Murder Well-Done

by Claudia Bishop

  Howie clenched both his hands. "Your Honor! I must warn you that I will immediately contact the Office of Court Administration to file a complaint!"

  "... seven hundred dollars for the much-needed budget of the state of New York. Bailiff? Escort the prisoner to the jail house, please." He adjusted the collar of his judge's robe and smiled at Nora Cahill. `You get all that/ You want me to do it again?"

  -5-

  The drive from the Tompkins County Courthouse near Ithaca had taken about twenty-five minutes, which meant, Quill thought, that it must be about eleven-thirty, although she wasn't certain. Deputy Dave had taken her watch.

  The Municipal Building at the end of Main Street housed the Sheriff's Department and Town offices. The jail was on the west end of the building facing Main, so that Quill could see most of Hemlock Falls through the barred window. The sun was pale gold through a light snow, creating a veiled and misty landscape worthy of attention by Turner, if Turner'd ever gotten to America to paint, which he hadn't. And if he weren't dead. Which he was.

  Most of the stores lining Main Street were cobblestone. Marge Schmidt's diner, Esther West's dress shop, and a few other were of white clapboard with black trim. The contrast was pleasing, even, Quill thought gloomily, for this vantage point. Four inches of new snow covered rooftops and bushes and made feathery cones on the wrought-iron standards of the streetlights. The snowplows had left the curbs knee-high with pillowy drifts. Through the heavy gauge wire screen, Quill could see Esther West in a bright red ski jacket, mounting a pine wreath on the front door of her shop. Esther finished hanging the wreath and walked the three store-fronts down to Marge's diner and went in. A few cars drove by. Quill started to count he squares to the inch in the screen. Some minutes after Esther disappeared in to Marge's diner, Mayor Henry, portly in a black and green ski suit, ran out of his office, crossed the street to the diner, and charged inside. Then the street was quiet.

  Quill sighed, coughed, wound her hair around her finger, and sat on the bare mattress of the fold-out cot. She debated her chances of getting a cup of coffee. She'd been in the cell before, having interviewed incarcerated suspects in several murder cases in years past, and it was as utilitarian and boring as ever. Caffeine might keep her awake.

  Open bars on the cells' fourth side faced the solid door to the sheriff's office. This door was half open, and she could see Davy Kiddermeister's feet propped up on his desk. His socks were sagging. Quill's own feet were cold and bare except for her panty hose, since Davy'd taken her boots and then had been unable to find a pair of prison slippers. Quill loved her boots. They were crushed leather with a fleecy top. They'd been soaked with snow and mud on the outside, but the inside always kept her feet warm, no matter how poor the weather was. Quill sighed again, chewed on her hair, and stared at the ceiling. Perhaps she should have called Meg, although Howie had assured her she'd be out before lunch. A flash of re din the street caught her eye and she went back to the window.

  Like two fireplugs on either side of a skinny poplar, Mayor Henry, Esther, and Marge stood in the middle of Main Street staring at the Municipal Building. Quill untied her silk scarf, a bright teal and gold, and wagged it back and forth. Esther clutched Elmer. Elmer pointed at the jail window, his mouth moving soundlessly. Marge socked Elmer in the arm, then all three waved together, tentatively. Quill waved the scarf in response. Esther semaphored back, knocking the mayor's knitted hat sideways and poking him in the eye. There was an excited colloquy, then Marge stumped to her Lexus, the mayor and Esther on her heels. They piled in. Marge peeled out from the curb, slush spraying from beneath the wheels.

  "Coffee!" Quill shouted futilely through the barred window. "Bring coffee."

  "You need anything, Ms. Quilliam?" Davy Kiddermeister stood outside the cell, his thumbs hitched in his belt loops. Davy was blond and fair-skinned. In the winter, the tips of his ears were perpetually chapped.

  "No, thanks, Davy," said quill. She sighed and twiddled her thumbs. "Has Howie had any luck finding that judge? The real one, I mean?"

  "Mr. Murchison's down to the courthouse right this minute, paying your fine. I told you that, twice. Not that I mind saying it more than once," he added hastily. "No, ma'am."

  "Seven hundred dollars," Quill murmured darkly.

  Davy shuffled. He was able to shuffle, Quill noted, because he had boots. She, on the other hand, didn't.

  "I really hated to lock you up like this, Ms. Quilliam, but the law's the law."

  "Then how's about my boots? Honestly, Davy, why can't I just have my boots? They aren't exactly lethal weapons."

  "Sheriff Dorset'd have my guts for garters if I hadn't processed you in right, and prisoners can't have shoes or belts or anything like that. Says so in the manual."

  "Where is Sheriff Dorset, anyway?"

  "Out," Davy said vaguely, "with that senator."

  "Al Santini is not a senator." Quill explained with restraint, "He lost the election. He's an ex-senator. Which, if I'm not mistaken, is why I'm here at this very moment."

  Davy, who clearly had something on his chest, ignored this and said earnestly, "I just hope that you won't, you know" - Davy's ears turned an even brighter pink - "tell Kathleen that I treated you bad or anything like that. You want something, "I'll get it for you. Just lemme know. Unless it's your boots. Can't give you your boots."

  Quill felt an attack of tartness coming on. "Kathleen is perfectly capable of deciding that her brother is a Nazi all on her own. She's not only our best waitress, she's the one with the most sense." She sat on the cot and the sank her chin in her hands. She wondered if she'd be in here if Myles had been reelected sheriff. Nobody knew much about Frank Dorset, except that he lived at the very edge of Tompkins County and farmed pigs. Myles, she thought, wouldn't have let things get to this point.

  "If you think at all, David Emerson Kiddermeister," said Marge Schmidt, entering the cell area with a great stamping of feet and a rush of snowy air, "which I doubt. The men in this town have all gone crazy. Look, Esther. It's true. Every word of it. There she is!"

  Esther, Marge, and the mayor crowded next to Davy and stared at Quill like owls on a fence. Esther patted a stiffly lacquered curl over one ear and chirped in distress.

  "I don't know as how you all are allowed in here," said Davy. "Prisoner's only allowed one visitor at a time."

  "Stuff it." Marge planted a thick palm in Davy's chest and shoved him aside. "You all right, Quill? Getcha anything?"

  "Coffee," said Quill, `I'd love some coffee. And something to do. A book, maybe?"

  "How long they send you up for?" asked the mayor. "Are you going to need a lot of books? I could set up a fund-raiser, maybe."

  "She isn't going to be here that long," Esther said stoutly. Esther, whose taste in clothes seemed to have been formed by watching old movies starring the McGuire sisters, adjusted her patent leather belt and added, "Are you?"

  "Seven day's, said Davy. "Judge says she's supposed to serve the whole time."

  "He can't do that," said Marge. "I knew that little squirt Bristol never shoulda been elected. And it's your fault, Mayor. You and your nekkid friends running all through the woods like a bunch of assholes."

  "Maybe the judge can do that," Esther gasped. "I mean - if she did what she did, she could be in here for years. Did you do it, Quill? I mean, we heard that you ran over a little child, but which little child? And the child couldn't have died, because we would have heard about it."

  "I ran over a little child?" said Quill. "What/ What/"

  "You got it wrong, Esther. You always do. She didn't run over a little kid." Elmer sighed, regret all over his round face. "She almost ran over a little kid. Came this close." He held a pudgy thumb and forefinger minimally apart.

  "I passed a school bus," said Quill. "A parked empty school bus. There weren't any little kids within forty blocks of that school bus."

  "Well, there had to have been little kids within forty blocks," said the mayor reasonably. "The whole of
Hemlock Falls isn't forty blocks, so there must have been little kids around somewhere. But you - "

  "I did NOT run over a little kid!"

  "You heard it wrong, Elmer, you hopeless little shit." Marge put her hands on her considerable hips and surveyed the cell and the shoeless Quill with a suspicious touch of satisfaction. "Just look at this. Cold, hungry, and practically bare nekkid. I'm going to go down to the library and check out a couple of books for Quill, here. Esther, you find some slippers in that shop of yours, and then give Betty a call. She can run over here with some hamburg and a thermos of coffee." She fixed a malevolent eye on Davy. "And don't you touch a drop of my coffee, David Emerson Kiddermeister. I ain't subsidizing any damn fool that had a part in this. And speaking of damn fools, where's that useless son of bitch sheriff?"

  "You talking to me?"

  To her fierce annoyance, Quill jumped and her breath came short. Franklin Douglas Dorset, newly elected sheriff of Tompkins County, didn't look at all like Travis Bickle, he only sounded like him. He looked, as Meg had stigmatized him at the start of his election campaign, like a canned asparagus. He unzipped his quilted winter jacket and regarded the group crushed in front of the cell with speculation. Dorset was tall; his skin, hair, eyes, and clothes a uniformly nondescript pale brown. His hair was thick, standing almost upright, and his shoulders, chest, and hips were of similar circumference, so that if you had an imagination as food-oriented as Meg's it was possible to imagine Dorset as one of the more cylinderlike vegetables. Quill thought he looked more like a bleached-out Elvis Presley than an asparagus.

  Meg also claimed Dorset had the brains of a boiled onion. Quill, after one look at his flat brown eyes, wasn't sure about that.

  "Deputy?" said Dorset. "There some good reason why all these people are in here?"

  Marge drew breath. Quill waited confidently for the explosion. Blessed with the psychic drive of a Patton tank, Marge could flatten sumo wrestlers with a single glance from her turretlike eye.

  "Guess we better be getting along," Marge said meekly. "I'm bringing her coffee and a book, Sheriff," she added. "And somethin' to put on her feet. If you don't mind."

  "What I mind," said Sheriff Dorset, lifting a comer of his lip, "is you taking that intersection at Route 15 and 96 at seventy miles an hour last Sunday at 4:32 p.m., Marge Schmidt. That's a three-hundred-dollar, three-point V&T violation."

  "Route 15 and 96?" Elmer asked alertly.

  "Maybe it's there," Dorset said with relish, "and maybe it isn't. I'll see you folks sometime, right?" He held an imaginary camera to one eye and pretended to click it.

  Quill watched Marge leave, followed by a studiedly careless mayor and a nervous Esther. She said to Dorset, "You mean you can move the dam thing?"

  "The hidden camera? Bet your cute little ass. No use in a town this size if you can't."

  Dorset unclipped the keys to the cell from his belt with a flourish and opened the cell door. His gaze flicked over her carelessly, avoiding her eyes, and concentrating on her breasts. He stood slouched, one hip thrust out.

  "Deputy here says you want to go home. Says you're a little scared. Can't say as I blame you."

  Quill thought carefully about her response to this. She probably wouldn't get much more than seven years jail time If she punched Franklin Douglas Dorset right in the nose. On the other hand, her feet were cold and she was going to die if she didn't get a cup of coffee. "Ahem," she said, in a noncommittal way.

  "Tell you what. Senator out there wants to have a little talk with you, then he figures you pay the fine, you've served a little time, it's all settled, you can go back up to the Inn." Dorset smiled ingratiatingly.

  Quill didn't say anything. "Well, ma'am?"

  "What kind of talk?" she asked suspiciously.

  Dorset jiggled the keys. "Whyn't you come right out here and see?"

  Dorset behind her like an ugly sheepdog, Quill marched into the sheriff's office and into a glare of lights, cables, and Nora Cahill's camera crew.

  "Sarah Quilliam was released at 12:22, having spent all of two hours and forty-seven minutes of her seven-day sentence in jail," said Nora Cahill in her professional anchor voice. "Senator? Do you have a comment?"

  Quill's stockinged toe caught on a piece of curling linoleum. She pitched forward. Al Santini grabbed her elbow and pulled her upright. Howie Murchison draped her down coat over her shoulders, grabbed Quill's other elbow, and pulled her toward the door.

  "Sarah Quilliam is a wealthy businesswoman and Hemlock Falls' third largest employer," Santini said into the camcorder's little red light. "The level of this fine is a joke."

  Ex-Senator Al Santini and Sheriff Dorset smiled for the camera. Howie looked pained. "Here're your boots, Ms. Quilliam," Davy whispered apologetically. Quill grabbed them and pulled the left one on, hopping around the linoleum on one leg. They were still soggy with snow and mud.

  Nora Cahill shoved the microphone in Quill's face. "Do you have a comment, Ms. Quilliam? Do you think this criminal charge will affect business at your upper-crust Inn? And how do you feel about Senator Santini's efforts to reform small-town America?"

  Quill, who thought of herself as a generally equable person, felt the last shreds of her temper fray and snap. She grabbed the right boot by its wet, muddy top and swung.

  "And he's going to press charges?!" Meg said indignantly some twenty minutes later. "That lunatic! That creep! I would have whacked him right in the balls."

  Quill, wanting nothing more than to sit quietly for two minutes and warm her feet, looked at the kitchen with the nostalgic affection common, she supposed, to the recently paroled. She never wanted to see Al Santini or Bernie Bristol or Frank Dorset again in this life. She wanted to stay in the kitchen forever. The cobblestone fireplace was hung with dried bay leaf, braids of pearly garlic, and sheaves of lemon thyme. A fire burned briskly in the grate. Meg's collection of copper pots gleamed reassuringly from one of the oak beams running overhead. The air was filled with the scents of baking bread, orange sauce for the game hens, and freshly ground coffee. Admittedly, the view from the mullioned windows at the kitchen's west end was not quite as picturesque as that from the county jail; the herb gardens out back were still producing parsley and brussels sprouts. Sometime yesterday Mike the grounds keeper must have cleared them of snow. The mulched beds were consequently muddy with well-manured straw, but they looked beautiful to Quill. "Free," mused Quill, feeling warmly toward the mulch, "I'm free."

  "The son of a bitch," Meg continued.

  "Do you kiss your mother with that mouth, Miss Margaret Quilliam?" demanded Doreen, who had insisted that Quill completely change her clothes. "Lice," she'd said. "And I ain't sayin' a word more."

  She tapped Quill on the shoulder. "The senator got a powerful lot of mud up his nose, or so I hear. But that don't make it right for Meg here to cuss him out. Jail! The good Lord give me a stummick to hear this. Jail!"

  "Actually, I was aiming at Nora Cahill. I didn't mean to get Al Santini, although I'm glad I did. And why are you mad at me, Doreen?"

  Doreen darted a beady, somewhat proprietary eye around the kitchen. Six of the kitchen staff scrubbed vegetables, stirred sauces, and washed pots with unconcern for Doreen's cool reception of the fact that Quill had spent two hours and forty-seven minutes in the county jail. In her middle fifties, Doreen had been head housekeeper at the Inn for almost six years and regarded both Meg and Quill as sometimes satisfactory but frequently recalcitrant daughters, and everybody knew it.

  "I'm ashamed of you," Doreen said severely. "The whole town's talking about it."

  "It's not that big a deal! It was a setup! A mistake!" Quill sank her head in her hands. "I suppose Axminster's going to run a story in the Gazette."

  "Huh," said Doreen. She scratched her nose vigorously.

  "Isn't anyone glad to see me?" Quill asked somewhat plaintively.

  The kitchen got very quiet, although, thought Quill, the kitchen was never really quiet. Even at two o'clock i
n the morning, the Zero King refrigerators filled the air with a gentle hum. And at one o'clock in the afternoon, four days before Christmas, with the rest of the McIntosh family due that evening and a wedding due at the end of the week, the Inn's kitchen was filled with the clank and clatter of sous-chefs at the Aga, the oceanlike hum of the lunch crowd in the dining room, and the slam-whack of doors opening and closing.

  Quill thought about the sound of doors closing: store- room doors, cupboard doors, oven doors - all of it far preferable to the unique sound of a cell door being shut and locked. But at the moment, the kitchen was quiet only in relation to the usual people noise: Usually Meg alternately shrieked at and sang to the Cornell interns; Doreen recited the latest depredations of departed guests on the Inn towel supply; Frank, the assistant chef, called out food orders to the hapless Bjarne; the other workers whistled, gossiped, or hummed. At the moment, everyone in the kitchen was dead silent, out of sympathy, Quill had assumed, for her recent incarceration. Now she wasn't so sure.