“She’s not my Mrs. Webster.” She sipped at the hot, sweet coffee. “But I don’t have time to worry about that mess. I’ve got to get the Mystery Nights ready to roll—and come up with a plot that can’t possibly have anything to do with anybody, living or dead, in Chastain. Listen, how does this grab you? I’ll make it a South Sea Island and one of those New England missionaries and he gets involved with this languorous beauty—Max, you’re not listening.”
He was staring at the letter, his eyes unaccustomedly grim.
Annie whistled.
Startled, he looked up.
“Hey, it isn’t all that bad.”
“I think it is.” His voice was grave. “I don’t know. I have a funny feeling.”
She quirked an interested eyebrow. “Are you coming all over psychic? Like the tweenie in a Christie country house murder?”
“It doesn’t take any psychic powers to pick up bad vibes from this.” He tapped the letter. “It’s more than an ugly incident. It’s dangerous.”
She didn’t laugh. “I agree,” she said reluctantly. “It’s just like the The Moving Finger. The villagers dismissed the anonymous letters as nasty but meaningless. And they were dreadfully wrong.” She picked up the heavy stationery, squinting thoughtfully at the first page. “But surely this was nothing more than an effort to embarrass Corinne Webster. That’s all there was to it— and certainly I was a kind of innocent bystander.”
Max slammed his fist on the table. “Annie, tell the Chastain Historical Preservation Society to go get screwed.”
She laughed aloud. “Oh, my. What a vision that conjures.” Then she shook her head. “Nope. They’re counting on me.”
“I mean it. I think you should drop the whole thing.”
“Oh, I couldn’t do that. Really. I promised.” She reached over the table and ruffled his hair. “Come on, don’t gloom. It’ll be okay. The letter writer can’t fool me—or anybody—twice.”
“That’s right,” he said slowly. “But, I think I’ll nose around Chastain, see what I can pick up. That might discourage any further activity.”
“Oh, that’s a good idea.” Once again, she spoke absently, and she gave an abstracted wave as he departed. She could do a Victorian mystery, such as Peter Lovesey’s Wobble to Death. Or dart back to the days of Richard the Lionhearted as Victor Luhrs did in The Longbow Murder. Or attempt the clever twist achieved by Selwyn Jepson when he presented a modern Macbeth in Keep Murder Quiet. Or emulate Edward D. Hoch’s talent for the preposterous, exhibited so well in The Spy and The Thief when his master criminal, Nick Velvet, stole an entire major league baseball team. Or perhaps she should go for that perennial favorite, an English country murder, a la Catherine Aird, Reginald Hill, or Elizabeth Lemarchand …
Max floorboarded the red Porsche off of the ferry. As he drove toward Chastain, gray dust boiled in the car’s wake. His urgency surprised him. Damn. Why did Annie have such an indomitably Puritan conscience? He was the New Englander, and he’d never had any difficulty in persuading himself to do whatever he wanted. He thought for an instant of that wonderful New Yorker cartoon of the devil explaining to some newcomers that after all, down here it was whatever worked for you. Annie would never receive that advice. He sighed. So he might as well stop trying to talk her out of putting on the Chastain Murder Nights. But, dammit, it didn’t feel right to him. Maybe if he just sniffed around, the letter writer would lie low—at least until he and Annie were out of town.
The place to start was the Chastain Historical Preservation Society. He followed the plaques into the historic district, took one wrong turn into a dead end, but finally ended up at Lookout Point. He locked the Porsche, dodged through Chastain’s version of five o’clock traffic (one milk truck, a station wagon filled with a wild-eyed mother and nine Cub Scouts, a stripped down Ford Mustang, and three Lincoln Continentals) and pulled on the front gate. It didn’t budge. He read the gilt sign. Hours: 10 to 4.
Sourly, he wondered why Fletch always found somebody to talk to.
Okay. Four-thirty and nobody home. He kicked the gate. That shut off at least until tomorrow any inquiry into disbursement of the letterhead stationery. But he sure didn’t intend to go back to the island without accomplishing something.
Annie had described all the participants in the morning brouhaha. He leaned back against a brick pillar, pulled a small spiral notebook from his pocket, and studied the list of names.
Corinne Webster, the object of attack. An ice maiden busy leeching the vitality from everyone around her. She probably wouldn’t talk to him and would be better left for later, in any event.
Sybil Chastain Giacomo. Max’s eyes gleamed. Annie described her as a Ruebens nude in an Oscar de la Renta dress. With the mouth of a termagant. Awesome.
Lucy Haines. Sounded nice. Annie said she looked rather serious. A lean, tanned woman with a firm handshake. A librarian.
Roscoe Merrill. A stalwart of the community, obviously. Treasurer of the Society. A lawyer with a face that kept its own counsel. He’d promised La Grande Dame Webster he’d look into the letter, but all the while he kept stressing that it was better to drop the matter.
Dr. John Sanford. Intense, self-absorbed, arrogant. And something in the letter made him mad.
Edith Ferrier. The letter made her mad, too. Why did she take it personally? And she didn’t like Corinne. Why?
Miss Dora Brevard, permanent secretary of the Board, and Chastain’s ancient historian in residence. But she seemed to aim her venom at Sybil, not Corinne.
Gail Prichard. The letter writer said Mrs. Moneypot’s niece was seeing a very unsuitable man. Obviously, that was a reference to the combative reporter. Max ran down the list again. If he had his druthers, he’d drop in on the luscious Sybil, but he had a feeling—just a faint niggle of warning—that Annie might take that amiss. And the letter seemed far too subtle an approach for Sybil. So, checking the map Annie had loaned him, he began to walk down Lafayette street toward the heart of town.
“She wants the one with the nun who detects.”
Annie looked blankly at Ingrid. “Nun?”
“Mrs. Canady. She’s called twice, and she insists she wants the new book with a nun.”
Dragging her mind back from the depths of its involvement in the rapidly burgeoning plot for the Mystery Nights, she repeated, “Nun?” Then, in a burst of animation, she rattled off, “Sister John and Sister Hyacinthe? Sister Mary Teresa? Sister Mary Helen?”
“A new series,” Ingrid offered helpfully.
Annie squinted her eyes in concentration. New series. Oh, yeah. An ex-nun. “Ask her if she wants Bridget O’Toole in Murder Among Friends?”
As Ingrid loped back to the telephone, Annie gathered up the strands that had been swirling together in her mind: A weekend at an English country home, croquet, tea, and murder. Perfect. Move over Sheila Radley and Dorothy Simpson.
Audubon prints of a red-shouldered hawk and a wood ibis hung against the Williamsburg green wall. Heavy brown leather furniture offered soft-cushion comfort and the aura of a good men’s club. A faint haze of autumn-sweet pipe smoke hung in the air.
Roscoe Merrill met Max at the door, offered a brief handshake and an appraising look, then guided him to the oversized wingback chair that faced the desk.
“So you are helping Ms. Laurance with the program for our house-and-garden week.” Merrill settled back in his padded swivel chair, his face bland, but his eyes wary.
Max fashioned a genial smile. “Yes, she’s hard at work on the nefarious-doings plot now. However, both she and I were disturbed at the trick that was played on her.”
Max’s good-humored sally evoked no helpful response. The lawyer merely stared intently and said noncommittally, “Unfortunate. Very unfortunate. But just one of those things.”
Max quirked an eyebrow. “Does this sort of thing happen often within the Society?”
“No. Oh no, of course not. You misunderstand me, Mr. Darling.”
Max waited.<
br />
Merrill’s dry voice was unemotional, a nice match for his measuring eyes. It was easy to imagine him in settlement conferences, cautious, careful, and calculating. He would never give the store away. His pale gray suit fit him perfectly, and he wore his suit coat even in his office. Not a shirt-sleeve man. He had the air of authority to be expected in the senior partner in an old-line law firm. The law books ranged on the shelving behind his desk were leather bound and had been there for a century. The law firm had borne his family name since 1820. Merrill, Merrill, and Merrill.
“Not at all a usual occurrence, of course. I can’t think, in fact, of any other example where the Society letterhead has been misused. A shocking episode, upsetting to all of us. No, Mr. Darling, what I referred to was the—” Merrill paused as if in search of precisely the right word—“the proclivity of women, perhaps, to be a trifle more emotional in their responses to certain situations than men. And, of course, the fact that women, because they are not creatures of business, do not realize sometimes the seriousness of what might otherwise pass as a prank.”
Max briefly fantasized about Annie’s probable feminist response to Merrill’s pre-1940 view of women. Ka-boom.
“As I told Corinne, it will be very much for the better if we all overlook this incident, painful as it was. To seek to discover the perpetrator would avail nothing. Of course, Corinne has a legitimate complaint. Her signature obviously was forged to that missive, but making this a matter of law would bring an importance to it that it certainly doesn’t deserve.”
Max had a collection of relatives who specialized in obfuscation, so he sorted nimbly through the verbiage. “You think a woman did it. And you don’t think it matters.”
The lawyer leaned back in his chair and regarded Max over steepled fingers. “I wouldn’t go so far as to put it that directly.”
Max grinned. “No, I wouldn’t say you put it too directly, but that’s the substance, right?”
Slowly, Merrill nodded, his pale brown eyes alert.
“Why a woman?”
“It seems to me that it is a distinctly feminine attack.” Merrill rubbed his blunt nose thoughtfully. “Obviously, the letter was planned to humiliate Corinne in front of the Board. And the note to the newspaper editor seems an essentially feline touch.”
Max was tempted to describe some very feline men he’d encountered in his time, but instead concentrated on prizing loose information. “Did you check on that?”
Merrill pondered for a moment. He obviously didn’t relish imparting any information, but finally he conceded. “I spoke to Ed Hershey, the city editor. He received a note typed on plain white paper. No signature. He didn’t save it.”
So that was that. “Did Hershey print anything?”
“Not much,” Merrill said grimly. “Libel per se, young man. But the paper carried a general report of plans for the house-and-garden tours and a brief story quoting Sybil about the question of Bond’s paintings being exhibited in New York.” His mouth compressed.
“What’s going to happen there?”
The pale brown eyes regarded Max with about as much enthusiasm as a Republican dowager opening the door to an ACLU pamphleteer.
“That is hardly relevant to the question of the forged mystery plot.”
“No?” Max leaned back comfortably in the luxurious embrace of the soft leather. “I’d think it might have some bearing. You suggest the perpetrator is a woman. Maybe Mrs. Giacomo was ticked off enough to put the show together.”
For the first time, interest flickered across Merrill’s face, followed immediately by dismissal. Max realized with a surge of excitement that Merrill felt certain of the letter writer’s identity.
The lawyer said drily, “Mrs. Giacomo is capable of a rather alarming number of rash acts—but this is much too devious—too quiet—for her.”
“You know who did it.”
Merrill immediately assumed the bland expression of a sunning crocodile. “Absolutely not. I have no more information than you, Mr. Darling.” He paused, then reached out and pensively selected a cherrywood pipe from a rack. Opening a wooden canister, he picked out a thick clump of aromatic tobacco and methodically tamped it in the bowl. When the tobacco was lit and drawing, he regarded Max through the smoke. “I assume we can speak confidentially, Mr. Darling.”
“Ms. Laurance and I work together.”
He blew a cloud of bluish smoke toward the ceiling. “Let me put it this way.” How many settlement conferences had the canny lawyer begun with just that tone? “It is inevitable that jealousies arise when women work too hard and too fervently in organizations.” He smiled with all the warmth of a robot. “My wife has described situations to me that would shock you, Mr. Darling. I am confident that the unfortunate incident this morning was a direct response to this kind of pressure.”
Max wondered if he were being led down the primrose path, but he dutifully responded to the lure. “Did Mrs. Webster clobber somebody in the Society?”
“It could be viewed in that light. There may be some heartbreak here, Mr. Darling. Let us assume, hypothetically, of course, that a woman member has given herself heart and soul to the Society, served it in every capacity, devoted days and nights to its advancement, and then found herself refused the one office she desired. Now,” and he spoke precisely, “I wish to make it clear that I am not and will not be construed as referring to any particular individual. But that,” and he sucked on his pipe, “could be the answer to it.”
“How bitter is this woman?”
“What do you mean?” Merrill asked cautiously.
“How likely is she to sabotage Annie’s Mystery Nights?”
“That won’t happen. I’m confident that this was an isolated occurrence. It is over and done with. I’m sure of it.”
“I don’t want Annie embarrassed—or hurt in any way.”
“Mr. Darling, you can rest easy. I assure you it’s a closed chapter. The only thing that could cause more trouble would be for you to continue to pursue this. I feel that very strongly. And I’m asking you, as an officer of the Board, as a member of our Chastain community, to let it rest. Will you do that?”
Salt water stung Max’s eyes, but, blurrily, he could see a familiar—and oh so shapely and touchable—body, or the half of it, beneath the surface. He stroked nearer and reached out and slipped his hand delicately up the back of her leg.
Annie shot out of the water like a Yellowstone geyser, bounced back down in the surf, and flailed wildly toward shore.
Max came up, laughing so hard that he swallowed a mouthful of salt water and began to choke.
She paused in mid-lunge. “You rat! I thought it was a shark.” She squinted at him. “How did you get here?”
“I drove back from Chastain, parked, changed in the cabana—”
She slapped her hand down against the water. “No, I mean here. I didn’t see you come.”
“Actually, my love, a school of hammerheads could have surrounded you. You were staring at the horizon in total absorption. I came up behind you, then swam underwater. The better to pretend I was a shark.”
“Max, will you ever grow up?”
“Hell, no.” He splashed to her and picked her up in his arms.
“Put me down.”
“Hell, no,” he said again, enthusiastically.
They toppled backwards, the water roiled, and they came up again, sputtering with laughter.
His report on Chastain could wait until later.
Much later.
Annie put a big red X on the paper tablecloth. “And that’s where I’ll put the corpse.”
Max moved his Bud Light for a better view.
The waiter arrived with two Caesar salads. She motioned for hers to be put to one side of the red X.
With true sophistication, the waiter didn’t change expression when she said, “I’m going to have her bashed over the head with a croquet mallet.”
“Oh, good going,” Max murmured, avoiding the waiter’s
eye.
She leaned back and said in satisfaction, “So, I did pretty well today.”
The waiter cut his eyes toward her as he moved away.
“That’s great, honey.”
“And what happened in Chastain?”
When he finished his report, Annie speared an anchovy. “Are you going to drop it?”
Max scooped up a garlicky chunk of cheese. “I don’t know. I guess I’ll decide in the morning.”
MAX WAS SITTING with his tasseled loafers resting on his Italian Renaissance desktop when Barbie buzzed. He flicked on the intercom.
“A lady to see you, Mr. Darling. About a missing painting.”
Work.
If he didn’t exactly feel a transport of joy, he did feel a moderate stirring of interest. But he hesitated. Did he want to take anything on? He certainly could delve further into the matter of the Forged Murder Plot. But that would just be depressing if it turned out as Roscoe Merrill predicted. Well, it wouldn’t hurt to talk to this prospective client. A missing painting.
“Send her in.” Max rose and straightened his tie as Barbie opened the door for a little old lady with faded blue eyes, fluffy white hair, and an anxious expression.
“Mrs. Hilliard,” Barbie announced.
As Max solicitously directed her toward a chair, he felt her arm tremble under his hand. As he took his place behind the desk, he studied her.
She wore a navy-blue silk dress with a white ruffled lace collar. A brown and white cameo sprouted from the lace.
“What can I do for you, Mrs. Hilliard?”
She looked around nervously. “Do you make records of everything in your office, Mr. Darling?”
For a moment, he was puzzled. “Records?”
“Recordings,” she amplified.
So the old darling watched TV.
“No, I don’t tape record anything.”
“So our conversation is confidential. Absolutely confidential?”
“Yes, of course.”
She paused, looked around once more, then said, in a voice scarcely above a whisper, “Mr. Darling, a painting has been stolen from my home. A very valuable painting.” Her strained, fuzzy blue eyes avoided looking at him directly, focusing instead on the silver letter opener that Barbie had arranged artistically in the dead center of his desk. “I believe it has been—I think the expression is—hocked. Can you investigate for me, and discover who sold it to this antique shop?”
Design for Murder Page 8
