Where Is Bianca? (15 page)

“I understand.” Ainsley shivered. “I'll tell you anything I can. What do you want to know?”

“The truth.”

“All right.”

“And don't try to be noble. If others are involved, I want to know that, too. Maybe there are extenuating circumstances. Give yourself a break.”

“There are—a few.”

“Noreen Gardner. Why did you murder her?”

Ainsley stared, hollow-eyed. Then he began to laugh. “You never give up, do you, Captain? I've told you over and over—I didn't kill her. I don't know how to make you believe me, except to keep saying it.”

“You didn't kill her,” Corrigan said thoughtfully.

“I'm a gutless wonder, remember? I couldn't kill a human being. I couldn't kill a chicken.”

“Her body was found in a sewer main not far from here.”

Ainsley squeezed his eyes shut. “I know.”

“She went out on the night of her death with a man who said he could do things for her in the theater. That man was you, Ainsley.”

“Yes,” Ainsley whispered.

“I'd prefer you to keep your eyes open when we talk.” Ainsley opened his eyes. Looking into them, Corrigan regretted his command. “She did keep the date?”

“Yes.”

“Tell me about it.”

“In my own way?”

“Any way you want.”

“The evening began promisingly. She was greedy and sly, but she was also quite attractive—if you're an old stud with waning powers that need special stimulation.

“You see, Captain, we had at least one rare thing in common, Noreen Gardner and I. We were honest. Each of us knew exactly what the other was after, and we struck a tacit bargain. We were both sincere about delivering. For my part, I really could have furthered her career. I still know a few people.”

“You brought her here? To this apartment?”

“Yes. She enjoyed this place—as she put it, it has class. We had a few drinks. We went out to dinner. Then to a small nightclub. She wanted to drop in at a discothèque, and we stopped at still another place afterward. It was quite late when we got back here.”

“Just you two? You didn't pick up any freeloaders on the way?”

“Quite alone, Captain.” Carlton Ainsley paused. Then he said, “To the moment of her death.”

“But you didn't kill her.”

“When the old stud was approaching the high point of the evening, Captain?” Ainsley's delicate hands went to his temples. “I wanted her very much alive, believe me.

“We were both pretty well oiled. We went into the master bedroom with our arms around each other; it kept us from falling. She flopped onto the bed and I went to the closet and took out a nightgown I'd bought for her with some of the money Dmitri—Mr. Karam—had been kind enough to stake me to before he left for Europe. It was something, Captain. Apricot color—not quite apricot, no; I can't describe it. But it's the whoriest thing you ever saw. And sheer, just sheer enough to suggest without revealing. A real teaser's garment. I'd spent two hours finding just the thing I wanted.”

Corrigan was silent. Ainsley had forgotten he was there. He was reliving the past like a psychiatrist's subject under the truth drug, eyes wide open, pale, breathing slowly, unconscious of his surroundings.

“I showed her the nightgown. She tumbled off the bed and went for it, squealing like a little girl. While she held it up, uttering little cries, I undressed her. It was a … a sweet moment. So sweet. She suddenly put her mouth up to mine and kissed me. ‘I'll make myself nice for you, Carlton,' she said. They were her last words on earth.”

The actor fell into a reverie. Corrigan let him sit there for a long time before he said softly, “Go on.”

“She went into the bathroom,” Ainsley said with a start. “I went after her. As far as the doorway. She ran the tub full. Poured in bath salts. Chose a cake of French soap from the cabinet—very expensive soap; Karam has a thing about soap. Then she climbed into the tub and slid under the water and the bubbles came up to her chin and she smiled at me and I went out.”

“Where did you go?”

“Back in here to get a couple of drinks ready.”

“Not to undress?”

“I was saving that for later. I was … holding back the moment.” Ainsley began to breathe rapidly. “Savoring it. I kept thinking of what was coming. I drank one of the drinks while I waited.”

He closed his eyes and after a moment shuddered. “Then I began to chafe. She was taking so long. What was keeping her? Wasn't she as impatient as I was? I told myself to let her take her time. Maybe it was the tub—she'd never seen a sunken tub in her life, I'm sure, so big, made of pure marble. Like something out of ancient Rome. I made another drink for myself.”

“While she was dying?” Corrigan said. He had no doubt whatever that the actor was telling the truth. But habit made him put a barb into his voice, a stinger.

“While she was dying.” Ainsley opened his eyes. His face was death's color, as if to suit what he was saying. “I finished my second drink. I couldn't stand it any longer. I went to the bathroom and I couldn't see her. Just the bath water with the soap bubbles on it. I remember feeling completely disoriented. How was it possible? Had I dreamed the whole thing? Then the bubbles started disappearing and I saw her face. It was underwater, of course. And her mouth was open. And her eyes. But it was her mouth that fascinated me. It was open—
underwater
. And there were no air bubbles coming up.”

Ainsley shifted in the chair. Corrigan went quietly to the bar and poured another shot and brought it to him and thrust it in his hand. The actor did not drink. He sat there with the glass in his hand, staring.

“I can't describe how I felt, Captain. I must have been in shock. Looking at the tub. Telling myself I was seeing things, that I'd had too much to drink and this was all an alcoholic illusion. I remember praying that that was what it was, illusion. I don't know how much time passed with her dead body in the tub and me standing over her like a dummy, like some damned ventriloquist's dummy with his master away!”

His voice was beginning to rise. Corrigan recognized the symptoms. He forced the man's hand with the glass to the quivering lips, forced him to swallow. Ainsley choked and pawed the air. But a little color came into his face.

“Take your time, Ainsley,” Corrigan said. “We have plenty of time. I know this isn't pleasant for you, but it's important for your sake as well as for the sake of others.” And this time he got his voice into a friendly groove, quiet and sensible and sympathetic, and it did the trick. When Ainsley spoke again, it was in his normal voice.

His recollections of what had happened then were vague in spots, sharp in others, like a badly edited film. He remembered pulling the girl out of the tub, turning her over, laying her over a bath stool, trying to squeeze the bathwater out of her, turning her over again, trying mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. How long this went on Ainsley had no idea. But in time he knew his efforts were useless, that she was irrevocably dead, and that he had a terrible problem on his hands.

The next thing he remembered was walking the streets.

“The whole world had caved in on me,” the actor said. “I'd survived the wreckage of my life in California, I'd survived those horrible years at San Quentin, through the friendship of Dmitri Karam I had been given the chance to pick up the pieces of my life and put them together again, to launch a new career. And up here in Dmitri's apartment was the dead body of a naked girl.

“I was trapped. If the story got out, even though I was absolutely innocent of Noreen's death—even at the time I could only surmise that she had had a heart seizure in the tub, gone unconscious, slid under, and drowned; or maybe the heart attack killed her before she slid under, I didn't know—if the story got out, I was finished for good. I couldn't hope to count on Dmitri's friendship this time. He would have his own career to think of. He would have to wash his hands of me. It was unthinkable that he might go through with his plans for me. It would ruin him. Even if it didn't ruin him, he could never pull it off. No television show with me in it—after this—would have a chance of airing. I was through, all right.

“Unless—somehow—I could conceal the whole thing.”

That figured, Corrigan thought. That was the way a desperate man's mind would work. This was the McCoy, all right. He found himself sighing and wondered why. Then he knew. His brain was giving off warnings. His cop's brain.
Was this an act?
it was saying.
Carlton Ainsley is a first-class actor. Was this the top performance of his career?

Corrigan shook his head. He would have staked his shield on this. The thought was a cop's reflex. Ainsley was telling the exact truth.

Ainsley was going on. He had begun to rationalize; his head was clearing. Desperation made him keen. He wanted to believe that he could still save himself. The girl was dead. There was nothing he could do about that. Could he save himself?

“I found myself thinking: How can I dispose of a body in the middle of New York City?”

And then, as he was crossing a street, he found the answer. He stubbed his toe and looked down. He had stumbled over a manhole cover in the middle of the street. A manhole … a sewer.…

“What did you use,” asked Corrigan, “the service stairs?”

“Yes. I dried her body, wrapped it in a sheet, carried her down to the garage in the basement. It was very late; the doorman had long since gone off duty; there wasn't a soul around. I put her in Dmitri's town car, on the floor, below the rear seat. I was in a fever to get it over with. I felt that I couldn't go on with it unless I did it quickly. I don't know where I got the strength to do what I did. But, somehow, I did it. Somehow I pried the manhole cover up—I think I used a tool from the car, but I'm not sure—somehow I mustered the fortitude to drop the body in and cover the hole and get out of there. And no one saw me. There wasn't a soul in the streets.…”

His voice dribbled off, and he began to cry.

Corrigan blessed the buzzer that took him to the door.

It was Jean Ainsley and Chuck Baer. Jean's face was as white as the plastic covering the bar. She ran in and went to her father and knelt by him and took out a handkerchief as he clung to her, and tried to dry his eyes.

“What did you do to him?” she cried to Corrigan.

“He's done it to himself, Jean,” Corrigan said. “He'll be all right now. Give him a minute or two.”

Jean rose helplessly. Her father cowered in the chair, avoiding her eyes. But then he drew a deep breath and sat up straight, so that he looked like a man again. He got up and went to the bar and poured himself a drink, a small drink, and threw his head back; and when he set the glass down he remained with his back to them, his elbows on the bar, staring at his nightmare without fear.

“He's guilty of the illegal disposal of a dead body,” Corrigan said to Jean in a low voice. “No more, no less. The girl died by accident. Her heart carried the scars of rheumatic fever contracted when she was a child, and never treated. Traces of a French milled soap were found in her lungs. Between what our technicians found and your father's story, it's clear that she must have fainted, gone under the water—she was taking a bath—and drowned. Your father panicked and carried her down to that manhole to the sewer. That's the story of how Noreen Gardner-Nancy Gavin came to an end.”

“Will he have to go to prison?” Jean asked, but she was looking at her father's back.

“I doubt it. The D.A. is a reasonable man, and I'm ready to testify to what Mr. Ainsley told me, and how he told it if they'll let me go into that. I believe his story to the letter. I'm pretty sure he'll pull a suspended sentence, if he's charged at all. What he has to worry about are the headlines.”

“And they'll cook his goose.”

Corrigan shrugged.

The girl walked over to her father and put her hand on his arm. At her touch he started violently. But then he turned around and saw who it was, and he even smiled.

“Forgive me, Jeanie,” Carlton Ainsley said. “Forgive me. If you don't, I don't know what I'll do. I have no one else.”

“Daddy. You have yourself. Of course you have me, but this is something you're going to have to face, because I can't face it for you.”

“But, Jeanie, what am I going to do?”

“You have a choice of a great many things. You have charm, and personality, and you're articulate. You could write insurance, sell real estate, work behind the counter of a haberdashery. You can do almost anything you try to do. But you'll have to swallow your pride. You'll have to find the courage to look the world in the face, after a lifetime of having them look at you. Do you think you can do it?”

“I don't know,” he muttered.

“Neither do I, Daddy. You'll have to find out. And—who knows? Maybe in two or three years, after everybody's forgotten all this, you'll get a chance to go back into show business. Others have done it. And, after all, you haven't done anything so awful.”

“Jeanie.”

They fell into each other's arms.

As they stood aside, watching father and daughter, Chuck Baer said, “Well, where do we go from here?”

“What do you mean?”

“This cleans up the Noreen-Nancy foul-up. But—excuse me for bringing it up again, Captain—where is Bianca?”

“I have an idea—” Corrigan began.

“I'm glad somebody has. What idea?”

“—that that Mayan ring is going to give us the answer to the question.”

“How?”

“If I knew that, Chuck,” Corrigan said savagely, “would I be wasting my time standing here talking to the likes of you?”

16

Corrigan was at his desk early the next morning. Morning mail. Morning report. His own report to Inspector in Charge, MOS.