The Temporary Detective

Chapter Forty-Seven

"It's not a big deal," he said. "My wife knows."

"And she's none too happy about it. But that's not who you were hiding it from. Edmund Jeffards. The man at the top. Archie Conservative, who can't even deal with the idea of women in management. You were afraid that if he knew you were gay, it would be an obstacle to your own promotion."

"Blackmailing me for sex? Where would you get a crazy idea like that?"

Isobel set Doreen's Filofax on the table. Frank's face went pale when he saw it.

"I found this in your new office tonight after you left." She opened it to the date of the murder. "You knew about the emergency drill ahead of time. You told me that Stan and Paula knew in advance because they were fire marshals, but you neglected to mention that Doreen told you also." Isobel flipped to the page with the date of the murder. "You agreed to meet Doreen in the bathroom and have sex with her during the emergency drill."

"That's ridiculous! Who would have sex in an office bathroom during an emergency drill?" Frank scoffed.

"She got the idea from your last temp, who used to do it in Starbucks bathrooms with her boyfriend. And you agreed to it. See? The letter 'S' next to the word 'Drill' in her date book. It stands for sex, and you were the one she wanted it with."

"You don't know that. It could stand for anything. Like Stan!"

Isobel nodded. "That's what I thought at first. But look at what she's written the day before. The letter 'P'."

Isobel looked around at the raft of baffled faces.

"Delphi? Detective Kozinski?" she prodded. "Surely, I can't be the only woman who does this! Well, I'm not. Obviously, Doreen did it too. What do you ladies write? A 'P'? A checkmark? A circle around the date...?"

Delphi shook her head, perplexed, but after a moment she caught on. A second later, Detective Kozinski's lip curled in a knowing smile.

"I thought so," Isobel said. "We all keep track of when our periods start." She riffled back through the pages of Doreen's calendar. "Look. There's a 'P' every month. And sometimes you write down the letter 'S' for sex, so if you skip your period, you can see if there's a chance you might be pregnant. Or you might also jot down the letter to represent a noteworthy and exciting encounter coming up, like in this case."

Delphi sat up suddenly. "No jelly!"

Isobel nodded. "That's what did it. When you were talking about breathing from the diaphragm, I remembered Doreen's."

"I still don't get it," Detective Harvey said.

"Doreen wasn't going to let anything as mundane as her period stop her from her own personal porn flick," Isobel explained. "Office bathroom sex? It's like doing it on an airplane, only better. She must have been fantasizing about it for weeks. She wasn't using her diaphragm for birth control—she was using it for flood control."

Isobel watched, amused, as the men squirmed in their chairs. "That's why you didn't find any jelly in her cosmetics bag," she said to Detective Kozinski. "I thought you were wrong, and she must have been taking her diaphragm out."

"No," said Detective Kozinski, "we were pretty sure she was putting it in. There were no traces of semen or jelly." She gave a wan smile. "I just assumed she hadn't read the accompanying literature thoroughly."

"This is bullshit!" Frank finally exploded. "Maybe you're paranoid enough to write down that kind of stuff, but there's no way of knowing that's what Doreen meant except to ask her."

"It's not bullshit."

It was Stan who spoke, in a miserable voice.

Isobel turned to him and asked gently. "How did you know it was Frank?"