Mallets Aforethought (6 page)

All of the above, I figured. “Anyway, that was the news,” I said to Colgate. “Nothing to do with this.”

We headed for the door. “What did you mean about no locked-room mystery?” I asked. “And what’s in that plastic bag?”

He held the big old ornately paneled door for me, scraped it shut behind us over the uneven wooden floor as we left the house.

“Body goes in, there’s got to be a way in,” he said. “That, like the man says, is elementary.”

I put the key in the lock and jiggled it, waiting for the tumblers to fall. A good hard kick would have pushed the old door right over, or someone could’ve broken a sidelight window and reached through to turn the dead-bolt knob.

But no windows were broken and the door hadn’t been kicked. I handed Colgate the key when I was finished with it; everyone on the historical society’s volunteer team had one.

As did George. “Same with a gun,” Colgate added. “Gotta be a way out for it, too.”

I wondered if someone took the gun eighty years ago when Eva Thane was shot in the head, or later when Hector was put here.

“And I don’t know if you noticed,” Colgate continued, “but there was an old carpet on that floor.”

Right, an ancient red rectangle, its vaguely Oriental design mostly obscured by dust. I’d barely paid any attention to it. Now Colgate strode to the squad car ahead of me through sodden autumn leaves torn down by the storm.

I stood still, working it out. He was already on the radio, reciting his unit number, location, and situation.

“A trapdoor? Is there a trapdoor under that rug?”

He glanced over, nodded to confirm. Which encouraged me; if he thought I was screwing around with him he wouldn’t have told me anything.

Waiting for him to finish, I leaned against the squad car. As the storm pulled off, the wind had swung around out of the south, bringing with it a burst of warmth and a false smell of spring mingled with a hint of wood smoke. Crows cawed, blue sky peeped between the departing clouds, and shafts of sunlight beamed down onto the puddles shimmering in the streets.

Maybe everything would be all right, I thought.

Colgate hung up his radio, came around to me. “Found this in Gosling’s pocket.”

He held up the plastic bag. The paper inside had been torn from a lined notebook, the kind you could buy anywhere, marked with a heavy hand. Close up it was easy to read the single word block-printed on it: GUILTY.

The smoke smell got stronger. “You or your friend happen to put it there?” Colgate asked.

I stared at him. “No, of course not. Why would we?”

“Don’t know. That’s why I’m inquiring. Maybe for the same reason a nice woman like you turns out to know so much about an ugly thing like strychnine poisoning?”

“Don’t be silly. Anyway,” I went on, flustered, “aren’t you supposed to leave the evidence where it is? For the crime scene people?”

His gaze didn’t waver. “Not if it might not survive intact.”

“Oh, for heaven’s sake, why wouldn’t it?” But as I asked this I heard a faint crackling sound and glanced back puzzledly at the derelict old building’s sagging clapboards.

Smoke seeped from between them. “If things don’t go right, I might end up hauling those two bodies out, too,” Colgate went on.

Harlequin House was on fire.

In the old days, many of my clients believed the Big Three Myths: that they could run a hotel, operate a good restaurant, or manage a major league baseball team, given the opportunity.

Thinking this, I blew out the candles on the dining room table and switched on the lamps, their glow reflecting softly in the old gold-medallion wallpaper. It was six in the evening and through the front windows I could see the blue-white blaze of the floodlights set up around Harlequin House, blocks away.

“So what’d you tell him?” Wade asked. “When he asked how you knew so much about strychnine, I mean.”

Dark figures moved in the lights, cars leaving and others arriving. An occasional brief siren-whoop pierced the night.

“The truth,” I replied. “That Ellie and I have been involved in a couple of situations, before. And that I read a lot.”

We two women had fallen accidentally into a reputation for nosiness where murder was concerned, and Ellie still regarded any snooping we did as merely a hobby. But I had a forensics text,
Practical Homicide Investigation,
on my bedside table.

“He believed it?” Wade asked. Broad-shouldered, with brush-cut blond hair and eyes the pale grey of a fog bank at sea, my husband had the kind of quiet patience I’d heard of but never managed to possess for myself.

“Seemed to.”
Nux vomica,
the South American plant: a few in the medical literature had survived. Basically the stuff cranked the nerve impulses to the muscles up into the red zone and stuck them there. Its victim suffocated or died of exhaustion.

“The news people are here,” I said, drawing the curtains.

Murder in Maine came in one of two flavors, mostly: guy vs. girl or two guys vs. a case of beer and a cheap handgun. But this was different, so the vans topped with satellite dishes lumbered dutifully up Shackford Street like elephants in a circus parade.

“What’d they tell you?” I asked Wade. A fire danced in the fireplace, birch logs piled on andirons with front posts cast in the shapes of leaping porpoises.

“That they think the body came up through the trapdoor from the cellar,” he said. “Just like Colgate figured.”

The volunteer fire department had arrived within five minutes, put the fire out in ten. The crackling had been pigeons’ nests in the eaves, not yet the house itself, being consumed by flames.

“And the medical examiner was on his way back to Augusta from a meeting in St. John, so he stopped by and took a peek,” Wade said.

“And?” I crossed my mental fingers.

“And they’d pin it down more at autopsy, but he thought Hector’d been dead between twenty-four and forty-eight hours.”

“Anyone say anything more about that note in his pocket?”

Wade’s usual target-shooting range was the favorite of many cops, so they’d hailed him in friendly fashion. But he shook his head.

“Nope. Only other thing I overheard was, the fire probably started in the wiring.”

Not that anyone would yet have done a careful investigation, or even that there would necessarily be one, considering the fact that the wiring in the old place was probably ancient.

Wade surveyed the remnants of our meal. “That Will Bonnet’s quite a chef.”

“I guess.” The remains of a brilliantly seasoned fish dinner were ready to be removed to the kitchen; Will had delivered it for no reason other than that he’d felt like cooking and thought we would like it. Unfortunately I’d run into some bones.

“Never know,” Wade commented, “maybe he could make a restaurant go, here.”

“Maybe,” I said. “The numbers are iffy.”

It was the thing I’d never been able to get through to my clients: maybe they
could
run a restaurant but without customers, so what? Summer people flooded into Eastport but on Labor Day, they flooded right back out again. As a result we barely had the year-round population to support the eateries we had, never mind diluting the mixture with any more.

Still, Eastport had put stars in the eyes of harder-headed men than Will Bonnet, and I had worse things to worry about than him pouring money into a nonstarter.

Upstairs a blare of guitar music exploded from Sam’s room, got turned down hastily. Sam and Tommy had gone up there so Tommy could guide Sam deeper into the mysteries of the quadratic equation, Sam looking anxious as if he feared he might never emerge.

“Wade,” I asked, “couldn’t you try talking to Tommy? Get him to consider maybe just getting his feet wet in college?”

Wade looked regretful. “That’s something he’ll have to work out himself. For one thing, his mom needs the money he’s earning. And as long as George is doing okay without extra schooling . . .”

“Right,” I said, discouraged. I’d never seen anyone idolize anyone the way Tommy did George.

Except maybe me, in the old days when I was hanging out with Jemmy Wechsler. But this thought I pushed determinedly away.

“You heard Tommy’s latest plan?” Wade asked.

“The alpacas?” I began picking up plates and silverware.

“Nope. That lasted twenty minutes.” Wade started on the wine- glasses and napkins. “Now he thinks he might go north, days off, pan for gold. He heard what gold is worth an ounce nowadays.”

“Somebody should tell him how much per hour,” I replied. “Of hard labor . . . what is it, maybe a couple dollars a day?”

We’d done it once for a lark. If you can call freezing your tail off, getting wet and muddy and coming up with a teensy speck of gold dust anything like a lark.

“I wonder if George could,” I persisted. “Talk with him.”

“And say what?” Wade dropped napkins in the washing machine. “ ‘Go to school so you won’t be a loser like me’?”

I turned, my hands still full of silverware. “George is no loser, we all know that. But Wade, he’s not like you, either, he doesn’t have a . . .”

Wade hadn’t gone to college, but folks paid very well to get their antique guns restored. And in Eastport if you made a living on only two jobs, you were doing just fine.

“. . . special skill,” I went on. “He just cobbles it together, makes it work, but it’s so hard. And now with the baby coming . . .”

“Yeah,” Wade relented. He knew as well as I did how worried George had been lately, even though George would rather stick his hand in a fire than discuss it.

“George has already been asked to account for himself,” Wade said.

“Really? By the police? And what happened?”

Nothing good, if Wade had been procrastinating about telling me. “Everyone else they asked cooperated or promised to, soon’s they could get time, sit down and place themselves.”

Because of the storm, I translated, and the hundred and one things they had to do to protect their livelihoods from it. But once the boats, engines and lines, bilge pumps and nets, lobster traps and dragging gear were all safe and accounted for, people who’d had run-ins with Hector would put some time aside, relate their whereabouts over the last day or so.

It was the sort of delay a Maine cop might be flexible about. But I didn’t think Wade was talking about delay.

“Right.” He read it in my face. “Cops weren’t even being particularly aggressive. It was more like if someone’s name came up they wanted to rule him out. And you know, a lot of guys who have work boats also have second mortgages on their houses, keep the boats running.”

It was yet another reason why Hector was so unpopular, that he held many of those mortgages himself. And every year he got his greedy mitts on a couple of those houses.

“So that’s why the cops had so many guys’ names,” Wade said. “They already went over to Hector’s place, the door wasn’t locked, had a gander at Hector’s big black book. But like I said, most of the fellows were cooperative.”

The book was famous. If your name was in it, you owed Hector money. “But George,” Wade went on unhappily, “was different.”

“Sure, and the cops had
his
name because I told Colgate about him,” I said bitterly. “Me and my big mouth.”

Wade shook his head. “Didn’t matter. Other people mentioned George, too. They didn’t want to, but Colgate got it out of them somehow.”

Yeah, he was good at that; small comfort. I ran hot water on the plates in the sink.

“But anyway,” Wade went on, “that’s not what I meant. What’s different is, George said no.”

A saucer slipped from my hand and broke. “He . . . but why?”

George didn’t have any gear that might have been vulnerable to the storm’s aftereffects. Weeks earlier at Will Bonnet’s prescient suggestion he’d moved his own boat, fitted only to haul a few dozen lobster traps in season, to a more protected mooring out at Deep Cove.

“I don’t know. All I know is that he isn’t saying where he was for the last forty-eight hours or so. And he isn’t saying
why
he isn’t saying. His lip,” Wade finished grimly, “is zipped.”

Oh, brother: motive, method, and now what probably looked to the cops like opportunity. And once they get those three items corralled in a single suspect, cops don’t go racketing around looking for
other
suspects.

Not on your tintype. The fact that in Maine life was all you could get for premeditated murder—and if you fed someone strychnine, how could you say it wasn’t planned?—was no consolation.

I dropped the saucer pieces into the trash. “So then what happened?” I asked Wade. “And how do you know this stuff, anyway?”

He’d already said it wasn’t part of what he’d overheard, and I didn’t think it would’ve been included in old-shooting-buddies small talk, either. “Colgate told me,” he replied.

My uh-oh bells jangled like an alarm clock. “I see. Just out of the goodness of his heart he told you this?”

Wade shot a glance at me, then let it pass: the notion that maybe Colgate had been playing him for some reason.

“No. He wanted me to try getting George to reconsider. He’s giving George time to think it over. Pretty decent of him.”

My estimation of Colgate crept up a notch. He’d unnerved me with his interrogation skills back at Harlequin House, but in his place I’d have done just the same.

Or tried. “Not much time, though,” Wade cautioned. “It won’t even be up to him, soon. His bosses start asking hard questions, he’ll have to get George’s statement completed.”

“That’s a fine kettle of fish,” I said, annoyed. “George and his stiff-necked . . .”

Pride, I was about to finish, still hoping that was it. He’d been the same way about Ellie’s money, back when she’d had some; her small inheritance, so carefully invested, had evaporated in the accounting scandals that had helped pop the Wall Street bubble.

But just then I heard the boys coming downstairs so I didn’t continue. Tommy talked with customers at the Mobil station every day and we didn’t need this all over town right off the bat.

“Everyone okay at the boat basin?” I asked instead. “And the boats, are they all right?”