She tried to read his notes as he wrote them but his handwriting was atrocious, and he kept moving back and forth from one end of the board to the other.
Finally, finally he stopped, although likely it was more a function of him running out of space than his brain slowing down.
He capped the pen.
Stepped back, and stared at the board.
He held up the marker without turning around. “Thanks for this.”
Jill lifted an eyebrow. Acknowledgment of her usefulness. That was… new.
She pushed off the couch and moved beside him so they stood shoulder-to-shoulder. Actually, more like shoulder to waist, since he was several inches taller.
“What am I looking at?” she asked.
He tossed the marker on the coffee table, then linked his fingers behind his head, turning in a circle.
“I had a breakthrough.”
She smiled. “Yeah, I figured.”
He glanced at her then, seeming to see her for the first time since she’d arrived, and he dropped his hands, looking her up and down.
“You’re in your pajamas.”
She glanced down at her pink-and-white-striped flannel pants and white tank. “Well, you called me at nine o’clock on a Sunday night. Not quite my bedtime, but let’s just say I’d put my ball gown away for the evening.”
He’d already turned back to his boards. His main one—the one he called the board—was more barren than last time she’d seen it, and the stack of papers on the table told her that he’d recently decided he was on the wrong track.
“Talk to me,” she said patiently.
“We’ve decided that pushing someone over a railing smells more like impulse than premeditation, right? If you’re going to show up at someone’s house with the intent to kill, you take a gun, maybe a knife—”
“Right,” Jill said. “You don’t think, ‘gosh, I want to off someone; I’m going to wait until they’re in a prime position on the second-floor landing and then push them.’”
“Exactly. So we’ve been operating under the assumption that this is a crime of passion.”
“Right…” she said, waiting.
“It is a crime of passion, but we got the passion wrong,” he said, turning to face her, eyes excited.
Jill shook her head. “Explain?”
“Something’s been bothering me about the way she died,” he continued hurriedly. “We know that someone pushed her, likely in a fit of rage.”
“Sure, but that’s not all that unusual—”
Vincent held up a finger. “No, what’s been bothering me is that everything we’ve learned about Lenora Birch says that she’s not the type to provoke someone. Almost everyone we’ve talked to, from the housekeeper to her boyfriend, said she’s hard to rattle. Cool to the point of being cold.”
Jill nodded, still having no idea where he was going with all this.
“Everyone except one person said that,” he said.
Jill chewed her lip as she mentally ran through every conversation they’d had, every person they’d interviewed.
“Her agent,” Jill said. “The Lenora that her agent described was a different person. Fiery, temperamental, passionate.”
“Exactly.” He took a step nearer, his eyes blazing. “Passionate. This was a crime of passion, but not of the romantic, sexual nature. If Lenora could be provoked into saying something that would piss off another person to the point of murder, it means they would both have to be fired up.”
“Okay?”
He breathed out a sigh of irritation. “We’ve been looking at her lovers, and lovers of her lovers. But the Lenora we keep hearing about would have been indifferent if she were talking about a husband or a boyfriend, and nobody pushes an indifferent person to their death.”
“Not entirely true,” Jill said, holding up a finger. “For some people there might be no more trigger quite as hot as being ignored by someone you love.”
He shook his head. “Lenora was nearly seventy. The people in her life would have learned not to love her that deeply. They would have been used to it.”
“So what are you saying?”
“I’m saying that we’ve been trying to figure out the murder’s trigger, when what we really should have been looking for is Lenora’s. What would have set her off enough to say something that would drive another person to murder her. She’s not a woman that inspires great passion because she doesn’t feel great passion. Except when talking about—”
“Her career,” Jill said, finally understanding what he was getting out. “Lenora Birch cared about her career—her legacy—more than anything.”
He nodded. “Someone that threatened that—challenged that—it would have pissed her off. She would have been—”
“Cruel,” Jill finished for him. “Her agent said that Lenora could be cruel when she felt her legacy as an actress was threatened.”