Death by Surprise (Carolyn Hart Classics) (22 page)

She started to close the door.

I said briskly, “Wait a minute, Prissy. I know you were at Boutelle’s apartment Wednesday night.” It was a guess but I felt pretty confident Prissy would have been included in the roll call of Carlisles that evening.

The door stopped. She stared at me, her pale blue eyes hostile. She looked spectacular this morning, her color as rich as fresh cream, her hair a shining loose golden blonde, her mouth moist with red lip gloss.

“Fuck,” she said quietly in her soft husky voice.

It was as obscene, that expletive coming from between those perfectly painted lips on that fresh young face, as graffiti on a Christmas card.

Abruptly, she shrugged. “All right. Come in.” She led the way to the living room but she didn’t ask me to sit down.

“Who saw me?”

“A neighbor.”

She thought about it. “I can say he’s a damned liar.”

“Come off it, Prissy. You’re pretty memorable.”

That flattered her. “Okay,” she said finally, “I was there. So what? She was dead. Damned dead.”

“What time?”

“Why should I tell you?”

“I’m trying to help Kenneth.”

She took her time. She wasn’t, obviously, swept by sisterly concern. “Look, K.C., I’ll tell you—but if you repeat it, I’ll deny every word of it. It was about six-forty-five.”

“Did you knock or . . .”

“The door was open,” she said carefully. “Wide open. Like I was supposed to come on in. I did. I stood in that little hall for a minute and it felt creepy, really creepy. I yelled out, ‘Hey, where are you?’ but it was quiet. Too damn quiet. I started to back out then, I don’t know, I guess I was curious, I thought, hell, I’ll just take a look around.”

I could interpret that. Prissy might not be too brainy, but she was shrewd. She thought she was in an empty apartment with a golden chance to look around for that famous manuscript.

“I took a few steps into the living room. God. She looked awful.”

“What did you do then?”

“I got out. I got the hell out.”

I asked the next question very carefully.

“Okay, Prissy, pretend you’re standing in that little hall. I want you to think about it, remember it.”

She looked at me warily, but nodded.

“Okay, Prissy, what do you see from where you are standing?”

“A big chair,” she said slowly. “It was blue. And a big fat rubber-tree plant and her desk.”

“That’s good, Prissy, really good.” But not a word about drawers being pulled out, papers askew. “Okay, Prissy, what did you do with the manuscript and tapes?”

She backed away from me, reached out to grip the mantel over the fireplace. “Go to hell, K.C.”

“You’re going to tell me, Prissy.”

She stood, her mouth a tight line, and shook her head.

“Yes, you are, because I’ve recorded every word you’ve said and, if you don’t cooperate, I’m going to play it for the cops.”

It wasn’t nice. I didn’t feel nice. I kept remembering the look on Kenneth’s face before he turned to go up the walk to meet Megan.

Prissy turned and walked blindly toward the liquor cabinet. She sloshed whisky into a tumbler, raised it, and drank it half down before she turned to face me.

“K.C.,” and her husky voice was hard, “you are a bitch.”

“Let’s not fight, Pris,” I said tiredly. “I’ll protect you, but I have to know exactly what happened. You got there and Boutelle was dead so you decided to look around and see if you could find the manuscript. Is that right?”

Sullenly, she nodded.

“That was good thinking, Pris,” I said encouragingly. “Did you find it?”

My praise threw her off. “Yes,” she said uncertainly. Then, eagerly, “It was sitting on her desk, the final copy and the carbon. I grabbed them up and then I looked on her desk and there were a bunch of cassettes with the name Carlisle on them. I rummaged through the drawers, looking to see if there were anything else, but I didn’t find anything.”

So it was Prissy who had searched the room, taken the manuscript and tapes. And Grace’s fifty thousand?

“There was a shoe box,” I said carefully. “It had some money in it. Did you take that?”

She frowned. “I didn’t see a shoe box.”

When Prissy came, Francine was dead and the shoe box gone. Could it have been murder for profit, after all? I felt a surge of hope. Then I remembered Kenneth’s scarf. It couldn’t have been murder for theft. The scarf had to be explained.

I considered the timing. Grace came at six, paid her money and left. According to her, Francine was alive. I didn’t know when Travis had come. Edmond and Sue claimed they had not come. Prissy said she came at six-forty-five. According to her, the murderer took Grace’s money but left the manuscript. Now, that was funny, wasn’t it? After all, the manuscript threatened all of us . . .

“K.C., what are you going to do now?”

She stood between me and the door. One hand rested on the neck of a heavy cut-glass decanter. The sun streamed through a window behind her. I saw her through a glare. She looked indistinct and larger even than she was. And Priscilla was not small.

“I don’t know, Pris, I’ll have to think about all this. Now, why don’t you give me all the stuff you took . . . ?”

She laughed, a throaty satisfied laugh. “I’m not so damn dumb. There isn’t a scrap left. I burned the papers and mashed the ashes. I tore the tapes to pieces, then I burned them, too.” She wrinkled her nose. “They smelled.” She laughed again. “I played them first. I’ll have to say that bitch knew how to find things out. Did you know they caught old cousin Edmond with his pants down in the park? And it turns out Cousin Travis is a fraud and you,” and she glared at me, hostility naked in her eyes, “and you, clever clever K.C., you tipped Sheila out of the boat, didn’t you?”

Shock roared in my ears. So that had been Francine’s game. Not the truth, that Sheila had pulled away, leaving me to drown. No, she had twisted it, turned it, would have left me dangling in the wind as my sister’s killer,

“And Grace,” Priscilla continued shrilly, “oh, how I would have loved to see that printed. Righteous Grace and her roll in the hay.”

“But Priscilla,” I interrupted sharply, “you’ve forgotten something!”

“Forgotten?”

“Yes, you’ve forgotten yourself. She really had the goods on you.”

Priscilla raised the decanter. It glittered richly in the sunlight. She pulled the stopper and once again filled her glass. She took a deep swallow.

“Maybe she did,” Priscilla said thickly, “but it didn’t do her any damned good. I’ve got the picture now and I burned it and the negative and nobody will ever know.”

Picture, picture, picture. Something teased at my brain, wavered in my memory. Picture. But what the hell was it?

“Yeah,” she said heavily, “and that’s the only picture there ever was, that one in the
Beacon.”

I remembered. Amanda had sent me the clipping. “Poor Miss Prissy,” Amanda had written, “I’m so afraid she will never learn to know good people from bad. She has had such a narrow escape but it’s an awful thing . . .”

I looked at Prissy, standing there swaying, holding the decanter, now tipping it again to refill her glass. Beautiful Priscilla with her clear lovely skin and china blue eyes. Everyone always made excuses for her, blamed her mistakes on her “crowd.” The picture had been a dreadful one, the sleek rounded body of the sports car tilted crazily against a brick wall, and, starkly pitiful against the pavement, three sheeted figures. Such small sheeted figures. Children’s bodies.

I didn’t remember the details of the picture now, though I dimly recalled the driver’s door had hung open. I did recall the headline:

CHILDREN RUN DOWN, DRUNK DRIVER DIES; PASSENGER THROWN

Prissy had been the passenger. It was her car but Jimmy Fremont was driving. An all-night party and Jimmy had driven through a school zone and two little brothers and their friend died. Prissy left town, went to Acapulco for a year to avoid questions about why she had let a drunk drive.

“So that was it,” I said quietly. “Jimmy wasn’t driving, after all, was he, Prissy? And you were drunk, too.”

She stared at me a long moment, her face heavy with drink, then slowly, sickeningly, she began to laugh. “I fooled them all, didn’t I?”

“You didn’t fool Francine.”

The laughter stopped. Black anger twisted Prissy’s face. “That bitch. She brought me the picture, showed it to me.”

Francine made Prissy understand that the picture proved it was impossible for Jimmy to have been driving. There had been time, after the crash, for Priscilla, with minor injuries, to climb out of the upended car and stagger to the sidewalk. But Jimmy’s body was beneath the car and it could have been wedged there only if he tumbled from the passenger seat as the car began to tip.

How had the police missed it then?

Prissy shrugged. “Those little kids . . . The mother of one of them came and she screamed and screamed . . . and Jimmy was still alive, see, right after it happened, so they lifted the car and pulled him out from under, then nobody thought about it because I said he was the driver, of course.”

Of course. That was Prissy. She could kill little kids and in the next breath be busy saving herself.

Perhaps Francine had run into a tougher customer than she had expected.

I drove to my office, told Pat to bar the door and sat down to think.

First, I listed the suspects.

Grace.

Priscilla.

Edmond and Sue.

Travis.

Kenneth.

Myself.

Then—and did I do it reluctantly?—I put down Harry’s name. He had been at the scene of the crime. If he were the murderer, he could have waited nearby and followed me onto the scene to be sure that the murder was reported then.

What would be the point of that?

For one thing, it was he who had the letter, purportedly from Francine, that directed the police to Kenneth.

But I had no reason to believe Harry knew Francine or could have any motive for murdering her.

Could he be Francine’s Mr. Wonderful? Could he be Francine’s link to La Luz? He would certainly have the kinds of information that could have led Francine to the sorry secrets of the Carlisles.

If only I knew more about Francine.

Impatiently, I called John Solomon’s office.

“No, Pamela’s not in. She’s still working on the Boutelle case for you.”

“Has she come up with anything else on Boutelle’s boyfriend?”

“Not yet. She’s trying to get in touch with Boutelle’s best friend at the Cocoa Butter, but so far she hasn’t found the woman at home. Course, with that kind of gal, who knows when she might come home. You still interested?”

“Yes. Have her keep after it. I’ll check back later today. When you talk to her, get the woman’s name and address.”

It sounded like the best bet for information. It was from the Cocoa Butter that Francine had come to La Luz. Francine. Bright, beautiful, unprincipled. What had lured her from the Cocoa Butter to La Luz—and death?

On the surface, it was to write a story about the Carlisles. But why had she wanted to do that? Was it just to make a fast buck? Maybe. But why the Carlisles? Until Kenneth went into politics, the Carlisles weren’t at all well known beyond the confines of this little coastal town. How could Francine have come up with the dirt on each of us? It suggested a long and intimate acquaintance with La Luz or the family but so far as John Solomon and Pamela had been able to discover, Francine had never in her life been to La Luz until she showed up six weeks ago.

Six weeks to death.

It would never have occurred to Francine, young and sensuous, vibrantly, crudely alive, in love with a ‘magical’ man, that she had an early appointment with death. It must have been quite a surprise when death reached out to her.

Francine came to La Luz and died because she threatened to write a story detailing the sins and follies of my family.

I sighed. No matter how I looked at it, it always came back to the Carlisles.

All right, turn it around. Who profited from Francine’s death?

Grace. Priscilla. Travis. Edmond and Sue. Kenneth. Myself.

But only because Priscilla lifted the manuscript and the tapes.

What then did the murder itself accomplish?

Most obviously, it removed Francine. It resulted in Kenneth’s arrest.

Wearily, I poured a cup of coffee from my desk thermos and stirred it slowly. The coffee was murky, murky as my thoughts.

The scarf. That was critical, of course. If Kenneth were innocent, it meant the scarf was deliberately taken with murder in view and the ultimate goal of saddling Kenneth with the crime. I tried to picture Travis, hearty red-bearded Travis, opening the cloakroom at Kenneth’s office, looking swiftly around, then reaching out to grab Kenneth’s scarf. Or Priscilla? Or Edmond?

The scarf, if Kenneth were innocent, meant that death had stalked Francine all that day. It was no spur-of-the-moment, angry attack. It was cool and deliberate and planned.

Their faces, the faces of my kin, moved in my mind. Imperious Grace, greedy Travis, retiring Edmond, selfish Priscilla, confident Kenneth.

Suddenly, I felt very discouraged. I wasn’t getting anywhere. I could posit from here to Christmas, and one theory would be as good or as bad as another. I had no proof and I had no inkling who was the murderer.