Лоуренс Блок - One Night Stands and Lost Weekends

“You can go if you want, Ed. I’ll stick around until they send a truck for the body. But—”

“Run over the timetable, will you?”

“From when to when?”

“From when you released him to when he died.”

Jerry shrugged. “Why? You can’t read it any way but suicide, can you?”

“I don’t know. Give me a run-down.”

“Let’s see,” he said. “You called around five, right?”

“Around then. Five or five-thirty.”

“We let him go around three. There’s your timetable, Ed. We let him out around three, he came back here, thought about things for a while, then wrote that note and killed himself. That checks with the rough estimate we’ve got of the time of death. You narrow it down — you did call him after I spoke to you, didn’t you?”

“Yes. No answer.”

“He must have been dead by that time; probably killed himself within an hour after he got here.”

“How did he seem when you released him?”

“Happy to be out, I thought at the time. But he didn’t show much emotion one way or the other. You know how it is with a person who’s getting ready to knock himself off. All the problems and emotions are kept bottled up inside.”

I went over to a window and looked out at Horatio Street. It was the most obvious suicide in the world, but I couldn’t swallow it. Call it a hunch, a stubborn refusal to accept the fact that my client had managed to fool me. Whatever it was, I didn’t believe the suicide theory. It just didn’t sit right.

“I don’t like it,” I said. “I don’t think he killed himself.”

“You’re wrong, Ed.”

“Am I?” I went to Donahue’s liquor cabinet and filled two glasses with cognac.

“I know nothing ever looked more like suicide,” I admitted. “But the motives are still as messy as ever. Look at what we got here. We have a man who hired me to protect him from his former mistress — and as soon as he did, he only managed to call attention to the fact that he was involved with her. He received threatening phone calls from her. She didn’t want him married. But her best friend swears that the Price girl didn’t give a damn about Donahue, that he was only another man in her collection.”

“Look, Ed—”

“Let me finish. We can suppose for a minute that he was lying for reasons of his own that don’t make much sense, that he had some crazy reason for calling me in on things before he knocked off the girl. Maybe he thought that would alibi him—”

“That’s just what I was going to say,” Jerry interjected.

“I thought of it. It doesn’t make a hell of a lot of sense, but it’s possible, I guess. Still, where in hell is his motive? Not blackmail. She wasn’t the blackmailing type to begin with, as far as I can see. But there’s more to it than that. Lynn Farwell wouldn’t care who Mark slept with before they were married. Or after, for that matter. It wasn’t a love match. She wanted a respectable husband and he wanted a rich wife, and they both figured to get what they wanted. Love wasn’t part of it.”

“Maybe he wasn’t respectable,” Jerry said. “Maybe Karen knew something he didn’t want known. There’s plenty of room here for a hidden motive, Ed.”

“Maybe. Still, I wish you’d keep the case open, Jerry.”

“You know I won’t.”

“You’ll write it off as suicide and close the file?”

“But I have to. All the evidence points that way. Murder and then suicide, with Donahue tagged for killing the Price girl and then killing himself.”

“I guess it makes your bookkeeping easier.”

“You know better than that, Ed.” He almost sounded hurt. “If I could see it any other way I’d keep on it. I can’t. As far as we’re concerned it’s a closed book.”

I walked over to the window again. “I’m going to stay with it,” I said.

“Without a client?”

“Without a client.”

A maid answered the phone in the Farwell home. I asked to speak to Lynn.

“Miss Farwell’s not home,” she said. “Who’s calling, please?”

I gave her my name.

“Oh, yes, Mr. London. Miss Farwell left a message for you to call her at—” I took down a number with a Regency exchange, thanked her, and hung up.

I was tired, unhappy, and confused. I didn’t want the role of bearer of evil tidings. I wished now that I had let Jerry tell her himself. I was in my apartment, it was a hot day for the time of year, and my air conditioner wasn’t working right. I dialed the number the maid had given me. A girl answered, not Lynn. I asked to speak to Miss Farwell.

She came on the line almost immediately. “Ed?”

“Yes— I...”

“I wondered if you’d call. I hope I wasn’t horrid last night. I was very drunk.”

“You were all right.”

“Just all right?” I didn’t say anything. She giggled softly and whispered, “I had a good time, Ed. Thank you for a lovely evening.”

“Lynn—”

“Is something the matter?”

I’ve never been good at breaking news. I took a deep breath and blurted out, “Mark is dead. I just came from his apartment. The police think he killed himself.”

Silence.

“Can I meet you somewhere, Lynn? I’d like to talk to you.”

More silence. Then, when she did speak, her voice was flat as week-old beer. “Are you at your apartment?”

“Yes.”

“Stay there. I’ll be right over. I’ll take a cab.”

The line went dead.

While I waited for Lynn I thought about Joe Conn. If one person murdered both Karen Price and Mark Donahue, Conn seemed the logical suspect. Karen was blackmailing him, I reasoned, holding him up for hush money that he had to pay if he wanted to keep wife and job. He found out Karen was going to be at the stag, jumping out of the cake, and he took a gun along and shot her.

Then Mark got arrested and Conn felt safe. Just when he was most pleased with himself, the police released Mark. Conn started to worry. If the case dragged out he was in trouble. Even if they didn’t get to him, a lengthy investigation would turn up the fact that he had been sleeping with Karen. And he had to keep that fact hidden.

So he went to Donahue’s apartment with another gun. He hit Mark over the head, propped him up in the chair, shot him through the mouth, and replaced his own prints with Mark’s. Then he dashed off a quick suicide note and got out of there. The blow on the head wouldn’t show, if that was how he did it. Not after the bullet did things to Mark’s skull.

But then why in hell did Conn throw a fit at the ad agency when I tried to ruffle him? It didn’t make sense. If he had killed Mark on Sunday afternoon, he would know that it would be only a matter of time until the body was found and the case closed. He wouldn’t blow up if I called him a murderer, not when he had already taken so much trouble to cover his tracks.

Unless he was being subtle, anticipating my whole line of reasoning. And when you start taking a suspect’s possible subtlety into consideration, you find yourself on a treadmill marked confusion. All at once the possibilities become endless.

I got off the treadmill, though. The doorbell rang and Lynn Farwell stepped into my apartment for the third time in two days. And it occurred to me, suddenly, just how different each of those three visits had been.

This one was slightly weird. She walked slowly to the same leather chair in which she had curled up Saturday morning. She did not wax kittenish this time.

“I don’t feel a thing,” she said.

“Shock.”

“No,” she admitted. “I don’t even feel shock, Ed. I just don’t feel a thing.

“I wasn’t in love with him,” she said. “You knew that, of course.”