Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 122, Nos. 3 & 4. Whole Nos. 745 & 746, September/October 2003

I shook my head. “He liked the attention more than I did. You know, Sammy Cahn once said that most songwriters look like dentists, but Max was an exception. He was handsome and talented and even if his wife wasn’t exactly Barbra Streisand, who cared? They made a good-looking couple. So while Patty and I got on with our lives, Max and Lorna kept the scribes busy and our songs benefited. I guess they got more exposure than they deserved.”

“For a while,” she said gently.

“Nothing is forever,” I admitted. “Flower power came and went. Then there was heavy metal. All of a sudden it seemed that the songs Max and I were writing belonged to a bygone age. There was talk of a TV series, with Lorna and Rick Nelson, but Rick’s career was in a tailspin and it all came to nothing.”

“And then you and Max split up.”

“It was no one’s fault,” I insisted, propping myself up in the bed. I shouldn’t be talking so much; the nurse would scold me for tiring myself out. But what did it matter? “Except perhaps it was my fault, for going down with pneumonia at the wrong time. Max and I had been asked to write a couple of numbers for a TV special. I got sick and finished up in hospital. The deadline was forty-eight hours away, so the television company asked Max to work with Chrissie Goldmark. They hit it off straightaway. The songs they wrote were candy floss, but by the time I’d recovered, they were talking to Specter about producing a new album together. Not for Lorna, though.”

“Lorna didn’t take that well, did she?”

“Could you blame her? Chrissie fancied Max, and like all men, he was susceptible to flattery from a pretty girl.”

Alice leaned close again. I supposed it was a trick of hers, a ploy to use when talking to men. A habit, almost. “Were Max and Chrissie lovers?”

“What do you think?” Playing for time again.

“Everyone I’ve spoken to believes the two of them had something going.”

“Maybe they did. So what? It doesn’t make Max a murderer.”

“Lorna was an emotional woman.”

“Emotional woman? Tautology, Alice.”

She wouldn’t be riled. “Lorna was tempestuous. Her career was fading and she hated that. She must have realised her looks wouldn’t last forever. She was smoking eighty a day; her whole life was burning up. Losing her husband to a second-rate wordsmith would have been the last straw. I bet she wanted revenge. Hell hath no fury, you know. Maybe she threatened him with divorce, bad publicity...”

“Max never stopped caring for her. Besides, he wasn’t a violent man.” Suddenly I felt very tired. Reaching back into the past was draining the life from me.

“Anyone can snap,” Alice said softly.

How could I deny it? Clearing the phlegm from my throat, I said, “Max didn’t.”

“Your loyalty does you credit,” she said as I closed my eyes. “But how can you be sure?”

“You’re torturing yourself,” I told Max. “And for no reason.”

“I don’t have an alibi, you know. I was hanging out here on my own while Lorna was in the house on Long Island. We’d had a fight. No point in lying to you, it was over Chrissie.”

I checked my fingernails. “She accused you of having an affair?”

“Yeah, the morning she died. It wasn’t an accusation, just a statement of fact. I didn’t try too hard to deny it. She asked if I wanted a divorce. If so, she was willing to agree. She didn’t intend to spend the rest of her life with someone who had fallen out of love with her. I said I didn’t want to rush things and she made a coarse remark and things kind of went downhill from there. You know how it is.”

“So you came back here, to your old bachelor pad.”

“Lucky I kept it on, huh? I haven’t had the heart to spend time on Long Island ever since she tumbled down that staircase. Fact is, I could have gone back and killed her, made it look like an accident after she’d been drinking. Which she’d been doing too much. The house is quiet, no one would have seen me come and go. Who’s to say I’m innocent?”

He leaned back and the kitchen stool wobbled dangerously beneath him. The sink was piled high with dirty dishes; there were coffee cups filled with day-old instant Yuban. Looking out onto the terrace, I could see rumpled beach towels and grubby squeezed-out tubes of Bain de Soleil.

Following my gaze, he said, “I’ve not been in the mood for tidying.”

“It won’t do, Max.”

“Said like a true Englishman. Sorry for falling short in the stiff-upper-lip department, but the truth is, I’m pretty pissed about all this. All of a sudden, nobody wants to know me. Not even the woman I’m supposed to have committed murder for.”

“You’re right,” I said suddenly. “If you had an alibi, the tongues would stop wagging. You could start your life over.”

“Pity I screwed up by not having Chrissie round that night.”

“Where was she?”