“Ryan told me he never stays in love for long,” I said. “Do you think he'll ever find his soul mate and settle down?”
Lennie chuckled. “His soul mate would have to be very rich. Ryan has expensive tastes.”
“So he doesn't have money of his own? I'd have thought, being a famous playwright, he'd be rich.”
“He spends it as fast as it comes in,” Lennie said. “He
needs another Angus MacDonald with an inexhaustible supply of cash. Actually”—he looked up with the hint of a grin—”I told him what he needs is a rich elderly widow. He could marry her, then feed her a steady supply of arsenic.”
He started laughing. “We had a long, earnest talk along those lines, one night when we were both in our cups. We sat there discussing painless and undetectable ways to bump off old ladies.”
“At O'Connor's, was this?” I asked.
“Where else? Now hold still. You moved your head.” And he went on painting.
I tried to hold still, but I couldn't wait to get off that stool. Maybe this was what Paddy had overheard at O'Connor's that night. Ryan and Lennie had been joking, but Paddy had taken their plans seriously. In which case the overheard conversation had nothing to do with his death after all. In which case I was wasting my time sitting on a cold hard stool!
Twenty
I was stiff and numb by the time Lennie announced that he had painted all he could for one day. He was pleased with the result, though. “Another session and I think we'll have something marketable here,” he said, but he wouldn't show me the canvas. “I never show anyone until it's finished. It's bad luck.”
So I agreed to come back the next morning and walked home briskly, trying to restore the circulation to my legs. In a way I was relieved to have solved the mystery of the overheard conversation and to know that Ryan and Lennie were not involved in Paddy's death. It would appear, then, that his death had nothing to do with Ryan, for which I was glad. But that meant that I didn't know where to go from here. If either Angus MacDonald or his father had hired a killer, then I couldn't go delving into the New York underworld to unmask him. This made me realize how useless I was as an investigator. Paddy would have known where to go and whom to question. He had contacts in all the gangs. He moved on both sides of the fence, as Sergeant Wolski had said. He was lucky to have that facility. On the other hand, it might have been the cause of his death.
So it looked as though I would have to leave the investigation of Paddy Riley's murder to the police. From my brief conversation with Daniel a week ago, he had hinted that he had been looking into the case himself, and that a dangerous element might be involved. I told myself I was well out of it. If I started probing around, asking questions about gangs and hired killers, I might well wind up dead myself.
I stopped at the post office on my way home, to see if any letters had come for Paddy. I had asked the post office to hold any mail, but until now nothing had shown up. So I was surprised to find two letters. One contained a check for a hundred dollars, along with a note in slanted green ink apologizing for the delay in paying the fee. The other was from a Mrs. Edna Purvis of White Plains, asking him to call on her at his earliest convenience to discuss a matter of extreme delicacy. A new divorce case, obviously. I was tempted to call on Mrs. Purvis myself and take on the case as the junior partner in the firm. Then I reminded myself that I hadn't been at all successful in solving Paddy's murder. I had better stop these foolish aspirations right away and find myself a sensible job I could do well. At least I now had contacts in the Village. Sid and Gus knew everybody. And if everything else failed, I could always make my living as an artist's model.
That night I woke from a deep sleep with a jolt. I had been dreaming again about Paddy's coat. “It's too big for me. You take it,” he was saying. I lay there, shaken, and unable to sleep. Was there something I had missed? Had I been too quick to dismiss Ryan and Lennie's little joke? Now that I analyzed it calmly, I had to admit that the scenario did not ring true. Paddy was an experienced, streetwise detective. He had lived on both sides of the law. Overhearing two men discussing how to poison an old woman would not have upset him to that degree, and it wouldn't have been a case he couldn't handle either. All he had to do was see Daniel and pass on his suspicions to him. Whatever Paddy had overheard that night at O'Connor's, it was something quite different.
The next day, after my session with Lennie, I went to see Paddy's former landlady.
“I'm glad you turned up again,” she said. “I want to get that room cleaned out and the first of the month is coming up.”