“Shut up, you puling, overstuffed veal calves,” I snarled, and even though it’s a line from Doom on Deimos, I delivered it better in 1930 than I ever did in 1925. “Have a little respect! Clear off! Give me some room!”
They flattened against the wall like school kids at a dance. I examined Thaddeus. He still had his dinner jacket on. The shot had gone through his back, straight into his heart. His cigarette still burned itself down between the fingers of his right hand. His left arm was folded under his chest. The craziest thought popped into my silly head: His hand’s gonna fall asleep that way! He’ll be all pins and needles when he wakes up. I went to disentangle him. No! Maxine Mortimer snapped in my head. Don’t you dare move that body, you dozy cow! The further one gets from the body, the harder it is to see the truth. I looked quickly round the ballroom instead. What luck! The gun lay under one of the banquet tables. Kicked there? Hidden deliberately? Dropped in the turmoil of it all? I sent Makoto to retrieve it, as he and Nigel were the only ones I felt certain about. Nigel was telling me about moustache wax when the gun went off, and Mack was fresh off the rocket. He didn’t know any of us well enough to care whether we lived or died, and besides, who would want something this drastic for their debut?
.22 Perun, walnut grip. Martian, I thought, but that didn’t mean anything. We’d all been to Mars. There wasn’t much to do there but shoot kangaroos.
Hartford raised his hand like a little boy in class. “Mary, whoever did this probably ran off at once. Why do we have to hang about watching you play detective? We’ve all seen it, love. Let’s be sensible: make a search party, comb the ship. Staying stuffed up in here won’t help anyone.”
“Hartford, if I thought you had the sense God gave a gumdrop, I’d let you ‘comb the ship’ to your heart’s content. What, pray tell, would you be searching for? The murder weapon—” I sniffed the Perun’s barrel to be sure; indeed, freshly fired. “—is here. The body is here. The first people to the scene—and therefore those nearest to the ballroom when our Thad was shot, and the closest thing we’ve got to witnesses—are here. You don’t get blood all over yourself when you shoot a man in the back; tearing up the laundry for a stained dinner jacket won’t do a lick of good. So why don’t you button up your expensive little mouth and let the adults talk?”
He did just that. I won’t say I didn’t get a wallop of satisfaction out of it. That vicious gossip hound Algernon B stood next to Hart, looking as though he were about to get on socially with an aneurysm. Sweat wriggled off his bald head and steamed up his glasses. He put his head between his knees. But if sweating makes you guilty, they were all in on it. Gin-sweats, stroke-sweats, beef-sweats, murder-sweats—who could tell the difference? I scanned their faces. I can do this, I thought. With everything I know about them, about Thaddeus, about deduction—at least the celluloid kind—I can figure it out.
“I’m leaving,” Freddy said. His face went red as a stoplight. “You’re nothing but a nasty, two-bit has-been with a flat ass and the clap, and you can’t keep me here.”
“So am I,” cried Dante de Vere. The pair of them stormed up to me, as though I’d never stared down a man who wanted my kidneys for earrings before.
I didn’t budge. “Mr Edison!” I roared. “You had a dispute with the deceased over unpaid fees for sound recording on Miranda, did you not?”
He recoiled. I don’t suppose anyone had roared at Franklin Edison since he crashed his tricycle into a swing set. But then, I did have the .22. Roaring has more oomph with a Martian pistol behind it. “Don’t be ridiculous, Mary. I have disputes with everyone over unpaid fees for sound recording. If I started killing anyone who owes me money, the Moon would be a ghost town inside of a week.”
“What about you, Dante? He fired you from Death Comes at the Beginning. No one’s called you for so much as a footman’s role since.”
“Mary! I had no idea you thought of me that way—as so ruthless or so abject. I was with Maud, stargazing, just out there on the starboard rail. We heard the shot—we’re perfectly innocent. I loved Thad, you know that. He looked after my dogs when I was on location.”
This gave me an idea. I pounced upon it before it could get away. “I have a question. If I feel you have answered honestly, I shall let you go on your way. Who among us loved Thaddeus Irigaray? I believe that may tell us more than asking who hated him.” Proper Maxine Mortimer, from first syllable to last. “I certainly did,” I answered first. And it was true. He’d kept me in steady work for a decade and let me bring my cat on set. Hell, he’d proposed eight times. When Laszlo Barque left him, he stayed in my guest room for a month.
No one else spoke up. Percy stared determinedly at his feet. Maud and Dante looked quite thoroughly bored, smoking together by the piano. Finally, Maud stubbed out her cigarette and said, “All right, fine, I loved him. He looked after me post my little spot of nastiness with Oxblood. I was supposed to get the Mortimer contract, you
know. The studio wanted me. But Thad wanted…I don’t know, I suppose he wanted a blonde.” She hurried to correct the bitter edge in her voice. “But no hard feelings! Why, that was ages ago.”
Freddy’s mouth kept running away from him. It twitched; it grimaced. It wanted to say something his brain knew it oughtn’t. He was drunk as a lord, careening from side to side, as though that great huge ballroom were too small for him, that coarse, awful elephant of a man.
“How about you, Penny?” Freddy hissed. Penelope Edison looked as though she were going to split apart at the seams. She kept rubbing her arms as though she were freezing to death. She stared at her husband, such a horrible stare, full of pleading and misery. Helpless tears started rolling down her face and they didn’t look like they’d ever stop. “Penny? Cat got your tongue? Who do you love, Pen? Me? Percy? How about Algernon over there? Or that sad sack of shit?” And he pointed to the ruin of Thaddeus Irigaray.
“Please, Freddy,” she whispered. I have never seen anything quite so wretched as Penelope Edison weeping.
“Please what? I didn’t do anything. But if somebody asks a question, it’s only polite to answer. And being polite is so important, isn’t it? If I forget one little P in an ocean of Qs, it’s the end of the goddamned world, but you can just stand there and quiver and not answer the fucking question?”
“Freddy, stop.” Percy put a hand on his shoulder and Edison swung wild, whacked him right in the eye. Percy doubled over, holding his face. “Fred! I’m trying to help you!”
“You need help, not me,” Freddy snarled back. “After everything I’ve given you people! Without me, without my family, you cunts are just flouncing around on a stage in hell with nobody fucking watching. And what do I get back? What’s my fabulous fee for making your entire disgusting existence possible?” He crossed to the body in two enormous strides and kicked Thaddeus’s shoulder, kicked him over onto his back, and kept on kicking him. Thad’s poor limp arm fell onto the floor.
Everyone started hollering, grabbing Edison, and gnashing their teeth—but all Maxine Mortimer saw was Thad’s left hand, the one poor softhearted Mary had worried would go all pins and needles on him. He’d curled his fingers into a fist. He had something in there, clutched in his bloody fingers. Nobody else saw it. They were too busy wrestling a drunk tycoon, sliding around in a good man’s death.
“That garbage shit-fucking cocksucker fucked my wife,” wailed Freddy, dogpiled under the biggest stars in Tinseltown. “That’s who loved him. My Penny. That’s who!”
Penny shook her head back and forth, her mouth hanging open, not breathing. She flopped onto the floor. “I didn’t…” she gasped. “I didn’t…”
No, she didn’t. Penelope Edison most certainly did not. She couldn’t have. Not in a year of Easters. What the hell was going on here?
“Jesus, someone get her a paper bag,” Maud Locksley said.
“Tell them!” shrieked Edison. The King of Sound and Colour was bawling his eyes out in a pool of cold blood. “That fucking whore snuck around on me while I was in Elish for the Worlds’ Fair! And when I got back, you were all slim and trim again, weren’t you, you bitch, you goddamned gold-digging Jezebel—”
It was going so well. Just like a movie. Right now, in my stateroom, in the silence of the deep, woeful night, I think it was going so well because…that’s what happens in a movie. I cast a spell, and for a moment, just a moment, life had a script. The detective locks the door and names the suspects and, eventually, someone confesses. That’s how the whole business works. It’s instinct. Freddy couldn’t resist it. Or Percy couldn’t. Couldn’t resist the desire to crawl inside the script. It’s safe in there. Nice. Warm. The script will look after you.
But Percy stopped it.
“Everybody cool off!” Percival Unck, for all his faults and virtues, can yell louder than anyone I know. Quiet on set! “Listen to me. This was an accident. Mary, I appreciate what you’re doing, but it’s not necessary. I am telling you the truth. Freddy and I were having a few scotches out on the deck, talking about the new camera line. Fred clapped me on the back, and when he turned around, he saw Penny and Thad through the ballroom windows. Thaddeus kissed Penny, and Freddy saw black. You can’t blame a man for that. He shouldered the door in, confronted Thad, it came to blows, we struggled—all of us, all four of us! We struggled and the gun went off. It could have been any of us who pulled the trigger: me, Penny, Fred—we all had our hands on it at some point. But it was an accident. And what we have to decide now is: How many lives does this terrible accident destroy?”