A Conventional Corpse

by Joan Hess

  “So you were arrested for brawling and spent the night in jail?”

  “That would be one interpretation. Anyway, the key ring was gone and I went by your apartment this morning to explain, but your front door was locked. When I opened the door at the top of these stairs, this satanic creature streaked by me. I went scrambling after it.” He paused to scratch his scalp. “I didn’t want you to be even more upset with me, Senator.”

  I crossed my arms and gave him an icy look. “There is no way I could be more upset with you, Arnie. Shall I assume the cat went over the wall into the Azalea Inn garden?”

  “Not being a pole vaulter, I went through the gate, thinking I could grab the cat and get it back to your porch before anyone noticed it was gone. It wasn’t anywhere to be seen, but then I saw the lid on the cistern was pushed aside. Fearing the worst, I leaned over and made those ridiculous noises people do when trying to convince a cat to cooperate. The cat cooperated by springing on my buttocks, its claws extended like all those gadgets on a Swiss Army knife. That’s pretty much all I remember until I regained consciousness. Except for the tunnel, of course, and Grandma and her cookies.”

  “Why won’t you tell this to the police?”

  He hunched his shoulders. “I didn’t want to tell them about the keys. All I’m trying to do is help the homeless by giving them a dry, warm place to sleep. I’m like a social worker, tracking down people who’ve been sleeping outdoors all winter. The guy in the Tyson box is holding down a job and going to rehab. The woman in the Wal-Mart box is going to have a baby any day now. She’s going to name it after me.”

  “Do you have a trained midwife in another skybox?”

  “A landlord can only do so much,” he said huffily. He stood up and, with a wary expression, watched as another car drove by. “As much as I’ve enjoyed our conversation, Senator, this may not be the most prudent place for me to linger. I was thinking I might have a tailgate party in the stadium parking lot to celebrate Memorial Day. Is there any chance I could borrow your tailgate?”

  I grabbed the front of his shirt. “Did you see anyone else in the garden?”

  “Can’t say that I did. If you don’t mind, I’d like to go home and relax. It’s been one helluva day.”

  “No kidding.” I released him, then watched as he scuttled up the shadowy path between my duplex and the sorority house. Once he was across the street, he could dart from bush to bush all the way across the campus, and he no doubt had an alternative route to the tier of skyboxes that would preclude exposure to any cruising campus cops.

  His version of what had taken place pretty well fit what I’d supposed. Wimple was capable of attempted murder, but Arnie was not. Someone else had arranged to speak to Roxanne in the garden, then quite possibly thumped her with a rock and dumped her in the cistern. Any damage to her head would have been attributed to the impact. Coroners tend to find what they’re forewarned to find.

  Peter was waiting, I reminded myself as I walked down the street and went through the gate into the garden. Caron would be mortified if I was actually dragged off in manacles, whimpering for a lawyer (and wondering how I’d pay for one). I’d done nothing wrong, mind you, except for possibly not remaining available. I’d told Peter everything I knew, for the most part. If he had no interest in missing cats and manuscripts, it was hardly my responsibility.

  “Hey!” bellowed a voice from the patio. “What do you think you’re doing?”

  “Tiptoeing through the tulips?” I suggested.

  “No one is supposed to be out here.”

  “You’re out here.”

  There was a moment of silence. “Yeah, but the lieutenant told me to make sure nobody goes into the garden.”

  “Then you should lock the gate,” I said primly to the uniformed officer as I went past him and into the sunroom. To my profound dismay, Peter was seated at the desk, interviewing Dilys, who was perched on the wicker throne where Laureen had held court less than twenty-four hours earlier.

  She leapt to her feet and came over to squeeze my hands. “Oh, my dear, we’ve been looking everywhere for you! I was quite sure you were once again in the cistern, but this police officer assured me that you were not. He would not allow me to search the basement. Allegra made some impertinent remarks about the size of the freezer in the pantry off the kitchen, but Lily’s been entirely too busy to chop anyone into pieces and wrap the extremities in butcher paper. It would be called butcher paper, wouldn’t it? I must make note about it.”

  “Ms. Malloy,” Peter said, sounding a bit frustrated, “is there a chance you might help Ms. Knoxwood explain her whereabouts today?”

  “Ask her to show you her receipts, Lieutenant Rosen. If you’ll excuse me, I need to find out if Caron has—”

  “I will not excuse you, Ms. Malloy. Ms. Knoxwood, I’ll have someone type up your statement and you can sign it in the morning. Thank you for your cooperation.” He waited until she left, then came over to me and gripped my shoulder. “You fell in the cistern this afternoon? Did it not occur to you to tell me about this? You might still be out there, unconscious or in too much pain to call for help.”

  “You are not attractive when you sputter,” I said as I disengaged his hand. “May I assume you’ve spoken to Sherry Lynne Blackstone?”

  “If that damn cat—”

  “Don’t let her hear you say that.” I sat down on the wicker chair and gazed at him with all the warmth of Elizabeth II confronting one of her rambunctious offspring. “I intended to tell you when I saw you. It was my impression that someone shook the ladder and then pulled it up, but Farberville is on a fault line. Stranger things have happened during earthquakes. I’ve already had three offers from the tabloids. The one with the highest bid wants me to swear I saw Jesus’s face on the bottom of the cistern lid. I could have, I suppose.”

  “You might have been seriously injured.”

  “But I wasn’t.”

  “Obviously,” he said in a flat voice. “Would you care to tell me why you decided to climb down into the cistern?”

  “I thought it was possible that Arnie’s key ring might have fallen out of his pocket. I’ve spent all day trying to get inside the room in Old Main where the boxes of books were stored for the convention. Fate intervened.”

  “Fate does not interest me. Do you have any idea where Arnie is at this moment?”

  “Have you checked the cistern lately? It’s one of his watering holes, so to speak.”

  “You did not answer my question, Ms. Malloy. Do you know where Arnie Riggles is?”

  “It’s my understanding he spends most of his time on campus. You might start there.” I arose and beckoned at my nonexistent court lackeys to follow me. “I really must see that Lily has the supper situation under control and Caron has put out the books in the parlor.”

  He cut me off at the pass. “Someone tried to kill you, dammit!”

  “If any of these people had wanted to kill me, I’d be sporting a toe tag. Someone tried to frighten me—and that was a big mistake.”

  Chapter

  14

  Peter stared at me. “You’re determined to prove something to these authors—or to me.”

  “Don’t be absurd,” I said with the vastly superior smile of someone recently nominated for a Nobel prize in tact. “If you’ll excuse me, I really do need to make sure things are running smoothly. I swear I will not set foot outside the Azalea Inn for the rest of the evening. Roughly one hundred people will be arriving soon. They are anticipating food, drink, conversation, and the opportunity to buy books and have them signed. If you would like to take charge, that’s fine with me. If you would like to bring a date, that’s fine with me, too. Be warned, however—the wine’s cheap and the women are easy.”

  Before he could respond, I went into the kitchen. Lily’s face was glistening with sweat, but she did not appear anymore homicidal than usual. “Everything under control?” I asked.

  She stared at me as if I’d wandered in nake
d. “I heard you fell in the cistern and cracked your skull like that other woman.”

  “Sherry Lynne told you that?”

  “I overheard her talking to somebody in the sunroom.”

  “I may have slipped in the cistern, but I cracked nothing more than my tailbone and my dignity. Are you prepared to serve wine and canapes in fifteen minutes, and the meal in about an hour?”

  “What do you think I’ve been doing all day?”

  “I just wanted to confirm,” I said as I edged toward the door. “Do you need any help?”

  “Do I appear to need help?”

  I would have felt more at ease if she’d blinked, even once. “Of course not, Lily. You’ve done a splendid job thus far. I’m sure whatever you’ve chosen to serve will be delicious.”

  “I hope there’ll be enough for leftovers tomorrow. I’m going to spend the afternoon in my bedroom watching basketball on TV. It’s an intriguingly contemporary version of classical Russian ballet, although with nihilistic overtones. I can almost visualize Baryshnikov slam-dunking those prissy little swans.”

  “The authors will be gone by noon,” I said, clutching the doorknob behind my back as she picked up a carving knife.

  “No, they won’t. Lieutenant Rosen has informed me that they will not be allowed to leave until he has satisfied himself that none of them are involved—and that might require several days. I agreed to a discount for the convention. My rates will double as of tomorrow, or, if the Knicks lose, triple.”

  “Is that fair to the Thurber Farber Foundation?”

  “Was it mentioned anywhere in the contract I signed that a dead body would be found in the cistern? I’d hoped for two diamonds from the AAA. Now I’ll be lucky to be listed in the Chamber of Commerce brochures. My only chance is that this woman from New York will take to haunting the Azalea Inn. Ghosts are popular drawing cards so long as they’ll materialize often enough to establish notoriety.”

  “A ghost in designer clothes, carrying a laptop computer as she pirouettes among the azaleas?”

  “It’s a new millennium,” Lily said with a shrug. “I need to put the stuffed mushroom caps in the oven and start uncorking the wine. Unless you’re inclined to do either . . .”

  “I’m sure you’ll handle it admirably.” I went back out to the sunroom, where I saw Peter nodding sympathetically as Allegra complained about the rigors of her tour. Their faces were so close that they must have been befogging each other’s eyeballs. Red alert, Leslie.

  Caron was not in the parlor, but some books had been taken out of the boxes and stacked on a card table. Laureen and Dilys were murmuring to each other as they browsed.

  “Do you know where my daughter is?” I asked.

  Laureen spun around and came over to give me a hug. “I wish you’d told us what happened, Claire. I would have insisted that you report it to the police. That lieutenant seems very concerned about you.”

  “One might go so far as to say he’s obsessed,” added Dilys. “You could do worse, you know. He’s attractive enough to have come out of one of Laureen’s books, although I suppose he would have slate gray eyes, be wearing something more dashing, and have a cruel scar across his cheek. Why do they always have cruel scars, Laureen? Are they all ex-pirates?”

  Laureen disregarded what was clearly a barb. “Seriously, Claire, there were only six people inside the Azalea Inn when you climbed down the ladder into the cistern. As much as I rely on old-fashioned coincidences to disentangle my heroines from sticky situations, I find it impossible to believe that someone was hiding in the garden or happened to come in through the gate while you were . . . doing whatever it was you were doing.”

  Dilys gasped. “So you’re saying it must have been one of us!” She gazed at the ceiling. “Unless, of course, Lily has locked away a deranged relative in the attic. A great-aunt, I should think, who only dares to come out on dark and stormy nights.”

  “It wasn’t dark,” I said, “and it wasn’t stormy.”

  “Did the perpetrator of this heinous deed have a cruel scar? Perhaps Lily has an ex-pirate in the basement as well as a great-aunt in the attic. If there is a chest of gold doubloons buried beneath the stones at the bottom of the cistern—”

  “We don’t get a lot of pirates around here.” I turned back to Laureen. “Do you have any idea why someone in the publicity department at Paradigm House would suggest to Sally that she include Walter in the convention?”

  Laureen lowered her voice to exclude Dilys, who was gazing alternately at the floor and ceiling, and mumbling to herself in a way I would have found distressingly abnormal only a day ago. “That’s not likely to have been the case. I would be more inclined to think that Roxanne was told that the four of us would be here, and realized she had an excuse to show up without warning and further torment Walter, should he be present. She would have done the same thing if we’d been scheduled to do a signing in a hut at the South Pole.”

  “Do you know why was she so determined to make his life miserable?”

  “I’ve heard rumors, but he must be the one to tell you, if he chooses. Mysterydom is a tight community; if need be, we circle the wagons and take out our flintlocks to protect our own, no matter how objectionable they may be. Authors are powerless in the overall scheme of the publishing industry. We do what we can.”

  “So you do know,” I said, frowning.

  “And I also know that Caron is in Lily’s office, making a phone call. Walter was last seen in his room.”

  “Will you keep watch over the stock until Caron gets back?” I asked. When she nodded, I went upstairs to the Petunia Room.

  Walter’s door was open. He was stretched out on the bed, holding the flask of scotch in one hand. His eyes opened as I tapped. “Ms. Malloy, I hear you’ve been quite the giddy superheroine today. Will you next be donning a leotard and a cape in order to leap off the roof? Please give me notice so that I can be watching from the lawn.”

  “Don’t get your binoculars just yet,” I said as I sat down on a chair across from him. “Why was Roxanne so dedicated to destroying you that she arranged for you to be invited to the convention this weekend?”

  “I wondered if that was the case,” he said, sitting up. “A drink, Ms. Malloy?”

  “No, thank you, I’d rather have answers.”

  “And you think I have them?”

  I crossed my arms and glowered. “Yes, Mr. Dahl, I think you do. This vendetta could not have started when she read your manuscript. She must have skimmed hundreds every week. The fact that you were sent a galley and a gracious letter from Paradigm House implies that Roxanne was trolling for you. She was in the flat-boat, and you were nibbling on the algae at the bottom of the river until the plastic worm drifted into sight.”

  “I am not a bass, Ms. Malloy,” he said stiffly.

  “But you rose to the bait, did you not?” I looked at my watch. “We don’t have much time. Laureen has acknowledged that she knows what this is about. If you won’t tell me, then I have no choice but to inform Lieutenant Rosen, who will force her to reveal the details.”

  “If you’re planning a career in blackmail, the procedure is for you to demand a sum of money in exchange for your silence. That’s the classic approach. There is one thing I should point out about blackmailers in mystery fiction, however, and that is they rarely survive beyond the third chapter.”

  “If you’re threatening me, Mr. Dahl, I am not impressed. You, on the other hand, are likely to spend the night in the Farberville jail. Watch out for the four-hundred-pound biker. He always insists on the only decent mattress. When you’re released, you’ll need to buy something to deal with lice.”

  He set the flask on the bedside table. “I wasn’t threatening you, Claire. I knew Roxanne when her last name was Pickett, so I never thought twice about approaching someone at Paradigm House named R. P. Small. Had I known who she was, I would have flung myself off the edge of a very deep canyon. Make that a bottomless canyon.”

  “
Does this go back to when you were teaching at Harvard and Roxanne was enrolled at Radcliffe?”

  “How astute of you to make that connection. She took one of my classes. I saw nothing but a sea of shiny faces, but she began to drop by my office during hours, and eventually we lapsed into a relationship. Intimacy between teacher and student was forbidden, but she seemed old enough to know what she wanted.” He paused as he looked down at the petunias on the bedspread. “God knows I wanted her. We spent two years together, staying in quaint inns on Cape Cod, skiing in Vermont, camping in Maine, and even just sitting in coffee shops, sharing the newspaper and a bagel. One summer we were lucky enough to be offered a tiny house on Nantucket. Every time I think of our picnics beside the cranberry bogs, I—” He broke off and wiped his eyes.

  “I gather this relationship did not end well.”

  “She dumped me for a professor with tenure. I nearly went out of my mind with jealousy. I begged her to come back, sent flowers for weeks, and called her apartment until her roommates refused to take my messages. No one as beautiful as she had ever so much as smiled at me when I held open a door. I followed her when she went out at night, and lurked in the stacks when she studied at the library. When she went home for Thanksgiving, I spent four days and nights in my car at the end of her block. I was on the verge of losing my assistantship when I finally sought help at the campus infirmary. I received no counseling, but the medication helped.”

  “Was she aware of this?” I asked softly.

  “I suspect it amused her.”

  “So why did she turn on you?”

  He went to the window and pushed aside the drapes in order to stare at the house beyond the wall. “I did one thing for which I am still truly repentant. The grad assistants at Radcliffe and Harvard mingled in the bars we could afford. I dropped a few remarks hinting that her papers in my class were plagiarized, although I acknowledged that I could never find the original sources. The rumors spread. Unsubstantiated gossip is the grist that keeps the wheels of academia grinding ever so relentlessly.”