“The landlady. Your landlady?”
“She was in love with him. And he rejected her, you see.”
“A woman scorned, eh?” he said, leaning back. “Once saw a jilted lady over on Cheremoya take a clothes iron to her fellow’s face while he slept.”
“Look at this,” Penny said, pulling Mrs. Stahl’s little red book from her purse.
“Gaudy Night,” he said, pronouncing the first word in a funny way.
“I think it’s a dirty book.”
He looked at her, squinting. “My wife owns this book.”
Penny didn’t say anything.
“Have you even read it?” he asked wearily.
Opening the front to the inscription, she held it in front of him.
“ ‘Dirty murderess.’ ” He shrugged. “So you’re saying this fella knew she was going to kill him, and instead of going to, say, the police, he writes this little inscription, then lets himself get killed?”
Everything sounded so different when he said it aloud, different from the way everything joined in perfect and horrible symmetry in her head.
“I don’t know how it happened. Maybe he was going to go to the police and she beat him to it. And I don’t know how she did it,” Penny said. “But she’s dangerous, don’t you get it?”
It was clear he did not.
“I’m telling you, I see her out there at night, doing things,” Penny said, her breath coming faster and faster. “She’s doing something with the natural gas. If you check the gas jets maybe you can figure it out.”
She was aware that she was talking very loudly, and her chest felt damp. Lowering her voice, she leaned toward him.
“I think there might be a clue in my oven,” she said.
“Do you?” he said, rubbing his chin. “Any little men in there?”
“It’s not like that. It’s not. I see them, yes.” She couldn’t look him in the eye or she would lose her nerve. “But I know they’re not really little men. It’s something she’s doing. It always starts at two. Two a.m. She’s doing something. She did it to Larry and she’s doing it to me.”
He was rubbing his face with his hand, and she knew she had lost him.
“I told you on the phone,” she said, more desperately now. “I think she drugged me. I brought the cup.”
Penny reached into her purse again, this time removing the teacup, its bottom still brown-ringed.
Detective Noble lifted it, took a sniff, set it down.
“Drugged you with Old Grandad, eh?”
“I know there’s booze in it. But detective, there’s more than booze going on here.” Again her voice rose high and sharp, and other detectives seemed to be watching now from their desks.
But Noble seemed unfazed. There even seemed to be the flicker of a smile on his clean-shaven face.
“So why does she want to harm you?” he asked. “Is she in love with you too?”
Penny looked at him and counted quietly in her head, the dampness on her chest gathering.
She had been dealing with men like this her whole life. Smug men. Men with fine clothes or shabby ones, all with the same slick ideas, the same impatience, big voice, slap-and-tickle, fast with a backhanded slug. Nice turned to nasty on a dime.
“Detective,” she said, taking it slowly, “Mrs. Stahl must suspect that I know. About what she did to Larry. I don’t know if she drugged him and staged it. The hunting knife shows there was a struggle. What I do know is there’s more than what’s in your little file.”
He nodded, leaning back in his chair once more. With his right arm he reached for another folder in the metal tray on his desk.
“Miss, can we talk for a minute about your file?”
“My file?”
“When you called, I checked your name. S.O.P. Do you want to tell me about the letters you’ve been sending to a certain address in Holmby Hills?”
“What? I... There was only one.”
“And two years ago, the fellow over at MCA? Said you slashed his tires?”
“I was never charged.”
Penny would never speak about that, or what that man had tried to do to her in a back booth at Chasen’s.
He set the file down. “Miss, what exactly are you here for? You got a gripe with Mrs. Stahl? Hey, I don’t like my landlord either. What, don’t wanna pay the rent?”
A wave of exhaustion shuddered through Penny. For a moment she did not know if she could stand.
But there was Larry to think about. And how much she belonged in Number Four. Because she did, and it had marked the beginning of things. A new day for Penny.
“No,” Penny said, rising. “That’s not it. You’ll see. You’ll see. I’ll show you.”
“Miss,” he said, calling after her. “Please don’t show me anything. Just behave yourself, okay? Like a good girl.”
Back at Number Four, Penny lay down on the rattan sofa, trying to breathe, to think.
Pulling Mrs. Stahl’s book from her dress pocket, she began reading.
But it wasn’t like she thought.
It wasn’t dirty, not like the brown-papered ones. It was a detective novel, and it took place in England. A woman recently exonerated for poisoning her lover attends her school reunion. While there, she finds an anonymous poison-pen note tucked in the sleeve of her gown: “You Dirty Murderess...!”
Penny gasped. But then wondered: Had that inscription just been a wink, Larry to Mrs. Stahl?
He gave her books she liked, Benny had said. Stiff British stuff that he could tease her about.
Was that all this was, all the inscription had meant?
No, she assured herself, sliding the book back into her pocket. It’s a red herring. To confuse me, to keep me from finding the truth. Larry needs me to find out the truth.
It was shortly after that she heard the click of her mail slot. Looking over, she saw a piece of paper slip through the slit and land on the entryway floor.
Walking over, she picked it up.
Bungalow Four:
You are past due.
“I have to move anyway,” she told Benny, showing him the note.
“No, kid, why?” he whispered. Mr. Flant was sleeping in the bedroom, the gentle whistle of his snore.
“I can’t prove she’s doing it,” Penny said. “But it smells like a gas chamber in there.”
“Listen, don’t let her spook you,” Benny said. “I bet the pilot light is out. Want me to take a look? I can come by later.”
“Can you come now?”
Looking into the darkened bedroom, Benny smiled, patted her forearm. “I don’t mind.”
Stripped to his undershirt, Benny ducked under the bath towel Penny had hung over the kitchen door.
“I thought you were inviting me over to keep your bed warm,” he said as he kneeled down on the linoleum.
The familiar noise started, the tick-tick-tick.
“Do you hear it?” Penny said, voice tight. Except the sound was different in the kitchen than in the bedroom. It was closer. Not inside the walls but everywhere.
“It’s the igniter,” Benny said. “Trying to light the gas.”
Peering behind the towel, Penny watched him.
“But you smell it, right?” she said.
“Of course I smell it,” he said, his voice strangely high. “God, it’s awful.”
He put his face to the baseboards, the sink, the shuddering refrigerator.
“What’s this?” he said, tugging the oven forward, his arms straining.
He was touching the wall behind the oven, but Penny couldn’t see.
“What’s what?” she asked. “Did you find something?”