The Naked and the Deadly by Lawrence Block

Author:Lawrence Block
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Subtropic Productions, LLC
Published: 2023-05-11T00:00:00+00:00

ELEVEN

“I GUESS I missed my calling,” Ceil said. “I should have been a detective. I probably would have flopped there, too, but the end might have been different. We all know what girls become when they don’t make it as actresses. What do lousy detectives turn to?”

“Cognac,” I said. “Pass the bottle.”

She passed and I poured. We were in her apartment on Sullivan Street. It was Tuesday night, Ray Powell had long since finished confessing, and Ceil Gorski had just proved to me that she could cook a good meal.

“You figured it out beautifully,” she said. “But do I get an assist on the play?”

“Easily.” I tucked tobacco into my pipe, lit up. “You managed to get my mind working. Powell was a genius at murder. A certifiable psychotic, but also a genius. He set things up beautifully. First of all, the frame couldn’t have been neater. He very carefully set up Donahue with means, motive and opportunity. Then he shot the girl and left Donahue on the hook.”

I worked on the cognac. “The neat thing was this—if Donahue managed to have an alibi, if by some chance somebody was watching him when the shot was fired, Powell was still in the clear. He himself was one of the few men in the room with no conceivable motive for wanting Karen Price dead.”

Ceil moved a little closer on the couch. I put an arm around her. “Then the way he got rid of Donahue was sheer perfection,” I continued. “He made it look enough like suicide to close the case as far as the police were concerned. And Jerry Gunther isn’t an easy man to bulldoze. He’s thorough. But Powell made it look good.”

“You didn’t swallow it.”

“That’s because I play hunches. Even so, I was up a tree by then. Because the murder had a double edge to it. Even if he muffed it somehow, even if it didn’t go over as suicide, Donahue would be dead and he would be in the clear. Because there was only one way to interpret it—Donahue had been killed by the man who killed Karen Price, obviously, and had been killed so that the original killing would go unsolved. That made me suspect Joe Conn and never let me guess at Powell, not even on speculation. Even with the second killing he hid the fact that Donahue and not Karen was the real target.”

“And that’s where I came in,” she said happily.

“That’s exactly where you came in,” I agreed. “You and your active imagination. You thought how grim it would be if Karen had only been playing a joke with those phone calls. And that was the only explanation in the world for the calls. I had to believe Donahue was getting the calls, and that Karen was making them. A disguised voice might work once, but she’d called him a few times.

“That left two possibilities, really. She could be jealous—which seemed contrary to everything I had learned about her. Or it could be a gag.

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