“No, Darling, you don’t. You’ve nagged me quite enough about that incident as it is. With the way you bring it up at every opportunity, one might almost think you care.”
He turned back to Tom and continued before I had the chance to say anything, which was probably for the best. Yes, I cared, but if he tried to force me to admit it, he probably wouldn’t like the result.
“Kit’s brother Francis uses dope. Not cocaine, not as far as I know, but we all know he’s dependent on Veronal, and you saw him that night at Sutherland Hall, Gardiner. The only thing that’ll do that to someone’s eyes is opium.”
Tom nodded. “I daresay you’ve tried that, as well?”
“Since this isn’t an official interview,” Crispin said coolly, “I’ll admit that I have tried a lot of things. Once. But I don’t use dope as a general rule. And I largely don’t do business with Dominic Rivers.”
“Who does? Other than Ronald Blanton and Gladys Long?”
“A long list of people,” Crispin said. “I’ll write it down for you, if you’d like. Some of them would be guesses, the others I know about for a fact.”
Tom nodded. “I’ll take it. But that’s for another day. First, we have to deal with this one. Who killed Montrose?”
“We don’t know,” I said. “Rivers and Blanton had gone off into another room, and when Blanton came back, he was flying high. Rivers then took Gladys off to a different part of the flat. Montrose asked for the loo, and after he left, the others figured out that he was most likely spying on them, and went after him. The three of us were left alone in the sitting room. I thought we ought to make sure that everything was all right—” I slanted Crispin a disgruntled glance, “because I was afraid they would hurt Montrose…”
“You were afraid they were going to kill him, and you sat in the sitting room and waited?”
“No,” I said, “Good God, Tom, of course not. We wouldn’t have done that. I was afraid they were going to get into a fight. That someone would catch him eavesdropping, and would hit him and toss him out on his ear. I didn’t think he would die. That didn’t even cross my mind.”
Clearly it should have, but even now, after the fact, I had a hard time believing it had happened.
“Did you know these people, Kit?” Tom wanted to know, and Christopher shook his head.
“I met them for the first time tonight.”
“It’s up to you, then,” Tom told Crispin. “You had met them all before?”
“Met them?” He nodded. “Yes. Know them, not necessarily. Montrose and I went to Cambridge together. So did Hutchison, so I’m reasonably familiar with him. He’s friendly with Blanton, who’s friendly with Gladys. I’m not sure where Graham Ogilvie came from, but he’s part of the same clique. I see them off and on on the weekends I come up to Town.”
“And Rivers?”
“Rivers comes and goes,” Crispin said. “He has a business to run, and better things to do with his time than waste it in idle carousing.”
“Undoubtedly,” Tom nodded. He had pulled his little notebook and a stub of a pencil out of his pocket and was taking notes. I had no idea how he could possibly see what to write, or how he’d be able to decipher the scratches tomorrow, but the pencil moved steadily across the page. “Any idea where I’d be able to find him?”
“Where he lives, do you mean?” Crispin shook his head, causing his—Christopher’s—earrings to dance. It says something that by this part of the evening, I no longer did a double-take whenever I looked at him and realized that he was wearing makeup and a gown. “I don’t know. I don’t think anyone does. When someone wants Rivers or what he’s offering, they’ll ring up and leave a message, and Rivers comes and finds them.”
“And you know this because?—?”
Tom was still writing, not looking up at Crispin, but the latter squirmed guiltily.
“I may have taken advantage of it once or twice.”
Christopher caught his breath, and I narrowed my eyes. “That was stupid of you, St George.”
“Yes, Darling,” Crispin said, “I know.”
“People can die from sniffing cocaine, you know. Not to mention that I wouldn’t trust Dominic Rivers any farther than I could throw him. I wouldn’t be surprised if he laced his powder with arsenic.”
“That would be very bad for business,” Tom said mildly, and turned back to Crispin. “You know, of course, that cocaine is on the Dangerous Drugs list.”
Crispin nodded.
“Using it is illegal.”
“I told you that in confidence,” Crispin said. “And we’re sitting here in my car with a dead body in the backseat. If you wanted me to hang over something, it’s more likely to be that.”
