The two men halted just inside the door, staring at Angel, who returned their stare unblinking.
“Sy, close the door,” Masuto whispered.
He closed the door and said, “Masao, what the hell goes on here?”
Masuto walked over to Angel Barton and picked up her arm. There was no pulse and the hand was cold.
“Is she dead, Masao?”
He pushed the lids down over the staring blue eyes. “Very dead, I think.” On the floor next to the chaise longue there was an empty hypodermic needle. Beckman picked it up with his handkerchief.
“How long?” he asked Masuto.
Staring at Angel thoughtfully, Masuto said, “The hands are cold. Twenty minutes, half an hour.” He was examining her arm. There was a single puncture mark. “What’s the smell?” he asked Beckman, who was sniffing the air.
“Ether.”
“I thought so. Go downstairs, Sy, and tell Dempsy that no one leaves the house. I’ve been stupid, and I don’t want to go on being stupid. Then call the station and tell them to get another cop over here and to inform the captain. Then call Baxter and tell him we want him and an ambulance.”
“He’ll love that.”
“We’ll try to live with his displeasure.”
Beckman was studying the hypodermic. “No prints.”
“No, he wanted to get rid of it, so he wiped it and dropped it.”
Beckman left the room. Masuto walked over to the dressing table and raised the lid. There was the gun Mrs. Holtz had spoken about. It was a small, expensive purse gun, twenty-two caliber and probably, Masuto guessed, of Swiss make. He took it out, hooking his pinky through the trigger guard and then brought it into the light of a lamp, studying it carefully. It bore a clear set of prints which, he was convinced, would match those of the dead Angel. He then wrapped it in his handkerchief and dropped it into his pocket.
He then walked over to the dead Angel and stared at her thoughtfully. She was indeed a very beautiful woman, even in death. He tried to analyze his own feelings. Had he been the cause of her death? Was his own failure to anticipate it to be condemned? Should he have known? There was something missing. He was not attempting to exonerate himself. There was simply something missing.
He bent over the dead woman now and raised one of the eyelids he had closed before, peering at the cold blue eye it revealed. Then he lowered the lid again. There were two doors at one side of the bedroom. Masuto went to them now. One led to a bathroom, where tile and sink and tub were in varying shades of pink. The other door opened on an enormous walk-in closet.
Masuto flicked on the closet light, staring at the racks of dresses, slacks, and evening gowns. One entire wall of the closet was devoted to a shoe rack, holding at least a hundred pairs of shoes and, at the bottom, four pairs of riding boots. He then went through the racks and finally found, not on the racks, but carefully folded on a shelf behind the dresses, six pairs of whipcord breeches. What this added up to, Masuto could not for the life of him imagine. Possibly nothing. Possibly she liked to ride. In the detective stories he read occasionally, everything pointed in a specific direction. But here were things most curious that pointed nowhere.
7
“You don’t need me,” Dr. Baxter said sourly. “I don’t have to dance attendance on every corpse you clowns turn up. I was in the middle of my dinner-”
“It’s ten o’clock,” Wainwright said apologetically.
“Civilized people eat late, and if you think I’m going to spend all night doing an autopsy, you’re crazy. I’ll get at it in the morning.”
“All we want to know,” Wainwright begged him, “is why she died.”
“Because her heart stopped. It causes death.”
“Come on, Doc, be reasonable.”
“Are you reasonable? What do you think they pay me to be medical examiner for this silly town of demented millionaires. All right, you want to know what she died of? I’ll tell you what she didn’t die of. She didn’t die of an over-dose of heroin, if that’s what you’re thinking. She’s not a user.”
“Was she murdered?”
“How the hell do I know whether she was murdered? I’m not a cop, and I can’t read the minds of the dead. When I cut her up, I’ll tell you what I find.”
“You can take her away,” Wainwright told the stretcher bearers. They left the bedroom with the body, Baxter stalking after them.
“He’s a doll,” Beckman observed. “He’s just a sweet, good-natured doll.”
Sweeney, glancing up from his search for fingerprints, blamed it on Baxter’s profession. “You do that kind of work, it’s got to show.”
The photographer was still working his flashbulbs. “The body’s gone,” Wainwright said tiredly. “That’s enough. Take what you got back to the station and develop it.”
“I don’t know how the word gets around. Maybe it’s ESP,” Beckman said. “But there’s two TV crews outside and four or five reporters. Someone’s got to talk to them.”
“I’ll talk to them. Just tell them to wait and be patient.” Beckman left the bedroom. Wainwright slumped down on the chaise and said to Masuto, “What makes you so damn sure she was murdered?”
“It had to be. Only I didn’t have enough sense to realize it.”
“I don’t know what in hell you’re talking about, Masao, but I know one thing. This afternoon you told me you knew who killed Mike Barton. No more games. I want the name.”
“All right. But it doesn’t finish anything. Angel Barton killed her husband-but only in a legal sense. She was with a man, and the man pulled the trigger. Of course, she was part of it. They planned the thing together. And the stakes were high-one million dollars in cold cash, and if it worked, anything she was entitled to in his will.” Masuto reached into his pocket and took out the gun he had wrapped in his handkerchief. “Here’s the gun that killed Mike Barton.”
Wainwright stared at it speechless. Sweeney came over, lifted the little pistol carefully by its trigger guard, and examined it in the light of a lamp.
“As lovely a set of prints as I’ve ever seen.”
“Where did you get it?” Wainwright demanded.
“Over there-in her dressing table. Where the killer had placed it after he finished with Angel. The prints are excellent. He put them on the gun after Angel was dead, pressing her fingers to it.”
“And how did he kill her?”
“I don’t think we’ll ever know that. My guess is that he knocked her out with something, perhaps ether, and then he injected her vein with air. I don’t know whether that can be proven in an autopsy. They may find traces of something in the syringe. He was desperate and in a hurry, and I guess he decided to make it look like suicide. It was a stupid, witless crime from the moment it started this morning.”
“Yeah, when it’s not stupid, we don’t even know that a crime took place. I guess you’re right about the gun, but we’ll let Ballistics decide. You said this morning, you think the whole kidnap caper was a rigged job?”
“A kid’s job. I think the husband, Mike Barton, was in on it, and then his Angel double-crossed him and brought someone else into it. Or maybe the whole thing started with the killer. I couldn’t make any sense out of the kidnap thing until I spoke to a cousin of mine who’s an expert on legal ways to cheat Internal Revenue, and he said that there would have been a big tax break for Barton.”
“Except that from what I hear, neither Barton nor the Angel were smart enough to figure it out.”
“Exactly. There’s another small matter,” Masuto said. “The killer is right here in this house.”
“You’re sure?”
“Very sure. No one came in when it was done, no one left.”
