Digression! No! Mary! The reason I must make a note of the fact that I was talking to Nigel on the staircase is to establish that:
I did not see Percy or Thad at all between the closing of the ballroom at midnight and twenty past one in the morning.
N. and I were sitting in the aft stairwell, which adjoins the south wall of the ballroom, thus…
We heard the gunshot immediately and bolted toward the grand entrance, which the stewards had opened up with a quickness, however…
A small number of people had already trampled all over the crime scene by the time I arrived.
We heard a great deal of screaming and dropping one’s drinks and weeping. I ran pell-mell; the heel of my left shoe broke off, but I kept hobbling on until I swung wide round the great carved ballroom door—Thad had it brought over from Mars only last year. And I saw it all. I saw the whole ugly thing like a set dressed for shooting. Poor Thaddeus lying face down on his own ebony floor, bleeding like mad. It was ever so much more blood than in the movies. When you shoot someone on film it’s just a pinprick, really, and then a little trickle of red. They slump to the floor and it’s over ’til the next take. But Thad’s blood gushed out all over the place. People had stepped in it. Yolanda Brun was trying to wipe some off of her green silk slingback.
I’ve said wrap parties obey no natural law. I’d been Madame Mortimer, at full tilt, only the week before. She roared up inside me, all pearl-handled soul and acid heart. Without a word, I walked up to one of the stewards (who’d gone about as pale as arsenic), took the key off his belt, shut and locked those grand Russian doors, and shoved a brass hat-rack through the handles for good measure.
“If I may have your attention?” I put on my biggest, most booming voice, the one that had slapped the back row in the face at the Blue Elephant Theatre back in London. I locked down my tears—I’ll cry for you later, Thaddy baby. I promise. “Thank you. I’m afraid I can’t allow any of you to leave just yet. Everything we need to solve this awful mess is right here at our fingertips. There’s not a moment to be lost if we’re to uncover the truth.”
You’d think I’d put them all in a cage and dangled the last rump roast in the universe outside the bars, the way they behaved. Shameful. But I stood my ground, and the stewards stood with me—whether because they knew who sliced their bread or because they appreciated the need to secure the scene of a crime before all the evidence gets simply fucked away by cretins, I’ve no idea. It would take a day to sail back to Grasshopper City, and by that time there wouldn’t be so much as a sip of evidence left for the police. I had to work quickly. For Thaddeus. He didn’t need my tears just then, he needed his heroine.
I knew everyone I locked into the ballroom that night, some better, some worse: Yolanda Brun, Hartford Crane, Nigel Lapine, Freddy and Penelope Edison, Percival Unck, Algernon Bogatryov, Himura Makoto, Dante de Vere, and Maud Locksley. (I’d only met Makoto, Capricorn’s newest golden boy, that night, but we’d already made plans to shoot pheasant together on the weekend.) I don’t quite know what came over me in that moment, facing those people—people I had known most of my life, worked with, slept with, admired, loathed, envied, the whole handbag of human push-me-pull-you—but suddenly, watching Yolanda whine and pour club soda on her bloodstained shoe, I was positively sick to death of them all. I could have gaily tossed them all into the drink and poured myself a grapefruit juice without a wink of pity in my heart. I don’t know what got into me, except Maxine Mortimer and her damnable need to solve the puzzle.
“Shut up, you puling, overstuffed veal calves,” I snarled, and even though it’s a line from Doom on Deimos, I delivered it better in 1930 than I ever did in 1925. “Have a little respect! Clear off! Give me some room!”
They flattened against the wall like school kids at a dance. I examined Thaddeus. He still had his dinner jacket on. The shot had gone through his back, straight into his heart. His cigarette still burned itself down between the fingers of his right hand. His left arm was folded under his chest. The craziest thought popped into my silly head: His hand’s gonna fall asleep that way! He’ll be all pins and needles when he wakes up. I went to disentangle him. No! Maxine Mortimer snapped in my head. Don’t you dare move that body, you dozy cow! The further one gets from the body, the harder it is to see the truth. I looked quickly round the ballroom instead. What luck! The gun lay under one of the banquet tables. Kicked there? Hidden deliberately? Dropped in the turmoil of it all? I sent Makoto to retrieve it, as he and Nigel were the only ones I felt certain about. Nigel was telling me about moustache wax when the gun went off, and Mack was fresh off the rocket. He didn’t know any of us well enough to care whether we lived or died, and besides, who would want something this drastic for their debut?
.22 Perun, walnut grip. Martian, I thought, but that didn’t mean anything. We’d all been to Mars. There wasn’t much to do there but shoot kangaroos.
Hartford raised his hand like a little boy in class. “Mary, whoever did this probably ran off at once. Why do we have to hang about watching you play detective? We’ve all seen it, love. Let’s be sensible: make a search party, comb the ship. Staying stuffed up in here won’t help anyone.”
“Hartford, if I thought you had the sense God gave a gumdrop, I’d let you ‘comb the ship’ to your heart’s content. What, pray tell, would you be searching for? The murder weapon—” I sniffed the Perun’s barrel to be sure; indeed, freshly fired. “—is here. The body is here. The first people to the scene—and therefore those nearest to the ballroom when our Thad was shot, and the closest thing we’ve got to witnesses—are here. You don’t get blood all over yourself when you shoot a man in the back; tearing up the laundry for a stained dinner jacket won’t do a lick of good. So why don’t you button up your expensive little mouth and let the adults talk?”
He did just that. I won’t say I didn’t get a wallop of satisfaction out of it. That vicious gossip hound Algernon B stood next to Hart, looking as though he were about to get on socially with an aneurysm. Sweat wriggled off his bald head and steamed up his glasses. He put his head between his knees. But if sweating makes you guilty, they were all in on it. Gin-sweats, stroke-sweats, beef-sweats, murder-sweats—who could tell the difference? I scanned their faces. I can do this, I thought. With everything I know about them, about Thaddeus, about deduction—at least the celluloid kind—I can figure it out.
“I’m leaving,” Freddy said. His face went red as a stoplight. “You’re nothing but a nasty, two-bit has-been with a flat ass and the clap, and you can’t keep me here.”
“So am I,” cried Dante de Vere. The pair of them stormed up to me, as though I’d never stared down a man who wanted my kidneys for earrings before.
I didn’t budge. “Mr Edison!” I roared. “You had a dispute with the deceased over unpaid fees for sound recording on Miranda, did you not?”
He recoiled. I don’t suppose anyone had roared at Franklin Edison since he crashed his tricycle into a swing set. But then, I did have the .22. Roaring has more oomph with a Martian pistol behind it. “Don’t be ridiculous, Mary. I have disputes with everyone over unpaid fees for sound recording. If I started killing anyone who owes me money, the Moon would be a ghost town inside of a week.”
“What about you, Dante? He fired you from Death Comes at the Beginning. No one’s called you for so much as a footman’s role since.”