He bent over the dead woman now and raised one of the eyelids he had closed before, peering at the cold blue eye it revealed. Then he lowered the lid again. There were two doors at one side of the bedroom. Masuto went to them now. One led to a bathroom, where tile and sink and tub were in varying shades of pink. The other door opened on an enormous walk-in closet.
Masuto flicked on the closet light, staring at the racks of dresses, slacks, and evening gowns. One entire wall of the closet was devoted to a shoe rack, holding at least a hundred pairs of shoes and, at the bottom, four pairs of riding boots. He then went through the racks and finally found, not on the racks, but carefully folded on a shelf behind the dresses, six pairs of whipcord breeches. What this added up to, Masuto could not for the life of him imagine. Possibly nothing. Possibly she liked to ride. In the detective stories he read occasionally, everything pointed in a specific direction. But here were things most curious that pointed nowhere.
7
“You don’t need me,” Dr. Baxter said sourly. “I don’t have to dance attendance on every corpse you clowns turn up. I was in the middle of my dinner-”
“It’s ten o’clock,” Wainwright said apologetically.
“Civilized people eat late, and if you think I’m going to spend all night doing an autopsy, you’re crazy. I’ll get at it in the morning.”
“All we want to know,” Wainwright begged him, “is why she died.”
“Because her heart stopped. It causes death.”
“Come on, Doc, be reasonable.”
“Are you reasonable? What do you think they pay me to be medical examiner for this silly town of demented millionaires. All right, you want to know what she died of? I’ll tell you what she didn’t die of. She didn’t die of an over-dose of heroin, if that’s what you’re thinking. She’s not a user.”
“Was she murdered?”
“How the hell do I know whether she was murdered? I’m not a cop, and I can’t read the minds of the dead. When I cut her up, I’ll tell you what I find.”
“You can take her away,” Wainwright told the stretcher bearers. They left the bedroom with the body, Baxter stalking after them.
“He’s a doll,” Beckman observed. “He’s just a sweet, good-natured doll.”
Sweeney, glancing up from his search for fingerprints, blamed it on Baxter’s profession. “You do that kind of work, it’s got to show.”
The photographer was still working his flashbulbs. “The body’s gone,” Wainwright said tiredly. “That’s enough. Take what you got back to the station and develop it.”
“I don’t know how the word gets around. Maybe it’s ESP,” Beckman said. “But there’s two TV crews outside and four or five reporters. Someone’s got to talk to them.”
“I’ll talk to them. Just tell them to wait and be patient.” Beckman left the bedroom. Wainwright slumped down on the chaise and said to Masuto, “What makes you so damn sure she was murdered?”
“It had to be. Only I didn’t have enough sense to realize it.”
“I don’t know what in hell you’re talking about, Masao, but I know one thing. This afternoon you told me you knew who killed Mike Barton. No more games. I want the name.”
“All right. But it doesn’t finish anything. Angel Barton killed her husband-but only in a legal sense. She was with a man, and the man pulled the trigger. Of course, she was part of it. They planned the thing together. And the stakes were high-one million dollars in cold cash, and if it worked, anything she was entitled to in his will.” Masuto reached into his pocket and took out the gun he had wrapped in his handkerchief. “Here’s the gun that killed Mike Barton.”
Wainwright stared at it speechless. Sweeney came over, lifted the little pistol carefully by its trigger guard, and examined it in the light of a lamp.
“As lovely a set of prints as I’ve ever seen.”
“Where did you get it?” Wainwright demanded.
“Over there-in her dressing table. Where the killer had placed it after he finished with Angel. The prints are excellent. He put them on the gun after Angel was dead, pressing her fingers to it.”
“And how did he kill her?”
“I don’t think we’ll ever know that. My guess is that he knocked her out with something, perhaps ether, and then he injected her vein with air. I don’t know whether that can be proven in an autopsy. They may find traces of something in the syringe. He was desperate and in a hurry, and I guess he decided to make it look like suicide. It was a stupid, witless crime from the moment it started this morning.”
“Yeah, when it’s not stupid, we don’t even know that a crime took place. I guess you’re right about the gun, but we’ll let Ballistics decide. You said this morning, you think the whole kidnap caper was a rigged job?”
“A kid’s job. I think the husband, Mike Barton, was in on it, and then his Angel double-crossed him and brought someone else into it. Or maybe the whole thing started with the killer. I couldn’t make any sense out of the kidnap thing until I spoke to a cousin of mine who’s an expert on legal ways to cheat Internal Revenue, and he said that there would have been a big tax break for Barton.”
“Except that from what I hear, neither Barton nor the Angel were smart enough to figure it out.”
“Exactly. There’s another small matter,” Masuto said. “The killer is right here in this house.”
“You’re sure?”
“Very sure. No one came in when it was done, no one left.”
“That’s beautiful.” Wainwright rose and began to pace the room. “Pink and white, pink and white, she must have really seen herself as some goddamn kind of angel. They don’t want a cop for my job, they want a diplomat. Downstairs, we only got one of the most prominent lawyers in town, a top film producer, a hotshot business manager, and a congressman. Plus a chauffeur with a record long as my arm.”
“Not to mention a number of women who are probably a lot smarter than the men.”
“And a fed. That kid from the FBI pushed his way in and started bugging me about what was his role in all this. I told him how the hell did I know what his role was? He’s a goddamn idiot. He’s got a notion that the Mafia is mixed up in it because he heard we found a syringe in here.”
“Is he still here?”
“Prowling around downstairs. I can’t throw him out. We’ve had too many run-ins with the feds.”
“We’ll both be very kind to him.”
They had their opportunity almost immediately. As they went downstairs from the second floor of the Barton house, they saw Frank Keller waiting for them at the foot of the staircase, his pink-cheeked, snub-nosed face set in a grimace of determination. He was wearing a carefully pressed gray flannel suit, a white shirt, and a tie with brown and maroon stripes. Masuto, who wore an old brown tweed jacket over rumpled trousers and a tieless shirt, had once been asked by another FBI man whether he always dressed that way or only when in disguise.
“I’ve been trying to work out my role here,” Keller said. “I don’t want to push in like a bull in a china shop.”
“That’s very considerate of you,” Masuto agreed.
“On the other hand, there’s been a kidnapping, even though both the victim and the ransom payer are dead. You know, it’s a national tragedy. I don’t think anything quite like this ever happened before. You think of Mike Barton and you think of Robert Redford, Al Pacino, John Wayne-although I don’t think it would have happened to John Wayne in just this manner.”
“I guess not,” Masuto agreed.
“Of course, the murders are a local matter, if murder is the correct term?”
“We think Angel Barton was murdered,” Wainwright told him. “We won’t know for certain until after the autopsy. We found a syringe and a puncture mark-which is all we know for sure.”