"Oh, I knew he was innocent for a dozen reasons."
"Even so, didn't the Carr woman know about Broadfield's apartment?"
I nodded. "As a matter of fact, she did. But she couldn't have led her killer there because she was unconscious when she made the trip. She was hit on the head first and then stabbed. It stood to reason that she'd been hit elsewhere. Otherwise the killer would have just gone on hitting her until she was dead. He wouldn't have stopped to pick up a knife. But what you did, Claude, was knock her out somewhere else and then get her to Broadfield's apartment. By then you'd disposed of whatever you'd hit her with, so you finished the job with a knife."
"I think I'll have a cup of chocolate. You're sure you wouldn't care for some?"
"Positive. I didn't want to believe a cop would kill Portia Carr in order to frame Broadfield. Everything pointed that way, but I didn't like the feel of it. I preferred the idea that framing Broadfield was a handy way to get away with murder, that the killer's main object was to get rid of Portia. But then how would he know about Broadfield's apartment and phone number? What I needed was somebody who was connected to both of them. And I found somebody, but there was no motive apparent."
"You must mean me," he said calmly. "Since I certainly had no motive. But then I didn't know the Carr person either, and barely knew Broadfield, so your reasoning breaks down, doesn't it?"
"Not you. Douglas Fuhrmann. He was going to ghostwrite Broadfield's book. That's why Broadfield had turned informer- he wanted to be somebody important and write a bestseller. He got the idea from Carr because she was going to go the Happy Hooker one better. Fuhrmann got the idea of playing both ends and got in touch with Carr to see if he could write her book, too. That's what tied the two of them together- it has to be- but it's not a murder motive."
"Then why am I elected? Because you don't know of anyone else?"
I shook my head. "I knew it was you before I really knew why. I asked you yesterday afternoon if you knew anything about Doug Fuhrmann. You knew enough about him to go over to his house last night and kill him."
"This is remarkable. Now I'm being accused of the murder of a man I never heard of."
"It won't work, Claude. Fuhrmann was a threat to you because he'd been talking with both of them, with Carr and with Broadfield. He was trying to reach me last night. If I'd had time to see him, maybe you wouldn't have been able to kill him. And maybe you would have, because maybe he didn't know what he knew. You were one of Portia Carr's clients."
"That's a filthy lie."
"Maybe it's filthy. I wouldn't know. I don't know what you did with her or what she did with you. I could make some educated guesses."
"Damn you, you're an animal." He didn't raise his voice, but the loathing in it was fierce. "I will thank you not to talk like that in the same house with my mother."
I just looked at him. He met my eyes with confidence at first, and then his face seemed to melt. All the resolve went out of it. His shoulders sagged, and he looked at once much older and much younger. Just a middle-aged little boy.
"Knox Hardesty knew," I went on. "So you killed Portia for nothing. I can pretty much figure out what happened, Claude. When Broadfield turned up at Prejanian's office, you learned about more than police corruption. You learned through Broadfield that Portia was in Knox Hardesty's pocket, feeding him her client list in order to escape deportation. You were on that list and you figured it was just a question of time before she handed you over to him.
"So you got Portia to press charges against Broadfield, accusing him of extortion. You wanted to give him a motive for killing her, and that was an easy one to arrange. She thought you were a cop when you called her, and it was easy enough for her to go along with it. One way or another, you managed to scare her pretty well. Whores are easy to scare.
"At this point you had Broadfield set up beautifully. You didn't even have to be particularly brilliant about the murder itself because the cops would be so anxious to tie it to Broadfield. You decoyed Portia to the Village at the same time that you sent Broadfield off to Brooklyn. Then you knocked her out, dragged her into his apartment, killed her, and got out of there. You dropped the knife in a sewer, washed your hands, and came on home to Mama."
"Leave my mother out of this."
"That bothers you, doesn't it? My mentioning your mother?"
"Yes, it does." He was squeezing his hands together as if to control them. "It bothers me a great deal. That's why you're doing it, I suppose."
"Not entirely, Claude." I drew a breath. "You shouldn't have killed her. There was no point to it. Hardesty already knew about you. If he'd thrown your name into the open at the beginning, a lot of time would have been saved and Fuhrmann and Manch would still be alive. But- "
"Manch?"
"Leon Manch. It looked as though he might have killed Fuhrmann, but the timing was wrong. And then it looked as though you might have set it up, but you would have done it better. You would have killed them in the right order, wouldn't you? First Fuhrmann and then Manch, and not the other way around."
"I don't know what you're talking about."
And this time he evidently didn't, and the difference in his tone was obvious. "Leon Manch was another name on Portia's client list. He was also Knox Hardesty's pipeline into the mayor's office. I called him yesterday afternoon and arranged to see him, and I guess he couldn't handle it. He jumped out a window last night."
"He actually killed himself."
"It looks that way."
"He could have killed Portia Carr." He said it not argumentatively but thoughtfully.
I nodded. "He could have killed her, yes. But he couldn't have killed Fuhrmann because Fuhrmann made a couple of telephone calls after Manch had been officially pronounced dead. You see what that means, Claude?"
"What?"
"All you had to do was leave that little writer alone. You couldn't know it, but that was all you had to do. Manch left a note. He didn't confess to murder, but it could have been interpreted that way. I would certainly have interpreted it that way and I would have done everything possible to pin the Carr murder on Manch's dead body. If I managed it, Broadfield was clear. If not, he would stand trial himself. Either way, you would have been home free because I would have settled on Manch as the killer and the cops had already settled on Broadfield and that left nobody in the world hunting for you."
He said nothing for a long time. Then he narrowed his eyes and said, "You're trying to trap me."
"You're already trapped."