There were a few packages of chicken breasts, Le Menus, and lean ground beef. Cooking, it appeared, was not a pleasure for Beryl but a utilitarian exercise. I knew what my own kitchen was like. This one was depressingly sterile. Motes of dust were suspended in the pale light seeping through slits of the gray designer blinds in the window over the sink. The drainboard and sink were empty and dry. The appliances were modern and looked unused.
“The other thought is she came in here for a drink,” Marino speculated.
“Her STAT alcohol was negative,” I said.
“Don’t mean she didn’t think about it.”
He opened a cabinet above the sink. There wasn’t an inch to spare on three shelves: Jack Daniel’s, Chivas Regal, Tanqueray, liqueurs, and something else that caught my attention. In front of the Cognac on the top shelf was a bottle of Haitian Barbancourt Rhum, aged fifteen years and as expensive as unblended Scotch.
Lifting it out with a gloved hand, I set it on the counter. There was no strip stamp, and the seal around the gold cap was unbroken.
“I don’t think she got this around here,” I told Marino. “My guess is she got it in Miami, Key West.”
“So you’re saying she brought it back from Florida?”
“It’s possible. Clearly, she was a connoisseur of good booze. Barbancourt’s wonderful.”
“Guess I should start calling you Doctor Connoisseur,” he said.
The bottle of Barbancourt wasn’t dusty, even though many of the bottles near it were.
“It might explain why she was in the kitchen,” I went on. “Perhaps she came downstairs to put away the rum. She may have been contemplating a nightcap when someone arrived at her door.”
“Yeah, but what it don’t explain is why she left her piece in here on the counter when she answered the door. She was supposed to be spooked, right? Still makes me think she was expecting company, knew the squirrel. Hey, she’s got all this fancy booze, right? She drinks the stuff alone? Don’t make sense. Makes more sense to think she did a little entertaining from time to time, had some guy in.
Hell, maybe it’s this ‘M’ she was writing down there in the Keys. Maybe that’s who she was expecting the night she was whacked.”
“You’re entertaining the possibility ‘M’ is the killer,” I said.
“Wouldn’t you be?”
He was getting combative, and his toying with the unlit cigarette was beginning to grate on my nerves.
“I would entertain every possibility,” I replied. “For example, I would also entertain the possibility she wasn’t expecting company. She was in the kitchen putting away her rum and possibly thinking of pouring herself a drink. She was nervous, had her automatic nearby on the counter. She was startled when the doorbell rang or someone started knocking–”
“Right,” he cut me off. “She’s startled, jumpy. So why does she leave her piece here in the kitchen when she goes to the damn door?”
“Did she practice?”
“Practice?”
he said as our eyes met. “Practice what*”
“Shooting.”
“Hell… I donno …”
“If she didn’t, it wasn’t a natural reflex for her to arm herself but a conscious deliberation. Women carry Mace in their pocketbooks. They’re assaulted and the Mace never enters their minds until after the fact because defending themselves isn’t a reflex.”
“I don’t know …”
I did know. I had a Ruger .38 revolver loaded with Silvertips, one of the most destructive cartridges money could buy. The only reason it would occur to me to arm myself with the handgun was I practiced, took it down to the range inside my building several times a month. When I was home alone, I was more comfortable with the handgun than without it.
There was something else. I thought of the living room, of the fireplace tools upright in their brass stand on the hearth. Beryl had struggled with her assailant in that room and it never occurred to her to arm herself with the poker or the shovel. Defending herself was not a reflex. Her only reflex was to run, whether it was up the stairs or to Key West.
I explained, “She may have been a stranger to the gun, Marino. The doorbell rings. She’s unnerved, confused. She goes into the living room and looks through the peephole. Whoever it is, she trusts the person enough to open the door. The gun is forgotten.”