A GREAT CHANGE HAD come over the Alexander apartment in a few hours. A woman Julie didn’t recognize opened the door. The place looked trampled through or as though an auction had been held there with everything sold in place and now waiting to be carted away. The doors off the foyer, generally open, were closed. The woman was a detective, Julie realized as she followed her to the dining room—a solid person in a dark blue suit and carrying a shoulder bag. The remains of a buffet meal lay on the long table, the salads wilted, the butter soft, cold meats beginning to curl and discolor. Luncheon plates, some with the food on them scarcely touched, had been returned to the table. A big man with luminous eyes and hearty mustache came to meet them.
Detective Jane Lawler introduced herself and her partner, Joe Ferretti.
Eleanor rushed from the kitchen and then stopped with almost comic abruptness.
Julie looked at the detectives: they were tensed as though ready to intervene if the girl had gone further.
“Something’s happened here since this morning. What?”
“They’ve taken mother away. I don’t know what they’re going to do about me.”
The detectives had nothing to say.
Julie put her carry-all on a chair and suggested to Eleanor that they clean up.
“I’ve been trying, but I don’t seem to get anywhere.”
When everything from the table was in the kitchen, Eleanor closed the door. Detective Lawler opened it and set the doorstop in place. She and her partner sat in the chairs nearest the kitchen. There was nothing to do but ignore them. “Do you know where your mother is?” Julie asked.
“She went to the shop with Inspector Fitzgerald and some other detectives. Some of them stayed here and started questioning people. Everybody cleared out so fast you’d have thought it was a bomb scare.”
“Then what?” Julie put the meats and cheeses on one plate and covered it with plastic wrap.
“It got down to them and me.” She indicated the detectives who were dividing a newspaper between them. “They kept getting a lot of gibberish over their intercom system and then Detective Lawler asked me to fix an overnight bag for my mother which the police would pick up. I don’t know where she is and if they know they won’t tell me.”
Julie’s guess was that the trip to the shop had to do with the other revolver, the mate to Tony’s. Except that they would have picked that up the night before, suspecting that the guns might have been switched. “I assume she’s been in touch with her lawyer?”
“Yes. He telephoned me and said I wasn’t to talk with anyone unless he was present. But that doesn’t mean you.”
“It might,” Julie said. She scraped the dishes, rinsed them and handed them one at a time to Eleanor to put in the dishwasher.
“If only I knew where mother was I’d be more together, you know?”
“I’ll see if I can find out,” Julie said. “Do you know the lawyer’s name?”
“I forget his name. He was Tony’s lawyer.”
“Then I can find out through the office.”
“If I need a lawyer will you find one for me?”
That seemed strange from a couple of angles. Julie looked at the girl, who was avoiding her eyes. “Do you expect that to happen?”
“Yes.”
“Do you want to tell me why?”
“I can’t prove where I was last night. Mother told the police I was here, but I wasn’t actually. I went to a movie. I went to see Stevie again.”
Again, Julie noted. “Same theater?”
Eleanor nodded. “I always cry. It’s so beautiful.”
“I know.”
“You saw it?”
Julie said that she had.
“I love the aunt more than any character I’ve ever seen in any picture,” Eleanor said.
Julie put the detergent into the machine. She sneezed several times.
Detective Lawler called out, “God bless you.”
“Thank you.” She remembered the cold she had thought she was getting. Aborted. “The police will find someone who saw you at the movie, Eleanor.”
“Not necessarily.”
“If you were there.”
Eleanor finally looked at her. Was the girl trying to build a case against herself? She had shed no tears for Tony, not in Julie’s presence. “Julie, would you stay here with me tonight?”
“I’m not sure I can. I’ve got things I must do.”
“Night clubs and previews and things like that?”
“None of those things. They’re not important right now.”
“Are they ever?”
“Yes, relatively and sometimes.” The dishes were in the machine helter-skelter, big plates, little ones, cups, more plates, glasses…. She began to rearrange them.
“What difference does it make how they’re arranged?” Eleanor wanted to know. “A dishwasher is not a work of art.”
Julie pondered this a moment and then closed the washer door and sent the machine on its way. The dining room table hadn’t been a work of art either. She made a pot of coffee. Eleanor sat on a stool and watched her. Neither of them spoke. When the coffee was ready she poured herself a cup and then took some out to the detectives. Eleanor said she never drank coffee. When Julie proposed to make a few phone calls, the girl asked if anyone minded if she lay down for a while. Nobody did, but when she went through the foyer and on to the guest room, turning on lights as she went, Detective Lawler followed and lugged along a chair from the foyer which she set down opposite Eleanor’s room. Again, when the girl closed the door the detective opened it.
Julie turned to Ferretti who had joined the procession. “Is she not to be left alone? How come?”
He opened the living room door and beckoned Julie to follow him. She waited while he found the light switch. When the lights came on she saw what he had brought her in to see: the portrait of Tony hung in strips, slashed through.
“Did she do it?”
“She sure did.”
“When?”
“A couple of hours ago. My partner and I were having a bite to eat out there.”
Strange to do it now, Julie thought, with the man already dead. She asked the cop for an opinion: “Real or acting, do you think?”
“It’s some kind of real no matter what.”
Julie stayed in the living room to make her calls. Service first. Saturday night: she reached no one by phone except Alice Arthur whose mother called her from the kitchen where she was doing dishes. How many men were doing dishes at this hour, Julie wondered in a sudden burst of irrationality. She got the attorney’s name from Alice: Allan Zimmerman. Was Allan Zimmerman washing dishes? She marched out to the kitchen with her empty coffee cup. Joe Ferretti was at the sink washing his and Detective Lawler’s cups and saucers.