Murder on a Hot Tin Roof

Chapter 37

HAVE YOU EVER HAD THE FEELING THAT you were two people instead of one? That one of you was a smart, strong, insightful champion of truth and justice, while the other one was a perfect fool? Well, that was the way I felt that afternoon in Flannagan’s office. Like a pair of mismatched twins. Or a monster with two heads. I was brave and decisive one minute, dopey and delusional the next. I was Wonder Woman and Lucy Ricardo combined. I was Brenda Starr with a brain tumor.

“What led you to believe that Barnabas Kapinsky was the murderer?” Flannagan barked, finally getting around to asking for my side of the story. He was glaring at me through squinted eyes, as if I were still under suspicion.

“The long sleeves,” I said, “and his buttoned-up collar and cuffs.”

“What?!” Flannagan squeezed his eyelids even tighter, peering at me through slits so narrow I was surprised he could see at all. “Long sleeves? Collar and cuffs? I think you’d better explain yourself, Mrs. Turner. And make it fast.”

“Well, yesterday was the first time I saw Binky,” I began, “and it was so hot that-”

“Binky?” Flannagan croaked. “Who the hell is Binky?”

“Barnabas Kapinsky,” I said. “His nickname is Binky.”

Flannagan’s accusing glare grew even more intense. “You called the murderer by his nickname? I didn’t know the two of you were so close.”

“No!” I cried. “That’s not the way it was! I only called him Binky because-”

It was at that moment-as I was just beginning to explain my theories and actions to Flannagan-that Dan walked into the office. He sauntered down the aisle between the desks and the file cabinets, shook hands with Detectives Flannagan and Dash, gave Abby a smile and me a curt nod, and then positioned himself-arms crossed, legs slightly apart-near the side of my chair.

“Don’t let me disturb you,” he said, to nobody in particular. “Please go on with what you were doing.”

Oh, sure. How could I go on with my explanation when all of my words were stuck in a huge lump in my throat? I couldn’t breathe, much less talk. My body temperature and blood pressure were shooting through the roof. My emotions were having seizures in every chamber of my broken heart.

“Yes, go on, Mrs. Turner,” Flannagan said, with a smirk. “I believe you were telling us why you called the killer Binky.”

I tried to say something clever and enlightening, but the only word that came out was, “Ack!”

“Leave her alone already!” Abby snapped, leaping to my defense like a rabid Jewish mother. “Can’t you see she’s upset? She hasn’t slept in over thirty hours! And she’s had a really hard day, you dig? And she caught your murderer for you, didn’t she? What else do you want? You should be treating her like a queen-and I

don’t mean a homosexual!”

I smiled. That Abby. You gotta love her.

“I advise you not to speak to me in that manner!” Flannagan seethed. His boyish face was changing colors again. “I’m the head of this department and I-”

“Miss Moskowitz is right,” Dan interrupted. His voice was soft, but his tone of authority was coming through loud and clear. “What Mrs. Turner needs right now is a cup of coffee and some peace and quiet, which will improve both her frame of mind and her recollection of events. Therefore, since I have a special interest in this case, I think it best if I show her into a private room and continue taking her statement myself.” He leaned down, put his hands on my shoulders, and gently coaxed me to my feet.

Flannagan rose to his feet, too. “But I don’t… well, I… do you really think-”

“Yes, I do,” Dan cut in again. He put one arm around my back and began escorting me down the aisle toward the door. “We’ll be in the interrogation room across the hall,” he said, glancing back over his shoulder. “Please bring us some coffee.”

I LOVED BEING ALONE WITH DAN; I HATED being alone with Dan. (I

told you I was two people.) One of me was so turned on by his intense black gaze, disheveled hair, and determined jawline that I wanted to throw myself in his arms and attach my mouth to his for all eternity (or at least until next week). The other me was still so haunted (okay, incredibly hurt) by the way he’d kissed that redhead in Sardi’s last night that I couldn’t stand the thought of putting my lips where hers had been. Not now. Not ever.

Averting my eyes from Dan’s gorgeous face and enticing mouth, I sat back in my chair at the table in the middle of the small interrogation room, crossed my legs, took a sip of my coffee, and hurriedly fired up a cigarette. (I knew if I waited Dan would offer me a light, and I wanted to avoid that painfully intimate gesture.) Staring at me from his chair on the other side of the table, Dan lit up, too.

“Are you ready to tell me the truth?” he asked, in a voice as rich and dark as chocolate. “There’s no reason for you to keep any secrets now.”

“Why should I bother?” I said, tossing my head back and exhaling a stream of smoke toward the ceiling. “I’m sure you know everything there is to know already. Flannagan has obviously kept you clued in.” I was acting as cool as Lauren Bacall, but I was feeling as hot as Scarlett O’Hara during the burning of Atlanta.

“You’ve got it wrong, Paige,” he said. “It’s the other way around.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean I’m the one who’s been keeping Flannagan in the know, not vice versa. I’ve been in charge of this case since the day after Gray Gordon was killed.”

“What?!” I shrieked, shocked to the bone. “That’s impossible! You were in Maine at the time! And this isn’t even your precinct!”

Dan’s coal-black gaze stayed fixed on me. “

You are my precinct,” he said, and the way his forceful voice echoed against the walls of the tiny room made my skin dance.

Dan took a swig of his coffee and continued talking. “As soon as I read the reports of the murder in the Maine papers and saw that two young women who lived near the victim had discovered the body, I called Flannagan to find out who they were. And I wasn’t the least bit surprised when he named you and Abby. And I knew damn well your involvement wouldn’t end there. So the minute I hung up with Flannagan, I called the commissioner and got myself assigned to the case. After that I called Flannagan back, appointed him my second in command, and told him to put his best man on your tail to watch over you and keep you safe. Then, after making arrangements for Katy to stay with my parents for another week, I jumped in the car, and drove all night to get to you.”

“But why didn’t you

tell me?!” I cried, trembling with curiosity, gratitude, and outrage.

“Because

you didn’t tell me,” he said. “When I saw how far you were willing to go-how many lies you were willing to tell so you could keep me in the dark and stay involved in the case-I knew I couldn’t trust you to back off and let me handle things my way. And since I couldn’t trust you to tell me the truth, I was afraid I would jeopardize the investigation and cause you to put your life in more danger if I told the truth to you. You put me in a real bind, Paige. I was so mad I wanted to kill you myself.”

The gross absurdity of our deceitful duet suddenly hit me like a ton of bricks. “Good grief, Dan!” I sputtered. “If I had known that you’d been assigned to the case I would have told you the truth immediately! I swear! The only reason I lied to you was because I knew you’d order me to stop looking for the killer, and I simply couldn’t do that as long as Flannagan was in charge. He’s a horrible detective, Dan. You’ve got to believe me! He was trying to pin the murder on Willy Sinclair just because he’s gay!”

Dan nodded and took a deep drag on his Lucky. “I realized that myself after working with him for one hour.”

Aaaargh! “Then why didn’t you come back and tell me what was going on?”

“A little knowledge is a dangerous thing.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Like I said before, I thought the truth would hurt you instead of help you.”

Uh oh. Dan was beginning to sound as shifty and slippery as somebody else I knew (i.e., me). “But how on earth could it possibly hurt me?” I asked, growing more confused by the second.

He gave me a challenging smirk. “You want examples?”

“Uh, yeah, I guess so,” I said, wondering what I’d let myself in for.

“How many?”

He was being too cute for comfort. “One will be quite enough,” I snapped.

“Okay, how does this one strike you? How do you think you would have reacted to the knowledge that Dash was following you? Would you have been glad that he was watching your every move and working to keep you safe, or would you have dreamed up an elaborate scheme to ditch him so you could conduct your secret investigation in secret?”

“I, er… um, I…”

“Never mind,” Dan said. “You don’t have to answer that. I knew exactly what you would do, and that’s why I didn’t tell you the truth. It was for your own good.”

I couldn’t think of anything to say, so I busied myself putting out my cigarette and lighting another one.

Dan stood up from his chair and began pacing the floor in front of me, giving me a good look at his powerful physique and devastatingly sexy walk. “This would all be funny if it wasn’t so damn serious,” he said, raking a wave of unruly brown hair off his forehead with his fingers. “Do you realize how much trouble you’ve caused? Do you have any idea how close you came to sabotaging the whole case?”

“No way, Doris Day!” I huffed. “In fact it seems to me that the opposite is true. I mean, I

solved the damn thing, didn’t I? Nobody suspected that Barnabas Kapinsky was the murderer but me! Nobody even knew who Binky was!” To say that I was irked would be like calling a heart attack uncomfortable. Would credit ever be given where credit was due (i.e., to me)?

Dan stopped dead in his tracks and turned toward me with a look of pure fury on his face. “Yes, and why do you think that was, Paige? Do you think that maybe, just maybe, it was because you

stole the only piece of evidence that showed a connection between Kapinsky and Gordon? Did it ever occur to you that you were hiding important information from the police-that the list of phone messages Rhonda Blake took down for the victim on or around the night he was killed might be indispensable to the investigation?”

My heart sank to the pit of my stomach and stayed there. “So you knew about that,” I mumbled, staring down at the floor in shame.

“You’re damn straight, I did! Rhonda told me about it when I questioned her at the theater. She said two extras from the

Bus Stop cast had come to see Gray, and to get her autograph, and she thought they must have taken the message pad with them when they left because she hadn’t been able to find it since. I knew right away she was talking about you and Abby.”

I wasn’t two people anymore. Now I was just one-the bad one.

“I’m sorry, Dan,” I whimpered. “I never would have snatched the list if I had known you’d be taking over the case. Flannagan was in charge at the time, don’t forget, and I couldn’t be sure that he would ever find the list, or follow up on all the names if he did. So I felt I should take it home and study it carefully, and then turn it over to Flannagan later.”

“But you never got around to enacting the last part of your plan,” Dan growled.

“No, but I

told Flannagan about the message pad,” I stressed, “and I gave him all the names that were listed. All except one.”

“The most important one, it turns out.”

“Yes, but I didn’t know that at the time! I kept Binky’s name and number to myself for only one reason: because I didn’t want Flannagan to screw up my visit to the Actors Studio. I thought it was important for me to meet and talk to Gray’s fellow acting students-see if any of them were the homicidal type-and Binky was my passport inside.”

Dan’s face turned from furious to afflicted. “Yeah, and he was almost a passport to the end of your life.” He sat back down in his chair and released a deafening sigh. “I don’t know what to do with you anymore, Paige. You’re impossible!… You were right not to trust Flannagan-he’s a bigot and a bungler. And I know your motives for getting involved were good. They always are. But you came to within a split second of having your throat slit open!” he cried, throwing his hands in the air. “How am I supposed to live with the knowledge of that? No matter how hard I try to keep you safe, you’re always working your way toward another disaster. And nothing I can say or do will make you stop! You’re addicted to danger.”

“I prefer to think I’m addicted to the truth,” I stiffly replied, feeling righteous again.

That did it. Dan’s eyes popped wide as golf balls and his jaw dropped to the floor. “The

truth?” he howled. “That’s the funniest joke I ever heard in my life! You wouldn’t know the truth if it flew in the window and bit you on the nose.”

“I would so!” I whined, sounding incredibly childish, even to myself. “And if you had told me the truth about your involvement in the case, I would have told you the truth about mine!” So

there.

We sat in silence for a few seconds, each stewing in our own private thoughts.

And then the most extraordinary thing happened.

Suddenly, out of nowhere, when I least expected it-when I was so bewildered and confused I could barely comprehend it-the miracle I had long been dreaming of and aching for occurred. Dan turned his face toward mine, looked straight into my eyes, gave me the most pleasing of all possible smiles, and pronounced the words I had begun to think I would never, ever, ever-in all the miserable, magical days of my crazy, mixed-up life-hear him say:

“I love you, Paige.”

“What?!” (It wasn’t a very romantic response, but it was all I was capable of at the moment.)

He laughed. “Have you lost your hearing or your interest? I said I love you. I’ve loved you for a long time. I didn’t tell you before because I didn’t want anything to change. I was happy with our relationship just the way it was. But now I’m not so sure. Now I’m thinking-”

“You’ve got a lot of nerve, you know that, Dan?” I was so furious I thought my head would melt. “

Now you say you love me? Now that you’ve ripped my heart out of my chest and kicked it around like a bloody football?” (Okay, so maybe that was a bit livid, but it was exactly how I felt.) I jumped out of my chair and began my own round of pacing. “Well, you can cry me a river,” I went on, feeling very dramatic, quoting the lyrics of the new Julie London song I now identified with so much. “Cry me a river. I cried a river over you.”

“Julie London,” Dan said. “I like that song a lot, too. But what does it have to do with us?”

Aaaargh!

“I saw you last night,” I said, coming to a sudden standstill and propping my hands on my hips. “In Sardi’s. You were wrapped up in the arms and lips of a beautiful redhead. And if you felt even one ounce of love for me at that particular moment, I’ll eat Hedda Hopper’s new hat!”

Dan didn’t move a muscle. He sat still as a stump in his chair, staring up at me with the eyes of a guilty, but thoroughly unrepentant, adolescent. Then he took a long, slow drink of his coffee, set the cup back down on the table, and started laughing.

It wasn’t the loud, boisterous, slap-you-on-the-back style of laughter you would hear in a bar or a locker room. It was the deep, personal, private kind… the kind that grabs you in the gut and causes intense but near silent paroxysms of glee.

“Well, I’m glad you think it’s so funny,” I said, stomping one stiletto-heeled shoe on the floor, then starting to pace again. It was either that or start crying another river.

“I’m sorry, Paige,” Dan said between spasms, “but if you knew what I was really feeling while I was-as you so eloquently put it-‘wrapped up in the arms and lips’ of that so-called ‘beautiful redhead,’ then you’d be laughing, too.”

I didn’t say a word. If Dan thought I was going to humiliate myself by asking him to explain his stupid feelings, then he had another think coming!

After what seemed like an hour but was probably no more than four seconds, Dan’s laughter subsided. He sat up straight, rubbed his face in his hands, and then gave me a dead serious look. “I was disgusted by that woman,” he declared. “She’s coarse, vulgar, demanding, ostentatious… When she was kissing me, the rancid smell and taste of whiskey was so strong I felt sick to my stomach. I went straight into the men’s room afterward and rinsed my face and mouth with cold water.”

My eyes were downcast, but my heart was soaring. He was telling the truth! I could hear it in his voice. “If she disgusted you so darn much,” I said, “why did you ask her out in the first place?”

“I didn’t,” he said. “I just met her at Sardi’s to ask her a few questions about Gray Gordon.”

“What?!” I yelped. The man was full of surprises. And I was panting for more. “How was she connected to Gray?” I begged. “How did you find out about her? Why didn’t

I know about her? Did you consider her a suspect? What’s her name?” (I’m so cool sometimes, it kills me.)

“Her name is Loretta Cuppano,” he said, “but everybody calls her Cupcake.”

Oh!

“And, no, she wasn’t a suspect,” he went on. “I just wanted to talk to her about Gray, see what I could learn about his personal life. According to Rhonda Blake, Loretta and Gray had a brief fling a couple of years ago, when they were both students at the Actors Studio, so I figured she could tell me whether or not he was a homosexual. Confirmed, or otherwise.”

“And did she?”

“She said Gray went both ways, but preferred men to women. That’s why she broke up with him. She wanted a leading, not supporting, role.”

“I take it she’s an actress.”

“And how!” he said. “She’s so showy and pretentious she couldn’t possibly be anything else. She’s appearing in

The Pajama Game now.”

That figures, I sneered to myself.

“So that’s why you met her so late at Sardi’s,” I said, thinking aloud. “You went there after the show.”

“Right.”

“Did you know that I was there?”

“Not until later.”

“Aren’t you going to ask me

why I was there?”

“Don’t have to. I already know.”

“What else do you know?”

“Plenty.”

“Do you know that I love you, too?”

“Yep.”

“Smarty-pants.”

Dan smiled, stood up, and walked over to where I was standing. “Are we okay now, Paige?” he said, putting his hands on my shoulders and piercing me to the core with his hot black gaze. “Our truce is signed? The cease-fire is in effect?”

“That’s the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth,” I vowed.

Then Dan took me in his arms and we sealed our agreement with a long, slow, soul-scorching kiss (openmouthed, in case you’re wondering). My knees were weak as water but my heart was going strong, leaping in unbounded delight that Dan and I had finally turned to the same page.