The Good Old Stuff (29 page)

“Talk,” Bill Hewett said tonelessly.

“Objectivity,” Park said, “is often easier at a distance. The police concentrated on the apartment. That, I feel, was a mistake. The fact that the body has not appeared indicated to me that it was a crime carefully planned. Too carefully planned to assume that the murderer would select a city apartment as the scene of the crime and hope to get away with it, to walk out with the body. She was seen going into the apartment. She was not seen coming out. The apartment had a phone. All four of you were able to prove that you could not possibly have gotten back to the apartment before eleven. But you couldn’t prove, had you been asked to do so, that Lisa Mann had not come to you. She could have been summoned by phone to the place where she was murdered and where the body was disposed of so successfully.”

“Just how do you dispose of a body successfully?” Prine Smith asked.

“Fire, the sea, chemicals. But, best of all, legally. Death certificate and a funeral.”

“Why would anyone kill her?” Hewett asked. “Why? She was my girl. There wasn’t any question of that. What good would she do anyone dead?”

“Sometimes a man kills,” Falkner said, “for the very simple reason that the act of killing gives him pleasure.”

“It would be nice to meet him,” Hewett said. “Nice.” He looked hard, first at Guy, then Prine Smith, then Stacey Brian.

“Off it!” Prine said harshly. “We were over that. You know we aren’t capable of anything like that.”

Hewett continued to stare and there was a trace of madness in his eyes. Slowly it faded. He walked over to the bar. Mick filled his glass.

“Hell,” said Stacey, “Lisa may be wandering around right now. Amnesia. You can’t tell about things like that.”

“Sure,” Hewett said. “Sure. It could be that.” He didn’t speak as though he believed it.

On the way to dinner Georgie Wane took Park aside. “The money,” she said, “is nice. I like it. You’ve got a nice place here. But how about this, uncle? One of these boys maybe clobbered a girl. It leads one to think. Maybe it’s a habit yet.”

“Not a habit. Not quite that. Call it a tendency.”

“I thought maybe you could tell by looking at hands. I’ve been looking. No dice, uncle. I would say Hewett didn’t. Beyond that I cannot go. Shouldn’t a murderer look like a murderer?”

“I knew one once who could have been your twin, Georgie.”

“I can see how she got in the killing mood,” Georgie said.

At three in the morning Falkner awoke at the sound of the first tap on his door. He came completely awake in a fraction of a second. He pulled his robe on as he went to the door. It was Taffy.

She looked small, young, wan in the lamplight. “You can’t sleep either, eh?” she said.

“What’s got you down, Taff?” he asked. “Come on in.”

They walked out onto the terrace. The wind was directly out of the west. It had sea fragrance.

She said, “You hear about something like this. I mean it’s a problem like filling in a nine-letter blank beginning with
G
meaning a South African herb. Then you meet the people and it’s something else again. Gee, they’re nice kids. I don’t want it to be one of them.”

He put his arm around her. “Old Taff, the world mother. She loves everybody. Maybe I’m wrong this time. The agency checked it out pretty carefully, though. Lisa Mann was one of those rare people who make no enemies. No one profited by
her death. She was exceptionally striking. Emotions can get wound up pretty tightly.”

“If one of them did it,” she said softly, “I wonder if he is sleeping right now. I don’t see how he could be, knowing that all this is supposed to make him give himself away. I’ve been watching them so carefully. It’s not Hewett, of course. Darana seems like a big sleepy animal. But he did come alive when he did that part out of his last play for us. Stacey Brian is an awful nice little guy. Prine Smith is a little quarrelsome, but you sense a certain amount of integrity in him. I can’t see him murdering anybody. Park, you must be wrong. You must!”

“The tension is building, Taff. You can feel it.”

She moved out of his arm. “And you love it, don’t you? It’s bread and wine to you. Park, there’s a faint streak of evil in you.”

“Man is a predatory animal,” he said happily.

She sighed. “Too late to change you now. I should have adopted you when you were a baby.”

“Foster mother at the age of seven?”

“I matured early.”

When Falkner came down, Taffy, Georgie, Guy, and Stacey Brian were breakfasting on the patio, shielded from the brisk morning wind. He heard them laughing before he saw them. They made room for him. He had touched his bell a few minutes before coming down. Mrs. Mick brought him his breakfast tray.

Georgie said, “I was telling them about home in Scranton
when I had a crush on a guy who drove a hearse. We didn’t have any place to be alone, so we used to go and neck in the room where they stored the coffins. Well this one time Joey heard the boss coming back unexpected, so what does he do but pop me in a box and shut the lid and then make like he’s taking an inventory. My God, I was petrified. It’s dusty. I sneeze. The boss says, ‘Whassat?’ He opens the lid and says, ‘Girl, you ain’t dead!’ Joey, the dope, says, ‘Her aunt died. She was looking for a box.’ Next time I see Joey, he’s driving a bread truck. Terrible kind of breakfast talk, isn’t it? But on this house party maybe it isn’t so far out of line after all.”

“You say you and this Joey had a place where you could be alone,” Guy Darana said. “That isn’t a question. I’m just thinking out loud.”

“Stop making like a detective,” Stacey Brian said.

“He’s working on our little problem,” Taffy said. “Can’t you see the look of the hunter?”

“What kind of a detective you want?” Stacey Brian said. “A Jimmy Stewart type? Like this? Wal, I guess all you … uh … nice people need a … uh … little detectin’ done around here. Or how about an Edward G. Robinson? Like so. Listen to me, sugar. You got to lay it right on the line, see? You’re not talking to no small-town copper, see? This is the big time, sugar. See?”

They laughed and applauded. The imitations had been uncannily accurate. Hewett came onto the patio, and the look of of him quenched the high spirits. His eyes appeared to have receded back into his head. His mouth was a thin, bitter line.

“Good morning, all,” he said. “Fun and games?”

“You look rocky, honey,” Georgie said.

He smiled coldly. “Bad dreams. Copywriter’s dreams. I could see Lisa with her eyes bulging and hands around her throat, but I couldn’t tell whose hands.”

“Ugh!” Georgie said.

“By the way, Bill,” Park said, “I’m assuming that you would like to find out whether or not one of your friends killed her. I’m assuming you’ll help by answering questions. Did you and Lisa have a place where you used to go to be alone?”

“It’s not any of your business,” Hewett snapped.

“Blunt and to the point.”

“We did have. A farmhouse so broken down you couldn’t go into it. Just the foundation where the barn had been. But you could drive in there and not be seen from the road. She used to pack lunches, and we’d picnic there.”

“Did you ever go separately?”

“Sure. We’d meet there. She had a car. You know that already. It was in the newspapers. They found the car five days later in a big parking lot on West Forty-first Street. Nobody could say who’d driven it in there. Maybe she did. I used to take a bus out to Alden Village and walk to the farm.”

“Did you tell the police that?” Park asked.

“Why should I? She never went there except when we went together, or when we were going to meet there.”

“Her body might be there, Hewett. She could have been decoyed there.”

“How do you mean?”

“A faked message from you. It wouldn’t be hard. Any of your apartment mates could get their hands on your handwriting.”

Bill Hewett looked down at his plate. Suddenly he looked no longer young, as though he had donned the mask he would wear in middle age. “I went back once. Alone. It was like visiting some damnable cemetery. The wind whined. She could be there, all right.”

“I’ll wire the New York police. Tell me the name of the farm or how to direct them to it.”

“About a mile and a half north of the village on the left of a curve. Route Eight. They call it the Harmon place.”

He sent
the wire after breakfast. At eleven thirty they were all out by the pool. Park was nursing a purpling bruise high on his cheek where Mick Rogers had tagged him heavily during the usual morning workout. Mick hummed as he made drinks. He seemed well pleased with himself.

“Gotta remember to keep that left hand higher, boss,” he said, grinning.

Taffy swam effortless lengths of the pool, her brown arms
lifting slowly from the pale-green water. Stacey Brian, in deference to his redheaded lack of skin pigmentation, was the only one in the shade. Stocky Prine Smith was whispering to June Luce. He was propped up on his elbows. She lay on her back with plastic linked cups on her eyes to protect them from the sun glare. From time to time she giggled in a throaty way. Stacey glared over at them. Georgie Wane was trying to teach big Guy Darana how to make a racing turn against the end of the pool.

From the amplifier came muted music, old jazz piano by Errol Garner and Mary Lou Williams and Art Tatum. The last record, one by Garner, had played twice. Park thought of sending Mick up to reverse the stack, but suddenly an idea came to him. He went up himself, walking slowly, planning it in detail. It was based on the sensitive mike he had hooked into the set. Once, when it had been left turned on quite inadvertently, during a party, one couple who had sneaked away from the crowd came back to find that every word, every sound, had blared out above the noise of the music. He had had the mike installed to simplify some of the problems of running the household.

He reversed the stack of records, waited for the music to start, clicked on the mike at the point of a loud remembered chord in the music, hoping that it wouldn’t be heard. He picked the table mike up gingerly and carried it away from the set. He set it on the bedside table, picked up the phone, and dialed the number of the hotel. Before anyone could answer, he pushed the receiver down with his ringers.

“Give me Mr. Norris’s room, please. Four-twelve, I think it is.… Hello, Lieutenant Norris? This is Falkner. I guess your trip hasn’t been a waste after all.… Yes, I think I know who our man is.… Right. He’ll crack under the strain, and we’ll have something definite to go on.… Yes, I’ll call you just as soon as—”

The door burst open and Mick came running in, panting from the run up the stairs. “Hey, the mike’s on! Every word is coming over the—”

Park reached out quickly and clicked the mike off.

He grinned. “Thanks, Mick.” He hung up the phone.

Mick’s eyes widened with comprehension. “So! A fake, is it?”

“Did you hear what I said?”

“No. I started running when I heard you dial.”

Park repeated the conversation. “What do you think?” he asked.

Mick scrubbed his heavy jaw with his knuckles. “It ought to make the guy pretty uneasy. I can’t figure which one it could be. Maybe it isn’t any one of the three.”

“I’m placing my bet that it is one of them.”

They went back down. The atmosphere had changed. Hewett was the color of watery milk under his two-day tan. He stood with his fists clenched, staring at his friends, one by one. June had sat up, moved a bit away from Prine Smith. Taffy stood near the diving tower, toweling herself. Georgie sat alone on the edge of the pool, her feet in the water. Guy Darana stood behind her, his eyes slitted against the sunlight, looking half asleep. Stacey Brian looked at Hewett and said, “Easy, boy. Easy.”

“I’m terribly sorry that happened,” Park said. “It shouldn’t have happened. Like a fool I forgot the mike was on. I’m afraid I’ve forewarned the man who killed Lisa Mann.”

Hewett walked over to Park. “Who is it?” he said. “Tell me who it is.”

“Not quite yet, Bill,” Park said soothingly.

“Tell me, damn you!”

“I don’t think I’m wrong, but there’s always that chance. I’m not ready to tell you. You’re in no emotional condition to handle yourself properly if I should tell you.”

Hewett threw his fist full at Falkner’s face with an almost girlish ineptitude. Park caught the fist in the palm of his hand and squeezed down on it. Hewett’s mouth changed with the impact of the sudden pain.

“Don’t try that again,” Park said.

Hewett yanked his hand free, turned without a word, and walked across to the house.

Everyone started to make bright, shallow conversation to cover the awkwardness. Taffy came over to Park and lowered
her voice so that only he could hear her. “Dirty pool, friend,” she said. “Very dirty pool.”

“I don’t understand, Taff.”

“The music suddenly got louder and then faded back again. The mike stands near the set. You should have carried it over to the phone before turning it on.”

“You know, you’d be a very difficult type to be married to.”