Текст книги "Epitaph For A Dead Beat"

Автор книги: David Markson

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Текущая страница: 11 (всего у книги 13 страниц)

CHAPTER 28

She got to her feet. Her face had no more color than dispersing smoke. “Are you mad—?”

“Am I? Maybe I am, because I can’t conceive of any reason. Why, Fern—?”

I had taken a step forward. My shoe touched something and I glanced down. Go Home, Little Children. A Novel by Fern Hoerner.I stared at it like a man looking down from the rim of an abyss. By Fern Hoerner.

I saw it then, as clearly as fanatics see hell. I had to brace myself against the dressing table. “By Lucien Vaulking,’’ my mouth said.

“What—?”

“Your husband, the writer who supposedly didn’t write– that was his name, wasn’t it? It has to be. There’s no other answer, none—”

She didn’t speak. Her eyes were wide.

“The author who died without leaving the novel everyone expected him to leave. You didn’t write the book, did you, Fern? Lucien Vaulking did, and somehow you got hold of the manuscript. A manuscript you knew at a glance would sell to Hollywood for big money, since you were in the business. You—”

I had the rest of it. But I had to push the words up out of my throat like uncomprehending draftees out of a slit trench. “Josie and Audrey,” I said. “The same two girls Vaulking had been seeing before he died. They must have found out – recognized the book – and threatened to expose you. Which has to mean that Audrey Grant’s father was killed for no other reason than—”

“You aremad,” she hissed. She let herself drop to the bed. “You have to be – utterly.”

I groped for the cigarettes I didn’t have. “Someone is, Fern. Someone who could kill those two girls to cover a theft, and then take a third life for no other reason than to throw suspicion in a different direction. Someone absolutely wanton, ruthless—”

“I—” Her hand moved, and light flashed on the patch of adhesive on her wrist. I sank to the bench.

“Christ. Someone who could even pretend to such terrible anguish that she would deliberately mutilate herself with a burning cigarette. All the acting you’ve done, every minute, so that I thought you were the only normal human being in this whole crew of psychopaths. My God, how sick you must be—”

Something changed in her face. Her lips parted, and then, incredibly, every trace of shock was gone from her expression. She dropped back onto one elbow, as casually indulgent as if Td started to tell a joke she’d heard a dozen times before. “All this because I said three people were dead, which I shouldn’t have known. You willgo on?”

The unreality of the pose struck me like a blow. I stared at her. I didn’t know whether I was physically ill or whether the whole thing had hit me too hard in a place I’d set myself up to be hurt, but I felt dazed. Three of them, over a manuscript, a novel. I had to force myself to realize how much money was involved. I was sweating from every pore.

“You would have been familiar with the background,” I managed. “Josie would not have told many people about her illegitimacy, but her roommate would have known. You would have heard about Grant’s wealth also, and you obviously knew about Ephraim’s marriage—”

“I can admit all of that. And I was married to Lucien – it was never any secret. None of this means a thing.”

I shook my head, thinking it out. “Blackmail,” I said. “Josie and Audrey. Everything I’ve heard about the pair of them indicates they were capable of it. Not ordinary Village kids, but call girls, both of them bitter, opportunistic. Sure. They must have had proof that the book was Vaulking’s. They told Oliver Constantine they were coming into money, and the logical assumption was that they meant Grant’s – except that finally it didn’t make any sense, not with the girls dead themselves. But they meant your money – from the movie sale, the book club. They couldn’t very well admit to Constantine that they were leaving one dirty racket because they’d found an easier one, going from one rotten way of life to another, so they made up an excuse about an inheritance – probably the first idea that came to mind. So a story they contrived in all innocence helped you lead the police in the wrong direction—”

She said nothing, watching me. “Not that you needed the help,” I went on, “since you’d already established a connection between Grant and his heirs by sending those clippings. Or no, you threw in that telegram also, didn’t you? Just in case Ephraim didn’t work out as a patsy, an investigation of Constantine would lead to Ivan Klobb. So he’d be the one the cops would have thought had been blackmailed—”

I let it trail off, feeling unsteady again. “Is this all?” she said.

I nodded. “Although some small items begin to fit now also. Like the twenty-two you said you got as a gift. Vaulking was a marksman. It isn’t important, but it’s a good bet he was the one who gave you the gun – which you planted at Ephraim’s when you were supposed to be at that revival of Casablanca.You didn’t go to the picture, Fern. After we made our statements that night, standing by the car – I said, ‘Play it again, Sam/ It’s ten years since I saw the film, and I don’t even know if Bogart uses the line more than once, but I still remember it. You didn’t react. At the time I chalked it up to your being upset. And sure, one other triviality. Tonight at the party – why was I there? You didn’t ask. You knew the minute you saw me – that Grant had contacted me because of my name being in the paper. I suppose you did have a minute of panic Tuesday when you found out the sucker you’d picked to hold your hand was a private cop. Jesus, I can just see it. If I hadn’t poked my face into that bedroom you would have found a pretense to look in yourself, of course, but what was next on the schedule? A coquettish little scream, a demure faint—?”

There was a minute. “I hope you’re going to notice just a few of the flaws in all this,” she said then. “Audrey and Josie were blackmailing me. And yet Audrey didn’t suspect me in the least when Josie was killed.”

“She did suspect you – tonight, when she saw that Ephraim was out. The gun in his apartment fooled her first, sure, like it fooled the cops. But she got scared the minute she spotted him at McGruder’s. She knew the police didn’t have anything on him. Then you knifed her about three minutes later—”

I had leaned against the table, and my ribs contracted sharply. “I suppose you would have killed her sooner,” I said, “if she hadn’t run off with Peters for the few days. But you were probably fairly sure they’d show up at the party. What weapon did you have for that one, Fern – I mean before you picked up the knife? The same gun you shot Grant with earlier?”

She ignored the question, toying with the top button of her jacket. I could have made more sense out of her reaction if she’d shaved her head and danced on a chandelier. “I killed Ulysses Grant to make Ephraim’s inheritance look like a motive,” she said. “But suppose Ephraim hadn’t gotten out of jail before tonight’s deaths – who would be the murderer then?”

“The cops thought of that. Thirteen million would buy a lot of partner – they would have worked like hell to bring Peters into it.”

She wet her lips. “And you’ve concluded all of this on the basis of something I said which I wasn’t supposed to know. Suppose Dana had made the same slip – could you have built a case against her the same way?”

I must have been staring at her stupidly. “Damn it, Fern, what kind of dumb irrelevancy is that? You made the slip, not Dana. It’s going to send you up for life at the least – can’t you comprehend the fact?”

“Is it? What a shame – just when we were beginning to get along with each other, too.” She came off the bed. I hadn’t believed she could do anything with her face which might distort its beauty, but her lips twisted into a snarl that was more than ugly. “So I couldn’t have known about the third killing,” she said.

I didn’t answer her, but only because the dizziness came back. I had to shut my eyes, fighting a sudden mounting nausea.

“I couldn’t have known,” she repeated. “Well, maybe you ought to ask Pete Peters if I couldn’t have, mister. Or wake Dana – she was here when we heard.”

My head was swimming. “Heard—?”

“Yes, heard. Pete called here, damn you, just a minute before you came down – after you’d dropped him off. Hebrought up the third killing – which you’djust told him about.”

I forced myself off the bench. The room was murky as a steambath, and I could hardly hear her. “My lover man. I think you better scram, Fannin, before I really do get sore—”

I reached toward her, but I grabbed only mist. I hit the open door with a shoulder, stumbling, before blackness swirled over me like a shroud.

CHAPTER 29

I was back in the magic time machine again. I was a small boy in a white bed in an antiseptic hospital room. I lay with my head buried against an arm, spurning the complicated, pernicious adult world about me.

“Little Harry is just shy,” a voice said. “There’s someone to visit you, Harry, come to cheer you up. It’s that baseball player whose photo you’v tacked on the wall. It’s Mr. Medwick.”

“DuckyMedwick?” I said. “Ducky – is it reallyyou? Will you hit a home run for me today? Will you hit one off Carl Hubbell?”

But Hubbell wasn’t pitching. Someone named Bowman was. Bowman?I remembered too late. Medwick was already at the plate and the ball was rocketing toward him, faster than I could see. My heart stopped in anticipation of the hideous, ringing carom. When I dared to look again the great idol of all my boyhood lay pinioned on his back with his arms outstretched, like a man crucified to earth. He didn’t move, he didn’t move at all.

The machine went out of focus, and a nurse was hovering near me. “No,” I cried, “never mind me, take care of Ducky first—” She was a beautiful nurse, although I was seeing her through a smog. Her hair was the color of golden silk.

“You did it,” I told her.

“You still think so. In spite of my so-called slip not being a slip at all. You poor tenacious sap.”

“I saw you,” I said.

“What?”

“You beaned him. You beaned the only man who ever led the National League three consecutive times in runs-batted-in.”

“More delirium—”

“Shoot,” I said. “Shoot if you must.”

“Poor Harry. What are you jabbering about?”

Who knew? I thought it might help if I got my eyes open, but it didn’t. All I could see was bedroom floor. My entire body was drenched with perspiration. I was weak as a watered cobweb.

A hand pushed something under my nose. “Here – see if you can drink the coffee before it gets cold.”

I tried to lift myself. I couldn’t.

“Drink it, Harry.”

“Drink it yourself. Drown in it.”

“Oh, now don’t tell me you re angry? At little old me?” She tittered. “Just because I upset all your clever deductions? Would it make you feel better if I confessed, Harry? I think perhaps I will. It might be fun to talk about it.”

She thought perhaps she’d confess. Because it might be fun. Somebody in that room was as batty as Lady Macbeth, but I didn’t have time to figure who. I was too preoccupied with the blur in front of my face. Out, damned spot.

“You’re right about it being Lucien’s book, of course. Shall I tell you the details, Harry?”

I shuddered. Audio-hallucination, without doubt. Maybe if I concentrated hard enough on something it would all go away.

Famous dates. 1066, the Battle of Hastings. 1215, the Magna Carta. 1649, Charles the First lost his head. If you can keep your head when all those about you are losing theirs…

“—He’d fiddled with the manuscript for five years. That son of a bitch, treating me like dirt, running around with tramps who weren’t worth my little finger – but that’s beside the point. The book is good, all right. He always liked to get my judgment on things – he thought I had a fair ear, and I was also familiar with what he was trying to bring off He gave me the final handwritten draft to read on a Thursday, and the next night he died. Showing off at a party, doing chin-ups to impress a couple of simpering girls as if he’d been fourteen instead of forty. Nobody knew I had the script—”

– 1620, the Pilgrims. 1773, the Boston Tea Party. Tea? 1588, Spanish Armada…

“—Josie and Audrey were the only two I was worried about. He never let anyone see anything that wasn’t finished, but he’d been playing his he-man games with the pair of them for six months or so, and there was a chance they might have gotten a look. Audrey was over here one day after I had galley proofs and I left the first sheet in the living room deliberately, as a test. She did recognize it, and of course she told Josie. Josie herself wouldn’t have recognized The Scarlet Letterif her name was Hester. Audrey said that she had three pages of manuscript in Lucien’s handwriting hidden away – part of an earlier draft he’d given her as a souvenir. They told me they wanted ninety percent of everything I made.”

I forced my head up then. She was sitting with her legs crossed. Her face was flushed, and her eyes were gleaming, not looking at me. She wasn’t Mrs. Macbeth, but that didn’t keep the thing from being creepy. She was talking almost mechanically.

“They made it so absurdly easy. They told me they had the three sheets in a safe-deposit box.” She grunted. “I found them in Josie’s closet Tuesday afternoon. They’d put them in the obvious place, thinking I’d never look. Like all stupid people they thought everyone else was stupid too. A hundred thousand dollars from Hollywood alone, not to mention the reputation that goes with it, and they thought I’d crawl, let them hold the lie over my head for as long as they lived. Fools—”

She wasn’t conscious of me at all now. I could feel the Magnum on my hip when I shifted my weight. Her hands were in her lap, empty. That made things even weirder.

“You weren’t quite sure why Audrey didn’t suspect me when Josie died. She did, of course, although she couldn’t be sure until she learned if I’d located the three pages. So she ‘dropped in’ yesterday. She brought Pete with her, although he had no idea what was going on. I knew damned well she wanted a look at that closet, so I let her have one. I made a pretense about needing something from the drugstore, and even asked Pete to walk me down so she could be alone in the place. Except by then I’d substituted three pages on matching paper in my own handwriting – close to Lucien’s but unquestionably mine. I didn’t know exactly when or where to kill her yet, you understand. She stole the pages – meaning she didn’t notice the substitution. They’ll most likely turn up in her apartment – absolutely meaningless. That was enough to convince her that I wasn’t involved. I did have some luck with the timing on some things, but then everything was in my favor to start with – the degenerate way these people live, all the sordid relationships, Ephraim and his mockery of a marriage – God, how weary I’d gotten of all that. But I’m out of it now, you see. I’ll be somebody – a rich somebody.”

“With a number over your breast pocket,” I said. “You’ll be able to buy cigarettes and soap for everybody else in death row.”

“Well, the man is recovering.” She came back from wherever she’d been. “He’s his ironic old self again. How droll.”

I used all my hands on the bed, getting to my knees. She watched me indifferently. After a minute she smiled.

“You’re not really one of the stupid ones, Fannin – you’re just stubborn. Why do you think I’ve told you all of this? You’ll go to the police, of course—”

I didn’t answer, busy breathing.

“You will, all right. It’s really quite amusing – except for one thing.”

“I know,” I said. “But you tell me anyhow.”

“You’re dopey. You staggered up here looking like somebody Noah left off the passenger list, and you collapsed on my floor. Tell them I did it. You won’t even be able to explain what gave you the idea to start with, it’s based on such a false premise.” She laughed, rising gracefully in a little half-pirouette. Then she cocked an eyebrow toward the bed. “There truly isn’t any point in rushing about it, you know. I’ve got a hunch your immediate future would be considerably less frustrating if you spent it sleeping. Shucks, I might even fondle you where it hurts.”

I made it the rest of the way up, staring at her. I was gritting my teeth so hard I could hear them. “Three,” I said. “One a man nearly blind you didn’t even know.”

“Two cheap whores and a filthy, odorous wretch who tried to put his hands on me when I walked in claiming to be a friend of Audrey’s. An overwhelming loss to the world.”

“You found the three sheets and killed the girls anyhow, because even without the proof they could still talk and cause doubt. You killed Grant only to cover your trail. Why did you bother? Why, if you were going to tell me all of this?”

“Oh, but I hadn’t intendedto tell you anything, you see. This was just impulse—”

“Just—” I swallowed. “My God, I thought people like Ephraim and Peters were in bad shape. Harmless phonies who simply haven’t outgrown their adolescence. But you—”

“What about me, Harry? You were getting stuck on me, to tell the truth, weren’t you? Say that you weren’t, especially after Tuesday night. When I wept on your manly chest, Harry– remember when I cried?”

“I’ll get over it, Fern. “I’ll spend a night in a cesspool.”

“Heck, that’s a pretty flimsy parting line. Too bad you’re not one of those Mickey Spillane detectives – you could shoot me in the belly and be done with it. But that would be murder, wouldn’t it? I mean, since after all, you can’t prove a thing.”

She laughed again, slipping the robe off her shoulders. She glided to the bed, naked as a reptile. “You willexcuse me then, but I do have to get my rest – a girl ought to look her best for the reporters. Yes, my little confession – just an impulse, but what a brilliant one. I wonder how many copies it will sell – a million, do you think? Surely, at least a million.”

The light snapped off, and I heard sheets rustling, with sounds like nuts being shelled. “Drop in again, why don’t you – sometime when you’re feeling a little more friendly. I might even autograph a copy for you—’To helpless Harry, who had no proof.’”

I did shoot her– through her twisted, malevolent brain, with every bullet in the Magnum, savoring each separate recoil as it jarred my arm to the shoulder – butonly in my imagination, only in my imagination.

“Good night, lover,” she said.

CHAPTER 30

There was a Benzedrine inhaler in the bathroom. I crushed the gummy substance out of the tube with my heel, then chewed on the stuff as long as I could stand the taste. Dana was torpid from the barbiturates, and I had all the capacity for exertion of an anemic amoeba, but I wasn’t going to leave her in that apartment.

It took a glass of water in her face to get her into a sitting position, and she kept mumbling something incoherent about San Francisco while I yanked the red sheath over her head. We went down into the street like walking wounded, but nobody asked us how the rest of our boys were doing at the front. She was out cold again the minute she hit the car.

I double-parked and left her for the five minutes it took to get some response from Joey Pringle, a hophead musician who lived on the third floor of my building. Between the pair of us we carted her up the one flight. Pringle didn’t ask what was going on either, but only because at 7 A.M. he’d be operating on two hours’ sleep at best, all of it induced intravenously.

I showered, worked myself into fresh clothes, then reheated yesterday’s coffee and forced down two cups. After that I got Dana stripped again and between the sheets. I did it with all the jaded worldliness of an aging gynecologist. I made the precinct house just as Lieutenant Vasella was finishing his night’s tour.

If I sounded as inane to him as I did to myself, he didn’t show it. It took the two patrolmen still posted at Audrey Grant’s apartment exactly sixteen minutes to locate the three manuscript pages under the base of a lamp. Their existence proved nothing about Fern’s guilt, but at least suggested that my story wasn’t sheer fantasy. The downtown lab had no sizable samples of either Fern’s or Lucien Vaulking’s handwriting with which to compare them, but within thirty minutes more Vasella was informed that the writing had been done long after Vaulking’s death, in fact most likely within the last seventy-two hours.

A car was dispatched to my office with instructions for finding my Grant file under S,like in General Sherman, which I actually should have been asked to turn over earlier. Central Identification had Fern’s prints on record, because of secretarial work she had once done for an insurance firm which registered all employees, but we learned quickly that they matched none of those on the newspaper clippings or the envelope in which Grant had received them. What prints there were belonged to Grant himself, his lawyer Fosburgh, two mail clerks, a letter carrier and me.

The original message form for Grant’s telegram had been picked up at a midtown Western Union office, but this also bore no prints of any interest. It had been filled out laboriously in left-handed block printing by a right-handed person, and the line requiring identification of the sender listed the name R. E. Lee. The civil service intellect. No clerk had been alert enough to take a second glance at someone who had appended that signature to a communication addressed to one U. S. Grant.

The knife which killed Audrey Grant had been handled with cloth, and there was nothing which could establish Fern’s presence in the death room. The same was true at Grants. A check of the Hudson River near his apartment was already underway in an attempt to turn up the third murder weapon– a.38—and sewers in his neighborhood were being dredged also.

I learned most of this before ten o’clock, by which time the amphetamine and lack of sleep had me flighty. Vasella brought in an M.E. to look me over and the man decided I had a fracture of one rib, the obvious contusions but no damaged bones in my face, and only a lingering trace of my concussion. He taped me up and Vasella told me to get some rest.

Dana was still drugged. She tossed for half a minute when I woke her, then did a double take about the unfamiliar bedroom. She closed her eyes again, turning away with a moan. “Oh, heavenly damn,” she said. “Dana, you done did it again.”

She did another confused shudder when she got a look at my face. “You didn’t done it either,” I told her. She stared at me while I gave her the shortest condensation which would make sense, sitting up with a blanket around her bruised shoulders. I asked her if she could think of anything which might help, but she could only shake her head.

“Boy, I guess I owe you some thanks for getting me out of there. Leave it to perceptive O’Dea to pick the right girl to run to in an emergency.”

“How are you feeling?”

She fingered one of the welts on her arm. “Delicate to the touch, hung over and still woozy from those pills – otherwise downright jovial.” She glanced toward her clothes, then smiled. “I suppose it would be sort of superfluous to ask you to leave the room while I get dressed, wouldn’t it?”

“Hell, there’s no need to scram – the couch is okay for me.”

“Oh, stop. You look like you fell under a tractor.”

I grinned. “I’ll tell you what. They strapped about sixty yards of adhesive around my middle – I’m as safe as Don McGruder, if you want to take a chance on moving over half a foot.”

She lifted an eyebrow impishly. “Like old folks – cohabitation for companionship alone?”

“At least give it some dignity. Like wounded tigers, sulking—”

The clock on the dresser said twelve when I woke up. I had the bed to myself, but I saw the red dress still draped over the chair. I was stiff as Nebuchadnezzar’s femur. My robe wasn’t behind the door so I limped out front in my shorts and found her wearing it, reading something in my big chair.

“You’re a good-looking girl,” I told her. “You were pretty drunk at that party.”

“I’m a shopworn Greenwich Village slut with acute dislocation of all functioning parts,” she said. “I’m twenty-six. I fell in love with a guy when I was nineteen, the way it only happens once – a beautiful goddam scatterbrained hunk of test pilot who got himself disintegrated over some salt flats exactly one year to the day after we were married. Sex was the first thing I tried, then dope. I haven t quite abandoned either, but I guess I prefer Scotch. Although it’s funny – I found where you cache the booze a good two hours ago, and I haven’t had a drop. Did Fern really kill them, Harry?”

“Yes.”

“I’ll make you some breakfast, or whatever you call it at midnight. Bacon and eggs?”

“Four eggs. We did sulk at that, didn’t we?”

“You kissed me once – on the ear. And then you started muttering. Oh, sure, I meant to ask you about that. You were insisting that somebody named Bowman had hit you in the head with a baseball. Do you often have delusions of grandeur– I mean mixing yourself up with Ducky Medwick?”

“For crying out loud, how would you know who—?”

Her eyes sparkled. “Older brothers. The louts used to beat it into me. Who do you want, the old St. Louis Gas House Gang? Durocher, Medwick, Dean, Rip Collins, Pepper Martin—”

“Marry me,” I said. “Or at least bring your fielder’s glove and move in for a month or two.”

“You might just get me to think about it, if you were looking at me instead of the telephone. Call them, for heaven’s sake.”

I got Vasella, and since I asked he told me he’d slept in the office. “We decided to bring her in,” he said. “About seven o’clock. She denies everything, of course. We checked Peters on that slip – he did tell her about the third killing.”

I swore. “She booked?”

“We’d need a good deal more than we have. It’s an odd one, all right – the girl couldn’t be more sure of herself. We allowed her a phone call after a couple of hours, but do you think she contacted a lawyer? She called her publisher. He’s been pacing halls here ever since, trying to make up his mind.”

“I don’t get you—”

“Evidently the book is in the process of being shipped all over the country to go on sale in a few days, with her name on the cover. They don’t know whether to back her or not. He’s anxious to hear things from you directly. Oh, yeah, just incidentally, our friend Ephraim Turk finally appeared – walked in on us twenty minutes ago. Considerate of him, we feel.”

I said I’d be down, then ate and got dressed. Dana had to tuck in my shirt. I told her I’d meant it about sticking around, especially if she didn’t want to spend time alone in the place she’d shared with Audrey. She said she’d stay the rest of the night.

I saw the publisher. He was five-feet-two at most, forty-five at least, shoulderless, pleatless, impeccable. He carried a severely rolled British umbrella, an alligator attaché case, a Burberry.

He was what all good little status-seekers get to be when they grow up.

“I just don t know,” he said. “I’m shocked at the implications. On top of which I was supposed to have dinner this evening with Papa and I had to cancel—”

“Huh?” I said.

“I had copies of the novel rushed to a number of critics by special messenger the moment we heard, along with samples of Lucien Vaulkings work for comparison, but no one seems to want to make an unequivocal judgment about authorship. Lionel and VanWyck and Cleanth have phoned saying they have to have more time, and I haven t yet heard from Edmund. Edmund is in Connecticut, of course—”

“Of course—”

“It’s like Shakespeare and Bacon, isn’t it? I wonder what Bennett would do in such a situation. Perhaps I’ll call him—”

He wandered away to call Bennett. He finally decided to call his lawyers also, three or four of them. A soft-spoken, darkly shaven young man named Dunn from the District Attorney’s office had been brought in, and I told the story again for his benefit. I was going to get it by heart, like Galia omnia divisa est.At 1:10 my friend Nate Brannigan appeared from Central Homicide, big and beefy and sinewed like an ox, assuming responsibility probably because no one else could verify my reliability. “What are we doing about long-range background,” he wanted to know. “Her relationship with this man Vaulking– how much did she see him after the divorce? Can we establish that he’d been writing?”

Floyd Toomey was handling that end of the investigation. He kept looking at me as if he hoped I might disappear into an open manhole. “We’ve dug up four neighbors from when they lived together, captain,” he said. “Two of them claim he worked a lot, all the time.”

“Would seem to indicate there should have been a script,” Brannigan said.

“The other two say he never worked at all,” Toomey went on stonily. “Old ladies. Both of them swear he kissed his wife good-by when she went to work in the morning, then used to crawl back into the sack. Had female visitors three or four times a week. They’re both sure Vaulking is roasting in hell – Tin quoting here – while his wife suffered and was a dear.”

A cop from technical detail came in. They had shut off the plumbing in Fern’s apartment and drained the pipes. No burned papers, no trace of anything that could have been the original sheets in Vaulking’s handwriting. The search for the gun which had killed Grant was also getting nowhere.

I told it one last time at two o’clock, and this time they had me throw it at Fern. She’d gotten that beauty rest, and after it she’d wriggled into a tight black jersey blouse and a tweed skirt that clung to her hips like the primer coating on an Alfa-Romeo. “You deny having made the confession Mr. Fannin claims you made?” Brannigan asked her.

“Wouldn’t you?” she said.

“These pages of your manuscript at Audrey Grant’s – how would Fannin have known about them if you hadn’t told him?”

“Gracious me, how should I know how he knew? Certainly there can’t be any harm in copying out passages of one’s book as a memento for a dear friend? Does someone have a cigarette, please?”

She crossed her legs, waiting. The publisher went over, offering her a Pall Mall.

“Actually there isone thing I might mention,” she decided then. “Embarrassing as it is, it seems pertinent. I spent a certain portion of Tuesday evening in Mr. Fannin’s apartment – after we discovered Josie’s body. It wasn’t really a very successful arrangement. I hadn’t thought of it before, but I imagine the fact that I repudiated Mr. Fannin’s subsequent advances – once I ceased to be vulnerable – might well have some bearing on this curious behavior of his.”