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  I shook my head. ‘Thank you for your offer, though. I have to go through Rudy’s apartment tomorrow and decide what to do about his belongings, the things I won’t want to keep. I won’t know what I’ll need to do until I see what’s there.’

  Kelly Ingram said, ‘That’ll be a big job. I was there once, and the place is crammed with files and papers and stuff. It’ll take you a while.’

  I’d expected the files and papers, but I hadn’t expected that other thing she’d said. ‘You were there once? Only once?’

  She raised one graceful eyebrow. ‘That’s right.’

  ‘Captain Michaels said you were Rudy’s girlfriend. I’d have thought …’ I trailed off, not really knowing how to finish.

  She sighed. ‘I was Rudy’s friend, Dr. Benedict. Not “girlfriend”—did the Captain really use that word? Rudy and I weren’t lovers.’

  And still another surprise. ‘Oh,’ I said, trying not to show I was flustered. ‘Captain Michaels led me to believe, ah …’

  ‘I can’t help what Captain Michaels thinks,’ she said, an edge to her voice. ‘Rudy and I hadn’t seen each other for a couple of years, not until just a few weeks ago. We were only getting reacquainted. We weren’t lovers.’

  She didn’t say yet, but she might as well have. But she’d made one other thing quite clear: whether they would eventually have become lovers or not, Kelly Ingram quite clearly had not been in love with Rudy. She was not crushed by his death. Upset, yes—even horrified, perhaps, but in that distanced way one reacts to the misfortune of someone who is an acquaintance rather than an intimate part of one’s personal life. Kelly Ingram was an actress, but I didn’t think she was that good an actress. She had not been in love with Rudy.

  I accepted Marian Larch’s offer of a ride to my hotel.

  The next morning the medical examiner’s report came through and Rudy’s body was released. I notified the crematorium.

  Rudy’s apartment in Chelsea was what in my younger days would have been called bohemian—arty and cheap. It was the sort of place I could see Rudy living in fifteen or twenty years ago, when he was just starting out. It was a sophomoric apartment.

  Rudy had five or six pieces of original artwork, but he’d hung none of them. Instead, what wallspace wasn’t taken up with bookshelves was covered with posters, most of them advertising theatrical events. Rudy had said he didn’t like the apartment and was looking for a better place to live; perhaps that was why he’d never bothered hanging the paintings. I found them in a small pantry off the kitchen that Rudy had used as an all-purpose storage room; they were still in the movers’ crates from the time they’d made the trip from California, almost a year ago.

  I’d already decided to box up all of Rudy’s papers and ship them to Ohio; there I could go through them without rushing, taking as much time as I wanted. The clothes could go to Goodwill Industries or the Salvation Army. Rudy had quite a few pieces of good furniture; I’d ask the Ingram woman if she wanted any of them. I’d need to get the phone disconnected, notify the utility companies—I decided to make a list.

  I was sitting at Rudy’s desk trying to think of everything that needed to be done when the door buzzer sounded. As soon as I figured out how the intercom worked, I heard a voice saying, ‘It’s Kelly. May we come up?’

  My heart sank; it was hard enough going through Rudy’s things, but having to be polite to that … yet I could think of no reason to refuse and buzzed her in. The other part of ‘we’ turned out to be a successful-looking man whom she introduced as Howard somebody. Each of them was carrying a stack of flattened cardboard cartons.

  ‘The shippers can pack most of what you’ll want to send back,’ the Ingram woman said, ‘but there are always some things you have to take care of yourself. Now, we’ll help or we’ll get out of your way, whichever you say. Just tell us.’

  It was a little thing, showing up with some boxes, but it made me realize that on the whole she’d been behaving better than I had. ‘I’d like you to stay,’ I said as pleasantly as I could. ‘Right now I’m trying to make a list of all the things that need to be done.’

  ‘Did your son have a safe-deposit box, Dr. Benedict?’ Howard the mystery man said.

  ‘I have no idea.’

  ‘Have you gone through the desk yet?’

  ‘Not yet.’

  ‘Then that’s the place to start. Was there insurance, a will?’

  ‘Howard’s a lawyer,’ Kelly Ingram explained.

  ‘A will … I don’t know,’ I said. ‘I do know there was insurance.’

  ‘He probably had a safe-deposit box, then,’ Howard said. ‘Look for a key and his bank statements. Then we’ll get a court order to open the box.’

  ‘The key might be in the bedroom,’ the Ingram woman said and went to look.

  I looked at the man named Howard. ‘Are you Ms. Ingram’s lawyer?’

  ‘Personal friend.’

  One of her men, then.

  ‘Mind if I take a look?’ he said.

  I yielded the desk to him, and watched as he quickly and methodically went through the papers. Kelly Ingram came back in from the bedroom waving a key just as Howard held up a bank statement. ‘Barclays Bank,’ he said. ‘This is Saturday, Dr. Benedict. I won’t be able to get an order to open the box until Monday. If you want my help, that is.’

  ‘I would like your help very much, Mr.…?’

  ‘Call me Howard. Let’s see what else we have here.’ He took a ledger out of a middle drawer, opened it, and said, surprisingly, ‘Glorioski!’

  The Ingram woman laughed. ‘Glorioski, Howard?’

  ‘The inner child speaks. Do you know what this is?’ He meant the ledger. ‘It’s an inventory of his belongings—location, cost, and so on. Thank the Lord—a careful record-keeper! This will simplify things enormously. And look here. Will, two insurance policies, some stock, title papers to various things like his car and some paintings—the papers are all in the Barclays box. Great. Kelly, do you know where he kept his car?’

  ‘In a garage on Eighth Avenue. I don’t remember the name, but I know where it is. What paintings?’

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘Didn’t you say paintings were listed there? I don’t see any paintings.’ She gestured at the postered walls.

  ‘I know where they are,’ I said, and led them to the pantry.

  ‘Yup, there they are,’ Howard said. ‘One, two, three, four, uh, five? That’s all? There’re supposed to be six. Where’s the other one?’

  ‘Perhaps he sold it,’ I suggested. ‘Although that doesn’t seem likely. I don’t think they were worth very much.’

  ‘Not a whole lot,’ Howard agreed. ‘The most expensive was twenty-five hundred. All six together cost less than what he paid for his car. One of them he paid only five hundred bucks for. Who are these people? The artists, I mean.’ He held the ledger out to me. ‘Do you know any of these names?’

  I glanced at Rudy’s carefully printed list and shook my head. ‘I’m not a good one to ask. I know very little about contemporary art.’

  ‘Don’t look at me,’ the Ingram woman said.

  ‘Well, let’s see which one is missing,’ Howard said. Rudy had taken a black felt-tip marker and printed the title of each painting on the crate it was in. The missing painting turned out to be one called Man and Shadow, and the artist was someone named Mary Rendell. I’d heard of neither painting nor painter. Man and Shadow had cost Rudy only eight hundred dollars.

  Howard said, ‘If the safety deposit box has ownership papers for just the other five, then I think we can assume he sold the painting. Or maybe gave it away, birthday or Christmas present or the like.’

  ‘And what if the papers are there for all six paintings?’ I asked.

  He shrugged. ‘Cross that bridge when we come to it.’

  It went on like that for a while, until we reached a point where only I could make decisions about the disposal of Rudy’s personal belongings. I thanked Kelly Ingram as gr
aciously as I could manage for bringing a lawyer to help out. After all, she was doing the best she could to atone for having caused Rudy’s death.

  The will in Rudy’s safe-deposit box listed me as sole heir, and the two insurance policies both named me as beneficiary. One had originally been taken out to benefit Rudy’s wife, but even when they divorced he hadn’t changed the policy. Only when she remarried did Rudy substitute my name for hers on the second policy. I learned from Detective Larch that Rudy’s ex-wife had been notified of his death soon after his body was discovered, almost twenty-four hours before Captain Michaels had contacted me. It was just like her not to call me. Impossible woman.

  Howard the lawyer found a buyer for Rudy’s car. The offer was low but I accepted just to be done with it. Marian Larch was intrigued by the fact that the deposit box had contained bills of sale for six paintings but only five were in the apartment. I think she had visions of Man and Shadow’s turning out to be a priceless American primitive and that there was some sort of crime-within-a-crime just waiting to be discovered. I made it clear I was not sympathetic to her supersleuth ambitions; at a time like that I couldn’t be bothered with what happened to an eight-hundred-dollar painting.

  Nevertheless Marian Larch had taken Rudy’s inventory list and contacted several galleries and museums, trying to ‘get a line on the artists,’ she said. The experts she consulted hadn’t even heard of most of them; none had heard of Mary Rendell, the artist who’d painted Man and Shadow. She’d tried to track down the California dealer whose name appeared on the bill of sale, but his gallery had gone out of business several years ago. So Marian Larch asked permission to make one final search of Rudy’s apartment before the packers and shippers took over. I told her yes just to get her to stop bothering me.

  She found nothing, of course. ‘It’s odd,’ she said, as we waited for the men from the shipping company. ‘The first thing you think of in the case of a missing painting that everybody says isn’t worth anything is that it is worth something. If not for itself, then maybe somebody painted over an old painting that is valuable. A Corot or a Manet or something like that.’

  ‘It’s the first thing you think of,’ I pointed out to her. ‘The first thing I think of is that the movers lost the painting when Rudy came here from California. Or he did give it away but didn’t bother passing on the bill of sale. Or he got tired of looking at it and threw it out. Rudy wasn’t a collector. He’d just buy something now and then to hang on a bare wall.’

  ‘Did you ever see the painting?’

  ‘I’ve been trying to remember. The last time I visited Rudy—let’s see, I spent most of last year in London, and … it must be close to five years, the last time I was in California. And I just don’t know whether I saw Man and Shadow then or not. I didn’t pay much attention to the paintings, I’m afraid. I know I didn’t ask Rudy their titles.’

  ‘Do you remember seeing one of, well, a man and his shadow?’

  I didn’t. ‘To tell you the truth, Ms. Larch, I don’t really remember any of them.’

  Just then the shippers showed up, to finish the packing and clear the apartment. They were rough and noisy and couldn’t seem to work without a transistor radio blaring away, but they were fast. I appreciated their being fast.

  At last it was done. Marian Larch drove me back to my hotel. She told me that when I got back home if I thought of something I’d forgotten to do, just give her a call and she’d take care of it. Belatedly it occurred to me the police detective had shown a lot more consideration than her job required her to, so I tried to thank her but she wouldn’t let me. Strange woman, Marian Larch. But nice.

  In my hotel room I’d just finished locking my suitcase when there was a knock on the door. It was Captain Michaels—whom I’d thought I’d seen the last of.

  ‘Could we sit down, Dr. Benedict?’ he said. ‘I have something to tell you.’

  I didn’t like the sound of that and said so.

  He plunged right in. ‘We’ve just had the final report from the crime lab. They go over the scene of the crime pretty thoroughly, you know.’

  Scene of the crime—Rudy’s apartment, which I’d just closed. ‘And?’

  ‘And they found some undissolved Lysco-Seltzer crystals caught under the surface rim of the drain. The drain in your son’s kitchen sink.’

  I failed to see the significance. ‘And?’ I repeated.

  ‘Don’t you see what that means, Dr. Benedict? Somebody dumped out the Lysco-Seltzer right there in Rudy’s sink. That bottle hadn’t been tampered with before it went through the postal service and ended up in Kelly Ingram’s mailbox.’

  I began to see—dear God, I began to see.

  ‘What probably happened was, your son came home from visiting Kelly, put the Lysco-Seltzer on the kitchen cabinet, and just left it there. He may have taken part of the bottle that night or he may not have, the medical examiner can’t tell us that. But some time the next day somebody emptied out whatever medicine was left in the bottle and substituted cyanide crystals.’

  ‘So the poison wasn’t meant for Kelly Ingram at all,’ I said woodenly.

  Captain Michael’s florid face was drawn into a scowl. ‘’Fraid not. It seems your son was the intended victim all along.’

  CHAPTER 3

  KELLY INGRAM

  I was so relieved when Rudy’s mother went back to Ohio I felt like celebrating. I know that sounds callous and I can’t help it, but I was glad she was g-o-n-e, gone. She’d had one bad shock after another, enough to flatten most people, she’d handled it all with considerable aplomb, I think I’m using that word right, and she’d been courteous to me after that first meeting when I went off my head and flew at her. Stiflingly courteous. She drove me nuts.

  And I’m not going to say how sorry I was to hear poor old Rudy was the ‘right’ victim after all, because for starters nobody would believe me. I was truly sorry Rudy was dead and I hated the idea that his murderer hadn’t been caught, but I still liked that scenario better than the one that cast me as the body on the floor. So I’m thick-skinned and unfeeling—okay, that’s too bad, I’m sorry. But I’m also alive and likely to stay that way, and I’m happy about that part of it.

  Now that I’ve got that out of my system, I can say I did feel sorry for Dr. Benedict, in fits and spurts. (Starts?) She made it hard for you to feel sorry for her, being so formal and remote like that. She did it on purpose, that don’t-touch-me bit. I don’t like people getting too close either, unless I say so, but I’m no ice lady like Dr. Mrs. Fiona Benedict. No wonder Rudy didn’t talk about her much. I tried to help; I even took Howard Chesney along to handle the legal details for her. She thanked me, but it was obviously killing her to make the effort.

  She was still blaming me for Rudy’s death, right up to the time Captain Michaels told her about the Lysco-Seltzer in the sink. I saw her only once after that; she stayed on for a few more days to answer what questions she could about Rudy, but then she had to get back to her classes. That couldn’t have been easy for her, going back home with all those questions about Rudy’s death still not answered. And then having to stand up in front of a classroom with all those students knowing—well now, wait a minute, maybe they didn’t know. Would the murder have made the Ohio papers? Dr. Benedict sure as hell wasn’t going to make a public announcement if she didn’t have to.

  Marian Larch seemed to think Rudy’s death was somehow tied up with a cheap painting that was missing from his apartment, but she admitted nobody else at Police Headquarters thought so. Captain Michaels had told her to stop wasting time on it. I still thought the play Rudy’d been going to write had something to do with it, but I couldn’t get Marian interested in that at all. I kept trying to tell her the whole thing seemed wrong, somehow. Rudy Benedict just wasn’t the type of person to get himself murdered, it seemed to me.

  That amused Marian, in a morbid sort of way. ‘Oh?’ she’d said. ‘Tell me, Professor Ingram, what do you consider the right type to get murd
ered?’

  ‘Don’t get smart, I’m serious,’ I told her. We were on a break in shooting LeFever; Marian Larch had gotten into the habit of dropping in—continuing her investigation, she said. I think she just liked to watch what was going on. Or maybe she liked watching Nick Quinlan; lots of women did, Lord help us. ‘Rudy wasn’t a threatening person,’ I said. ‘Aren’t people who get murdered supposed to be a threat of some sort?’

  ‘You’d be surprised,’ Marian said. ‘Some of the people who get killed were so mousy when they were alive you could forget they were there at all.’

  ‘I didn’t say Rudy was mousy—’

  ‘I know, I know, that was just an example. Don’t be so loose and easy with that word type. Kelly, there just aren’t any murder victim types—not really. A guy overhears something by accident that makes him a danger to the mob so they put out a contract on him …’

  ‘Yecch,’ I said.

  ‘… so what does this guy’s “type” have to do with anything? He just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time so they kill him for it. It happens like that, you know, more often than you’d imagine. Couple of months ago an old woman was fished out of the East River, a landlady from Lois Aida—’

  ‘From where?’

  ‘Lower East Side, that’s the way they say it. One of her tenants was a pusher and she stumbled on his cache and he killed her. She probably would have kept her mouth shut, but it was easier for him to kill her than worry about her talking. We got the pusher, but that didn’t help the landlady any.’

  ‘You know, I was beginning to feel safe again until we started this conversation.’

  ‘And what do you really know about Rudy Benedict?’ she plowed on. ‘You hadn’t seen him for two years, Kelly. You don’t know what kind of enemies he might have made in that time. He could have changed completely from the last time you knew him.’

  ‘No, he was the same old Rudy.’ I was on firm ground there. ‘Putting on the dog a little because of that play he was going to write, but he was still Rudy. Wanting more than he had, but not really knowing how to go about getting it. Trying to change, but not really making any big break from what he’d always done.’