Rather Cool for Mayhem, page 8
The rest of us less-privileged suspects went into a huddle of our own, like cattle before an approaching storm. Grace was the nucleus. She was sitting on the front steps of the inn, her eyes closed, her head raised slightly to the anaemic sunshine as though seeking whatever light there was to dispel the dark suspicions that had closed in on all of us. I sat down beside her. I said nothing and I didn’t touch her, but I knew she knew I was there. Her eyes remained closed, but her face seemed to relax a trifle.
“Where were you, Jim?” she asked, without opening her eyes.
“Looking for Tommy.”
“Where did you find him?”
“Right here at the inn.”
“With Alma?”
The remark startled me. I don’t know why I should have considered the relationship between Alma Frazer and Tommy to be my own private discovery, a deep secret to everyone else, but I still felt a compulsion to guard it jealously.
“What do you know about Alma?” I asked.
“I knew that’s where you’d be.”
“Sure. That’s where Tommy was.”
“You were in Alma’s room, weren’t you? You can’t help it, I guess. It’s a tropism.”
“Look,” I said. “We were chaperoned by Tommy. Besides, you forget that I’m irresistible only to brazen, extraverted hussies. My guess is that Alma isn’t either brazen or extraverted; she’s scared to death and I have a hunch you know what she’s scared of. What is it?”
Grace didn’t reply but she opened her eyes. She looked right at the Westerfords, who were hovering expectantly just beyond the bayberry hedge, then at the Hurleys, who had already flanked the hedge. I had been aware for some time that Conchita Westerford had been looking at me, mostly with her eyes, which burned me with a curious expression. Her stare met mine without blinking. Her lips seemed to be looking at me, too, with a hint of a smile.
Her husband was not looking at me—or at anyone else, as far as I could judge. It would not have surprised me if his eyes were at that moment incapable of sight. They were glazed and bloodshot and ringed with a sagging darkness that from a distance could be mistaken for heavy shell-rimmed spectacles. He could not have had a very restful night. The gloss was gone from his golden hair, and if his tiny golden mustache had been a little longer it would have drooped. There was a faint stubble on his face that glinted like copper when the sun caught it. His collar was something out of Dali.
The approach of Eddie Westerford did little to improve the state of my health, which was somewhat seedy. The sight of Henry Pennington dispensing his half-whispered wisdom while strutting his influential connections with the County officials had already set the lump on my head to throbbing again. Moreover, Karl Vogel’s rye whisky was echoing hollowly in my empty stomach, like the flapping of butterfly wings, and the noise made me giddy. I would have greatly preferred an aspirin or some bicarbonate of soda to Eddie’s limp presence, but Conchita was maneuvering him toward us with determined steps and a firm hand on his arm.
“Eddie, you and Jim Lawrence go take a walk,” Conchita said. “I want some girly-girly talk with Grace.”
Grace nudged me. I thought she was asking me to be stubborn and I stayed parked until she said: “Go on, Jim. Give the girls a break.”
So I uncoiled myself and walked down the road with Eddie. He didn’t want to walk any more than I did. He would have settled for a hot tub and some clean sheets, but he was obviously under orders and doing his damnedest to manage the stiff upper lip. But that didn’t oblige me to nurse him along.
“You look as though you and Conchita tied on a lulu last night,” I said. “Were you both stinko?”
Eddie started to shake his head but decided against the risk of its dropping off.
“I can’t sleep in a strange bed,” he said. “We had a few snifters in the bar before it closed, but we weren’t at all tight. We were both just terribly upset about Norman. We talked all night.”
He didn’t say what they talked about, so I prompted him.
“What did Conchita ask you to pump me about?”
“Nothing,” Eddie said, looking straight down the road. “We were wondering about that platter you and Grace found in the woods.”
“News travels with supersonic speed up here,” I said. “What about the platter?”
“It was broken, wasn’t it?”
“Smashed all to hell.”
“There was no indication of where it might have come from or anything?”
“No. Where do you think it came from?”
“Oh, Norman had it made. There’s not much doubt about it. It was one of his snide little jokes. It must have been. He sent us all telegrams in Grace’s name, so he could play his recording for us and embarrass everybody in front of everybody else. Norman loved to make people squirm.”
“What do you think might have been on the recording that would make you squirm?” I asked.
Eddie stopped so suddenly that I thought he was going into a spin. He fished in his pocket for a handkerchief, making three tries before he got a strike. Then he sat down on a concrete culvert that jutted out from the side of the road. He was perspiring like a Tom Collins glass in August. He mopped his face with a half-yard of silk that had a red monogram in one corner as big as the Japanese naval ensign.
“I wish I knew which of my youthful foibles Norman managed to dredge up from the past,” Eddie said. “Conchita and I had been going over everything I could think of—oh, a lot of nasty little things almost everybody does and wishes he hadn’t. There was the four dollars I stole from the treasury of the high school dramatic society, when I was manager of the senior play. I used it to buy myself a make-up kit. I’ve always intended to pay it back some day, with interest. I also stole a volume of Strind-berg’s plays from the public library. I don’t know what ever happened to the book.”
“And you think Dr. Norman went through the back records of your library to trace the Strindberg?” I suggested.
“Norman had an uncanny genius for digging up unpleasant things people would like to forget.”
“Didn’t he have anything on you more interesting than petty larceny? That seems hardly worth the trouble of cutting a record. Haven’t you ever killed anybody?”
“Once in Martha’s, Vineyard I went to bed with a girl who wanted a part in a summer show I was directing,” Eddie said. “She didn’t get the part. But then I’d never really promised it to her. She had no talent whatsoever.”
“You mean in bed?” I asked.
“Whatsoever,” Eddie repeated. “She’d read somewhere that a girl could win theatrical success in more ways than one, and I guess she never forgave me for not keeping my end of what she thought was a bargain. Do you suppose Norman might have got hold of her story somewhere?”
I said I didn’t know. I didn’t say what I thought: that the girl’s story would probably be a curious one indeed, and that it would probably qualify for Krafft-Ebing.
Eddie mopped his face again and stood up. “Let’s go back,” he said. “Conchita and Grace must have finished their little tête-à-tête by this time.”
We started back down the road.
“What’s Conchita worried about?” I asked.
“Nothing,” Eddie said quickly. “Positively nothing. Conchita never worried in her life. She’s marvelous that way. Besides, Norman wouldn’t try to hurt Conchita. He liked her, and she was never any sort of a Freudian antagonist. He detested me. Simply abhorred me. I don’t know why. Well, I do know why, really. At least I know how my analyst would explain it. But he always liked to try to make me crawl in front of Conchita. You get the picture, don’t you?”
I got the picture, all right, but I don’t think it was the picture Eddie thought he was projecting. He was giving what he thought was a great performance, and all he did was to remind me of what Grace had said about his failures in the theatre. I could see why. He wasn’t a very convincing actor. Here he was, putting on a performance that may have been a matter of life and death, and he still couldn’t make it plausible. I could almost see the script in his hand, with Conchita prompting from the wings. You’re the wide-eyed, worried innocent, Eddie, with nothing to hide. You’re making a clean breast of your little peccadillos, Eddie, just to show how frank and innocent and full of good will you are. And while you are not proud of the petty sins of your youth, they are certainly nothing to provoke murder. You talk about them so freely, Eddie, that perhaps your frank confidence will engender frank confidences from Jim Lawrence. Because Jim Lawrence seems to know something, Eddie. Maybe he knows what was on that broken recording. Find out, Eddie. Find out what Jim Lawrence knows.…
If only Eddie had known how little I cared at that moment whether he had killed Norman H. Norman or not, he would not have wasted his minuscule thespian talent on my buzzing ears. By the time we got back to the inn, my health had deteriorated even further. It was no longer butterflies I had in my stomach, but large lunar moths, or perhaps even cedar waxwings. And the little man with a hammer was back at work on my skull, accompanied by a couple of friends who also had hammers. I was wondering if there was anything in Karl’s rye besides fusel oil that could make me feel the way I felt—and looked, too, I guess, because as soon as we hove into view, Grace got up and started toward us.
“Jim, what’s the matter?” she asked, full of concern. Then, when she got close enough to smell my breath, she added, “Are you drunk?”
“Probably,” I said. “I had two drinks on an empty stomach. I guess they brought on a delayed reaction to my slight concussion.”
“Poor Jim! I’m neglecting you,” Grace said. “I forgot about your scalp wounds and I forgot you didn’t have any breakfast. Let’s climb the hill and I’ll make coffee.”
“Will the law allow us to move that far?” I asked. “Where are the shock troops?”
“Some of them are probably in the cabin, but I think most of them have gone into the woods. Don’t you want Dr. Hurley to look at your head, Jim?”
“No,” I said. I had thought several times how silly it was not to take advantage of an expensive physician being on the scene of a possible concussion and not letting him check for symptoms, because in my days with the working press I had seen how a bang on the head can develop a tricky aftermath. But every time I got myself to the point of asking Hurley to take a look, I got cold feet. I suppose it was a normal part of the abnormal atmosphere of general suspicion that we all were breathing. As long as I didn’t know who had killed Norman and banged me on the head, as long as it might have been Hurley, I didn’t want him fluttering around me with his little black bag. He might decide I needed a sedative, and inject me with a few c.c.’s of air bubbles.
“I’ll just take an aspirin with my coffee,” I said, “and for dessert you can rub my head with an ice cube.”
Grace took my arm and started me up the hill. For considerably less than five cents you could have bribed me to sit right down on the ground and claim a flat tire. However, Eddie Westerford had already blown a gasket and was sprawled on the steps with his head in Conchita’s lap. So I could hardly admit that I was in his class. I girded my loins and produced a manly stride that fooled nobody.
“You lie down for a while,” Grace said, “while I rustle up something to eat. Then if you aren’t better, I’ll get Dr. Hurley to feel your bumps.”
“It won’t be necessary,” I said.
The idea of playing the quasi-invalid while Grace served me breakfast on a tray appealed to me mightily, but I should have known it could be nothing more than a pipe dream. When we got to the cabin, Henry Pennington was there ahead of us, doing a bit of housework.
I thought Pennington would be off in the woods with the forces of law and order, very busy being important. However, he evidently considered it essential to keep an eye on his bride-to-be at this point. Or perhaps he was just showing off his domestic talents. He was tidying up the living room like mad. He had folded up the blankets from my makeshift bed on the sofa, and laid a new fire on the grate, stuffing under the fresh logs all the wrappings from the liquor purchases of the afternoon before and his green box and florist’s paper from the roses he had brought to Grace. He was changing the water in the vase that held the roses when Grace and I came in.
“Oh, leave all that, Henry, please,” Grace said. “I’ll take care of everything later.”
“The flowers are wilted,” Pennington said. “I must get you some fresh ones.”
“Please don’t bother, Henry,” Grace said, but Pennington picked up a dust pan and whisk broom.
“Let him bother,” I said. “A future senator should know how it feels to work with his hands in order to legislate intelligently for-and-against labor.”
I shook out the blankets that Pennington had so carefully folded, and moulded them into a magnificently untidy dog’s nest. Then I stretched myself on the sofa, pulled the blankets around me, closed my eyes, and relaxed. After about five minutes, I felt much better, so much better that the aroma of coffee in the making was actually appetizing. Even the smell of sizzling bacon did not upset me. In fact, I savored the knowledge that Grace knew I liked my bacon crisp and my eggs over. I looked at my watch. It was really not too late for Sunday breakfast. Although it seemed that we had been up all day, the morning was only half over.
Occasionally I opened one eye to watch Pennington sweeping. He wasn’t doing a very good job of it, but the sight was very satisfying. It made me feel almost friendly toward him.
“Well, Senator,” I said after a while, “have you and the boys figured out yet who killed Norman?”
“We’re all under suspicion still, I’m afraid,” Pennington said, “with the possible exception of young Tommy.”
“I’m way ahead of you then,” I said. “I’ve already eliminated three suspects—myself, Bob and Joan Stewart. We’re the only three who didn’t get Norman’s telegrams inviting us for cocktails at Blindman’s Lake.”
“The Stewarts got a telegram,” Pennington said. I opened the other eye and pushed down the blankets.
“Grace, did you hear that?” I called. “The Senator says the Stewarts got one of those cocktail telegrams.”
Grace came in with the breakfast and set the tray in my lap. She fluffed some pillows and piled them behind me. I loved being an invalid for half an hour.
“The Stewarts didn’t get any telegram,” Grace said, as she unfolded the napkin for me. “When we stopped by there yesterday afternoon, Joan asked me if they could come over later because she and Bob wanted to speak to me. I invited her for cocktails then. She didn’t mention a telegram.”
“The Stewarts got a telegram,” Pennington declared categorically. “Captain McKay showed me the list he got from Western Union. The Stewarts were on it.”
“That’s funny,” Grace said. “Why do you suppose Joan didn’t mention it to me when I stopped to pick up the eggs? Why did she ask me if she could come over, if she’d been invited by telegram?”
“The Stewarts were obviously in on Norman’s skulduggery,” Pennington said. “Otherwise they wouldn’t have lied to you.”
“Joan wouldn’t lie,” Grace said hesitantly. “She just didn’t—I can’t understand it.”
“I don’t see anything mysterious about it,” I volunteered. “The Stewarts were pretty much in a tizzy over Norman’s threat to repossess Tommy. A little matter of a cocktail invitation via Western Union could very easily have slipped both their minds.”
Further discussion of the Stewarts was interrupted by the arrival of the top echelons of State and County authorities. Captain McKay stood in the doorway, flanked by his aides and the D.A.’s boys, solemnly surveying the living room as though the battle were about to begin and he had only to ask his officers to synchronize their watches before he gave the final order to attack. Then he said:
“Will you come with me, please, Mr. Pennington?”
“You want—me?” Pennington’s jaw sagged with shocked incredulity.
“Better go along quietly, Senator,” I said. “Grace and I will bring you cigarettes and oranges in jail.”
Nobody laughed. Quite the contrary. Pennington drew his dignity about his shoulders like a toga.
“Do you have a warrant, Captain?” he asked.
“I’m not making any arrests—yet,” McKay said. “I’d like to check the geography of the story you told me last night. Will you come?”
“Certainly, certainly. Glad to co-operate.”
Pennington was evidently trying to sound condescending, but McKay and his colleagues were not even accepting him as an equal at this point. The phalanx closed around him as he moved to the door, and his exit was that of a man in custody.
Grace stood looking after him with a strange expression on her face that I could not make out. After a moment she turned to me and said casually: “Jim, your breakfast is getting cold.”
I don’t think I have ever eaten such ambrosial bacon and eggs, or drunk such delicious coffee. The bump on my head almost stopped throbbing. Obviously there was nothing wrong with the mundane part of Jim Lawrence that couldn’t be cured by feeding him—or his ego.
Chapter Ten
I must have fallen asleep from a sheer feeling of wellbeing—or perhaps of euphoria. Anyhow I dozed for about half an hour. I was aroused by what my half-awakened brain identified at first as the rustle of dead leaves, a sound that had taken on sinister overtones for me. When the other half of my consciousness came to life, I heard the sound for what it was. I opened one eye and saw that Grace had started the fire. The wrappings of our Saturday purchases and of Pennington’s floral offering were burning brightly, and the logs were beginning to snap and sputter. Then I saw Grace kneeling on the hearth and I opened the other eye.
