“Ms. Royce, you spoke a minute ago about the structure of your relationship with Mr. Childress. How would you define that structure?”
“Mm. Yes. Please call me Patricia. The only person who gets formal with me is the loan officer at my bank, and I don’t want to be reminded of him. I know it sounds like a newspaper gossip-column cliché, but Charles and I truly were good friends — nothing more. We first met years ago, lord, it’s been almost ten now, at a writers’ workshop up in Vermont. We hit it off immediately. We found we admired the same authors — and disliked the same ones, too. Back here in New York, we ended up growing into sort of a two-person support group, encouraging each other, propping each other up when the rejection slips came in. And they did, for both of us, before we started getting published. And we’ve bounced ideas off each other, and passed manuscripts back and forth for help in improving them. We were always comfortable together.”
“But there was no romantic aspect?”
She almost smiled. “Mr. Goodwin, have you ever been married?”
“First off, I feel the same way you do about nominatives of address. My handle of first choice is Archie, and I implore you to use it. Second, no, I have never taken that walk down the aisle. Why?”
“My guess is you have one or more close woman friends. Am I correct?”
I nodded. “You are, and I think I see where you’re headed.”
Now she really did smile, which was a welcome sight. “I’m sure you do, Archie. How often do you get asked, ‘When are you going to marry so-and-so?’ ”
“It has happened more times than I have thumbs.”
“Like you, I never have been married, although I was close on one occasion, and even now, more than eleven years later, I don’t know whether or not I’m sorry I backed out of it. But I do know it is possible to have a close relationship with a man without sex being its lodestar. I realize Debra Mitchell saw me as a threat to her relationship with Charles, but she needn’t have. Debra’s greatest enemy was her own personality.”
“Uh-huh. I gather you have a book of your own in the works right now?”
Her whole body sagged, and she shook her head. “I did — about half of a manuscript of a novel set in Scotland at the time of the last Stuart uprising, at Culloden. But, after... after... what happened, I couldn’t stand to even look at the stupid thing anymore. Everything in it reminded me of him, because I’d done so much of the work at his apartment.”
“So now it’s on hold?”
“Now it’s as dead as the House of Stuart,” she murmured. “I destroyed the disk. It’s gone — completely.”
“How does your publisher feel about that?”
She turned her palms up. “I haven’t told them about it, but of course I’ll have to. They weren’t expecting anything until the fall anyway, and my editor had never seen even a sample.”
“Seems like a shame. Patricia, can you think of anyone who might have wanted to kill Childress? Or who would have profited in any way from his death?”
She shook her head vigorously. “No! And that’s why I can’t believe he was murdered. Mr. — Archie, Charles shot himself, it’s that simple. I know that doesn’t make it any less tragic than murder. But he had tried suicide one other time years ago after what he called his ‘Great American Novel’ got rejected by the seventh or eighth publisher. He turned on his gas stove and — well, a neighbor smelled the gas, and the building super came in just in time. Charles was in therapy for a long time after, but in all the years that I’ve known him since then, he never went more than a few months without slipping into some sort of very deep depression. He was a very creative, very troubled spirit.”
“I understand he had no close relatives.”
“Just an aunt or two and a cousin out in Indiana. He came from a place called Mercer. His mother died about two years back. I remember it because he was there with her for a long time, six months or more, while she lingered. He was different when he returned to New York.”
“In what way?”
She closed her eyes tightly and started rocking again, then blinked awake. “Oh, older, I guess, or more world-weary. Maybe that’s to be expected when the person closest to you dies. He was an only child, and his father had been dead for years, so he had to bear the whole strain while his mother slowly slipped away.” She shuddered. “Sorry, I didn’t mean to go and get morbid on you. It’s just that Charles never seemed the same after that; he quit laughing and smiling almost entirely.”
I’ll bet you don’t do a lot of either yourself, I thought as I looked at her, wondering how many times she’d been in therapy herself. “You mentioned that Childress had given you a key to his apartment. Speaking of keys, does this one look familiar?” I pulled out my newfound brass acquisition.
“No... no, I don’t think so,” she answered, taking it from my palm and peering at it. “Should it?”
“Not necessarily. Well, thanks for the time you’ve given me. If you think of anything that would be helpful, here’s my card. Oh, and one more thing,” I said, trying to make it sound like an afterthought, as I rose from a chair that should be tossed on the nearest New York City dump.
“Yes?”
“For the record, where were you a week ago Tuesday before you went to Childress’s apartment — say from about noon on?”
“I’ve been expecting you to ask me that.” Patricia Royce, too, stood. Her sandy head came just up to my shoulders. “I was here all day, until I walked over to Charles’s place. Your next question, of course, is, ‘Did anyone see me during that time?’ And the answer is no, other than passersby on the street during my three-block walk, none of whom I knew.
“If that makes me a suspect in your eyes, so be it. I’m afraid I haven’t been very helpful, Mr. Archie Goodwin, and I guess I can’t be, at least if your goal still is to show that Charles died by any hand but his own.”
Okay, maybe she wasn’t the life of the party, but the woman did have a way with words. I thanked her again and we shook hands, but her dark blue eyes never met mine. If we didn’t part as friends, we weren’t enemies, or at least I didn’t feel we were. After she closed her door, I lingered in the hallway long enough to determine that the lock on her apartment door was not a match for the mystery key.
Six
It was a little after two when I got back to the brownstone, which meant Wolfe was still in the dining room consuming flounder poached in white wine. I wasn’t about to interrupt him in mid-meal, but I wasn’t about to pass on Fritz’s flounder, either, so I marched directly to the kitchen.
“Archie, I kept a plate warm for you,” he said, popping up from the high stool where he was reading one of his German-language magazines.
“I was hoping you’d say that,” I told him, getting milk from the refrigerator and filling a glass. “Any calls while I was gone?”
“Mr. Cohen, at ten-fifteen — he sounded irritated, but he didn’t leave a message. And Mr. Horace Vinson, at ten-twenty-five. He wanted to know if we had received his check, and I told him we had.” Although Fritz did not know the amount of the check that had been delivered to our door that morning, he now had that cheerful “there’s-money-in-the-bank-again” lilt to his voice. He was dying to ask me how things were going, but he didn’t, and I didn’t volunteer anything. I was too busy concentrating on the plate of flounder that he had just set in front of me.
After polishing off two helpings plus a dish of papaya custard, I carried coffee into the office, where Wolfe had settled in with beer and a fresh book, Dreadnought, by Robert K. Massie.
“Have you eaten?” he asked peevishly.