“If he had,” Durango remarked, “Dr. Golden might still be alive. Anyway,” he promised, “we’ll check your story out with him. But even it it’s true, any one of the three of you still might have returned in plenty of time to kill her.”
“Not Vance and I,” Lisa said firmly. “We were in the sack together from then on.”
“But without witnesses,” Durango pointed out.
“Wrong again. There was one witness,” Lisa remembered. “The square who lives over me came down to complain about all the noise we were making. He thought Vance was beating me up.”
“And was he?” Durango asked.
“If he was, I’m not complaining about it. I never had it so good.”
“Spare us any more details. What time did your neighbor complain?”
“Three-fourty-five on the button.”
“How can you be so sure of the precise time?”
“He was holding a wristwatch by the strap and waving it in my face and yammering about what time it was and how late and all. He’d still be at it if Vance hadn’t got mad and thrown him out.”
“We’ll check that out, too,” Durango vowed. “And what about you?” He turned to Brenda. “Can you prove you did'n’t come back?”
“I think I can prove I couldn’t possibly have made it back before four o’clock, if that means anything.”
“It might. Go ahead.”
“Well, it was a rainy night and it was a good half-hour before the doorman got me a cab. That makes it almost two o’clock. I live out in the Coney Island section of Brooklyn. The driver wasn't familiar with it and it was after three before he dropped me. I couldn’t possibly have gotten back to Dr. Golden’s before four. But, of course, I didn’t go back there at all.”
“All right, you three come with me and the rest of you wait.” Durango led Brenda, Lisa and Vance outside. “Sit over there.” He indicated a bench and crossed over to the desk at which Sergeant Connors was sitting.
The sergeant had his overcoat on the looked like he’d just come into the stationhouse. “That Dave Ivers kid checks out,” he told Durango. “He was with the broad, all right. Also, the other five names you gave me have been processed. Two of ’em have airtight alibis for last night. I got the other three waitin’ for you in there.” He pointed to the closed door of Durango’s office.
“Good. I’ll get to them in a little while. Now, I want you to check the cab companies for the trip sheet of a driver who made a pickup at Dr. Golden’s about two a. m. and took Brenda Haley out to Coney Island. Particularly, I want the times of pickup and delivery. Let me know if they show she couldn’t have made it back to Manhattan in time to commit the murder. Then check the doorman at Dr. Golden’s building to see if he saw Haley, Bourdon and Thurmond. And check the guy who lives upstairs over Bourdon to see if he complained to her last night and what time. Oh, and ring up the widower Golden and ask him in a nice way to get down here. You got all that?”
“I got it.”
“And, oh yeah, I almost forgot. The dyke says she’d got a friend in Golden’s building.“ Get the name from her and check out what time she left the friend’s apartment.”
“Anything else?” Connors asked with a touch of sarcasm.
“Nope. Just report to me on what you find. I’m goin’ back in with what’s left of the looneys.”
“Good luck.”
“Thanks.” The door of the interrogation room closed behind Durango.
Kevin Connery, Reggie Ivers and Cora Williams looked up apprehensively as he re-entered.
“Well, we do seem to be dwindling, don’t we?” Durango said cheerily. “Do you three happen to know what Dr. Golden’s dying words were?”
They shook their heads.
“ ‘Ask the group. The group knows!’ That’s what she said. And now the group is down to three, and I’m asking you.”
“Asking us what?” Cora Williams voiced the question for the three of them.
“Asking you who killed Dr. Mavis Golden, that’s what.”
“But surely you can’t think that any of us did it,” exclaimed Reggie Ivers.
“Sometimes I'm thinkin’ everyone’s a bit queer for murther but me an’ thee,” Kevin Connery murmured. “An’ I’m not so sure a-tall about thee!”
“Exactly!” Durango said.
The three drew away from one another. Somehow murder was once again among them!
CHAPTER 14
Three of a Kind!
“. . . EACH OF YOU wants to kill me . . . certain factors. Opportunity for one. Motive — which is to say the feeling of wanting to kill me finding its fullest expression due to some outside pressure—for another . . . Of course, some are more dangerous than others. I have one patient, suffering from the same thing as Brenda over there but in a far more exaggerated from, whose hostility verges on the paranoid. Close to the brink of violence . . .” '
Thus had Dr. Golden spoken to the group a few hours before she was murdered. Her words had been preserved on the tape. And when Durango heard them, these were the phrases which had become implanted in his mind as possibly having special import. These words, taken in conjunction with her dying stricture to “Ask the group!” seemed the most likely clue to the identity of her killer. And it was because of these words that the three women were now sitting and waiting in Durango’s office.
While they waited, Debbie Smith tossed restlessly on the hard cot of the jail cell and tried to sleep. Dr. Zachary Golden, in answer to the summons from Sergeant Connors, got into his car and started down the West Side Highway for police headquarters. And Durango continued to play cat-and-mouse with a trio which, while mixed, was probably not as mixed up as the trio waiting in his office.
They were an oddly assorted threesome. They didn’t even attempt to talk among themselves. They were strangers. The had never met before. Each of them was occupied with her own thoughts.
At first glance the trio seemed comprised of two women and a man. The one with the short, black hair trimmed in male fashion, wearing a man’s tie and a V- cut man’s white contour shirt tucked into neatly pressed, tapered trousers at the waist, the one with the broad shoulders and fiat chest, the hipless one with the strong, masculine face which eschewed make-up—this one was Jonnie O’Faye. She was a professional entertainer at a Village joint where her specialty was a male impersonation act in which she made passes at female customers, convinced them she must be a man, and then shocked them with the truth by revealing herself as a woman.
Jonnie was thinking of Dr. Mavis Golden. She had first started going to Dr. Golden for treatment about three years ago when she was twenty-two years old. Quite soon, Dr. Golden had shown her that her Lesbianism was only one symptom of her real trouble. It was only the expression of the contempt in which she held other women, of the raging, pent-up aggression toward anything female which filled Jonnie.
It stemmed from Jonnie’s relationship with her mother. Trite, but true nevertheless. Jonnie hated her mother for being weak. And this hatred spread to include all women. The weaker they were, the more Jonnie hated them. That was one reason she so enjoyed making them crawl with her act at the club.
But Jonnie had thought Dr. Golden was different. She’d thought Dr. Golden was strong. She’d thought so right up until that session with her the day before Dr. Golden had been murdered. And then Dr. Golden had slipped, and Jonnie had caught the slip, and inside Jonnie’s brain Dr. Golden’s strength had crumbled away, leaving Jonnie to look at just one more weak and foolish woman worthy only of contempt and loathing.