Cobalt (25 page)

“But Terry knew exactly what he was doing,” said Valentine.

Clarisse nodded hesitantly.

“Oh,” cried the Prince excitedly, “I feel just like Ida Lupino in
I Love a Mystery
!” He paused, then added sadly, “Only there's nobody to arrest. Old Terry O'Sullivan committed the perfect crime, then broke his heart in two in a basement bar. There's no trial to attend. What a pity.” The Prince sniffed, straightened the banner across his breast, and took a long sip of his fourth drink. “I can just see how it would have been,” he said, looking dreamily at the ceiling: “I'm called up to the witness stand, and I'm dressed just like Dietrich in
Witness for the Prosecution
—stacked heels, black dress, simple pearls, black veil. The defense tries to trip me up, but they can't do it. I hold a handkerchief to my nose and I throw my veil over my forehead, and I point at Terry O'Sullivan, and I scream
She did it! She did it! I saw her do it!
And they have to
drag
me out of that courtroom…”

During the Prince's speech, Clarisse had been thinking with furrowed brow. Then she said, “Terry O'Sullivan couldn't have killed Jeff King.”

“Why not?” said the Prince. “When Terry O'Sullivan first came to the house he was wearing plaid pants. A man who wears plaid pants could be guilty of any crime.”

“He couldn't have done it,” said Clarisse. “Axel, where did you find Jeff King?”

Axel named a guesthouse to the east of the Throne and Scepter. “On the beach right behind it.”

“And that's where Jeff and Terry had their fight?”

Axel nodded.

“Daniel, I thought Terry was with you the whole night,” said Noah. “How did he get outside to
have
a fight with Jeff?”

“He went out with Ann and Margaret,” said Valentine, turning to Margaret.

“Ann had had too much to drink. Terry said he'd help me get her home, but as soon as he had helped me out the door he split and ran down to the beach. Luckily I found a taxi. How long was Terry gone?” she asked Valentine.

“I was out with Clarisse on the deck then. So however long that was—twenty, thirty minutes.”

Clarisse shook her head. “Which means that in twenty or thirty minutes, Terry would have had to have gone out, located Jeff, have the fight, make up, walk half a mile down the beach with him, kill him, cover him up with seaweed, and then get back to the party by the time Val and I had finished our cigarettes.”

“But if he had hurried,” said Noah. “Or if you are wrong about the time…”

“Another thing,” said Clarisse. “When Terry and Val and I left the party, we walked directly to where the corpse was. Terry and Val left me right before I found it. If Terry had known that Jeff's body was there he would
never
have let us walk along the beach. I'm sure he didn't do it.”

“You're right,” said Scott, “I
know
he didn't do it.”

All heads turned again.

“
How
do you know?” said Axel sharply.

Scott smiled. “He got his key back and then he went back toward the Crown.”

“You were watching?” said Axel with some astonishment.

“If there's going to be a brawl,” said the White Prince, “I'm leaving—unless somebody orders me another drink.”

Valentine signaled for another round.

Scott continued, smiling unpleasantly at Axel as he spoke: “After our little run-in with Jeff King on the deck I went to the men's room, and when I came out again I saw you looking around for me. I saw you go outside, so I followed. If you had turned around you would have seen me. You went right down to the beach. And so did I. I was under the pier.”

“God,” said Axel with disgust. “If you're not being an exhibitionist, you're being a voyeur.”

“No, just curious. I watched Terry O'Sullivan come down hard on you and Jeff, I watched you leave, and—” He paused for effect.

“And what!” demanded Clarisse.

“—and I watched Terry leave too, with the room key in his pocket.”

“And Jeff King was left alone?” said Valentine.

“For about twenty seconds,” said Scott. “Then somebody else came up.”

“And who was that?” said Clarisse anxiously.

“I don't know his name,” said Scott. “But it was the same man I saw snorting coke with Terry O'Sullivan at Back Street the night he died.”

“You said before that you didn't see who Terry was with in the john,” said Clarisse. “Come on, Scott, get your story straight!”

“I didn't see
all
of him,” said Scott, “but I did see the top of his head.”

“And from that you could identify him?” said Clarisse.

“Yes,” said Scott.

The table was absolutely still for a moment. Then Valentine stood, looked hard at Scott, and then without warning snatched off Evita Piranha's wig. The Prince's white hair shone in the dim light of the bar. “Was it like this?” Valentine asked.

“Exactly like that,” said Scott quietly.

The White Prince shrieked, swept his long arm across the table, and sent all the glasses, empty beer bottles, ashtrays, and candles crashing to the floor. He stood, and threw his hands over his face. He kicked over his chair. Angel ducked to one side and fell off her chair toward Noah, who leapt out of her way. The Prince turned to flee. Clarisse clutched at his skirt, but the Prince slapped her sharply across the face. She tumbled off her chair and tripped up Valentine, who had reached for the Prince's arm. The Prince smashed his fist so hard against Valentine's nose that blood spurted across the bodice of the Prince's dress and he howled in anger. Valentine fell on top of Clarisse. The Prince started to run, but Clarisse grabbed the heel of his shoe. He fell forward and crashed into the next table. The table collapsed and the Prince sprawled on the floor at the feet of several horrified onlookers. He plucked off his other shoe and flung it at Clarisse's head. It hit Valentine instead.

The crowd in the bar had seen only the confusion surrounding the White Prince. “Evita, Evita!” they cried.

The White Prince wrenched himself to his feet but stopped dead. The barrel of Matteo Montalvo's revolver was pointed directly at his chest.

V
ALENTINE AND Clarisse sat at the kitchen table the next morning, silent, still, and nursing cups of steaming coffee. It was only half past eight, but already the day was hot and bright. Outside, in a brief bathing suit, Axel stood idly beside the pool, watching it fill with water. Noah was weeding the flower bed just outside their window.

Experimentally, Clarisse smiled. Then she grimaced, touching the large bruise on her right cheek.

“Don't complain,” said Valentine. “I'm worse off than you are.” He crossed his eyes to look down at the large strip of gauze and tape over his nose. Both his cheeks bore large circles of bruised flesh. “I'll bet the doctor set it wrong,” he said. “When the tape comes off I'll have a cauliflower nose.”

“Stop worrying. I've been offering up prayers to Debbie, goddess of nose jobs.”

The screen door scraped open. Noah came in with dirty trowel in one hand and a bouquet of orange zinnias in the other. He bowed and handed the flowers to Clarisse. “The Prince may have been Queen of the Ball last night, but this morning you're certainly the Woman of the Hour.”

“You're awfully chipper,” said Valentine glumly to Noah. “Shouldn't you be in mourning or something?”

“The Prince gave me so much grief in the past five years that I don't have any sympathy left for him. I guess I'm just a hard woman.”

“No, you're not,” said Clarisse. “The Prince murdered Jeff King. Deliberately. He doesn't deserve any sympathy.”

“We were at the doctor's all night,” said Valentine. “You were at the police station. Did you find out
why
the Prince killed him?”

Noah replied calmly, “Victor loves coke. He was hooked on it—or he says he was hooked on it. Do you know how expensive that can be?”

Neither Valentine nor Clarisse bothered to answer so obvious a question.

Noah crossed his arms. “If I showed you the books at the restaurant and lent you an adding machine, you could find out exactly how much it costs.”

“The Prince was playing the piano?” said Valentine surprised. “He was robbing the till?”

“For the past year and a half,” replied Noah. “Ever since he began working there, in fact. Siphoning off a little every time he bought a couple of grams. It's one of the reasons I wanted him to leave this season.”

“Why didn't you just tell him to stop?” asked Clarisse.

Noah shrugged. “Why didn't I kick Jeff King out before he robbed me blind? I guess I'm no good at endings. I'm not very good at beginnings either. I'm great at middles, though. Anyway, Angel figured out what was going on, and she came to me and I said, ‘Don't do anything, I'll replace the money,' and that's what I did.”

“But how did Jeff King figure in all this?”

“Jeff figured out what was happening. I don't know how. Maybe he just put two and two together. The Prince was buying all this coke, and his job didn't pay
that
much. But what I think happened is that he found out about it from one of the waiters at the Swiss Miss—Jeff supplied a lot of people in town. Anyway, he doubled his price on the coke he sold the Prince and told him if he didn't pay he'd come straight to me.”

“I think of that sweet young man on the ferry,” mused Clarisse. “Drug pusher, blackmailer, petty thief, co-respondent in homosexual divorce cases, murder victim…”

“That Saturday afternoon when Jeff came by here, the Prince saw him,” said Noah.

“The Prince wasn't here then,” said Clarisse.

“No, but he did see Jeff leave, and he figured that Jeff had come to tell me about the cooked books. But when I didn't say anything, he realized that he had a grace period.”

“The Prince didn't know you knew about the books?” said Valentine.

“He had no idea,” sighed Noah. “What a dummy. In a restaurant everybody knows everything.”

“So he planned to kill Jeff that night?”

“I don't know,” said Noah. “The Prince spent last night gulping out a confession between sobs, but he didn't tell everything.”

“How'd you get to hear all this?” asked Valentine.

“I sat outside the room where they questioned him—I more or less had my ear against the door. The Prince wouldn't shut up. Anyway, after we came back here from the party, he got out of his Salome drag and went for a walk. I don't think he was looking for Jeff, but he sure enough found him. So they did some coke together and walked along the beach, and when they got to a place where the Prince couldn't see anybody, the Prince took off one of his sandals—you know, the wooden ones—and hit Jeff over the head with it. That stunned him and then the Prince strangled him.”

“Then covered him up with seaweed,” Clarisse put in. “But did the Prince also kill Terry O'Sullivan?”

“Well, he gave him the coke in the ladies' room at Back Street,” said Noah, “but he didn't know Terry had a heart condition. The Prince forgot to latch the stall. Terry O'Sullivan barged in, looped to the gills, and saw the Prince doing coke and started going on and on about how gay people shouldn't do hard drugs. The Prince told him to mind his own business, and then Terry said he was going to turn him in to the cop on the door. So the Prince said, ‘Hey! Coke's not really hard drugs, try some.' And he gave Terry four good lines and Terry went out and dropped dead at your feet. It was an accident.”

“Two down,” said Valentine. “Now the question is, did Terry O'Sullivan kill Ann Richardson?”

“That I don't know,” said Noah. “Victor confessed to everything but that and the kidnapping of the Lindbergh baby.”

“I still think Terry O'Sullivan killed Ann,” said Clarisse.

“I do too,” agreed Valentine, “but did he do it on purpose?”

“When I went through the autopsy reports day before yesterday, I realized that Ann didn't have any bruises on her,” said Clarisse. “It's pretty hard to drown somebody, especially somebody who could swim as well as Ann could. There would have been a struggle.”

“But he might have mixed the drugs on purpose. He probably thought she would say something to someone that would implicate him in the murder of Jeff King.”

“Pretty bad reason to murder someone, particularly since Terry
didn't
kill Jeff. I vote that it happened by accident, just the way he told you it did. But afterward he was afraid to go to the police and tell them he was the one who provided the drugs.”

“I've got a question,” said Axel, who had been standing outside the door listening.

“What?” said Valentine.

“How'd you know to bring everybody together last night? If all those people hadn't been there, you wouldn't have found out anything at all.”

Clarisse preened, and smiled despite the pain it caused her. “That was my doing. I knew all the victims, so I figured I knew the murderer too. So I just sent out invitations.”

“It wouldn't have worked without Margaret being there,” Noah pointed out. “So there was at least a bit of luck involved.”

“Did you suspect the Prince?” asked Axel.

“We weren't sure who did it,” Valentine said.

Clarisse nodded agreement.

“But who
did
you think did it?” said Axel.

Now Valentine looked embarrassed.

Clarisse spoke up. “We were hoping it was Scott.”

Axel laughed. “And if it had been, that would have broken us up, right?”

“Right,” said Clarisse. “It was none of our business, though.”

“Well,” said Axel with a smile, “you will be happy to hear that I have cut the cord. Last night while all of you were at the doctor's and at the police station, Scott and I came back here. I told him I didn't like being spied on and that I didn't like to be made to feel guilty for playing around and that I was tired of supporting him and that I wanted him out of my life.”