trouble on that score. Who do you want to see first?”
“I might as well start with you, Phil.”
I talked with him for ten minutes. But I had already pumped him dry the day before. Still, he gave me a little information on some of the others I would be seeing. Before, I had tried to ask him about his own relationship with Karen Price. Although that tack had been fairly effective, it didn’t look like the best way to come up with something concrete. Instead, I asked him about the other men. If I worked on all of them that way, I just might turn up an answer or two.
Abeles more or less crossed Fred Klein off the suspect list, if nothing else. Klein, whose wife was in Reno, had tentatively made the coulda-dunnit sheet on the chance that Karen was threatening to give his wife information that could boost her alimony, or something of the sort. Abeles knocked the theory to pieces with the information that Klein’s wife had money of her own, that she wasn’t looking for alimony, and that a pair of expensive lawyers had already worked out all the details of the divorce agreement.
I asked Phil Abeles which of the married men he knew definitely had contact at one time or another with Karen Price. This was the sort of information a man is supposed to keep to himself, but the mores of Madison Avenue tend to foster subtle backstabbing. Abeles told me he knew for certain that Karen had been intimate with Harold Merriman, and he was almost sure about Joe Conn as well.
After Abeles left, I knocked the dottle out of my pipe and filled it again. I lit it, and as I shook out the match, I looked up at Harold Merriman.
A pudgy man with a bald spot and bushy eyebrows, forty or forty-five, somewhat older than the rest of the crew. He sat down across the desk from me and narrowed his eyes. “Phil said you wanted to see me,” he said. “What’s the trouble?”
“Just routine.” I smiled. “I need a little information. You knew Karen Price before the shooting, didn’t you?”
“Well, I knew who she was.”
Sure, I thought. But I let it pass and played him the way I had planned. I asked him who in the office had had anything to do with the dead girl. He hemmed and hawed a little, then told me that Phil Abeles had taken her out for dinner once or twice and that Jack Harris was supposed to have had her along on a business trip to Miami one weekend. Strictly in a secretarial capacity, no doubt.
“And you?”
“Oh, no,” Merriman said. “I’d met her, of course, but that was as far as it went.”
“Really?”
The hesitation was admission enough. “L-listen,” he stammered, “all right, I…saw her a few times. It was nothing serious and it wasn’t very recent. London—”
I waited.
“Keep it a secret, will you?” He forced a grin. “Write it off as a symptom of the foolish forties. She was available and I was ready to play around a little. I’d just as soon it didn’t get out. Nobody around here knows, and I’d like to keep it that way.” He hesitated again. “My wife knows. I was so damn ashamed of myself that I told her. But I wouldn’t want the boys in the office to know.”
I didn’t tell him that they already knew, and that they had passed the information on to me.
Ray Powell came in grinning. He was a bachelor, and this made a difference. “Hello, London,” he said. “I made it with the girl, if that’s what you want to know.”
“I heard rumors.”
“I don’t keep secrets,” he said. He sprawled in the chair across from me and crossed one leg over the other. It was a relief to talk to someone other than a reticent, guilt-ridden adulterer.
He certainly looked like a Don Juan. He was twenty-eight, tall, dark, and handsome, with wavy black hair and piercing brown eyes. A little prettier and he might have passed for a gigolo. But there was a slight hardness about his features that prevented this.
“You’re working for Mark,” he said.
“That’s right.”
He sighed. “Well, I’d like to see him wind up innocent, but from where I sit, it’s hard to see it that way. He’s a funny guy, London. He wants to have his cake and eat it, too. He wanted a marriage and he wanted a playmate. With the girl he was marrying, you