“It was spiritual. Blood was calling to blood.”

It was Patience who said this, and all of us stopped what we were doing and stared at her.

She put her hand to her mouth. “Maybe I spoke too soon,” she said. “Was Luke already in this apartment?” I said he was. “And he was, uh, dead?” Quite dead, I said. “Then that must have been it,” she said. “There must have been a strong psychic connection between Luke and…I’m sorry, Bernie, is her name Wendy or Doll?”

“Actually, most people call me Gwen,” Doll said, “but at this point I don’t honestly give a damn what anybody calls me. Could we get on with this?”

“A strong connection,” Patience said. “His spirit, freed from his body, was in communication with her. But she didn’t know that’s what it was, she only felt a sense of urgency relating to this apartment.” She held out both hands, the fingers spaced an inch or so apart. “This apartment is psychically charged,” she told Joan Nugent. “I don’t know how you can possibly live here.”

“It’s intense,” Mrs. Nugent agreed, with a toss of her braids. “But I think the energy is good for my creative work.”

“I never thought of that,” Patience said. “I’ll bet you’re right.”

I felt like a backseat passenger trying to get a grip on the steering wheel. “Whatever it was,” I said, “she baited the trap, bade me good night—”

“With a kiss,” Doll reminded me.

“With a kiss,” I agreed, “and then you scooted past the doorman and disappeared into the building.”

“It was probably Eddie,” Harlan Nugent murmured to his wife. “That incompetent.”

“Maybe you went upstairs and banged on Luke’s door some more,” I went on. “Maybe you stationed yourself where you could keep an eye on the lobby to see if I took the bait. Eventually you gave up and went home, which is what I’d already done. I slept off a larger intake of scotch than is my custom, went downtown to open up the store, and the next thing I knew I was under arrest.”

“It was a legitimate collar,” Ray Kirschmann said. “The phone call you made, your priors—”

“I’m not complaining,” I said. “It was a shock, that’s all. I spent Friday night in a cell, and Saturday night all I wanted to do was sleep in my own bed. But I got a late-night phone call from you, Doll. You had a brand-new collection of lies to tell me, and this time you knew just what you wanted me to do. Luke was your boyfriend, you said, and you broke up with him and threw his keys in his face, and you just knew he’d retaliated by stealing your good friend Marty’s baseball cards. And all I had to do was open Luke’s door for you and we could return Marty’s baseball cards and clear my name.”

“Hang on a sec,” Ray said. “She took the cards an’ now she wants to give ’em back?”

“I have a feeling the program would have changed again once she got her hands on the cards,” I said, “but it made a good story for the time being. I knew something was fishy, but I figured I’d play out the string and see where it led. One of the first things it did was catch you in a lie, Doll. You’d said you couldn’t call me earlier because you didn’t know the name of the store or where it was located. So when we split up Saturday night I said I’d meet you the following afternoon at the bookshop, and you said fine. You didn’t have to ask where it was or how to find it.”

“You had told me earlier.”

“Nope. You already knew. And you were there in plenty of time, and we came uptown and I opened Luke’s door.”

“Breaking and entering,” Ray intoned.

“I’ll cop to entering,” I said, “but we didn’t break anything. Didn’t find much of anything, either. Some pills, and what looked like marijuana. A couple of dollars in a jelly jar.”

“We found the drugs when we searched the place,” Ray said, “but I don’t remember no cash in no jam jar.”

“Gee,” I said, “I wonder what could have happened to it. Oh, and there was one other thing. We found a baseball card. ‘A Stand-up Triple!’ it was called, and it showed Ted Williams with his hands on his hips.”

“From the mustard set,” Borden Stoppelgard said. “That was one of Marty’s cards, all right. It’s a great picture of Williams, too.”

“If you like that sort of thing,” I said. “Much of its charm was lost on Doll and me. The message I got from it was that the cards had been there and now they were gone. Doll already knew they’d been there, and now she knew that Luke must have forced the lock on the briefcase. Then he’d started to transfer the cards to a backpack, and then he’d evidently changed his mind, but the one card he overlooked in a compartment of the backpack made it clear what he’d done. So that meant he was making a move on his own, and either he’d sold the cards already or he was in the process of doing so, and either way Doll could kiss the money goodbye, at least until Luke turned up again and she got another shot at him.”

“But that wasn’t going to happen,” Carolyn said helpfully, “because Luke was dead in the bathroom.”

“Not anymore,” I said. “Oh, he was still dead, but by the time we got into his apartment the cops had hauled him out of here in a body bag. That made the news Sunday night, and after that I never heard another word from Doll. She concluded, reasonably enough I suppose, that any chance she had of making a couple of bucks had just gone down the bathtub drain, so she’d move on to whatever life offered her next.”

“What happened to the cards?” It was Lolly Stoppelgard who wanted to know, reinforcing my view of her as an eminently practical woman.

“Gone,” I said. “Did Luke sell them? If so, what happened to the money? My guess is he put them, briefcase and all, in a coin locker somewhere while he figured out what to do with them. But there must be half a dozen other things that could have happened to them, and I have a feeling we’ll never know where they wound up.”

“And what about Luke?”

“I beg your pardon?”

“The young man,” Edna Gilmartin said. It was, as far as I could recall, the first time she’d spoken up all night. “The young man who died mysteriously in a locked bathroom. Who killed him?”

“Oh, that’s easy,” I said. “Harlan Nugent killed him.”

CHAPTER Twenty-two

I had a tense moment there, I have to admit it. Because all Harlan Nugent had to do was tell us to go home and pick up the phone to call his lawyer.

But what he said was, “That’s ridiculous. I never even knew the man. Why on earth would I kill him?”

“That’s a good question,” I said.

“And we were in London,” Joan Nugent put in. “Neither of us could have had anything to do with it. We were out of the country.”

“You left Wednesday evening,” I said. “Doll dropped the cards at Luke’s apartment on Monday. Sometime between then and when you left, Luke was up here and Harlan Nugent killed him. If I had to guess, I’d go with Tuesday afternoon.” I looked over at Ray. “How does that square with the estimated time of death?”

“No problem, Bernie.”

“I think you must be out of your mind,” Nugent said. “That man was never in this apartment on any of those days.” A shadow passed over his wife’s face, and for an instant it looked as though she was about to say something, but her husband’s hand settled on hers and the moment passed. He set his jaw. “I’ll repeat what I said before. You admitted it was a good question. Why on earth would I kill him?”

“It’s still a good question,” I said, “but I’ve got a couple of good questions myself. Why would a man take off all his clothes and lock himself in somebody else’s bathroom?”

“To take a shower,” Lolly Stoppelgard suggested.

“That would make sense if it was his own bathroom,” Carolyn volunteered, “but it wasn’t. Maybe he got all sweaty posing and he needed to wash up.”

“He was not here,” Harlan Nugent said.

“Or maybe he just needed to use the john, Bern. That wouldn’t get him in the tub, though, would it? Ray, has anybody checked if the shower worked in his apartment on the seventh floor? See, if he couldn’t take a shower at his own place—”