Donald Westlake - The New Black Mask ( No 3 )

Shaking the thought from his mind, Dewey asked, “What do you have to report?”

“Nothing.”

“Nothing?”

“Uh, that’s right, sir. I talked to sixteen people. Just like you told me to: discreetly and confidentially. I talked to everybody from the mayor and the banker to the barber and the town drunk. Not a single one of them ever heard of George Trane having a mistress. And none of them believed it was true.”

“It must not be true, then,” Dewey said.

Simply frowned. “Why not?”

“Truth is nothing more than popular opinion,” Dewey explained. “If nobody believes something, then it isn’t true.” He guided Simply back out of the room. “I’ll be leaving in a little while, Simply. It’s been nice working with you.” He started to close the door.

“Uh, Mr. Taylor, have you given any more thought to my byline?”

“Still considering it, Simply. I’ll let you know.” He closed the door on the young stringer and started sluggishly for the bathroom. Then he stopped, reconsidered, and opened the door again. “Fred!” he called, using Simply’s given name for the first time. The stringer looked back from the motel parking lot. “Whip out two thousand words recapping the Strawn trial for the Sunday supplement. I’ll see you get an exclusive byline on it.” Without waiting for Simply to gush his thanks, Dewey slammed the door.

In the bathroom, his thrashed image glared back at him from the mirror. He thought of the previous night, the hours spent with Elizabeth, the food, the liquor, the unbridled passion. God, he thought, shaking his head, had that been him ?

Dropping his robe, Dewey got under a stream of hot water in the shower and stood there for ten minutes. Eventually he reached out and got his toothbrush and used it. Then he lathered his face and shaved from memory, without a mirror. He was lucky; he only cut himself four times. But under the hot water he began to come alive again and the memory of the previous night came into sharper focus. The previous evening, he remembered vividly now, had been incredible — the food, the drink, the lovemaking — it had all been perfect.

He came out of the bathroom feeling great. From his garment bag he took fresh clothes and dressed. He combed his hair, gave his shoes a lick with the motel towel, packed the rest of his things, and checked out. He drove the two blocks to the library.

Elizabeth was in her workroom again. She looked up and smiled as he came in. “Good morning, Dewey.”

“Good morning.”

She stretched luxuriously. “Do you feel as wonderful as I do?”

“I feel pretty good,” he admitted.

“If you’re here to take me to lunch, it’s a little early, but I don’t mind if you don’t—”

“I’m not here to take you to lunch,” he interrupted. He rubbed his fingers around the glue pot on her worktable and they picked up dried particles of rubber cement. Scrapings from the victim’s fingernails … some slight rubber cement residue …

He touched a slight indented mar in one comer of the table. Other damage to the body…a small bruise on the right temple …

Moving over to her desk, he caught some of the fragrance of her still-fresh bath oil. A perfume scent on his shirt and coat … jasmine fragrance …

From the desk, he picked up her old-fashioned spindle with its ice pick point.

“Why did you kill him, Elizabeth?” he asked quietly.

Elizabeth Lane sighed a helpless little sigh and shook her head. “I don’t know. He was standing there, getting ready to leave, as he had so many countless times before. He had a little smirk on his face that he always seemed to have after he had… used me. It never bothered me much before, but for some reason on that particular night—” She shook her head again. “I just picked up the spindle and stabbed it into his chest. He started to fall, then he hit his head on the table and kind of staggered back and actually sat right in the book lift over there. I used it to move him upstairs. Then I rolled him onto a library cart and pushed him to the back door where I keep my car. I drove him out to his home and dropped him there.” She half shrugged. “I didn’t know what else to do with him.”

“That was as good as any place, I guess,” Dewey said. He put the spindle back on the desk.

“I had no idea about that gardener and what happened with his wife ten years ago. It’s been very heavy on my mind.”

“Don’t let it be. Strawn is right where he belongs; you can believe that. But you shouldn’t stay in New Rome, you know. If I found out, someone else could also.”

“As a matter of fact, I’ve been thinking of moving away,” she told him. “I’ve been offered a head librarian job in a little town in Florida, near the ocean. I’ve always wanted to live near the ocean.”

“Funny, so have I,” said Dewey. “There’s a book I always thought I’d write someday, living near the ocean.”

“Really?” An excitement came into her eyes. “I have some money, you know. A small inheritance from my parents. And the house they left me. And my own savings; I’ve saved plenty in the last fifteen years; nothing to spend, it on in New Rome. And of course he gave me gifts: expensive jewelry, mostly; I have a drawer full of it, because naturally I couldn’t wear it around town.”

“Naturally.”

“We could live near the ocean and I could run the library and you could stay home and write your book.” She got up and came around the desk. As she did, she picked up the spindle. Dewey tensed slightly at the sight of it in her hand. But she only stood holding it.

“What do you think I should do with this?” she asked.

He relaxed. “Let’s drop it in the Chattahoochee River on our way to lunch.” He took her arm. “Come on, we’ve got lots of planning to do.”

On their way out to his car, she said, “Dewey, do you suppose we could get married?”

“I guess so. Why do you want to?”

She shrugged. “I’ve never been very pretty. Maybe I just want to tell people my name is Elizabeth Taylor.”

Dewey laughed and put his arm around her. “Sure,” he said, “why not?”

They were laughing together as they drove away from the library.

Linda Barnes introduces a female PI in “Lucky Penny” Like Michael Spraggue, the independently wealthy actor-detective of Barnes s three exceptional novels, Carlotta Carlyle is a six-foot-one-inch Bostonian. The similarity ends there. Carlotta may lack Spraggue’s sophistication, money, and good looks, but the combination of her experience as a Boston city cop and her womanly, if not feminine, instincts makes her a wily, doggedly determined detective. She also happens to be a splendidly fresh storyteller. The prospects at the beginning of her career look excellent.

Linda Barnes came to detective fiction from a background in the theater. In addition to her Spraggue novels, the most recent of which is Cities of the Dead, scheduled for publication in February 1986, she has written two one-act plays. Presently she is at work on a full-length play and a novel featuring Carlotta Carlyle.

Lieutenant Mooney made me dish it all out for the record. He’s a good cop, if such an animal exists. We used to work the same shift before I decided — wrongly — that there was room for a lady PI in this town. Who knows? With this case under my belt, maybe business’ll take a 180-degree spin, and I can quit driving a hack.

See, I’ve already written the official report for Mooney and the cops, but the kind of stuff they wanted: date, place, and time, cold as ice and submitted in triplicate, doesn’t even start to tell the tale. So I’m doing it over again, my way.