“But why would I? Why would I?”
“I don’t know for certain,” Gregor said, “but what I guess is, Stephen Willis was a kind of insurance policy. You were ambitious even then, but you weren’t sure that you would be able to realize your ambitions. And you didn’t want to go back to being what you had been before you went to Vassar. So you did what a lot of poor girls have done. You married a man on his way up.”
“I could have done that under my own name,” Julianne Corbett said. “I could just have married Stephen Willis and gone on being Julianne Corbett.”
“I don’t think it would have suited you. I don’t think it would have given you enough latitude to do the things you wanted to do.”
“I don’t see how I could possibly have had any latitude, as you put it, at all,” Julianne said. “Marriage is not usually a liberating institution, you know, Mr. Demarkian. Husbands tend to like to know where their wives are and what they’re doing.”
“Your husband was on the road,” Gregor pointed out. “Stephen Willis traveled in great six-week blocks of time several times a year. In fact, he was away most of the time.”
“And while he was away I was running around pretending to be myself,” Julianne said.
“That, and siphoning off his money. It’s expensive to get places in politics these days. It’s expensive to get anyplace at all in any business at all. I think Stephen Willis’s money came in very handy.”
“And you think he just sat still for it.”
“I think you were very good at hiding it, and would have gone on being very good at hiding it right up until the conditions of Stephen Willis’s job changed. That’s what had happened right before Stephen Willis died. He finally got something he was looking to get for a long time. He finally got assigned to a stationary job where he wouldn’t have to travel. At that point you had to get rid of him. Practically everything you have now is dependent on nobody ever finding out that you have spent the last twenty-five years being two people.”
“And so I killed him.”
“That’s right.”
“And then I blew up a Volvo station wagon with a pipe bomb.”
“That’s right.”
“Why?” Julianne Corbett demanded. “Why make all that fuss? Why call attention to myself?”
“But you weren’t calling attention to yourself,” Gregor said. “You were calling attention to Patsy MacLaren. And Patsy MacLaren was about to disappear. For good.”
“But she didn’t disappear for good,” Julianne Corbett pointed out. “At least according to the papers, she’s been all over everywhere, setting off pipe bombs, causing havoc. I’m disappointed, Mr. Demarkian. I’d think you’d know I was more intelligent than that. If I’d wanted to kill—who? That poor woman with her antifur slogan button?”
“Karla Parrish,” Gregor said. “Also Liza Verity. The two people anywhere around who might be able to identify the photograph of Patsy MacLaren Willis for who it was. Karla Parrish was more of a danger to you than Liza Verity. You’d seen quite a bit of Liza Verity over the last few years. She was used to seeing you in a ton of makeup. She was used to thinking of you as a woman wearing a ton of makeup. That photograph of Patsy MacLaren Willis bothered her when she saw it, but she couldn’t tell right away why. The last time Karla Parrish saw you, you didn’t have a dab of foundation on your face. She knew who that photograph of Patsy MacLaren Willis reminded her of right off.”
“And so I blew her up with a pipe bomb,” Julianne said sarcastically. “I put the bomb under a table at a reception I was giving and just let it go off. I killed some woman I didn’t even know. What I read in the papers was that Stephen Willis was killed with a gun. If I wanted to kill Karla Parrish, why didn’t I just shoot her?”
“Because you couldn’t get hold of a gun,” Gregor said. “I think that if you’d realized what kind of trouble you were going to be in after the death of Stephen Willis, you would have kept the gun you had. Instead, you left it at the side of the bed where Stephen Willis died, wiped clean of prints. That way, nobody could trace it to you, nobody could see it on you, there was no way you could be caught trying to dispose of it. It was disposed of. The pipe bomb in the car made a big fuss that obscured the whole mess and made it look more mysterious than it necessarily was. And you were back in your office by midafternoon, with the last fifteen thousand dollars from Patsy MacLaren’s bank account and your makeup in place. But you couldn’t get another gun, Ms. Corbett. You’re not just anybody anymore. You’re a member of the United States Congress. It would have been much too risky.”