“Yeah. I guess you’re right.”
I walked back to my car and got in and drove off. I parked two blocks away and came back to Channel 3 through the woods, the same path I’d taken when I was chasing Diane Beaufort the other night.
I waited in the woods until I saw somebody at the rear door. He stood there talking, saying good night to a co-worker. He stood there long enough for me to go up to him and walk past him right inside.
“Hey,” he said, “you work here?”
“Yeah. In the newsroom,” I said.
He and his buddy looked at me and then at each other and shrugged. I kept on walking.
I took the back stairs up to the second floor. I had a sense of ascending into deeper and deeper shadow. From below, on the first floor, I heard the buzz of the news department — people shouting, teletypes clacking, hip angry jokes evoking hip angry laughter — and then I was in the deepest shadow of all, the middle of the second floor, which had been closed down since the executives had gone home.
Exterior light fell through the tall windows as I moved over the thick carpeting toward Fitzgerald’s office. If he was watching for me, he’d have no trouble seeing me.
His office was empty.
I suspected then where I’d find him. I moved into the shadows again. The small studio was down at the west side of the building. It was a control room with banks of monitors so that Fitzgerald could see what was going on in the news studio and all four production studios.
I paused outside the door.
There was only one way to go in, the way cops go in, quickly and with surprise on their side.
I jerked open the door, and then I saw him.
He was sitting in a big futuristic swivel chair in the middle of the large oval room, which was lined on either side with banks of monitors, bright and flickering with scores of different images. His head was in his hands, and when I came in and he looked up, he didn’t seem to recognize me. I used to see accident victims in this kind of shock.
Kelly Ford’s greeting was far different. Before I got two steps over the threshold, she brought up a sleek new pistol and leveled it at me. “I suppose I’ll have to handle him, too,” she snapped at Fitzgerald.
From inside my jacket I took the blond wig I’d found in her hope chest. I threw it at Fitzgerald and then looked at her. “You killed Stephen Chandler,” I said.
She came up closer. “I knew you’d figure it out.” She sounded sad, very sad, and I liked her despite it all. “The other night when you were in my apartment, we were so close for a time that I got scared. I was afraid you’d be able to read my mind or something, that you’d know I’d faked the robbery at my own office to confuse the police, that I’d helped arrange Stephen’s death, that it was Robert and me you were looking for.” She looked down at Fitzgerald. “I wouldn’t have done it if he hadn’t been so weak. He was going to do it but then he backed out.”
“Do what?”
“Kill Chandler. It was going to be a trick. He had gotten Stephen to agree to accept four thousand dollars and fake a suicide attempt. Take some heroin and turn himself in. Stephen went along with it. He was very intrigued by it. But Robert was going to make sure the heroin he got was so pure that he actually would die. It would make a great story. And help our ratings. Over the past year — what with his investments going bad — he’s been acting pretty crazy. But I went along with him.” She laughed bitterly. “Then at the last minute he backed out. He said he didn’t have the nerve to take Stephen the heroin. So I did.”
I glanced down at Fitzgerald. If he was aware of what was going on, he was keeping it a secret. She followed my gaze and shot him a look that claimed whatever masculinity he had left.
“You killed David Curtis, too,” I said.
“He found out. Or thought he had. Ross, the private detective, started questioning Curtis, and Curtis put things together. He threatened to expose Robert and me if we didn’t make him sole anchorman. He had to be killed. Then we had to worry about his partners, the twins.”
“Why did you try to kill Robards?”
She glanced up. “He’s not dead?”
I shook my head.
She leaned back against a large videotape console. In the flickering light of the control room she looked her years now.
“I didn’t have any choice. He saw me leave David’s dressing room after I put the cyanide in the laxative.” She shook her head. “I wanted to tie up all the loose ends for Robert and me.” She stared at the monitors. A terrible smile came over her face. “Just before I shot him tonight, I told him why I was doing it — and you know what he told me? That that night he’d fallen off the wagon and didn’t remember me being in David’s dressing room.”
I tried to make sense of her words, of her, but there was no way. She had been so caught up in her need for Fitzgerald that she could have justified anything. It was a form of madness, of course, but the kind juries never buy. I looked down at Fitzgerald again. “Was he worth it all, Kelly?”
“I guess you know the answer to that,” she said. She spoke in barely a whisper.
For a moment I thought she was going to break but she didn’t. She kept it inside and her voice and gestures got more and more painful to watch.
“He didn’t love me. He never did. Ever. But I felt so sorry for him because of his leg and because of all the pain he’d been through in his life — building his little empire here, never quite feeling as if he was the equal of any of his peers.” She looked down at him again and shook her head. “I loved him so damned much.”
“You could just give me the gun.”
“What?” She hadn’t quite heard me.
“You could just give me the gun.”
“Are you afraid I’ll kill you, too?”
“Yes.”
“Then you don’t know much about me.”
“I guess I don’t, after all.”
“It’s funny because I was about to ask you if you’d take the gun and kill me.”
She was serious.
“I couldn’t do that.”
“Can you imagine what it’s going to be like for my children and my ex-husband? All the scandal.”
“They’ll be all right eventually.”
“In school I was always the good little girl. When they read about me in the papers, the people who grew up with me won’t know what to think.”
“I don’t suppose they will.”
“You’re a very nice man. You really are.”
“Thank you.” And I meant it. “Don’t be foolish, Kelly. You’re strong. You can handle things.” I was beginning to suspect what she had in mind.
“I’m not strong, that’s the irony. After all this, I’m still not strong.”
“Just call the goddamn police and get it over with. Give him the gun, Kelly.” Fitzgerald’s voice droned in the aching silence and we looked down at him as if he were Lazarus.
“Just give him the gun, Kelly,” Fitzgerald said again. He didn’t look natty now. Not at all.
“That’s just what you’d do, isn’t it, Robert? No nerve.”
I could see what she was going to do and I couldn’t stop her and I wasn’t even sure I wanted to. She twisted the gun around to her forehead and pulled the trigger, and just like that she fell to the floor.
“My God, my God!” was all Fitzgerald could get out.
I knelt down beside her and closed my eyes so I wouldn’t have to look at the mess where the top of her head had been. I took her hand and held it tightly and finally, finally I got myself to cry and goddamn but I cried, goddamn but I did.
Then I stood up and went over to where Fitzgerald sat in shock. I got him up high enough from the chair to get three good punches into his face, and then I went out to phone Edelman.