Free Suspicious Circumstances by Patrick Quentin Page B

crinkles came. Hadn’t he stopped and looked at Tray? Hadn’t he said, ‘A pooch doing handsprings? You don’t see that every day?’ At the time, I’d thought he was just being chummy. But — what if he’d noticed the paw-prints on The Night and was putting two and two together? What if all that revolting Daddy Long Legs palsy-walsiness had been fake?
    The marble foyer seemed to rock and roll around me. Gino was away from the others, standing gazing at the Juan Gris. Gino had an unexpected highbrow thing about modern painting. In a desperate attempt to seem nonchalant, I slid over to him.
    ‘Gino.’
    ‘Hi, Nickie,’ he said, still pondering the Juan Gris.
    ‘Gino, it’s the end. Tray’s paw-prints — they’re all over the hall.’
    ‘So.’ Gino turned to me with the broadest, whitest grin. ‘I kind of figured they might be.’
    ‘You figured . . .?’
    ‘Didn’t you get it? When I saw the cop watching Tray, I suddenly figured, what if there were some prints on Ronnie’s floor? That’s why I gave him that line about Norma being crazy about Tray and us bringing him over here all the time.’
    He slung his arm over my shoulder. ‘Get it, Kid? That way I’ve got it all sewed up. If the cop didn’t notice the prints, then okay he didn’t notice them. If he did — what can he do now? He’s maybe got a suspicion that maybe Anny was there after all. But how can he prove it? What’s to stop us from having brought Tray over to do his tricks for Norma the day before or even the day before that or even maybe the morning of the day when she fell? Boy, it’s in the bag.’
    The foyer wasn’t rocking and rolling quite as much, but it was still rocking and rolling a bit. My face must have showed it, for Gino took his arm off my shoulder and playfully tapped me on the cheek with his fist.
    ‘Relax, kid. There’s nothing to get steamed up about. Thanks to the Old Home Team, starring Uncle Hans and Gino, there's…’
    At that point he broke off because Ronnie came hurrying down the staircase towards us.
    Ever since I was a boy, I’d always thought of Ronnie Light as the suavest, most debonair figure in Hollywood, and I’d been sure that Mother’s description of him as ‘shattered’ had just been Mother. Ronnie, I felt, was the one man who could more than rise above this hideous situation. But, to my surprise, as he came towards us, ‘shattered’ was exactly the word for him. His distinction was still there, of course. Nothing could get rid of that. But it was a sort of ‘shattered’ distinction.
    He went to Mother first and kissed her cheek. ‘Anny!’
    ‘Dear Ronnie!’
    He vaguely noticed the rest of us and gave us the weakest of greetings.
    ‘Hello, everybody. I’m …’
    His voice choked off in what could have been grief but which seemed to me much more like an uncontrollable attack of the jitters.
    Mother was squinting down at a tiny diamond watch pinned to her breast.
    ‘Heavens, it’s late. We must leave. This very minute.’
    She was half way towards the door when Ronnie managed to croak, ‘Anny, I’m afraid we can’t leave just yet. I’m afraid … That is, I’ve just had a call …’
    And then, while Mother was poised on the threshold, halted by his words, another lovely black-draped figure came hurrying in from outside. She saw Mother and stretched out both arms to her, her teeth flashing shark-white under her little flying veil.
    ‘Deah, deah Anny,’ she cried in that rich, unspeakably cultured voice which Pam, who was the ‘real thing’ in England and knew what she was talking about, maintained had been fabricated in the slums of Birmingham for Export Only. ‘Deah, deah Anny — deah, deah Ronnie. I do hope I’m not tar somely late.’
    There it was — there was no doubt about it — there was Sylvia La Mann, a rather plump but quite unmistakable Sylvia La Mann.
    While Mother stood rooted to the spot like a beautiful pillar of salt, Sylvia La Mann wafted over to