“I think we have to go over it all again,” Kolankiewicz was saying. “We have to reconsider.”
Troy was shaking his head at this.
“No,” he said. “Viktor killed himself. I have no doubts about it.”
“All that from a dusting of his piano?”
“I found the last person to play that piano. His mistress. Méret Voytek. I rather think she interrupted Viktor in his preparations for death. He had in all probability wiped down most of the apartment. She turned up unexpectedly. He saw the opportunity for one last request and she played the piano for him. As soon as she left, he wiped the keys and did the deed with the sound of her playing still ringing in his ears. Your nose for woman did not deceive you.”
“And?”
“The wiping of the fingerprints was Viktor’s way of protecting her, protecting her reputation.”
“Why so fussy? When you have it in mind to kill yourself, why think of anything else? Who would give a shit about the living?”
It seemed to Troy to be yet another strand in a conversation half the world wanted to have with him. Why did he do it? Was he the type to do it? And it was so far off the mark.
“How many suicide notes have you and I read over the years? Think of the things they wrote about that still bothererd them, things that they still had to act upon only moments before death. The tying up of a lifetime of loose ends. Neither you nor I will know what passes through the mind of a dying man until it’s too late. It has its own logic, and in this case he was protecting the person he cared most about.”
“And Skolnik?”
“Well, he certainly wasn’t protecting Skolnik. I’d bet you a penny to a quid Skolnik never set foot in that apartment. A hip flask is the kind of thing you pass around outdoors. The fact that you found it inside Viktor’s overcoat surely confirms that?”
This gave Kolankiewicz pause for thought. What he said next gave Troy pause for thought.
“And has the opposite occurred to you?”
The idea took shape even as he spoke.
“It’s occurring to me now,” Troy said.
“That Viktor Rosen might have killed Skolnik?”
“Yes.”
“Was he the type?”
The same, unending conversation again. The type to kill. The type to die—well, we were all that. And the certainties of Arthur Kornfeld flashed through his mind, “I can say without doubt that Viktor wasn’t that type.”
Troy could not say that. Troy said nothing.
Kolankiewicz pressed on, “And this mistress . . . ?”
“Méret Voytek.”
“Is it possible she knows about Skolnik?”
“Dunno,” said Troy. “I’ll ask her.”