“I’m afraid I’ve locked myself out,” Fletch said.“By any chance do you have a key to 6B?”
The smell of gin was not stale, but it was mixed with the odor of an air purifier.
From beside the skirt of Joan’s housecoat, Mignon was looking at him with her usual polite courtesy.
“Who are you?” Joan asked.
“Peter Fletcher. I’m using Bart’s apartment. We met in the elevator yesterday.”
“Oh, yes.” She lurched heavily on her left foot as she turned to the small hall table. “You’re the man Bart dumped the body on.”
“Ma’am?”
The drawer of the hall table held many keys.
“The police were here. An enormous man. Name of Wynn, or something.”
“Flynn.”
“He spoke so softly I could hardly hear him. Came this morning. He showed me a picture of the murdered girl. I forget her name.”
“Ruth Fryer.”
“Yes.”
She stirred her hand through the key drawer.
Fletch said, “Yes?”
She pulled out a key with a white tag attached. It read, “Bart’s—6B.”
“There it is.”
She lurched toward the doorway, apparently thinking Fletch was still standing in it.
“Oh,” she said, finding him. “Now use this key and give it right back to me so next time one of you lock yourselves out I’ll have it.”
Key in hand, Fletch asked, “Did you let anyone into the apartment Tuesday night?”
“No. Of course not. I’ve never let anyone into that apartment. Except Bart. Lucy. And now you. Anyway, I wasn’t here Tuesday night. I had drinks and dinner with some friends.”
“Where did you have drinks?”
“Bullfinch Pub.” She knew she was repeating herself. “Just up the street.”
“I see.”
“That’s where I saw Bart. And the girl.”
Fletch crossed the small hall and opened the door to 6B with Joan Winslow’s key.
Handing it back to her, he asked, “Was the girl you saw with Bart Tuesday night the same girl, in the photograph the police showed you?”
“Yes, Joan Winslow said. ”Of course.“
“Did you tell the police that?”
“Certainly. I’d tell anybody that.”
She whisked Mignon behind her with the long, skirt of her houserobe.
“Come in,” she said. “It’s drinks time.”
“Thank you.”
“Don’t you want a drink?”
“I’ll be right with you.”
Fletch crossed the small elevator landing, closed the door to his apartment, and returned to Joan’s. He closed the door behind him.
Swaying over a well-stocked bar in the living room, her face was that of a child at a soda counter.
Her living room was a counterpart of Connors‘, in its large size and basic solidity, but far more feminine. Instead of polished leathers and dark woods the upholstery was white and blue and pink, the furniture light and spindly. The paintings on the walls were originals, imitative modern junk.
“Seeing it’s Friday night, shall we have a martini? Why don’t you make it?” She waved her hand airily at the bar. “Men make martinis so much better than women do.”
“Oh, yes?”
She placed the ice bucket centrally on the service table.
“I’ll make crackers and cheese,” she said.
She walked flat-footed, placing most of her weight on the heels of her house slippers, prepared at each step to prevent a fall sideways. Joan Winslow was accustomed to being crocked.
“Well.” On the divan, her legs curled up under her houserobe, she bit into a bare cracker. “Isn’t this nice?”
Fletch poured.
“Have you known the Connorses long?”
“Years. Ever since they were married. The, apartment next door was being prepared for them while they were on their honeymoon and I was in Nevada getting a divorce. We all arrived back within a day or two of each other and just fell into each other’s arms.”
“You hadn’t known each other before?”
“No, indeed. If I had laid eyes on Bart Connors before Lucy, she wouldn’t have had a chance. He was a darling. And we’d all be much better off.”
She took the tiniest sip of her martini.
“Umn good. Men can make better martinis then women.”
“I used a little vermouth.”
“You see—what’s your name, Peter? That doesn’t seem right to me, somehow, but I’ll use it—they were just getting used to marriage, and I was just getting used to divorce. My husband, a structural engineer, had accepted a contract in Latin America, in Costa Rica, the year before. The poor, empty-headed boob remarried there. I found out some months later. I mean I had no choice but to divorce him, did I? Why put a person in jail just because he’s a booby? Don’t you think it was the best thing to do?”
“Absolutely,” Fletch said firmly.
“Only the Connorses never did get used to marriage.” She drank half her martini in a single swallow. “And I have never gotten used to divorce.”
The woman, at the most, was in her, early forties.
She had probably been attractive, in a petite, helpless, feminine way. She probably could be again, if she would put down her glass.
“At first,” she continued, “it was great fun. They didn’t know the building, or the district. I got the janitorial service to work for them—there was always something abrasive about Lucy—and found them a string of apartment cleaners. People were doing things for the Connorses because I asked them to. Lucy quite turned people off.”
She finished her drink. Fletch did not pour her another.
“After a year or so, it was pretty obvious she turned Bart off, too. When I had a dinner party, I usually had the Connorses as guests. They invited me, with or without escort, when they were throwing a bash. What could we do, really? There are only two apartments on this floor, and we were friends. We had to be.”
She poured herself a fresh drink.
“One night, after they had been here for dinner, Bart came back. All the other guests had gone. We had a nightcap. A big one. We both had too much to drink. Lucy was frigid, he said. Always had been. Or so he thought.
“There was a year of psychiatry for her. During that time, I sort of played psychiatrist for Bart. He’d come over late at night. We’d have a drink, and talk. As you can imagine, Lucy became a little cool with me. I could never make out whether it was because I was intimate with the family secrets, or because I was getting too much attention from Bart. I can tell you one thing. During all that time, and it went on for a long time, Bart was completely faithful to Lucy. He couldn’t have been otherwise, without his telling me. I was his good friend. His drinking buddy.
“Lucy dropped psychiatry after a while. Bart found her another shrink, but she refused to go. You see, I think she had discovered what the so-called problem was.
“Then I noticed a young woman coming in and out of the apartment house, and it sort of puzzled me, as I knew no one had moved in. I saw her during the daytime. Then I realized she was going to 6B. I assumed it was some old friend of Lucy’s. Then I met her at a cocktail party at the Connorses. Her name is Marsha Hauptmann. It was announced she and Lucy were starting a boutique together. How nice. All very reasonable.
“Until the servant we had in common in those days—that was before Mrs. Sawyer, who now comes to me on Tuesdays and Fridays, she just left, and you on Wednesdays and Saturdays—told me Lucy and Marsha were taking showers together! How else can I say it? They were using the bed together.
“Incidentally, I fired the person who told me that. Servants must not be allowed to gossip in the neighborhood. And, in truth, I had not wanted to know any such thing. Do you believe that?”
“Of,course,” Fletch said.