Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine. Vol. 120, No. 3 & 4. Whole No. 733 & 734, September/October 2002

Luck of the Dead by Francis M. Nevins

Though he has a half-dozen crime novels and numerous uncollected stories to his credit, Francis M. Nevins’s greatest output has been as an editor and scholar of mystery fiction: St. James Cuticle to Crime and Mystery Writers lists nearly two dozen books on which Mr. Nevins served as editor or critical contributor. His latest story for EQMM will also he available later this fall in a collection of his work entitled Leap Day and Other Stories (Five Star Press).

How Lucky Ralston got his nickname had nothing to do with his death, and Gene Holt was ready to make an arrest by the time she heard the story, but it opened up a dimension of the case that she hadn’t seen before. An aesthetic dimension. Like the tiger in the Blake poem. A fearful symmetry.

On a cool spring day in the middle of the last decade of the twentieth century, five days after Ralston died, a memorial service was held in the Ralston Investment Services auditorium on the twenty-eighth floor of the mirror-walled Exchange Tower. Gene left her desk at Major Case Squad and went. She plunked herself in a stack chair next to the center aisle, draped her all-weather coat on her lap, and squinted through bifocals as each speaker was introduced by the master of ceremonies. The first to stand at the podium was Ralston’s widow, petite and perfectly formed and more than fifty years younger than her late husband. Black silk dress, minimal jewelry. A subdued radiance seemed to emanate from her as she publicly said goodbye. No one could have guessed she was the prime suspect in a murder investigation. After her came various Ralston executives, and the mayor, and an assortment of political and business bigwigs.

The last speaker on the printed program was someone named Harry Mills, a wizened old duck whose parchment face and bald pate were deeply tanned like a sun worshiper’s. Gene had no idea who he was. “Thank you,” he cackled to the master of ceremonies. “Thanks very much. Lucky and I go back, probably, to before most of you were born. He was eighty-three, you know — my gosh, who’d believe it to look at him? — and I’m eighty. I was an assistant director fifty-five years ago when Charlie was acting in Western B movies. He was still Charlie back then. Anyway, I was with him and the crew on location when he got the name Lucky. We were shooting this little Western, it was in nineteen and forty I believe, and Charlie was on top of this magnificent palomino stallion, racing hell for leather along some mountaintop trail with the evidence to save his innocent pal from being lynched or some such foolery. The director and the crew and I are on the camera car shooting the running insert shots. Bang! Horse goes down. Charlie sails over the palomino’s head like he was shot out of a cannon and goes rolling over the cliff. That was one hell of a fall. I swear there was no way he could not have broken his neck. But when we all get to the foot of the cliff, he’s alive! He’s laughing! Had some cracked ribs and a chipped tooth or three, had to go to the hospital, but he looks at all of us sliding down the cliff to reach him and he laughs and says: ‘Just call me Lucky, guys.’ And the name stuck.”

Gene hadn’t heard the tale before, but she knew the shape of the rest of Ralston’s life. How he’d applied for a commission in the Navy after Pearl Harbor and, as communications officer aboard a submarine, had survived several major Pacific battles without a scratch. How he’d invested his movie savings and military pay in California real estate and made a fortune and moved back to the Midwest, where he’d been born. How he’d founded Ralston Investment Services, which now took up the Exchange Tower’s top three floors. Whatever the market might do, he somehow stayed ahead of the curve and his clients made money. In his eighties he was still tall and erect and handsome, with abundant snow-white hair and a body as firm as that of his fourth and final trophy wife. Health, wealth, prestige, and sex — it was as if he had a magic amulet. Until five days ago when, after a vigorous workout in the company health center on the Tower’s thirtieth floor, he, to all appearances, had slipped and broken his neck in the Jacuzzi and shower room reserved for himself alone in a corner of the gym.

As Gene absorbed Harry Mills’s story she saw in her mind’s eye young Ralston catapulting out of the saddle and over that cliff, rolling and tumbling down and down and down, to land fifty-five years later on the Jacuzzi’s treacherous tiled floor. As if after five and a half decades he finally had to keep his appointment in Samarra.

It hadn’t been her case at first. Captain Andrews assigned it to himself as soon as Major Case Squad was called in, but over the weekend, while he was out shopping, a pickup truck had broadsided his Honda at an intersection and Andrews had wound up in traction. He called from his hospital room Monday morning, waking Gene up and metaphorically tossing the case on her desk. At which she had sat for nine straight hours with her earphones on and the portable CD player in her bottom right drawer programmed to perform the complete Beethoven string quartets in an endless cycle while she read and reread every document in the bulging file until she could see everything about the murder almost as clearly as she heard the music. Everything but the murderer.

Lucky Ralston and his wife of four years occupied the penthouse on the roof of the Exchange Tower. “Her real name’s Marla,” Andrews had told Gene over the phone, in a sedated voice, “but he always called her Chickie. Each of his wives had a pet name he took from an animal. One was Bunny, one was Kitty. Number four was Chickie. He gave almost everybody he knew a nickname.” Gene had heard him groan softly and wondered whether the cause was his broken leg or Ralston’s taste in nomenclature. One quick skimming of the file and she knew why Andrews had stressed the point.

A private elevator operated by a key connected the penthouse with the health center Ralston had installed on the top floor for his firm’s employees. On Friday, around 10:00 A.M., following his normal routine four days a week, he had taken that elevator down to the health club for a workout. On a business day, with the markets open and roaring, the club didn’t open till eleven-thirty, which was why Ralston always worked out before lunch. His wife and her morning guests in the penthouse greatroom, and the health center’s full-time manager in his office below, agreed on the time the soon-not-to-be-lucky Ralston had descended in his private elevator and stepped out at the rear of the health center near the locker rooms and showers. Andrews’s rough sketch of the scene was in the file and enabled Gene to follow events as if they’d been captured on video.

She noted with special pleasure that the women’s locker room and shower area was larger than the men’s. But of course, if Ralston had put his private spa in the female zone he’d have been sued for sexual harassment before he could get comfy in his Jacuzzi.

From health-center manager Nicholas Portman’s statement to Captain Andrews, taped in Portman’s office Friday: “Mr. Ralston had a regular routine, took like an hour. Nautilus equipment, weights, punch bag, skipping rope, some laps in the pool. Then he’d hit the shower, maybe soak in the whirlpool if his muscles were sore.” Andrews: “And he came down this morning right at ten?” Portman: “Maybe five or six after. You could pretty much set your clock by him. I punch in anytime between eight-thirty and nine; Louie, the janitor, usually shows up a little after nine, but like I told you, he called in sick this morning.” Andrews: “So your best guess is Ralston headed for the shower a little after eleven?” Portman: “Around eleven, yeah, plus or minus a few minutes. Then, after he’d gone, Mr. Strachan and the others came pounding on the door and I let them in.”

Gene knew from other transcribed statements in the file who all three of the visitors were. James Strachan, one of the four executive vice presidents who had run Ralston Investment Services since Lucky, on his seventy-fifth birthday, had given up active involvement; Sally Papas, a fast-rising administrative assistant and the only member of the staff who could speak a little Korean; Syngman Cheung, a visiting bigwig from the Far East who was being wooed to pick the Ralston company as his American broker. Andrews, in his phone conference with Gene, had called him Seoul Man. “Tom,” she had said gently, “promise you won’t take up comedy writing when you retire?”

Peering through her bifocals at Andrews’s sketch atop her desk blotter, she ran the action through her mind once more. Portman gives the three visitors a tour of the health center while Ralston lathers up in his private shower, which is four times the size of a standard model. His eyes soapy from shampoo, he gropes to turn off the hot water, steps out of the stall, and reaches for the hook on which his European toweling robe is hanging. That is when he slips on the wet floor and his feet go out from under him and he pulls the shatterproof glass door of the stall off its hinges and takes it down with him as he falls hard and breaks his neck.

Gene squeezed her eyes shut and tried to become that old man. Lying naked on the tiled floor. Knowing himself near death. Feeling the ice-rink-glassy surface and knowing his fall was not an accident. Knowing — how he knew still wasn’t clear — who had spread all over the floor of the spa the bath beads whose traces the Crime Scene Unit had found an hour later. He can’t move, can’t cry out. Minutes pass. The three visitors reach the private spa on their tour and find Ralston dying. From James Strachan’s statement to Captain Andrews: “I bent over Lucky and asked what happened to him. He couldn’t seem to form words.” Andrews: “But he did say something, right?” Strachan: “He somehow managed to say three words, or maybe it was four.” Andrews: “Once more now, what did he say?” Strachan: “‘Lefty did it.’ Or maybe it was, ‘A lefty did it.’”

And Papas and Cheung had agreed that Ralston had distinctly said either the one set of words or the other.

“And Marla, or ‘Chickie,’ Ralston is left-handed.” Gene squinted professorially at Andrews in his short hospital gown and at the remains of his creamed beef entrée on a green plastic tray on the bedside table.

“I’d stake my pension on it,” the captain grunted as he readjusted the pillows behind his back. “I took her statement in that penthouse of hers and watched every move she made. I didn’t tell her about her husband’s last words to Strachan till right near the end of the interview so she had no reason to try to hide the fact. She opened the great-room door for me left-handed, drank her coffee left-handed, wore a watch on her right wrist. When I got around to mentioning the Lefty thing she went white as a sheet for a couple of seconds but didn’t change the way she did things. She’s a damn good actress. When I was finished with her she keyed the elevator for me with her left hand and made sure I saw her do it. Cool as they come and guilty as hell.”

“Tom,” Gene pointed out, “Mr. Ralston’s wife is named Marla and his nickname for her was Chickie. If he had meant to say she had killed him, why didn’t he just use one of those names that would identify her and her alone? Why would he spend his last moments of life confusing the issue by bringing up a Lefty?”

“I expect you to answer that question before they let me out of this hole,” Andrews told her. “And to bust her alibi while you’re at it.”

Gene had pored over the alibi evidence through two string quartets. The morning of Lucky’s death, Marla Ralston had hosted a meeting of the steering committee of IOU, Interfaith Outreach to the Unfortunate, the charity to which she gave more time than any other. The meeting had begun a few minutes before ten. Lucky himself had greeted the guests, who had come up together in the express elevator from the Exchange Tower lobby to the penthouse foyer, but after a few minutes of small talk he’d excused himself and, in gym outfit, had headed down in the private elevator for his workout.

The other members of the IOU steering committee were a monsignor from the diocesan offices, a nationally known Presbyterian minister, and the rabbi of the most prestigious synagogue in the metro area. All three had sworn on their respective versions of the Bible that Marla Ralston sat in the same room with them until just before 11:30 when she’d received the phone call from downstairs with the news of Lucky’s death. Andrews, from the transcript in the file: “She never left once? Even — you know — to go to the john or something?” Rabbi Goldner: “She excused herself once or twice to bring us a fresh pot of coffee or — you know — as you say — but she was never gone for more than a minute or two.” Andrews: “How many times total?” Rabbi Goldner, after a pause: “Three, I think.” Monsignor Lewis: “No, just twice.” Reverend Ward: “It might have been four.” But they all insisted that none of her absences had been longer than two minutes, that they could hear her in other rooms of the penthouse while she was gone — silverware clinking, water running in the bathroom — and that she’d been with them uninterruptedly after about 10:50, at which time her husband apparently was still alive and skipping rope or something. “It’s a perfect alibi,” Gene said. “She couldn’t have done it.”

“It’s too perfect an alibi.” Andrews’s face went scarlet with frustration. “Damn it, no one else has a motive!”

“Maybe Portman did it,” Gene suggested unflappably. “Or Mr. Strachan, or Ms. Papas, or that health-center janitor who never showed up for work Friday. Perhaps even Mr. Cheung, although it does seem he never laid eyes on Ralston while he was alive.”

“Sergeant Holt.” Andrews’s attempt at a voice of command came a cropper as he tried to tug the hospital gown below his thighs. “This is not an episode of Murder, She Wrote. Every cop instinct I’ve picked up in seventeen years says the widow did it.”

“Every cop instinct I’ve picked up in twelve says she didn’t,” Gene replied. “Well, perhaps in a few days we’ll find out which of us is right.”

Her loveliness made Gene’s heart race. Marla Ralston’s white-blond hair fell softly below the shoulders of a nubby knit ensemble such a dark shade of blue it seemed black. She wore no jewelry or ornaments. There was nothing in her cobalt eyes but the stunned and devastated blankness of the wounded fawn, waiting in silent agony for the second blow that would bring worse pain or death. The way she had entered the penthouse’s high-ceilinged great room, the way she’d crossed the parquet and the oriental carpet that covered the floor of the living-room area, tentatively, like a stranger in a strange land — Gene had seen other women move like that. Victims of violent rape. The two women, one so lovely and the other plain as mud, sat at opposite ends of the pillow-back sofa upholstered in red leather while Gene’s midget cassette recorder sat on the glass-topped coffee table between them with its Record light glowing like a ruby. Mrs. Ralston answered questions in a voice without affect, as if nothing mattered anymore.

The questions would not have been asked by a textbook cop. Gene wondered why Lucky had given each of his wives an animal pet name. “Well, he’d always loved animals but he was allergic to just about all of them except horses so, well, maybe we were...”

“The pets he could never have?” Gene finished.

“You’ve never been married or really involved with a man, Sergeant, have you?”

Gene bit into her lower lip and tasted blood.

“I — there were some men in my life before Lucky. Men my own age or a little older. Compared to him, they were garbage. What earthly difference did it make that he liked to call me Chickie? No woman could have been happier than I was with him. Why in God’s name would I have thrown it all away?”

“Well,” Gene ventured, “he had money and you never had much till you married him. Some people might call that a reason.”

“My parents barely scraped by,” Marla admitted. “They were — both of them were compulsive gamblers and they usually lost. All they could afford to give me was two years in junior college. Then I left home and moved here and went to work at Metro Bank.”

“Where you met Mr. Ralston, I think?”

“There’d been a terrible mixup in his personal checking account and he came in to straighten it out and... well, I helped him get it settled and he invited me to lunch and I guess one thing led to another. I wish you could have known what a charming man he was.” They had married five months later. “I knew he was almost eighty, I knew we wouldn’t have forever and so did he. Before we left on our honeymoon he had his lawyer draw up a power of attorney for me in case he suddenly became disabled. But...” Gene saw the tears forming and wordlessly handed over a box of tissues from the end table. The younger woman used her left hand to pull out a few. “I’m sorry. I still can’t believe I’ll never see him again.”

Why? Gene demanded of herself. Why did this woman get four years of ecstasy with Mr. Right while toad-faced, squint-eyed, lumpy-bodied Gene Holt didn’t get four minutes? It was all she could do to keep the interview professional.

No, Marla insisted tonelessly, she couldn’t imagine why Lucky should apparently accuse her, nor could she name anyone of their acquaintance whom her husband called Lefty. “We have people up for drinks,” she said. “Had,” she corrected herself. “Maybe once a week. A catered cocktail party for business clients or people from my charity work. Once or twice a year someone Lucky knew from the movies would pass through town and we’d throw a reception for him, like Harry Mills last year. I suppose any number of them might be left-handed but I can’t say I ever noticed any, not that I was looking. Oh, that reminds me, Harry’s flying in from Hawaii today for the memorial service we’re having for Lucky tomorrow downstairs, in the auditorium. You’re — welcome to come if you’d like.”

“I’ll try to make it,” Gene promised. “But the real problem you face isn’t the fact that you are the only left-handed person in your husband’s life that we’ve found so far. It’s the fact that whoever killed him managed to get into the health club when the main entrance was locked tight. The only other way into the club is his private elevator, and only you and he had the keys to run it.” Not a muscle in the widow’s face moved as Gene stated the case against her. She might have been listening to a disquisition on dinosaurs. “Of course, you do seem to have an unbreakable alibi but, well, I hope you can appreciate my position at least a little.”

The pearl-tinted phone on the end table cheeped discreetly and Marla Ralston’s fashion-model body gave a tiny jerk of fright. She made herself reach for it — with her left hand, Gene noticed — then after listening a moment offered the handset to Gene. “For you,” she whispered. “Someone named Cameron.”

Gene listened in her turn and said: “Down in three minutes,” handing the phone back as she switched off the recorder and got to her feet. “They’re waiting for me in the health club,” she said, “and I’d like to go there the same way your husband did Friday morning. Would you mind walking me to the private elevator? I have his key.”

Marla led the way across the penthouse and along a glass-framed walkway lined with flowering shrubs that terminated at an elevator enclosure the shape of an upended coffin. Gene inserted the key and shook hands with the widow as the cage door hissed open. “I appreciate your help,” she said. “It’s, well, really not my place to suggest this, but the next time we have a chat, if there is a next time, mightn’t you feel more comfortable if a lawyer were with you?”

“I don’t need a lawyer,” Marla answered calmly. “I did not kill Lucky. I would have died for him. I can’t conceive of life without him. Please,” she said as the door sliced them apart. “Please find his murderer.”

One floor below the penthouse Gene stood by the elevator door and made a downward slashing movement with her hand. Twenty feet along the narrow corridor the cop in the doorway of Ralston’s spa swung around so he could be seen inside and repeated the gesture. A deafening clatter roared out to where Gene and Dan Cameron stood. “Excellent!” she said. “Now, Dan, you wait here.” Leaving Cameron by the elevator entrance, she retreated along the main corridor of the health club until about ten yards separated them. Then she slashed her hand down again. Cameron repeated the signal, as, in turn, did the cop in the spa doorway, and a moment later she again heard the clatter, not so thunderous this time, but still clear as a bell. She stepped into the doorway to the vast room that held the Olympic-sized swimming pool, signaled a third time, and trotted deeper into the chamber. Nothing. The intervening walls and the pool water’s lapping muffled the din. She strode out, rejoined Cameron at the elevator, and both of them marched to the spa doorway. Inside, two uniforms stood splay-footed on the tile floor, holding upright a duplicate of the shower-stall door that Lucky Ralston had yanked off its hinges when he’d taken the fall that broke his neck. “That’s enough, fellows,” she announced. “You can return the door to the supply house with my thanks.”

“Good break for us it was bought locally” Dan Cameron ventured. Major Case Squad’s newest recruit was thin as a strand of uncooked spaghetti and Gene thought he’d develop into a fine investigator in another few years if he didn’t complete night law school first and vanish into the police bureaucracy. “Are you satisfied?”

“Just slightly” Gene told him. “We know now that no one on this floor could have heard the shower door falling unless he or she happened to be close to the shower room when Ralston fell.”

Cameron’s look was as blank as the bullets they fired in Ralston’s old shoot-’em-ups.

“Remember, Dan,” Gene said, “the janitor never showed up for work that day, so he couldn’t have heard the sound of the falling door. Portman says he was working at his desk until he went to let in the Strachan party. His office is too far from the shower for him to have heard the crash.”

“The murderer must have scattered those bath beads on the floor while Ralston was showering, which was only a few minutes before he slipped and fell,” Cameron replied. “Portman could have done it, but he has no motive and he isn’t left-handed.”

“Mrs. Ralston has motive and is left-handed but she couldn’t have done it,” Gene countered sharply. “She was upstairs with three clergymen, damn it!” Following the main corridor towards the health-club entrance, Gene, through her bifocal lenses, made out a bulky figure in gray sweats standing awkwardly outside the door of the club manager’s office, gawking like a rubbernecker at a street accident.

“Come along,” she prompted her young colleague. “That’s our next interview waiting for us.”

Nick Portman sat hunched at his gray steel desk. Balding, beefy, chin nested in knuckles, eyes darting about the drab, functional office as if following the flight of a pesky mosquito, he gave Gene the impression of a high school coach whose team hasn’t won a game in months. She knew from the case file that in fact he’d been a gym teacher for fifteen years until the school board had eliminated his job in an economy move, and that he’d been living on unemployment checks when Ralston had hired him four months ago.

“Nah,” he said. “You couldn’t say I really talked with him. I mean, how do you talk with a guy while he’s doing laps or using the punch bag? But while he was on the Nautilus equipment, yeah, I had a few words with him.”

“What sort of words?” Gene threw a quick glance at the recorder in her lap to make sure plenty of tape was left.

“Nothing to speak of. I might have told him about a couple of improvements the place needed. Like, you know, adjusting the chlorine level in the pool. And the women wanting some flowering plants in the aerobics room like he had in that walkway on the roof. Stuff like that.”

“Did he argue with you about any of these things?”

“Ma’am, Mr. Ralston was retired. He wasn’t the one who had to approve expenses here anymore. I was just shooting the breeze with him.”

Cameron asked the next one. “And you saw no sign of anyone else in the health club while you were chatting with Mr. Ralston?”

“Not then, no. Ordinarily Louie, the janitor, would be mopping around but he was out sick Friday. If there was anyone else in the club and he came around to chin with the boss after I’d left him, well, I couldn’t have heard voices from my office here.”

After a few more minutes of perfunctory Q&A Gene looked at her watch and rose from her chair, hearing her knees creak in the silence. She thanked Portman for his help, and with Cameron in her wake made her exit from the health-center office and its manager, whose face seemed to her almost the same color as his sweats.

“It’s eleven-ten,” she said. Actually, it was after lunch, but Gene wasn’t referring to this Tuesday. She aimed the cap of her razor-point pen at the spot on the diagram that represented the entrance doors to the health center. “You come knocking.”

“Precisely at eleven-ten,” the probable future CEO of Ralston Investment Services intoned. James Strachan, decked out in a dark pinstripe suit with regimental tie, seemed blissfully unaware that the way he combed his mouse-colored hair did little to hide his bald spot, which glistened in the conference room’s overhead lights as he bent over the enlarged photocopy of Andrews’s sketch of the crime scene. He had smiled with pleasure when, on meeting him fifteen minutes ago, Gene had pronounced his name right, “Strawn,” the Scottish way.

While she had been poring over the case file yesterday, Dan Cameron, at her behest, was trolling for background data among the firm’s lower-level personnel. “A sort of troika has run the place since Ralston more or less stepped down,” he had reported at end of shift. “Strachan and three other executive vice presidents. That was Ralston’s idea.” Gene had thought of pointing out to her young protégé that troika meant a team of three, not four, but had opted not to interrupt. “Poop around the break room is that Strachan’s sure to be the big enchilada now that Ralston’s gone,” Dan had continued. Motive enough for an ambitious organization man to commit murder? Gene wondered. If only Strachan’s Friday morning tour of the company facilities with two other witnesses didn’t account for every minute of his time so perfectly!

This Tuesday afternoon Gene sat at the head of the long cherry-wood table, in the high-backed brown leather swivel rocker that Ralston must have used when he was still active in the business and conducted meetings here. Sun from a cloudless sky filtered through tinted panoramic windows on Gene and Strachan and bulldog-faced Sally Papas at Gene’s left and bewildered-looking Syngman Cheung at Papas’s left.

“All three of you entered the health center together?” Gene asked.

“Of course.” She caught the hint of testiness in Strachan’s voice and sensed his displeasure at seeing the corporate throne warmed by any bottom other than his own.

“An unexpected visit, I believe?”

“It didn’t take as long as I’d budgeted to explain our computer system to Mr. Cheung,” Sally Papas replied. “We had some time to spare.” Short orange hair, granny glasses, square aggressive chin, no makeup, twenty pounds overweight: Gene was pleased to conclude that sexiness did not seem a prerequisite to success for a woman in this company, at least not for one who spoke Korean. Her link to Strachan wasn’t hurting her, either, Gene mused. According to Cameron’s report yesterday, the Scottish exec was mentoring her and the two had a close but definitely nonsexual relationship. “Sort of like the two of us,” Dan had ventured. Perhaps Papas might have killed Ralston to help her sponsor rise to the top of the heap, but she had the same rock-solid alibi for Friday morning that Strachan had. Damn! “I was responsible for the schedule,” Papas went on. “Naturally I made sure word went out that if we got ahead of schedule we would tour the health center last thing before our luncheon engagement.”

“Word went out to whom?”

“Why, to Mr. Ralston, of course. I knew he worked out in the health center several mornings a week and we didn’t want him surprised by unexpected visitors.”

“To no one else?”

“It was hardly necessary to inform anyone else of a mere possibility,” Papas said. “We knew Nick Portman would be there to let us in, and if by any chance he wasn’t I had my own key to the health center.” By this time Gene had learned that all too many private keys to the health center were in circulation around the top three floors of the Exchange Tower. The chances of her being able to snag the murderer on grounds of opportunity to use one and sneak past Portman to Ralston’s Jacuzzi were nil.

“Mr. Ralston was to have joined the three of us at lunch,” Strachan cut in. “We had reservations for noon at the Futures Club.”

“Future Crab.” Syngman Cheung beamed cherubically, as if grateful he’d finally heard a few words he understood. “Excerrent ranch. Never happen. Murder happen. Send out for ranch when detectives ret us go.” Sally Papas leaned towards the Asian tycoon and whispered into his ear what Gene could only assume was a precis of the dialogue.

“The Futures Club is the rooftop restaurant in the Transnational Building,” Gene pointed out, “which is at least two miles from where we now sit. With your tour of the health center tacked on to the schedule, did you still expect to make it there by noon?”

“I thought we’d just give Mr. Cheung a quick look at the gym facilities,” Strachan said, and Papas bobbed her head in agreement.

“And you didn’t have to wait at the health-center doors? Port-man let you in as soon as you knocked?”

“Well, in less than a minute, I would say.”

“And he led the three of you around the place?”

“Yes, ma’am,” Papas told her. “I took him aside and asked him to keep it brisk.”

“And by your watch it was eleven twenty-three when you entered Mr. Ralston’s private Jacuzzi and found him dying?”

“We didn’t all go in at first,” Strachan corrected. “Remember, Sergeant, this was a, well, a man’s sanctum, if you will. Ms. Papas was sensitive enough to hang back at the elevator door. It was the rest of us who found Mr. Ralston and, er, that was when Ms. Papas joined us.”

Papas inclined to her right and whispered into Gene’s ear. “I came running when Strachan let out a screech like a banshee.”

And so passed half the afternoon, Gene walking and talking them through every minute of the Friday morning while the midget recorder that anchored the diagram on the conference table fixed everyone’s recollection on tape. After two hours even Gene was bored. She found herself wondering what Dan was digging up, and when she couldn’t control her curiosity any longer she shut down the recorder, thanked the witnesses, as usual, and accepted Strachan’s offer of an escort through the labyrinth of corridors and cubicles and computer terminals to the reception area and the bank of elevators to the Exchange Tower’s lobby.

“I invested eight solid hours. Some of it wasn’t a waste.” Dan Cameron slumped in the armchair beside Gene’s desk at Major Case Squad with fatigue making his eyes twitch. Her watch gave the time as just short of nine in the evening. “I picked up a nice little collection of Ralston’s nicknames for people.” He flipped open his notebook. “The head of the company’s legal department is George Alexander. Ralston called him Salamander. There’s a guy in Germany he did business with by the name of Rudolf Duda. Ralston called him Zipadee.”

Gene was too spent to endure the complete anthology of nicknames. “Could we keep it to the people we know were in the health center Friday morning?” she suggested politely.

“No problem. Let’s take James Strachan.” Cameron turned to another page. “Everyone I talked to says he’s a compulsive workaholic. Doesn’t drink, doesn’t smoke, doesn’t do drugs. Married to the same woman for twenty-six years, has two sons in Ivy League colleges and a daughter at Harvard Business School. That means three hefty tuitions every year, but he doesn’t seem to have financial problems. On the other hand, there’s no such thing as too much money, and if he takes over the firm he’ll make at least twice what he’s drawing down now. And speaking of hands, he’s definitely not a southpaw. Ralston’s nickname for him was Scotty.”

“And Sally Papas?” Gene asked.

“A couple of her coworkers hinted she’s a lesbian. If you’re in the mood for far-out possibilities you might speculate that she killed Ralston because she had the hots for his wife. She’s not left-handed but she is ambidextrous.”

“What was Ralston’s pet name for her?”

“He never called her anything but Ms. Papas. Makes you think he was afraid she might sue if he gave her a nickname.”

“Okay,” Gene said, “now tell me about Nicholas Portman.”

“His worst habit is he tends to hang out in sports bars, hitting on women half his age. Probably figures if Ralston could do it, he could too. His trouble is, he isn’t Lucky.” Cameron’s face was so empty Gene had no idea if he knew he’d said something funny. “He’s definitely right-handed. If Ralston had a nickname for him, no one I talked to knew it. Remember he just came aboard at the health club a few months ago.” Dan paused and his eyes seemed to brighten. “Now we come to why some of my day wasn’t a waste,” he went on. “Syngman Cheung.”

“The tycoon from South Korea?”

“He wasn’t always from the South,” Cameron told her. “The guy was born in a village near Pyongyang and was a rising star in the North Korean Communist bureaucracy till he figured out which side of the DMZ the rice was buttered on and defected and wound up making millions as a capitalist. But with a past like that, Ralston might very well have given him the nickname Lefty.”

“Dan,” Gene pointed out gently, “Ralston never even laid eyes on Mr. Cheung. They were to have met over lunch at the Futures Club the day Ralston died.”

“Yes, but Ralston had a memo about him before they met. Prepared by Sally Papas, who seems to have a network of informants in Seoul. The name Lefty might have sprung to his mind even though they hadn’t met. And,” Cameron continued, “I did dig up one other possibility. Remember Louie, the guy who did the scutwork around the health club?”

“Certainly,” Gene said. “He called in sick the morning Ralston was murdered.”

“Judging from the empty bottles I saw in his trash can, I’d say his sickness that morning was likely a hangover. Louie was living on the streets till six months ago. The Interfaith Outreach people were trying to rehabilitate him and Ralston gave him a job as a favor to them. He lives in a cheap walkup on the north side. When I came by this afternoon he was up and dressed and watching TV. Said he felt a lot better. I noticed he was wearing a belt buckle with three initials. Dated back from before he hit the skids. Like to guess what the initials were?”

From the look in Cameron’s eyes Gene hardly needed to guess. “LFT?” she suggested.

“On the money. His full name’s Louis Francis Tuttle. I haven’t found anyone yet who heard Ralston call him Lefty. But,” Cameron went on with a touch of pride in his voice, “when I inspected his key ring I found a key to the entrance door of the health club. He can let himself in any time he pleases. Which means that he could have made up that sickness excuse and sneaked in and past Portman’s office before eleven and holed up somewhere for a while and then slipped into the Jacuzzi while Ralston was showering and spread the bath beads on the floor.”

“And his motive?” Gene asked sweetly.

“Maybe the envy of a failure in life for a success,” Cameron said. “Otherwise none, as far as I can see. I can’t place him in the building, but he can’t prove he wasn’t there, either. There were no bath beads in his john when I checked it.”

The possibilities evoked by her talk with Cameron kept Gene tossing restlessly through the night and neither a Valium nor the cello sonatas whispering through the speaker of her bedside CD player soothed her mind enough to bring the gift of sleep. But somehow in the empty hours she saw what she hadn’t seen before.

In the morning she stopped at the Squad office and left precise instructions before climbing into her Camry and heading downtown. She reached the Exchange Tower auditorium just moments before the memorial service was to start. As survivors’ stories of Lucky Ralston flowed over her like waves, as she heard Harry Mills’s account of how he had come to be called Lucky, she knew his death was a sort of logical culmination, in a sense as inevitable as the unfolding of a symphonic motif. But still and all, he’d been murdered. And now Gene knew who had killed him.

As the service was breaking up she twisted in her stack chair and saw Cameron slouched against the auditorium’s rear wall, next to a muscular young black man in plainclothes whom Gene recognized as another cop. At her nod they came forward and fell in behind her, making their way up the aisle against the flow of human traffic to the dais where a handful of those who had been closest to Ralston were clustered around his widow and cackling Harry Mills. There was Strachan in his black pinstripe suit, and Sally Papas still shepherding Mr. Cheung, who managed to look both mournful and befuddled with the same expression, and three or four others. Cameron and the black cop cut their quarry out of the herd like range drovers nudging a calf to the branding fire, and Gene then stepped forward to perform the verbal honors herself.

“Mr. Portman,” she said, “let’s have a heart-to-heart talk. Now.”

“We should both of us be flipping burgers for a living,” Captain Andrews groaned in his hospital bed that evening as Gene finished her explanation. Cameron was still closeted in the interrogation room at headquarters with Portman and his attorney, who had already hinted his client might be willing to make a deal. “My God, five days it took us to figure it! But with no motive...”

“Look at the facts without blinders on and no one else could have done it,” Gene said, forbearing to mention that her superior hadn’t figured it at all. “Ralston knew visitors might be coming through the health club at eleven. He cut his workout short and went into his shower at, oh, say ten-fifty. Portman followed him in and spread the bath beads on the floor. Of course, at that moment Ralston suspected nothing. He stepped out of the stall and took his tumble. Portman heard the sound of the stall door crashing to the floor and came back to make sure Ralston was dead. But he wasn’t. And when he saw or heard or felt Portman in the doorway, just standing there, not doing anything to help, he knew. But by now it’s after eleven. Suddenly Portman hears a pounding on the entrance door to the health club. It must have scared the wits out of him. He races out and finds Strachan and Papas and Cheung, demanding to be let in. Remember, Portman hadn’t been told they might be visiting the health center that morning because it was only a possibility. So when they reach the Jacuzzi on their quickie tour, Ralston is still barely alive and able to tell those witnesses that the person who killed him was Lefty or ‘a lefty.’”

Andrews lay with his back propped against a mound of pillows and his leg rigid in traction, and his face dark with self-disgust. “Lefty,” he said. “Portman. Port means the left side of a boat. Ralston served in the Navy in World War Two. Damn, if only you or I had been boat people!”

“Imagine what Portman must have gone through in the past few days,” Gene said, “hoping against hope that we wouldn’t pick up on what Ralston meant. He must have died a thousand deaths since Friday morning.”

They were still rehashing the subtler points of the case a few minutes later when the beeper in Gene’s purse went off. She excused herself, reached for the phone on the bedside table, and used it to call in. As she listened to Cameron for what seemed an eternity she felt her face going numb with shock. She missed the cradle when she hung up, and the handset clattered on the Formica.

“I’m afraid we know the motive now,” she said softly. “Portman is talking up a storm. He says Marla Ralston went to bed with him and offered him half a million dollars to make her a widow. He secretly videotaped their sessions in case she turned on him later. Dan just finished watching the tape. She tells Portman she’s afraid her husband will live as long as George Burns and she’ll be too old to enjoy his money when he dies, and she’s the one who suggests spreading bath beads on the Jacuzzi floor while Lucky’s taking a shower. They’re picking her up now.” Gene could almost hear what must have precipitated the murder. Marla on one of her brief absences from the meeting with the clergymen makes a quick phone call to Portman in his office downstairs, telling him that the time has come, that she’ll never have such a perfect alibi for herself as she has at this moment. Portman tells her that the janitor has called in sick, that he and Lucky are alone in the health center. And that brief exchange seals Ralston’s doom. It was a gamble, of course, but then Marla was the daughter of compulsive gamblers, and even if Lucky were not killed but only disabled, she with her power of attorney would control his property until, soon or late, the end came for him.

“God,” Andrews muttered. “What a crazy case. Ralston’s dying words were on the mark twice! My cop instincts were right, I guess, but by God, so were yours.”

Gene groped in her outsize purse for a handkerchief she prayed she wouldn’t need. “Tom, I was — so sure she really loved him,” she said, and lapsed into a frozen silence as Andrews wriggled to the edge of the bed and reached out to take her hand in his.