Thai Die

by Monica Ferris

  Heidi screamed out from the kitchen, “Be careful! The body’s right inside the door!”

  The door opened just enough for two uniformed policemen to sidle in. They seemed huge in their dark blue jackets, and they shed snow and melting snow all over everything. They both held guns pointed at the ceiling.

  “Who’s in the house?” the bigger of the two asked.

  Heidi gestured at Phil and Doris near the doorway. “Me, and Mr. Galvin and Ms. Valentine are all the ones down here,” she said, “and upstairs there are three women—Bershada Reynolds, Shelly Donohue, and Alice Skoglund. They had the two front bedrooms.”

  “Is anyone else hurt?”

  “Down here? No, just that woman on the floor. I think she’s dead.”

  The other cop had holstered his gun and gone to one knee beside the dead woman.

  “Kelly,” he said, “go clear the upstairs.”

  “Right,” said Kelly. Gun in hand, he went up the stairs faster and more quietly than Phil would have thought possible.

  “Who is she?” asked the kneeling policeman, who was pressing two fingers into the woman’s neck.

  Heidi said, “I don’t know. I never saw her before. I heard the door alarm go off a little while ago, but when I came out, there wasn’t anyone here. If that was when she came in, I guess she went right upstairs. It was just a couple of minutes later that I heard some kind of a fight, and a gun went off three or four times. I was calling nine-one-one when she fell down the stairs.”

  “Where’s the gun?”

  Phil said, “I saw it near her hand when we came down, and I kicked it away.”

  Heidi stepped back a little and pointed to the floor near a counter.

  “Was that the gun that was fired?” asked the cop.

  Heidi said, “I think so.”

  “Yes, it was,” said Dorie. “At me.”

  The policeman looked at Dorie so sharply that she took a step back. “Who are you?” he asked, even though Heidi had already told him.

  “My name is Doris Valentine,” she said, with a tremor in her voice.

  “I’m Phil Galvin,” announced Phil. “We’re together.” He took Dorie’s hand. “All of us, Bershada, Shelly, and Alice, and me and Dorie, were coming up from Amboy when the snow got so bad we had to stop here in St. Peter.”

  “Are you from Amboy?”

  “Nossir, we’re from Excelsior, and we were headed back there.”

  The policeman nodded. “The both of you just stand there a minute, okay?”

  “Yessir.” Phil gave Dorie’s hand a reassuring squeeze.

  The policeman went over to the gun, bent low, and said, “It smells like it’s been fired.” He turned to Heidi. “Is this your gun?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Do you have a gun?”

  “No, sir!”

  Then he looked at Doris and Phil. “Not our gun, either!” said Phil, and Dorie shook her head emphatically.

  The officer pushed a button on a microphone clipped to the shoulder of his jacket and said, “Base, this is Officer Max here. We’re in. Kelly’s clearing the upstairs. I’ve got one down, a DOA, at the foot of the stairs right inside the back door. Three people here with me—one’s the manager, two are guests. The rest of the downstairs not cleared.”

  They must have been waiting on the front porch for Officer Max to say something. Phil heard a rattle and then a thumping as someone tried the front door.

  “Locked,” apologized Heidi. She crossed the kitchen, came through another door into the dining room, and disappeared into the parlor. Phil heard the door open. He leaned backward, looking through the dining room, and caught a glimpse of two people in brown as they entered the front door. Sheriff’s deputies. One peeped into the dining room, and Phil straightened hastily. The deputy waved briefly at the cop, then went back out of sight. The other came into the dining room. Her brown jacket was soaked, and her trousers were wet to the knees. “Whatcha got, Max?”

  “The DOA’s a female, unidentified as yet, and there are supposed to be three more females upstairs. Kelly’s gone up to have a look. Is Hansen watching the front?”

  She nodded, pulling off a pair of heavy leather mittens. Phil noticed that they looked like shooters’ gloves: There was an overlapping split in the palm so fingers could come out without removing the mittens.

  “Whad’ja do, Amhurst, walk over?” asked Max.

  “That’s a big roger, Max,” she replied, matter-of-factly. “We heard shots were fired, so we came the fastest way. All our SUVs are out on the highway working accidents and bringing in strandeds. Is your DOA shot?”

  “Not that I can see, but I haven’t moved her. Three shots fired, according to the witnesses, but none of my three here are wounded.”

  “She fell,” said Dorie. And when the law turned its regard on her, her tone became defensive. “Well, she did! She had the gun, but we fought—”

  “Who fought?” asked Max.

  “The three of us,” said Phil. His gesture took in the dead woman, Doris, and himself. “She was like a crazy person. We don’t know why she attacked us.”

  OFFICER Jack Kelly quickly searched the back bedrooms and bathroom, reporting them cleared via his radio to Max downstairs. He found quite a lot of pottery fragments on the floor of the back hall, including a broken handle. Then he went around a corner, up two steps and down the carpeted hall to the front bedrooms. He went all the way to the front of the hall and waved at the sheriff’s deputy at the bottom of the stairwell. The twist of wooden stairs made an interesting and dizzying shadow play as he moved around the top of it.

  The door to one bedroom was open. He did that sly, rolling-around-corners entry that had been drilled into him at the academy—he was new to all this, and halfway between excitement and terror. He paused to look around, with his gun at the ready. The light was on, but the room was empty. The bed looked very disordered, a blanket half on the floor. The bathroom had a set of women’s underwear hanging on the shower curtain bar.

  He went across the hall, listened briefly at the door, then rapped sharply on it. “Police! Open up!” he barked in his deepest register.

  There was a louder murmur of voices from the other side.

  “I said, open up! This is the police!”

  “All right,” said a woman’s voice near the door. “But please, there’s just three of us, all women, and we’re scared.”

  “I am not going to hurt you,” Kelly said in a milder tone.

  The door opened and behind it were, as advertised, three scared females: a slim attractive black woman, a tall elderly white woman, and a medium-sized young white woman with lots of disheveled brown hair. The black woman and old woman were dressed, but the woman with all the hair was wrapped in a duvet, which she held as if she might be nude under it. Well, well, kinky, he thought. All three pairs of eyes were wide with alarm.

  “What’s going on out there?” quavered the woman in the duvet.

  “We’re still figuring that out,” he replied. “Is anyone else in here with you all?”

  “No, just us,” said the elderly woman, surprising him with her deep voice.

  But he took a quick look around anyway, in the closet and the bathroom—where more women’s undergarments hung drying—ignoring their slightly insulted faces. He’d been warned never to take civilians’ words at face value no matter how innocent their appearance.

  “Now,” he said, “what’s going on here?”

  Ten

  ANOTHER siren announced the arrival of emergency medical crews. Two women and a man made up their party, and again the mysterious intruder was checked for signs of life. And, as before, none were found. They stepped away and stood in the kitchen awkwardly, professionals with no call for their profession. The investigators had their work to do, though the woman was not officially dead until the coroner, who had not yet arrived, said so.

  “Have you called Dr. Sholes, Max?” asked the man.

  “No, I decided to wait until
a thaw clears the streets.” Max said this so deadpan that it took a moment for the emergency tech to laugh.

  One woman tech said, “He’d wade through drifts taller than this to come here. Nothing he likes better than to be at the scene of a nice, juicy murder.”

  Which was true, so it was a sorrow to him that St. Peter was such a quiet, friendly town, despite its being host to both the large Gustavus Adolphus College and the Minnesota Security Hospital, where the dangerously insane were held and treated.

  “Now, hold on, this may not be a murder,” warned Max. “The story I’m hearing is that this woman came here with a gun to attack an innocent guest of the inn, and they engaged in a struggle. The result was that this woman fell down these stairs.”

  “So we assume the dead woman is the attacker, not the innocent guest?” asked the other female tech.

  “Yes. The guest, also a woman, yelled for help and another guest came out of his room. If their story checks out, this was simple self-defense.”

  “Poor Dr. Sholes,” said the female tech. “Not so juicy. Still, I’m betting he’ll enjoy hearing the story. But meanwhile we’re in for a long wait, because if he turns up in the next hour, it’ll be a miracle. The roads are about as bad as they can be.”

  A loud, rough, grating noise, like a giant bicycle bell with croup sounded from the front of the house. “What the hell’s that?” demanded Max.

  “Front doorbell,” said Heidi, rising. “Shall I answer it?”

  “Did you lock the front door when you came in?” Max asked Amhurst.

  “Nope,” said the female deputy.

  The noise sounded again. “Good manners, maybe,” said one of the med techs.

  “I’ll get it,” said Amhurst. She hurried out and in a few moments a man’s voice called, “Wow, it’s terrible out there! Tell me, where is it? What have you got for me?” By the sounds he was stamping snow off his boots and slapping it off his coat in the little foyer.

  “We’re here by the back stairs, Doc,” called Max. “We’ve got a DOA female.”

  “Don’t you want a professional opinion about that?” asked Doc.

  “All right, if it’ll make you happy, come and look.” He said in a lower voice, “Though a man who can’t check for his own self whether a door is locked or not—well, I just don’t know.”

  “Here, let me help,” the deputy was heard to say. More stamping and brushing noises could be heard. “Hold still, let me get your back. You look like a snowman.”

  A short, stocky man in Wellington boots and a camel hair overcoat came into the dining room. He was smacking a purple knit hat into one gloved palm. The deputy was behind him, dodging flying snow and reaching fruitlessly for the hat. A snow-clogged purple scarf was already in her hand.

  “All right, all right,” he said abruptly, realizing what she wanted though she had said nothing. He handed her the hat, pulled off the gloves—thick brown leather lined with fleece—and handed them to her as well. Then came his heavy wool overcoat. He sat on a dining-room chair and pulled off his Wellington boots, which dripped ice, snow, and water on the beautiful antique Persian rug under the table.

  “Thank you,” said the deputy faintly, as she staggered off with her burden.

  Dr. Sholes’s silver hair had been squashed flat against his head by the hat, and his cheeks were red from cold. His face was broad, his mouth wide and friendly, his big nose shapely and even redder than his cheeks, his eyes small and very blue. His voice was a gruff baritone but not harsh in tone. “Well, well, well,” he murmured, already focused on the body, intensely interested. He walked to it slowly, eyes taking in detail, then stooped with a little grunt—he was rotund—to check the carotid with two fingers and lift an eyelid. “DOA, all right.” He looked up the stairs. “Steep sucker. She take a tumble down this?”

  “That’s what I’m hearing,” said Max. “Though she may have been pushed.” He spoke into his microphone. “Kelly, you done with those three females yet?”

  “Yeah. I let one go back to her own room and put on some clothes. All they know is there was a fight and shots were fired. They locked themselves in this bedroom waiting for rescue. Want me to bring ’em down?”

  “No, you stay up there with them. Detectives are on their way.”

  “Copy.”

  Officer Max looked at Phil and Doris and said, “Investigators are coming. They’re going to have a whole lot of questions for the both of you, so how about we put one of you in one front room and the other can stay in the kitchen.”

  “I’ll start a pot of coffee,” said Heidi.

  “No, you come here into the dining room and have a seat. We’ll want to talk to each of you separately.”

  “Yes, sir.” Max stepped out of the way, but Heidi repeated her trick of going to the back of the kitchen and into the dining room through another doorway.

  “The kitchen used to be two rooms,” she explained.

  “Fine.” He called in that this was an official homicide and asked if a team could be sent over to process the scene. Then he raised his voice to call, “Hansen!”

  “Yo!”

  “Come here and take Ms. Valentine into the front room.”

  “May I have the library instead?” asked Doris. “It has a fireplace, and I seem to have kind of a chill.” Phil had noticed she was shivering and wished he’d thought to make that request first.

  “Sure.”

  Now that he knew about the other doorway, Max took Phil through it into the kitchen and sat him at a little table under a window.

  “I know how to make coffee,” volunteered Phil.

  “No, you just sit tight, okay?”

  “All right.”

  DETECTIVE Mark Shindler struggled through growing drifts and wind blowing a gale full of snow into his face, up his sleeves, or down his neck, depending on which direction he was walking. It wasn’t all that many blocks from the police department, but it seemed miles in that storm.

  He was joined a few blocks from the station by two investigators from the sheriff’s department. St. Peter was the Nicollet County seat, so their department was headquartered here. Having companions to share the misery did, as advertised, halve it.

  The house, when they reached it, was ablaze with lights, glowing even through the twisting veils of snow whirling in front of it and around its corners.

  The trio paused on the big front porch to consult—briefly, both because the routine was familiar and because the thermometer was sinking like an anchor.

  “There are supposed to be five guests at the inn plus the manager,” said Shindler. “Mandy, you take the manager, she’s the one who called this in. Heidi’s her name.”

  “Yeah, I know,” said Mandy. “She’s my cousin.”

  “Whoops, then Paco, you take Heidi. Her last name’s Mogenson. Mandy, there are three naked women on the top floor.” He shook his head. “Don’t ask, that’s all I was told about it. There are four big bedrooms up there. Separate them before you talk to them. I’ll tackle the woman who was allegedly attacked by the victim. Whoever finishes first can tackle the man who helped her. Ready? Let’s go.” He opened the big old front door and stepped gratefully into warmth and light.

  AN HOUR later, Deputy Paco went out to look at the cars parked on the street. He found a huge flat-backed vehicle with squared-off headlights and a severely rectangular windshield: a Hummer. There seemed to be slightly less snow on it than on the other parked cars. The grill was cold when he put a bare hand near it, but when he gently brushed at the snow in the middle of the hood he found a thin layer of ice. The same on the windshield. So it had been parked here warm, after the snow started. The first layer of snow had melted, then turned to ice.

  He bent and brushed away the snow and road crud on the license plate, using his flashlight to read the three letters and three numbers. He wrote them down in his notebook and went back inside.

  He told Detective Shindler what he’d discovered, was duly praised for his enterprise, and was a
sked to call the plates in.

  In a few minutes he was told that the plates were registered to a Hummer belonging to one Wendy Applegate of St. Paul.

  Shindler tried the name out on everyone in the house, but he drew another blank from everyone but the Valentine woman, the would-be victim. She thought she might have heard the name before. Then again, she was so rattled she thought she might have heard her boyfriend Phil’s name before. Stranger and stranger, he thought.

  Eleven

  “BUT they had to let us go for lack of evidence that we’d committed a crime,” said Doris to a thunderstruck Betsy. “Then they said that they would keep in touch, and they’d appreciate it if Phil and I wouldn’t take any trips out of the country.”

  “Oh, Doris!” said Betsy. “This is so horrible! I can’t believe it! This woman actually tried to kill you?” They were in her shop on Monday afternoon—the five had ridden home in Bershada’s luxury automobile, then taken lengthy naps before coming to talk to Betsy. Shelly was with them; the schools were closed because of the snow.

  “I don’t think that was her intent, not at first,” Doris replied in a low voice. She was sitting on a chair at the library table, a cup of tea sitting untasted in front of her. A white bandage was coming loose from her cheek, and she was wearing the same clothes she’d worn on the trip. “She wanted a piece of Thai silk from me. She said she’d looked for it in my apartment and couldn’t find it.”

  “So the person who burglarized your apartment was this woman.”

  Doris nodded. “She said in those exact words that she’d looked for the silk and it wasn’t there.”

  “But the Thai silk is in her apartment,” said Alice, in a tone meaning she’d made this argument before. “I saw it with my own eyes when we cleaned up. Except the piece that was stolen—and it was stolen by this woman.”