“What about the commercials?” Terry asked me. “The ones you were suing him for. What about the supermarket company, the ad agency, all the people involved with that stuff?”
“No conflicts and nothing current,” I said. “He shot those commercials almost a year ago, and had just about nothing to do with any of those people since, except minor things connected with the lawsuit.”
Terry said, “Well, you know, it doesn’t have to be something current in his life. People have been known to hold grudges.”
“So far,” I said, “I haven’t found anything like that. Julie gave me the keys to Wormley’s apartment; it’s still hers, too, I guess. I’ll go there tomorrow and see what I can find. The thing is, Terry,” I said, “I’ve been asking myself the same kind of question. What am I accomplishing? Am I just spinning my wheels? Is Packard going through the motions, playing the part only because it’s better to do that than just sit at home and do nothing? I don’t know. Maybe that’s the truth. For now, all I can do is follow a very cold trail, and see where it leads me.”
32
My cash was running low — when all you can spend is cash, it does tend to run low pretty rapidly — so I’d arranged for Robinson to transfer a couple thousand to Terry Young’s checking account. Next morning, we started the day with Terry taking out five hundred for me from his bank. “By God, it’s nice to have a healthy-looking balance for a change,” he commented, when he came back out to the car. (I’d waited in it, parked by a fire hydrant on Flatbush Avenue, down the block from the bank.) “Even when it’s not real.” And he handed me my cash.
“Thanks, Terry,” I said, stuffing the money away. Twenty-five twenties make a thick wad, but I’d discovered that anything over a twenty dollar bill attracts attention and suspicion. No matter how much inflation pushes the cost of things up, people still notice a fifty.
Again we drove into Manhattan together, Terry dropping me off downtown and me then taking a cab up to 497 West End; just below 86th Street. The name slot beside the bell for apartment 4-E read Wormley Kaplan in careful black-ink lettering on a bit of white cardboard; Julie’s work, I guessed. I rang the bell next to the card, just in case the police still had someone there — though that was extremely unlikely, six weeks after the event on a very dead case — and when there was no answer I used one of Julie’s keys to let myself into the building. After a slow ride up to the fourth floor in the elevator, I used her other key to enter the apartment.
It was two long narrow rooms next to one another, with a small kitchen carved out at the front of the first, next to the entry door, and a bathroom in the equivalent position of the second. At the far end of both rooms were large double-hung windows overlooking a featureless central court; just the stone building walls around a rectangle the size of a large car, with concrete four stories down and a glimpse of sky seven stories up.
The living room had been furnished with a look to utility and expense rather than style. The sofa, long and low and old and covered with a Mexican-influenced cotton spread, was the largest piece of furniture, with a couple of mismatched easy chairs and tables and lamps grouped in traditional manner around it. The television set and VCR and tape deck and trays of cassettes — mostly original cast show albums, male singers, some easy jazz — were stacked on a wooden bench facing the sofa, with the stereo system’s speakers under the bench.
And here was the cream-colored linoleum kitchen floor I had once seen in a photograph. Nothing showed now; the letters in blood had been cleaned away.
Terry Young had looked up the details of that murder, and so now I knew at least what had been done here, if not yet why nor by whom. Kim Peyser, wearing Julie Kaplan’s coat, had been stabbed, in this room, with a large kitchen knife. She had been stabbed twice, first in the back and then in the chest — the first cut not having killed her, she’d turned around to confront her murderer, who presumably had been startled not to see Julie Kaplan’s face above that coat, but who could no longer pull back from his actions — and the knife had been left in the second wound; it had snagged on a rib. The knife had come from this kitchen, had been the only large useful knife in here.
The immediate result of the stabbings was a trauma, in which Kim Peyser fell to the floor, but didn’t immediately die. So long as she was alive, her heart kept beating, and blood kept pumping from the rips in her body; that would have been for five to ten minutes. It was unlikely but dimly within the range of the possible that she could have been conscious part of that time, and used her own freshly-drawn blood to start writing my name on the linoleum floor. What had in fact happened was that the killer had turned her awkwardly — the awkwardness because of the knife hilt sticking out of the middle of her chest — and arranged the scene, with the letters and the positioning of her hand. And then he’d left.
Who was he? Why had he been here? If Julie Kaplan had been his intended victim, why hadn’t he pursued her to Florida and tried again? If Kim Peyser was the intended victim, did her death link with Dale Wormley’s at all? If she were the intended victim, why did the killing take place here? Had the killer actually come here with Kim? Had he followed, and rung the bell? Had he been here already when she arrived? Did they know each other? Did he have a key to this place? Was he the same person who killed Wormley, or not? Why had he come to this apartment?
There were so many answers I didn’t know. Packard, it seemed to me, was proving not to be such hot stuff without a scriptwriter.
I opened the refrigerator, and was surprised to find it half filled with food. Current food, that is, not spoiled old food from six weeks ago. There was a quart of low-calorie milk, half a grapefruit face down on a saucer, leafy vegetables in the crisper, a jar of diet strawberry jelly, a number of other things.
Somebody was living here. But who? Julie hadn’t loaned the place to anybody, or she would have told me so. If she’d known someone was in residence, whether through her doing or not, she would have warned me about it when she gave me these keys.
I went back out to the living room, where the signs of occupancy were subtler but finally just as clear. The TV Guide atop the television set was this week’s. A plate on an end table beside the sofa contained crumbs — cookie crumbs, I thought — that were not entirely hard; last night’s midnight snack.
Who was living in here? Was it somebody who knew the situation — one tenant dead, the other away for an extended stay in Florida — and just decided to take advantage of the empty apartment and move in? Was it a friend of Dale Wormley’s, or Julie’s, or was it a stranger?
Was it the killer?
Since none of this made the slightest sense, that last idea was no more nonsensical than any other. And while I was standing there in the living room, rolling cookie crumbs between my fingertips, thinking about the lack of sense in this affair, I heard the key grate in the lock and knew the interloper — the other interloper, actually, since I was an interloper, too — was home.
I had no desire to begin with a confrontation; I preferred first to find out who this person was and what was going on. At the entranceway, at that door about to be opened, there were three choices of movement: One could come straight ahead into the living room. One could turn left into the kitchen. Or one could turn right through a doorway and then left through another doorway into the bedroom. Striding, trying to be silent, I went into the bedroom.