McNally's Bluff by Lawrence Sanders, Vincent Lardo Page A

dream a reality. “How was the party?”
    “Not bad until the hostess dropped dead.”
    “You’re kidding?” Georgy said, moving to sit up.
    “I wish I were,” I told her, “and so, I’m sure, would the hostess.”
    Wide awake now, she asked, “Accident?”
    “The jury is still out. Why don’t you go back to bed and I’ll tell you about it in the morning.”
    Glancing at the night table clock, she reminded me, “It is morning, and you know I won’t sleep until you tell me what happened.”
    “I have to get a bicarb. My tummy is talking to me.”
    Georgy propped herself up by placing my pillow over hers for support. “Your tummy is telling you that less is better. The bicarb is in the bathroom.”
    As I made my way to the bathroom I recalled Matthew Hayes telling us that barbiturates were the staple of the carnival’s medicine cabinet. Thanks to Georgy girl’s idea of food, bicarbonate of soda is our staple of choice. I dare not say this aloud as besides her beauty, Lieutenant O’Hara is also the Annie Oakley of the firing range.
    I dropped two tablets into a glass of water and as I waited for them to self-destruct, I called out, “I only picked.”
    “You mean you picked the plate clean.”
    I didn’t have the nerve to tell her it was a table I had picked clean. I drank the lemon-flavored brew and hoped for the best. Georgy had switched on the bedside lamp, looking like a child in her pigtails waiting to hear a fairy tale with a happy ending. I sat on the bed and told her about a party with a deadly ending. I had repeated the story so often, and rehashed it in my mind so many times, I could recite it by rote and did.
    When done, Georgy opened her mouth to speak and I put my finger over her lips. “Don’t say it,” I ordered.
    “Impossible.” She said it anyway.
    “Then I was witness to a miracle,” I said, going to the closet and feeling shirt pockets until I hit on a pack of English Ovals, the only brand of cigarettes I used to smoke. I am down to two, maybe three, a day and felt the need for one now, thinking I would have another the next time I witnessed a miracle.
    “Time of death?” Georgy grilled.
    “Georgy girl, we won’t know that until the medical examiner performs the PM, but you know time of death is not an exacting science with parameters of give or take some several hours.”
    “I also know that Eberhart asked the doc for a ballpark estimate and the doc gave it to him because they always do.”
    “Okay,” I said, lighting up, “based on a career of examining fresh corpses, the doc guessed she had been dead some two to four hours.”
    “And that was when?”
    “It had to be after eleven by then, maybe closer to midnight.”
    “You saw her as Venus at nine.” The little girl in pigtails was now the policewoman in pursuit of the facts. “That makes the time of death shortly thereafter or approximately three hours before the doc saw her. Good for the doc and cherchez la maid.”
    I removed an eyebrow tweezer from a glass coaster and declared it an ashtray. “Lieutenant, we don’t even know the cause of death as yet.”
    “If she had checked out via natural causes she would have been found on that chaise lounge and not in that ridiculous maze...” Georgy almost leaped out of the bed. “ The Lady from Shanghai ,” she announced with glee.
    I am a Hollywood buff who can hold his own in the World Series of trivia games, but Georgy girl is a true connoisseur of celluloid. I speak of the industry’s output from inception to the middle of the last century when they stopped making movies and began making something called “films.” Connie would tolerate an evening with Fred and Ginger only to placate her biological clock while Georgy likes nothing better than to pop some corn and sing along with Nelson and Jeannette.
    I am familiar with Orson Welles’s cult film noir, The Lady from Shanghai, mostly because he turned his stunning redhead wife into a stunning blonde for the