“Oh,” she said. “I just had a grisly idea.”
“What?”
“It’s silly. Like an Alfred Hitchcock television show. I thought maybe Karen really did make those phone calls to him, not because she was jealous but just to tease him, thinking what a gag it would be when she popped out of the cake at his bachelor dinner. And then the gag backfires and he shoots her because he’s scared she wants to kill him.” She laughed. “I’ve got a cute imagination,” she said. “But I’m not much of a help, am I?”
I didn’t answer her. My mind was off on a limb somewhere. I closed my eyes and saw the waiters wheeling the cake out toward the center of the room. Stripper music playing on a phonograph. A girl bursting from the cake, nude and lovely. A wide smile on her face—
“Ed, what’s the matter?”
Most of the time problems are solved by simple trial and error, a lot of legwork that pays off finally. Other times all the legwork in the world falls flat, and it’s like a jigsaw puzzle where you suddenly catch the necessary piece and all the others leap into place. This was one of those times.
“You’re a genius!” I told Ceil.
“You don’t mean it happened that way? I—”
“Oh, no. Of course not. Donahue didn’t kill Karen—” I stood.
“Hey, where are you going?” Ceil asked.
“Gotta run,” I said. “Can’t even walk you home. Tomorrow,” I said. “We’ll have dinner, okay?”
I didn’t hear her answer. I didn’t wait for it. I raced across the park and jumped into the nearest cab.
I called Lynn Farwell from my apartment. She was back in her North Shore home, and life had returned to her voice. “I didn’t expect to hear from you,” she said. “I suppose you’re interested in my body, Ed. It wouldn’t be decent so soon after Mark’s death, you know. But you may be able to persuade me—”
“Not your body,” I said. “Your memory. Can you talk now? Without being overheard?”
She giggled lewdly. “If I couldn’t, I wouldn’t have said what I did. Go ahead, Mr. Detective.”
I asked questions. She gave me answers. They were the ones I wanted to hear.
I strapped on a shoulder holster and jammed a gun into it.
TEN
The door to Powell’s apartment was locked. I rang the bell once. No one answered. I waited a few minutes, then took out my penknife and went to work on the lock. Like the locks in all decent buildings in New York, this was one of the burglar-proof models. And, like just 99 percent of them, it wasn’t burglar-proof. It took half a minute to open.
I turned the knob. Then I eased the gun from my shoulder holster and shoved the door open. I didn’t need the gun just then. The room was empty.
But the apartment wasn’t. I heard noises from another room, people-noises, sex-noises. A man’s voice and a girl’s voice. The man was saying he heard somebody in the living room. The girl was telling him he was crazy. He said he would check. Then there were footsteps, and he came through the doorway, and I pointed the gun at him.
I said, “Stay right there, Powell.”
He looked a little ridiculous. He was wearing a bathrobe, his feet were bare, and it was fairly obvious that he had been interrupted somewhere in the middle of his favorite pastime. I kept the gun on him and watched his eyes. He was good—damned good. The eyes showed fear, outrage, surprise. Nothing else. Not the look of a man in a trap.
“If this is some kind of a joke—”
“It’s no joke.”
“Then what the hell is it?”
“The end of the line,” I said. “You made a hell of a try. You almost got away with it.”
“I don’t know what you’re driving at, London. But—”
“I think you do.”
She picked that moment to wander into the room. She was a redhead with her hair messed. One of the buttons on her blouse was buttoned wrong. She walked into the room, wondering aloud what the interruption was about, and then she saw the gun and her mouth made a little O.
She said, “Maybe I should have stayed in the other room.”
“Maybe you should go home,” I snapped.
“Oh,” she said. “Yes, that’s a very good idea.” She moved to her left and sort of backed around me, as if she wanted to keep as much distance as possible between her well-constructed body and the gun in my hand. “I think you’re right,” she said. “I think I should go home…And you don’t have to worry about me.”
“Good.”
“I should tell you I have no memory at all,” she said. “I never came here, never met you, never saw your face, and I cannot possibly remember what you look like. It is terrible, my memory.”
“Good,” I said.
“Living I like very much better than remembering. Goodbye, Mr. Nobody.”
The door slammed, and Ray Powell and I were alone. He glared at me.
“What in hell do you want, exactly?”
“To talk to you.”
“You need a gun for that?”
“Probably.”
He grinned disarmingly. “Guns make me nervous.”
“They never did before. You’ve got a knack for getting hold of unregistered guns, Powell. Is there another one in the bedroom?”
“I don’t get it,” he said. He scratched his head. “You must mean something, London. Spit it out.”
“Don’t play games.”
“I—”
“Cut it,” I said. “You killed Karen Price. You knew she was going to do the cake bit because you were the one who put the idea in Phil Abeles’s head.”
“Did he tell you that?”
“He’s forgotten. But he’ll remember with a little prompting. You set her up and then you killed her and tossed the gun on the floor. You figured the police would arrest Donahue, and you were right. But you didn’t think they would let him go. When they did, you went to his place with another gun. He let you in. You shot him, made it look like suicide, and let the one death cover the other.”
He shook his head in wonder. “You really believe this?”
“I know it.”
“I suppose I had a motive,” he said musingly. “What, pray tell, did I have against the girl? She was good in bed, you know. I make it a rule never to kill a good bed partner if I can help it.” He grinned. “So why did I kill her?”
“You didn’t have a thing against her,” I said.
“My point exactly. I—”
“You killed her to frame Donahue,” I added. “You got to Karen Price while the bachelor dinner was still in the planning stage. You hired her to make a series of calls to Donahue, jealousy calls threatening to kill him or otherwise foul up his wedding. It was going to be a big joke—she would scare him silly; and then for a capper she would pop out of the cake as naked as the truth and tell him she was just pulling his leg.
“But you topped the gag. She popped out of the cake covered with a smile and you put a bullet in her and left Donahue looking like the killer. Then, when you thought he was getting off the hook, you killed him. Not to cover the first murder—you felt safe enough on that score…because you really didn’t have a reason to kill the girl herself. You killed Donahue because he was the one you wanted dead all along.”
Powell was still grinning. Only not so self-assuredly now. In the beginning, he hadn’t been aware of how much I knew. Now he was learning and it wasn’t making him happy.
“I’ll play your game,” he said. “I killed Karen, even though I didn’t have any reason. Now why did I kill Mark? Did I have a reason for that one?”
“Sure.”
“What?”
“For the same reason you hired Karen to bother Donahue,” I said. “Maybe a psychiatrist could explain it better. He’d call it transference.”
“Go on.”
“You wanted Mark Donahue dead because he was going to marry Lynn Farwell. And you don’t want anybody to marry Lynn Farwell, Powell, you’d kill anybody who tried.”
“Keep talking,” he said.
“How am I doing so far?”
“Oh, you’re brilliant, London. I suppose I’m in love with Lynn?”
“In a way.”
“That’s why I’ve never asked her to marry me. And why I bed down anything else that gets close enough to jump.”
“That’s right.”
“You’re out of your mind, London.”
“No,” I said. “But you are.” I took a breath. “You’ve been in love with Lynn for a long time. Four years, anyway. It’s no normal love, Powell, because you’re not a normal person. Lynn’s part of a fixation of yours. She’s sweet and pure and unattainable in your mind. You don’t want to possess her completely because that would destroy the illusion. Instead you compensate by proving your virility with any available girl. But you can’t let Lynn marry someone else. That would take her away from you. You don’t want to have her—except for an occasional evening, maybe—but you won’t let anyone else have her.”
He was tottering on the edge now…trying to take a step toward me and then backing off. I had to push him over that edge. If he cracked, then he would crack wide open. If he held himself together he might wriggle free. I knew damn well he was guilty, but there wasn’t enough evidence to present to a jury. I had to make him crack.
“First I’m a double murderer,” Powell said. “Now I’m a mental case. I don’t deny that I like Lynn. She’s a sweet, clean, decent girl. But that’s as far as it goes.”
“Is it?”
“Yes.”
“Donahue’s the second man who almost married her. The first one was four years ago. Remember John? You introduced the two of them. That was a mistake, wasn’t it?”
“He wouldn’t have been good for her. But it didn’t matter. I suppose you know he died in a car accident.”
“In a car, yes. Not an accident. You gimmicked the steering wheel. Then you let him kill himself. You got away clean with that one, Powell.”
I hadn’t cracked him yet. I was close, but he was still able to compose himself.
“It was an accident,” he exclaimed. “Besides, it happened a long time ago. I’m surprised you even bother mentioning it.”
I ignored his words. “The death shook Lynn up a lot,” I said. “It must have been tough for you to preserve your image of her. The sweet and innocent thing turned into a round-heeled little nymph for a while.”
“That’s a damned lie.”
“It is like hell. And about that time you managed to have your cake and eat it, too. You kept on thinking of her as the unattainable ideal. But that didn’t stop you from taking her virginity, did it? You ruined her, Powell!”
He was getting closer to the edge. His face was white and his hands were hard little fists. The muscles in his neck were drum-tight.