turned and went back out through the sliding door and over the broken glass into the yard. A pair of monarch butterflies zigged and zagged among the geraniums. I sat in one of the white lawn chairs. The idea was to organize my thoughts and control my emotions. It might take a while. After three or four minutes, I realized that a phrase was running through my head. In for a penny, it went, in for a pound. Where had that come from? It made a perverse kind of sense. I’d been retained by Matthew Wansborough to look into possible dubious operations at Ace Disposal, and in the course of my investigations, admittedly of the ad lib variety, I’d committed a crime or two. It was too late to knock off the case even if someone—to wit, Alice Brackley—seemed to have been murdered. I got out of the lawn chair and stepped over the glass and through the door. In for a penny, it went in my head, in for a pound.
I knelt down beside Alice Brackley and felt the carotid artery in the right side of her neck. No beat. I thought about applying other medical tests but rejected the idea. Touching a corpse wasn’t turning out to be much fun. Besides, Alice’s neck told me enough. It felt cold and stiff. Ms. Brackley had been alive at twenty after four when she phoned me. Eight hours later, her body had no warmth and rigor mortis was right around the corner. She must have died not long after she got off the phone, and the likeliest cause seemed to be a broken neck. There was a high red mark on her right cheek that looked like it had come from a blow. It wasn’t makeup. I stood up and shook off a small attack of queasiness.
Alice was dressed for an evening alone. She had on a quilted dressing gown and fluffy slippers with heels. One of the slippers had fallen from her foot. The gold Rolex was on her left wrist. She was lying on beige carpeting that went wall to wall, and around her the living room was furnished in pieces that glowed and shone. Silk fabrics on the armchairs and dark wood tables with a high polish. The paintings on the walls didn’t go with the rest of the decor, stolid nineteenth-century landscapes and formal portraits of men with spade beards. Family heirloom stuff. Nothing in the room had been disturbed. Except Alice.
I went upstairs. The master bedroom was at the back of the house. Mistress bedroom. Powder blue was its dominant shade. There was a duvet on the bed, and it and the sheet underneath were lightly rumpled, not as if someone had been sleeping between them but as if someone had been lying in them reading or watching television. A glass filled with brown liquid sat on a bedside table next to a push-button phone. The phone was powder blue. I sniffed the glass. Scotch and not much water. Two video cassettes for the VCR across the room lay among the bedclothes. I leaned over to read the titles without touching the cassettes. The first was a Fred Astaire movie, Funny Face, not one of the ten with Ginger Rogers. Audrey Hepburn. The other movie was titled Going Down on Stud Ranch. Alice had a dirty little secret.
Two doors opened off the bedroom on the right side, one to the bathroom and the other to a dressing room. Whoever had done in Ms. Brackley seemed to have visited the dressing room and not tidied up afterwards. An ornate jewellery box had been knocked over and its contents dumped across the top of the French Provincial dresser. Some of the contents had probably departed with the intruder. The pieces on the dresser top were costume jewellery of the bauble sort that Alice would wear for slumming. There was no sign of the fabulous Brackley gold collection.
I opened the top drawer of the dresser. It held three smaller jewellery boxes. I looked inside one of them and thought the contents seemed intact. The box held mostly shiny earrings in many shapes and sizes and materials. None of the materials was gold. I shut the box and pushed it into a corner. The edge of an envelope peeked out from under the box. It was an envelope from the Eddie Black photography people, and inside it was a bunch of colour snaps. I shuffled through them. They’d been taken on the patio of a beach house, probably Caribbean judging from the vegetation in the background, and they showed two people. Charles Grimaldi and the late Alice Brackley.
All the photos but one had Grimaldi alone or Alice alone. Grimaldi wore a white swimsuit and tennis shoes. The rest of him was bare and tanned. He had more hair on his chest than Gene Shalit has on his head. Alice was in a yellow bikini. Good figure, and breasts substantial enough to get her a job at the Majestic. Grimaldi must have snapped the pictures of Alice and vice versa. The last photo showed Alice and Grimaldi together. Maybe a passing tourist took it for them. Alice was giving Grimaldi a lovey-dovey look in the photo. Grimaldi was beaming into the camera.
I put the pictures back in the drawer, went downstairs, walked around Alice’s body, and left through the opened glass door. The kids on the bikes down the street remained engrossed in their conversation, and unless someone was spying from behind a curtain, I fled the scene of the crime undetected. I stopped the Volks at a phone booth outside the subway station near the bottom of Bedford Road and dialled 911. The cop wanted to know what I meant by trouble at the Brackley address and who was I, sir? Trouble that went with a break-in, I said, and told him I was a concerned citizen and a very influential chap. The cop sounded like he doubted it. I hung up and drove home to tell Annie about the murder of Alice Brackley.
Poor thing, she’d probably say.
22
ANNIE CHANGED HER MIND about another cup of coffee. I opted for a large vodka.
“Most conspicuously,” I said, “the burglary that went with the murder wasn’t the kind that professionals commit.”
Annie couldn’t keep the small tremble out of her hand when she lifted the coffee cup.
She said, “You’ve just told me that Alice’s gold necklace and bracelet and whatnot were taken.”
“Or even that a sensible amateur would commit.”
“You were there, Crang,” Annie said. “You’ll have to explain what you’re talking about.”
“Whoever bopped Alice rigged the house to look like a break-in after the deed was done in the living room,” I said. We were talking in the kitchen and Annie had her feet tucked under her in the chair closest to the window. “The broken glass gave it away. It was on the patio side, which means our intruder punched out the sliding door from the inside. Obvious stuff. And, another item, if he was so intent on Alice’s gold, why did he leave the Rolex on her wrist? Everything about the set-up smacks of contrivance. Not very sophisticated contrivance.”
I was leaning against the kitchen counter. My body wanted me to pace, but no one paces anymore: Doesn’t look hip. I settled for leaning and drinking.
Annie said, “Well, how did this intruder get into the house in the first place? If he was some sort of threat to Alice, surely she wouldn’t open the door to him.”
“Maybe intruder isn’t the right description.”
“It’s not bad for characterizing someone who murders the occupant of a house.”
“Ex post facto intruder,” I said. “Alice let him in because he posed no danger. He was a friend, an acquaintance, a late-night date, and afterwards he turned nasty.”
“Killed her, you’re supposing,” Annie said, “and then arranged the rooms to make it seem like the killing happened when Alice caught a burglar in the act?”
“But why was he so sloppy about the cover-up?” I said. “We don’t need to summon Sherlock Holmes from 221B Baker Street to spot the flaws in the faked robbery. It was as if the killer were making a show of his arrogance.”
“Or his panic.”
I’d drunk three ounces of Wyborowa. It was beginning to kick in with a muzzy warmth in my chest.
“I choose arrogance,”
