Prior started. He stared at Jake for several seconds and then smoothed his closely cropped hair with an absent gesture and smiled slightly. “Now what the hell do you mean by that, Jake?”
“I mean that you murdered May Laval and Dean Niccolo,” Jake said, easily. “Would you like to hear the details?”
Prior lit a cigarette and smiled again, and then he said, “Well, I guess you’d better explain yourself,” in a puzzled but unworried voice.
Chapter Fifteen
Prior lit the cigarette he had in his mouth and dropped the lighter into his vest pocket. “Jake, I hope you know what you’re doing,” he said.
“Don’t worry,” Jake said. “I know precisely what I’m doing. You murdered May because you feared the details of your long-ago affair with her might become public knowledge.”
He smiled without humor as color mounted suddenly in Prior’s face.
“Offhand,” Jake said, “I can’t think of a more embarrassing development in the career of a shining knight from the Hampstead Committee.”
Prior stared at Jake unseeingly and then put a hand to his forehead and sat down stiffly, like someone who had received without a warning a piece of shocking news. For an instant he seemed oblivious to everyone and everything in the room. And then he took his hand down and his features were hard, wary, appraising.
Jake glanced at Martin who nodded with finality.
“Yes,” Jake said. “That does it, I think.”
“But go on,” Martin said. “I’d like to hear it all.”
“Okay,” Jake said, and lit a cigarette. He sat on the arm of an overstuffed chair, and took Sheila’s hand. She squeezed his fingers with quick, intimate pressure, and he smiled at her before glancing back to Martin.
“The big thing of course was this: Prior came to me and said he had evidence of Riordan’s wartime peculations — evidence he claimed to have gotten from the Riordan Company’s official books and records. Prior had the details, including the name of the man who okayed the faulty barrels, Nickerson. I’m not certain why Prior did this, but my guess is he hoped to convince me there was no point in defending Riordan. You see, in the first exchange, we had made Prior look very bad, so bad, in fact, that Senator Hampstead had flown in and raised hell with him. Prior wanted to prevent that from happening again; and he thought it would slow me down to know that their case against Riordan was unassailable.
“But getting back to the main point: Prior’s information surprised me. Avery Meed had previously told me that the Riordan Company books were doctored by experts to hide what was going on. And yet Prior hadn’t been sidetracked or fooled. My first thought was that Meed had overestimated the astuteness of his accountants.
“Later that day I told Riordan what I’d learned from Prior. Riordan, of course, must have known instantly that Prior was on the right track; but Riordan didn’t tell me that. He did say, parenthetically, that Nickerson, the government inspector, had died. I imagine Riordan made up his mind then to convert as much of his holdings as he could into cash and clear out. He had just learned that his wife was untrue, and my information told him that Prior would soon be breathing down his neck. And so I’m sure he started planning right then to get out.”
Martin said, “It’s a good guess.”
“But it’s not important,” Jake said, “except as an interesting sidelight on life in America. The important thing was that I decided to pass on to Prior the news that Nickerson had died. I didn’t get hold of Prior — he was leaving the office with Hampstead when I arrived — but I talked to his assistant, Gil Coombs, who is an accountant in charge of digging through the Riordan records.
“But Coombs knew nothing of Prior’s information. The name Nickerson — supposedly gleaned from the Riordan Company records — meant absolutely nothing to him. He had to write it down on a piece of paper to make sure he wouldn’t forget it.
“The significance of that escaped me at the time. But it eventually dawned. Prior couldn’t have gotten his information from the Riordan Company records. If he had, Coombs would have known, too.
“Therefore Prior had lied. Secondly, I started to wonder where he had gotten his information. And that wasn’t too difficult to guess. May Laval’s diary, of course. Prior also lied about another thing. He said he didn’t know Chicago, but as Coombs told me he knew it well enough to act as a guide to its remotest joy spots.”
Jake put out his cigarette, glanced at Prior and then back to Martin. “You can see what that meant? Prior knew May well enough to look through her diary, or else he’d seen it at some time when she wasn’t around. Yet he had said he had never known or heard of May — obviously a flat lie.
“Now there were two questions to answer: One, when had he seen May’s diary; and two, where had he seen it? I started with the where. Well, undoubtedly, in May’s home. That’s where the diary was until Avery Meed got hold of it. It was unlikely that Prior had seen it after Meed got it, because Meed took it home and it was still there when Niccolo killed him. Niccolo had it until he mailed it to me, and the stuff he clipped from it that pertained to Riordan was in his apartment — so, there was just no way for Prior to have seen it after Meed got it. Therefore he saw the diary in May’s apartment some time before Meed arrived.
“That brought me to the when. Well, there was a Mr. X at May’s home early that morning. Gary Noble got there at two o’clock and she told him she was expecting a visitor at three. Now that visitor was gone when Meed arrived — and when Meed arrived May was dead.”
Martin said, “And you decided that Prior was Mr. X?”
“It was inevitable,” Jake said. “It was just a question of arithmetic. Also, Prior had made one more damaging slip. Talking to me he mentioned May’s red pajamas — an item he couldn’t have known about unless he’d been in her home that morning, at the time she was wearing the red Mandarin pajamas. I happen to remember she was wearing the red pajamas because Noble told me she was — but Prior’s knowledge had to, and did, come at first hand. He had been to her home; he had seen the diary some time between three and four, when Meed arrived and found May was dead. That’s when he saw May in the red Mandarin pajamas.”
“That’s why you borrowed Murphy, eh?” Martin said.
“Of course. The minute I saw the clips from the diary I knew I was right. There, in May’s handwriting, was the same story Prior had told, with Nickerson’s name and all the rest of it.
“And I also knew then that Prior had murdered Niccolo. Prior probably realized he’d made a mistake in telling me what he’d learned from May’s diary. Any minute I might wake up and ask myself: How did he know? It was imperative that he get the clips from the diary and destroy them. But he didn’t know where they were. Then Niccolo called him tonight with the hope of selling him the information. Prior told him to go to hell — and then got out there as fast as he could to get the clips and also put Niccolo out of the way. He shot Niccolo and started a search for the clips. And got scared off by the prospect of someone finding him on the scene.”
Jake lit another cigarette and blew out a stream of gray-blue smoke. The patrolman had released Denise and she was rubbing her arms and watching Jake closely. Brian still lay on the floor. Noble looked as if he wanted desperately to speak, but couldn’t think of an opening wedge.
“It occurred to me then,” Jake said, “that the whole story would have to come from May. I began to wonder if there might be another diary — one covering the last day or so of her life. And of course there was. Not a diary, but a dictaphone recording.”