“I heard rumors.”
“I don’t keep secrets,” he said. He sprawled in the chair across from me and crossed one leg over the other. It was a relief to talk to someone other than a reticent, guilt-ridden adulterer.
He certainly looked like a Don Juan. He was twenty-eight, tall, dark, and handsome, with wavy black hair and piercing brown eyes. A little prettier and he might have passed for a gigolo. But there was a slight hardness about his features that prevented this.
“You’re working for Mark,” he said.
“That’s right.”
He sighed. “Well, I’d like to see him wind up innocent, but from where I sit, it’s hard to see it that way. He’s a funny guy, London. He wants to have his cake and eat it, too. He wanted a marriage and he wanted a playmate. With the girl he was marrying, you wouldn’t think he’d worry about playing around. Ever meet Lynn?”
“I’ve met her.”
“Then you know what I mean.”
I nodded. “Was she one of your conquests?”
“Lynn?” He laughed easily. “Not that girl. She’s the pure type, London. The one-man woman. Mark found himself a sweet girl there. Why he bothered with Karen is beyond me.”
I switched the subject to the married men in the office. With Powell, I didn’t try to find out which of them had been intimate with Karen Price, since it seemed fairly obvious they all had. Instead I tried to ascertain which of them could be in trouble as a result of an affair with the girl.
I learned a few things. Jack Harris was immune to blackmail—his wife knew he cheated on her regularly and had schooled herself to ignore such indiscretions just as long as he returned to her after each rough passage through the turbulent waters of adultery.
Harold Merriman was sufficiently well-off financially so that he could pay a blackmailer indefinitely rather than quiet her by murder; besides, Merriman had already told me that his wife knew, and I was more or less prepared to believe him.
Both Abeles and Joe Conn were possibilities. Conn looked best of all. He wasn’t doing very well in advertising but he could hold his job indefinitely—he had married a girl whose family ran one of Darcy & Bates’ major accounts. Conn had no money of his own, and no talent to hold a job if his wife wised up and left him.
Of course, there was always the question of how valid Ray Powell’s impressions were. Lynn? She’s the pure type. The one-man woman.
That didn’t sound much like the drunken blonde who had turned up on my doormat the night before.
Jack Harris revealed nothing new, merely reinforced what I had managed to pick up elsewhere along the line. I talked to him for fifteen minutes or so. He left, and Joe Conn came into the room.
He wasn’t happy. “They said you wanted to see me,” he muttered. “We’ll have to make it short, London. I’ve got a pile of work this afternoon and my nerves are jumping all over the place as it is.”
The part about the nerves was something he didn’t have to tell me. He didn’t sit still, just paced back and forth like a lion in a cage before chow time.
I could play it slow and easy or fast and hard, looking to shock and jar. If he was the one who killed her, his nervousness now gave me an edge. I decided to press it.
I got up, walked over to Conn. A short stocky man, crew cut, no tie. “When did you start sleeping with Karen?” I snapped.
He spun around wide-eyed. “You’re crazy!”
“Don’t play games,” I told him. “The whole office knows you were bedding her.”
I watched him. His hands curled into fists at his sides. His eyes narrowed and his nostrils flared.
“What is this, London?”
“Your wife doesn’t know about Karen, does she?”
“Damn you.” He moved toward me. “How much, you bastard? A private detective.” He snickered. “Sure you are. You’re a damn blackmailer, London. How much?”
“Just how much did Karen ask for?” I said. “Enough to make you kill her?”
He answered with a left hook that managed to find the point of my chin and send me crashing back against the wall. There was a split second of blackness. Then he was coming at me again, fists ready, and I spun aside, ducked, and planted a fist of my own in his gut. He grunted and threw a right at me. I took it on the shoulder and tried his belly again. It was softer this time. He wheezed and folded up. I hit him in the face and just managed to pull the punch at the last minute. It didn’t knock him out—only spilled him on the seat of his tweed pants.
“You’ve got a good punch, London.”
“So do you,” I said. My jaw still ached.
“You ever do any boxing?”
“No.”
“I did,” he said. “In the Navy. I still try to keep in shape. If I hadn’t been so angry I’d have taken you.”
“Maybe.”
“But I got mad,” he said. “Irish temper, I guess. Are you trying to shake me down?”
“No.”
“You don’t honestly think I killed Karen, do you?”
“Did you?”
“God, no.”
I didn’t say anything.
“You think I killed her,” he said hollowly. “You must be insane. I’m no killer, London.”
“Of course. You’re a meek little man.”
“You mean just now? I lost my temper.”
“Sure.”
“Oh, hell,” he said. “I never killed her. You got me mad. I don’t like shakedowns and I don’t like being called a murderer. That’s all, damn you.”
I called Jerry Gunther from a pay phone in the lobby. “Two things,” I told the lieutenant. “First, I think I’ve got a hotter prospect for you than Donahue. A man named Joe Conn, one of the boys at the stag. I tried shaking him up a little and he cracked wide open, tried to beat my brains in. He’s got a good motive, too.”
“Ed, listen—”
“That’s the first thing,” I said. “The other is that I’ve been trying to get in touch with my client for the past too-many hours and can’t reach him. Did you have him picked up again?”
There was a long pause. All at once the air in the phone booth felt much too close. Something was wrong.
“I saw Donahue half an hour ago,” Jerry said. “I’m afraid he killed that girl, Ed.”
“He confessed?” I couldn’t believe it.
“He confessed…in a way.”
“I don’t get it.”
A short sigh. “It happened yesterday,” Jerry said. “I can’t give you the time until we get the medical examiner’s report, but the guess is that it was just after we let him go. He sat down at his typewriter and dashed off a three-line confession. Then he stuck a gun in his mouth and made a mess. The lab boys are still there trying to scrape his brains off the ceiling. Ed?”
“What?”
“You didn’t say anything…I didn’t know if you were still on the line. Look, everybody guesses wrong some of the time.”
“This was more than a guess. I was sure.”
“Well, listen, I’m on my way to Donahue’s place again. If you want to take a run over there you can have a look for yourself. I don’t know what good it’s going to do—”
“I’ll meet you there,” I said.
EIGHT
The lab crew left shortly after we arrived. “Just a formality for the inquest,” Jerry Gunther said. “That’s all.”
“You’re sure it’s a suicide, then?”
“Stop dreaming, Ed. What else?”
What else? All that was left in the world of Mark Donahue was sprawled in a chair at a desk. There was a typewriter in front of him and a gun on the floor beside him. The gun was just where it would have dropped after a suicide shot of that nature. There were no little inconsistencies.
The suicide note in the typewriter was slightly incoherent. It read: It has to end now. I can’t help what I did but there is no way out anymore. God forgive me and God help me. I am sorry.
“You can go if you want, Ed. I’ll stick around until they send a truck for the body. But—”
“Run over the timetable, will you?”
“From when to when?”
“From when you released him to when he died.”
Jerry shrugged. “Why? You can’t read it any way but suicide, can you?”
“I don’t know. Give me a run-down.”
“Let’s see,” he said. “You called around five, right?”
“Around then. Five or five-thirty.”
“We let him go around three. There’s your timetable, Ed. We let him out around three, he came back here, thought about things for a while, then wrote that note and killed himself. That checks with the rough estimate we’ve got of the time of death. You narrow it down—you did call him after I spoke to you, didn’t you?”
“Yes. No answer.”
“He must have been dead by that time; probably killed himself within an hour after he got here.”
“How did he seem when you released him?”
“Happy to be out, I thought at the time. But he didn’t show much emotion one way or the other. You know how it is with a person who’s getting ready to knock himself off. All the problems and emotions are kept bottled up inside.”
I went over to a window and looked out at Horatio Street. It was the most obvious suicide in the world, but I couldn’t swallow it. Call it a hunch, a stubborn refusal to accept the fact that my client had managed to fool me. Whatever it was, I didn’t believe the suicide theory. It just didn’t sit right.
“I don’t like it,” I said. “I don’t think he killed himself.”
“You’re wrong, Ed.”
“Am I?” I went to Donahue’s liquor cabinet and filled two glasses with cognac.
“I know nothing ever looked more like suicide,” I admitted. “But the motives are still as messy as ever. Look at what we got here. We have a man who hired me to protect him from his former mistress—and as soon as he did, he only managed to call attention to the fact that he was involved with her. He received threatening phone calls from her. She didn’t want him married. But her best friend swears that the Price girl didn’t give a damn about Donahue, that he was only another man in her collection.”
“Look, Ed—”
“Let me finish. We can suppose for a minute that he was lying for reasons of his own that don’t make much sense, that he had some crazy reason for calling me in on things before he knocked off the girl. Maybe he thought that would alibi him—”
“That’s just what I was going to say,” Jerry interjected.
“I thought of it. It doesn’t make a hell of a lot of sense, but it’s possible, I guess. Still, where in hell is his motive? Not blackmail. She wasn’t the blackmailing type to begin with, as far as I can see. But there’s more to it than that. Lynn Farwell wouldn’t care who Mark slept with before they were married. Or after, for that matter. It wasn’t a love match. She wanted a respectable husband and he wanted a rich wife, and they both figured to get what they wanted. Love wasn’t part of it.”