"Last week sometime."
"Would you remember the day?"
"Thursday, I think it was."
"Did he call you? Or did you call him?"
"He called me."
"And he didn't call here anytime after last Thursday?"
"No, he didn't."
"Were you home last night?"
"No. I've been away for the weekend."
"Oh? Where?"
"I don't think that's any of your business."
"Can you tell us what time you left the apartment here?"
"Why?"
"It might help us pinpoint the time of Mr. McKennon's death. We're certain that the last call he made from the apartment on Silvermine Oval was to your phone here. If we can…"
"How do you know that?"
"His phone has a redial feature. The number here was stored in the unit's memory as the last number dialed. It's possible, but not probable, that the last call he made was the one to you on Thursday. It's more likely that he tried to reach you after that. Possibly last night. Or early this…"
"I've been away since Friday afternoon."
"What time Friday?"
"About five-thirty."
"And you got home when?" Willis asked.
"Half an hour ago. Just before the phone started ringing."
"Around four o'clock or so?"
"Aren't you going to ask me who I went away with?"
"If you'd like to tell me, sure."
"A man named Nelson Riley."
"Thank you," Willis said.
She was beginning to irritate him. Maybe because her attitude was so damn antagonistic. No one had accused her of anything—not yet. But her stance was defiant, as if she was certain she'd be railroaded to the penitentiary if she didn't watch her step. Sometimes the innocent behaved that way. Sometimes the guilty did, too.
"And you say you got home here around four this afternoon, is that right?" Carella asked.
"Around then," Marilyn said.
"You mentioned earlier that you're seeing other men," Willis said.
"Yes."
"How many?"
"What's that got to do with Jerry's murder?"
"Or suicide, as the case may be," Willis said. "How many?"
"Oh, please, none of my friends killed Jerry."
"How do you know that?"
"Because none of them even knew him."
"You're sure of that?" Willis said.
"Positive. I don't make a habit of telling Tom and Dick about Harry."
"How many Toms, Dicks and Harrys are there?" Willis persisted.
Marilyn sighed. "At present," she said, "I'm seeing three or four men."
"Which is it?" Willis said. "Three or four?"
"Four, counting Jerry."
"Then that makes it three."
"Yes."
"On a regular basis?"
"If that means am I sleeping with all of them, the answer is occasionally."
"May we have their names and addresses, please?" Carella said.
"Why? Are you going to drag them into this?"
"A man is dead…"
"I realize that. But neither I nor any of my friends…"
"We would appreciate their names and addresses."
Marilyn sighed again and went to a dropleaf desk in one corner of the room. She took her address book from it and started copying names and addresses onto a sheet of her stationery. When she handed it to Carella, he glanced at it briefly, put it into his notebook, and then asked, "Have you turned on your answering machine since you got home?"
"I was about to," Marilyn said. "But then the police started phoning every three minutes."
"Would you mind turning it on now?" Carella said.
She went to the equipment on her desk and pushed a button.
Willis opened his notebook.
"Hi, Marilyn," a woman's voice said, "this is Didi. Call me when you get a chance, will you?"
In his notebook, Willis wrote Didi.
A click, a buzz, another voice.
"Miss Hollis, this is Hadley Fields at Merrill, Lynch. Would you call me, please?"
Willis wrote Hadley Fields, Merrill Lynch.
A click, a buzz, and then…
"Marilyn, it's Baz. I have tickets for the Philharmonic on Wednesday night. Can you let me know if you're free? By Monday latest, okay?"
Willis kept writing as the tape unreeled.
"I hate your machine, Marilyn. This is Chip, call me, okay?"
A click, a buzz… and someone hung up.
"I hate when they do that," Marilyn said.
Another click, another buzz.
"Marilyn, this is Didi again. Where the hell are you?"
The parade of calls went on. A very busy lady, Willis thought.
And then, buried in the midst of the recorded messages…
"Marilyn… I need you… I'm…"
And a gasp…
And the sound of the telephone clattering onto a hard surface…
And the sound of someone retching…
A click, another buzz, and the recorded messages continued.
"Marilyn, this is Didi, I've been calling you all weekend. Will you please get back to me?"
Marilyn, this is Alice, this is Chip (and I still hate your machine), this is Baz (about the Philharmonic again), this is Sam, this is Jane, this is Andy…
Not a Tom, Dick or Harry among the male callers.
But a few more men than the three she'd listed for them.
Carella opened his notebook, unfolded the sheet of stationery on which she'd jotted down the names, addresses and telephone numbers, and said, "Are you sure these are all the men you're dating?"
"At the moment," Marilyn said.
"And the others?" Willis said.
"What others?"
"On the phone."
"Acquaintances."
"But not men you're dating."
"No."
"Was that Mr. McKennon's voice?" Carella asked.
She was silent for a moment. Then she said, "Yes," and lowered her eyes.
Carella closed his notebook.
"We may need to reach you at work," he said. "Is there a number you can let us…?"
"I'm unemployed," she said.
Willis thought his face registered blank, but she must have caught something on it.
"It's not what you're thinking," she said at once.
"What am I thinking?" he said.
"You're thinking expensive, well-furnished town-house, you're thinking she's got a sugar daddy. You're wrong. I've got a real daddy, and he's an oilman in Texas, and he doesn't want his only daughter starving in the big, bad city."
"I see."
"Well, we're sorry to have taken so much of your time," Carella said. "You've been very helpful, though, and we…"
"How?" she asked, and showed them to the door.
Outside, the air was cold and the wind was sharp.
CHAPTER 3
In this city, they called it a 24-24. It applied to homicides and it referred to the importance of the twenty-four hours preceding a person's death and the twenty-four hours following it.
The pre-mortem twenty-four hours were important because what a victim did, where he went, whom he saw, all might have bearing on his death. Officially Jerome McKennon was a victim, even if he'd swallowed the nicotine of his own volition. The post-mortem twenty-four hours were important only if someone had murdered McKennon because then the investigating detectives would be working against the clock, and as more and more time elapsed, the trail could get colder and colder, giving the killer an edge. It was a dictum in police work that if a case went beyond a week without a solid lead, you might as well throw it in the Open File. The Open File was the graveyard of investigation.
There were only two detectives working the McKennon case. This wasn't a big-deal front-page murder. Nobody important had been slain, no exotic setting had been involved, this was just another garden-variety murder in a city that sprouted them like weeds. The poison was unusual, true, but even that wasn't something an aboriginal tribe might dip its arrows into. The media had more than enough sensational murders to shout about every day, and since this case lacked what the cops referred to as the Roman Arena Appeal, it got less than passing notice in the newspapers and on television. Only one of the Tuesday morning commentators—a man who'd been touting the evils of cigarette-smoking for the past six months now, ever since he himself had quit, there's nothing like a reformed whore—found the case an opportunity for mentioning how strong a poison nicotine actually was, but he was a voice in the wilderness.