“So you didn’t actually see the woman shoot her secretary.”
“No,” I said. “But I wouldn’t have seen that if I’d been inside when it happened. Ms. Speers didn’t kill Bernice Dolan. The man right over there, Joe Craig, did that.”
There was one of those sudden electric silences. Both Craig and Lauren Speers were near enough to hear what I had said; he stiffened and gaped at me and she came up out of her chair on the porch. Craig’s face tried to arrange itself into an expression of disbelief, but he was not much of an actor; if this had been a Hollywood screen test, he would have flunked it hands down.
He said, “What the hell kind of crazy accusation is that?” Which was better — more conviction — but it still sounded false.
His guilt was not so obvious to Orloff or any of the others. They kept looking from Craig to me as if trying to decide who to believe. The security guy said, “How could Joe be guilty? The balcony door and all the windows are locked from the inside; you said so yourself. You also said there was no one else in the cottage except Ms. Speers and the dead woman when you entered.”
“That’s right,” I said. “But Craig wasn’t in the cottage when he shot the secretary. And everything wasn’t locked up tight, either.”
Craig said, “Don’t listen to him, he doesn’t know what he’s saying—”
“The living room smells of gin,” I said to the security guy. “You must have noticed that when you were in there. It smelled just the same when I first entered. But if you fire a handgun in a closed room you get the smell of cordite. No cordite odor means the gun was fired outside the room.”
“That’s true enough,” Orloff said. “Go on.”
“I’d been here less than ten minutes when Craig showed up,” I said. “He claimed he’d come to keep a tennis date with Ms. Speers. But the parking lot attendant told me earlier that she drinks her lunch every day and then comes here to sleep it off until Happy Hour at four o’clock. People on that kind of heavy drinking schedule don’t make dates to go play tennis at three o’clock.
“Craig said something else, too — much more damning. When I asked him if he knew the dead woman he identified her as Bernice Dolan. Then he said, ‘Did Ms. Speers do that to her? Shoot her like that?’ But I didn’t say anything about hearing a gunshot until later; and the way the body is crumpled on the rug, with one arm flung over the chest, all you can see is blood, not the type of wound. So how did he know she was shot? She could just as easily have been stabbed to death.”
There was not much bravado left in Craig; you could almost see him wilting, like an uprooted weed drying in the sun. “I assumed she was shot,” he said weakly, “I just... assumed it.”
Lauren Speers had come down off the porch and was staring at him. “Why?” she said. “For god’s sake, why?”
He shook his head at her: But I said, “For money, that’s why. A hundred thousand dollars in extortion payoffs, at least some of which figures to be in his own cottage right now.”
That pushed Craig to the breaking point. He backpedaled a couple of steps and might have kept right on backing if one of the patrolmen hadn’t grabbed his arm.
Lauren Speers said, “I don’t understand. What extortion?”
“From those three men I asked you about a few minutes ago — Huddleston, Boyer, and Rykman. They figure prominently in the book you’re writing, don’t they? Large sections of it are devoted to them and contain material either scandalous or criminal?”
“How do you know about that?”
“Craig told me; he was trying to make it seem like you had a motive for killing Bernice. And you told me when you said those three men were bastards and one of them was an out-and-out thief. This little piece of paper took care of the rest.” I fished it out of my coat pocket again and handed it to Orloff. “The first series of numbers after each name are page numbers — pages in the book manuscript on which the most damaging material about that person appears. The numbers after the dash are the amounts extorted from each man.”
“Where did you get this?”
“It was on the floor between the couch and the coffee table. Right near where Ms. Speers’ bag was. I think that’s where it came from — out of the handbag.”
She said, “How could it have been in my bag?”
“Bernice put it there. While she was out impersonating you this afternoon.”
Now everybody looked bewildered. Except Craig, of course: he only looked sick — much sicker than Lauren Speers had earlier.
“Impersonating me?” she said.
“That’s right. Wearing a red wig and your white coat, and carrying your bag. You didn’t go anywhere after lunch except back here to bed; it was Bernice who took your car and left Xanadu. And it was Bernice who passed me in the car, Bernice I saw enter the cottage a couple of minutes before she was shot.”
The security guy asked, “How can you be sure about that?”
“Because Bernice was left-handed,” I said. “And Ms. Speers is right-handed; I could tell that a while ago when she started to pour from a decanter into a glass — decanter in her right hand, glass in her left. But the woman who got out of the car carried the straw bag in her right hand; and when she got to the cottage door she used her left hand to take out the key and to open the door.”
Lauren Speers looked at a lock of her red hair, as if to make sure it was real. “Why would Bernice impersonate me?”
“She and Craig were in on the extortion scheme together and it was part of the plan. They must have worked it something like this: as your secretary she had access to your book manuscript, your personal stationery, your signature, and no doubt your file of incriminating letters and documents. She also had access to your personal belongings and your car keys, particularly from one to four in the afternoons while you were sleeping. And she’d have known from your records how to contact Huddleston and the other two.
“So she and Craig wrote letters to each of them, on your stationery over your forged signature, demanding large sums of money to delete the material about them from your book and to return whatever documents concerned them; they probably also enclosed photocopies of the manuscript pages and the documents as proof. The idea was to keep themselves completely in the clear if the whole thing backfired. You’d get the blame in that case, not them.
“To maintain the illusion, Bernice had to pretend to be you when she collected the payoff. I don’t know what sort of arrangements she and Craig made, but they wouldn’t have allowed any of the three men to deliver the money personally. An intermediary, maybe, someone who didn’t know you. Or maybe a prearranged drop site. In any event, Bernice always dressed as you at collection time.”
Orloff asked, “Why do you think Craig killed her?”
“The old doublecross,” said. “They’d collected all the extortion money; that’s evident from the way each of the three names is crossed out on that paper. Today was the last pickup and I think they had it worked out that she would resign from Ms. Speers’ employ and Craig would resign from Xanadu and they’d go off somewhere together: her closet is all cleaned out and her bags are packed. But Craig had other ideas. He knew when she was due back here and he was waiting for her — outside on the rear balcony. When she let herself in he knocked on the window and gestured for her to open the two halves. After she complied he must have said something like, ‘Quick, lock the front door, take off the coat, and give me the wig and the money.’ She must have thought there was some reason for the urgency, and she trusted him; so she did what he asked. And when she pulled the money out of the bag she also pulled out the slip of paper. In her haste it fell unnoticed to the floor.
“As soon as Craig had the wig and the money he took out the gun, which he’d swiped from Ms. Speers’ night-stand, and shot her. And then he threw the gun inside and pulled the halves of the window closed.”