Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 126, No. 1. Whole No. 767, July 2005

I had looked away and Leigh was gone.

So I stood there in silence, shaken. In the distance, I could hear a siren now.

Anthony Beck studied her for a long moment, his mouth tightening. I wondered what was running through his mind. I will always wonder that.

Barbara reached for one of the empty champagne flutes and held it out to him. He poured. She took a dainty sip. Under the circumstances, her steady cool was beyond remarkable. It was sheer madness. “You mustn’t blame yourself, Tony,” she said gently. “Promise me you won’t.”

He didn’t promise her anything, or say anything. Just poured himself some champagne and took a long, slow drink of it.

Me, I found the kitchen and used the phone in there to wake up my editor. “She pushed her,” I told Al Posner after I’d filled him in on Leigh’s death plunge. “Barbara Darrow pushed her. She can’t get away with this, Al.”

“They’ve arrested her for it?” he wheezed at me, yawning.

“The police aren’t even here yet.”

“Then how do you know she did it?”

“I was right here when it happened, that’s how.”

“You witnessed it?”

“Not exactly,” I had to concede. “But I know what happened. Leigh didn’t jump. She wouldn’t jump.”

“In your opinion,” he pointed out. “Which, as you know, is worth bupkis. We go by what the police say. An official source goes on the record, fine. Otherwise, it’s libel. This is a major star we’re talking about.”

“Barbara Darrow is a murderer.”

“In... your... opinion,” he repeated sharply. “It’s out of our hands now anyway, Opie. Metro will take over. But, hey, I might be able to wangle you a sidebar about this Grayson girl — how she gets her big break with Darrow and Beck in Private Lives and ends up, splat, all over the pavement.”

“I can’t write that, Al.”

“Then go home, Opie,” he growled at me. “Go home and forget about it.”

I walked all the way home that night but I didn’t forget about it. I couldn’t. I had fallen for someone, and now she was lying dead under a tarp on the sidewalk, and I felt partly to blame. After all, I was the one who’d rejected Barbara’s advances in her dressing room. Barbara Darrow was a proud, ageing beauty whose husband had been sleeping with a much younger woman. Instead of showering her with affection and reassurance, I’d dumped her onto the floor. Would Leigh still be alive if I hadn’t done that? By doing the right thing — saying no to Barbara — had I driven her to such an act of savagery?

I’ve asked myself this a million times over the years. I don’t have any answers. I never do.

And I never forget. Whenever I bump into one of Barbara’s old movies on TV, it comes to me. When I’m walking down the street and catch sight of a tall, young brunette with good legs, it comes to me. When I fall asleep at night, I see Leigh Grayson in my dreams. It’s always the same dream. She’s going off that terrace to her death and I’m standing there not helping her. She’s always wide-eyed with fright. Always wondering, wordlessly, why I’m not saving her. In my dream, Leigh never gets any older. She’s always young. I’m not anymore. In fact, my wife and I have two daughters who are both older than Leigh was that night Barbara pushed her to her death. I am no longer gangly. I am no longer someone who barrels around corners certain that something exciting and wonderful is waiting there for me. Mostly, I see darkness and fear around that next corner.

I can’t remember the last time anyone called me Timmy.

I never heard from Barbara Darrow or Anthony Beck again, not that I expected to. But after my first novel came out, and got some attention, I did wonder if she’d seen it and recognized my name. He had already died by then. Barbara was by his side when he passed. She later remarried, twice, most recently to a physician who was fourteen years her junior. Barbara Darrow died this past weekend in Palm Desert at the age of seventy-five after a long battle with cancer. A valiant battle, all of the obituaries said.

That’s why I can finally tell this story. Because you can’t libel the dead. You can say anything you damned please about them.

You can even tell the truth.