“Neither did I,” said Paul.
I moved away from the mantel, starting to walk around the room, but never taking my eyes off them.
“You could save all of us a lot of time and trouble by just confessing,” I said.
“Which one of us are you talking to?” Gwen said. “I can’t see your eyes in the dark.”
“I’m talking to the real killer,” I said.
“Maybe you killed her,” David Styles said, “and you’re trying to frame one of us.”
This was pretty much how it went for the next fifteen minutes, me getting closer and closer to the real killer, making him or her really sweat it out, while I continued to pace and throw out accusations.
I guess the thing that spoiled it was the blood-red splash of light in the front window, Cliff Sykes, Jr.’s, personal patrol car pulling up to the curb, and then Cliff Sykes, Jr., racing out of his car, gun drawn.
I heard him on the porch, I heard him in the hall, I heard him at the door across the hall.
Moments after the door opened, Bobbi Thomas wailed, “All right! I killed her! I killed her! I caught her sleeping with my boyfriend!”
I opened the door and looked out into the hall.
Judge Whitney stood next to Cliff Sykes, Jr., and said, “There’s your killer, Sykes. Now you get down to that jail and let my nephew go!”
And with that, she turned and stalked out of the apartment house.
Then I noticed the Christmas kitten in Bobbi Thomas’s arms.
“What’s gonna happen to the kitty if I go to prison?” she sobbed.
“Probably put her to sleep,” the ever-sensitive Cliff Sykes, Jr., said.
At which point, Bobbi Thomas became semi-hysterical.
“I’ll take her, Bobbi,” I said, and reached over and picked up the kitten.
“Thanks,” Bobbi said over her shoulder as Sykes led her out to his car.
The people in Linda Palmer’s apartment each took a turn at glowering at me as they walked into the hall and out the front door.
“See you, Miss Marple,” said David Styles.
“So long, Sherlock,” smirked Gwen Dawes.
Her boyfriend said something that I can’t repeat here.
And Millie Styles said, “Charlie Chan does it a lot better, McCain.”
When Sophie (I’m an informal kind of guy, and Sophia is a very formal kind of name) and I got back to my little apartment over a store that Jesse James had actually shot up one time, we both got a surprise.
A Christmas tree stood in the corner — resplendent with green and yellow and red lights, and long shining strands of silver icing, and a sweet little angel right at the very tip-top of the tree.
And next to the tree stood the beautiful and elegant Pamela Forrest, gorgeous in a red sweater and jeans. Now, in the Shell Scott novels I read, Pamela would be completely naked and beckoning to me with a curling, seductive finger.
But I was happy to see her just as she was.
“Judge Whitney was afraid you’d be kind of down about not solving the case, so she asked me to buy you a tree and set it up for you.”
“Yeah,” I said. “I didn’t even have Bobbi on my list of suspects. How’d she figure it out anyway?”
Pamela immediately lifted Sophia from my arms and started doing Eskimo noses with her. “Well, first of all, she called the cleaners and asked if any of the rugs that Bobbi had had cleaned had had red stains on it — blood, in other words, meaning that she’d probably killed Linda in her apartment and then dragged her back across to Linda’s apartment. The blood came from Sophia’s paws, most likely when she walked on the white throw rug.” She paused long enough to do some more Eskimo nosing.
“Then second, Bobbi told you that she’d stayed home and watched Gunsmoke. But Gunsmoke had been preempted for a Christmas special and wasn’t on that night. And third—” By now she was rocking Sophia in the cradle of her arm. “Third, she found out that the boyfriend that Bobbi had only mentioned briefly to you had fallen under Linda’s spell. Bobbi came home and actually found them in bed together — he hadn’t even been gentleman enough to take it across the hall to Linda’s apartment.” Then: “Gosh, McCain, this is one of the cutest little kittens I’ve ever seen.”
“Makes me wish I was a kitten,” I said. “Or Sherlock Holmes. She sure figured it out, didn’t she?”
Pamela carried Sophia over to me and said, “I think your daddy needs a kiss, young lady.”
And I have to admit, it was pretty nice at that moment, Pamela Forrest in my apartment for the very first time, and Sophia’s sweet little sandpaper tongue giving me a lot of sweet little kitty kisses.
En Famille
By the time I was eight years old, I’d fallen disconsolately in love with any number of little girls who had absolutely no interest in me. These were little girls I’d met in all the usual places, school, playground, neighborhood.
Only the girl I met at the racetrack took any interest in me. Her name was Wendy and, like me, she was brought to the track three or four times a week by her father, after school in the autumn months, during working hours in the summer.
Ours was one of those impossibly romantic relationships that only a young boy can have (all those nights of kissing pillows while pretending it was her — this accompanied by one of those swelling romantic songs you hear in movies with Ingrid Bergman and Cary Grant — how vulnerable and true and beautiful she always was in my mind’s perfect eye). I first saw her the spring of my tenth year, and not until I was fifteen did we even say hello to each other, even though we saw each other at least three times a week. But she was always with me, this girl I thought about constantly, and dreamed of nightly, the melancholy little blonde with the slow sad blue eyes and the quick sad smile.
I knew all about the sadness I saw in her. It was my sadness, too. Our fathers brought us to the track in order to make their gambling more palatable to our mothers. How much of a vice could it be if you took the little one along? The money lost at the track meant rent going unpaid, grocery store credit cut off, the telephone frequently disconnected. It also meant arguing. No matter how deeply I hid in the closet, no matter how many pillows I put over my head, I could still hear them shrieking at each other. Sometimes he hit her. Once he even pushed her down the stairs and she broke her leg. Despite all this, I wanted them to stay together. I was terrified they would split up. I loved them both beyond imagining. Don’t ask me why I loved him so much. I have no idea.
The day we first spoke, the little girl and I, that warm May afternoon in my fifteenth year, a black eye spoiled her very pretty, very pale little face. So he’d finally gotten around to hitting her. My father had gotten around to hitting me years ago. They got so frustrated over their gambling, their inability to stop their gambling, that they grabbed the first person they found and visited all their despair on him.
She was coming up from the seats in the bottom tier where she and her father always sat. I saw her and stepped out into the aisle.
“Hi,” I said after more than six years of us watching each other from afar.
“Hi.”
“I’m sorry about your eye.”
“He was pretty drunk. He doesn’t usually get violent. But it seems to be getting worse lately.” She looked back at her seats. Her father was glaring at us. “I’d better hurry. He wants me to get him a hot dog.”
“I’d like to see you sometime.”
She smiled, sad and sweet with her black eye. “Yeah, me, too.”
I saw her the rest of the summer but we never again got the chance to speak. Nor did we make the opportunity. She was my narcotic. I thought of no one else, wanted no one else. The girls at school had no idea what my home life was like, how old and worn my father’s gambling had made my mother, how anxious and angry it had made me. Only Wendy understood.