Murder is a Girl's Best Friend (36 page)

Chapter 28

I WANTED TO GO HOME AND SPEND THE night in my own bed, but my fretful friends wouldn’t let me. They accompanied me next door for a few minutes—just long enough for me to see if my apartment was still taped shut (it was), and to grab my flannel nightgown, robe, and toothbrush. Then they ushered me right back to Abby’s , where I was expected to sleep like a baby on the lumpy little red couch in her studio.

Abby fixed me up with a pillow, a blanket, a glass of milk, and a plate of cookies. Then she and Terry hurried upstairs to their bouncy, blissful double bed, giggling like teenagers. They were beyond tipsy, and so was I. We had definitely had—as Dean Martin is so fond of saying—tee many martoonis.

As soon as the door to the upstairs bedroom slammed shut, I stumbled over to Abby’s kitchen phone and dialed Dan’s apartment. As inebriated as I was, I had no trouble remembering the number. Though I rarely allowed myself to use it, it was engraved in my heart like a Tiffany monogram.

There was no answer.

Hoping I had misdialed, I hung up, then tried again. Still no answer. Dan was probably still over at his ex-wife’s place, watching over his innocent, sound-asleep young daughter, while the girl’s partygoing mother drank and danced herself stupid in the grasping arms of sundry lecherous men. (If you think that sounds too catty, please blame it on the martoonis. Mine, not hers.)

Staggering back over to the couch, I sat down and devoured the cookies. I was so hungry I’d have eaten the box they came in. I drank all the milk, too, even though I was afraid it would curdle when it hit the sea of alcohol in my stomach. Leaving the empty glass and cookie plate sitting on the coffee table (if Santa came down the chimney looking for goodies, he’d be out of luck), I took off the diamond necklace and returned it to the security of Abby’s sugar canister. Then I changed into my nightgown, curled up on the little red love seat (it was a cinch I couldn’t stretch out!), and went to sleep (okay, fell into a coma).

I was unconscious for a while—about three hours, I think—and then a most astonishing thing happened. I woke up suddenly—in a dazzling flash—with a single word (or, rather,
name
) bouncing against the walls of my skull:
Lily . . . Lily . . . Lily.
Augusta Smythe had called her daughter Lily.

Certain that this was the same flickering signal that had been driving me crazy at the party—and also certain that I had heard the name Lily
before
the party, but very recently, during the course of my five-day investigation into Judy’s murder—I sat up stick straight on the couch and racked my brain to remember the details.
Lily . . . Lily . . . Lily.
Where and when had I heard that name? Whose voice, besides Augusta’s, had spoken it?

Closing my eyes and putting my hands over my ears, I began replaying my mental recording of the last five days, starting at day one, listening to the echoes of my initial conversations with Terry and Elsie Londergan and Vicki Lee Bumstead and Jimmy Birmingham and Roscoe Swift and . . .
Hold it!
I cried to myself.
Play that part over again!

And so I did, from the beginning—from the very moment I first entered the Chelsea Realty office. And many of the details came back to me. Before I ever saw Roscoe Swift’s face, I remembered, I heard him yelling at someone over the phone. He was furious, and banging furniture around, and screaming his lungs out at someone named . . . Lily.

But what had Roscoe been so angry about? And what exactly had he said to the woman named Lily? I couldn’t, for the life of me, recall. And every time I tried to repeat that part of the soundtrack, the record got stuck. It was driving me nuts. I couldn’t stand it another second. I
had
to know what Roscoe had said, and I had to know right now! Luckily, there was one way I might be able to find out.

I snatched the key to my apartment out of my purse, leapt across the hall, and let myself in. After turning on the light and checking my back door again (the Duz detergent patch still hadn’t been disturbed), I made a beeline for the cabinet over my kitchen sink, shoved the soup cans out of the way, and pulled out Judy’s trusty oatmeal box. Yanking my story notes out of the Quaker container and blowing off all the oatmeal dust, I pressed the twenty-six pages flat on the kitchen counter, and madly searched for the section I was burning to see—the Roscoe Swift section. Had I been careful and thorough enough to write down Roscoe’s words to Lily?

Yes! There they were, plain as day, on page fourteen. They probably weren’t the
exact
words Swift had used, but I figured they were pretty close: “Jesus H. Christ!” he had shouted (in a voice loud enough to wake the dead). “Haven’t you had enough? I did what you wanted, Lily. Give it up already! I’m through! Go find yourself another stooge!”

So somebody named Lily had been making unwelcome demands on Roscoe Swift, and he was
really
upset about it. The question was, were Roscoe Swift’s Lily and Augusta Smythe’s Lily one and the same? I had a very strong feeling they were. But feelings—no matter how strong they are—don’t qualify as evidence. I needed to
prove
that there was a connection between Lillian Smythe and Roscoe Swift. But how the heck was I going to do that?

It was 4:30 in the morning.
Christmas
morning. Everybody in Manhattan was sleeping but me (me and untold numbers of overexcited, insomniac children who were sneaking downstairs to see what Santa had left them under the tree). Abby and Terry were sleeping soundly. Dan was surely snoring up a storm. And here I was—so wide awake and stimulated I could barely breathe—tottering around my apartment like a demented ostrich, desperately trying to think of a way to contact Roscoe Swift and get him to talk about his association with Lillian Smythe.

I looked Swift up in the phone book, but he wasn’t there. Either he didn’t live in the city, or he had an unlisted number, or he was entered under a different name, or he didn’t have a home telephone at all. Not knowing what else to do—and so crazed I just had to do
something
—I looked up the number for Chelsea Realty and wrote it down. And then—even though I knew it was really, really early in the morning, on Christmas Day, of all days; and even though I knew I had a better chance (at that particular hour, on that particular holiday) of reaching
God
than getting through to Roscoe Swift—I picked up the phone and dialed the Chelsea Realty office.

Nobody answered. But that was no surprise. What was surprising was the
reason
nobody answered—which was because the phone never rang in the first place. And
that
was because the line was busy.

You heard me right. The line was
busy!
Somebody was actually
there,
in the Chelsea Realty office, at 4:30 (by now, 4:45) in the morning, on Christmas Day, talking on the telephone! I was in shock. I couldn’t believe it. It couldn’t be true. I slammed the phone down, then picked it up and dialed the same number again. And I got the same busy signal again. Who was on the phone? Was it Roscoe? And if so, who was he talking to?

Knowing I’d probably never learn the answers to these questions, but determined to at least
try,
I ran upstairs and threw on some clothes. Then I scrambled back down the stairs and dialed the number again. It was still busy. If I hurried,
really
hurried, I might be able to get to the Chelsea Realty office in time to see (and hopefully speak to) whoever was there.

Moving at breakneck speed, I pulled on my coat and my snowboots, and darted next door for my purse, checking to see if I had enough money for the subway. (I did—a half dollar and two dimes). Then I lunged down the stairwell and burst out onto the street—smack into the frigid, pitch black, pre-dawn air—feeling like Brenda Starr on a heroic fact-finding mission, but surely looking like a half-drunk harridan who’d lost her everloving mind.

 

 

LOOK, I KNEW IT WASN’T A SENSIBLE THING for me to do. Whoever had been using the phone in the realty office when I got the busy signals would probably be long gone by the time I got there—
if
I ever got there (the subways were running on early-morning holiday schedule, which meant the next train might not arrive until sometime next year). But that was a chance I was willing—make that
compelled
—to take. Once I had made the connection between Roscoe Swift and Lillian Smythe, I simply couldn’t sit still. Or wait for the rest of the world to wake up. I had to take action.

By some unimaginable stroke of luck, a train pulled into the Sheridan Square station just minutes after I did. I jumped on and grabbed hold of the strap closest to the door, too hopped-up to sit down. I held on tight as the train lurched out of the station and hurtled its way uptown. There was only one other person in the car with me—a skinny old man in a coonskin cap who sat next to a window, smoking a cigarette, and staring out at the black blur of the vanishing tunnel walls as if enjoying the view.

When I emerged from the subway depths at 28th Street, it was still dark as night. But I had no trouble seeing. Thanks to the shining street lamps and the radiant holiday displays (many of the store windows were decorated with glowing Christmas lights), I made my way down Seventh Avenue with ease. When I turned onto 27th Street, however, the world grew a whole lot dimmer. The lampposts were few and far between, and none of the office or apartment windows facing out onto the dark, deserted street were lit from within.

The front window of the Chelsea Realty office was completely obscure. I walked up close to it and, standing on my tiptoes so I could see over the large, flower-strewn sign covering the entire lower half of the window, I pressed my nose to the glass, cupped my hands around my eyes, and peered inside.

Not a single lamp was lit in the long, narrow front room, but I could see a tall, thin sliver of light emanating from one side of the almost-closed door at the far end of the room—the door leading to Roscoe’s private office.

My heart started beating like a conga drum. There was a light on in the back room! Somebody might be there! Maybe it was Roscoe! I was panting so hard and so fast I felt lightheaded.

(I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking I’m
always
lightheaded. And considering the various sticky situations I’d so blithely put myself into since my search for Judy’s killer began, you may be right. But let me just say this about that: The situation I’d put myself into
this
time suddenly felt a whole lot stickier than the others—and my head felt a whole heck of a lot lighter than usual. So there!)

Forcing myself to move quickly, before my cold feet got any colder, I stepped over to the Chelsea Realty entrance and tried the knob. To my great surprise, the door clicked open, just as it had the first time I’d come. Had Roscoe’s assistant forgotten to lock it again? Or had Roscoe himself neglected to lock it when he let himself in? Taking care not to make the slightest sound, I slithered into the dark front office . . . and then I just stood there—like a tree—for a few minutes, listening for noises from the back room.

At first I didn’t hear anything. Just the echoing whoosh of my own breath and the loud, walloping beats of my own heart. I was straining so hard I thought my eardrums might pop. The profound silence told me one thing for sure: Nobody was talking on the phone anymore. It was so quiet I wondered if anybody was even
there
anymore.

I stared at the thin strip of light at the edge of the door for a while, watching for silent shadows, sudden movements, any breaks in the beam. When nothing disturbed the steady shaft, I came to believe that the person had either gone or was being very still. Unimaginably still. Dying to know which of these possibilities was actually true, I slowly—very slowly!—began to sneak toward the lighted crack in the door, holding my breath and creeping along the creaky wood floorboards like a cartoon mouse.

When I was about six feet away from the door I heard something. It was a very faint sound, but at least it was audible. Stopping dead in my tracks, I sucked in a quick breath of air, aimed one ear toward the crack in the door, and focused all my energy on listening.

There. I could still hear it. It was a kind of hum. Not the musical kind of hum people use when they’re singing to themselves. More like the kind of hum a bee makes. Like a droning, whining buzz. Like a busy signal.

My heart sank down to my snowboots. What a complete and utter jerk I was! I had gone dashing out of my apartment on a freezing cold Christmas morning—and rushed down the deserted, night-black streets, and suffered a gloomy subway trip uptown, and snuck around all by myself in a dark, creepy real estate office—just because some other utter jerk had been in such a hurry to start his Christmas vacation that he had fled the office in a breezy daze, leaving a light on, the door unlocked, and the phone off the hook.

Well, it
could
have happened that way! And I’m not ashamed to say that my first reaction was to accept that comfortable, hastily formed scenario. After further consideration, however (and after the hairs on the back of my neck refused to stop bristling), I had to admit that my initial conclusion was preposterous—that something far more evil and insidious was probably afoot.