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

film.
    Georgy now reminded me that the film’s final sequence took place in a mirror-maze with... “The good guy and the bad guy shooting it out and hitting mirror images of each other. So many broken mirrors everyone connected with the movie had a zillion years of bad luck.”
    “Interesting, but what’s the point?” I asked, happily puffing away.
    “Mirror images. Nothing is what it seems. That’s the point.”
    “Go to sleep, Georgy.”
    “Look, McNally, if she wasn’t found on her chaise lounge she was murdered and carried to the maze, or was led to the maze and killed there.”
    Which was what Al Rogoff had said. Marlena Marvel either walked there alive, or was carried there dead. But why and how was the enigma. Why kill her in one place and carry the body to another place? How could she have gotten from the second floor of the house to the goal of the maze, alive or dead, without being seen by literally dozens of people?
    “You saw her on the second-floor balcony at about nine,” Georgy reiterated. “Then you all went to the maze.”
    “Right.” My English Oval was near extinction and I wished for another miracle. “We were all over that damn maze. Up and down every pathway and finally inside the goal. Marlena was not there. Believe me.”
    “And when the party moved out, the caterers moved into the great room which is in full view of the staircase leading to the second floor.”
    “Right again,” I said. “But we found Marlena Marvel, dead, in the goal of the maze—and don’t say it...”
    “I won’t say impossible,” she assured me.
    “You just did.” I doused my smoke and got into bed telling her of Joe Gallo’s on-the-spot coverage of the crime. “His name will be all over the newspapers and airwaves tomorrow—or today, that is.”
    “Joe? Was he there?”
    “Big as life,” I said, “and with Fitz, of all people.”
    “Who’s he?”
    “Not he, my dear. She. Elizabeth Fitzwilliams.”
    “Really? What does she look like?”
    I thought a moment, then said, “Like that lady from Shanghai, only better.”
    Georgy closed the light. “He’ll only make a fool of himself,” she predicted.
    What’s it to you? And may I have my pillow?
    “It’s nothing to me.” I got the pillow in my face. “Is she rich?”
    “Her father is a Wall Street tycoon and she never wears the same dress twice.”
    “Another Palm Beach brat. Serves him right. She’ll break his heart.”
    “The way he broke your heart, Lieutenant?”
    She rolled over to my side of the bed, snuggling up like a kitten wanting to be stroked. “He didn’t break my heart. He left it to make room for you.”
    I took her into my arms and whispered, “What a lovely sentiment. You’re a poet, Georgy girl.”
    “And you’re my inspiration. Are you going to work for this Hayes guy?”
    “Not if I can help it. He’s a cantankerous little runt and a con artist.”
    “In that case, McNally, cherchez la husband.”
    “Impossible,” I said—then bit my tongue.
    “Amazing,” was father’s take on the death of Marlena Marvel, which made the front pages of the PB Post and Daily News this morning, as well as in most of the dailies from Jacksonville to Miami, and the tabloid press across the country.
    That father did not declare it impossible was testimony to the rigid objectivity he applied to his legal cases in particular and life in general. We were seated in father’s office in the executive suite of the McNally Building on Royal Palm Way where his Sergeant at Arms, in the guise of executive secretary Mrs. Trelawney, dotes on the King and harasses his subjects.
    Father explained that he was in the den last night reading Dickens, when Ursi disturbed his nightly journey back to the days of horse and carriage, divorceless marriage and a footman behind every diner. Ursi had come from her apartment over the garage where she and Jamie were watching the evening news when the story of trouble at Le Maze preempted the scheduled