Free A Killing in Comics by Max Allan Collins Page B

were going.
    I sat next to her and she nestled against me, grabbing on to my arm like a Titanic survivor clinging to a floating chunk of deck chair. The lighting was subdued, with only one of several lamps on, its square shade upheld by a female Balinese dancer on a white table; a male Balinese dancer was doing the same thing with an identical shade on an identical table, but in darkness, past a white door down the wall.
    The other day I hadn’t noticed that the modernity of the furnishings and the general decor—the drawn drapes on a big window we faced were light green with a coral geometric pattern—had these faux touches of antiquity. The lamp tables and a couple of spare chairs had an Egyptian feel, and a couple more disembodied white-plaster Greek noggins on pedestals stared at us from this corner or that one.
    At the same time, even as my nostrils tingled with her Chanel No. 5, I saw the ghosts of the guests of the birthday party, wandering around and even through the furniture—Donny in his cape and sweat-soaked superhero long johns flying from attendee to attendee, Rod Krane in his gray Brooks Brothers rewarding the room with his presence, Harry Spiegel and Moe Shulman in their wrinkled off-the-rack numbers, Selma Harrison off to one side with her floral tent a stark contrast to Louis Cohn’s maitre d’s tuxedo.
    Right over by those drapes—they’d been open onto the city at the party, the Empire State in the background—the table had stretched with Donny’s birthday cake. With the lighting so dim, a discolored patch on the floor was hard to make out, and at first I thought it was my imagination.
    I was sitting up.
    She said, not quite slurring, “Liquor cart’s in the bedroom. You want something? . . . Oh, but you don’t drink.”
    “You have any Coca-Cola?”
    “Sure. It’s in the kitchen.” She pointed and her red-nailed forefinger tickled the air. “Over there.”
    She indicated the white door between the two white tables with the Balinese dancer lamps.
    “I’ll get it myself,” I said, and rose.
    I glanced at her, and she was slumped back into an emerald leather cushion, eyes closed, a provocative pile of blonde hair, pink flesh and black taffeta.
    But I took a small detour, to see if my imagination was working overtime or if there really was a big fat stain on the plush white carpeting, right where Donny had fallen. I crouched like Sherlock Holmes trying to find a magnifying glass he’d dropped, finding instead that (despite the lack of light) my eyes were doing fine.
    An area roughly the size of dead Donny had discolored the carpet, all right, turning it a sort of sick gray, as best I could tell in this lighting. That knife had gone in Donny and held the blood in, the cork in a bottle—there’d been precious little spillage, and the knife had not been removed when the body had been, by the ambulance boys—I remembered that clearly, since it was one more bizarre aspect of that offbeat birthday party.
    Then why was the carpet so discolored? And, anyway, blood wouldn’t have made this gray smear. Had the cops noticed this last night? Had Chandler been here today? I rose and glanced over at the couch where Honey appeared asleep.
    Shrugging to myself, I went through the white door into a white kitchen—medium-size, but it had probably been crowded when the Waldorf caterers were using it as a staging station. Much of the floor space was taken up by a red-topped Formica table with four red plastic-upholstered chairs, and two walls were cabinets above counter with doors below, another wall was given over to a little more counter and cabinets but mostly double sink and a big refrigerator. And a second door connected to the dining room.
    Still, the space was small enough that you’d imagine any guest who ducked in to fiddle with something in the refrigerator would get noticed.
    Speaking of the fridge, I checked it to see if any insulin bottle was still in there. It wasn’t—Chandler must