The Man Who Tried to Get Away

by Donaldson, Stephen R.

  But I was in no mood—and no condition—to suffer over it. The back of my brain would talk to me when it damn well felt like it, not one heartbeat before. And I had other agendas.

  I still meant to have a drink. If Ginny wanted to get burned playing with Joseph Hardhouse, that was her business. I had an entirely different fire in mind.

  By the time I finished cleaning my weapon, I heard chimes out in the hall. When I opened the door, I saw a woman walking away from me, beating rather aimlessly on a small xylophone. From the back, she looked like a cross between everyone’s favorite grandmother and the Pillsbury Doughboy. Amalia Carbone, the housekeeper, announcing dinner.

  Until Cat Reverie emerged from the room across from mine and smiled at me, I didn’t realize that I hadn’t heard Buffy’s companions return from their walk. No banging doors, no creaking floorboards, no talk, nothing. The rooms had better insulation than I’d expected.

  A couple of things surprised me about Cat’s appearance. She’d changed her clothes. Now she wore a drop-dead gown, black and slinky, which showed enough cleavage to reanimate a corpse. And she seemed glad to see me.

  “Brew.” She beamed up at me. “Good timing.” Slipping her arm through mine, she hugged my biceps. “You can escort me to dinner.”

  I’d seen her walk with Hardhouse, so I was braced for the way she tucked her hip against my leg. Immediately I noticed that her posture had one particular advantage. It made her look like her breasts might come out of her dress at any moment.

  But I wasn’t interested in her. She wasn’t Ginny. She wasn’t even Queenie Drayton. I didn’t pull my arm away—but I also didn’t smile. With my usual charm, I asked, “What’s all this about? I thought you were after Hardhouse.”

  Just for a second, her smile flicked away. Nevertheless she recovered quickly. “I am,” she admitted in a tone that contained a world of possibilities. “But you could persuade me to change my mind. I like men.

  “No,” she amended at once, “that’s not quite right. I like strength. I like muscle and toughness. Unless I’m losing my touch”—she chuckled as she squeezed my arm—“you have both.

  “Take me to dinner,” she commanded before I could respond. “Maybe later I’ll find out whether I’m right.”

  While I groped for a snappy retort, I was interrupted.

  A door slammed behind me. A hand came down on my shoulder.

  Simon Abel.

  He glared at me, lines pinched around his mouth. Unfortunately anger didn’t suit his too-young face. Instead of lending him force, it only made him look like a petulant kid.

  “If you don’t mind,” he snapped, “she’s with me.”

  He gave me a problem. Nobody touches me—not like that. No matter how weak or wounded I am. But Cat’s face wore a laughing expression for my benefit, and I didn’t like that either. I didn’t want to take sides between them.

  So I pulled my arm out of her grasp and caught him by the wrist. Holding him hard enough to make him wince, I put his hand on her shoulder for him.

  “Take her,” I said with a malicious grin. “She’s yours.”

  Then I strode ahead of them toward the dining room. For a few paces, anyway, adrenaline helped me walk like a normal person.

  God, I wanted a drink. More and more, I couldn’t think of any other way to stand being myself.

  Most of the crew had already assembled in the dining room when I arrived. And most of them had changed for dinner. Ginny and Mac Westward were the only exceptions. Hardhouse had produced an actual dinner jacket, and Lara’s gown rivaled Cat’s. Houston Mile and Rock had on suits, Buffy and Maryanne Green wore dresses which would’ve done justice to an Easter service, and even Constance Bebb gave the impression that she’d donned her best tweed. As for the Draytons, Sam looked merely elegant and movie-actorish in a sports coat and cream scarf, but something about Queenie’s silk blouse and flowing skirt almost broke my heart.

  Feeling more than ever like the ugly duckling, I hunched into the room and glowered democratically at everybody.

  Cat and Simon followed a moment later. They were both flushed, but for different reasons, and they didn’t touch each other. Cat headed toward Hardhouse. Abel stood in the doorway, looking baffled by his own anger.

  “Ah, here we are at last,” Buffy announced happily. She may’ve been immune to awkward situations. “Please don’t think dinner is a formal occasion. Some of us just like to dress up. It makes us feel that we’re taking part in an Agatha Christie novel.

  “Why don’t we sit down?”

  Smoothly she assigned seats. No haphazard arrangements for Sue-Rose Altar. After a bit of shuffling, we were all in our places, Rock and Buffy at the ends of the long table, Maryanne, Westward, Lara Hardhouse, Drayton, Ginny, and Simon along one side, Joseph, Cat, and me, then Connie, Mile, and Queenie down the other. Everywhere we looked, gun cases loomed behind us. Either the guns didn’t belong there, or we didn’t, I couldn’t decide which.

  When we were seated, Buffy rang a little bell, and Amalia Carbone appeared. I hadn’t seen her face before. More than anything, she looked like someone you could trust to make spaghetti sauce.

  Faith Jerrick trailed behind her. A demure net contained Faith’s fine, almost white hair. She wore her crucifix outside her blouse. She didn’t look at any of us.

  Both she and Ama carried bottles of wine. From opposite ends of the table, they started offering wine to the guests.

  I was never much of a wine drinker, but I knew the difference between white and red. Suddenly my pulse began to clamor in my head, and my throat felt too tight to breathe. I’d arrived without expecting it at a crisis. The mere idea of alcohol made my whole body constrict with eagerness. I stood on the brink of something irrevocable—a choice more important than I could measure. I deserved a drink, didn’t I? Wasn’t that the one true thing I could say about myself? I was an alcoholic, and alcoholics drink because they deserve to drink. Being sober was just a smoke screen, a way of hiding the truth—of pretending to be something I wasn’t.

  And Ginny didn’t give a shit. Obviously. She didn’t look at me. She’d already cut me off. She sat too far away from Hardhouse to focus her attention on him, so she talked to Sam Drayton. Even he held more interest for her than I did.

  Self-pity is a wonderful thing. It justifies whatever you want. I couldn’t think of one reason why I shouldn’t get stone drunk as fast as possible. When Faith brought the red wine to my place, I nodded, and she filled my glass.

  Looking at it, I realized for maybe the first time in my life that wine can be as lovely and seductive as rubies. It lacked whiskey’s tranquil amber promise, but its attractions were still powerful. The lights in the dining room made my glass seem deep enough to drown in.

  “Let me propose a toast.” Buffy raised her glass. She was in her element. Her smile sparkled like her earrings, and her skin appeared to glow. When she looked that happy, I could understand why Rock went along with her hobby.

  We raised our glasses. She paused dramatically, as if she knew what this moment meant to me, then said in a clear voice, “To a beautiful murder and an elegant solution.”

  Ginny gave me a glance like a sneer, but she didn’t watch while I brought my glass to my mouth.

  Lara watched. Her own wine forgotten, she stared at me intently, almost avidly, as if she were hungry for the implications of my drinking. Her lips were parted and moist, unmistakably ready to be kissed, and a dusky smolder filled her eyes. All of a sudden, she was the loveliest woman in the room, and every ounce of her was aimed at me.

  Her intensity went through me like a kind of panic. Abruptly—too abruptly for grace, never mind discretion—I put the wine down untasted and picked up my glass of water. Conspicuously late, I joined the toast.

  Everyone at the table seemed to stare at me. Ginny’s face had an odd congested look, like conflicted fright. I couldn’t read Lara’s reaction, but Sam gave me an unabashed grin, and Queenie murmured almost too softly to be hea
rd, “Good for you.”

  As if in acknowledgment, Hardhouse proposed another toast. “May we all get what we want most this week.” His voice grated on my nerves, but I drank with the group anyway.

  His toast made his wife blush. Maybe it had something to do with infidelity.

  Then Houston Mile started to chuckle. “Son,” he said down the table at Hardhouse, “if Ah required an opportunity such as this to get what Ah want most, Ah wouldn’t bother. Ah’d purely lie down and die.”

  “You must have simple wants, Houston,” Hardhouse replied. “Perhaps you aren’t very ambitious.”

  “Oh, Houston is ambitious,” Maryanne Green put in, sounding rather breathless. “He’s amazing, really. He can do anything. No one ever beats him—no one ever says no to him.”

  That I doubted. There were people right here who were perfectly capable of saying no to Houston Mile. But accuracy wasn’t the point—not to Maryanne, anyway. Her words seemed to inflate Mile, take up some of the slack in his appearance. Somehow she made him look less bloated, more like he fit inside his skin.

  He gave an aw-shucks grin. “How that woman do talk,” he said expansively. “Ah’m just a good ol’ boy from down home, if Ah do say it mahself. But I got no qualms about mah taste in horseflesh. Or womanflesh.”

  Now it was Maryanne’s turn to blush.

  “Don’t let Mr. Mile mislead you,” Rock put in unexpectedly. His air of vague disinterest may have been a disguise, concealing the man who liked to tamper with clues. Without looking at any of us, he explained, “He’s been to two of our mystery camps. At the first, he was the first to solve the crime. At the second, he was the only one to solve it.”

  Buffy clucked disapprovingly. “Now, Rock, you shouldn’t tell them things like that. You’ll embarrass Houston. And you’ll intimidate everyone else.”

  Embarrass Houston Mile? No chance. In fact, he said as much himself. “Ah’m not embarrassed, Buffy. Ah got mah reputation to maintain. Tell you what,” he said to the rest of the table. “Ah’ll lay you a small wager, whatever you like, Ah already know Buffy’s actors. Ah got ’em figured. And Ah know which of us is supposed to be detectives.”

  Faith and Ama had brought out food. Cream of broccoli soup, I think it was. But eating didn’t prevent us from listening hard.

  “Fascinating,” Queenie Drayton breathed. “Are you really sure?” When Mile nodded, she went on, “Ill bet with you. I think I have it figured out as well. What shall we bet?”

  At once Mile flapped his fat hands in protest. “Miz Drayton, a gentleman don’t wager with a lady.”

  “Oh, come on,” Cat Reverie chimed in eagerly. “In this day and age? Don’t you have women’s liberation down there in Texas? Go on, bet with her. I want to know what you both guess. Maybe you aren’t as good at this as you think.”

  Her challenge didn’t ruffle Mile. He acceded easily. “Miz Drayton, if you insist Ah’ll wager the princely sum of ten dollars that mah figurin’ is righter than yours.”

  “Done,” Queenie said without hesitation.

  “So tell us,” Cat demanded. “Start with the actors. Who do you think they are?”

  Simon had his face buried in his food. Ginny was smiling unaccountably at Hardhouse. From where I sat, it looked like she was wasting her time. While she spoke, Cat Reverie kept one hand clamped to Hardhouse’s thigh. However, everyone else paid close attention to Queenie and Mile.

  Everyone except Mac Westward. He paid no attention to anything except his wine.

  “No!” Buffy insisted before either Mile or Queenie could answer. “If you’re right, you’ll ruin the fun for the rest of us. And if you’re wrong, you’ll help us eliminate possibilities.

  “I’ll tell you what. Write your guesses on a piece of paper. Give them to me. When the camp is over, I’ll read what you wrote. Then the rest of us can judge who wins the bet.”

  I had to give her credit. Sue-Rose Altar knew how to run a mystery camp.

  Cat pouted, but both Queenie and Mile accepted Buffy’s terms. For the moment, anyway, they kept their faces studiously blank, bluffing each other like mad.

  As if he’d been ready for this since the beginning of time, Rock produced a sheaf of paper. He passed a sheet to Queenie, a sheet to Mile. Then he supplied pencils.

  Queenie and Mile wrote briefly. She chewed the end of her pencil between names and glanced up and down the table, apparently suppressing a giggle. Mile approached the exercise more laboriously.

  When they were done, they both folded their lists and handed them to Buffy. She unfolded the papers and read them solemnly, as if this were a momentous occasion. I waited for the background music to swell, playing the “suspense” theme from The Deerskin Lodge Murders.

  She couldn’t keep it up, however. When she read Mile’s list, she burst out laughing. “Houston Mile, you should be ashamed of yourself.” But then she put both papers away in her purse.

  Mile favored us with an oleaginous grin, exposing his bad teeth.

  I turned toward Cat to catch her reaction.

  Apparently she’d already lost interest in guessing games. Instead she leaned toward Hardhouse. Now she had both hands on his leg under the table.

  Mac Westward cleared his throat. He was gazing up at the ceiling as if it had a message written on it. After squinting upward for a minute, he read it to us.

  “‘mystery Camp of Fools.’ Good title.”

  For the first time, Connie Bebb spoke. “Do you think we could get away with it? It may not be original enough.”

  Westward didn’t answer. His attention returned to his wine.

  Faith and Ama brought the next course—prime rib with sweet potatoes and homemade dressing. Unfortunately the soup was already as much food as I could handle. I tasted enough of the meal to raise my opinion of Faith Jerrick. After that I concentrated on water to keep myself from thinking about wine.

  Gradually the conversation became general. Ginny and Sam Drayton began discussing ozone depletion in the troposphere, of all things. Cat was consumed—the perfect word for it—with Joseph Hardhouse. Beside me, Connie dipped at her food like a recent graduate of Miss Manners’ school for “excruciatingly correct behavior.”

  Buffy kindly kept Simon Abel off the conversational streets. At the other end of the table, Maryanne Green worked so hard to strike some kind of spark from Rock that I feared she might do herself an injury. But I could hardly make out what either pair said. That left me with the disturbing prospect of Lara Hardhouse.

  Nominally, at any rate, she was talking to Westward. In fact, she’d actually succeeded at getting him to listen to her. He tilted toward her with his elbow propped on the arm of his chair and his chin braced on his palm. While she spoke, he stared abysmally at her food, as if he found it depressing.

  She kept her eyes on me, however. Her gaze held an appeal, a need almost strong enough to be called supplication. She might’ve been asking—begging?—me to rescue her from something.

  Whatever it was, it couldn’t have been Westward. If she’d left him alone, he might’ve fallen asleep. But instead she was telling him what she thought was wrong with most mystery novels.

  “It’s the puzzle,” she explained. “How did the murderer get into the locked room. Why isn’t there any blood. Who could have switched glasses with the victim. It all gets in the way. It’s only an intellectual game, like a crossword puzzle—it prevents you from caring about what happens. It’s just curiosity, not suspense. Real suspense is emotional, not intellectual. It has to do with liking one of the characters and not knowing whether he’ll be the next victim. It has to do with hating the murderer and wanting him to get caught—or liking him and not wanting him to get caught.

  “I don’t care whether Mr. X must’ve killed her because he’s the only one who knows how to remove wine corks with an ice pick. I care that he did it because he was in love with her and couldn’t stand seeing her sleep with anyone else.”

  There Lara paused as if she were waiting,
not for Westward’s reaction, but for mine.

  I was mildly surprised to see that he did react. Without shifting his stare—or his posture—he mumbled, “You’re right. But you’re also wrong.”

  Lara and I both gave him time to go on. He didn’t. Instead he drank more wine.

  “Mac’s being cryptic,” Connie announced primly. “He’s had too much to drink.” If Westward felt the effect of her jibe, he didn’t show it. “The subject happens to be one we feel strongly about.”

  She didn’t raise her naturally soft voice. Nevertheless, its firmness took over the table. Everyone stopped talking to hear her. Buffy in particular watched and listened as if she were studying at the feet of a priestess. But even Cat Reverie and Houston Mile stopped whatever they were doing to pay attention.

  “Mac means,” Connie said, “that you’re right about intellectual puzzles, but you’re wrong about suspense.

  “The problem with building a mystery novel on an intellectual puzzle is the implicit assumption that anyone is capable of anything. This is debatable in itself, but the puzzle goes one step further. It implies that everyone is equally capable of anything. Therefore the only way to distinguish between equal possibilities is to focus on how the crime was committed rather than on why.

  “But surely this is nonsense. Everyone is not equally capable of anything.

  “If we reject that assumption, the mystery becomes, Who is capable of this particular crime? Which one of the characters has the capacity for it? But even if we accept that anyone is capable of anything, we still have to recognize that different people—being different, unequal—require different kinds of stress to bring out their latent capabilities. The mystery becomes, What kind of stress would make a given individual capable of this particular crime? Is that kind of stress present?”

  Buffy was too excited to sit still. “But surely,” she said, unconsciously echoing Connie, “one of the capabilities you’re talking about is the ability to commit the crime in a way that will conceal or confuse who did it. That’s an intellectual ability. Whether a murderer gets caught doesn’t depend on what kind of person he is. It depends on how smart he is.”