The Corpse in Oozak's Pond (17 page)

“Hi, Pete. Walking the cat?”

“Hi, Jim. Which meeting are you off to tonight?”

“No meeting. I’m on my way to Goulson’s. Trev Buggins used to belong to the August Amalgamation of Amazonians, so the brothers thought we’d give him a little send-off.”

“Er, not to be rudely inquisitive, but aren’t brothers the wrong sex for Amazonians?”

Feldster thought that one over for a while, then shook his head. “Oh, I get it. Always got to have your little joke, eh, Pete? You must be thinking of Amazons. I saw some in the movies once. Big, strapping girls with shin guards and bare thighs clear up to their you-know-wheres. Supposed to be warriors. Heck, who’d want to fight ’em?”

He permitted himself a mildly salacious grin before he remembered the solemnity of his mission. “You and Helen coming down later?”

“I’m not sure. Helen has to work late at the library. By the way, were you ever acquainted with either of Trevelyan’s sons?”

“Nope. They were gone before we got here. I can tell you who did pal around with them, though. At least I could if I could think of his name. It’ll come to me. See you later.”

Professor Feldster clanked on his’ way. Jane Austen scurried back into the house, scolding Shandy for letting her get her paws wet. He picked her up and carried her to the kitchen.

There was roast beef in the refrigerator. Shandy had his with rye bread and pickles; Jane took hers plain. They were sharing their supper in companionable silence when the phone rang. The caller was, rather to Shandy’s surprise, Jim Feldster.

“It came to me, Peter. The gink you want to see is Hesperus Hudson. He usually hangs out at the Dirty Duck out on the county road. If he’s not there, they can most likely tell you where to find him.”

Shandy didn’t ask how his colleague, a recognized expert in fundamentals of dairy management, happened to know a gink named Hesperus Hudson who hung out at the Dirty Duck. He did say, “What makes you so sure I want to see him?”

“Why else would you have asked?” With a final muted clank, Feldster hung up. Shandy ate another pickle.

Strictly speaking, he did not want to see Hesperus Hudson. He wanted to stretch out in front of the as yet unlit living-room fire with a mild Scotch and water to wash down his sandwich, and mull things over. He decided not to light the fire, but he did allow himself a short mulling period. This somehow turned into a nap, as his mulls too often did. He awoke after half an hour or so with a stiff neck and a guilty feeling that he ought to be up and doing with a heart for any fate.

Careful not to disturb Jane, he went and got his old plaid mackinaw and his baggy tweed hat. These ought to be proper attire for the Dirty Duck. Helen still wasn’t home, and he debated calling the library but didn’t. It wasn’t late and she had enough on her hands without an overprotective husband trying to make believe she couldn’t manage without him. He scrawled her a note reading, “I’ve gone to whoop it up with the boys in the Malemute Saloon,” and went to get his car.

Maybe Charlie Ross was an Amazonian, too. Anyway, he’d closed up even earlier than usual tonight. There was only the one dim light inside the garage to illuminate the parking lot. It would be a piece of cake to swipe a car from here, only nobody ever did because stealing cars was not the done thing in Balaclava Junction. Betsy Lomax would be sure to find out who did it because she lived right around the corner and ran the most effective bush telegraph in town.

Shandy wondered whether Mrs. Lomax might in fact know something about Dr. Porble’s car that Porble himself didn’t. If so, why hadn’t she taken steps to make sure the car thief got his comeuppance? Betsy Lomax was no self-appointed vigilante, but she did hold firm and often expressed opinions about civic responsibility.

This time, though, there could be a conflict of interest. Mrs. Lomax must be feeling an obligation toward her friend Sephy, but she also had to consider the fact that she herself was landlady to one of Purvis Mink’s fellow security guards and cousin-in-law or something to a couple more. Among the townsfolk, she was chairman of this, president of that, and related in one way or another to almost everybody. Around campus, she was the highly respected, well-paid domestic prop and mainstay to several faculty families. Shandy didn’t think she’d deliberately cover up a crime involving town against gown, but she’d be a fool to open her mouth before she was damned sure of her facts.

Betsy Lomax was no fool. Sighing, Shandy started his car and headed out for the county road.

S
HANDY WAS IN NO
mood for the Dirty Duck. To be sure, he’d never been inside the place before, but he’d driven past it often enough, and past it was the obvious place to go. Scowling at its repulsive dark-brown facade, its filthy windows behind which a couple of neon signs advertising beer glowed dully in the places where they glowed at all, he could not imagine anybody going there to have a good time. They must go solely for the purpose of getting drunk.

Men—probably no women—would be slouched over the bar having endless, dreary arguments about nothing in particular. The bar itself would be chipped plastic laminate, most of its pattern worn off, smeared with dirt and puddled with stale beer. Messy ashtrays would be sitting around full of soggy, stinking cigarette butts. Maybe there’d be a bowl of stale cheese popcorn, kernels spilled over the edge by unwashed hands that had glommed into the bowl when their owners had stopped in for a couple of brews after pumping out somebody’s septic tank.

It would be the kind of scene angry young dramatists liked to present to their angry older audiences as stark realism. Who the hell needed it? Not P. Shandy, for sure. He’d thought of another fish to fry. He’d get on to the next place first, giving his dinner a chance to settle, and come back later. If Hesperus Hudson was already inside here, he’d be set for the evening. If he hadn’t yet arrived, why suffer the agony of having to sit there smelling the cigarette butts while waiting for him?

Shandy supposed Budge Dorkin’s testimony with regard to the proofreader from the Pied Pica didn’t really need to be checked, but Dorkin was young and inexperienced, and one excuse to procrastinate over the Dirty Duck was as good as another. He kept straight on to Second Fork and had no trouble, as who could, finding the white house with the red-and-blue barber-pole trimmings.

Nor was the proofreader herself far to seek. Marietta Woozle was at home relaxing. At least Shandy assumed she was relaxing. The fitted ankle-length gown she had on didn’t look like the sort of garment a person would wear to check copy in. All those blue feathers around the edges of the flowing sleeves would be awfully in the way, he should think, if Mrs. Woozle tried to use her arms for anything more strenuous than peeling a grape. Shandy was reminded of the gowns Mae West used to wear in the movies he’d snuck into as a boy, except that Miss West’s gowns had always shown up on the screen as black or white, whereas Mrs. Woozle’s was scarlet with blue feathers. Dyed chicken feathers, he thought, but he couldn’t be sure. Dan Stott would have known at a glance.

Mrs. Woozle did not go into wild jubilation at sight of a middle-aged man in a shabby mackinaw. “If you’re looking for Zack,” she told him drily, “he’s over at the Dirty Duck.”

“Er, no,” said Shandy. “It’s yourself I was hoping to see. You are Mrs. Marietta Woozle, I take it?”

“Take it or leave it for all I care.” Mrs. Woozle shrugged, causing the blue chicken feathers to flutter in a manner that might perhaps have suggested an attempt at beguilement had the flutterer shown herself more hospitably inclined. “How do you spell Constantinople?”

Shandy supposed this might not be a particularly out-of-the-way question coming from a proofreader. Or perhaps she was doing a crossword puzzle. Anyway, he spelled it, and she nodded.

“Aha, just as I thought. You’re one of those professors from the college, come to tempt me with your filthy lucre to recant my testimony about the perfidious Dr. Porble. My only reply to you, sir, is no, no, a thousand times no.”

“Half that number would have sufficed,” said Shandy. “I freely admit to being a professor from the college, Shandy by name, but I have no intention of trying to buy you off.”

“You haven’t?”

“No, no, a thousand times no. I shouldn’t dream of such a thing. Anybody can see you’re a woman of”—he gauged the depth of her neckline in some bemusement and settled for—“character.”

“Oh.”

She rested her right hand on her hip and raised the left to toy with her back hair exactly the way Mae West used to do. It was at moments like this that the older boys used to start whistling and the younger ones go out for popcorn. For an eerie moment, Shandy experienced an auditory illusion of corduroy knickers squeaking in the dark.

“What I came for, Mrs. Woozle, was simply to, er, verify a few points from the testimony obtained by Officer Dorkin earlier today. Provided you can spare the time, that is.” He’d noticed her swift glance at the white hands on the blue face of the red clock on the wall.

“Make it snappy, then. What do you want to know?”

She hadn’t asked him to sit down and clearly didn’t intend to, although there were plenty of white vinyl chairs around, each with its starred-and-striped cushion of red and blue. She must have born on the Fourth of July, Shandy decided. He cleared his throat.

“As I understand it, Mrs. Woozle, you were on your way to the community hall at twenty minutes past nine on the night of February first. As you reached the intersection, you noticed a car with no lights on coming out of First Fork.”

“Dr. Porble’s car, yes.”

“How did you know it was Dr. Porble’s car?”

“I know the car, and I saw the number plate. I told Budge Dorkin that. Furthermore, I wrote down the number right away so I wouldn’t forget it, not that I ever do. I have a photographic memory.”

“Handy for you. Then perhaps you can describe the appearance of Dr. Porble’s car.”

She could and did. Shandy became increasingly depressed. He told himself the description didn’t necessarily mean anything. Grace Porble must have driven the car over here often enough, bringing the Bugginses hot soup and flower arrangements. Marietta Woozle would have had opportunities enough to memorize its details.

But why would she want to lie about having seen it night before last? Surely she must realize the probable consequences to Porble. Mrs. Woozle didn’t look to him like any half-wit, notwithstanding her blue chicken feathers. Maybe the Mae West getup was just one of those Total Woman ploys intended to lure Zack away from the Dirty Duck. As Marietta was a size or two larger than the dress, there did seem an element of overkill in her technique, but it might be that Zack was a type on whom subtleties would be wasted.

“Did you actually see Dr. Porble driving the car?” he asked in desperation.

“Well, hardly, how could I? When I flashed my high beams, I could see a shape that looked like him, sitting up tall the way he does, with sort of a Dick Tracy profile and one of those Harry Truman felt hats. I don’t know anybody else who still wears one like it, so I figured that must have been him, but I’m not going to swear it was. I couldn’t see the features, just a silhouette in the dark.”

“I’d say you did unusually well to see as much as you did in the flash of a headlight,” Shandy told her somewhat nastily. “You must have incredible eyesight, Mrs. Woozle.”

“I have,” she snapped back. “In my profession, you need it. Furthermore, it wasn’t just one flash of a headlight. I had my high beams on him the whole time he was pulling out and making his left turn toward the Junction, so I got both a back and a side view. Both of which are registered on my photographic mind like as if they were a videotape in the old family cassette box, and don’t you think they’re not. And I’ll say so in front of a judge and jury if I have to. Got what you came for, Professor?”

She fluttered over to the door and held it open. Coming from a woman who stood perhaps five feet eight in her blue artificial-leather mules and must weigh in at one sixty-five or better, not counting the chicken feathers, the hint would have been a difficult one not to take. Shandy hadn’t got what he’d hoped for, but he’d clearly had all she was about to give him. He mumbled, “Thanks for your time,” and left. Zack Woozle’s preference for the Dirty Duck, at least, had begun to make some sense.

Now that it was too late, Shandy remembered that he hadn’t asked Mrs. Woozle why she was lolling around peeling grapes instead of going down to Harry Goulson’s to view her former neighbors’ remains along with the rest of the town. Maybe she’d felt she had nothing subdued enough to wear. Maybe she’d had another tough day over the annual warrant. Maybe she’d had enough of the Bugginses to last her while they were still alive.

Or maybe she was expecting a gentleman caller. As Shandy pulled away from the house, he noticed another car turning into Second Fork. Just for the hell of it, he pulled up on the verge once he’d got safely out on the county road, cut his engine, and got his field glasses out of the glove compartment. It was all swamp maples and alder along here, so he had a clear view through the leafless branches. Sure enough, the other car was backing up and pulling into the Woozles’ turnaround.

Marietta had snapped on the outdoor light, and all he saw was Flo in her fake fur and red fright wig. Marietta didn’t seem to be evincing any sign of overwhelming joy, but she was letting Flo in. As Mike’s official resident lady friend, Flo might hold some kind of quasifamilial status among the Woozles. Or perhaps Marietta just welcomed any audience to unload an account of her latest real-life drama on.

They could sit over a cup of coffee in the red-and-blue dinette while Marietta gave Flo an earful about how she’d foiled the perfidious designs of the vile Professor Shandy. Flo could riposte with his comeuppance from Miss Minerva Mink. All told, Shandy wasn’t cutting much of a figure around the Seven Forks. Well, he might as well turn a disastrous day into a total ruin. On to the Dirty Duck.

The roadhouse’s interior was almost exactly as scabrous as Shandy had pictured it, except that he’d forgotten to include an old black-and-white television set with a totally flyspecked screen blaring away mostly unheeded on a shelf behind the bar. He ordered a beer and told the bartender not to bother about a glass. The bottle would be cleaner. Or so Shandy assumed until the bartender gallantly twisted the top off for him and wiped the neck with an unspeakable rag before shoving it across the beer-puddled, popcorn-strewn counter. There wasn’t much Shandy could do except give the bottle a surreptitious wipe on his coat sleeve and send up a silent orison to whichever saint might happen to be in charge of streptococcus bacilli.