“What?!” Abby cried, tearing her attention away from Terry and plastering it on me. “Did you talk to her again? What did you find out? What did the little Nazi slut have to say?”

I filled them in on everything that had happened after they left the living room. I gave them a dramatic description of Lillian’s violent outburst, and a detailed account of my hallway chat with Augusta. I told them how Lillian had jumped to the conclusion that I was her father’s new mistress and ordered me to leave. I related my surprise that Augusta, the picture of upper crust propriety, had so willingly revealed-to me, a perfect stranger!-her total disdain for both her husband and her daughter. And then I told them that Augusta, not Gregory, controlled the family fortune, and that Lillian was the couple’s only heir. I mean heiress.

“That cinches it!” Abby cried, slapping her hand down on the tabletop so hard our martinis shook. “Lillian did it! Lillian Smythe killed your sister!” She was staring into Terry’s eyes with a look of sheer certainty on her face.

“What makes you so sure?” Terry asked, befuddled (and, I thought, a bit bemused). “You have any proof?”

“She’s the only heir, Sherlock!” Abby stressed. “What more proof do you need?”

Terry wasn’t convinced. “So what? Lots of people are heirs and heiresses,” he said, “that doesn’t make them murderers.”

Spoken like a true pragmatist (i.e., reasonable guy). “He’s right, Abby,” I said. “We can’t come to any conclusions yet. We don’t have enough facts.”

“What about the fact that Lillian Smythe’s a raving Fascist?” Abby snapped, angrily yanking the bobby pins out of her hair and shaking it loose down her back.

“That proves she’s an awful person,” I said, “but it doesn’t prove she’s a killer.”

“Okay then, so what about the ice?” she croaked. “You can’t deny it played a big role in Judy’s death. And you can’t deny the fact that Lillian-more than any of our other suspects-has a true, vested interest in the diamonds. They are, after all, going to be hers someday-if her dear old daddy-o doesn’t give ’em all away first.”

“That’s true,” I said, “and it all adds up to a pretty strong motive. But it doesn’t confirm that Lillian pulled the trigger. ”

“Diamonds are a girl’s best friend,” Abby insisted, taking a big gulp of her martini.

“But if we’re ever going to get Sweeny to reopen the case,” Terry added, smiling, “we’ve got to have much harder evidence than that.”

“So what the hell do we have to do?” Abby sputtered. “Find a pistol with her prints on it?” She threw her head back and tossed down the rest of her drink.

“That’s about it,” I said, with a heavy sigh. “Unless we can find an eyewitness. Or get her to confess.” (And the chances of anything like that happening were-I knew-very, very slim. Or fat, take your pick.)

I didn’t say anything to Abby and Terry, but I felt, at that moment, so sick and tired of our seemingly endless (and endlessly frustrating!) investigation that I just wanted to call the whole thing off. I wanted to give the diamonds back to Sweeny or Augusta, rip up all my story notes, take a scalding hot bath, and crawl into bed for a century or two. I had a sinking feeling we would never find Judy’s killer; that all our efforts and adversities-including my close shave on the subway tracks and the break-in at my apartment-had been for nothing; that the smartest thing Abby and Terry and I could do right now would be to terminate our fruitless, bungling search for the truth and get on with our pitiful little lives.

I didn’t know at the time, of course, how pitifully short our pitiful little lives were likely to be.

Chapter 28

I WANTED TO GO HOME AND SPEND THE night in my own bed, but my fretful friends wouldn’t let me. They accompanied me next door for a few minutes-just long enough for me to see if my apartment was still taped shut (it was), and to grab my flannel nightgown, robe, and toothbrush. Then they ushered me right back to Abby’s, where I was expected to sleep like a baby on the lumpy little red couch in her studio.

Abby fixed me up with a pillow, a blanket, a glass of milk, and a plate of cookies. Then she and Terry hurried upstairs to their bouncy, blissful double bed, giggling like teenagers. They were beyond tipsy, and so was I. We had definitely had-as Dean Martin is so fond of saying-tee many martoonis.

As soon as the door to the upstairs bedroom slammed shut, I stumbled over to Abby’s kitchen phone and dialed Dan’s apartment. As inebriated as I was, I had no trouble remembering the number. Though I rarely allowed myself to use it, it was engraved in my heart like a Tiffany monogram.

There was no answer.

Hoping I had misdialed, I hung up, then tried again. Still no answer. Dan was probably still over at his ex-wife’s place, watching over his innocent, sound-asleep young daughter, while the girl’s partygoing mother drank and danced herself stupid in the grasping arms of sundry lecherous men. (If you think that sounds too catty, please blame it on the martoonis. Mine, not hers.)

Staggering back over to the couch, I sat down and devoured the cookies. I was so hungry I’d have eaten the box they came in. I drank all the milk, too, even though I was afraid it would curdle when it hit the sea of alcohol in my stomach. Leaving the empty glass and cookie plate sitting on the coffee table (if Santa came down the chimney looking for goodies, he’d be out of luck), I took off the diamond necklace and returned it to the security of Abby’s sugar canister. Then I changed into my nightgown, curled up on the little red love seat (it was a cinch I couldn’t stretch out!), and went to sleep (okay, fell into a coma).

I was unconscious for a while-about three hours, I think-and then a most astonishing thing happened. I woke up suddenly-in a dazzling flash-with a single word (or, rather, name) bouncing against the walls of my skull: Lily… Lily… Lily. Augusta Smythe had called her daughter Lily.

Certain that this was the same flickering signal that had been driving me crazy at the party-and also certain that I had heard the name Lily before the party, but very recently, during the course of my five-day investigation into Judy’s murder-I sat up stick straight on the couch and racked my brain to remember the details. Lily… Lily… Lily. Where and when had I heard that name? Whose voice, besides Augusta ’s, had spoken it?

Closing my eyes and putting my hands over my ears, I began replaying my mental recording of the last five days, starting at day one, listening to the echoes of my initial conversations with Terry and Elsie Londergan and Vicki Lee Bumstead and Jimmy Birmingham and Roscoe Swift and… Hold it! I cried to myself. Play that part over again!

And so I did, from the beginning-from the very moment I first entered the Chelsea Realty office. And many of the details came back to me. Before I ever saw Roscoe Swift’s face, I remembered, I heard him yelling at someone over the phone. He was furious, and banging furniture around, and screaming his lungs out at someone named… Lily.

But what had Roscoe been so angry about? And what exactly had he said to the woman named Lily? I couldn’t, for the life of me, recall. And every time I tried to repeat that part of the soundtrack, the record got stuck. It was driving me nuts. I couldn’t stand it another second. I had to know what Roscoe had said, and I had to know right now! Luckily, there was one way I might be able to find out.

I snatched the key to my apartment out of my purse, leapt across the hall, and let myself in. After turning on the light and checking my back door again (the Duz detergent patch still hadn’t been disturbed), I made a beeline for the cabinet over my kitchen sink, shoved the soup cans out of the way, and pulled out Judy’s trusty oatmeal box. Yanking my story notes out of the Quaker container and blowing off all the oatmeal dust, I pressed the twenty-six pages flat on the kitchen counter, and madly searched for the section I was burning to see-the Roscoe Swift section. Had I been careful and thorough enough to write down Roscoe’s words to Lily?