The Outsmarting of Criminals: A Mystery Introducing Miss Felicity Prim

by Rigolosi, Steven

  They had stopped in front of an ivy-covered red-brick building. A sign in the shape of a potbelly stove dangled over the front door: Maude’s Tavern.

  Yes, Miss Prim thought, tying Bruno’s leash to a bicycle rack. This looks like an excellent place to begin.

  *

  Maude’s Tavern was everything one could ask for in a local bar/eatery. Lorraine and Miss Prim entered a cozily decorated front room with two dozen or so tables and banquettes. Each table was covered with a red-checkered tablecloth and decorated with a Snapple bottle overflowing with fresh-cut flowers. A fireplace along one of the walls would provide a pleasant background crackling, as well as far too much heat, in the winter months. Bookshelves around the room held a large assortment of books that patrons could borrow, trade, or simply take any time the mood struck.

  At the rear of the tavern was a well-stocked bar. Lorraine elbowed her way through the crowd—it was nearing lunchtime—and approached the bar as Miss Prim followed close behind.

  A yellow-haired older man sat at the bar, sipping a pint of Guinness and glancing occasionally at the television mounted to the ceiling. Lorraine poked him. “Jedediah Mason, can’t you see two ladies need a seat? Be a gentleman and take your fat buttocks elsewhere.”

  Jedediah Mason turned slowly, revealing a wonderfully craggy face.

  “Sweet Mother of Mercy, Lorraine, can’t a man sit back and enjoy a pint? If I wanted harassment from women, I’d have stayed at home.” But, despite his protests, Jedediah rose and offered his seat to Lorraine. Miss Prim couldn’t help but be amused. Contrary to Lorraine’s description, Mr. Mason’s buttocks were nonexistent, not fat.

  “It’s not for me, it’s for my friend here.” Lorraine pointed to Miss Prim. “This is Miss Prim. She’s new in town.”

  Jedediah turned to face Miss Prim. “Welcome, Miss Prim,” he said. “Jedediah Mason, Mason.”

  “Lovely to meet you, Mr. Mason-Mason. I didn’t mean to conscript your seat …”

  “Just one Mason, Miss. It’s my last name and my profession. Here’s my card. Feel free to call me if you need any work done.” He looked at Lorraine skeptically. “And steer clear of this she-devil. She’ll get you into scrapes you don’t rightly want to get yourself into.”

  “Off with you, Jedediah,” Lorraine commanded. “Or perhaps I’ll have to let Juanita know you’re enjoying a pint at an inappropriate time of day.”

  “Oh, for the Good Lord’s sake, Lorraine …”

  “Mr. Mason, before you go,” Miss Prim said, “would you mind taking a look at a photo? We’re trying to discover a man’s identity, and I’m asking around to see if anyone recognizes him.”

  Jedediah took the photo from Miss Prim’s hands. “This the guy you found in your basement?”

  “Yes, actually. Does he look familiar?”

  Jedediah squinted at the photo. “Can’t say that he does. I’d check with Maude. If anyone knows who he is, it’ll be Maude.” Jedediah Mason drained his pint and took his leave.

  Miss Prim settled onto her bar stool while Lorraine bullied another man into giving her his seat. Lorraine raised two fingers to call the bartender, a short, barrel-chested man with a great deal of hair on his arms but none on his head. The bartender ambled over, neither smiling nor unsmiling.

  “Maude, meet my friend, Miss Felicity Prim. She’s new here, so I know you’ll make her feel welcome.”

  “Hi,” Maude said.

  In her nearly six decades on the planet, Miss Prim had never met a man named Maude. She smiled cordially and complimented him on the tavern’s atmosphere.

  “Thanks,” Maude said.

  “Now, Maude, Miss Prim is trying to find someone. Or rather, she’s trying to determine somebody’s name. We thought you might help. Can you have a look at a photo—Felicity, give it here, please—and tell us if you recognize him?”

  Maude looked at the photo.

  “Nope.”

  “Not familiar at all? You’ve never seen him?”

  “Nah.”

  “You’ll let us know if you have any sudden recollections, Maude?”

  “Yup.”

  “Thank you. We’ll be grabbing a table and ordering some food. Send over an apple martini for me and a club soda for Miss Prim.”

  Maude nodded and went to fix the drinks as Miss Prim wondered how, exactly, Lorraine had ascertained that club soda was her decadent non-tea beverage of choice.

  “Maude seems to be a man of few words,” Miss Prim noted as they took a table recently vacated by two women of indeterminate age with chunky ankles and impressive helmets of salt-and-pepper hair.

  “Indeed,” Lorraine said, handing Miss Prim the menu, a laminated card folded in two. “But he’s a total dear. You just have to know how to talk to him.”

  While Miss Prim scrutinized the menu, Lorraine showed the photo around the dining room, but with no success. Nobody recognized the man Miss Prim had discovered in her basement. After a very pleasant lunch—Lorraine insisted on paying, explaining that Lucian had more money than God and she was hell-bent on spending it—the two women took their leave and continued their exploration of downtown Greenfield.

  Miss Prim stopped to gaze in the windows of the local bookshop, Cambria & Calibri. To the left of the door a dozen mystery novels with brightly colored jackets featured prominently under a sign reading CRAPPY MYSTERIES BY PEOPLE WHO HAVEN’T WRITTEN A GOOD BOOK IN YEARS. In the window to the right of the door was a sign reading REALLY GOOD MYSTERIES BY WRITERS YOU SHOULD READ: WHY AREN’T THESE PEOPLE ON THE BEST-SELLER LIST? Nicely displayed under the sign were books by Wallace Stroby, Karin Fossum, Brian Freeman, Jeff Markowitz, Sandra Carey Cody, C. Solimini, D.J. McIntosh, Robin Spano, and Dennis Tafoya.

  I like this bookstore already, Miss Prim thought. “Let’s go in here, Lorraine?” she suggested.

  “Oh, not right now, Felicity. I have to be in the mood for Valeska, and I’m just not. Come along, there are plenty of other things to see.”

  10

  Introducing Some Conflict

  Miss Prim had fallen in love with the Greenfield village square upon seeing it for the first time. Now, strolling through it arm in arm with Lorraine, she appreciated it anew as Lorraine described the colorful and sometimes sordid histories of the buildings and businesses surrounding the central green. For instance, The Green Fields Bed and Breakfast, a pricey restaurant-hotel, had at one time functioned as a house of ill repute. The building that housed the Greenfield Post Office on the first floor and the Greenfield Historical Society on the second floor had once been a gathering place for a New England branch of the Mafia. Prothero’s supermarket, a town institution, had expanded by taking over the firehouse located next door to it, much to the consternation of the historical society and some of the locals.

  The north and east sides of the square were currently the more fashionable, Lorraine pronounced, in a non-ironic manner similar to Lady Bracknell’s. “These things go back and forth,” Lorraine elaborated, explaining that the Old Timers (a group whose dwindling membership included Lorraine and Lucian) were currently boycotting the south and west sides of the square, where real-estate speculators had managed to erect tasteful but still very much unwanted condominiums for, ahem, New Yorkers looking for a little place in the country. “But we never win these battles,” Lorraine said with a sigh. “Give us twenty years and we’ll accept the buildings grudgingly, or we’ll just die off. In the meantime, some intrepid younger locals have started patronizing the new coffee shop and the bakery. Thus the assimilation begins.”

  Miss Prim soaked up the town gossip as a sponge soaks up water. “Lorraine, let’s walk around the entire square, if doing so will not compromise your standing in town,” she suggested. “Since I am one of the new people, I feel I should be open to the other new people. I wouldn’t mind stopping at that coffee shop you just mentioned.”

  “For you, Felicity, I’m willing to risk becoming a pariah. Truth be told, I’ve had a cup of Joe in Beantown—that’s t
he name of the coffeehouse—once or twice, and it’s pretty good, if a bit thick and muddy. That’s the preferred style today, the baristas tell me. And you know what happens when one resists current trends. I’m rather a slave to them, myself. One must keep one’s edge. Or else.”

  With this rather ominous statement, Lorraine pushed open Beantown’s door as Miss Prim tied Bruno’s leash to a lamppost. An overhead chime announced their arrival, and the barista looked up from her book lazily, nodding a greeting without being overly effusive, which was, of course, the New England way. And a good way to be it is, Miss Prim thought, for the rest of society seemed to be crashing along on waves of false smiles, fawning insincerity, and plastic surgery.

  Lorraine insisted on ordering the refreshments (Earl Gray for Miss Prim, a hazelnut latte for herself), dispatching Miss Prim to find a table among the ill-coiffed and alarmingly unkempt young people intently focused on their portable computers. Really, Miss Prim thought, some of these young men would be quite handsome if they would trim their whiskers, wash their clothes, and doff their woolen caps (why exactly were they wearing them indoors?), but she prevented herself from inwardly railing against youthful fashions. She herself had indulged in them as a younger woman, and while Papa had been driven to distraction, Mama had been quite supportive (and had even helped the young Felicity obtain difficult-to-find fashion items). Styles come and go, Miss Prim thought, but beneath all styles lie people with hearts, souls, dreams, ambitions. Perhaps that young man, tapping away on his laptop, would become the next Ellery Queen; perhaps that young lady with dreadlocks, scribbling in a journal, would become the next Ruth Rendell or P. D. James.

  Miss Prim found a table and squeezed her way into one of the chairs. The tables were set most disconcertingly close to one another, but such were the exigencies forced upon business owners by the notoriously high rents in business districts. She smiled pleasantly at a few coffee and tea sippers, including a man in uniform surrounded by a cup of coffee, a cheese danish, a Boston cream donut, and a chocolate chip muffin.

  “Why, Officer Reed! At first I didn’t recognize you, sitting there. Any progress to report on our case? I haven’t had any luck yet, myself.”

  Reed sipped from his cup of coffee. “Hi, Miss Prim. Spike and I have been knocking on doors all day. Nobody’s identified the guy yet, and working as a team takes too much time. So we split up. I’m covering this side of town, and Spike’s covering the east side. All that walking around is tiring. I needed a snack.”

  At that moment Lorraine arrived carrying two steaming cups and two cinnamon scones.

  “Hi, Lorraine,” Reed said.

  “Good day, Martin,” Lorraine responded graciously. “Are you and Felicity conferring on the facts of the case? I must warn you, she has very strong ideas about crime and criminals. Isn’t that right, Felicity?”

  Reed’s walkie-talkie squawked. Miss Prim recognized Spike Fremlin’s voice. “Reed, where are you? You’d better not be eating donuts when I’m out here pounding the pavement. God, these shoes are uncomfortable. They call us flatfeet in the movies, right? Now I know why. If I don’t sit down for half an hour my arches are going to collapse and that’ll be the end of that. But then I won’t get drafted, at least. They don’t take people with flat feet in the army, right? But I heard …”

  Reed switched the radio off. “I should go. I know you got off to a rough start, Miss Prim, but Greenfield is a nice place to live. Try not to let it get to you. We’ll figure out who the guy is, somehow. And we’ll figure out who killed him, too.”

  “Of course you will, Martin,” Lorraine said. She reached into her purse (Miss Prim thought it looked more like a pillowcase than a handbag) and retrieved a few Ziploc bags. “I’ll just pack these goodies up so you can take them with you. I hate to see good food go to waste.”

  Officer Reed gone, Lorraine steered the conversation away from the investigation.

  “We’ll continue your official research soon enough, Felicity, but now’s as good a time as any to give me all the details of your amour back in New York. Is he simply dashing? Totally unsuitable, or so suitable it’s boring? Don’t hold back on the details, please. My marriage to Lucian is so devastatingly uninteresting that I must live vicariously through others. If you need to embellish for entertainment value, feel free to do so. I’ve been known to embellish myself, every now and again. Makes life worth living, yes?” She tapped the side of her nose twice and winked conspiratorially.

  Thus Miss Prim found herself talking about her longtime relationship with Doctor Poe and how they seemed to be on the cusp of … something difficult to define. His timing had been quite poor, Miss Prim admitted, what with waiting to declare his affections until after she’d purchased a home quite a distance from New York City.

  “Isn’t that just like a man?” Lorraine asked in her usual rhetorical way. “They admire us from afar, mooning all over the place like courtly knights in medieval days, but God forbid they ever put themselves out there emotionally. Do you know I had to ask Lucian to marry me? I got so tired of all the dithering around, and it wasn’t as if I didn’t have other suitors who knew a good thing when they saw it. And the smarter they are when it comes to books, the dumber they are when it comes to women. Your doctor sounds like a good egg, but the dead wife thing worries me. When they’ve been married for so long, they get used to it, you know? And they figure one woman is as good as another. It’s being married that they like, not necessarily the woman. That’s not meant as a swipe against you, Tootsie Pop. We girls have to stick together when it comes to men. Let’s face facts: They need us more than we need them.”

  When Lorraine interrupted her own monologue to visit the ladies’, Miss Prim took the opportunity to chat with the barista and the patrons of Beantown. All looked closely at the photo of the dead man. All shook their heads; sorry, they did not recognize him, though the barista thought him “ruggedly handsome” and asked if he was single.

  Miss Prim encountered her first piece of luck when she approached the young woman writing in her journal. Miss Dreadlocks looked at the photo, pursed her lips, and said quietly, “Hmm. I can’t say that I know him, but somehow he looks familiar. I can’t place him, but I’d say I’ve seen him around town, or at least someone who looks like him. I think it’s the beard that’s throwing me off.”

  “Any idea where you might have encountered him?” Miss Prim asked hopefully.

  The woman shook her locks. “Maybe the library? Or the post office? I just don’t know, but the bone structure—it’s nice—I would remember a face like that, and something’s telling me I’ve seen him before.”

  Not much specific information, Miss Prim thought, but it’s a start. Clearly the victim hadn’t lived in town. If he had, someone would have recognized him by now. But maybe he was related to somebody who lived in Greenfield? That might explain the resemblance.

  Miss Prim belatedly introduced herself.

  “Pleased to meet you,” said the young lady. “I’m Faye Cotillard.”

  *

  Their next stop was Prothero’s market. As Miss Prim found a basket, Lorraine promptly disappeared down one of the aisles.

  Because she had not brought her much-loved wheelie-cart to Prothero’s, Miss Prim added just the necessities to her basket: vegetables—bread—eggs—Milk Bones—even, yes, a small and overpriced dinner bell that she would use to train Bruno not to drool upon seeing or smelling food. As she strolled the aisles, she saw Prothero’s concessions to modernity: a gourmet-foods section at the rear, where busy professionals could purchase prepared foods; an overpriced salad bar with many epicurean goodies, such as bleu cheese crumbles and five-bean salad; even a gifts section, a boon for husbands and children who remember (or are reminded of) birthdays at the last minute.

  Deciding that she had selected the maximum weight and bulk that she and Lorraine could carry to Rose Cottage without a loss of gravitas, Miss Prim began walking to the front of the market. Behind one cash register stood a pa
trician-looking woman with stiff silver hair. She wore a pearl necklace and pearl earrings. Copious rings called attention to her well-manicured fingernails.

  Miss Prim began unloading her groceries onto the belt and—could she be imagining this?—felt the cashier’s withering stare stabbing ice picks into her. Miss Prim glanced up to read the woman’s name tag: Hi! My name is MISS LAVELLE and I’ve been serving you for 42 year(s)!

  Pay dirt, Miss Prim thought. Here is someone who will recognize the man in the photo. She would have smiled if she had not continued to sense the hatred emanating from Miss Lavelle’s pores.

  Miss Lavelle began ringing up Miss Prim’s groceries, handling them much more roughly than a cashier should. Loaves of bread were squashed between Miss Lavelle’s beringed fingers; eggs in their styrofoam containers were crushed against the aluminum sides of the bagging area; produce was weighed and then tossed like yesterday’s garbage down the belt.

  After giving Miss Lavelle the benefit of the doubt for half the order, Miss Prim decided to speak up.

  “Excuse me? May I ask you to be a bit more … gentle … with the goods?”

  Miss Lavelle’s eyes became Satanic slits.

  “So sorry,” said the queen of Prothero’s market in a tone indicating she was not sorry in the least. “I apologize if we aren’t up to your New York City standards.”

  Miss Prim took a breath, remembering the shibboleths Mama had drilled into her head. A stitch in time saves nine: Yes. Don’t lose the forest for the trees: Yes. A stranger is just a friend you haven’t met: Yes, until this very moment.

  Miss Prim was preparing her response when Lorraine materialized, as if out of thin air.

  “Knock it off, Gladys. If I’d seen your broom parked outside, I would have warned Felicity about you. Felicity, for the record, Miss Lavelle here has been sleeping with Ethan Prothero for the last 41 years, but he has yet to marry her. The fact that he’s already married is probably what’s standing in their way. As you can see, the wait has made her irritable.”