Something in the Water

by Charlotte MacLeod

  Drake was not too happy with the turn this interview was taking. “What makes you so sure of that, Professor Shandy? As I understand it, you only saw him with his face in a plateful of chicken pot pie.”

  “On the contrary, I happened to be sitting opposite him at a nearby table, where I could watch him eat. It was such an arresting spectacle that I couldn’t keep my eyes away. I’m sure Flodge didn’t notice me gawking, he was too busy wolfing down his food. I’d never seen anybody eat so much so fast. When he fell forward, I assumed he’d choked but he wasn’t making any sound. Thurzella, who happened to be clearing a table nearby, took hold of his hair to pull him up, but the hair turned out to be a toupee. That was more than she could handle, so I straightened him up and tried to mop off the gravy. That was when I realized he was dead.”

  “Then what happened?”

  “Mrs. Bright called the local constable and an ambulance. Withington and I stayed with the body until it arrived. That gave me ample opportunity to study Flodge’s facial structure. It was in no way similar to Thurzella’s. Or her mother’s, for that matter; the mother and daughter could pass for twins. I’m sure Mrs. Bright must have photographs of her husband, she says Michele and Thurzella take after him. Jean-Luc, as she calls him, is said to have been a handsome man, even in his mutilated condition.”

  “All right, Professor, we can check on that. How long did it take the ambulance to show up?”

  “A good deal longer than I’d bargained for. At least half an hour, probably more. Mrs. Bright made a second call to see what was keeping them.”

  “Did she stay with you the whole time?”

  “No, she walked Thurzella home and stayed long enough to tell the girl’s parents what had happened. She was back here a good while before the ambulance showed up, though.”

  “M’h. How do you think Flodge got the cyanide?

  Peter shook his head. “I’ll pass on that one, if you don’t mind. Were you aware, by the way, that Flodge was in the habit of drinking almond extract?”

  “Huh? What the hell for?”

  “For the purpose of keeping a buzz on, according to both Mrs. Bright and the ambulance driver. They claim he’d been hauled in for drunk driving so many times that he’d been threatened with a stiff jail term and permanent loss of his license unless he went on the wagon and stayed there. He seems to have struck a viable compromise by carrying a small bottle of almond extract around with him and taking a quick nip every so often when he thought nobody was looking.”

  “Why almond, I wonder? It’s usually vanilla or lemon they go for.”

  “Flodge happened to be an almond freak. Mrs. Bright said he’d eat almonds in any form: plain, on pastries, cutesied up as marzipan rutabagas, you name it. After we’d detected the almond odor on his breath, I did make a quick search of his pockets and, sure enough, there was the almond extract, about an inch left in the bottle. I didn’t touch the glass and left it where it was. I assume it was analyzed in the police laboratory but of course I have no way of knowing.”

  “I’ll have somebody check on it,” said Drake. “I doubt if they’d have found anything but almond extract, though. Cyanide works so fast that he’d hardly have had time to recap the bottle and get it back into his pocket. And it apparently wasn’t in the chicken pie.”

  “Not to my knowledge. Flodge had the last piece in the pan. I ate the next-to-last one myself, with no ill effects.”

  “Okay, then, Professor. I guess that does it for now. Say, don’t I know you from somewhere?”

  “I believe we—er—met briefly in Hocasquam a year or so ago.”

  “Oh hell, yes. You’re that friend of Guthrie Fingal’s who helped him get back the college weather vane.” *

  “I was just one more face in the crowd,” Peter replied modestly.

  “That’s not what Guthrie says. Your wife and the McBogle woman who writes those crazy books were in on it too, as I recall.”

  “Yes, they were. Catriona’s been visiting us, she and my wife just drove back to Maine today. Helen and I were planning to leave for home tomorrow, but I expect that’s not going to happen, is it?”

  “I’d just as soon you stuck around, if it won’t inconvenience you too much.”

  “No, not if we can be of any use to you. We’ll just phone home and let the neighbor who’s minding our cat know that we’re staying on another day or two.”

  “It might be more than a day or two,” Drake cautioned. “Seeing as how you’re a friend of Guthrie’s, I don’t mind telling you I’m none too happy about this situation. Two deaths in one week in the same place are kind of hard to swallow, even if one was a suicide and the other could have been an accident, or been made to look like one. Kids are pretty crazy these days, some of them. Like tonight, Theresa, was it?”

  “Thurzella.”

  “Okay, Thurzella. She could have run back here after her grandmother came inside, and lammed Mrs. Flodge with a rock for calling her mother a bastard.”

  “I doubt that very much,” said Peter. “I doubt still more that Mrs. Bright had any hand in either of the killings.”

  “What makes you so sure, Professor?”

  “Instinct, I suppose. I’m not saying she couldn’t kill somebody under certain circumstances, say if some thug with a knife was threatening to rape her granddaughter. But for her to sneak poison into food that she’d prepared herself and was about to serve to a patron in her own dining room would have been not only wicked but also stupid. Mrs. Bright is neither one.”

  “She attacked Mrs. Flodge, though.”

  “‘Attack’ is far too strong a word. She slapped Mrs. Flodge’s face for good and sufficient reason. If anybody ever asked for a backhander, that floozy surely did. As my wife must have told you, and as you must have seen for yourself, the bloody assault that Mrs. Flodge was raving about when she phoned your station was nothing more than a practically invisible scratch caused by the stone in Mrs. Bright’s ring. That’s a common occurrence, my wife says. People’s fingers do tend to swell or shrink very slightly, depending on what they’re doing, what they’ve eaten, what time of day it happens to be, whether it’s the full of the moon, I don’t know. I suppose it’s more noticeable in women because they’re more apt than men to be wearing rings. Anyway, a ring that fits too perfectly may be hard to get off if the finger happens to swell the least bit, so most people would as soon wear them a trifle loose. That’s how Mrs. Flodge’s face got scratched.”

  “Very scientific, Professor. But what about the rock that killed her?”

  * Vane Pursuit

  Chapter 19

  “NOW THAT’S ANOTHER STORY,” said Peter. “You’re quite sure the wound that caused Mrs. Flodge’s death was on the left side of the head?”

  “Yes, of course.”

  “And the scratch caused by the ring was on the right cheek?”

  “So?”

  “So Mrs. Bright happens to be left-handed. That’s how the ring came into play. Wedding and engagement rings are customarily worn on the left hand, as I’m sure I don’t have to tell you. Mrs. Bright was facing Mrs. Flodge when she struck, so the scratch naturally appeared on the right cheek. In order for Mrs. Bright to have inflicted the fatal blow holding the rock in her hand, she’d have had to be standing either behind Mrs. Flodge or at her right side.”

  “She could have thrown the rock.”

  “Assuming that she’d happened to see Mrs. Flodge standing outside the inn, had a rock handy in the house, unhooked the window screen without being detected, and thrown the rock accurately enough to hit her target on the crucial spot in very dim light.”

  Drake started to say something more, but Peter cut him off. “Moreover, Mrs. Bright’s own immediate reaction to the slap was one of acute embarrassment and humiliation at having committed so gross a breach of civilized conduct. Even if she had found a way to slip out and pound Mrs. Flodge with a rock, I cannot for the life of me visualize her lowering herself to do it. She’s just too much of a lady.
”

  “Well, damn it, the Flodge woman’s dead. Somebody must have killed her.”

  “Oh yes, I certainly can’t quarrel with you there. I do think however, that there are other avenues to be explored.”

  “Such as what?”

  “Well, for one thing, has anybody else happened to mention a small incident that occurred just after Mrs. Flodge had left the inn in high dudgeon but with all parts in working condition? As I mentioned, Mrs. Bright was in a bit of a state by then. The inn doesn’t have a liquor license, but I figured there must be some cooking sherry or liqueur in the kitchen for culinary purposes, so I asked Thurzella to go get her grandmother a drink. As she turned toward the kitchen, she happened to glance out into the lobby and said ‘Oh, hi, Evander.’”

  “Evander? You don’t by any chance mean Evander Wye, Fred’s brother who works at the tourmaline mine?”

  “That’s the only Evander I know of. He’s a regular patron here in the dining room.”

  “He’s been an occasional patron of the county lockup too, in case you hadn’t heard. What was he doing?”

  “I don’t know. Mrs. Bright said something about going to see what he wanted, so I went out into the lobby but nobody was around. The door to the upstairs was shut and it shrieks like a soul in torment when I open it to go to my room, so I doubt very much that he could have gone upstairs without my hearing him. It’s possible Thurzella was hallucinating, I suppose, or that the inn is haunted by the ghost of Evander’s great-grandfather who died in the pesthouse, assuming he did. If it really was Evander Wye, he must be pretty nippy on his pins to have skinned off before I could catch him. I did look around behind the desk, check the phone booth, and all that, because Mrs. Bright acted concerned over his coming in after the dining room was closed for the night.”

  “I can see where she might,” said the detective. “I used to hear stories about that guy when I was riding a cruiser. He’d get kind of playful sometimes when he’d had a few too many. Is there any other way than by the front door that he could have got out?”

  “Not through the kitchen, anyway. He’d have had to come through the dining room and we’d have seen him. I don’t know the inn all that well, though. Withington has a downstairs room, but I doubt whether it has an outside door. Of course Wye could have jumped out a window easily enough, they’re not that high off the ground. But he’d have had to unhook the screen and leave it flapping, and he’d surely have rattled a few stones when he landed. If he really was here, he must have left by the front door.”

  Drake nodded. “That’s something none of the others mentioned. I guess we’ll have to talk to Thurzella. I don’t suppose Bob Cluny would take it very kindly if I barged in there now and woke her up. Will she be here tomorrow morning?”

  “I expect so, but I can’t tell you when. Her grandmother gave her permission to sleep in to make up for the rough time she got tonight. Around half past nine should be a good time to catch her, the breakfast crowd’s usually cleared out by then. That’s assuming there’ll be one. I don’t know what effect Mrs. Flodge’s murder is going to have on Mrs. Bright’s business. Oddly enough, it was Mrs. Flodge’s antics that saved the bacon after Flodge cashed in his chips.”

  “You don’t say? How did that happen?”

  “M’well, the day after he died, I went off to collect lupine seed at Rondel’s Head, as I believe I mentioned to you earlier. I got back around suppertime, cleaned up a little, came down here, and discovered that I was the only customer in the place, except for Withington. At first I thought I’d misread my watch and got here too late or something, but I hadn’t. Normally that would have been the busiest time of the evening, so of course I realized there was trouble. Poor Thurzella was practically in tears when she took my order. Then Lucivee Flodge blew in, just back from Portland, or so she said, and sat down jabbering with Withington. One or two people started drifting in off the street out of curiosity, and pretty soon the place was packed as usual. That was when Mrs. Flodge stood up and delivered her spiel about Jasper’s having got in trouble with the mob and killed himself in front of witnesses as a way to spite her out of the insurance money.”

  “Those two must have been quite a pair,” said Drake. “Flodge sounds like a good guy to stay away from.”

  “Oh, Flodge was all that and then some, judging from what I’ve been hearing the last couple of days. Guthrie Fingal told me about a rotten trick Flodge pulled on him some years ago, and we had a real melodrama played out here last night, stemming from one of the filthiest scams ever pulled on an innocent woman. That one involves a case of grand larceny which never got reported to the police, you may be interested to know. It’s too late tonight to go into the particulars, but we could talk about it tomorrow if you want.”

  “You bet I want. Was Mrs. Bright in any way involved in either of those cases?”

  “Only to the extent that last night’s event took place here in this dining room and Mrs. Bright came out of the kitchen to help celebrate the happy ending.”

  “So you wouldn’t advise us to take her in as a material witness?”

  “I think you’d be making a serious mistake if you tried. Mrs. Bright’s a woman very much looked up to in this town. You don’t have a single damned thing to pin her with, and you’d be lucky to escape a lawsuit after you’d been forced to let her go. My suggestion would be for you to leave a guard on duty here tonight and get on with the investigation when there’s daylight to see by.”

  The detective sighed. “I just wish we knew where to investigate next. At least we don’t have to worry about how Flodge died, that part’s all sewed up. This afternoon, for your private information, Mrs. Flodge turned over to our lieutenant some letters and a diary that she’d found among her husband’s effects. They established beyond any possible doubt that Flodge had in fact been wiped out financially, was being pressured for money he had no way to pay, and was definitely planning to kill himself rather than sit around waiting for some hired gun to mosey along and do it for him.”

  “That’s very interesting,” said Peter. “Who wrote up the diary?”

  “Oh, he did. It was just one of those little day-at-a-glance things that you jot down appointments and whatnot in. Mrs. Flodge identified his handwriting. She also verified his signature on a couple of letters he’d written to her and on their wedding certificate.”

  “Then there’s where you start investigating. I strongly suggest that you take all the material Mrs. Flodge gave you, particularly the handwritten diary, out to Rondel’s Head and show it to Miss Frances Rondel.”

  “You mean that old lady who raises the big lupines? What’s she got to do with Flodge?”

  “She told my wife and me yesterday afternoon that she’d had Jasper in her third-grade class when he was a kid. He was evidently smart enough in some ways, but he could never learn either to read or to write. He was either hopelessly dyslexic or else too lazy to apply himself; he squeaked through on a superlative memory, a wide streak of cunning, and a glib tongue. His wife claimed she’d been handling his paperwork for some years, even after she’d got fed up with having to cook breakfast for the lady friends he used to bring home nights, and moved back to Portland.”

  “Godfrey mighty! Then the diary and letters were nothing but out-and-out forgeries?”

  “I’m reasonably sure that both Miss Rondel and any competent handwriting expert will tell you so,” Peter replied. “Mrs. Flodge must have spent the bulk of the time since her husband died cooking you up a nice bunch of evidence. I doubt very much whether she herself had any inkling that she might be in danger. She struck me as being much like her husband, crafty and cocky but nowhere near so smart as she thought she was. It wouldn’t surprise me if you found out that they’d both been taking their orders from a third party who was clever enough to stay out of sight, coach them to perform as directed, and scoop the lion’s share of the profits as his or her reward for doing all the heavy thinking. I’m only guessing about that, of course. I d
o think I’m on firm ground in saying that I don’t believe there’s one iota of truth in that tale Mrs. Flodge spun about the mob.”

  “What makes you so sure, Professor?”

  “The pattern. The modus operandi, if you want to get fancy. Guthrie Fingal told me about some of Flodge’s scams. The one with the Wyes that came to a head last night here at the inn, and Mrs. Flodge’s abortive attempt to shake down Mrs. Bright this evening were along the same lines. Both involved situations where there was a goodly chunk of family money that could be got at through one vulnerable person. Whether Mrs. Flodge bungled her boss’s instructions, entertained a mistaken notion that she could handle Mrs. Bright on her own, or was deliberately set up to be killed because she was getting out of hand is moot now, of course. The fact remains, however, that somebody was right on the spot to shut her up as soon as she either came back or was lured back to the inn. Why a rock was used as a weapon is for you and your colleagues to decide.”

  “Right now I’m in no shape to decide anything,” Detective Drake groaned. “Cripes, I can’t even think straight. Any more murders you want to tell me about?”

  “Yes, Jasper Flodge’s. If that man committed suicide, I’m Count Dracula’s grandmother. He came swaggering into this dining room all togged out like the Lord Duke of Magurriwock as if he owned the place, and started hectoring Thurzella about what was on the menu. This was quite late for the inn to be serving, they’d evidently had a slew of customers and the kitchen was pretty well cleaned out by then. He rather snooted the chicken pot pie until Thurzella told him there was only one piece left and she wanted it for herself. Then he insisted on having it.”