A Conventional Corpse: A Claire Malloy Mystery

by Joan Hess

  I went out to the hall. Four of the other doors had botanical plaques; the fifth proved to be a linen closet with nothing more incriminating than pastel towels, blankets, and sheets that would have given Laura Ashley hives. There was no trap-door in the ceiling that might have led to an attic.

  I was trying to decide if I ought to call Sergeant Jorgeson with this rather peculiar observation when I heard footsteps on the stairs. Had I been in a Laureen Parks novel, I would have spotted the heretofore unseen doorway to the turret and dashed up there to hide amidst the spider webs and purple shadows. In a Dilys Knoxwood novel, I would have crouched behind a door, candlestick poised. Allegra Crazetti’s protagonist would have slapped down a restraining order that prevented the perpetrator from setting foot on the second floor of the Azalea Inn, with or without a machete. Walter Dahl’s would suggest a session on the couch in the parlor to chat with a few stray subliminal personalities. Sherry Lynne Blackstone’s would have merely hissed and darted up a drainpipe to the roof.

  Bram Stoker, however, was the author responsible for the dampness on my back and the acceleration of my heartbeat. I looked over my shoulder at the sunlight coming in the window at the end of the hallway ever so tranquilly. Lily Twiller was only a scream away, assuming she was not lost in a meditative catalepsy brought on by stone-ground flour.

  Coward that I was, I opened the nearest door, slipped inside, and snatched up the only weapon in sight. I would have held my breath, had I the opportunity.

  “Ah,” said Walter Dahl as he came inside, “Ms. Malloy, in the Petunia Room, with an alarm clock. Is Professor Plum in the bathtub with a bar of scented soap? Shall I anticipate Colonel Mustard in the closet with a mothball, or Miss Scarlet perched on the armoire with a bad attitude?”

  I put down the clock. “What are you doing here?”

  “That’s my suitcase on the dresser. My toothbrush is in the bathroom, as well as my mint-flavored dental floss and electric razor. My well-thumbed copy of Proust is on the table beside the bed, and my slippers beneath it. One might conclude that this is my room.”

  “I suppose so.”

  “Note the prevalence of petunias, Ms. Malloy. I fear for my life each time I turn off the light.”

  I forced a smile. “I heard you coming upstairs, and with all that’s happened . . .”

  “You assumed the celery was stalking? Lily Twiller is more than capable of restraining her produce.”

  “Why aren’t you at the panel?” I asked.

  His eyes slitted. “Ms. Parks has dictated that the afternoon panel will be divided. Ms. Blackstone and that lint-brained Brit are taking the first half. At four o’clock, Ms. Parks, Ms. Cruzetti, and I will take the stage. I tend to find this sort of thing tedious, but in this case, I do anticipate a level playing field.”

  “Or battle field?” I said, sighing. “Why are all of you so competitive? Not one of you writes more than a book a year. The mystery readers who come into my store buy a bag of books every month.”

  Dahl regarded me for a moment. “I have a flask of very good scotch in my suitcase, Ms. Malloy. May I offer you a glass while I attempt to explain the realities of the business?”

  It was well into the afternoon, and I felt as though I’d spent most of the day in a boot camp in the Louisiana swamps. “Yes, please,” I said as I sat down on an expanse of flattened petunias.

  “You may have sensed that I did not care for Roxanne Small,” he said, returning with glasses from the bathroom. “She is the reason that I had no option but to accept the minimal offer from White Oak Press. My publisher is stout-hearted and optimistic, but the key factors in sales are promotion, print run, and distribution.”

  “What did Roxanne do?”

  “Exactly what any boa constrictor does when confronted with a potential meal.” He handed me a glass. “Cheers, Ms. Malloy. De mortuis nil nisi bonum.”

  “Give me a break, Mr. Dahl. You’re clearly eager to speak ill of the dead, as well as of anyone else who challenges your narcissistic view of your impact on mystery fiction.”

  He smiled, although I could hear his teeth grinding like splintered gears. “Went to high school, did we? How admirable, considering the predisposition in this region to be barefoot and pregnant by the onset of puberty.”

  “Is that an invitation to belt you before I leave?”

  “No,” he said, “it’s a very bad habit I picked up during my years in academia. Shall we discuss Roxanne?”

  His tone was level, if not contrite, and his scotch was indeed very good. “An excellent idea,” I said.

  “Two years ago I submitted a manuscript to Paradigm House. I will confess I was quite naive in matters of popular fiction, having had only a few scholarly works published by university presses, but Paradigm had sent me a galley, requesting a jacket blurb and inviting me to submit my own work to them. When I had a finished product, I wrote a cover letter that described my background and credentials, and enclosed the entire manuscript. Four months later the manuscript was returned, accompanied by a scathing letter of rejection, stating in no uncertain terms that I was an amateurish, pompous twit to have dared take up the editor’s precious time with four hundred pages of twaddle. I was advised to bury the manuscript in my yard and not expect grass to grow for seven years. I may be paraphrasing, Ms. Malloy, but that was the gist. Certain phrases were etched on my soul, to be honest, and I shall take them to my grave.”

  “Ouch,” I murmured.

  Walter shook his head. “That would have been my response, had it been the end of it. I subsequently learned that Roxanne Small ridiculed me when speaking at writers’ conferences, citing me by name and reading aloud from my cover letter. She took passages out of context and encouraged the audiences to bray like the illiterate jackasses they were. She wrote articles that focused on my submission as an example of everything an aspiring author ought not to do if he or she hoped to be published. My name and the name of my college were never omitted. I kept waiting to run across my home address, telephone number, and date of birth in the footnotes. Whatever aspirations I had of receiving tenure, well . . .”

  “Why did she respond so virulently?”

  “I have no idea.”

  I stared at him over the rim of the glass. “I think you do, Mr. Dahl.”

  He raised his hand, then let it fall away as Laureen Parks swept into the room as if she were clad in a floor-length cape and a diamond tiara. “Ah, Claire,” she said, “I was hoping I might find you here. I made a few tiny changes to the afternoon schedule, but I simply cannot allow Mr. Dahl here to continue to badger those two dear women. Dilys was brave during the luncheon, but I saw her shedding tears on her croissant. It was entirely too soggy to be edible. Sherry Lynne agreed to participate in the first half of the panel before she rents a bullhorn and goes looking for that animal of hers. The neighborhood will never be the same.”

  “None of us will,” I said. “Want some scotch?”

  She gave me the same dazzling smile I’d been treated to in the garden the previous day. “I would never dream of imposing on Mr. Dahl. Why don’t I pop into Roxanne’s room and fetch her bottle of gin? She won’t be drinking it, will she?”

  Walter wiggled his eyebrows. “Perhaps we can arrange for the medical examiner to drain her blood so that you can drink that, too. Surely Lily can be prevailed upon to provide a slice of orange and a maraschino cherry, although I would hesitate to request a perky paper umbrella. We might call it a ‘Roxie on the Rocks’ or a ‘Small Sin.’”

  “We shall talk,” Laureen said, then went across the hallway and returned with the bottle of gin and a glass she must have taken from the bathroom. “As extraordinarily offensive as you are, Walter, and you have gone well beyond the bounds of anyone I’ve encountered in decades, I am willing to do what I can to help your career. With your permission, I’ll speak to my agent. Roxanne’s death will put Paradigm House’s mystery imprint in chaos for months, but there are other publishing houses that might be interested�
��with a bit of prodding, that is.”

  “Why would you do that?” he asked.

  She filled the glass and drained half of it without so much as a wince. “You were not Roxanne’s only victim, although she did go after you with a rather amazing vengeance. I was at the Authors Guild symposium when she spoke in January, and I must say—”

  “Please don’t,” he cut in. “I have no doubt what she said, and I have already apprised Ms. Malloy of the situation.”

  I shrugged. “I had no idea this business was so . . .”

  Laureen sat down beside me and patted my knee. “It’s a jungle, my sweet Claire, and survival of the fittest can be determined by the whim of the art department or a buyer from a chain bookstore, who, on any given day, is either having great sex with his wife or screaming at a divorce lawyer. A Hollywood celebrity may have a lurid confession out at the same time. A White House pet may be inspired by the muse in time to hit the fall list. All we can hope for is support from our editors.”

  “You seemed to feel as if Roxanne was letting you down,” I said cautiously.

  “Had I been swinging through this jungle, she would have chopped off the grapevine and taken pleasure in watching me plummet into a pool of hippopotami.” She took a cigarette out of her purse and lit it, then glanced around for an ashtray. “I thought this establishment was smoker-friendly, at least for the weekend.”

  Walter straggled with a window until it slid upward with a shriek. “You have a vile habit, Ms. Parks.”

  “You, sir,” she replied, “have a vile way with the written word. I actually forced myself to read your first book, and found it worthy of internment in a sandbox—or a litterbox. You accused Allegra of jumping on a bandwagon, but at least it’s one that has been hauled out in the last year. Your books are more suited to the middle of the last century, when men wore white suits and women swooned every twenty-eight days because their fathers had rejected them in the formative years.”

  “Save this for the panel,” I said, putting my glass down. “I came upstairs for a reason, and I can use some help. You both have experience concocting ways to dispose of potentially incriminating evidence.”

  “How intriguing,” Laureen purred. “I do so love a mystery.”

  Walter, who’d been sulking in silence, raised his glass as if offering a toast. “Then why don’t you write one?”

  “Why don’t you?” she said, looking as though she might sling the contents of the dearly departed’s gin in his face. “Of course, it would require you to come up with a plot, wouldn’t it?”

  “And you might need characters that were not clipped out of magazines. Supermodels, by definition, are not the deepest ponds on the farm. Have you ever written about a young woman who did not have raven hair and emerald eyes?”

  Laureen crossed her arms. “Have you ever written about one and had a print run over two thousand?”

  “Hey, I have raven hair and emerald eyes,” said Allegra as she came into the room. “Laureen may not have had me in mind when she began writing, but that doesn’t—”

  I cut her off. “Gin or scotch?”

  “No Zinfandel?”

  “Gin or scotch?” I repeated.

  She looked at Walter and Laureen. “Gin—and a tranquilizer gun, if you and I want to get out of here alive.”

  “So what evidence might we be looking for?” asked Laureen. “A smoking gun? A bloody dagger?”

  “Definitely gin,” Allegra said as she filled a glass and sat down. “Evidence of what?”

  I wasn’t sure how much I ought to tell them. “Roxanne went to Ammie’s house this morning, and came back here with some notebooks. They’re not in her room.”

  Walter snorted. “Is that why you were searching my room? Do you think I might have strip-searched Roxanne before I threw her in the cistern?”

  Laureen took the bottle out of Allegra’s hand. “There is only a limited amount of gin in the universe. This has my name on it. The idea of strip-searching Roxanne brings to mind frisking a North Atlantic cod. Cold and slimy, scales glistening, eyes forever rounded, mouth agape.”

  “Notebooks?” said Allegra, neatly retrieving the bottle from Laureen with only a minor bout of wrestling. “We should be searching for notebooks? Isn’t that a bit mundane? I tend to think copies of love letters from JFK or Howard Hughes might be worthy of a search. Ammie Threety’s definitive thoughts about life in the wilds, on the other hand . . .”

  Laureen narrowed her eyes. “Notebooks?”

  “Roxanne carried them away this morning,” I said. “I’m sure they’re filled with tedious insights, but her parents might find comfort. Roxanne made some grandiose promises to see that the fiction would be published.”

  “And they’ve disappeared?” said Allegra. “You searched Roxanne’s room?”

  “Have you called in the CIA?” added Walter.

  “The FBI, I should think,” said Laureen as she refilled her glass.

  Allegra smiled ever so smugly. “Never underestimate the ATF in these cases. I can almost hear agents rustling in the garden—unless, of course, it’s Sherry Lynne’s cat. He could well be typing a confession while he devours a mole or vole.”

  I stood up. “Has anyone ever told you people how annoying you are? Two women are dead, and a third victim is in the hospital. This is not some ditzy plot in a novel. Dead is dead. It’s time for funerals, not jokes.”

  Laureen drank the remaining gin in a gulp. “You’re absolutely right, Claire. We’re all being horrid, and we have no excuse. I suggest we find these notebooks so that you can return them to Ammie’s parents. I promised her that I would read her manuscript, although I warned her that I would be blunt in my assessment.”

  “May we presume you’ve already searched Roxanne’s room?” said Walter. “And mine as well?”

  “Not yet,” I admitted.

  “Then why don’t I sit here while you do so?”

  “Fine,” I said. The three watched as I checked all the possibilities. “What about your room, Laureen?” I asked. “Any objections?”

  “My dear, were I to hide something, not even the KGB would stumble across it. By all means, let’s search my room.”

  We all ambled down to her room, which was dominated by determined roses. They all once again plunked themselves down and watched me as I crawled under the bed and opened cabinets and drawers. The countertop in the bathroom was littered with vials of prescription drags, along with various personal items not worthy of mention.

  “I never doubted your innocence for a moment,” Allegra said to Laureen. “Or, well, not for more than a few minutes. After all, you’ve killed how many cads over all these years?”

  “Eighty-seven,” she said as she refilled her glass. “I have not retired, however. Shall we have a look at your room?”

  Allegra looked less than enthusiastic at the idea. “I wasn’t here when Roxanne came back this morning, and there’s no reason to think she would have left anything in my room. I called my agent, then came upstairs and took an aspirin.”

  “You were downstairs when Sherry Lynne went dashing to the garden,” I said.

  “I was having tea with Laureen.”

  Laureen gave her an enigmatic look. “Yes, we were in the parlor, nibbling rice crackers and wondering how far it was to McDonald’s. Dilys was shopping, as she is so inclined to do. Sherry Lynne was, of course, having a nervous breakdown, as she is also inclined to do whenever she’s concerned about her cats. During the presentation of the Dorothy L. Sayers awards last summer, she made no fewer than a dozen calls to her vet to ascertain that whichever cat it was had successfully coughed up a hairball. I shall never eat angel hair pasta again.”

  “Not even al dente?” drawled Walter.

  “Search my room,” Allegra said. “I don’t care. This is all so awful and nasty. Roxanne may not have been my best friend, but somebody killed her.”

  I stood up. “Roxanne Small is dead. She died when she hit the bottom of the cistern. How can
you make jokes about it?”

  “Jokes?” said Laureen. “I thought we were helping.”

  “How did you think you might be helping?”

  Walter had the decency to flinch, visibly and with some display of contrition, which didn’t mean I bought it. “You do understand how distressed we are, Claire. Roxanne was a significant player.”

  “Did any of you like her?” I asked bluntly.

  Laureen sat back. “Like her? Oh, please. You should be asking about anyone who did not wish her dead, would not have cheerfully shoved her over the wall of the cistern. There may be two or three authors out there who believed in the myth. I would like to think they’ve been institutionalized. The rest have day jobs.”

  Allegra shook her head. “Not me. Roxanne was a great editor. She worked with me, nurtured me, encouraged me, brought me along.”

  “Let’s all clap so that Tinkerbell will live,” Laureen said, her voice drier than the bottom of her glass.

  I felt as if I’d been beckoned to the plate in a World Series game—but without a bat.

  Chapter

  11

  Despite an artful array of pricey makeup, scarves, combs, brashes clotted with tangles of black hair, unmatched earrings scattered on the top of the dresser, and the prevalence of magnolia blossoms on the wall and upholstery, the only item worthy of discussion in Allegra’s room turned out to be an amethyst broach. Laureen insisted on examining it, then shook her head sadly and pronounced it paste. Allegra begged to differ, claiming it was Victorian and quite valuable. While they squabbled about the authenticity of the filigree and Walter watched with a supercilious expression, I darted into Dilys’s room (lilacs), and then Sherry Lynne’s (forsythias).