Death Dines Out

by Claudia Bishop

  -16-

  "What do you think I should wear tonight? It's black tie." Quill yawned, shook a long black jersey dress free of its hanger, and held it up to herself. "I always feel like a cellist in this. Meg?" She stuck her head out into the hall. "Meg!" She walked into the living room. It was just before lunch. Tiffany had called in great excitement. The electrical problems were fixed, the banquet was on, and the hurricane wasn't supposed to hit until tomorrow. Everybody was coming. And - although it might not be nice to say it - the interest in Verger's disappearance had heightened, if that were possible, and nothing at all had happened for the last twenty-four hours, so they could count on excellent media coverage. She, Tiffany, was going to wear black.

  Quill looked at the sky dubiously. She'd rapidly become accustomed to Florida's insistently sunny weather. It was gloomy today. And those looked like genuine cumulonimbus thunderheads stacking up in the east. The living room was unaccustomedly shadowy.

  Meg, curled up into a small ball in the corner of the couch, was wearing a T-shirt that said NO GUTS, NO GLORY.

  "Hey." Quill greeted her. "You talked to Doreen and Andy? The airport in Syracuse is still snowed in, I take it."

  "Yep, I talked to Andy. Noreen had her baby. C-section. It was quite an operation, Andy said."

  "Myles is still out helping with the blizzard victims?"

  "Yep. He sends his love, though."

  "I'm homesick," Quill said.

  "Me, too."

  "But thirty-six inches of snow in twelve hours with a wind chill factor of six below sounds positively gruesome."

  "That it does. What else have you got to wear besides the black?"

  "Nothing."

  "Then I guess you'll look like a cellist."

  "You all right?"

  "Yeah. Tired, though. Jeez, I thought he'd show up. I was sure he'd show up." She rubbed her face with both hands.

  Quill yawned again. "Look, as I told you about sixty times, Ernst probably won't get the message until this morning. I'm convinced we're right, Meg. No one else had sufficient motive to take Verger's body anywhere."

  "Mr. X," Meg said glumly. "This may be the first case we fail to solve."

  "I doubt it. I'm taking the tape recorder, and we'll keep an eye out for Ernst. At the first opportunity, I think we should get him into a secluded corner..."

  "We've been over this about a million times," Meg grumbled.

  "We'll go over it once more, just to be sure. I think the best place is the charcutiere kitchen. It's isolated, all your dishes will have been sent downstairs long before the banquet itself starts, and you'll be crawling the walls waiting for the L 'Aperitif people to fall over in delight over your dish - which they will, Meg. Guaranteed. Anyhow, we back him into a comer at the earliest opportunity and get him to admit the heist."

  "The heist?"

  "Whatever. And bingo, we're free and clear to go home."

  "I've got to psych myself up for this thing tonight. All the challenge has gone out of the banquet, though."

  "That's because you don't have enough to do," Quill said. "Just supervising the main course presentation isn't nearly enough. Usually about this time, you're in the middle of the kitchen at home, flinging pots against the wall, singing and yelling. But that was the point, wasn't it? Didn't we say something about easy money and the time of our lives and fabulous weather?"

  Meg stretched her legs out, wiggled her toes, and looked dreamily at the ceiling. "If we were having a competition this size at home, and I was in charge, I'd be flying around the room right about now. But instead, I'm sitting here like a big fat lump."

  "You know what it is? It's the fact that the barometer's dropping. With any luck, we'll be out of here by tomorrow morning before Hurricane Helen comes roaring in, but there's this low pressure system in front of it, and that's why you feel so miserable. I'm a little depressed myself."

  "It isn't a low pressure system that's making you feel depressed. You're scared."

  "I'm not scared," Quill said indignantly. "How dangerous can a five-foot, three-inch body snatcher with a potbelly be? My gosh, Meg, the two of us outweigh him by thirty pounds."

  "You've got a point there, pal. So, I'm not scared of Ernst the body snatcher." She brightened. "I'm nervous. I'm nervous that the darn rabbit will taste like mung, I'm nervous that the editor from L 'Aperitif is going to hate Jugged Hare a la Quilliam and I'll get skunked and end up with no stars instead of three stars."

  She jumped to her feet. "At home I'd be in my own kitchen with my own stuff and Andy to look forward to at night. Tell you what-pack up the dress and we'll go to the institute early. I need to cook something. Anything."

  "And what am I going to do?"

  "Take your sketch pad. You can do a charcoal of Ernst and sell it to the publisher of Luis's book for the cover. You'll make a million bucks. Besides, it'll make a great place to conceal the tape recorder."

  The activity at the institute was both familiar and soothing to Meg and, by extension, Quill. Le Nozze had been closed for the day, and the students were busy setting up tables, decorating the ceiling with swags of white roses and eucalyptus, and polishing all the available woodwork.

  Meg went up to the pastry kitchen to try a variation on crŠme fraŒche that had just occurred to her. Quill helped for a bit with the tables, folding napkins into tulip: shapes, and then, when the hour for the cocktail party approached, went into Linda Longstreet's former office to change. She eyed the black jersey dress in the mirror. Myles had told her that the dress did make her look like a cellist - but a very sexy cellist. It fitted smoothly over her shoulders, breasts, and hips. The skirt was full and swinging from the hips on down, but she could hardly strap the tape recorder around her waist. Despite Meg's suggestion, she'd left the sketch pad at home and carried the tape recorder in her leather purse. To her dismay, it wouldn't fit into her evening purse.

  "Meg'll just have to do the recording," she muttered.

  The door swung open and she turned, tape recorder in her hand. Ernst Kolsacker stood there. He was dressed in white tie. He was sweating freely. Quill wanted to scream, didn't, and hastily thrust the tape recorder down the bosom of her dress, where it made a peculiar-looking bump.

  "Sorry. I thought the office was empty." He averted his eyes. "Um. Yeah. Look, I'll catch you later."

  He really was, as Birdie had said, a dear, teddy bear sort of a man. Quill was almost sorry for him. "Ernst," she said. "Wait."

  He turned back. He was breathing with difficulty. Quill advanced toward him, her hand stretched out. "We know," she said. "We know everything."

  His gaze sharpened. He stopped looking like a cute little bear and looked a great deal like a very competent business executive. "Know what?"

  "About Murex. About Verger. About the body."

  "Whose body?"

  "Verger's body, Ernst. The penalties for removing a I body aren't nearly as severe as you might think. You're looking at a year or two suspended sentence. Unless you've done it before. Which I'm sure you haven't."

  Ernst not only looked angry, he looked completely bewildered. "What in the name of God are you talking about? If it's Murex, screw Verger, wherever he might be. I was free to sell the stuff if I wanted to."

  "We knew you'd say that," Quill said sympathetically.

  Meg appeared at the open door. She was wearing her dress tunic, the one with the gold buttons and the flowing sleeves. She looked smaller than usual inside the folds. Her face was paper-white. "Quill," she said. Her voice was barely above a whisper. "Come with me. Right now."

  "Ernst is right here," Quill said brightly. "We were just about to..."

  "He didn't do it. Come with me. Both of you, come with me. No. Ernst, you call the police."

  "Meggie, are you okay?"

  "No. No. I am definitely not okay. Just come with me, now. Ernst, please. Call Jerry Fairchild."

  "Meggie, you're shaking."

  "Come on."

  "I can't hear you."
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  "I said, come on!"

  They passed the archway into Le Nozze. Meg hurried up the stairs ahead of her. Quill paused for a moment. The room was filling up with formally dressed guests. Tiffany was in the middle of a group of three men, two of them in ten-gallon hats, flirting madly. She was wearing lilac, which did remarkable things for the color of her eyes. Quill waved at Franklin Carmichael, who smiled and waved back.

  "Quill." Again that weird, strained whisper from Meg.

  Quill, by now recovered from the near faux pas with Ernst Kolsacker, was becoming alarmed. She followed Meg down the empty halls to the charcutiere kitchen. All of the banquet preparations were being made, of course, in the Le Nozze kitchens. Quill wasn't surprised to find it empty. It was dark, though, and the light from day had gone. "Is there something wrong with the potted rabbit?" Quill asked again. It would be typical of Meg - as much as she claimed to disdain this evening's banquet and its consequences - to call the police if something had happened to her precious rabbit.

  "Come in here, Quill."

  Quill followed her into the storage cupboard. As soon as she stepped over the threshold, Meg flipped on the lights. The shelves were the same untidy mess they had been when Quill toured with Linda Longstreet. The empty shelves at the bottom had recently been filled. Forty or fifty quart jars of potted rabbit? Quill thought. How odd.

  Meg pointed to the first jar. Quill looked at it more closely, then sprang back with a shriek. A small foil square floated among the potted meat. An empty square of nicotine gum.

  "Snap-snap," said Meg. "That's what Maria was trying to tell us. The body snatcher was chewing gum."

  "Franklin Carmichael?" Quill whispered. She looked at the quart jars of meat. For a moment, she was sure she'd faint. "He...oh my God. Verger!"

  "Oh my God, indeed," said Franklin Carmichael.

  Quill whirled. He stood there in white tie, holding a small, efficient-looking gun.

  "It's too late," Quill said. "We've already called the police."

  EPILOGUE

  Quill sat in the lounge at the Inn at Hemlock Falls, watching the news. Hurricane Helen was hitting the south coast of Florida with brutal force. The palm trees lining the channel to the Port of Palm Beach were horizontal with wind. A buoy flew past the camera lens, there was a wash of spray, and the camera tilted.

  The station cut back to the announcer, "Hurricane Helen continues her rampage across Florida's southern coast. Seventy-mile-an-hour winds have devastated much of the vaunted Gold Coast at Hobe Sound. Next, another sensational revelation in the murder trial of accused killers Evan and Corrigan Taylor."

  Quill grabbed the remote and turned the television off. She was sitting at one of the small tables for two next to the mahogany bar. Nate, the bartender, was restocking the shelves with a shipment of liquor that had just come in. Outside, the sun sparkled on snow. The sky was a clear, frosty blue. The inn was going to reopen tomorrow, unless another storm blew in.

  Quill put her feet up on the chair across the table from her own and sighed. It'd been a long trip home.

  The door facing the perennial gardens opened, and Myles walked in. He pulled off his heavy parka, and Quill looked at his shabby sports coat with a surge of affection. "I ought to sew those buttons on for you."

  Myles laughed.

  "What?" she demanded.

  "Just wondering how long this excess of sentiment is going to last. No. Don't get huffy. I love it." He bent over her chair and kissed her hair.

  "Did you straighten things out with Jerry?"

  Myles nodded, eased her feet off the chair, and sat down. His eyes were very gray in his weathered face. Quill thought she noticed more silver in his dark hair than there had been before. She took his hand and held it. "Is he still furious with Meg and me?"

  "He's making loud noises, but I think he'll come around. He's right, Quill. Fooling around with someone like Franklin Carmichael could have been very dangerous."

  "I told Ernst to call the police."

  "But Jerry didn't get there until after Ernst tackled Carmichael and got the gun away from him. And if Ernst hadn't had a black belt in tae kwon do - " His hand tightened on hers. "Well, I'm just glad he did."

  "Has Carmichael confessed?"

  "No one's confessed. But it took Carmichael almost eighteen hours to - er - prepare those quart jars, and he's having a lot of trouble coming up with an alibi that the prosecution's going to buy. My guess is that he'll plead and get a suspended sentence."

  Quill straightened up in horror. "After what he did? He canned Verger Taylor's body! And it was just for the percentage he got selling that stock for Ernst?"

  "He cleared close to a million dollars on it, Quill. And he was running with an expensive crowd. Anyway, it's pretty clear Verger was already dead when he got there. He was Verger's personal lawyer, remember - he wouldn't have had a slice of Ernst's business after Verger's death. The heaviest charge Jerry can come up with is interference with the disposal of a body. The risks were pretty small. And, of course, the fee Carmichael collected for the stock sale belongs to him. It was all perfectly legal."

  Quill shuddered.

  "So. I talked to John this morning. Convinced him that the inn can do without you for a few days. That the two of us should take off for a long weekend. Someplace warm. What do you think?"

  Quill looked at him. "They say that Toronto is absolutely fantastic this time of year."

  "Then Toronto it is."

  The End