I knew everyone I locked into the ballroom that night, some better, some worse: Yolanda Brun, Hartford Crane, Nigel Lapine, Freddy and Penelope Edison, Percival Unck, Algernon Bogatryov, Himura Makoto, Dante de Vere, and Maud Locksley. (I’d only met Makoto, Capricorn’s newest golden boy, that night, but we’d already made plans to shoot pheasant together on the weekend.) I don’t quite know what came over me in that moment, facing those people—people I had known most of my life, worked with, slept with, admired, loathed, envied, the whole handbag of human push-me-pull-you—but suddenly, watching Yolanda whine and pour club soda on her bloodstained shoe, I was positively sick to death of them all. I could have gaily tossed them all into the drink and poured myself a grapefruit juice without a wink of pity in my heart. I don’t know what got into me, except Maxine Mortimer and her damnable need to solve the puzzle.
“Shut up, you puling, overstuffed veal calves,” I snarled, and even though it’s a line from
They flattened against the wall like school kids at a dance. I examined Thaddeus. He still had his dinner jacket on. The shot had gone through his back, straight into his heart. His cigarette still burned itself down between the fingers of his right hand. His left arm was folded under his chest. The craziest thought popped into my silly head:
.22 Perun, walnut grip. Martian, I thought, but that didn’t mean anything. We’d all been to Mars. There wasn’t much to do there but shoot kangaroos.
Hartford raised his hand like a little boy in class. “Mary, whoever did this probably ran off at once. Why do we have to hang about watching you play detective? We’ve all seen it, love. Let’s be sensible: make a search party, comb the ship. Staying stuffed up in here won’t help anyone.”
“Hartford, if I thought you had the sense God gave a gumdrop, I’d let you ‘comb the ship’ to your heart’s content. What, pray tell, would you be searching for? The murder weapon—” I sniffed the Perun’s barrel to be sure; indeed, freshly fired. “—is here. The body is here. The first people to the scene—and therefore those nearest to the ballroom when our Thad was shot, and the closest thing we’ve got to witnesses—are here. You don’t get blood all over yourself when you shoot a man in the back; tearing up the laundry for a stained dinner jacket won’t do a lick of good. So why don’t you button up your expensive little mouth and let the adults talk?”
He did just that. I won’t say I didn’t get a wallop of satisfaction out of it. That vicious gossip hound Algernon B stood next to Hart, looking as though he were about to get on socially with an aneurysm. Sweat wriggled off his bald head and steamed up his glasses. He put his head between his knees. But if sweating makes you guilty, they were all in on it. Gin-sweats, stroke-sweats, beef-sweats, murder-sweats—who could tell the difference? I scanned their faces.
“I’m leaving,” Freddy said. His face went red as a stoplight. “You’re nothing but a nasty, two-bit has-been with a flat ass and the clap, and you can’t keep me here.”
“So am I,” cried Dante de Vere. The pair of them stormed up to me, as though I’d never stared down a man who wanted my kidneys for earrings before.
I didn’t budge. “Mr Edison!” I roared. “You had a dispute with the deceased over unpaid fees for sound recording on