Enough! (A Travesty and Ordo) (17 page)

I said, “Locking the office behind
them?”

“No,” Staples said. “It was
only kept locked when Kaklov was in it.”

“How about the front
door?”

Bray said, “That was locked, but it
doesn’t matter. It’s the kind you can open by slipping a credit card down
between the door and the jamb.”

I said, “So the killer came into the
building while everybody was at lunch, and hid in here. In
the bathroom, in fact.”

Staples said, “Ah, good man. You saw
those smudges on the bathroom floor.”

“Of course,” I said. “We have
sloppy weather outside.

Even if the killer took a cab he wouldn’t get
out right at this address, so he did some walking and he tracked dirty snow in
with him. It melted while he waited for Kaklov to finish lunch.”

Bray said, “That part we can work out for
ourselves. We know how the killer got in, and what he did after he got here.
The question is, how in hell did he get out again?”

I nodded. “That’s the question, all
right. I wonder what the answer is.”

Nobody told me. So I turned away again,
wandering around the room, looking at this and that. There was a certain
atmosphere of disarrangement in the area of the desk, which was only to be
expected, but otherwise the place retained its neat anonymity.

Well, not quite. The paper shredder was out
about three feet from the wall, standing alone and awkward into the room like a
volunteer robot. It didn’t look as though it belonged there, so I went over to
check, and from the indentations in the carpet I could see that the machine
usually stood against the wall. It had been moved out here, by some person for
some reason.

It was a heavy machine, about waist height,
but it moved readily enough on its casters. There was nothing underneath it.
There was no shredded paper in the white plastic bag in the bottom half. A dirt
smudge on the beige metal top suggested nothing in particular. When I pushed
the On button the machine gnashed its many teeth but
nothing came out.

Staples and Bray had been watching me, and now
Staples came over to say, “Something?”

“I’m not sure.” I frowned at him,
frowned at the room, at all its lumber yard banality.

“You’re onto something.” Staples was staring at me as though I were an egg and he’d
just heard cracking sounds.

I said, “Kaklov and the receptionist and
the guard all went upstairs at twelve. They all came down together at
one?”

“Right.”

“Kaklov came in here, and the other two stayed
outside. That was at one o’clock. When was the body found?”

“Three-thirty. A
phone call from outside came through for Kaklov, the receptionist buzzed, there
wasn’t any answer, she knocked on the door, she and the guard talked it over,
and finally the guard broke the door in.”

“Between one and three-thirty, did Kaklov
have any visitors?”

“No.”

“Any other phone
calls?”

“No.”

Bray had also come over, and now he said,
“The preliminary medical report says he’d been dead at least a couple of
hours when he was examined. Meaning probably before
two.”

I said, “Or as close to one o’clock as the assassin could make it.”

“Looks that way.”

I frowned at the room. The answer was in here
somewhere. I felt I could almost reach out and touch it. I said, “The
assassin came in during lunch and hid in the bathroom. Kaklov came in at one o’clock, locked the door, and the assassin killed
him. The guard broke the door down at three-thirty, and Kaklov was in here
alone.” Looking back at Bray, I said, “What about after they found
the body? Any time when there wasn’t anyone around?”

But Bray shook his head. “There’s a
special police detachment a block from here,” he said. “For
the UN. There were officers on the scene within five minutes, and both
the receptionist and the guard swear they stayed right in that office the whole
time.”

“I was afraid that was the answer.”
I leaned against the paneled wall, folding my arms and looking around this damn
bland enigmatic room. I said, “I find myself thinking of the Sherlock
Holmes dictum: When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains,
however improbable, must be the truth. So what are the
impossibilities here?”

Bray said, “The whole thing is
impossible. This isn’t the kind of case I like.”

“No, let’s think about it.” I looked
over at the desk again, where the killing had taken place. “The assassin
getting in was possible. The assassin committing the crime was possible.”

“The assassin getting out again,”
Bray said. “That’s impossible.”

“So we eliminate that.” Smiling as
though I knew what I was doing, I said, “In approved Sherlock Holmes
style, we eliminate the impossible. The assassin did not get out. So where does
that leave us?”

“Up a tree,” suggested Staples.

“Up a—” Then it hit me. “Of course!”

They both stared at me. Half-whispering,
Staples said, “You’ve got it?”

“Of course I’ve got it. If the assassin
didn’t get out of this room, Fred, then he’s still here.”

Bray said, “If you mean suicide, Kaklov
did it himself, it won’t work. A man can’t strangle himself, not that
way.”

“No, there was a killer,” I agreed.
“But the point is, he’s still in this room.
That’s what the dirt on the paper shredder is all about.”

“Dirt on the paper
shredder?” Staples went over to frown at it. “Yeah, you’re
right. So what?”

“Think, Fred. Think about the dirt on the
bathroom floor.”

“Smudged
footprints.” He transferred his bewildered frown from the paper
shredder to me. “He stood on the paper shredder?”

“Certainly.
Don’t you know where he is?” I pointed up. “He’s in the
ceiling.”

*

I was right, of course. Dropped ceilings are
constructed of a metal gridwork hung by wires from the beams of the original
ceiling. The two-foot by four-foot fiberboard rectangles simply lie in this grid,
and can be pushed up and out of the way. A space of a foot or more is left
below the old ceiling, to leave room for the fluorescent light fixtures and for
the fiberboard pieces to be slipped up over the grid.

The gridwork isn’t very strong, and wouldn’t
normally support the weight of a man, but this was a special case. First, the
killer had brought in two six-foot lengths of thin lumber and placed them
diagonally across the grid, spreading the weight. Second, the killer wasn’t a
man but a woman, a slender twentyish girl who couldn’t have weighed over a
hundred pounds.

A hundred very nasty pounds, I might say. When
Fred Staples, following my suggestion, climbed up on the paper shredder, lifted
the nearest section of fiberboard and stuck his head in between the ceilings to
look, she kicked him in the face. He gave a yelp and came catapulting off the
shredder and into my arms, the fiberboard rectangle bouncing and careening
around us, while at the same time the girl came through another ceiling section
and landed feet first on Al Bray’s head.

Both cops were yelling, I was falling down
from the weight of Fred Staples, and Al Bray was being beaten to the ground by
the furious knees, heels, elbows, fists and forehead of the woman wrapped
around his neck. She was dressed all in black—shoes, slacks,
sweater—and she’d descended more like a demon than a human being.

“Stop her!” Bray yelled from the
floor, and I wriggled out from under Staples just in time to snap my fingers
around her near ankle as she scurried for the door.

I learned to regret that. She turned back the
way a cat does when its hind leg is grabbed. The first thing she did was leave
three long fingernail gashes on my right wrist, and the second thing she did
was leave four long fingernail gashes on my left cheek. Then Bray arrived, and
hit her very very hard with his fist on the side of her head, just above the
ear. (He later explained that in all head-punching the target should be an area
covered by hair, to minimize visible bruises later. Every trade has its
expertise.)

The girl fell down when Bray hit her, and he
immediately stepped on her long hair, so she couldn’t get up again. When she
snapped her head around to bite his ankle he rested his other foot on her
throat and said, “Think it over.”

She thought it over, glaring up at everybody,
and while she was thinking Fred Staples put her wrists in handcuffs behind her
back. They stood her up then, and frisked her in a thorough blunt irritable way
that had nothing of sex in it at all.

Meantime, my wrist and face were both
beginning to sting. I licked my wrist, but couldn’t do much about my face. I
also went to the nearest vinyl divan and sat down, feeling a bit shaky.

The girl had suddenly become very vocal. She
shouted a lot of fierce things, undoubtedly of a political nature, burning with
passion and historical ignorance, but since this Nathan Halizing was being done
in that k-k-k language I took to be Visarian I remained ignorant of her
specific quarrel with the late Mr. Kaklov. Al Bray rapped her with a knuckle in
the hair a couple of times and she subsided, but continued muttering and
glaring at everybody.

Bray and a uniformed cop then took the girl
away, and Fred Staples came over to me with a handkerchief extended in his
right hand. “What’s that for?” I said. “I’m not crying.”

“No, you’re bleeding.”

“I’m what?” Grabbing the
handkerchief, I pressed it to the stinging side of my face, and it came away
with diagonal red lines on it. “That’s my blood!”

“Better come with me,” he said.

NINE

The Death of the Party

After the hospital, where
they gave me a shot and a scrub and some gauze bandage on my cheek, I went with
Staples back to my apartment and we discussed the Laura Penney murder some more.
He assured me they were investigating possibilities other than the guilt of Kit
Markowitz, meaning they were still checking into the five original male suspects.
I asked him the questions Kit had assigned me, and he said no, they hadn’t
established solid alibis for Jay English or Dave Poumon, mostly because the initial
interview with that pair had seemed conclusive enough. As for Claire and Ellen,
Kit’s two alternate female suspects, Staples acknowledged they’d studied Claire
a bit without establishing much of anything, but Ellen came as a surprise to
him. He made himself a note, and I said, “Our investigations
overlap.”

“The more the merrier,” he told me.
“I really want to solve this Laura Penney murder, Carey.”

“Good,” I said.

Next I asked him about the anonymous letter,
and he turned out to have a Xerox copy of it on his person. He let me make my
own copy, in longhand, and then a phone call from his office summoned him away.

I hadn’t wanted to check my messages while he
was there, not being absolutely certain Patricia wouldn’t be cute in spite of
my warning, but it turned out to be just the usual dull band of voices,
including Shirley, calling from Boston again about those damned papers she
wanted signed: “I know you have them by now, and this time I’m serious. If
I don’t receive them by tomorrow, my Boston attorney is going to hire a New York attorney. At your
expense.”

Papers, papers. Yes,
I remembered receiving them, but had I ever signed and returned them? With all
this other stuff going on, I was pretty sure I hadn’t, but when I went through
the crap on my desk they weren’t there.

Damn. Who needed this annoyance? I spent ten
minutes searching the apartment, in every likely and unlikely corner, and
finally had to give up and call Shirley, a thing I hate to do. One of the brats
answered—until John’s voice changes, which I presume it will some day, there’s
no way to tell them apart, even if I wanted to—but then Shirley came on the
line and I said, “Look, I’m not trying to make trouble, but I lost those
damn papers.”

“You’re such a bullshitter, Carey.”

“Well, that’s all right, you do what you
want to do, only if you send me another set I’ll sign them right away and send
them straight back.”

Some snarling followed, until it was agreed
I’d be sent another set of papers, and then we both hung up and off I went for
the Valium. That, plus the medication I’d been given at the hospital, plus the
hectic life I’d been leading recently, combined to knock me out all of a
sudden, and I staggered to the bed and slept until seven-thirty, when the phone
woke me, being Kit, wondering where I was.

“Sorry,” I said. “I’ll be right
there.” And I was, extending the anonymous letter out in front of me as a
peace offering.

“Wonderful!” she said, clutching at
it. “How did you do it?”

“I have my methods, Watson.”

So then dinner, which was already late, had to
be delayed further while Kit immersed herself in the anonymous letter, reading
aloud its cryptic algebra: “If A got too close to
B, what would C do?” With paper and pencil, she proceeded to put columns
of names under the letters A and C, reserving B for Laura. Gradually she
demonstrated to her own satisfaction that everybody she knew could go in one
column or the other, and that most names could go in both. “Oh,
really!” she said, at last. “Being anonymous is one thing, but being
a smartass is something else. Why didn’t she say what she meant?”

“She?”

“This was obviously written by a
woman.”

“Ah.”

“Look at this sentence about the husband. ‘He doesn’t know anything about it.’ That’s a woman saying
that. A man wouldn’t even mention the husband at all.”

“I see. Very
clever.”

Having announced this deduction, Kit went back
to studying the columns of names again, and it began to look as though we’d
never get to dinner, until I pointed out that Laura need not necessarily be
character B, but could also be character C. Kit frowned at the sheets of paper
in front of her and said, “How could that be?”