Fit to Die (7 page)

“See that little cave? I think there's a bird's nest inside. If we go along this little ledge, I bet we can see inside.”

“Along that ledge? Are you crazy?” The ledge was barely two feet wide and wet with spray from the surf below.

Patrick eyed me closely. “You're afraid of heights, aren't you?”

“No, I—I just don't go into orgasms over some old bird.”

“Just follow me, and put your feet exactly where I do. I promise you'll be fine.”

He set out before I could object, and I stood frozen, watching him pick his way slowly along the cliff, gripping the jagged rock with his hand to steady himself. My hands turned clammy, and the surf pounded in my ears.

Patrick turned. “It's a chough! And I think there may be eggs!”

In his excitement, his foot slipped on the wet ledge, and he fell to his knees. For an instant I thought he'd plunge to his death, but then he grabbed the cliff face and crouched motionless on the ledge.

“Patrick?” His voice was frail against the roar of the surf. “I twisted my ankle. Help.”

Help! He had to be kidding. He was stuck on a flimsy ledge above a precipice, inches from death. What good would two of us be, inches from death? I'd have to go for help.

I thought of the diamonds and the Jag waiting above. Peered at the sea below…

“Help,” came his voice again, even weaker. I looked down at his rigid frame, swore, and began to make my way down towards him. Sliding one foot at a time, testing each toehold, inching my hands over the rock face, wrapping my fingers around each tiny knob. I didn't look down. I didn't even look ahead to Patrick's face. I stared at the wall and pressed its rough surface against my cheek. After an eternity, I reached him.

“I just need to lean on your arm,” he said. “Then I can walk without putting much weight on it.”

I braced myself and extended my arm so he could pull himself up.

“Ready?” His voice was tense.

I risked a nod. Patrick grabbed my arm and pulled hard. Instantly I was thrown off balance, my foot slipped and I felt myself going over the edge. In that instant, I caught a glimpse of Patrick's face, alight with triumph as he tried to wrench himself free.

Shock jolted through me. On blind instinct I clutched at him, every inch of me fighting to survive. My free hand caught a jagged tooth of rock and my feet found a toehold on the wall beneath the ledge. I clutched Patrick's arm and pulled for my life. Suddenly his body shifted and slithered over the edge. Pain shot through my arm as he fell, held only by my hand clamped to his wrist.

He flailed about, vainly seeking a grip on the rock. His face, upturned to me, was white as death, and his eyes bulged.

“God, Patrick, help me!” he gasped.

I hung on despite the pain screaming through my fingers. Had he really tried to push me off? Had I really seen triumph in his eyes? Why? And if so, why should I save him? I could just open my fingers and let him plummet to certain death on the rocks below. It would be so easy.

No one knew he was here. No one even knew who he was. He was wearing my clothes, and I could throw my backpack over with him. Just some poor lonely Canuck who'd taken a wrong step along the top of the cliff.

And I would walk away with the identity of a millionaire, a car to die for, and two million dollars in untraceable gems in my bag.

Surely that had been triumph I'd seen in his eyes. He'd tried to play me for a sucker, and no one did that to me. Not ever again. “Help me, buddy,” Patrick said, stretching up his free hand.

“Fuck you,” I said. And I let him go.

•  •  •

The sun had nearly set over the distant hills by the time the Jag purred back up to the Bed and Breakfast. I'd considered not coming back. After all, I had Patrick's backpack with his diamonds, passport and papers. My own papers were in my backpack, now floating with his body out to sea.

But I had to make sure Patrick had left no telltale evidence at the inn. In the twilight I spotted the row of shiny cars parked along the edge of the house, but thought nothing of them. I climbed out of the Jag, slung Patrick's bag over my shoulder and headed for the front door. My legs felt like rubber and my heart thumped sickly in my chest. That's to be expected, I told myself. You've had a harrowing day, and it's
not every day you let a man die. You'll get over it.

I crossed the threshold and caught sight of the landlady behind her desk. She wore a glare, not her usual smile at the sight of me.

“That's him,” she said.

Four figures emerged from the shadows of the sitting room. Two uniforms, two dark suits. Four gold badges, glinting in the light from the desk.

“Patrick Johannsen?”

I turned, a denial stuck in my throat, but before I could form it, cuffs were snapped around my wrists. Incredulity rushed through my mind. How could they possibly know?

“What's going on?”

“You're under arrest for the murders of Richard and Beatrice Johannsen.” The suit had the same Boston twang as Patrick. “It took us a while to track you down, son, but you should never have underestimated the power your father has, even from the grave.”

BARBARA FRADKIN
works as a child psychologist during the day, which gives her plenty of inspiration for her favourite night-time activity, plotting murders. Her dark, compelling short stories have appeared in the previous Ladies' Killing Circle anthologies, as well as in several magazines, and her debut detective novel,
Do or Die,
featuring Police Inspector Michael Green, was published in 2000 by RendezVous Press. A sequel,
Once Upon a Time,
is due out in 2002.

THERESE GREENWOOD

Of course one feels for the late—though, let's face it, unlamented—Harry Pilgrim, but nothing beats a little armchair detecting. It makes a girl's heart thump.” The girl in question, Miss Case Doyle, was in high spirits as she leaned across the bar towards Gunboat Merkley. He would not have been surprised to see her pull a magnifying glass and Sherlock Holmes hat out of the overstuffed little sack she called a purse.

“Think of it, Gunboat,” she said. “Comfortably ensconced in her beloved watering hole, the beautiful but brainy sleuth mulls over the unsolved mystery with a dispassion brought on by the passage of time. Witnesses are gob-smacked as she reveals the now screamingly obvious pattern that left the local flatfoots flat-footed. There is absolutely nothing I would enjoy more, you can take that to the bank.”

Gunboat would have put five to one this was not strictly true. Miss Doyle enjoyed a lot of things. Take that crazy jazz whooping out of the new Victrola the boss had brought back from Rochester, and that loopy hat with the scarlet feather that came from no bird he had ever seen, and the martini she was lapping up like a kitten at the cream pitcher. And the boss. She liked the boss. But Gunboat would not have laid odds on how much. She was a dark horse that way. Look at the
handsome pill stringing her along now.

“It'd take a month of Sundays to sort through all the jokers who wanted to kill Pilgrim,” said the pill, one Lester Ketcheson. He was so right about that. Harry Pilgrim was dead six years, but even tonight, you could swing a stick in the speakeasy and hit a half-dozen people who had wanted to do the chump in. It bothered Gunboat, though, that after all this time the boss was still the odds-on favourite. Oh well, he thought, at least the boys in the backroom kept Ketcheson steady at two-to-one.

“And here you are, Les,” said Miss Doyle, “back at the scene of the crime after six years. You must have some vital but overlooked clue that once known will reveal all.”

“Wish I could help,” Ketcheson said agreeably. “But I had just popped in to conduct a little business and take the boat home before that crumb Pilgrim bought the farm.” He was watching his language in front of a lady or he would have used a different word for crumb. But those years in stir had not turned Ketcheson crude. He was still a fine-looking, loose-jointed know-it-all, wearing his hat, if you called that lousy piece of felt a hat, indoors to hide the work of the prison barber. His jacket was a dog's breakfast, too, lopsided like it was buttoned wrong. Gunboat supposed he hadn't had time to get a snazzier one, given that he had only been sprung that morning.

“The most interesting part of the puzzle is the gunshot, of course,” said Miss Doyle. “It's something right out of a melodrama. A pair of doomed lovers bursts into the room screaming blue murder about a body by the croquet hoops. And then the topper, a shot rings out. I hear the girl fainted, which must have been a lovely touch. It really happened that way, didn't it, Gunboat? It isn't a bit of embroidery stitched on over the years?”

It wasn't. It had been a helluva scene, the room more or less quiet with the orchestra taking a break. Then Pilgrim's son and the young housemaid Harry Jr. was so nuts about ran screaming in. The pair had just calmed down enough to gasp out something about a murder when the gunshot blasted outside.

“You couldn't touch that for dramatic effect,” Miss Doyle said with satisfaction. “A gunshot after the body is discovered. As a plot twist it is second to none.”

“Somebody was just making sure the old crumb was really dead,” said Ketcheson, tugging at the frayed collar of his open-necked shirt. “Harry Pilgrim was an A-one louse. You'd have had to stand in line to do him in, and the line was pretty long that night.”

True enough, Gunboat thought. It had been a big crowd, even for a Friday. Back then Pilgrim's Rest had been a high-class club for smug folk who wore badges on their coats. They'd thought a lot of Harry Pilgrim then because he did not smoke, drink, bet, chew gum or talk loudly. It didn't matter he was mean as cat's piss. They came in the dozens, sailing pricey boats up to the dock, liking that the hotel was on an island in the St. Lawrence River, for the exclusive use of rich people fishing a little, shooting a little and gossiping a lot.

Things had changed after the War, but the private locale was an even bigger draw now Prohibition had turned it into a gin joint. They still came in the dozens, still sailing pricey boats, but now they wanted to smoke, drink, gamble and brush up against wickedness. Now the smug folks thought a lot of the boss because he never boasted, never flirted with a man's wife, never took a drink from his own bar and was suspected of killing the previous owner. Tonight, with the Dempsey fight to come on the radio, they came because they thought the boss had once fixed a big-time heavyweight scrap.

The boss, as always, looked like the rumours had never laid a glove on him. There was a fresh nosegay in the narrow lapel of his fitted double-breasted jacket, his pants were creased and cuffed in the smartish way he had worn even before the Prince of Wales made it the rage, and his shirt was a brilliant, crisp white. He seemed almost merry as he walked up to Stevie Pounder, the serious-looking lad donning the radio's ear pieces and twiddling the dials on the fat wooden box as if his life depended on bringing in the fight. The boss put Stevie at ease with one of the Cuban cigars special-ordered four to a box labelled “Reginald Ashe”. Gunboat noticed the boss had lit his third stogie tonight, and that he was in no hurry to talk to Ketcheson.

Ketcheson had been cooling his heels for half an hour, although a nice half-hour inching his stool closer to Miss Doyle, pretending to look at her newspaper for the poop on the Dempsey fight. Not that they did much reading. She was a born talker, going on about a new pair of boots she had ordered, about learning to shoot at her papa's knee, about Dempsey's right hand, and about the night Harry Pilgrim bought the farm. She had made what she called “a tableau of the crime scene” with now-empty martini glasses standing for the folks Gunboat had seen that night when he went down to the boathouse to fetch a twelve-bottle case of real French champagne.

“The night air must have been especially invigorating,” Miss Doyle was saying, as she gave her funny tableau the once over. “Everyone and his brother was out for a stroll. The band was taking a break by this bottle of vermouth. Darling Reggie had slipped behind the soda siphon. Stevie Pounder's father was out by the ashtray helping the boatman tie up the launch. Harry Junior and that girl he was so mad about were stealing a minute somewhere around the Beefeater, although I guess
they don't have to steal any more. I heard they got married on the proceeds when Reggie bought this joint.”

Ketcheson sniggered. “They had to, I suppose, after everyone got a look at the grass stains on the back of that pretty red dress of hers. They weren't playing croquet that night.”

“Tsk, tsk,” said Miss Doyle, but Gunboat figured she was more ticked off at Ketcheson than the pretty housemaid. Miss Doyle felt certain allowances ought to be made for pretty girls, likely because she was very pretty herself. Tonight she looked like a flower, more like a rose than a girl. Her pink, freckled cheeks made her look younger than the twenty-three he knew she was, and her gold eyes had an agreeable way of sizing up a fellow. Gunboat liked, too, that she showed off her first-rate gams with a paper-thin, slinky number that quit just below the knee. Though he didn't like Ketcheson's hand, rock-hard from the hoosegow quarry, resting just above the hemline on her first-rate knee.

The boss wouldn't like it either. But he was busy making with the friendly, chatting up the Wall Street big shot and the son of the man who owned the Waldorf-Astoria, and keeping a fatherly eye on Stevie Pounder, who suddenly stood up halfway, before the wire on the radio ear pieces jerked him back.

“Hot dog! There's the Polo Grounds!” Stevie cried. “The fighters are going to their corners.”

“Holy Mike, is it fight time already?” Miss Doyle said. “I've just got time to plunk down a few smackeroos on the champ.”

She clicked open the glittery crystal clasp on the cloth purse no bigger than Gunboat's fist. When the pencil and notepad came out it reminded him of clowns coming out of a paper car at a vaudeville show he had seen at the Winter Garden when he and the boss were on the road. He kept a poker face as the tiny pearl handle of a gun peeked out of the
bag, too. As long as she didn't point it at the boss, it was none of his business, and a girl who went to speakeasies and talked to jailbirds and bet on prize-fights couldn't be too careful.