The Gladstone Bag (29 page)

“Darned decent of her,” MacDuff grunted.

What he meant was “Darned crazy of her.” Emma shook her head.

“I know it sounds unusual, but it wasn’t really. She’d been in the habit of entertaining artists and writers whom she didn’t necessarily know socially. She knew she could rely on Vincent to carry on as usual. And lastly, I think she couldn’t quite bring herself to give up Pocapuk. Wouldn’t you suppose so, Vincent?”

“It’s not for me to say,” he replied gruffly. “All I know is, I been comin’ here to work every summer since I was fifteen years old. Her an’ me always got along pretty good, she’d know how I—”

“Anyway,” Emma stepped in quickly so that the rest wouldn’t notice how close the man was to breaking down, “my first hint of trouble—and a pretty broad one, I must say—came on the ferryboat, when I was drugged and robbed of an old Gladstone bag containing a lot of stage jewelry.”

“You sure you were drugged?”

Deputy MacDuff wasn’t buying her story. Emma couldn’t blame him, but neither was she about to let him think her a liar.

“Quite sure. I grant you it sounds like cheap melodrama, but the same thing happened to me a few years ago in my own house when a valuable painting was stolen. I recognized the symptoms. As it turned out, this robbery was only temporary. Count Radunov here recovered my bag shortly afterward. I’ll let him tell you about that.”

“Wait a minute,” said Vincent. “We might as well get the rest of ’em in here, too, so’s you’ll have us all where you can get at us.”

MacDuff said that was a good idea and presumably MacIvor agreed, so Vincent went and rounded up his staff: the three young ones clearly thrilled to be in on the action, Bubbles fussing at being dragged away from his kitchen, Ted Sharpless scared stiff and doing a poor job of pretending he wasn’t. They squeezed themselves in as best they could: Bubbles in the one extra chair, Neil and the girls on the floor, Ted perched on the doorstep leading from the porch into the dining room as if poised for a quick getaway.

Radunov picked up the ball, MacDuff kept it rolling from him to the next. This was no country bumpkin; the deputy handled the questioning smoothly, with as little help from Emma as she could hold herself down to. She’d chaired enough meetings to know when to speak and when to yield the floor. Deputy MacIvor noted down the salient information with an occasional assist from Vincent when a word came along that he didn’t quite catch.

Merely taking down the various testimonies ate up more time than Emma had anticipated. Once Deputy MacDuff was satisfied that they’d covered the ground, Vincent declared a sandwich break, which the men from the sheriff’s office appreciated as much as the rest. And now, thought Emma, to serious business. She took a last sip of tea, patted her lips with her napkin, handed the cup to Sandy, and reopened the meeting.

“I must tell you, Deputy MacDuff, that my cousin and I have some family connections who are private detectives. We’ve been in touch with them by telephone and managed to collect some information for you. To begin with, the man Neil fished out of the water was named Jimmy Sorpende. Perhaps you’d already learned that?”

No, they hadn’t and MacDuff didn’t seem any too pleased that the Kelling ladies had got the jump on them. “What else do you know about him?” he demanded.

“He had a prison record. We don’t have the details, but I expect you can get them easily enough. Unless some of the people here could fill you in.”

Vincent caught the inference fast enough. “How ’bout you, Ted?”

The young man only glowered and sneaked a furtive glance in Emma’s direction.

“I’m sorry, Ted,” she told him, “but two people are dead and three more have been physically assaulted, of whom I’m one, and I’m not about to let it happen again. You’d better tell what you know.”

Ted stayed mute. Vincent didn’t.

“Two dead? Who’s the other one, for God’s sake?”

“A young art student from Boston named Cecily Green.”

“Cecily Green? You mean that kid who was here last summer with Mrs. Sabine?”

“That’s right. You no doubt remember that Mrs. Sabine was far from well even then and had to stay in bed for a while. During that time, she taught Miss Green how to open the safe so that she could put Mrs. Sabine’s jewelry away for her.”

“Why the hell didn’t Mrs. Sabine ask me?”

“Because she thought the task more suitable for a lady’s maid than a man in your position, I assume. You must remember, Vincent, that Mrs. Sabine has very old-fashioned ideas about how to run her household. Anyway, sometime in May, Miss Green was killed by a hit-and-run driver who still hasn’t been caught. A month or so before that she’d become friendly with a young man named Ted Sharpless, whom she’d met in a singles bar. Her father had taken exception to the acquaintance and made her break off the affair. You were living in Boston yourself at the time, weren’t you, Ted?”

“So what if I was?” he snarled. “Couldn’t there be two guys with the same name?”

“I suppose there could, but it appears this particular Ted Sharpless came from the same part of Maine where Miss Green had spent last summer. I realize young fellows like you don’t like to take advice, Ted, but I strongly recommend that you quit trying to make your position worse than it already is. Cecily Green told you about that safe in Mrs. Sabine’s upstairs closet, didn’t she? And you passed on the information to Jimmy Sorpende.”

“Okay, she told me. What the hell, it didn’t mean anything to me. I only told Jimmy for a joke.”

Emma raised her eyebrows. “Theonia, would you care to comment?”

“Indeed I should. I’d like Mr. Sharpless to explain why, if he thought Miss Green’s story was merely a joke, he took pains to memorize the combination and write it down for Jimmy Sorpende to bring here with him.”

Vincent boiled over. “And I’d like to ask you, Mrs. Brooks, how you knew Sorpende had the combination with him.”

“I didn’t,” Theonia replied with one of her Mona Lisa smiles. “I only made the suggestion to see what sort of reaction I’d get. Then you did find the combination.”

“I found a cardboard match folder from a Boston bar with some numbers written on the inside when I went through his pockets trying to find out who he was. I gave it to Lowell when he took the body ashore.”

“And Lowell turned it over to us, as was right and proper.” Deputy MacDuff showed Emma a small plastic envelope that contained a water-soaked remnant with a few figures still readable on it. “Is this the combination, Mrs. Kelling?”

“Yes. I know because it also happens to be Marcia Pence’s telephone number. If you want to try it yourself, I can take you upstairs and show you the safe.”

“Later, maybe. Go ahead, Sharpless. So you killed your girlfriend to shut her mouth about tipping you off to the safe.”

“I didn’t kill her! Cecily was hit on Huntington Avenue outside the art museum at half-past nine on a Wednesday night. I was tending bar at the Gone Goose way the hell and gone over in Dorchester. I didn’t get off duty till one o’clock the next morning. Ask the Boston cops; they’ll tell you. I’ve got an alibi you couldn’t break with a fucking chain saw.”

“Watch your language, Sharpless,” snapped MacDuff. “Where was your friend Sorpende that night?”

“Working at a dog track halfway to Rhode Island. Want me to draw you a map?”

“Never mind, just tell me the name of whoever you and Sorpende were working with.”

“I wasn’t working with anybody! Jimmy was just a guy I happened to meet in a bar, that’s all. Maybe he was working with somebody; I wouldn’t know about that. We weren’t real buddies or anything.”

“Then why did you let him have the combination to Mrs. Sabine’s safe?”

“I told you why.”

“I know what you told me. Now tell me the truth.”

Ted was crumbling around the edges by now. “Jim said he’d make it tough for me if I didn’t,” he growled.

“Make it tough for you how?”

“Aw, I got busted on a D and D and did three months. Jim was going to spread it around that I had a record if I didn’t come across.”

“That so?” said Deputy MacDuff. “According to the bulletin we received a while back, you’ve done two years of a three-year term for aggravated assault with dangerous weapons: namely a pair of hobnailed boots, a knuckle-duster, and a tire iron. You’ve been in violation of your parole since shortly after you were taken in for questioning with regard to the apparent hit-and-run accident that killed Cecily Green of Boston. Speaking of which, how did the Green girl’s father get to know you were a convict? The report says that’s why he’d broken off the connection between you and his daughter. Did Sorpende rat on you after all?”

“I guess so.”

Ted was lying, of course, thought Emma. Mr. Green could have found out easily enough by seeing Ted’s name in the newspaper or asking around the neighborhood barrooms. Jimmy must have had some other hold over Ted; probably there’d been an earlier violation of his parole. Regardless of decorum, she whispered to Theonia, and Theonia nodded.

“Excuse me, Deputy MacDuff,” Emma said. “I have a question. Ted, you said you first met Jimmy Sorpende at a bar. How did that happen? Did somebody introduce you, or what?”

“What difference does it make?”

“Quite a lot, I should think. Please answer my question.”

“Answer her question, Sharpless,” said Deputy MacDuff.

Ted shrugged. “Okay, no big deal. The bar was crowded, see. I was up there ready to order and this guy behind me stuck a five in my hand and asked me to get him a beer. So I did and looked around and he’s over at a table waving to me. So I went over and gave him his beer and he wouldn’t take the change. So I sat down with him and we got to talking, that’s all.”

“That’s what I thought,” said Emma. “What it amounts to is that Jimmy Sorpende picked you up. Could that have been because he already knew you were in fact not a released prisoner but a parolee who could be sent back to jail for consorting with a known felon, namely himself? I don’t suppose you realized then what Jimmy was up to, but I expect you found out fast enough when you’d told him your little tale about Cecily and then balked at giving him the combination to the safe.”

“I didn’t want to get Cecily in trouble.”

“But when it came to the pinch you decided better her than you. You’re a charming fellow, Ted. Did Jimmy Sorpende tell you why he wanted the combination?”

“He told me he knew a guy who’d pay for it, and we could split the money.”

“What would this person have wanted it for?”

“A place to stash something was all I could think of.”

“And how right you were. What was he planning to stash?”

“How should I know? It was none of my business.”

“And did you get your share of the money?”

“Nah. I never laid eyes on him again till he showed up here in that beat-up wet suit.”

“Then how did you know he was at the dog track the night Cecily Green was killed?”

“I heard. See, I’d told the police Jimmy was a friend of hers, so they checked him out. I had to tell them something, didn’t I? They were leaning on me. I figured if I told them she’d found another guy they’d leave me alone. Besides, I—I guess I felt as if I owed Cecily something. She wasn’t a bad kid. Just stupid.”

“In other words, you knew perfectly well Cecily’s death was no accident, and you thought Jimmy must have been responsible. That was why you set the police on him, wasn’t it? You hoped to get enough on him so that he wouldn’t tell on you. Did Cecily actually ever get to meet Jimmy?”

“How do I know? And what difference did it make? They wouldn’t believe Jimmy anyway, and she wasn’t around to say.”

MacDuff shook his head. “You’re a winner, Sharpless. How come you got that bartending job? Since when did bars start hiring convicts?”

“It was only for one night. A guy got sick and they needed somebody in a hurry. The head bartender got hold of my name and called me up, so I said sure.”

“Was the Gone Goose one of your regular hangouts?”

“No, I never went in there before.”

“Then how did the bartender get hold of your name and phone number?”

“I don’t know, he never said.”

“You don’t expect me to believe that, Sharpless.”

“I’m telling you, I don’t know.”

Ted Sharpless was desperately keeping his eyes on his own sneakers, black ones with white stripes along the sides and a small hole over the left big toe. Emma Kelling drew a deep breath.

“That’s all right, Deputy MacDuff. If Ted really doesn’t know, I believe I can help you.”

Really, this being clouted over the head was getting monotonous. Through the pain, Emma could hear the crash of a breaking window and a great deal of shouting. By the time she realized what was causing her temporary blindness and straightened the wig he’d pushed down over her eyes, Joris Groot was through the broken window and off down the path to Shag Rock Point, with almost the entire population of Pocapuk Island pelting after him.

“I
GUESS I STILL HAVE
a lot to learn about building a raft.”

Ruefully did Black John speak and well might he say so. The makeshift raft on which Joris Groot had made his insane attempt to get away from Pocapuk had started to fall apart even before Vincent, Lowell, and the two deputies had collected themselves and gone for the boat. They’d still been too far away to do any good when the last two logs went their separate ways and Groot tried to swim for it. All they’d been able to retrieve was one white-and-blue running shoe, size eleven and one half.

“Cussed fool,” Vincent was fuming, “if he’d had brains enough to grab on to a floatin’ log we’d o’ saved ‘im easy enough.”

“For what?” said Emma. “Groot would have been convicted of grand larceny, criminal assault, manslaughter, and no doubt the deliberate murder of Cecily Green. He’d have spent the rest of his life behind bars drawing pictures of other prisoners’ feet. I suggest you stop blaming yourself for something you couldn’t prevent and fix us all a drink, yourself included, if you can forget for once how things have always been done around here.”

“I’ll get thome thnackth.” Bubbles left the porch to which they’d all automatically gravitated again despite the broken window, but came back empty-handed in a minute or two. “Mithith Kelling, there’th a telephone call for you.”