hands three times already, an’ nobody’s ever gonna see ’em again. This gentleman here, Mr. Gilmartin, he might have a bone to pick with you, on account of it’s his cards you walked off with. If he insists on pressin’ charges, well, I think it’ll get kicked for lack of evidence, but I’d have to take you in.”
“I don’t want to press charges,” Marty said. “I just hope Miss Cooper might narrow her range in the future and limit her acting to stage and screen. She would seem to have a considerable talent, and it would be a shame to see it diluted.”
“You know,” Doll said, “you’re a gentleman, you really are. I’m sorry I took the cards from you. I was playing a part, that’s exactly what I was doing, and I think I fooled myself into thinking it gave me a dramatic license to steal. It’s corny to say this, but I may have actually learned a lesson tonight.”
Carolyn gave me a “get her” look, but the speech seemed to go over well with everybody else.
“So that’s that,” Ray said. “Brings us back to you, Mr. Nugent. What we keep comin’ back to is there’s no evidence, an’ I also gotta say the deceased don’t sound like no great loss. Of course there’s also the matter of makin’ a false report to an insurance company, claimin’ a loss when there was no loss.”
“That bothered me,” Nugent admitted. “The idea of making an actual profit on the man’s death. But once the burglary was a matter of record I could hardly fail to put in a claim.” He thought for a moment. “I could tell them I made a mistake. The jewelry actually turned up.”
“You sure you want to do that, Mr. Nugent? You sorta call attention to yourself that way. You’re in this deep, the shortest way’s straight ahead.” He put a companionable hand on the big man’s shoulder. “Far as makin’ a profit on all of this, believe me, sir, you got nothin’ to worry about. The rest of you folks, I’m thinkin’ maybe you all oughta clear outta here about now. The show’s over, an’ me an’ Mr. Nugent here need a little privacy to work out some of the details on how we’re gonna keep this whole matter private an’ personal.”
CHAPTER
Twenty-three
I had a lunch date the following day, so I didn’t get a chance to sit down and talk with Carolyn until we met after work at the Bum Rap. I was a little late closing—a customer, a devout G. T. Henty collector, may his tribe increase—and by the time I got over there she was already at work on a scotch and soda. I asked Maxine to bring me a beer, and Carolyn told me that was a load off her mind.
“You’ve been working up a storm lately, Bern,” she said. “I was starting to worry about you.”
“Not to worry,” I said.
“I went on home by myself last night,” she said, “because I had the feeling you and Patience might want to creep off into the night.”
“On little iambic feet?” I shook my head. “I bought her a cup of coffee,” I said, “and put her in a cab.”
“I was wondering what she was doing there, Bern. I was trying to figure out how she could have stolen the cards or shot Luke Santangelo, and I came up with a couple of real winners. Why’d you have Ray bring her?”
“To save going through the whole thing another time,” I said. “I kind of owed her an explanation, after all the dates I broke and the fibs I told.”
“Lies, Bern. Once you’re past seven years old, you don’t get to call them fibs anymore.”
“Besides, I suppose I was showing off a little. And I thought it might cheer her up. She’s a nice woman, but she’s depressed all the time. She’ll come out of it for a minute or two to sing haiku to the tune of ‘Moonlight in Vermont,’ but then she’s off again, sinking into the Slough of Despond.”
She frowned. “Isn’t that what they called Babe Ruth?”
“That was the Sultan of Swat.”
“Right. It’s hard keeping them all straight. Bern, you gotta remember that Patience is a poet.”
“Who else would sing haiku?”
“And they’re all moody like that, especially the women. It’s a good thing most of ’em have to live in basement apartments or they’d be jumping out the window all the time. As it stands they kill themselves left and right.”
“Sylvia Plath, Anne