Going Out in Style Read Online Free Page B

him a particularly unfriendly look. “Of course I did. I always lock the door. What’s the use of having a key otherwise?”
    “Thank you very much, Mrs. MacGregor. You’ve been very helpful.”
    Janovy’s interview with Etta Pinsky was short and very much to the point. She told him that she had been at home all last night. She lived in an apartment about fifteen minutes away. She was Bella’s maternal aunt and in the sixty-eight years since Bella had been born they had gotten along just fine. She was, she informed him, seventy-nine years old, and would be eighty very soon. If he thought that at her age she was capable of jumping around and strangling people to death, particularly her well-loved niece, then he was, she said flatly, out of his mind.
    Detective Janovy felt all at once that he was nine years old again and his favorite aunt had caught him in the process of systematically destroying his brother’s toys. He barely had time to say a meek “Yes, ma’am,” before Great-auntEtta told him she had a loaf of bread to see to, and sent him packing.
    He went out into the front hallway and stood looking thoughtfully around him. The hallway was big and square, with a spectacular grand staircase opposite the front door. There were archways on the other two sides of the square, one leading to the living room, the other to the dining room. Between the staircase and the archway to the living room was the front hall closet. Janovy crossed over to it and opened the door. The closet was small and narrow. It smelled faintly musty. He poked around between the coats. No room for anyone to hide in here.
    The outlines of the murder were becoming a little clearer now. The murderer had come into the house around six-fifteen, hidden somewhere in or near this hallway, and waited until Bella Whitaker came sweeping down the red velvet carpet of the staircase. Then the murderer had come up behind her and killed her. Janovy looked around again. Where had that person hidden for over an hour?
    Not in the closet, certainly. Either in the living room or the dining room, near the archways leading to the front hall. Either of them would allow the murderer to come up quickly and silently behind someone headed toward the door. Or …
    Janovy walked around behind the staircase. There was a space there, between the stairs and the floor, a space just about the height of a man, a reasonably sized, dark hiding place.…
    He stood behind the stairs for a long time, feeling his skin prickle. This was it, he was sure of it. This was where someone had stood last night and waited.
    He walked around the staircase. If someone stood stillin the shadows, he or she could not easily be seen. Mrs. MacGregor, coming in from the dining room, must have passed right by the murderer on her way to the coat closet.
    Shame, thought Janovy. It’s a shame she didn’t see anything. If she had only turned her head …
    He went back into the kitchen and asked her about it. Mrs. MacGregor propped her elbow on her mop and replied in a nasty tone that she had told him all she knew. No, she hadn’t seen anything or anyone in the hallway when she left. No, she hadn’t looked at or under the stairs. She had better things to do with her time than go nosing about where it wasn’t any of her business.
    She said the last bit in a way that made it clear she thought that
he
should have better things to do as well. Janovy thanked her and left.

2
    Bernard and Maya were standing over Snooky’s bed watching him as he slept.
    “He looks like a child when he’s asleep,” Maya said fondly. “Like a child.”
    “Everyone looks like a child when they’re asleep, Maya. Don’t get sentimental. He was in shock, you say?”
    “Yes. All white and trembly. He
does
have feelings, you know, however rudimentary they may be.”
    Bernard looked thoughtfully down at the slumbering Snooky. “You gave him some brandy?”
    “Yes.”
    “Not the good stuff, I hope?”
    “Yes, Bernard. The