and did all those weird things that he did, and it came to you in a flash.”
“Oh, right.”
“I mean, let’s give credit where it’s due, huh?” She waved to Maxine for another round. “Couple of things I’m not completely clear on, Bern. How’d you know Joan Nugent was drugged and unconscious when her husband came home? I never would have thought of that.”
“Neither would I.”
“Huh?”
“What I thought,” I said, “was that she and Luke were having an affair, and that they were going at it when Harlan stuck his key in the door. But wouldn’t they have been in the master bedroom? And if so, wouldn’t Luke have gone in the other bathroom?”
“Unless they started out posing, and one thing led to another, and they got carried away.”
“Or unless she had some compunctions about committing adultery in the very bed she shared with her husband. Still, it became clear that she didn’t have a clue how that corpse wound up in her bathroom. And Luke had a whole storehouse of pills in his apartment, and she had the abstracted air of someone who just might have ingested a mood-altering substance sometime or other in the course of her life, and it all came together.”
“What a scumbag Luke must have been.”
“Well, I don’t think he was ever on the short list for the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award,” I said, “but he wasn’t here to give us his side of the story, either. The incident came out sounding like the next best thing to necrophilia, but maybe it didn’t start out that way. Maybe he got her stoned and they started necking, and she took off her clothes and they were, uh, embracing, and then the full force of the drug kicked in and she slipped out of consciousness.”
“And it didn’t occur to him to stop? I suppose he thought she was English. Believe me, Bern, the man was an insect. Look how he betrayed Doll Cooper. She left Marty’s cards with him, and he lifted them out from under her.”
“That was me, Carolyn. The attaché case full of cards was still under the bed when Luke got shot upstairs.”
“Oh, right,” she said. “So you’re the insect.”
“I guess so.”
“There was something else I was wondering about. Oh, right. The gun. Couldn’t they ever recover it?”
“From a storm drain? Have you got any idea how many guns get tossed down storm drains?”
“Lots, huh?”
“Put it this way,” I said. “If there really are alligators in the New York sewers, half of them are armed. Want to get rid of a gun? Just slip it down a storm drain. It’s like hiding a needle in a haystack.”
“I’d never hide a needle in a haystack,” she said. “It’s the first place they would look. Bern, why didn’t he leave the gun with Luke? I know he couldn’t get his arm through, but what if he tossed the gun so it landed in the tub?”
“And it would look like suicide.”
“Right.”
“Except it wouldn’t,” I said. “Not if you looked closely. Even if he managed to get his own prints off the gun, how was he going to get Luke’s on it? And if they ran a paraffin test on Luke they wouldn’t find any nitrate particles on his hand, nothing to indicate he’d fired a gun.”
“Oh.”
“I don’t know what kind of gun it was, so I can’t say whether it would have fit through the hole. Even if it would, if I’d just shot a guy and he’d fallen where I couldn’t get a good look at him and I had no way of knowing for sure whether he was alive or dead, I don’t think I’d be in a big rush to throw him a loaded gun.”
“I guess it was a bad idea,” she said. “Oh, well. Gotta drink up and go, Bern.”
“Already?”
“Got a date.”
“Oh? Anybody I know?”
“It’s no big deal,” she said defensively. “Just a quick drink, a little conversation.”
“That’s how Borden Stoppelgard described his pursuit of Doll.” I looked at her. “It is somebody I know, isn’t it? Who is it, Carolyn?”
“Somebody I just met the other night.”
“Not Doll,” I said. “It can’t be.”
“Jesus, no. Marty would kill me.”
“He did seem quite taken with her, now that you mention it. Considering that she stole his baseball cards. Well, he’s a patron of the theater. Maybe he’ll wind up taking a fatherly interest in her career.”
“Or a sugar daddily interest, Bern. Anyway, she’s not my type.”
“Not Patience. Joan Nugent? What are you going to do, have