A Conventional Corpse

by Joan Hess

  “Yes,” said Sherry Lynne. “I guess I’d better find her and thank her for coming all this way. She’s a very busy woman; her assistant was telling me just the other day on the telephone about all the demands on her time. She’s built up quite a large stable of mystery writers. If you get along well with her, she can do wonders with the marketing and sales of your book.”

  “Like Allegra’s, for instance?”

  Sherry Lynne shrugged. “Has she gone upstairs?”

  ‘Try the front room on the right,” I said. After Sherry Lynne left, I began deftly steering people down the hall like a wagon master in a fifties television series. Once the room was cleared, I tracked down Lily, who was in the kitchen gazing despondently at a vast array of bottles, wadded napkins, and lipstick-smudged wine glasses.

  “This is not what I expected,” she said.

  “Nor is it what I expected,” I countered without sympathy. “Based on the written agreement, you’re providing a light supper to the authors. I should think most of them are ready for something. Soup and a sandwich should be adequate. They’ll expect something heartier in the morning, along the lines of bacon, sausage, eggs, grits, biscuits, toast, whatever.”

  Lily shuddered. “The Azalea Inn is strictly vegetarian. I serve seasonal fruit from the farmers’ market, wheat breads, and tofu-and-onion tarts.”

  “I don’t much care if you serve boiled hats. Just feed the authors tonight and in the morning. Be prepared to feed one hundred people tomorrow at seven o’clock, because that’s how many tickets have been sold. If you want to discuss the menu, call Sally at the hospital. All she’s doing is having things dripped into her. I, on the other hand, am going home.”

  As I sailed out of the kitchen, Laureen and Ammie were coming through the back door. I caught Earlene’s eye and gestured accordingly.

  I then went down the hall and into the sitting room, where I found Allegra, Dilys, Sherry Lynne, and Roxanne. Everyone seemed reasonably comfortable. I assured them that a supper of sorts would be provided and that drivers would be on hand in the morning to shuttle them to Old Main for the panels and back to the inn for breaks as they wished. I did not mention tofu, in that I myself find the concept alarming. I was trying to remember where I’d stashed my purse when Ammie tiptoed into the room.

  “It was nice to see you again,” she said to Roxanne. “Maybe next time you come we can have lunch or something and talk about the good old days. Well, I don’t actually know if that’s what they were for you, but they sure were for me. When I get home, I’m gonna dig out all my old notebooks and stories, even the ones you gave me bad grades on. Maybe I’ll write something new and send it to you.”

  Roxanne patted the sofa cushion. “Sit down for a few minutes, Ammie, and we’ll have some coffee and a nice talk. Would anyone else like a cup?”

  Sherry Lynne shook her head. Allegra mentioned that a glass of wine sounded better; Dilys concurred and followed her out of the room, hiccuping in a manner unsuited to a modern-day Emily Bronte. Although I was desperate to go home, change into a robe, and pour myself an inch or two of scotch, I told Roxanne I’d speak to Lily about coffee.

  When I came out of the sitting room, I found Earlene sitting on the bottom step of the staircase.

  “Why don’t you join everyone else?” I said.

  “It’d be like sticking pins in balloons. At a distance, they’re all glamorous and wonderful and witty. I’d just as soon let them stay that way. Tell Ammie that I’m perfectly happy to wait out here for her.”

  I wondered how many minor pops I’d heard over the course of the day. More than a few, I surmised as I went back to the kitchen and asked Lily to start a pot of coffee. She was in the midst of explaining why the Azalea Inn was a caffeine-free environment as I went out to the sunroom.

  Laureen, Dilys, and Allegra were snickering madly as they examined wine bottles.

  “Do all of you know each other?” I asked.

  “From one event or another,” Laureen said. “This is an incestuous business, dear Claire. Publicists, editors, and assistants are constantly shifting houses. We’ve all experienced the same people—the good, the ignorant, and the flat-out incompetent. I’ve had the same publicist at three competing houses. She’s all of twenty-seven now, but very well trained. She knows that I travel first-class, never appear before ten in the morning, and require escorts who allow me to smoke.”

  “The first panel’s at nine,” I said. “I don’t have a program, but I believe it’s on the evolution of the amateur sleuth.”

  “And I’m sure you will lead a spirited discussion,” Laureen said blithely. “If not, my grand appearance at ten will liven things up.”

  “Three inches of rosé,” said Allegra as she snatched up a bottle. “I’ll share.”

  “Half a bottle of Chablis and I won’t,” said Dilys, clasping a bottle to her bosom. “Bedtime bliss. It’s my only solace these days.”

  Laureen frowned at her. “Are things not any better at home, Dilys? I thought the bypass surgery . . . ?”

  “Denton’s doctor told him not to worry,” Dilys said, her eyes welling with tears, “but he’s still sleeping in another bedroom. Being downsized at fifty is far from humorous. Denton can’t even find a job as a bookkeeper. We’ve been surviving on my royalties for two years, but now those have dried up. In my idle moments, I speculate on how challenging it would be to break into this mystical warehouse and liberate my backlist. Don’t mention my name if you see a story about a terrorist with a Tottingham accent.”

  “Is that what it is?” said Laureen, kissing Dilys on the cheek. “I knew there was something about you that makes me dote on you. It must be your accent.”

  “Not my undeniable wit?”

  “No one can ever surpass the flawlessness of your prose, my darling, or your exquisite satiric touch. Roxanne has no excuse to bury your backlist as she’s done. Have you spoken to your agent?”

  “I’m new at this,” Allegra said, “but it does sound as though your agent—”

  “May he rest in pieces,” Dilys said, then giggled as befitting someone taking swigs of wine from the bottle. “He went camping in Canada last month and had a fatal encounter with a grizzly bear. His agency is in disarray, for obvious reasons, and his widow has not yet decided what to do. Legally, I’m caught up in the quagmire.” She took another gulp. ‘Too much to bear, I suppose, unless, of course, he bared himself to the bear in order to retain foreign rights, in which case he could barely hope to escape intact.”

  I regret to report that Dilys, Laureen, Allegra, and I all started snorting as we straggled to pretend we weren’t laughing. There was nothing humorous about being killed by a bear. Dilys’s lilting accent made it all sound like a lovely little fairy tale, however; I presumed none of us were imagining any sort of pain and violence. Then again, I reminded myself as I regained control, these women’s incomes depended on murder most foul.

  Lily came out of the kitchen, holding a tray with a coffee carafe and several cups. “I’m heating the lentil soup,” she said as she thrust it into my hands. “Supper should be ready shortly.”

  We all went back up the hall to the front room, where Roxanne and Ammie were in a rather uninteresting conversation about people they’d known ten years ago. I might have recognized a few names had they been professors, but they seemed to be Ammie’s classmates. I stepped around Sherry Lynne, who seemed to be dozing, and set down the tray.

  “Earlene’s ready when you are,” I said to Ammie.

  “I don’t mind waiting,” called the designated driver. “I’m really very comfortable.”

  Roxanne raised perfectly-shaped eyebrows. “Shouldn’t we invite her to join us?”

  I shook my head. “She’d rather idolize the authors from afar. She’s afraid she’ll see warts and wrinkles if she gets too close.”

  “If she gets too close,” Allegra said, “she might catch a glimpse of my butterfly tattoo.”

  Sherry Lynne’s eyes flew open. “I ass
ume you’re joking. Tattoo parlors are a significant source of AIDS.”

  Roxanne poured coffee into a cup and handed it to Ammie. “Lighten up, Sherry Lynne. This new generation of authors is less bound by convention. The only cat in Allegra’s book is the one skinned by the serial killer. The cozy tide is ebbing. Today’s readers want realism, not tea and fishpaste sandwiches.” She patted Dilys’s knee. “As a child, you never really ate them, did you? They sound so nasty.”

  Dilys sighed wistfully. “As a child, I was mad for them, along with hot scones and strawberry jam.”

  Laureen poured herself a cup of coffee. “When I’m in London, I always zero in on cream cakes.”

  All this discussion of food, be it fishpaste or cream cakes, was reminding me that I hadn’t found so much as a mouse-sized morsel of cheese on arrival at the Azalea Inn. I wasn’t sure I’d had lunch, for that matter.

  “If everything is satisfactory, I’m off,” I said as I stood up. “I’ll see all of you in the morning for our panel at nine. I had very little warning that I would be called on to moderate and am woefully unprepared, but I assume you know the drill.”

  No one offered a counter-proposal. I went into the hallway and nodded to Earlene, who seemed to have taken permanent possession of the second step, waved at Lily, who was coming toward the sitting room with a tray of soup bowls and a platter of sandwiches, and continued outside. The rain had started once again, but with only a gentle cadence. I debated whether or not to go by the grocery store, then accepted the reality that I could not meet Sherry Lynne’s soulful gaze in the morning if I couldn’t swear with pained honesty that Wimple had been cared for as promised. I stopped and shopped.

  In that the creature was locked in the enclosed porch at the top of the stairs that led up from the garage to the kitchen, I parked in front of the duplex and dodged raindrops to the front door. It swung open before I could dig out my key.

  “Mrs. Malloy,” said the emaciated and perpetually gloomy musicology graduate student renting the downstairs apartment, “we have a situation. I don’t want to call the landlord, but I need to study. The noise is intolerable.”

  I was tempted to suggest he needed to study nutrition instead of Bach, but merely smiled and said, “Is my daughter playing her stereo too loudly? I’ll have her turn it down.”

  “It sounds as though she’s sacrificing animals in a satanic ritual.”

  Before I could think of a response, we both heard an unearthly sound that hinted not only of bloodshed, but of primal horror and pain.

  “We’re looking after a cat,” I said with a nervous chuckle.

  “What is she doing to it?” he countered. “Maybe I ought to call an animal rights group. It sounds as if it’s being disembowled on the dining room table.”

  “I’ll take care of it,” I assured him as I hurried upstairs. I unlocked the door and went inside. The dining room table was bereft of entrails and other nasty things, and the noise was emanating from the porch off the kitchen. I peeked through the glass panel. Wimple’s back was arched and he was obviously outraged by his incarceration, if his protests were to be interpreted loosely.

  Caron was in her room, sitting cross-legged on her bed with the telephone receiver glued to one ear. “Mother,” she said, looking up with a withering glare, “do you mind? Inez is telling me about the Latin Club banquet Angela Ridinn’s toga came unpinned in the middle of the skit about Cleopatra and Anthony, and from the consensus, there was no doubt the asp would have committed suicide.”

  “Do you not hear the cat?”

  “I gave it a can of tuna fish and a bowl of water. What else was I supposed to do?”

  “Did you provide a can opener?”

  Caron told Inez to wait, then put down the receiver. “I opened the can and stuck it on the porch at great personal risk. I thought about reading it a bedtime story, but I couldn’t put my hands on a copy of “The Owl and the Pussycat.” My nose was ranning and my eyes were itching; my face was pea green by the time I slammed the door.”

  I froze as another yowl curdled its way through the apartment. “We have to do something.”

  “I was hired to drive authors, not force-feed a cat. If Inez hadn’t bungled everything, I would have made twenty-one dollars today. Instead, all I did was walk up a really long hill in stifling heat to find out that I could have stayed in study hall and earned an equal amount of money. I was so hoping to buy a Ferrari on Monday.”

  Two years until I could pack her off to college, I reminded myself as I closed her door. Or perhaps I could surreptitiously sign her up for the Peace Corps and arrange for an assignment to a country in which head-hunting was still a popular sport. Or leave her in a basket at the door of a convent in a newly autonomized country such as Azerbaijan—sans passport.

  Another yowl sent me into the kitchen. I opened a can of gourmet cat food, dumped it in a very nice china bowl, and eased open the door. “Here we go, Wimple,” I said soothingly. “Pate defoie de souris.”

  That’s mouse liver paste, for those who have not sampled the delicacies of Paris.

  I closed the door just as the cat sprang, claws primed to effect significant damage on my aristocratic facial features. I then poured kitty litter in a plastic dishpan, made sure the cat was gulping down its dinner, and slid the box into the porch.

  I showered, put on my robe, and was lightheartedly dealing with food and drink when the doorbell rang. After a few seconds of thought, I realized there was absolutely no one with whom I wished to deal. The doorbell rang again—and again, and again. Wimple, who’d been relatively peaceful, resumed his remonstrations. Caron protested from her bedroom. The downstairs tenant thumped on his ceiling with what I hoped was a broom rather than an automatic weapon. It was only a matter of minutes before the sorority girls from next door showed up to shriek at me (that being, as far as I could tell, their sole means of communication).

  “Oh, all right,” I muttered as I went down the steps to open the door. Bad call.

  Peter was turning on all his charm, his eyes ever so sticky-sweet and his expression fraught with contrition. “Can we talk?” he said as he came into the foyer.

  “We have nothing to talk about.”

  “Yes, you do!” yelled the downstairs tenant. “Otherwise, he wouldn’t be ringing the doorbell as though composing a symphony in E-flat!”

  “I suppose I was leaning on the doorbell,” he murmured, brushing past me on his way upstairs.

  I had little choice but to follow him. I was contemplating which items of cutlery in the kitchen might be most lethal as I closed my door. “What gives you the right to barge in here like this, Peter? I told you that I didn’t want to see you. I may not be a priority player in this sick ménage à trois, but I still have a few rights. One of them is whether or not I choose to hear the details. I choose not to hear them. Has it occurred to you that I’m a medievalist? The next time you lean on the doorbell, you can expect boiling oil dumped off the balcony. Does that cover it?”

  “Ah, so you got my flowers.”

  I grabbed the vase and headed for the kitchen. “And they’re going into the garbage disposal.”

  “Your garbage disposal died three years ago.”

  “So they’re going into the trash,” I said. “Just leave, okay?”

  “Not okay. Have you got any beer?”

  I noted the profound silence from Caron’s room as I stopped in the middle of the kitchen. I banged down the vase and returned to the living room, where I found him on the sofa, his feet on the coffee table, his smile meant to be beguiling.

  I was not beguiled. “If I call 911, will they come get you?” I asked as I sat down in a chair across the room. “Dare I hope for a SWAT team?”

  “Will you please listen to me?”

  “Why should I?”

  “Because,” he said, “I love you. I want to marry you. I want you, Caron, and me to be a family. I want us to live together, deal with whatever happens, and after Caron goes on her way, get old
and constipated and gray and disabled together.”

  “With adjoining plots in the cemetery? What if our karma doesn’t correspond, and you come back as a cockroach? Is that part of the deal? Will I have to scurry around cabinets, too?”

  “You are in a mood, aren’t you?”

  “No, Peter, I’m not in a mood, or even what you’d like to describe as a jealous snit. You just spent three months with your ex-wife. In that you worked out all the details of the divorce ten years ago, I can only assume you were working out some entirely new ones.”

  “Any chance of that beer?” he said, grinning in what struck me as gauche fashion.

  Since Caron undoubtedly had her ear glued to her bedroom door, I nodded and went into the kitchen. “All right,” I said as I returned with a beer and my glass of scotch, “but you have precisely five minutes. I set the microwave. At the sound of the ding, you will get up and leave, your explanations half-thawed or otherwise. Got it?”

  Peter nodded. “It may take a few more minutes. Leslie wants to have a baby.”

  “Female imperative,” I said, although my throat was tightening and most of my organs were shutting down. I was pleased to see that Peter was beginning to perspire.

  “I guess so. In any case, she thinks that she and I present a very strong gene pool. No need of chlorine, so to speak. Neither of us has a family history of heart disease, diabetes, or cancer. Not everyone on each side has been short-listed for a Pulitzer, but there’s a decent scattering of doctors and lawyers.”

  “Then what’s the problem? Buy a bungalow in the suburbs of Connecticut and procreate to your hearts’ content. Oh, and buy a swing set while you’re at it. Very important to gross motor development. Maybe one day you can be president of the PTA. Please don’t ask me to be godmother, though. I’m entirely too busy these days.”

  “Claire.”

  “That is my name,” I said as I plucked the bottle out of his hand and opened the front door. “If you don’t mind, I have a difficult day in front of me. Go home and call Leslie—unless, of course, she’s at your house, waiting for you to commence activity. She doesn’t sound like the sort of woman to greet you in flannel pajamas and face cream. Good night, Peter. If we meet anytime soon, it will not be at my instigation.”