She ignored the question, toying with the top button of her jacket. I could have made more sense out of her reaction if she’d shaved her head and danced on a chandelier. “I killed Ulysses Grant to make Ephraim’s inheritance look like a motive,” she said. “But suppose Ephraim hadn’t gotten out of jail before tonight’s deaths — who would be the murderer then?”

“The cops thought of that. Thirteen million would buy a lot of partner — they would have worked like hell to bring Peters into it.”

She wet her lips. “And you’ve concluded all of this on the basis of something I said which I wasn’t supposed to know. Suppose Dana had made the same slip — could you have built a case against her the same way?”

I must have been staring at her stupidly. “Damn it, Fern, what kind of dumb irrelevancy is that? You made the slip, not Dana. It’s going to send you up for life at the least — can’t you comprehend the fact?”

“Is it? What a shame — just when we were beginning to get along with each other, too.” She came off the bed. I hadn’t believed she could do anything with her face which might distort its beauty, but her lips twisted into a snarl that was more than ugly. “So I couldn’t have known about the third killing,” she said.

I didn’t answer her, but only because the dizziness came back. I had to shut my eyes, fighting a sudden mounting nausea.

“I couldn’t have known,” she repeated. “Well, maybe you ought to ask Pete Peters if I couldn’t have, mister. Or wake Dana — she was here when we heard.”

My head was swimming. “Heard—?”

“Yes, heard. Pete called here, damn you, just a minute before you came down — after you’d dropped him off. He brought up the third killing — which you’d just told him about.”

I forced myself off the bench. The room was murky as a steambath, and I could hardly hear her. “My lover man. I think you better scram, Fannin, before I really do get sore—”

I reached toward her, but I grabbed only mist. I hit the open door with a shoulder, stumbling, before blackness swirled over me like a shroud.

CHAPTER 29

I was back in the magic time machine again. I was a small boy in a white bed in an antiseptic hospital room. I lay with my head buried against an arm, spurning the complicated, pernicious adult world about me.

“Little Harry is just shy,” a voice said. “There’s someone to visit you, Harry, come to cheer you up. It’s that baseball player whose photo you’v tacked on the wall. It’s Mr. Medwick.”

“Ducky Medwick?” I said. “Ducky — is it really you? Will you hit a home run for me today? Will you hit one off Carl Hubbell?”

But Hubbell wasn’t pitching. Someone named Bowman was. Bowman? I remembered too late. Medwick was already at the plate and the ball was rocketing toward him, faster than I could see. My heart stopped in anticipation of the hideous, ringing carom. When I dared to look again the great idol of all my boyhood lay pinioned on his back with his arms outstretched, like a man crucified to earth. He didn’t move, he didn’t move at all.

The machine went out of focus, and a nurse was hovering near me. “No,” I cried, “never mind me, take care of Ducky first—” She was a beautiful nurse, although I was seeing her through a smog. Her hair was the color of golden silk.

“You did it,” I told her.

“You still think so. In spite of my so-called slip not being a slip at all. You poor tenacious sap.”

“I saw you,” I said.

“What?”

“You beaned him. You beaned the only man who ever led the National League three consecutive times in runs-batted-in.”

“More delirium—”

“Shoot,” I said. “Shoot if you must.”

“Poor Harry. What are you jabbering about?”

Who knew? I thought it might help if I got my eyes open, but it didn’t. All I could see was bedroom floor. My entire body was drenched with perspiration. I was weak as a watered cobweb.

A hand pushed something under my nose. “Here — see if you can drink the coffee before it gets cold.”

I tried to lift myself. I couldn’t.

“Drink it, Harry.”

“Drink it yourself. Drown in it.”

“Oh, now don’t tell me you re angry? At little old me?” She tittered. “Just because I upset all your clever deductions? Would it make you feel better if I confessed, Harry? I think perhaps I will. It might be fun to talk about it.”

She thought perhaps she’d confess. Because it might be fun. Somebody in that room was as batty as Lady Macbeth, but I didn’t have time to figure who. I was too preoccupied with the blur in front of my face. Out, damned spot.

“You’re right about it being Lucien’s book, of course. Shall I tell you the details, Harry?”

I shuddered. Audio-hallucination, without doubt. Maybe if I concentrated hard enough on something it would all go away.

Famous dates. 1066, the Battle of Hastings. 1215, the Magna Carta. 1649, Charles the First lost his head. If you can keep your head when all those about you are losing theirs…

“—He’d fiddled with the manuscript for five years. That son of a bitch, treating me like dirt, running around with tramps who weren’t worth my little finger — but that’s beside the point. The book is good, all right. He always liked to get my judgment on things — he thought I had a fair ear, and I was also familiar with what he was trying to bring off He gave me the final handwritten draft to read on a Thursday, and the next night he died. Showing off at a party, doing chin-ups to impress a couple of simpering girls as if he’d been fourteen instead of forty. Nobody knew I had the script—”

— 1620, the Pilgrims. 1773, the Boston Tea Party. Tea? 1588, Spanish Armada…

“—Josie and Audrey were the only two I was worried about. He never let anyone see anything that wasn’t finished, but he’d been playing his he-man games with the pair of them for six months or so, and there was a chance they might have gotten a look. Audrey was over here one day after I had galley proofs and I left the first sheet in the living room deliberately, as a test. She did recognize it, and of course she told Josie. Josie herself wouldn’t have recognized The Scarlet Letter if her name was Hester. Audrey said that she had three pages of manuscript in Lucien’s handwriting hidden away — part of an earlier draft he’d given her as a souvenir. They told me they wanted ninety percent of everything I made.”

I forced my head up then. She was sitting with her legs crossed. Her face was flushed, and her eyes were gleaming, not looking at me. She wasn’t Mrs. Macbeth, but that didn’t keep the thing from being creepy. She was talking almost mechanically.

“They made it so absurdly easy. They told me they had the three sheets in a safe-deposit box.” She grunted. “I found them in Josie’s closet Tuesday afternoon. They’d put them in the obvious place, thinking I’d never look. Like all stupid people they thought everyone else was stupid too. A hundred thousand dollars from Hollywood alone, not to mention the reputation that goes with it, and they thought I’d crawl, let them hold the lie over my head for as long as they lived. Fools—”

She wasn’t conscious of me at all now. I could feel the Magnum on my hip when I shifted my weight. Her hands were in her lap, empty. That made things even weirder.

“You weren’t quite sure why Audrey didn’t suspect me when Josie died. She did, of course, although she couldn’t be sure until she learned if I’d located the three pages. So she ‘dropped in’ yesterday. She brought Pete with her, although he had no idea what was going on. I knew damned well she wanted a look at that closet, so I let her have one. I made a pretense about needing something from the drugstore, and even asked Pete to walk me down so she could be alone in the place. Except by then I’d substituted three pages on matching paper in my own handwriting — close to Lucien’s but unquestionably mine. I didn’t know exactly when or where to kill her yet, you understand. She stole the pages — meaning she didn’t notice the substitution. They’ll most likely turn up in her apartment — absolutely meaningless. That was enough to convince her that I wasn’t involved. I did have some luck with the timing on some things, but then everything was in my favor to start with — the degenerate way these people live, all the sordid relationships, Ephraim and his mockery of a marriage — God, how weary I’d gotten of all that. But I’m out of it now, you see. I’ll be somebody — a rich somebody.”