The Man Who Tried to Get Away

by Donaldson, Stephen R.

  That night, when I was supposed to be in my hospital bed, I went hunting for a killer, armed only with my instincts and the .45. I found him. Naturally he insisted that he was innocent. But he’d left a window open because he couldn’t afford the time to close it. That small detail should’ve given me the hint I needed. It should’ve told me that I was right, warned me to trust myself. Too bad I didn’t pay attention. Instead I let him give me a glass of vodka, thinking it was water.

  That mistake had nearly killed me and Ginny both.

  Simon’s open window was another hint. And Queenie had given me a glass of water that wasn’t vodka. That felt like a hint as well, a trigger for intuition.

  But why? What did either of those details have to do with the hole in the wine cellar wall?

  Ginny was saying, “Brew must’ve told you what I was doing.” She spoke coldly, without emotion—thinking hard, sifting information, organizing facts. “After he warned me about Smithsonian, we discovered Simon was gone. I went after him.

  “I started out assuming he was a hired gun who worked for el Señor, here to kill Brew. But once I had time to think, I realized there were other possibilities. He might be innocent. The real killer might’ve broken him out to get at the rat poison. In that case, he was probably dead. The killer couldn’t afford to leave him alive. So I had two reasons to catch up with him. To stop him, if he was the killer. Or to save him, if he was still alive.

  “I didn’t see anybody.” In this kind of mood, she wasted no time on bitterness or frustration. “I still don’t know who I was after. He hit me as soon as I reached the trees. Must’ve been less than half an hour after I left Brew, probably no more than twenty minutes.” She wasn’t digressing, just making connections. “He had plenty of time to come back here while you were having lunch.

  “He nearly finished me. I went down, and for a minute or two I hurt so bad I thought the slug was somewhere in my head. But I don’t think I passed out. Instead I waited for him for him to check on me, see if I was still alive. The snow covered me pretty well, and I was sure I’d hear him coming.”

  Ordinarily this sort of thing made me want to yell at her. Damn woman, who did she think she was, lying there in the snow with a head wound trying to spring an ambush on the goon who shot her? But now I couldn’t muster my usual indignation. My mind kept sliding away.

  El Señor’s hit man could have entered the lodge through my window. He could be here right now.

  In which case, why wasn’t I dead?

  The back of my brain wanted to tell me something about glasses of water—or glasses of vodka—but I couldn’t hear it.

  “I waited a long time,” Ginny went on. “He didn’t come. When I stopped shivering and got sleepy, I knew I had to take a chance on standing up and coming back here.”

  Sam muttered some sort of medical curse that had to do with drunks and idiots, but she didn’t stop.

  “It was harder than I thought it would be. I couldn’t tell if I’d lost blood or was just frozen, but I kept falling down. That’s how I know he wasn’t watching the lodge from my side. Otherwise he would’ve seen me and tried again. Which was a comfort.” For a moment she let a little of her anger out. “It helped me concentrate on getting up and going on.”

  But she didn’t dwell on that. “Eventually,” she concluded, “I got here. Now you know as much as I do. It’s your turn.”

  Sam scanned the group, apparently looking for volunteers. I guess he didn’t feel up to providing a summary of recent events. But no one else seemed to want the job either. Lara sat in one of the armchairs, chewing on her lips so hard that I thought she might draw blood. Her husband frowned studiously to himself like an entrepreneur deciding how to take advantage of a competitor’s mistakes. Beside Connie on the love seat, Maryanne looked too frightened to explain anything to anyone. To my surprise, Rock and Buffy stood together with their arms actually around each other, as gray as two halves of one lost soul. Mile’s eyes flicked piggy malice all around the parlor, but he didn’t speak.

  “Somebody?” Ginny asked acerbically. “Anybody?”

  I didn’t offer. In my struggle for insight, I was trying to be logical, even methodical. Which doesn’t usually work with intuition—but what the hell, I had to try something.

  Abruptly Connie said, “I’ll do it.”

  Scrutinizing the stained rug as if she needed to understand its pattern, Mac’s collaborator gave a clear, accurate, and concise account of events since Ginny went after Simon.

  I suppose I should’ve been impressed, considering the fact that Connie herself was one of the chief suspects, but most of the time I couldn’t make myself listen.

  Ginny absorbed the information intensely. When she asked a question, it amplified Connie’s explanation without distracting her. Then she thought for a while, scowling into the air.

  Everyone waited for her. The atmosphere in the parlor was tense with expectation or dread, but no one wanted to interrupt the professional investigator at work.

  “So,” she said finally, “we need to reconcile two apparently irreconcilable crimes. We have somebody with a gun outside, and somebody with strong fingers inside, and we don’t know how they fit together.” She emptied her cup and handed it to Queenie. “First we need to consider timing and access.”

  Rock and the Hardhouses nodded sharply. Even Connie nodded. To himself, Mile growled something I couldn’t make out.

  Queenie moved across the room to get more coffee. I followed her with my eyes simply because she was moving. When she picked up the coffeepot, I saw the decanter of port on the wet bar.

  A shiver ran through my head. Queenie had given me a glass of water. Which had reminded me of drinking vodka. Which now felt like a hint.

  A hint of what?

  What else, I thought because I’d just noticed it on the wet bar, what else besides Cat’s port?

  “Timing.” Ginny clicked her claw experimentally. “As far as I can tell, Mac could’ve been killed as much as half an hour after lunch. And you didn’t go to lunch right after I left. You talked in the den for a while. Whoever shot me obviously had time to come back here and kill Mac.

  “Another point. If we start from the assumption that one of you killed Mac, we’ll have a terrible time figuring out who was able to get away long enough to put rat poison in the fire, break Simon out of the wine cellar, leave that trail up into the hills, dispose of the body, shoot me, and come back without being missed. That doesn’t sound possible. If we assume the killer is an outsider, we’re at least dealing with things that are possible.”

  This made a certain amount of sense. Rock regained a bit of color, and Maryanne’s eyes brightened. With an air of concentration, Queenie took a fresh cup of coffee to Ginny, then stepped out of the way. Sam’s frown relaxed slightly. The idea of an unknown killer was bad enough, but it was better than the possibility that one of us, someone in this room, did it.

  For the time being, however, I left that stuff to Ginny. A completely different question troubled me. On what conceivable basis did a decanter of port accidentally left on a wet bar constitute a hint?

  Because Catherine Reverie, rest her poor lonely soul, had made such a point out of it. She was an actress, and she’d been downright ostentatious about her taste for port.

  Why would she do such a thing? What did it imply?

  “But,” Hardhouse said to Ginny, “that brings us back to the question of access. Your hypothetical outsider had to get into the lodge somehow. He had to have a key. Or help.”

  For a moment, Ginny seemed to accept this assertion. Once again, heads turned toward Truchi. But then she said, “Wait a minute. Did anybody relock the wine cellar after I left?”

  Considering his air of vagueness, Truchi’s prompt reply came as a surprise. “Me,” he said distantly. “The key was in the lock.” He rummaged in his pocket and produced a key. “The kitchen was cold, and we were told to lock all the doors.”

  “Shee-it,” Mile pronounced pro
foundly.

  So what, I asked myself, did Cat’s display of fondness for port suggest? For one thing, anyone who wanted her dead didn’t need to shoot her. All he had to do was spike her port. No one else drank the stuff.

  “Anything else?” Ginny asked the group. “Can you think of any way somebody could get in here without a key?”

  Abruptly Queenie gave a low gasp. “Brew’s window.”

  I should’ve expected this. Failing that, I should’ve reacted to it. But I was obsessed by nameless possibilities, and I wanted to talk to Rock. Or Buffy.

  I wanted to ask them how Simon was supposed to kill Cat.

  Heads swiveled from Truchi to Queenie. In a startled voice, Sam said, “That’s right.”

  Everyone waited for Queenie to explain.

  “It wasn’t latched,” she said awkwardly. She looked at me with misery in her eyes. She may’ve been asking me to forgive her. “I guess he forgot. I latched it for him.”

  “When was this?” Ginny demanded.

  “Right before lunch. Brew talked to us in the den. He asked Faith and Ama to get lunch ready. Then he and Sam and Rock went to look at the wine cellar from the outside. When they came back in, we went to his room. That’s when I noticed the window.”

  Ginny made a musing noise. “That complicates things. If the man who shot me got in through Brew’s window, he had to do it well before lunch. Was there enough time? Did any of you happen to see the time? How long did Brew talk?”

  Unfortunately that distracted me. It was too implausible. I simply couldn’t imagine a killer, presumably a professional, shooting Ginny and then running back along his trail to the lodge in plain daylight, risking being seen, encountering someone, all for the unlikely chance that he’d find a door or window unlocked.

  I shouldn’t have let my attention shift. I should’ve finished thinking about port.

  No one answered Ginny’s question. No one said anything. Except Queenie. In a worried tone, she murmured, “I need a drink.”

  For the second time, she crossed the parlor to the wet bar.

  I’d left a glass of vodka handy, but she ignored it. Instead she picked up the decanter and poured herself a hefty slug of port. Holding the decanter in one hand and her glass in the other, she turned back to the group.

  “Anyone else want anything?”

  Too late, I caught up with myself. I didn’t believe that Truchi had killed anyone. And I didn’t believe that he’d given his keys to a killer. Therefore—

  If the outsider theory were true, the killer must’ve entered the lodge through my window. And I sure as hell didn’t believe that. No one who knew what he was doing would take that risk.

  Therefore the killer was one of us. Someone who wanted a random assortment of us dead. Cat, me, Simon, Mac—

  —and who else? Surely he wouldn’t stop there?

  “No,” I choked out, “don’t.” But Queenie didn’t hear me. Or she didn’t know I meant her. Before I could stop her, she lifted her glass and took a deep swig.

  I’d nearly reached my feet when she started gagging.

  The sound she made was horrible to hear. Her own muscles strangled her. As she went into convulsions, she dropped her glass and the decanter. Sweet purple splashed the rug like blood. I tried to catch her, but she was too far away, I had too much of my weight braced on the wall. Flailing wildly, she went down in a pile of limbs and spasms.

  “Queenie!” Sam cried, a hoarse wail from the depths of his heart. Then he vaulted past Ginny’s chair and dove at his wife.

  For some reason, I noticed that a blue marble rolled out of the decanter into the middle of the puddle on the rug.

  20

  The puddle soaked in slowly, staining the rug a nauseating color, blurring the ambiguous design, while Sam fought to save Queenie’s life.

  Ginny took his bag to him before he called for it—before he finished his first quick check of Queenie’s vital signs. Then she knelt to help hold Queenie still while he worked.

  The way Ginny moved made her look like she’d never needed help in her life.

  Strain mottled Queenie’s face. The seizure closed her throat, sealed her chest, she wasn’t breathing. Spasms fired in her muscles. She thrashed like a madwoman. Ginny couldn’t control her. Sam needed someone to clamp down Queenie’s legs.

  It should’ve been me, but Joseph Hardhouse and Amalia Carbone got there ahead of me. They reached Queenie at the same moment and put their weight on her legs.

  Instead of pushing either of them aside, I lowered myself back down the wall and crawled on my hands and knees after the marble.

  Sam tore open a disposable needle, fixed it to a syringe. He snapped the top off an ampoule and filled the syringe. Every line of his face and arms focused on the necessity of keeping his hands steady.

  As soon as he had the injection ready, he snapped, “I need a vein!”

  Ginny didn’t seem to understand.

  No, that wasn’t it. She simply couldn’t pull either of Queenie’s arms away from her chest.

  She released Queenie’s shoulders to work on one arm. But when she did that, the convulsive wrenching of Queenie’s body went wild.

  I picked up the marble, closed it in my fist. My hands were sticky with port from the damp rug. At this rate, I’d smell like port for the rest of my days.

  In tandem, Hardhouse and Ama moved. He shifted himself onto Queenie’s legs while she leaned against Queenie’s shoulders. That enabled Ginny to concentrate on freeing one arm so that Sam could reach a vein.

  Ginny still wasn’t strong enough. She had only one useful hand. And the seizure gripped Queenie like iron, inhuman and unbreakable.

  But she wasn’t breathing, she couldn’t breathe, and oxygen starvation eroded her strength. As she lost consciousness, her muscles weakened.

  Sam helped as much as he could with his free hand. An inch at a time, Ginny broke the clench of Queenie’s arm.

  “Brew!” she panted. “Get them out of here. Give us room.”

  I knew that tone. It compelled me, in spite of all my mistakes and obsessions. The blue marble I followed in my mind would have to wait. With a heave, I got my legs under me and pitched upright. “Come on!” I barked at the group. “Everyone out! Back to the den!”

  I didn’t have Ginny’s talent for command. No one reacted. Matched like twins, Rock and Buffy looked like they might faint. Connie had her hands up over her mouth, uncharacteristically aghast. Maryanne’s whole face stretched for a scream that refused to come out, paralyzed by terror. Mile muttered to himself, words I couldn’t hear and didn’t want to. Only Lara glanced at me. The light in her gaze had the shining intensity of an orgasm.

  Without hesitation I pulled the .45 out of my pocket, worked the slide, and fired at the ceiling.

  That got everyone’s attention, no question about it. Even Ginny gaped for a second as if she thought I’d lost my mind. But she didn’t loosen her grip. Sam concentrated on his syringe as if the .45 and I didn’t exist.

  “I’m only going to say this one more time,” I remarked. “Everyone out. Back to the den.”

  This time people moved. Taking Maryanne by the hand like a frightened schoolgirl, Connie stood up and started for the door. For reasons of his own, Truchi put a hand on Mile’s arm and tugged him in the same direction.

  Then everyone else complied—the Altars, Lara, Faith Jerrick. To Ama, Ginny panted, “Joseph can do it.” Ama seemed to know that tone as well as I did. Without hesitation she joined her husband. At once Hardhouse stretched out across most of Queenie’s torso.

  Still clinging to the .45, I herded the depleted group back to the den.

  Queenie’s plight seemed to claw at my back as I left. I still hadn’t heard her breathe. How long could she go without air? How long before she suffered brain damage? Or died?

  It would be my fault. Another failure, like my failure with Simon. I couldn’t have known the port was poisoned, of course. But once again I’d recognized the potential da
nger too late. If I’d been faster, I could’ve saved her.

  To make matters worse, Mile was waiting for me in the den.

  Buffy and Rock had collapsed on one of the couches, and Connie and Maryanne sat as well, holding onto each other as if one of them, anyway, couldn’t go on without the other. Too tense for anything as helpless as sitting, Lara had begun to pace around the tree, repeating the circle to calm herself. Truchi had moved to the nearest hearth to build up the fire. His wife and Faith stood together, their arms folded across their bellies at exactly the same angle, but with very different effects. Ama looked like she was restraining a visceral outrage. Faith seemed to cradle her trust in salvation, using it to warm her heart.

  In contrast, Houston Mile confronted me with his fists braced on his hips and a flush of fat anger on his face.

  “This is your doin’, Axbrewder,” he rasped. “You know that? She’s goin’ to die. You know why? You didn’t listen to me. Ah tried to tell you, and you wouldn’t listen. You wouldn’t even listen, never mind give me a gun and let me try to save us. How many more of us got to become corpses before you wake up?”

  I glared at him and didn’t say anything.

  “Sam is a doctor,” Connie put in as if she’d taken on the job of reassuring everyone. “I expect he’s a good doctor. He may be able to treat her. Especially if he can guess what kind of poison it is.”

  “No,” Mile snarled. “You left the wrong people with him. They’ll make damn sure she dies.”

  There it was in a nutshell—Mile’s solution to the mystery. After all, he had his reputation to maintain—the one who always solved the crime, the best player at Murder on Cue’s camps. Now he intended to explain it to us. Judging by appearances, he didn’t plan on letting anybody stop him.

  I didn’t give a shit. In my own way, I was as lost as Queenie, as far gone. If I didn’t do something to treat myself soon, I’d never recover.