"You did very well this morning, Isabel," Stone said. "Thank you very much."
"All I did was tell the truth," Isabel replied. She opened a bottle of chardonnay and left them to their lunch.
They chatted in a desultory way about the events of the past weeks, and Stone felt depressed. He finished his salad and tossed off the remainder of his wine. "Excuse me a minute," he said, getting up. "I have to make a phone call."
"There's a phone," Dino said, pointing at the pool bar.
"This one is private," Stone replied. "I'll go inside." He went into the living room and looked around for a phone, but didn't see one, so he went into Vance's study and sat at the desk. Someone had left the bookcase /door to the dressing room open. He got out his notebook and dialed.
"Hello?"
"Betty, it's Stone."
"Well, hello there. I heard about the court thing this morning on the news. Congratulations."
"Thanks, but Marc Blumberg carried most of the water. Listen, I called about something else, something you have to know about."
"Dolce's dirty pictures? I probably saw them before you did; it's earlier here, remember?"
"I'm so sorry about that, Betty."
"Don't worry about it; it's made me a lot more interesting to people here. I've already had three dinner invitations this morning."
Stone laughed. "You're amazing."
"I don't imagine the pictures went down quite as well for you. They must have caused problems."
"Well, what can I do about it?"
"Treasure the photographs, sweetie; I will. Bye, now."
Stone hung up laughing. Then he noticed that something seemed to have changed in the dressing room. He got up and walked through the doorway. The dressing room was empty of all Vance's clothes; only bare racks were left. The chesterfield sofa, where Vance's trysts with Beverly Walters had occurred, was all that was left in the room.
He was about to turn and go back outside to join Dino and Mary Ann, when he remembered something. He walked to Vance's bathroom, looked inside, then down the little hallway that separated it from the dressing room. He had noticed something odd here before and had forgotten about it.
He went into the bathrqpm and, with his outstretched arms, measured the distance to the door from the wall of the bathroom that backed onto the dressing room. Holding out his arms, he walked into the hallway and held his arms up to the wall of the little corridor. Then he measured the distance from the wall containing the dressing room safe to the door, and marked that off on the corridor wall. Most people wouldn't have noticed, he thought, but with his experience of remodeling his own house, he had. The wall containing the safe appeared to be about eighteen inches deep, instead of the usual four or six inches.
He went back into the dressing room, trying to remember the combination to the safe. "One-five-three-eight," he said aloud, then tapped the number into the keypad and opened the door. The safe was about four and a half inches deep; it was the kind meant to be installed in a standard depth wall between the studs. Or it appeared to be. He rapped on the sides of the safe, which made a shallow metallic noise, then he rapped on the rear wall of the safe, which made a deeper, hol-lower sound. Something was very odd here.
He rapped harder, and the rear wall of the safe seemed to move a little. Then, with his fingertips, he pressed hard on the rear wall. It gave an eighth of an inch. Then there was a click, and the seemingly fixed steel plate swung outward an inch. Stone hooked a finger around the plate and pulled it toward him, revealing a twelve-inch-deep second compartment in the safe. Inside, Stone saw two things: Vance Calder's jewelry box and a nine-millimeter semiautomatic pistol.
"My God!" he said aloud. "Arrington killed him." Then from behind him, a male voice spoke.
"I thought so, too."
Stone turned to find Manolo standing there. "What?"
"When I found Mr. Calder dead, I thought Mrs. Calder had shot him. They had had a big argument about something earlier; there was lots of shouting and screaming. It wasn't their first."
"What have you done, Manolo?"
"When I heard the shot and found Mr. Calder, the gun was on the floor beside him, where whoever shot him had dropped it. I thought Mrs. Calder had done it, and my immediate thought-I'm not sure why-was to protect her. So I took the gun and put it in the hidden compartment of the safe, and, so the police would think it was a robbery, I put his jewelry box in there, too, and closed it. They never figured it ou
t."
Stone took a pen from his pocket, stuck it through the trigger guard of the pistol and lifted it from the safe. "Then it will have the fingerprints of the killer on it. Now we'll know for sure who killed Vance."
Manolo shook his head. "I'm afraid not, Mr. Barrington; I wiped the gun clean before I hid it. I was so sure that Mrs. Calder had done it. Of course, after this morning in court, I don't think so anymore."