"I'm sorry. I guess I'm just no good at this."
"Here's what I want you to do," Smith said. "Dry your eyes, go downstairs, walk a few blocks away, and then take a cab home. I'll meet you there in a little while."
"What are you going to do?"
"I want to make sure that you haven't dropped anything here or left anything. Then I'll follow you."
"We're not going to call the police?" she said.
"Feldmar's dead," Smith said. "Why should you be involved? It'd only hurt the organization."
She looked at him silently, then nodded. "I guess you're right."
"I know I'm right. Go ahead. I'll meet you at your apartment."
She ran quickly from the room, and the door swung shut behind her. Smith stood with his back to the entrance door
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and visualized what a woman might do if she came into a room and saw her friend dead on the floor, a murder victim.
He quickly stepped forward to the body and knelt alongside it. Almost without thought, his hand reached out to the wooden base of the bed to steady himself. With his handkerchief, he carefully wiped the wooden base clean of fingerprints.
Kneeling there, he looked at the body. There was a puncture wound under the left ear and then a slow jagged rip across the throat to under the right ear. He had seen that kind of wound before. It was administered by someone who came from behind the victim, threw an arm around her, and then with his right hand drove the knife into her throat and slashed from left to right. The wound was jagged, the flesh almost serrated. It had been a dull knife, and the killer had had to saw his way around Robin Feldmar's throat. It had taken a long time, and it demonstrated a lot of hate or anger, he thought.
The room key was back on the dresser where Mildred had put it, and he wiped the plastic tag free of prints. He walked back to the door, wiping his handkerchief along the edge of the dresser where Mildred might have rested a hand if she had stumbled or paused for a moment in her panic. He cleaned the doorknob, then with his handkerchief opened the door and listened for sound in the hallway. There was none, so he stepped into the hallway. The heavy door swung shut behind him and clicked. He wiped the doorknob, put his handkerchief back in his pocket, and walked quickly away down the hall.
He went out a side door of the hotel and walked for two blocks before hailing a cab to Mildred Pensoitte's apartment.
While he was riding the thirty blocks uptown, he wondered who would have wanted to kill Robin Feldmar. It would have been an easy problem if he had been one of
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her disciples: he could have believed that she was killed by the big, repressive, all-powerful government who wanted to silence her voice. But more than anyone else in America, Smith knew that was wrong, because he was the person inside the government who authorized the killing of people because they represented a danger to that government.
The killer was someone else.
But who?
"But who would have wanted to kill her?" he asked Mildred at her apartment. She had regained her composure somewhat and had changed into a long flowing robe. They sat across a pot of coffee in her living room. Smith had declined her offer of something to eat.
"I guess I'd better tell you everything," Mildred said.
"I think so."
Mildred walked to a sideboard, poured herself a small glass of cream sherry, and when she came back, sat on the sofa alongside Smith. She sipped her drink and put it on the table in front of them.
"Birdie was more than just my friend," Mildred said. "When I was a graduate student, I worked with her at the college. I started the Earth Goodness Society, but it was her idea."
"I see," Smith said.
"And she stayed active in it. Most of our long-range planning, well, she did on her computers back at the school. She had worked out a program. . . . Well, it's much too complicated for me; I could never really understand what she was talking about. But somehow it measured the potential of various public situations and told us where we ought to concentrate our efforts to get maximum public exposure and do maximum public good."
She stopped to sip her drink, then stared away across the room.
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"If the organization was her idea, why didn't she run it?" Smith finally asked.
"Birdie wasn't like that. She liked to plan and brainstorm and think, but she had no follow-through. She didn't want anything to do with administration. She was always starting different groups, leading different causes. She had a brilliant mind but no staying power." She hesitated, then added, "Sometimes, though, 1 thought she always kept a hand in Earth Goodness, because she often seemed to know more about what it was doing than I did."
"When did she tell you she was coming to New York?"
"I was coming to that," Mildred said. She extended her legs up onto the coffee table. Her long, shiny robe clung to the outline of her calves, and Smith forced himself to look away. "She called me yesterday," Miidred said. "This is the frightening part. She said that she had uncovered information that someone had infiltrated our organization, somebody dangerous."
"Exactly what did she say?" Smith asked.
"She said that four of our followers had just been killed in St. Martin's for no reason at all. She was afraid that they were killed by someone who had gotten their names from inside Earth Goodness."
"Did she have any idea of who infiltrated our society?" Unconsciously, Smith clenched his hands between his legs.
"No," Mildred said and his hands relaxed.
"What did you think of all this?" he asked.
Mildred turned to look at him. Her eyes were warm, and she had a small, sad smile at the corners of her mouth.
"Birdie was given sometimes to exaggeration. Honestly, I didn't think anything of it. I thought it was another one of her the-sky-is-falling stories. And now . . . now, she's dead."
She pressed her face forward against Smith, and he reached out to put his arm around her shoulder.
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"There, there," he said. "Would you have any idea why anybody would want to infiltrate Earth Goodness?"
"No. Why would anyone?"
"There aren't any secret projects going on that might have upset some corporation bigwigs somewhere?" Smith said. "Nothing that might have created enemies for us?"
"No," she said. "We do everything in public. There wasn't anything." She hesitated. "Not unless Birdie was doing something I didn't know anything about."
He felt her sobbing gently against him.
"Easy," he said. "It'll be all right."
"She's dead. My friend's dead. I'm afraid, Harry. If someone's in our organization who's a killer, I'm afraid. Maybe I'm next."