Death Dines Out

by Claudia Bishop

  Cressida, with a slightly disdainful eye on her guests, brought up the activities of Allen on the polo field, Tracy on the tennis court, and David and his sailing - none of whom were known to Quill or Meg. Finally, when Quill heard herself murmuring "wonderful, wonderful, wonderful," like Lawrence Welk after a sex-change operation, she gave up and ate as circumspectly as she could. In the British tradition, which Quill would have found pretentious anywhere else, Cressida led the ladies away for a short time after dinner, and Meg joined Quill in the bathroom. Quill liked the bathroom a lot. Like the rest of the house it was old, unpretentious, and there wasn't a Water Pik in sight. The walls were paneled with white pine, reminding her of the pleasant Nantucket beach cottages she and Meg had spent time in as girls.

  "I can't stand it," Meg hissed at her, closing the door. "I want to play the banjo or something."

  "Chocolate!" Quill said, in a subdued yell. "Chocolate! Chocolate! Chocolate!"

  "Why'd you yell 'fire' when you fell into the chocolate," Meg sang. "Why'd you yell 'fire' when you fell into the choooc-late?"

  "Because who would have come if I'd yelled 'chocolate!' Oh, dear." Quill looked in the tiny mirror, ran her fingers through her hair; sighed, and gave up. The humidity made it curl like bedsprings. "Hands down, this is the most awful dinner party I've ever been to."

  "Quill, there's no conversation."

  "I know there's no conversation. The thing is, Meg, we don't know anyone this woman knows except Verger Taylor. And other than talking about other people, I don't think Miss Houghton has much to say. About anything. Except her boys. Did you see how she looked at me when Evan grabbed my hand?"

  "I sure did. Yikes." Meg stood beside her and they both looked into the mirror. Meg's eyes, clear and candid gray, met Quill's greenish-hazel ones. "What do we do now?"

  "Bridge, I guess," said Quill. "And I haven't played for months."

  "I haven't played for years," Meg complained. "You're the one that started the tournaments at the inn. You know what? There's five of us. And you can't play bridge with five people. So I'll sit out. I'll go for a walk on the beach."

  "Coward," Quill said. "I'm the one Cressida Houghton wants to make into mincemeat. Why the heck did she invite us if she resents us?"

  When Meg and Quill rejoined their hostess, she rose and gracefully introduced an elderly gentleman, impeccably groomed, apparently the David of the yachting stories. David was, Cressida said, an old and dear neighbor and would make up a fourth. The boys, she said, with a slight emphasis in her tone, were going out to meet some friends closer to their own age.

  Two thoughts struck Quill at once. The first-that Cressida Houghton thought she and Meg were. cradle robbers, that she had encouraged Evan's attention-hit her with the force of the so-far nonexistent hurricane. The second, that she'd forced Cressida Houghton, famed for her politesse, into overtly rude behavior, made her want to crawl under the worn chintz couch and stay there. She, Quill, had managed to offend the second or third most famous woman in America. Was that why she and Meg had been invited here? To let the golddigger twins discover that the Taylor boys weren't up for grabs? Quill started to giggle. It was the kind of giggle that, once suppressed, surfaced harder than ever. She sat down with a pink face and bitten lower lip.

  Cressida looked at her with no expression at all. "Shall we sit in the game room? Everything's set up in there. I'm afraid the boys and I have been playing three-handed bridge in there since five." She smiled gently. "But the cards are all warmed up."

  To Quill's relief, the game room was brightly lit. It was the dimness in the rest of the house, she decided, that had put her so off-balance. A card table with a battered green felt cover had been drawn up before a cold fireplace. Quill sat in the scorekeeper's position, noting idly that East/West had been badly set by North/South three rubbers in a row in the three-handed game that afternoon. One of the games had been a grand slam: seven no-trump, doubled. Ouch.

  "If you wouldn't mind," Cressida said, "David and I will play North/South. I had the worst luck this afternoon."

  "I can see that," said Meg irrepressibly.

  Meg and Quill were down by a thousand points when the dove-gray maid appeared at the game room door with the portable phone on a tray. Cressida took the call. She said "yes," "no," and "I see." For a long moment, she remained perfectly still. Then, "Please call the police. I'll send Mr. Hawthorne." She set the phone back on the tray for the waiting maid and sat relaxed until she'd gone out of the room. "You might as well know this. It's going to be in the newspapers tomorrow morning." She sighed. "And the television news, too, I expect. The boys took their two friends over to their fathers' home. I think they were planning a visit to Au Bar." A slight grimace flitted across the perfect face. "At any rate, there's a great deal of blood in Verger's study. And Verger himself has disappeared."

  -8-

  "I knew it. I just knew it." Quill put the Mercedes in reverse and eased down the driveway. "Didn't I tell you that someone was going to get Verger Taylor?"

  "There's no body," Meg pointed out. She leaned back in the seat. "What an evening."

  "It was awful. Did you pick up the message I did?"

  "That we were harpies after the gold-dust twins? Yeah." Meg stared up at the sky. There was a frosty nimbus around the moon. The air was heavy. They drove in silence for some moments. Meg said, "What do you suppose she's doing now?"

  "Cressida? Calling a platoon of lawyers, I expect. She couldn't be as unconcerned as she appeared. Evan and Corrigan found the body... "

  "There wasn't a body," Meg said.

  "Or the blood, rather, and you can be that the media will be on this like a flock of pigeons after bread crumbs in central Park. They always are."

  "How much blood do you suppose there was?"

  "Meg!" She reached the road, stopped, and put the car in drive.

  "I mean, was the place awash with it? Was it human blood? Was it little drops that might come if you'd cut yourself and driven to the emergency room?"

  Quill didn't answer for a moment. She pulled onto the road and drove in silence, then said. "There was a security guard, surely."

  "Was there?" They looked at each other. Meg raised her eyebrows. "You know, we're coming up on his house in a moment. Let's go find out."

  "We can't interfere in a police investigation."

  "Quill, we've investigated how many murderers?"

  "Four," said Quill glumly. "And a dozen corpses."

  "And we've never worried about interfering in a police investigation before."

  "Myles was in charge of almost all of those cases, Meg. I hardly think that the police here in Florida are going to welcome the services of two amateur detectives." She slowed. They were approaching Verger Taylor's mansion. The two gold lions shone brightly in the glare of the Mercedes's headlights.

  "There's no one there!" Meg said in surprise.

  "We were closer to the house than the Palm Beach County police," Quill pointed out. "They haven't had time to get here yet."

  "Pull in," Meg said.

  "Are you sure?"

  "My investigative instincts have been roused. Let's just see what's going on."

  Although there was absolutely no traffic, Quill signaled a left-hand turn and pulled past Verger Taylor's elaborate gates. The drive to the house was broad and straight. The front of the mansion was illuminated like the Christmas tree in Rockefeller Plaza.

  "There's that little Jaguar of Evan's," Quill said. She came to a stop. They both got out and went to the front door. It was twice Quill's height, perhaps more, and made of heavily carved wood. A lion's head door knocker was placed squarely in the center. Quill hesitated a moment, then rapped the knocker sharply against the brass plate. The door opened almost immediately.

  "Quill!" Evan said. He was pale. His hair stuck up in little tufts around his head.

  "We wondered if there was anything we could do for you," Meg said. She pushed Quill firmly over the threshold and into the foyer. They
had both seen photographs of verger Taylor's home, but the reality was overwhelming. The foyer was lined entirely in pink marble: floor, ceiling, and walls. Three enormous flower arrangements had been placed on pedestals with gold cherubs as the bases.

  Meg looked up at Evan. "We thought we cold drop your two friends off at their home. Get them out of the way of the police."

  Behind them, through the open door, the wail of a police siren was abruptly cut off as a cruiser swept up the drive to the door. Two uniformed policemen scrambled out of the vehicle and approached the foyer at a run. A second cruiser came to a halt behind the first. Two more uniformed policemen spilled out of it. One took off at a run around the west wing of the house; the other, gun drawn, proceeded at a more deliberate pace around the east end.

  Meg pushed Quill through the other end of the foyer into a living room which, at a glance, was the size of a basketball court. This, too, was entirely lined in pink marble. The fourth wall of the room was a series of ornately framed sliding glass doors, overlooking the darkness and, Quill presumed, the beach. The glass door at the farthest end of the wall had been smashed in. Glass littered the floor.

  Corrigan and two young girls were huddled on a large, navy blue brocaded sofa in front of the fireplace. The cherub motif had been continued here in the supports for the black mantel. Both girls were blonde, thin, and tanned. They were wearing tight spandex dresses that stopped well above the knee. The one in red was smoking nervously. The girl in black huddled in the shelter of Corrigan's arm."

  "Hey, guys," Meg said. "What's going on?"

  Corrigan automatically rose to his feet. The girl in black whimpered and curled into a tight ball on the sofa. Accompanied by Evan, the uniformed police jogged past them to a half-open door set in the west side of the room. The room beyond was dimly lit. Meg and Quill followed Evan.

  This room had been a study, although, Quill thought, it looked more like the office of a Renaissance pope than that of the fourth largest real estate mogul in America. The room had a domed ceiling painted with scenes of the Annunciation. Bookshelves soared into the reaches of the dome on both sides of the room. Most of them were locked behind grilled doors set into the shelving.

  A desk, which was at least six feet long, occupied the center of the room. A laptop computer lay shattered on the floor. The screen was cracked, but the monitor glowed eerily. A ten-line telephone had been tossed - or had fallen - next to it. The receiver was off.

  There wasn't all that much blood. A small pool was next to the phone, and the handset had streaks of red on it. Quill narrowly avoided stepping in several splashes at the door. The younger of the two policemen - the one with a crew cut and wire-rimmed glasses - glanced at Meg. He barked, "Remain outside this area, please." The cellular phone at his belt beeped. He took it, flicked open the top and began to speak rapidly into it, his voice low and confidential. Meg moved into the shadow cast by a large statue in the Greek style - a copy, Quill thought - of Mercury in the Louvre.

  Quill backed out of the office. She stepped carefully on the marble floor, watching for splashes of blood. There was a small but discernible trail of red linking the office door to the smashed glass at the beachfront side of the living room.

  The glass had exploded inward. The shards sprayed out from the door in a parabola, which clearly demonstrated that at least two powerful blows from a heavy object had been struck from the outside. Remnants of shattered glass clung to the door frame. The most damage seemed to have occurred about four feet from the ground. Quill wished she had a tape measure.

  A powerful flashlight swept the area immediately outside the door and a voice ordered Quill away. She backed up. One of the policemen outside yelled, "Ange! We got a body! Not Taylor, do you read? Not Taylor. Seems to be security."

  The girl in red screamed. The policeman with the crew cut came out of the study and said calmly, "You're not on the radio, Kyle. I don't read you, I hear you just fine." His gaze swept over Quill - sharp, appraising, indifferent. "Out of the way, miss. Confine yourself to the fireplace area."

  The policeman outside called for an ambulance. Quill went to Corrigan and sat down in the chair directly across from him. He had half-risen at the policeman's shout about the discovery of the body, then sat back when he'd heard it wasn't his father. He looked bewildered. Out of the comer of her eye, Quill saw Meg slip across the living room into the east part of the house. She spoke gently to Corrigan, who jumped nonetheless at the sound of her voice. "Did your dad have a large security force, Corrigan?"

  "What? No. No. It was twenty-four hours a day, but it was just the one guard. He doubled as a chauffeur. I mean, there was a whole group of them, but only one at a time." He bit nervously at his thumbnail. "What do you think happened? Do you think my father's dead?"

  The girl in black started to cry, not, Quill judged, from grief, but from sheer nervous tension. The one in red stubbed out her cigarette, lit another, and jiggled her left leg up and down.

  "Just the one guard, Corrigan? Surely somebody like your dad had better protection than that."

  "Well, sure. The whole place is wired for security," He pointed upwards. "Cameras all over the place. The guard didn't even have to patrol, just watch the video monitors."

  "When did you four come to pick up Mr. Taylor?"

  "About nine-thirty. Ev and I went down to get Shirl and Beth just after dinner, and we came straight here."

  Quill addressed both girls. "How far away do you guys live?"

  "Shirl's here for the weekend, at Beth's house," Corrigan said.

  "Is your house here, Beth?"

  "I live in Juno," the blonde in black said sullenly. "Why the fuck do you want to know, anyway?"

  "Officer!" The shout came from the part of the house where Meg had gone. Quill jumped to her feet.

  "Officer!"

  "That's Meg!" Quill said.

  "She must be in the kitchen," Corrigan said. "What the hell?"

  Quill ran ahead of the others to the east wing archway, skidding on the floor in her high-heeled shoes. "Meg? Meg!"

  "Down there," Corrigan said from behind her. "Take a right. The kitchen's beyond the solarium."

  Two policemen ran past Quill, their guns drawn, Ange in the lead. "You civilians stay back," he ordered.

  "That's my sister," Quill said, and then immediately felt silly. She dropped back behind the cops and followed them into the kitchen. Verger Taylor's baroque tastes hadn't stopped with his pink-marble living room. This area was almost exclusively black granite and cherrywood, At first glance, there appeared to be no appliances at all, just a huge granite-topped island in the center of the floor. Meg was standing at it, her arm around a cowering, terrified maid.

  "Maria was locked in the pantry," she said.

  "You let her out?" Ange demanded.

  "Of course I let her out. She was kicking her heels against the door, poor thing."

  "She was tied up?"

  "With clothes line and duct tape," Meg said. She pointed to the detritus on the floor. "It's all right there."

  "You," said Ange sternly. "Don't leave. I'm giving myself a good hard think about arresting you for interfering with evidence." He scowled. "Step away from the witness, ma'am."

  Meg saluted smartly. "Yes, sir, officer, sir."

  Quill gave an exasperated tcha! and pulled Meg aside. She looked for an appropriately secure place to yell at her sister and found one in the maid's room. It was just off the kitchen, next to what Quill realized was a set of triple ovens concealed by cherry paneling. She shoved Meg into the room. It was small, with a neatly made twin bed, wicker chest, a print of the Scared Heart on the wall, and a small television set. Quill closed the door firmly and sat down on the bed. Meg prowled restlessly around the room. "Good idea, Meg, pissing off the police."

  A look familiar to Quill - mulish in the extreme - spread over Meg's face.

  "You know why it's not a good idea to piss off the police? Because if you get arrested, you can't present your p
otted rabbit at the banquet on Friday. And good-bye third star."

  Meg's face cleared. "You've got a point."

  "Of course I've got a point. Now what did that poor maid tell you before you called us in?"

  "I called you in right away," Meg said indignantly. "I know you, Meg. You grabbed the chance to question her, didn't you? What'd she say?"