The Palace Guard

by Charlotte MacLeod

  “Oh.”

  They sat awhile longer, then Sarah asked, “Did Brooks find out anything about Mr. Fitzroy?”

  “Yes. On Sunday when Witherspoon was killed, Fitzroy was attending a family reunion in Topsfield with about eighty-seven other Fitzroys. On Monday when Brown was killed, Fitzroy was with one or the other of the guards every damned minute of the time, mainly giving them all hell for letting things get out of hand while he was away. Brooks is inclined to think he’s a washout and so am I. His bank balance and style of living are consistent with his position, and his character is so irreproachable it’s pitiful.”

  “I’m so sorry, darling.” Sarah patted Max’s hand and went to find a ladies’ room. She spent quite a while doing things to her face and hair, then got in a panic for fear she might have missed a report from the doctor and ran out with one lock streaming loose.

  “Why don’t you go fix your hair?” said Bittersohn.

  She went back and fixed it. They sat some more. Then Sarah asked, “Where had she been before you got there?”

  Bittersohn jerked upright. “Where what?”

  “I’m sorry, I didn’t realize you were asleep.”

  “I wasn’t asleep,” he said huffily, “I was thinking.”

  “About what?”

  “Mmh?”

  Sarah picked up a newspaper somebody had discarded and read about bodies found in lonely lanes. Bittersohn’s head fell heavily but agreeably against her shoulder. She eased it to a more comfortable position, rested her cheek against the luxuriant dark brown waves of his hair, and did the crossword puzzle. She had turned to the sports section and was wondering how one went about handicapping a horse when the intern came out.

  “It was a mixture of arsenic and Nembutal,” he told her. “Dr. Fingerford says you’re to wait till the police get here.”

  Chapter 19

  BETWEEN THEM, SARAH AND Max knew just about every policeman on the Boston force by now. When uniformed officers Moynahan and Maloney showed up in the cruiser they merely remarked, “Oh, Jesus, you two again,” and sent for plainclothes detectives Fitzpatrick and Fitzgibbon. The latter pair, when they arrived, said much the same thing.

  “Okay, Mrs. Kelling,” Fitzgibbon began, “mind telling us how you happened to be entertaining this alleged Countess Ouspenska?”

  “I met her just this past week through Mrs. Tawne, an artist who’s a friend of my cousin Brooks Kelling. The countess and Mrs. Tawne are neighbors in the Fenway Studios on Ipswich Street. Mrs. Tawne had me over to tea. While I was there, the countess dropped in and invited me to see her studio. Then the other night she dropped by the house. My boarders thought she was fun, so I asked Mr. Bittersohn to bring her back to dinner this evening.”

  “Old friend of yours, Bittersohn?” asked Fitzpatrick.

  “If you mean what I think you do, no. I have known her for some years on a casual basis. I mentioned to Mrs. Kelling this afternoon that I was going to see Lydia, and she asked me to pass on the invitation. It was a spur-of-the-moment thing.”

  “That’s right,” Sarah confirmed. “I didn’t know whether or not she’d come until she arrived.”

  “What did you give her to eat?”

  “Only what the rest of us had.” Sarah recited the menu. “I didn’t get into the library, where we usually gather before dinner, until shortly after she’d arrived but I’m told she was shown directly there. Some of my other boarders were already present. She had sherry out of the same decanter as everybody else and hors d’oeuvres from the same tray. When we went in to dinner she helped herself from the same dishes that were passed to us all. The countess seemed to be in excellent spirits and ate a great deal. I knew she had very irregular eating habits, so when she got sick to her stomach, I simply assumed she’d eaten too much too fast.”

  “Um. Bittersohn, you were with this Ouspenska woman for how long before the dinner party? Did you come back to Mrs. Kelling’s together, or what?”

  “We drove back together in my car. Before that, I was in her studio for perhaps an hour.”

  “Doing what?”

  “Talking. She happens to be an expert on Byzantine icons.”

  “Whatever they are. Did you have a drink with her or anything?”

  “No. I saw a bottle of wine on the table, but she didn’t offer me any. She may have eaten or drunk something while she was in the back room changing her clothes.”

  “Or taken a pill,” Sarah put in.

  “Why a pill?” said Fitzgibbon.

  “Oh, I don’t know. It just occurred to me, I suppose because she’s not a young woman. I have a lot of middle-aged aunts and they all take pills for one thing or another. Don’t yours?”

  “Jeez, yes, come to think of it. My Aunt Theresa, every time she comes over to the house she lines up about six different pill bottles in front of her and pops ’em down one after the other like they were candy.”

  Max and his Aunt Fruma did the same thing, and Fitzpatrick was trying to get in a word about his Aunt Mary Margaret when Fitzgibbon intervened.

  “Who’d know about the pills? This neighbor of hers you mentioned, they’re pretty good friends, eh?”

  “I don’t know whether you’d call them friends or not. Mrs. Tawne told me the countess had a habit of dropping in at mealtimes, so I daresay she might have mentioned her health problems on some such occasion, if she has any. The countess isn’t what you’d call the reticent type.”

  “Maybe we’d better go and find out.”

  “At this hour?” Tears of exhaustion stung Sarah’s eyelids. “Mrs. Tawne’s not a young woman either, and she must have been in bed ages ago.”

  ‘Too bad,” said Fitzgibbon, “but it looks to me like we have a case of attempted murder on our hands, and maybe Mrs. Tawne got tired of being mooched on. If she was feeding the Ouspenska woman all the time, she’d have a pretty good chance of slipping something into the food, wouldn’t she?”

  “I suppose so.” Sarah heaved a mighty sigh and followed the two detectives out to their car, grateful for Max Bittersohn’s arm to lean on.

  As she’d expected, Dolores Tawne was none too happy at being aroused. She came up to her studio door in a pink plissé kimono and a headful of metal curlers such as Sarah had thought nobody in the world except Cousin Mabel still used.

  “I’m so sorry,” Sarah began in a faltering tone.

  “Well, I should think you would be, rioting around with a gang of men at this hour! Brooks gave me to understand you were a respectable woman.” She rattled her curlers fiercely at Max.

  Fitzgibbon was tired, too. “Are you Mrs. Dolores Tawne?” he snapped.

  “I certainly am, and would you kindly tell me what you mean by—?”

  “We’re police officers.” He stuck his identification and badge under her nose. “Would you mind telling us when you last saw your neighbor Mrs. Ouspenska?”

  “I assume you’re referring to the woman who calls herself a countess and as far as I know she’s still a Miss. I doubt if she’s ever bothered to marry any of them. What do you want to know for?”

  “For good and sufficient reason, Mrs. Tawne. Would you mind answering the question?”

  “Humph! Then I suppose I—let me see, she usually barges in when I’m having my cup of tea about four o’clock. Was it then? No, I was at the museum this afternoon. Yesterday afternoon I suppose it would be by now. Then we must have bumped into each other earlier in the—er—facilities. Neither of us has a private bathroom, more’s the pity.”

  “How did she seem to you? Was she in her usual spirits?” asked Fitzpatrick.

  “She was feeling the effects of her usual spirits if that’s what you mean. Any woman her age who goes out every night till all hours and drinks with riffraff has only herself to blame, as I’ve told her time and again.”

  “In other words she had a hangover?”

  “You could call it that.”

  “Would you say she was seriously depressed?”

  “She
’s always depressed, always whining and wailing about getting old and losing her looks. A decent woman shouldn’t have to worry about anything except being clean and covered.” Dolores hitched the shapeless kimono more closely around her barrellike form.

  “Has she ever mentioned suicide in your hearing?”

  “Not more than once every five minutes. Downright wickedness I call it, making jokes about a thing like that.”

  “What sort of jokes?”

  “Oh, Russian roulette. She was claiming the other day she’s invented a new version. She’s going to fill one of her stomach capsules with poison and—look here, I have a right to know why you’re asking me this stuff.”

  Fitzgibbon told her. “Because Countess Ouspenska is in the hospital with arsenic poisoning and we’d like to know how she got it.”

  “Oh, my God! Then I’m responsible.”

  “Why?”

  “Because”—Dolores rubbed her square, red palm across her square, red face—“I didn’t think she meant it. I thought it was just more of her foolishness. I should have stopped it.”

  “How could you?”

  “I don’t know. Taken away the capsules, maybe.” Dolores collapsed into a chair. “I just don’t know.”

  “Now, take it easy, Mrs. Tawne,” said Fitzpatrick, who was a kind man. “You can’t blame yourself if somebody else decides to pull a half-wit stunt like that. Do you remember exactly what she told you?”

  “As nearly as I can recall, she said she was going to take the medicine out of one of her digestive capsules—she has awful stomach trouble on account of the way she eats, or doesn’t eat. Well, anyway, she said she’d fill the capsule with poison and mix it in with the rest. That way she’d never know when she was taking the poison. It would be more fun to be surprised. That’s what she said, more fun. I told her to stop acting so silly and she laughed at me.” Dolores began to cry.

  Sarah slipped an arm around the beefy shoulders. “Now, Mrs. Tawne, please don’t take it to heart so. She may still come out of it all right. The doctors are doing all they can. Why don’t you make yourself a nice cup of tea and go back to bed?”

  “Sure,” said Fitzgibbon, “we’ll clear out and let you sleep. Is there any way we can get into Countess Ouspenska’s studio, do you know?”

  “Just open the door, most likely. She forgets to lock up more often than not. It’s the second door from this on the right.”

  As Dolores had predicted, the door was unlocked. They filed in. Bittersohn found a light switch and achieved a feeble glow from a twenty-watt amber bulb.

  “Jeez,” said Fitzgibbon, “this place looks like a rummage sale. She must be some kind of a nut all right.”

  “She’s an artist,” said Sarah. For some reason she felt duty-bound to stick up for the countess.

  “Yeah? Where would she keep the pills, I wonder?”

  “They could be anywhere.” Sarah looked around at the maze of furniture and bric-a-brac. “I should think by her bed or over the sink. There’s a little back room and a sort of kitchenette through here at the back.”

  The group picked their way through the confusion and found the bed. In calm repose on its grimy pillows lay the curly head of Bill Jones.

  “Bill,” shouted Fitzpatrick, “what are you doing here?”

  The artist flung off the covers and sat up. He was attired only in a pair of lavender satin shorts. “Oh, hi, Fitz. Hi, Sarah. Hi, Max. What gives?”

  “You a friend of this Ouspenska woman, Bill?” In view of the lavender shorts, Fitzpatrick’s question seemed redundant.

  “Su-ure. Lydia’s an old pal of mine. Some of the boys wanted to use the pad tonight and I wasn’t going to be needing it myself,” he added with the barest flicker of a glance at Sarah, “so I sacked out here. Hey, how come the delegation? Is Lydia okay?”

  “She’s down at the Mass General with a bellyful of arsenic.”

  “No-o-o!”

  “Has she ever said anything to you about playing Russian roulette with her stomach pills?”

  “Su-ure, but hey, you mean she wasn’t putting me on?”

  “That remains to be seen. Can you think of any way she might have got hold of some arsenic?”

  “Pal, the cats she hangs out with could get hold of a hydrogen bomb.”

  “Yeah? Well, I guess that more or less ties it. Cover up, Bill, you’ll catch cold. Just for the record, you don’t happen to know where she keeps the pills, do you?”

  “Right over there.”

  A bottle of immense yellow and green capsules was sitting in plain sight on the dresser. Fitzpatrick wrapped it carefully in a tissue and put it in a little box he took from his pocket. “Easy enough to take one of these things apart and reload it. The gelatin would take a little while to dissolve, especially on a full stomach, so she wouldn’t feel the effects right away. Arsenic doesn’t act all that fast anyway. That heavy meal she ate probably saved her life. Chances are it did upset her stomach so that she got rid of some of the poison before it had a chance to work. I suppose her idea was that the Nembutal would knock her out so she wouldn’t feel the pain when the arsenic began to work. We’ll have the lab check the rest of these out, just to give them something to do.”

  “Say,” said Fitzgibbon, “how about if this guy here loaded those knockout drops himself? Maybe it’s a crime of passion or something.”

  “Are you kidding? This is Pericles Jonubopoulos’s baby brother.”

  “Oh. Hey, pal, no offense?”

  “Forget it, pal,” said Bill magnanimously. “Hey, no kidding, is Lydia going to be okay? Should I go over to the hospital?”

  “They wouldn’t let you see her,” Bittersohn told him. “Sarah and I couldn’t get into the room, either. She’s pretty sick, because she was in rough shape to start with, but the doctor thinks she has a fighting chance.”

  “Then I might as well grab a little more sacktime. Night, Sarah. Night, Max. Night, Fitz. Night, pal.” The baby brother of Pericles Jonubopoulos smiled sweetly at them all, pulled the once white sheet up over his slim brown torso, and went back to sleep.

  Sarah kept her lips buttoned until the two Fitzes had dropped her and Bittersohn off at Tulip Street. Then she exploded.

  “How damnably convenient!”

  “Isn’t it, though. I think I’ll go back and have another little chat with Bill.”

  “Max, it’s so late.”

  “I only hope it’s not too late. Damn it, Sarah, I’m scared.”

  “Then let’s go and get it over with.”

  “Maybe you’d rather I sent you alone. You could use your feminine wiles.” He slipped his arms around her and leaned his head on hers. “How come Bill calls you Sarah?”

  “Think nothing of it. He knows I have a nice little thing going with Max Bittersohn. He said so to Mr. Hayre. Anyway, I haven’t a wile left in me. You don’t honestly believe Bill tried to murder Lydia Ouspenska?”

  “How could I? He’s Pericles Jonubopoulos’s baby brother. I think Bill knows something. Bill likes knowing things. You’d better go in the house and get some sleep.”

  “No, please, I want to stay with you. It’s too awful, people popping off all over the place and the police just saying tough luck and going away.”

  “You can’t blame the police too much. They don’t know a possible connection exists between Lydia and the two guards at the Wilkins.”

  “And you didn’t tell them because you want to do it all yourself.”

  “I don’t particularly want to, but I have to now that Palmerston’s boxed me in. You know that. Let’s see if we can pick up a cab on Beacon, if you can walk that far.”

  “I’m so tired now it doesn’t matter any more. Come on.” They walked a moment in silence, then Sarah remarked, “You know, whoever is doing these things must be awfully well informed. He’d have had to know about Witherspoon’s dizzy spells and Brown’s hidden bottle and Lydia’s new joke about her stomach pills, which I suppose doesn’t mean a thing, because Brow
n was Lupe’s uncle and Lupe is Bernie’s pal and Bernie is Lydia’s and Lydia is Dolores’s neighbor and everybody seems to be connected with everybody one way or another. Bernie could have put that stuff in Lydia’s capsule while they were together, couldn’t he?”

  “Why not?”

  “If he did, Mr. Fieringer put him up to it, right?”

  “You might ask Nick,” said Bittersohn. “There he goes now.”

  The hulking figure of the impresario was moving away from the studio building as they approached. They could see his yellow face clearly enough in the light over the steps. For once Nick wasn’t smiling. He paid no attention to them but turned the corner and walked up past the Catholic church.

  “Going home, I expect,” said Bittersohn. “He has an apartment over on Hemenway Street. Come on.”

  They went up to the third floor, tiptoed along the creaky wooden corridor that reeked pleasantly of linseed oil and turpentine, and pushed open the door of Lydia Ouspenska’s studio. Through the dark came Bill Jones’s sleepy voice.

  “What’s the matter, Nick? Forget something?”

  Chapter 20

  “NICK WENT ALONG,” SAID Bittersohn. “It’s Sarah and Max. Mind if we come down for a second?”

  “No-o.” There was the barest shade of irritation in the soft voice as Bill got up and switched on the lights so they wouldn’t break their necks on the stairs from the balcony. “I might as well have stayed for the game. There’s more action here tonight than in my own pad.”

  “Sorry, Bill. That’ll teach you to sack in with Plutonic women. How long did Nick stay?”

  “Long enough to say good-bye. He was looking for Lydia.”

  “Did you tell him about the Russian roulette?”

  “Su-ure. Why not?”

  “What does he think?”

  Bill began to draw pictures in the air. “Nick says it just goes to show. Nobody ever knows anybody.”

  “In other words he doesn’t believe it, either.”

  “What can I say, Maxie? Everybody figured she was putting us on. You know Lydia. I mean as well as anybody can know anybody.”