“Neither would I.”
“Huh?”
“What I thought,” I said, “was that she and Luke were having an affair, and that they were going at it when Harlan stuck his key in the door. But wouldn’t they have been in the master bedroom? And if so, wouldn’t Luke have gone in the other bathroom?”
“Unless they started out posing, and one thing led to another, and they got carried away.”
“Or unless she had some compunctions about committing adultery in the very bed she shared with her husband. Still, it became clear that she didn’t have a clue how that corpse wound up in her bathroom. And Luke had a whole storehouse of pills in his apartment, and she had the abstracted air of someone who just might have ingested a mood-altering substance sometime or other in the course of her life, and it all came together.”
“What a scumbag Luke must have been.”
“Well, I don’t think he was ever on the short list for the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award,” I said, “but he wasn’t here to give us his side of the story, either. The incident came out sounding like the next best thing to necrophilia, but maybe it didn’t start out that way. Maybe he got her stoned and they started necking, and she took off her clothes and they were, uh, embracing, and then the full force of the drug kicked in and she slipped out of consciousness.”
“And it didn’t occur to him to stop? I suppose he thought she was English. Believe me, Bern, the man was an insect. Look how he betrayed Doll Cooper. She left Marty’s cards with him, and he lifted them out from under her.”
“That was me, Carolyn. The attaché case full of cards was still under the bed when Luke got shot upstairs.”
“Oh, right,” she said. “So you’re the insect.”
“I guess so.”
“There was something else I was wondering about. Oh, right. The gun. Couldn’t they ever recover it?”
“From a storm drain? Have you got any idea how many guns get tossed down storm drains?”
“Lots, huh?”
“Put it this way,” I said. “If there really are alligators in the New York sewers, half of them are armed. Want to get rid of a gun? Just slip it down a storm drain. It’s like hiding a needle in a haystack.”
“I’d never hide a needle in a haystack,” she said. “It’s the first place they would look. Bern, why didn’t he leave the gun with Luke? I know he couldn’t get his arm through, but what if he tossed the gun so it landed in the tub?”
“And it would look like suicide.”
“Right.”
“Except it wouldn’t,” I said. “Not if you looked closely. Even if he managed to get his own prints off the gun, how was he going to get Luke’s on it? And if they ran a paraffin test on Luke they wouldn’t find any nitrate particles on his hand, nothing to indicate he’d fired a gun.”
“Oh.”
“I don’t know what kind of gun it was, so I can’t say whether it would have fit through the hole. Even if it would, if I’d just shot a guy and he’d fallen where I couldn’t get a good look at him and I had no way of knowing for sure whether he was alive or dead, I don’t think I’d be in a big rush to throw him a loaded gun.”
“I guess it was a bad idea,” she said. “Oh, well. Gotta drink up and go, Bern.”
“Already?”
“Got a date.”
“Oh? Anybody I know?”
“It’s no big deal,” she said defensively. “Just a quick drink, a little conversation.”
“That’s how Borden Stoppelgard described his pursuit of Doll.” I looked at her. “It is somebody I know, isn’t it? Who is it, Carolyn?”
“Somebody I just met the other night.”
“Not Doll,” I said. “It can’t be.”
“Jesus, no. Marty would kill me.”
“He did seem quite taken with her, now that you mention it. Considering that she stole his baseball cards. Well, he’s a patron of the theater. Maybe he’ll wind up taking a fatherly interest in her career.”
“Or a sugar daddily interest, Bern. Anyway, she’s not my type.”
“Not Patience. Joan Nugent? What are you going to do, have her paint a portrait of you in a clown suit?”
“Nice, Bern.”
“Well—”
“As a matter of fact,” she said, “it’s Lolly Stoppelgard.”
“Lolly Stoppelgard.”
“Didn’t you think she was nice?”
“Very nice, but—”
“But she’s married. That’s what you were going to say, isn’t it?”
“Something like that.”
“You didn’t see the looks she was giving me, Bern.”
“No, that’s true.”
“And you didn’t hear what she said to me on the way downstairs. ‘Call me,’ she said.”
“So you called her.”
“Uh-huh, and in the long run I’ll get my heart broken, but that’s what hearts are for, and mine’s getting used to it. She’s really nice, isn’t she? Pretty and sharp and funny.”
“It’s a shame to think of all that wasted on Borden Stoppelgard.”
“Well, I look at it this way,” she said. “I figure he’ll be an easy act to follow.”
CHAPTER Twenty-four
A day or two later I was on the phone with Wally Hemphill when the front door opened. “That’s great,” I told my lawyer. “So I’ll see you then. Listen, I’ve got to go now, I’ve got a customer.”
It was Borden Stoppelgard.
“I got your message,” he said, “and I’d have to say you’ve got your nerve, asking me to stop by. That was some little show you put on the other night. By the time we got out of there, my marriage was hanging by a thread.”
“I’m sorry about that.”
“Well, it’s all right now. Things blow over, you know? She’s a lot calmer the past couple of days. Now what’s this item you got that I might be interested in? Early Sue Grafton? Marcia Muller? What?”
I took an acetate-wrapped card from my breast pocket and laid it on the counter.
“You know,” he said, “when you talked about finding the Chalmers Mustard card in that schmuck Santangelo’s apartment, I wanted to ask whatever became of it, whether you or Wendy wound up with it. But it didn’t seem like the right time or place.”
“Probably not.”
“So you want to sell it? ‘A Stand-up Triple!’—right? That’s one of the later ones, so it’s worth a few bucks. What do you want for it?”
“Take a closer look, Mr. Stoppelgard.”
“Jesus Christ,” he said. “ ‘That Home Run Swing.’ Card #40. This is the key card of the whole set. Where the hell did you get this?” Even as I was plucking the card from his fingers, light dawned. “I’ll be a son of a bitch,” he said. “You got Marty’s cards!”
“It looks that way,” I admitted. “So now all you have to do is draw up that lease we talked about, the one that gives me a thirty-year extension at the current rent.”
“Shit.”
“What’s the matter?”
“Oh, hell. This is embarrassing, all right? I sold the building.”
“What?”
“When you’re in the real estate game,” he said, “you don’t marry buildings, you just buy and sell them. Anything’s on the block if the price is right. A few days ago I got an offer that was too good to turn down. So I took it.”
“But—”
“You should be getting a notice in the mail, where to send the check every month and like that. Your new landlord’s something called Poulson Realty. They’ll be in touch.”
“I hope they like baseball cards.”
“Maybe they won’t even notice the lease is ready to expire,” he said, which didn’t strike me as very likely. “Or maybe they’ll give you a break in order to keep the space rented to somebody reliable. Of course, the way they came to me and sought out the building, my guess is they want the space for their own purposes. But you’re a resourceful guy. You can work something out.”