isn’t it?” She smiled at Joan Nugent. “He was posing for you, wasn’t he?”
“I’ve never painted nudes,” Joan Nugent said. “I don’t believe in it.”
“You don’t believe in it?”
“No, I don’t. I think we’ve had entirely too much of that sort of thing down through the centuries. My most recent painting of Luke was in harlequin garb. I assure you he was fully clothed.”
“Then he was changing,” Patience said. “He’d posed in costume, and—”
“Never in costume. When he posed for me he wore street clothes. I would sketch the lines of his body, and then I’d paint the harlequin costume in later. I didn’t need him for that.”
“But he was naked,” I said.
“Oh, no,” she said. “I’d remember that. I’m sure it’s not at all the sort of thing I would forget.”
“Joan,” Harlan Nugent said gently, “shut up.”
“You might have remembered,” I told her, “if you’d known what was going on. But you were unconscious. You’d been drugged.”
“Not a word, Joan,” Nugent said.
“If you’ll all follow me,” I said, leading the way to the studio or guest bedroom, as you prefer. “You were drugged, Mrs. Nugent, and you were unconscious. Your clothes were off. Luke Santangelo’s clothes were off as well, and he was attempting to—”
“Oh my God,” someone said.
“I suppose you were on the daybed over there, or perhaps on the floor. Then there was the sound of your husband’s key in the lock, and seconds later he had thrown open the hall door and announced his presence. He’s a big, hearty man. I’m sure he tends to make his presence known.”
“Sometimes he’ll say, ‘Lucy, I’m home.’ Like Ricky Ricardo, you know. He does a good Cuban accent. Show them, darling.”
Harlan Nugent looked like a man trying to think of a reason to take the next breath.
“You walked in,” I said to him, “and found your wife unconscious, or at the very least out of her mind on drugs. You saw the bathroom door, closed. You tried the knob and it was locked.”
“And then what did I do?”
“You banged on the door, demanding that it be opened. Luke Santangelo was many things, most of them unsavory, but he was not entirely out of his mind. The last thing he was going to do was open the door.”
“Then I’d say we were at an impasse,” Nugent said, “since I’m hardly of a size to slither through the keyhole, and the door doesn’t have one anyway, does it?” He made a huge fist and gave the door a thump. “Pretty sturdy,” he observed, “but I suppose I could have knocked it down in extremis. Kicked it in, put my shoulder to it, that sort of thing. But didn’t I understand that it was still intact, indeed still locked, when the police were forced to break in?”
“I was wondering about that myself,” I said. I went over and tapped on the door, then flicked the switch alongside it. No lights went on or off. I opened the bathroom door and repeated the process, with the same results. “What have we here?” I said. “Doesn’t seem to do anything, does it?”
“I think it may control one of the baseboard outlets,” Nugent said. “What possible difference could it make?”
“I wonder,” I said, and whipped out my ring of burglar’s tools and began unscrewing the screws that held the switch plate in place. “Voilà,” I said at length, showing them all the rectangle devoid of the usual switchbox. “Once upon a time, this must have been a child’s bedroom. And after the child locked itself in the bathroom and couldn’t get out, perhaps for the second or third time, one of its parents resolved to make sure nothing of the sort ever happened again. Hence this little safety device.”
“Our children were grown when we moved here,” Joan Nugent said. “This room has always been my studio. And I’ve never locked myself in this bathroom. I hardly ever use this bathroom, and I rarely lock the door in the other bathroom, either.”
“Joan,” her husband said, “nobody cares. And you, sir,” he said to me. “What you’re suggesting makes no sense at all. Even if all the other nonsense you’ve suggested were true, which it is not, and even if I had known about this ancient passageway, which I did not, and even if I were sufficiently outraged to want to injure the villain, why would I leave him in the bathroom? If I went in there and killed him, why wouldn’t I get rid of the