“So you know,” I said.
“Know what? You’re playing games again.”
“No games, and you know damn well what I’m talking about.”
“Don’t speak to me in that tone,” she said.
“Then don’t try to waste my time.”
“Exactly what is it, Mr. Dwyer, that you’re accusing me of?”
“I’m not sure yet.”
“Well, that’s a very impressive piece of detective work.”
“All I know for sure is that your daughter went to Michael Reeves’s apartment the night he was murdered. Now I’m beginning to believe that she brought him an envelope from you that contained money. That would lead me to suspect that you, directly or indirectly, were paying blackmail to Michael Reeves. And that’s exactly what I’m going to tell the police when I leave here, Mrs. Bridges. They’ll want to talk to Sylvia.”
She reached over and pressed a button. David Ashton’s voice came on the intercom. “Yes?”
“David, I want you to give Sylvia that new prescription from Dr. Kern. I want you to give it to her immediately.”
“Is something wrong?”
“Don’t ask me any of your damn foolish questions. Just give it to her.”
“All right, if that’s what you want.”
She looked triumphant. “Sylvia won’t be interviewed by anybody for quite some time, Mr. Dwyer. As a matter of fact, before the night’s out I strongly suspect that she’ll be in Dr. Kern’s clinic. And Dr. Kern can be very persuasive.”
“Is that how he kept her from going to prison when she stabbed one of his workers?”
“How did you know about that?”
“You wanted me to look into the case, remember? When you start looking into things, you learn secrets sometimes.”
“I want you to leave.”
“What was Reeves blackmailing you with?”
“Did you hear what I said? I want you to leave.”
“There’s an innocent man in jail tonight.”
“I’m beginning to wonder if he is innocent. He sounds more and more guilty to me.”
“You’d ruin the theater’s reputation to save Sylvia, wouldn’t you?”
The anger faded. She looked old. “Do you have children?”
“One. A boy.”
“Wouldn’t you do nearly anything to save him?”
“Of course.”
“Then don’t be foolish. Of course I’d save Sylvia before I would the theater.”
I was suffocating in the flowers. “He was blackmailing you, wasn’t he?”
The hand she flung at me scarcely had any strength. “Just leave, Mr. Dwyer, leave now.”
On our way back to Donna, the servant said, “I’ve never seen her so exhausted like this. You must have disturbed her a great deal.” He was smiling as he said it. When we reached the other half of the penthouse, Donna explained that David Ashton had had to excuse himself. I knew what that meant. He was busy putting his wife into a form of brain death so that nobody, especially the police, could ask her any questions.
In the car, Donna said, “Dwyer, we’ve got to get some rest. Think of all we’ve been through in the last twenty-four hours.”
“I’ll drop you off.”
“Dwyer, you too, all right?”
“I feel fine.”
“You look like shit.”
“Thanks.”
“We’re not that young anymore.”
“I’m thinking of Stephen,” I said.
She was silent. Then she said, “I’m being selfish.”
“So I’m not dropping you off?”
“Right,” she said, sounding weary. “You’re not dropping me off.”
18
Trueblood Medical Supplies was housed in a small brick building a few hundred yards from a railroad siding. In the rain and fog, the green and red rail yard lights were bright as beacons. A lone switch engine lurched by. As we walked toward the building, the engineer tugged twice on the air horn.
A light shone through a grimy window. I peered in past the metal mesh. A naked overhead bulb lit long, tall rows of supplies on deep wooden shelves. The place appeared clean and orderly and prosperous. I rattled the door knob. I hadn’t really expected it to be open. “Let’s try the front,” I said.
We walked around the corner to where a big glass window read TRUEBLOOD MEDICAL SUPPLIES. From there I could see a small, tidy front office with three gray metal desks from the sixties, a fake red flower in a slender glass vase on each. I tried the front door. Zip. Zero. Nada.
“You still haven’t told me—” she started to say.
“—what we’re doing here exactly,” I finished for her.
“Exactly, smart-ass.”
“Well, in prison Lockhart worked in the infirmary. Out of prison he lived at a halfway house, where he had nothing whatsoever to do with medicine. But he had a card from a medical supply house in his wallet.”
“Boy, that is weird.”
“Now all we have to do is raise somebody and ask him a few questions.”
“There isn’t anybody in there.”
“There should be.”
“At this time of night?”
I nodded toward the back. We stood under an overhang. In the moonlight the rain drops looked fat and silver. “You didn’t notice the little decal on the door back there?” I said.
“What little decal?”
“It’s from the Thornton Security Agency. A bull’s-eye.”
“Uh-huh. I didn’t notice it.”
“Well, that supposedly means that Thornton keeps a man on the premises every night.”
“So there’s somebody in there?”
“Yeah, and apparently he’s asleep because I sure rattled the hell out of the back door.”
Without missing a beat, she said, “Are you hungry?”
“God, I wish you hadn’t said that.”
“Meaning you are.”
“Yeah. Sort of.”
“You know what I’m thinking about?”
“Before you tell me what you’re thinking about, I’ll tell you what I’m thinking about. I’m thinking about my waistline and about how my agent gets on my ass every time he sees me these days. Donna, I’ve really got to cool it with the food.”
“Yeah, I guess that’s sensible.”
We stood under the overhang some more and watched the fat silver raindrops and our chilled silver breath.
“So why don’t you tell me what you were thinking about?” I said.
“It’d probably be better if I didn’t.”
“Hell, there ain’t any calories in mental pictures.”
“I was thinking about Denny’s.” Junk food is her specialty.
“Yeah, what about Denny’s?”
“Well, you know that breakfast they serve, with a cheese omelet and hash browns on the side with one of those little containers of Kraft’s grape jelly?”
“Yeah.”
“That’s what I was thinking about. My relatives down South always serve food like that. You’re going down there in June with me, right?”
“Right.” I liked the South, and I’d heard so much about her relatives that I wanted to meet them. But right now I wanted to go to Denny’s and have the food she’d just described.
I was just about to take her hand and lead her around back, whether to the door again or to Denny’s I wasn’t sure, when the door behind us opened and a chunky woman with a butch haircut and a big Magnum said, “This ain’t no place for hanky-panky. This is private property.”
“Bertha,” I said.
She squinted at us with steely blue eyes. In her blue Thornton Security uniform she could easily have been a guy, and when I’d worked with her there had been occasional speculation that she actually was, or had been before the miracle of surgery. She was wide and squat and a good woman in a gruff way.