McNally's Chance (27 page)

“No time now, Connie. I have to meet Al in twenty minutes. I’ll be in touch. Will you be at home?”

“Only if a beautiful knight in shiny armor doesn’t carry me off to Camelot.”

“Fine. You’ll be home.”

In the kitchen Ursi was all atwitter as Jamie calmly perused his morning paper. Not even Walt Disney could animate the guy.

“I’ve heard, Ursi, so don’t ask. I haven’t got the time.” She handed me a glass of juice which I downed gratefully and I poured myself a cup pa adding only milk.

“It’s on the radio and the TV, Archy, but the newspaper doesn’t have it as yet.” On cue, Jamie raised the morning paper to show me the headline and confirm his wife’s words. “It happened late last night, they say. What a tragedy. As I was saying to Jamie just the other day, Archy, this town isn’t what it used to be. Time was when we never locked a door. Now you can’t go for a drive without fearing for your life. They say her next book was going to be an expose about an old Palm Beach family, that’s why she was done in. Her daughter and the boyfriend were doing the research, everyone knows that.”

Strange the things that pop up in one’s head when under stress. The rumors making the rounds of our island had me thinking of a line from Browning’s My Last Duchess “Here you miss, Or there exceed the mark.”

The execution of Sabrina Wright brought to mind the cruel duke’s response to his wife’s effervescent charm”I gave commands; Then all smiles stopped…”

“Are you going to Fort Lauderdale dressed like that, Archy?”

“Sorry, Ursi, but I’m not coming with you and Jamie. I have to go out now and will get back here to see the folks as soon as I can. Make my excuses.”

“It’s about the murder,” Ursi stated.

“Don’t say anything in front of mother, Ursi,” I warned her. “You know how she worries.”

I’ll have a word with your father,” Jamie said.

Ursi and I looked at him askance.

Al Rogoff and I maintain a mobile office in the parking lot of the Publix supermarket on Sunset Avenue. It’s convenient, discreet and you can’t beat the rent. Our location is as far from the madding crowd as one can get and our bays depend on space availability. Same church, different pews, but it works and what works is good.

As more people sleep in than go to Publix on Sunday morning I got a spot next to Al and joined him in his car. He was in need of a shave and a few hours’ sleep. For a change, Al wasn’t chomping on a cigar, but the aroma of those past pervaded his car’s interior like a pool hall on a busy night.

“You’re ten minutes late,” Al griped as I climbed in. “I gotta be back at the station in two hours.”

“Sorry, Al, but I’m still reeling from the news.”

“It never fails, Archy. You get a case and we get a body. Do me a favor and retire.”

I lit an English Oval and for reasons known only to Al Rogoff he immediately rolled down the window on the driver’s side.

“Start that rumor and I’ll be forced to retire,” I said. “What can you tell me, Al?”

“How about, what can you tell me? Everyone knows that Archy McNally was in the lady’s employ.”

“You first, Al,” I said in a bid for time. How much could I tell Al at this point? Very little. If Al and I were business partners in fighting villainy, I was committing an act of malversation which itself is a felony.

Al pulled a notebook out of his bulging back pocket and began to thumb through it. He was one of the shrewdest of Palm Beach’s finest. Never relying on memory, he always took notes in his own form of shorthand that resembled the writing on Cleopatra’s Needle, but I have known prosecuting attorneys to rely on their definitude, making Al one of the most sought-after trial witnesses and the bane of defense counselors.

Sabrina Wright went for a drive last night in her rented car shortly after eight. Her husband said this was not unusual. She enjoyed going for a drive by herself after dinner, saying it not only helped her relax but the time alone was conducive to concocting plots for her novels. In the short time she had been in Palm Beach she found driving along the ocean with a sky full of stars overhead especially influential when it came to weaving romances.

Since being at The Breakers, Sabrina had gone on such an outing several times before this particular evening, according to her husband, Robert Silvester.

(I immediately made that out to be two times. Each time to meet one of the boys. Last night was, in her own words, to meet with the last of the Mohegans. Which one? “Did you expect to shoot a leopard, Mr. ..

.”)

When she didn’t return by ten, as she usually did, her husband began to worry. He called his stepdaughter, who was in the next suite at The Breakers, to see if Sabrina was with her. She wasn’t. The girl, Gillian, then called Zack Ward, who was in an adjoining suite. He had not seen Sabrina since dinner. When Sabrina did not return by midnight, Robert Silvester had called the police to report her missing, giving them the make and model of the car she was driving.

Shortly thereafter, an anonymous caller reported an abandoned car on Island Drive at the turnoff to Tarpon Island. Al, cruising in his patrol car, was radioed to check it out.

Anonymous caller? Where had I heard that before? I did not interrupt Al for details.

“I found her,” Al concluded solemnly.

“Did you know who she was?” I asked him.

“Not by sight, but by her car. I got an APB on my radio with the car description a short time before I got the order to proceed to Island Drive. Like I said, Archy, you get a case and we get a body.”

“I do wish you would stop saying that, Al. It’s bad for business.”

“We like it when business is off,” Al reminded me. “So, what can you tell me?”

A lot, I thought, and I felt like a traitor for not being able to pass it on to Al, but it was early days. Why drag down the team when only one player had run amok? I wasn’t doing it for Tom, Dick, or Harry, but for Sabrina. I was the only one who knew her secret and I was going to keep it and uphold her end of the bargain she had made with those ignoble snobs. When the guilty malefactor was caught, and he would be caught, he could say what he pleased, but Sabrina would not have broken her trust.

I took a chance at the start of this case and now I had to take another. I had to go my own way, without the help of Al Rogoff and the police, and lasso the man that got away. I was in possession of all the puzzle’s pieces. I could see the solution, but I could not perceive it. As my favorite wit had observed: To look at a thing is quite different than to see a thing.

“Sabrina Wright asked me to find her husband,” I told Al, and repeated the story I had been passing around since my first meeting with Sabrina. Was the sin of omission a venial or mortal offense?

“It seems to me her daughter was as interested in eloping as I am,” Al said. “Why was she snooping around old newspapers and calling editors?

Everyone is talking about it because the girl didn’t exactly make a secret of what she was doing. What do you know about it?”

I repeated the rumors as told me by Lolly Spindrift and Ursi.

Al nodded thoughtfully. “It’s the theory we’re working on,” he said.

“Sabrina Wright was here to dig up the dirt on one of our old and respected families and write about it. Now I think she gave you that story about her daughter eloping as an excuse for all of them being here.”

“Why did her husband pull out of the Chesterfield without telling her where he was going?” I tossed out to muddy the waters.

“Did he?” Al said. “Or was it all part of the ploy and a good excuse to get you in on the game. He gave himself up as soon as his wife had given you enough misinformation to blab all over town.”

I didn’t take umbrage because I was delighted the police had a plausible theory and I was perceived as a dupe and not a perp. “Have you questioned the daughter, Al?”

He shook his head. “We ain’t seen her yet. The husband came to the station house when we notified him and he described the events that led to him calling us. No one has been grilled so far. We have to know what the girl and her boyfriend were looking for to crack this one, Archy. Someone didn’t like the idea of being wrote about by Sabrina Wright.”

Wrote about? Catchy, no? Al does not like being corrected, so I let that one pass and wondered instead if Gillian, Silvester, and Zack Ward would tell the police what they were up to? Gillian had said she did not want to go public with her quest. She wanted only a chance to meet with her father in private without causing aspersion to any concerned.

I doubt she would talk and if she didn’t, neither would Silvester or Ward.

But did the girl think her father had killed Sabrina to maintain his anonymity? If so, would she talk to revenge her mother’s death? And if she didn’t think her father was involved, what did she think? What did they all think?

“Did the scene-of-the-crime boys find anything?” I queried. Might as well learn as much as I could now as I had no intention of meeting with Al again until I, or the police, had solved the murder of Sabrina Wright.

“They think there was a car parked behind Sabrina’s rental. We roped off the area and went over every inch of it and that’s all we could come up with. But it doesn’t mean much. It’s a public access road.

There are tire tracks all over the place.”

I was certain the car behind Sabrina’s belonged to whomever she was meeting last night. I was tempted to ask if the tracks indicated a stretch limo. The meeting place told me nothing except that it must have been chosen by the last of her former sweethearts, as Sabrina was a stranger in our town.

“The anonymous call, Al what’s your take on that?”

“Zilch,” he said. A responsible citizen wants to do his duty, but he don’t want no involvement. We get a dozen calls like that every day, most of ‘em about domestic squabbles. The neighbors don’t want the wife beater to know who blew the whistle on him. In this case I would guess the caller was someplace she wasn’t supposed to be.”

“She? It was a woman?”

Al consulted his notes. “As far as the desk sergeant could tell, the caller was a female.”

That was interesting. If I recalled correctly, Lolly’s anonymous tipster was a man. “Could the caller have known there was a dead body in the car?” I asked Al.

“Not unless she got out and looked in the window. Sabrina Wright was in the driver’s seat, but slumped over toward the passenger side. To a passing driver it would look like the car was empty.”

“Was she wearing her seat belt?”

Al grinned. “Good catch, Archy, there’s hope for you. No, she wasn’t.

She must have parked and unbuckled the belt in anticipation of getting out of the car. She was meeting someone.”

I tried my best to point out that this was not necessarily true. “It’s possible, Al, but not everyone buckles up so we don’t know if she was strapped in or not. She could have stopped because she was lost.

Remember, she was new to these parts.”

“I ain’t buying it,” Al said. “I think the family she was researching knew she was after them and called her for a clandestine meeting. Her husband said she had a call that morning and went out shortly after noon.”

That, of course, was my call. But when I met with Sabrina she told me she was seeing the last of the Mohegans that evening so the assignation was set before yesterday. “That was me,” I admitted. “I had a drink with her yesterday afternoon.”

“Thanks for sharing, but we already know,” Al said.

“The husband told us she saw you yesterday afternoon.”

“Did you think I wasn’t going to tell you? That hurts, Al.”

“It hurts me, too, Archy, but we have to know where we stand. It’s my job.”

That made me feel better about holding out on Al. It was my job, too.

“Was anything taken?” I wondered aloud.

“This is strictly confidential,” Al said. “Her purse was emptied and she was stripped of her jewelry. According to her husband, she wore a diamond and sapphire necklace and matching earrings that night as well as her engagement and wedding rings, but she wasn’t done in for the loot. We ain’t got no highway robbers on Island Road.”

I littered the Publix parking lot with the butt end of my English Oval, at which point Al reverted to character and reached into his shirt pocket to bring out his adult pacifier. The stub of a chewed-up cigar.

“By the way, Archy, even if the husband didn’t tell us she met with you yesterday, we would have known.”

“Really? How?”

“Rumor was, she was having drinks at the Leopard Lounge with a guy in a safari jacket. So who would wear a safari jacket to the Leopard Lounge but Archy McNally?”

“I have imagination, Al.”

“You have a pair, Archy, that’s what you have. So what did you and the lady talk about?”

“Off the record?”

“Way off.”

I took a deep breath and resisted lighting up again. “You know Lady Cynthia Horowitz, Connie’s boss.”

“I know her only too well, Archy. What has she got to do with this?”

“Nothing. She’s thinking of writing her memoirs and she wanted to meet with Sabrina Wright to get some pointers from a bestselling author.

Lady Cynthia heard I was in contact with Sabrina Wright, and she asked Connie if I would put in a word for her. As a favor to Connie I tried, but got no place.”

Al took the stub out of his mouth. “When you write your memoirs, Archy, leave me out, okay?”

“Your wish is my command, Sergeant.”

“Now scram. I gotta get washed and head back to the palace.”

“Before we part can you tell me what the family was doing while Sabrina went driving under the stars?”

He thumbed his notes once again. “They had dinner downstairs at The Florentine. Bet it cost a week’s salary. After, they all went to their own rooms. Sabrina left and Silvester read. There was a ball game on the TV. Mets from New York, I believe, and Ward wanted to see it but the girl, Gillian, didn’t. She stayed in her room and watched a film instead. They didn’t get together until Silvester called about his missing wife. Why do you want to know?”

“Curious, that’s all. Thanks, Al. Did you enjoy your pancakes yesterday?”