'Uh, we told her there was an accident. I think Councilman Firestone was going over to tell her. They were very close.'
The lift doors shushed open behind them and Shock looked back to see Raymond Firestone enter the hallway, step back, and usher Ada Delaney into the apartment. She was a tall, stern-looking woman in her fifties, with arched eyebrows and confused eyes. Her face, stretched smooth by cosmetic surgery, still showed the sorrowful lines of a sad woman trapped in an unsatisfying life. She was dressed in a knee-length black cocktail dress and wore no make-up. She stood inside the door, looking around, then walked down the hall towards the living room.
'Jesus,' Shock said, 'somebody get a sheet. Cover that up.'
'No!' Ada Delaney demanded, standing in the entrance to the living room and looking across the room at the remains of John Farrell Delaney. 'Leave it just the way it is.'
Shock looked at Eckling and he nodded. She walked slowly into the room, stopping five or six feet from the corpse.
'He was like that?' Ada Delaney asked.
'Yes, ma'am,' Shock said.
She almost sneered down at the corpse. 'Typical,' she said.
There was a quick exchange of glances. Nobody said a word.
'I didn't even know about this apartment,' she said, staring out the window. She seemed transfixed by the scene of death. Her voice began to climb, not louder, but higher-pitched, and she spoke in a rush, as if she had memorized a monologue and was afraid she would forget something. Vail thought she was perhaps in some stage of shock, traumatized by the sight of her husband's corpse.
'It's quite lovely. A little severe, but quite lovely. Pretty good for a man who made a fortune running slaughterhouses.' She peered at one of the paintings. 'I never did like his taste in art. Abstracts leave me cold.' She turned to face Firestone. 'Doesn't seem quite fair, does it, Raymond? To have a beautiful place like this and not share it with the woman you supposedly love, who bore your children, shared your bed?' She paused for a moment and then added nonchalantly, 'Put up with all those lies.'
She stepped closer to the corpse until she was almost looking straight down at it.
'I married him right out of college, you know. Thirty-one years. I never knew another man - intimately, I mean. It was always just Farrell. Farrell, Farrell, Farrell. He was such an attentive suitor… and I did love him so… thirty-one years ago. He bought me an orchid for our senior prom. I don't know where he got the money. I'd never seen a real orchid before. He used to give me five orchids every anniversary. Until a few years ago.' She put her hand to her mouth. 'Oh, my, I would love to cry. But I can't even do that, I just can't seem to find my tears. You know how I feel, Raymond? I feel relieved. I'm relieved that it's over.' She looked back down at her dead husband. 'I was really growing to hate you, Farrell. And to think I didn't have to do anything. I didn't have to divorce you or go on being humiliated by you. It was done for me. What a nice… unexpected… surprise.'
She turned away from her dead husband and strolled out of the room.
'You can take me home now, Raymond,' she said.
As Vail watched her leave, he thought about Beryl Yancey, panicky with fear that her husband was dead or dying, in contrast with Ada Delaney, who couldn't even shed a tear over hers.
'Phew!' he said, as they watched the lift doors close behind her.
'Definitely a suspect,' Stenner answered.
'Oh yeah,' said Shock Johnson. 'This may turn out to be an easy one, Marty.'
'They're never easy.'
When Vail got home, there was a paper towel on the floor inside the door. On it was a lipstick print and below it Jane Venable's unlisted phone number. No other message.
The Delaney house was in Rogers Park on Greenleaf just off Ridge Avenue, an old, columned, Italianate mansion with tall windows and bracketed eaves, which from the outside had a gloomy nineteenth-century look. Eckling left his aide in the car. The maid led him through a house that had been gutted and remodelled with large, high ceilinged rooms decorated in bright pastel colours, to a radiant atrium at the rear of the house with french doors opening onto a large garden protected by high hedgerows. Outside, a bluejay fluttered and splashed in a concrete birdbath.
Ada Delaney, dressed appropriately in black, was seated on a bright green flowered sofa with a tall, slender man with shiny grey-black hair, olive skin, and severe, hawklike features. He was dressed in dark
