning. In the normal course of things, it wouldn’t have crossed my mind to ask Jenny, but I was fed up with Jenny alternately ignoring me and following me around.
“So, did the police ask him what he was doing coming down the stairs from the other apartments, when he lives on the ground level?” I asked. I had my back to Jenny, but I heard a sharp intake of breath that signaled shock.
“Yes, Claude did, just now,” Jenny said. “He wanted to ask Tom about that, since Tom hadn’t mentioned that earlier.”
I could see why Claude Friedrich would think of asking, since his own apartment was on the second floor, opposite Norvel Whitbread’s.
“And what did Tom say?”
“None of your business,” flashed Jenny.
Now, this was the familiar Jenny O’Hagen.
“Guess not,” I said. I ran the dust cloth over the metal parts of the rolling chair behind the desk.
“Well…” Jenny trailed off, then turned and marched into her bedroom, closing the door behind her firmly.
She emerged just as I finished cleaning-which I did not exactly consider a coincidence-clad in a bright green camp shirt and gray slacks.
“It looks great, Lily,” Jenny said without looking around. So she’d reverted to the new Jenny. I preferred the familiar rude Jenny; at least then I knew where I stood.
“Um-hm. You want to write me a check now, or mail it to me?”
“Here’s the money in cash.”
“Okay.” I wrote a receipt, tucked the money in my pocket, and turned to leave.
I could feel Jenny moving up behind me, and I spun quickly, to discover she was much closer.
“It’s okay!” Jenny said hastily, backing up. “I just wanted to tell you that Tom wasn’t doing anything wrong on the second floor, okay? He was up there, but it was okay.” To my amazement, Jenny looked red around the eyes and nose, as though she was about to cry.
I hoped that Jenny wouldn’t actually weep; I would not pat Jenny O’Hagen on the back.
Evidently, Jenny felt the same way. “See you next week,” she said in a clogged voice.
I shrugged, picked up my caddy of cleaning materials, and left. “Good-bye,” I said over my shoulder, to prove I was not uncivil.
I’d closed the door briskly behind me as if I intended to leave the building at my usual clip. But I stopped and looked up and down the hall. There was no one in sight; I could hear no movement in the building. It was about noon on a Friday, and aside from the Yorks and Mrs. Hofstettler, everyone should be at work.
It had occurred to me that the closet under the stairs (where Pardon kept odds and ends like extra lightbulbs and the heavy-duty vacuum for the halls) would have been an excellent temporary resting place for Pardon’s wandering corpse.
And it just so happened I had a key.
Pardon himself had given it to me three years before, when he’d taken the only vacation I could remember. He’d gone to Cancun with a bus tour made up mostly of other Shakespeareans. While he’d been gone, I’d had the job of cleaning the halls and the glass panels in the back door, making sure the parking lot was clear of garbage, and channeling all the residents’ complaints to the proper repairman. Pardon had given me the key then, and he had never asked for its return, perhaps anticipating more package tours in his future.
But all his fussing about his health had proved to have some basis, finally, when a specialist in Little Rock had told Pardon his heart actually had some small problem. Pardon had sworn off tours forever, for fear he’d have some kind of crisis in a foreign place, and he never tired of showing people his Canciin photos and telling them of his near brush with death.
I’d marked all the keys entrusted to me with my own code. If they were stolen, I didn’t want the thief to be able to get into my clients’ homes and offices. The code I used was not sophisticated: I just went down to the next letter of the alphabet, so the key to the closet of Shakespeare Garden Apartments had a little strip of masking tape on it with the initials THB in heavy black ink.
I tossed my key ring up and caught it with my right hand while I debated whether to look or not.
Yes, I decided.
The disappearance and reappearance of Pardon’s body, and its ultimate disposal in the park via my cart, had opened a vein of curiosity and anger in me. For one thing, it revealed unexpected depths in one of the people I saw often-for I didn’t think it possible that the killer could be someone other than an apartment resident.
I didn’t know I’d reached that conclusion until I had the key in the lock and was turning it.
I looked inside the large closet. It opens facing the hallway, and since it conforms to the rise of the staircase, it is much higher at the left end than the right. I reached up for the long string that hangs down from the bare bulb overhead. Just as my hand touched it, a voice spoke behind me.
“What you looking for, Miss Lily?”
I gasped involuntarily, but in a second, I recognized the voice. I turned around to face Claude Friedrich.
“Anything I can help you with?” he continued as I looked up, trying to read the broad face.
“God Almighty, where were you?” I asked ferociously, angry at myself that I hadn’t heard him, angry at him for the fear he’d made me feel.
“In Pardon’s apartment.”
“Just skulking?”
I was not going to be able to provoke him into anger so he’d forget to ask me again, I saw.
“Examining the scene of the crime,” he said genially. “And wondering, as I suspect you are, how come one person sees a body on the couch at four-thirty after someone else saw an empty couch at three o’clock, though at three o’clock the apartment looked like someone’d had a fight.”
“Pardon could’ve survived for a while,” I said, surprising myself by simply telling the policeman what was on my mind.
He looked equally surprised, and rather pleased.
“Yes, indeed, if it’d been another kind of wound.” Friedrich nodded his head of thick graying hair slowly. “But with that blow to the neck, he would have suffocated pretty quick.”
And he looked down at my hands, empty now, since I’d put down the cleaning caddy when I opened the door. My hands looked thin and bony and strong.
“I could have killed him,” I said, “but I didn’t. I had no reason to.”
“What if Pardon had said he was going to spread the story of your bad time all over town?”
“He didn’t know.” I’d come to that conclusion early this morning. “You know what Pardon was like. He loved knowing all about everyone, and he’d bust a gut to tell whoever it was that he’d found out something about them. He’d have loved to sympathize with me about what happened. No one knew until you called Memphis and left that report lying around.” That was something else I’d have to do on my own-find out who in the police department had been talking, and to whom. I thought it quite likely that whoever had planted the cuffs and gun on the Drinkwaters’ stairs had learned the significance of those items from a loose-mouthed police department employee.