The Fourth Wall (32 page)

He hadn't thought of that. But after a moment he said, “That works two ways.
You
're now a way of hurting
me
.”

I hadn't thought of
that
. “So we're both prime targets. Will he come after us first or will he—good God!” I jumped up.

“What is it?”

“Our minds have stopped working. I just thought of something we should have thought of last night.” I went looking for my address book. I dialed the Encino number and a few moments later I was talking to Loren Keith.

“It's five in the morning out here, Abby,” he complained.

“Listen, Loren, and listen carefully. Dorothy's life is in danger. Jake—”

“What?
”

“Jake Steiner was murdered last night. You see what this means? Destroying Sylvia's face and her career wasn't enough. That maniac wanted to hurt her even more. That means he wants to hurt all of us more. He is going to hit us again. And that includes you, Loren—you're on the list.”

“Holy Mother of God.” The shock made his voice tremble.

“He's already killed two women to punish their husbands. Couldn't
your
wife be next? I'm deliberately being alarmist because you may not have much time. Loren, he could be on a plane heading for California right now. I doubt that he's moving that fast, but you can't afford to take the chance.”

He said something I couldn't understand.

“Get Dorothy to drive you both to some place where you're not known,” I said. “Go now. Throw something in a suitcase and get in that station wagon and
go
. Don't stop to close the house or have the water shut off or the phone disconnected. Don't tell anybody where you are—not the police, not me, not anybody. Go now, Loren. Right now.”

“I … now.” His voice was shaky. “Right. We'll go now.” He hung up.

Ian was shaking his head. “Of course he wouldn't know about it yet—who'd tell him? Do you think the New York police notified the Los Angeles police? About Keith's connection with us, I mean.”

“Lieutenant Goodlow would have, if he were still on the case. This man in charge now, I just don't know.”

“So now Keith and his wife are on the run, just like Reddick. Is that the only answer? Run and hide? I don't want to run. We're not as vulnerable as Keith.” He started to pace around the room. “But what about you, Abby? Would you feel safer if we went into hiding? What do you think?”

“Depends on whether you put your faith in metal doors and bars on the windows or in concealment. Frankly, I don't see that concealment has all that much to offer.”

“We can't stay locked in here forever. But we can't hide for the rest of our lives either. Hell, what a choice.”

“There may be another way,” I said tentatively.

“Like what?”

“Like maybe we can figure out who this lunatic is ourselves.”

“When the police couldn't? Not a chance.”

“The police didn't know the people involved. They were faced with a bunch of strangers with names and pasts—case histories. The police brought the impersonal, disinterested eye to the problem—and it saw nothing. The objective investigation, the right way, simply didn't work. So maybe we should go at it the
wrong
way—subjectively, personally.”

“I can't believe you're serious.”

“Ian, there are things we know that the police couldn't possibly know. It's going to be up to us to ferret out what's significant.”

“But don't you think every one of us has thought and thought and thought about this? We've all tried to figure out who he might be—”

“But we haven't tried
together
. Not really. You and Leo and Hugh and I—we're the only ones left. Maybe four of us together can come up with something one of us alone couldn't.”

Ian looked at me oddly. “You think you know who it is.”

I shook my head. “I haven't the vaguest idea. But I just don't want to sit around waiting for that ghoul to strike whenever he feels like it. I think we ought to try.”

He thought about it a while, wandering around the room, abstracted. He came over to me and touched my earlobe. “All right, say we make a series of inspired guesses that convince us we know who the killer is. That's not evidence—nothing to take to the police. So we know who he is. What then?”

“Then we stop him,” I said.

4

“We're going to have to do it ourselves, Leo,” I said.

“Let's see if I got this straight.” He took a swallow of his whiskey. “The gifted amateurs succeed where the plodding, unimaginative police fail, is that the way it goes? I think I read that one. About a hundred times.”

We were in a booth of a Lexington Avenue bar that called itself a lounge but shouldn't have bothered. The proprietor had recognized Ian and tried to seat us in the one window booth, but Ian had waved him toward the back.

“Why don't you want to try?” I asked Leo.

“It isn't that I don't want to try, Abby, it's just that I think we're kidding ourselves. We're not going to figure out who this guy is. What does Odell say?”

“Haven't talked to him yet,” said Ian. “Later today, or tonight.”

Leo shook his head. “I wouldn't even know where to start.”

“We start with Michael Crown,” I said. “The cause of it all. What do we know about him? Who were his friends? Where did he go when he went out? That kind of thing.”

“And we're supposed to know all that?”

“Somebody might remember something, Leo,” Ian said. “I think Abby's right. We ought to give it a try.”

Leo released a sigh that started down around his belt. “Okay, I don't want to be the sour apple. I think it's a waste of time, but I'll go along.”

I patted his left hand. “Good, Leo.”

“There's one thing I want to talk about,” said Ian, “something that's been bothering me. It seems to me almost every time something has happened, all the on-the-spot suspects were people who'd been members of the governing committee. Do you think that's possible? That the killer was actually a member of the committee?”

“No,” said Leo bluntly. “And I don't buy that story that the killer had to be in the
Foxfire
company either. He could have been an outsider. I watched the police conduct one of their searches. Somebody hiding in the theater could have eluded them—
I
could have. Just by keeping on the move. Police don't really know their way around theaters.”

“Besides,” I said, “remember how Michael Crown broke down when we told him we knew he didn't write those plays? Do you honestly think a man could sit in that room and watch his lover of fifteen years go to pieces and not move a muscle? He'd have given himself away, somehow. He couldn't have helped himself.”

While I was talking a strange look had come into Leo's eyes: he seemed to retreat from us for a moment. Ian noticed it; and when Leo came back from wherever he'd been, he seemed uncomfortable.

We talked of other things for a while, and then Leo said, “I'm going to have some free time. This schlockfest I'm working has posted its closing notice. After Saturday I can play detective as much as you want.”

It was close to four when we left. Leo went one way and Ian and I another.

“Well, what do you make of that?” asked Ian.

“That reaction of Leo's?”

“Mm.”

It was impossible to talk on the streets, so we walked over to the Frick Museum and sat down in the court to watch the fountain.

“It was while you were talking about Michael Crown's lover,” Ian said. “In the committee room, watching Crown break down. Something struck a chord there, Abby. It meant something to Leo.”

“I wonder what.”

“Leo's in a bad spot—he's such an obvious choice for the villain. He's homosexual, he's middle-aged, and he was front-and-center with both Manhattan Rep and
Foxfire
.”

“Surely you don't think Leo—”

“Not for one minute. If Leo's the killer, that means he hacked off his own right hand, applied a tourniquet with his left hand, and then picked up the ax and knocked himself unconscious. Then he would have had to detonate the bomb from the hospital, where he lay unconscious for two days.” Ian said the last sentence calmly, with only a slight twitch at the corner of his mouth. “The whole thing's preposterous. If there's one person we can be sure is not the killer, it's Leo Gunn.”

I agreed. After a while we left and Ian called Hugh Odell. Hugh's answering service took the call and no, Mr. Odell didn't say when he'd be in.

We stopped in a bookstore. I was looking at a copy of Peter Handke's new play when Ian said “Abby!” so urgently that half the people in the store looked up.

He was white as a sheet, staring at a book open in his hands.

“What's the matter?” I asked.

He held up the book so I could see the cover. The title was
Do-It-Yourself Explosives and Homemade Bombs
. “It's all here,” said Ian. “Everything you need to know about making your own bomb—how to deface the batch number on the gelignite, how to rig the detonator …” He broke off when he became aware that the other customers were staring at him. We bought the book and left before somebody called the police.

“So he didn't have to hire a bomber after all,” I said. “He could have built his own bomb. But could he really? How technical is it?”

“I can understand it,” Ian said, reading as we walked, “and I don't know the first thing about explosives. It's very clear. Here, take a look.”

I read enough to see that Ian was right. Even I could build a bomb following those instructions. If I could hold my hand steady enough.

Ian's eyes were glazed and he was shaking his head back and forth like some big wounded animal. “How can it be? How can it
be?
Some ass writes out these instructions and some other ass publishes them and then one night my family is blown to bits! Abby? How can it be?”

I didn't have any answer. It sometimes seemed that responsibility was always something that belonged to the other guy.

Ian stopped walking, tilted back his head, and without warning roared out his frustration at the sky. People melted away from us as if we were wearing leper bells. I tugged at Ian's arm until he started walking again.

By the time we reached home, he had his fury under control. But his mouth was grim and his whole being radiated a hatred so intense it intimidated me. We climbed the stairs and found a note taped to the metal door:

Don't say anything to Hugh Odell until I've had a chance to talk to you again. It's important
.

Leo

We were waiting in a cab when Leo locked up his schlockfest for the night. “Let's get out of this zoo,” he said, meaning the Village. He gave the driver the name of a Greek restaurant forty blocks uptown and explained, “I didn't get a chance to eat tonight.”

Only when we were seated and Leo had ordered did he explain what it was all about. “It's what you said this afternoon, Abby—about Michael Crown's lover being unable to sit there in the committee room and watch Crown going to pieces without giving himself away. I thought of something this afternoon but I didn't want to say anything until I had a chance to think it over. So I thought it over, and now I think I'd better mention it.”

“For heaven's sake, Leo,” I said, “what is it?”

“That day we confronted Michael Crown—I'm pretty sure Hugh Odell wasn't there.”

Ian and I were silent, letting this sink in.

Leo ran his left hand through his hair. “Missing a committee meeting doesn't make a man a killer, but I thought I'd better mention it.”

“How sure is ‘pretty sure,' Leo?” I asked.

He lifted his shoulders. “Just … pretty sure.”

“You know,” Ian said slowly,
“somebody
wasn't there that day. That room had one big table and exactly nine chairs, and one of them was rickety. Remember? When we had full attendance, the last one in always had to take the rickety chair. And when Crown came in, I remember noticing he had to sit on the bad chair. That means only eight of the committee members were there.”

This had happened nearly ten years ago; I just didn't remember. There were no records to check to see who'd been there that day. Keeping formal minutes of every meeting we held was impractical. Too many times we had to meet on the spur of the moment to decide something quickly, sometimes only four or five of us for ten minutes or so. Hugh Odell's absence on any one day wouldn't have attracted any particular attention.

Leo's moussaka arrived and he fell to. Ian and I split a spinach pie just to have something to nibble on. None of us talked until Leo finished eating. When the dishes were cleared away and three cups of coffee set out, Ian finally spoke.

He said one word: “Rosemary.”

That was the kicker. No one who'd ever seen how besotted Hugh had been with Rosemary could ever forget it. “Do you really think Hugh could kill someone he loved that much?” I asked.

“Odell is a damned good actor,” Ian said quietly.

I thought about that. “You mean he didn't really love her at all? That it was all an act?”

“It makes sense, Abby,” said Leo. “Everybody on the committee was being punished. It'd look odd if Odell was the only one who didn't get hurt. So he had to lose
something
. Just like the rest of us. But he wouldn't really want to hurt himself. The solution would be to provide himself with a wife he didn't care for, and then at the right time—kill her. To make himself look like one of the victims.”

“If that's true, do you know what that means?” I said. “That means Hugh Odell married Rosemary
for the sole purpose of murdering her
.”