Lone star

“Bingo. A fight, tempers flare. Suddenly she’s dead.” He paused. “And the interesting thing I learned from your favorite boy is that the statue was a gift from Mr. Dean himself. Strange.”

“Why is that strange?”

“A fertility statue to a pregnant unwed girl? Very Ellery Queen, no?”

I said nothing.

Cotton went on. “Someone threw the statue that was conveniently there. Then rifled through the drawers for a letter.”

“And took it away,” said Mercy. “The evidence.”

“So,” I concluded, “you need to find out which letters were removed.”

Cotton took a long time answering. “Or, to make my life easy, which letter was not removed by the murderer.”

“Meaning?”

Again, the deliberate wait, the calculated staring from me to Mercy. “It seems Carisa did hide one letter. One letter she did not, for some reason, keep in that drawer with the others. A letter Carisa Krausse hid under a pillow.”

I held my breath. “From?”

“Well.” He paused, stretching out the word, and then melodramatically removed a copy from a breast pocket. “From your boy Jimmy. Who, when asked right after the murder, said he never wrote any letters to her. None. Zippo. Nada. Who, me? Who, when he finishes shooting, is going to be shown this copy, which seems to contradict his statement to the police. Unless, of course, someone else forged his signature.”

Mercy and I stared, uncomfortable. I was tempted to snatch the letter from him, annoyed with his roundabout conversation, his purposeful leading up the revelation of the new letter. Silent now, I waited. After all, this was Cotton’s grandiose moment, and he wanted to work it his way. Basil Rathbone as Sherlock Holmes, American style. The debonair Rathbone in pinstriped suit, with carnation in buttonhole. Well, Cotton’s sliver of a moustache was in need of a barber’s trim: one corner was higher than the other.

“Well…” I began.

“Exactly.” He unfolded the sheet of paper. “And let me quote you a line from the newly discovered letter.” He skimmed what looked to be a neatly typed copy. “Oh, here it is. ‘You know this is a lot of crap from you and no one is going to take your crap seriously, you know.’” He paused. “No, that’s not exactly the line I wanted to read to you ladies. Oh, here it is. ‘You know, people can get hurt if they get in my way.’” He looked up, made eye contact with me. He echoed. “‘Hurt.’”

“I heard you,” I said, icily.

A half-hour later, sitting alone in the commissary, nursing coffee-Mercy left for an interview with Louella Parsons whom she deemed “that bastion of bathos”-I was in no mood for Tansi’s intense, excited assault.

“Edna,” she sputtered, pulling up a chair. “I’ve been looking for you. Detective Cotton is all over the lot. He’s mad because he just found some letter, but Jake won’t tell me what’s it about.” She drew in her breath. “Edna, they fingerprinted me this morning.”

I was not in the mood for Nancy Drew. “So?”

Tansi paused for an imperceptible second. “It was so Public Enemy or something. James Cagney.”

I was still fuming from Cotton’s surprise information; more so, his smug delivery, his toying with me.

“I mean, in my lifetime I would not have expected it,” Tansi continued. “We all had to go, of course. Warner sent a memo. Now that memo will be omitted from the Giant archives, I’m sure. Jake protested, said it was impossible. He hadn’t gone to Princeton to be treated like a common criminal. I went with him, but he fussed and fumed. On the way back he kept showing me his stained fingertips until I exploded and said he wasn’t Christ revealing some stigmata. You know what he said? ‘I’m not made for skullduggery.’ I loved it. Then he said: ‘All the hugger-mugger stuff is bad for my digestion.’”

I held up a hand to stop the flood. “Tansi, did Jake say anything about the murder investigation?”

“No, why?”

“Just wondering.”

“Jake has decided-I guess Warner, too-to ignore me. Everything goes through Jake. The fewer people who know, the fewer the leaks to gossip sheets. Jake did say that some writer at Confidential phoned Warner, started asking questions. That threw Warner into a panic.”

“Tansi, I just asked you if you’d heard anything, and you said no. And then you share the Jake story and Confidential.”

“But,” Tansi defended herself, “I thought you meant evidence.”

I was tired. “Whom did you see at the precinct?”

“Lydia Plummer was leaving, and not happy. She was with Nell Meyers, but they didn’t leave there together.”

“How do you know?”

“They were both leaving when we arrived. Lydia called a cab and Nell waited at the bus stop. Jake and I watched Lydia get in the cab, and I tell you, she looked like death itself: pale, fluttery, and nervous. Nell’s avoiding Lydia now. Afterward, I asked Nell about it. You know, by the way, she’s finally listening to me. She’s leaving the Studio Club-and Lydia. Since Carisa’s death, Lydia is often hysterical, crying jags, whispered nonsense, and imagined horrors. I guess she’s told Nell some things about dating Jimmy-but she said she still plans on marrying him. Other girls are the problem, she said. It’s crazy, no?”

“Why?”

“Jimmy has already told Lydia to get lost.” A pause. “Nell told me she thinks Lydia killed Carisa in an argument.”

I sat up. “What? What did you say?”

“Well, Lydia, I guess a little out of it, told Nell that she’d gone to the apartment to see Carisa. Old roommate, you know, though they hadn’t talked in a while, some sort of fight. But I guess they started talking again. Anyway, Lydia told Nell they argued about Jimmy. Lydia was jealous. Lydia was angry at Carisa.”

“I’m not following this.”

“Lydia interpreted those letters Carisa was writing to Jimmy as a personal affront. A slap at her. Carisa, she told Nell, was old news, so she should leave her Jimmy alone. Lydia resented the baby threat. Lydia said she was the new girl and thought Carisa’s letters were a ploy to get Jimmy back. Nell told me she told Lydia-but now you’re the old girl. He’s got Ursula Andress. Lydia went nuts. Yelled at Nell. Scared her.”

“Would Nell actually tell Lydia that to her face?”

“Why not? Nell can’t stand Lydia now that I’ve made her see the light.”

I drummed my fingers on the table. “Jimmy has to come clean about a lot of things.”

Tansi spoke in a soft voice. “What does that mean?”

“Jimmy hasn’t been forthright with the police.” I was thinking of Jimmy’s newly discovered letter.

“Oh, I’m sure there’s a reason, Edna.”

“You don’t lie to the police.”

“He wouldn’t lie. Maybe he forgets things.”

“No, Tansi, stop this. I like Jimmy. I do, despite some of his childish behavior. And I don’t believe he’d kill anyone. But if we’re to help him, we have to be realistic. Your idealizing him into junior-grade God is touching, but one of the dangers of elevating men to godhood is that, well, we’re forced to stare at them up there. Sometimes, when the light hits the statue, you see the pock marks, the blemishes, the…”

“I’m not a giggly bobby-soxer, Edna,” she said, hurt, bewildered, near tears.

“I know you’re not, Tansi. And I know you are an intelligent woman. But your protestation of Jimmy’s innocence smacks of unexamined devotion.”

Tansi stood up, not happy. “Jimmy is the future of Warner Bros.,” she said. “And he’s a good boy.”

“He’s not a boy. He’s a man.”

“You know what I mean. He’s decent and…and…”