“Annie. Annie. ANNIE!”
She paused, images still flashing in her brain like neon on a rainy Saturday night.
“Quiet now. Take a deep breath.”
Obediently, she breathed. Then she shook her head impatiently. “I’m not choking.”
“I thought you were hyperventilating. Take it easy. Approach it logically.” His voice was low, deep, soothing, and extraordinarily irritating.
“I am fine, thank you. It’s just that there are so many wonderful possibilities—”
Max was trying hard not to laugh. He set his mug down and reached out to ruffle her hair. “Annie, love, I do enjoy you so.”
She looked at him skeptically. “Are you making fun of me?”
“I’d never do that,” he said virtuously, but the corner of his mouth twitched suspiciously.
They both laughed, and she realized this was the happiest she’d been in weeks, immersed in mysteries and laughing companionably with Max. Agatha leaped gracefully up to the bar to join in the merriment. Annie stroked her and felt ridiculously happy. It was almost as if she and Max hadn’t quarreled. Well, it wasn’t exactly a quarrel. But it was a disagreement. In spades. This moment forcibly reminded her in what direction happiness lay. But she had to retain her independence.
Oblivious to her unspoken soliloquy, Max reached for the notebook and took his pen.
“Okay. First things first. Who will play the role of the suspects?”
She understood at once. “Oh, sure. That limits some of the possibilities.” Her mind ran over and discarded murder in the Himalayas, on a submarine, or while deep-sea fishing. “The roles will be played by members of the Historical Preservation Society.”
He quirked an expressive eyebrow. “If they are anything like the women in my grandmother’s bridge club …”
“Allowing for cultural distinctions between Connecticut and South Carolina, I would imagine they are soulmates.”
Devilment glinting in his dark blue eyes, Max leaned forward. “Hey, I’ve got a great idea. Make the victim a Hollywood producer in 1926 and have the suspects be a bunch of young starlets. Oh wow, can you see these old ladies in vamp clothes and beads and bangles …” He melted in laughter.
She laughed, too, then mused, “Actually, I can see casting that horrid Mrs. Webster as an aging star, who everybody hates. Maybe an old folks’ home for retired actors and actresses, and she has a chance for a big role, and all the other old-lady stars are jealous and one of them spikes her bedtime toddy with cyanide.”
He shook his head, half in awe, half in despair. “You do have a fertile mind, love, but let’s skirt any possibility of slander. Your Mrs. Webster probably wouldn’t like that role at all.”
His caution surprised her. Max could act like a lawyer most unexpectedly. But how marvelous that he wasn’t predictable. Now, what was she doing mooning on about Max? The mystery was the thing.
“She’s not my Mrs. Webster. But, you’re probably right. I’d better not use her as the victim.” Absently, her face scrunched in thought, she stood on tiptoe and stretched. Her mind worked better when her muscles were loose. “Okay, we’re going to build a story that centers around upper-class, middle-aged suspects.”
He poised the pen over the notebook. “How do we go about it?”
“Just like Agatha Christie did. We think.” She ran her hand excitedly through her short blonde hair. “Did I ever tell you my favorite Christie story?” She charged ahead: “One day when walking in her garden with a friend, Christie abruptly announced her book was finished. This excited her companion, who had always wanted to read one of Agatha’s books before it was published. The friend asked for permission to read the manuscript. Dame Agatha looked very surprised, then responded, ‘Oh, I haven’t written it yet.’ ”
“Oh, that’s great.”
“So we have to do the same. We have to figure everything out.” Her eyes narrowed in concentration.
He tapped the paper with the pen. “How do we do it?”
“Here’s what we need,” she explained confidently. “Victim. Five suspects. Motives. Alibis. Clues.” She traced the outline of the title on her cup. “I mean real clues, like half of a torn letter, a smudged postmark, cigarette butts, a box of insecticide. I’ll scatter clues around the crime scene for the detectives to find.”
“Who’s the victim?” He scratched at his thick blonde hair with the stub end of the pen.
She pressed her fingers against her temples for a long moment, then nodded. “How about a bank president? Think of the lust, greed, and general hatred that can swirl around a bank president.” She pictured Roscoe Merrill’s shiny bald head. Any prosperous lawyer could look like a bank president.
“Dark secrets in the hallways of high finance,” Max intoned.
“We’ll call the bank president Thompson Hatfield—and we’ll use Kansas as a setting. Agricultural banks are nosediving all over the place in the Middle West. Now, here’s what happens,” and she leaned close to Max. They were elbow to elbow as he wrote furiously to keep up with her bullet-fast pronouncements. “Motives abound. His wife’s in love with another man, he’s about to foreclose on a huge ranch run by his brother-in-law, his stepson’s been embezzling, the vice president of the bank wants his job, he’s going to fire the PR director, and he’s the only man who won’t agree to merging with another town bank to save it from going under.”
“And somebody slips cyanide into his coffee thermos,” Max suggested. “See, there’s your cyanide.”
Clues to be found at the murder scene: The name of his wife’s lover written in his appointment book, the torn foreclosure notice for his brother-in-law’s ranch, a key chain belonging to the vice president who wants his job, a gun registered in the name of the PR director, a Stetson hat that belongs to the president of the rival, failing bank, and a strand of hair belonging to his wife. (She is a redhead.)
“Well, now that that’s settled,” Max began, and once again he had that determined, bullheaded September look in his dark blue eyes.
She threw herself into the breach. “Oh, no, we’ve just started. We have to figure out the information to give to the suspects.”
The phone rang at the front desk, but Annie knew Ingrid would answer it.
“Let’s see, we’d better draw up a timetable, then we’ll decide who was where and—”
“Max,” Ingrid’s voice warbled cheerfully. “It’s for you.”
He reached for the extension behind the coffee bar. “Hi, Barbie. Sure, I’m free. I’ll be right back.” He hung up and whistled. “Barbie said this guy’s waiting to see me, and he’s talking a thousand-dollar retainer.”
Annie was tickled. Max actually sounded interested. It wouldn’t be the money, of course, but the chance to have a job. Perhaps he was reforming. Max excited at the prospect of work!
He paused at the front door and called back meaningfully, “I’ll be back in a little while. We’ve got to talk.”
She stood by the coffee bar, her arms folded. Ingrid, her springy gray hair in tight curls from a new permanent, bobbed down the center aisle like a curious but ladylike bird. She had decided opinions on Annie and Max’s disagreement, but she practiced her own brand of tact. After she poured both Annie and herself fresh coffee, she said, “Sounded like you were having fun for a while.”
“Yeah.” She refused to meet Ingrid’s eyes.
Ingrid gently touched her arm and once again backed into her subject. “You know the old saying about pride. Well, pride is a mighty cold bedfellow. And people, if you hurt them too much, you can lose their friendship. And that would be a shame.”
Annie felt a sick ache in her heart. Lose Max? It seemed such a small thing, really, to want to plan the wedding her own way. A simple, small ceremony here on the island, paid for by her. But Max was obstinately insisting on a magnificent, grandiose, immense wedding in his hometown, at his expense.
She took a gulp of the hot coffee. “I’d better see if that delivery’s come,�
� and she carried her coffee mug past the scattered tables to the storeroom.
“Call me if you need any help,” Ingrid offered, before turning up the central aisle to the cash desk. Annie knew she was offering more than assistance with unloading boxes, and she was torn between affection and irritation. Darn it, did everybody think Max was right—except her? She put her coffee on the worktable and attacked the unopened carton of used books, bought from a collector in California. Wrestling the box open, she started pulling out the wads of crumpled newspaper. The top volume, well-wrapped in plastic, was an autographed first-edition copy of The Thirty-Nine Steps. It was a wonderful find, but she didn’t enjoy the usual flip-flop of pleasure. Instead, she slapped the cardboard carton shut, retrieved her coffee mug, and wandered back out into the bookstore. She’d not thought in terms of losing Max. Why, any fool could see how much fun they had together.
Even the excitement of working on the upcoming Mystery Nights waned as she considered Ingrid’s unsettling but well-meant warning. Restlessly, she paced into the American Cozy area, full of rattan chairs, wicker tables, and tangly ferns in raffia baskets. But the mingled smell of recently watered greenery and both musty and new books lacked its usual charm. Absently she noticed that Agatha had been chewing again on the fern closest to the Christie shelves. On a normal day, she would steal a half hour at least to look at her newest acquisitions, and perhaps succumb to the temptation to forget all duties, pressing or otherwise, and just curl up with one. Only yesterday she’d received a mystery she’d been seeking for years, Sax Rohmer’s Fire-Tongue. This was the famous book that he started without a solution, couldn’t solve himself, and finally had to ask his friend Harry Houdini to solve for him.
But not today. Fire-Tongue could wait until she’d completed the Mystery Night scripts—and stopped brooding about Max.
Come on, Annie, she instructed herself sternly, don’t be a gothic wimp. Everything would be all right with Max. She felt a flood of good cheer, with just a faint undercurrent of apprehension. Okay, she’d get back to work on her very own murder. Humming “Happy Days Are Here Again,” she returned to the coffee bar, put down her mug, and reached for the notebook. Now, what would cast members need to know about their characters to portray them successfully? She leaned against the bar and stared upward, and her eyes paused on the watercolors pinned to the back wall. By golly, these were a triumph.
In the first watercolor, a large, slope-shouldered man in a gray suit knelt beside a long, thin body in a black overcoat. The kneeling figure, with the face of a blond Satan, gripped a flaming cigarette lighter in his left hand. The flame flickered close to an open, immobile eye. His empty bloodstained right hand was raised. A football-shaped parcel wrapped in brown paper lay beside the body.
In the second picture, the strong-jawed, brown-eyed private detective in a wet trenchcoat clutched his dripping hat in one hand and looked impassively at the young, slim, naked woman sitting stiffly, in the pose of an Egyptian goddess, in a highbacked teakwood chair. Her eyes were opened wide in a witless stare. Her mouth was agape, her small, pointed white teeth as shiny as porcelain. Long jade earrings dangled from her delicate ears. A corpse lay face up on the floor near a tripod camera. He wore Chinese slippers, black satin pajama pants, and his embroidered Chinese coat seeped blood from three wounds. Strips of Chinese embroidery and Chinese and Japanese prints in wood-grained frames decorated the brown plaster walls of the low-beamed room.
Annie’s eyes narrowed thoughtfully. Maybe they were too easy.
In the third sketch, a body lay sprawled on the floor of a cabana overlooking surging ocean waters, a single crimson bullet wound in the head. A husky, dark-haired man with a scraped and bruised face and weary gray-blue eyes looked questioningly at his friend in the doorway and the .32 target pistol in his hand.
In the fourth painting, a yellow jeep with a front-end blade accelerated directly at the big, aging jock standing by an open pit in a subtropical pasture. Visible in the pit was the glossy, red-brown body of a dead horse. The driver of the jeep was shirtless, a mat of black hair on his tanned, muscular chest. He wore a white canvas cap and oval aviator’s sunglasses. His quarry, crouched by the pit, ready to spring out of the jeep’s charge, had light eyes and dark hair. He wore boat pants, sandals, and a faded white shirt. A vulture hovered overhead in the yellowish sky.
In the final painting, an athletic, savvy-looking man stood poised in the archway of the living room of an old apartment, a gun in his hand. Velveteen hangings covered the walls. Skulls flanked an altar. A naked girl, her body painted with cabalistic and astrological signs, was tied to a cross, which hung from the ceiling. The cult’s almost naked priest, wearing only a hood, stood near the cross, brandishing a stubby stick.
The old-familiar thrills coursed through her. Mysteries, the stuff of life. She bent over the bar and began to write, as fast as her hand could fly. By golly, this was going to be a wonderful mystery. And all her own. She whistled cheerfully as she worked. The Mystery Nights would be a smash and everything, of course, would ultimately come right between her and Max. He would see reason and agree to her plan for the wedding.
As Annie would later say, had she but known.…
5
Max held a freshly sharpened No. 2 pencil between his index fingers, but he didn’t write a word. The yellow legal pad lying in solitary splendor on his leather blotter was blank. Nor did he offer refreshments to his prospective client, though he knew good, strong coffee pilfered from Death on Demand steamed in his stainless steel Krups coffee thermos. Max felt neither receptive, sociable, nor agreeable. Max didn’t like Harley Edward Jenkins III.
Harley Edward Jenkins III sat in the red leather chair as if he owned it, Max, and the island. Only the latter was partially true, since he did control forty percent of the stock in Halcyon Development Inc., the real estate investment holding company which had created the luxury homes and condominiums on Broward’s Rock.
“So get on it today.” Jenkins started to rise, which wasn’t especially easy for someone of his bulk. He bulged, despite the deceptive embrace of an artfully tailored navy blue Oxford suit.
Max held up his hand. “Just a minute.”
A frown creased Jenkins’s porcine face, and he pursed his fat lips impatiently.
“I want to be certain I understand you.”
Jenkins jerked his head in acknowledgment and balanced on the edge of the chair. Max thought he resembled a rhino in a hurry to get out on the savannah and gore some fresh meat.
“You’re in a business deal,” Max summed up. “You want to buy some land cheap. The guy who owns it is running around on his wife. You want me to follow him, get some choice pictures, and hand them over to you. Right?”
Jenkins wet his thick lips. “I don’t quite like the way you put that, Darling. Let’s say I merely wish to improve my position in negotiations, gain some lever-age.”
Max slapped the pencil crisply on his desk and leaned forward. “I’ve got some advice for you, Jenkins.”
The businessman’s red-veined face turned a mottled purple.
“Why don’t you go after money the old-fashioned way, Jenkins? Why don’t you earn it?”
He was grinning as the door to his office quivered on its hinges as Jenkins, livid with fury, slammed it shut.
He couldn’t wait to tell Annie about this encounter, even if he did owe a little to Smith Barney for his bon mot. He wished he’d had a camera to capture the shock on that sorry bastard’s face.
Then he sighed. Dammit, he hadn’t had a job for three weeks. Not that it mattered financially, of course. It’s not as if he’d ever have trouble paying the rent. But Annie did like for him to be busy. That girl must have been frightened by a Puritan spirit in her cradle.
Actually, he felt that his office was an artistic creation able to stand on its own merit without any need for utilitarian justification. He looked around in satisfaction. The room was large. An elegant rose-and-cream Persian rug stretched in fr
ont of the Italian Renaissance desk. Annie’s tart observation had been that the desk deserved at least a cardinal’s red robe for its owner. Glass-covered bookcases, filled with statute books and annotated treatises, lined one wall, though he made it very clear to clients that he was not practicing law. In fact, clients were usually more than a little puzzled as to his exact role, which suited him fine, since he had decided upon reflection that he didn’t care to be bothered to take either the South Carolina bar or to obtain a private investigator’s license. In his view, it was cruel and unusual punishment to require anyone to take more than one bar exam. He had manfully (if that weren’t sexist) passed the New York bar. As for a private investigator’s license, the sovereign state of South Carolina required either two years of work in an existing licensed agency or two years as a law enforcement officer before one could be obtained. Hence, his office window bore the legend, CONFIDENTIAL COMMISSIONS.
As he had earnestly explained to a skeptical Annie, it was his aim to help his fellow man (or woman), and to that end he was willing to undertake any mission which was both legal and challenging. After all, he didn’t have to be either a lawyer or a private detective to ask questions and solve problems. A discreet but inviting ad ran in the Personals Column of both the Island Herald and the Chastain Courier:
Carolyn G. Hart Page 23
