Deadly Valentine

by Carolyn G. Hart

  “It broke Bradley’s heart. And I know it was Colville’s fault. He was such a hateful man, so jealous of anyone with true ability. Yes, I would like for the world to know what Colville Houghton is really like. And I can tell you.” Hatred rough-edged her voice. “I certainly can.”

  “The bitch. I knew she was a bitch.” Carleton glared at Annie defiantly. “I screwed her when I was a senior in high school. How do you think I felt when Dad said he was going to marry her?”

  Annie felt a sudden sympathy for this angry, immature man. Lousy, that’s how he must have felt. At the same time, she felt ever more sorry for Sydney, who so desperately sought reassurance from increasingly evanescent encounters.

  Carleton paced beneath the portraits. “Shit, I should have told him then. But I didn’t. And he probably wouldn’t have listened any better than he did—” He broke off abruptly.

  Some logic problems Annie could solve. Carleton hadn’t told his father about his sexual experience with Sydney before Howard married her. But he had tried to tell him at some time. When?

  “You tried to tell him Tuesday night.” Her tone wasn’t accusatory, merely thoughtful.

  He stood stiffly beneath the portraits of his parents. Where his mother was gentle and lovely, he was weak and too delicately handsome. Where his father was forceful and determined, he was obstinate. “Hell, no. I never told him.”

  He and Annie both knew he was lying.

  That made Howard’s decision to divorce Sydney even more understandable.

  But it also added to Howard’s reasons for anger with Sydney.

  “Your dad must have been really upset Tuesday night.”

  “He finally saw her for what she was. A slut. And it got him, all right. But, dammit, he didn’t deserve any better. How could he have put a woman like that in my mother’s house? In my mother’s bed?” Rage shook his voice.

  “Your mother is dead,” Annie said coolly.

  “Yeah.” The anger was gone, replaced by weariness.

  “And so is Sydney,” she added deliberately.

  They stared at each other for a long moment, her eyes questioning, his wary.

  “I didn’t do it,” he said sullenly. “I hated her, but I didn’t do it.”

  Annie studied him, then nodded. “All right. You say you didn’t do it. And, if I’m right and your father is trying to protect you, that means he’s innocent. So who does that leave?”

  “How the hell should I know?” he snapped.

  Annie was tempted to say, “Hey, jerk, if you can’t put your mind together to help your father, who the hell do you expect to do it?”

  With an effort of will, comparable, at least in her own mind, to Miss Marple’s restraint in dealing with Inspector Slack, she said in a reasonable tone, “Carleton, if you didn’t do it and your dad didn’t, it means someone else within this compound committed the murder. Now, I want you to tell me exactly what happened after the party was over.”

  Mrs. Crawford knew enough to put Max on the right track. It took another half-dozen calls before he had the whole story. And an ugly one it was.

  A cloud of yellow pine pollen swirled on the afternoon breeze. Annie sneezed. It would take a nonallergic foursome to play tennis at this time of year on the Cahills’ secluded court, screened by pines on all four sides. She had retraced Carleton’s path from the library the night of the murder. Another path angled from the tennis court to the gazebo and yet a third ran straight to the lagoon.

  She quickly followed the track from the court to the gazebo. It snaked through dense woodland and she understood better Carleton’s impatience with her demand to know what he had seen that night.

  Damn little, she realized, just as he had claimed.

  She stopped by the gazebo, off limits behind yellow police tape marking it as a crime scene, and turned toward the lagoon. Shading her eyes, she saw a uniformed deputy in a boat peering into the murky water.

  The water swirled, and a masked scuba diver surfaced. “I’ve got it. I’ve got it!” A gloved hand broke through the surface of the water, and the sunlight glinted on wickedly sharp metal spikes.

  Another nail in Howard Cahill’s coffin.

  But she wasn’t giving up yet.

  Although, as she slipped along the shaded path, passing her own house, heading for the next, she wasn’t altogether sure the coffin didn’t fit.

  But she couldn’t let Laurel down.

  Eleven

  THE GRAHAM HOUSE always made Annie think of Emporia, Kansas gone mad. The two-story white frame sported so much Victorian trim that one local carpenter had retired from his earnings and moved to Key West. Annie wasn’t sure how to describe the two-story protrusion which bulged in front; it was emphatically more than a bay window. In addition, a massive cupola topped the third-floor sun deck. Overall, the house had a decidedly pregnant look. However, despite its pretensions, the porched structure, complete with cane-bottom rockers, had a certain dandyish charm. She climbed up the steps, passed the Victorian bulge, and reached the front door, which was tucked in the back of the porch.

  Lisa Graham, dressed for tennis, answered Annie’s knock. The dentist’s wife was about Annie’s height, a little older, with—and Annie was proud of her own honesty—a tad better figure, more and riper curves. Her tennis dress, beige with red trim, clung to her like Bertha Cool to a retainer. She had a pleasant face, round and unlined, with widely spaced brown eyes and a firm chin. But her welcoming smile, as she recognized her visitor, slipped sideways like Sergeant Buck encountering Leslie Ford’s Grace Latham.

  “Hi, Annie.” Lisa was too well bred to evince overt surprise, but this was not a kaffeeklatsch neighborhood at any time, much less at close to three o’clock on a Wednesday afternoon. Moreover, though she and Annie knew each other—they’d worked on the community fund drive last fall—they were by no means friends on a drop-in basis.

  “Are you on your way to the club?” Annie asked. “I don’t want to delay you.”

  “No. Just got back. Played doubles. What can I do for you?” Her tone was pleasant, but just impersonal enough to indicate that a quick goodbye was in order, given the chance.

  Annie had her story ready.

  “It’s the crime,” she said with apparent frankness. “Sydney’s murder. Max and I are worried about neighborhood security. I’m canvassing everyone, and Max is talking to Chief Saulter about further safety measures. So, if I could just have a minute of your time—”

  At Annie’s mention of the murder, Lisa’s tanned face suddenly became as smooth and unreadable as the artfully schooled visage Carmen Sternwood turned to the world in The Big Sleep. But Lisa’s left hand, which could grip a tennis racket so expertly, tightened on the door frame until the knuckles ridged the skin.

  “Security,” she repeated blankly.

  Annie stepped into the hall, as if confident of her welcome, chattering vacuously, “Time for us to stick together. Such a surprise. Of course, I didn’t know Sydney very well, but it seems to me the implication is clear that she was meeting someone there. Can’t imagine who.”

  Lisa stiffened, and she looked sharply at Annie.

  Lord Peter himself could not have nattered on more innocuously. “Max thinks there must be some other way of getting into the compound. We wondered if you and George had ever seen any strangers around. We both agree”—should she cross her fingers?—“that it’s absurd to suspect Howard. So, it’s up to the neighborhood to come up with anything that can be helpful.”

  Moving as she spoke, Annie brushed past Lisa and headed for the living room.

  Lisa, after hesitating at the door, finally closed it and followed.

  Annie paused in the archway that opened into the living room. “Oh, Lisa, what a perfectly lovely room.”

  It was a vision of light and space. Overstuffed pastel furniture, in two distinct groupings, offered a pastoral view of the pinewoods through enormous floor-to-ceiling windows. Ferns spouted from hanging baskets and from earthenware pots. Cont
emporary paintings, vivid with splashes of topaz, burnt orange, and cherry, hung on three walls. There wasn’t a single piece of Victoriana in sight, despite the ornate scoria moldings on the ceiling. Maybe it was George’s first wife who had been rapturous over the 1890s. Lisa could redecorate as much as she wished, but nothing could be done about the Victorian exterior of this house.

  Annie dropped into a voluptuously comfortable two-seat couch. “Whew, does this feel good. It’s hot this afternoon. I’m parched.”

  The response, as Annie had calculated, was automatic. Lisa was a thoughtful hostess. “Would you care for a drink? Gin and tonic? Coke? Iced tea?”

  “Tea would be wonderful.”

  “Of course. I’ll be right back.”

  Alone, Annie popped to her feet and prowled, seeking a better insight into her neighbors’ lives. But even Sherlock Holmes would have been stymied by this impersonal room, luxurious but uncluttered. No family photos. No obvious mementos. She knew no more when she finished her circuit of the room than when she began. It bespoke money and quiet good taste, no more.

  Footsteps sounded in the hall. Annie sped back to her seat. Lisa entered with a tray, tall crystal glasses filled with ice and tea and generous sprigs of mint.

  “Sugar?”

  “No, thanks.”

  Now, safely ensconced as a guest, Annie set to work.

  Sitting opposite her, perched stiffly on the very edge of a huge ottoman, Lisa fielded questions cautiously. According to her, the Grahams had known the Cahills for several years, but only casually. (Annie forbore to point out that George and Sydney’s embrace in the alcove at the Valentine party had not been casual.)

  Lisa forced a social smile. “We happened to get married the same year. But we didn’t have much else in common.”

  “Did George have this house when you married?” Annie asked innocently. Lisa’s nod confirmed her hunch. She wondered idly what had happened to all the Victorian furniture.

  “Didn’t George and Sydney play tennis sometimes?”

  Lisa’s eyes narrowed, like a cat’s pupils subjected to harsh light. “Who told you that?”

  Annie gazed at her blandly. “I thought I saw them together a couple of times when Max and I were playing.”

  Lisa yanked off her red towel sweatband with a little more force than was necessary. Her curly brown hair popped forward, and she brushed it back. “Oh,” she said carelessly, “I suppose so. You know how casual everything is at the club. A lot of pick-up games on Saturdays.”

  That’s probably exactly the kind of games that ensued. Annie wasn’t thinking tennis. “Didn’t he ever mention playing with her?”

  Lisa’s smile was controlled and distant. “Probably. In one ear and out the other when it isn’t important.”

  Annie sipped her tea, and the aromatic mint tickled her nose. “Did you ever hear any gossip linking Sydney with anyone?”

  Again Lisa gave Annie a probing glance, but Annie maintained her bland, friendly expression.

  It was obvious to Annie that Lisa could unload on Sydney like Paul Drake reporting to Perry Mason.

  Annie read it in the angry glint of Lisa’s eyes, the tightening of her coral lips.

  But she didn’t.

  That’s when Annie decided Lisa had indeed seen her husband’s embrace of Sydney at the party.

  Lisa tossed her head, her dark curls quivering. “I really scarcely knew her.”

  “Oh.” Annie sighed gustily. “Then you can’t help us out in that direction. But you and George and Joel were at the Valentine party?”

  “They invited all the neighbors,” Lisa said quickly.

  “Oh, of course. Did you happen to notice Sydney that night, who she talked to, that kind of thing?”

  “She was like a cat in heat, rubbing up to every man in the place,” Lisa snapped.

  In Annie’s experience, it was the toms who came after the tabbies, but she decided it might be damping to disagree, so she listened, with a mental apology to Agatha and Dorothy L.

  Her eyes flashing, Lisa spewed the names of Sydney’s dance partners, who at one point or another included an island lawyer, the druggist, a pediatrician, the visiting tennis player, and—much more to the point if Lisa realized it—compound resident Buck Burger. Lisa, of course, didn’t mention her own husband or Annie’s, though quite obviously she hadn’t missed Sydney’s sultry attentions to them Tuesday night. And she didn’t mention Joel. An oversight? Did she consider it too unimportant—or too important?

  “She might as well have waved a flag that said Take me,” Lisa said bitterly. “She was absolutely—”

  It was then that Annie saw the shoe in the window. Although, of course, it wasn’t actually a shoe in the window. It was a reflection. Annie faced the windows. Lisa could see neither that particular window nor the portion of the hall it reflected. As delicately as Georges Simenon’s Inspector Maigret absorbs atmosphere, Annie shifted millimeter by millimeter until her peripheral vision encompassed the archway opening into the hall.

  The tip of a scuffed sneaker was just visible in the archway. Someone was listening to their conversation, to Lisa’s denunciation of Sydney’s actions on the last night of her life.

  “—out of control!” Lisa paused, her cheeks crimson.

  “I felt that, too.” Annie leaned forward confidentially. “You know, she must have had some real problems.” The shoe didn’t move.

  “That woman’s only problem was a bad case of nymphomania.”

  Annie was careful not to remind Lisa that she had begun their little chat by pretending absolute ignorance of Sydney’s activities. It was amazing what a little discretion could net by way of revelations. Annie was sure that if she had started off by asking about George and Sydney’s clinch in the alcove, she wouldn’t have learned a thing. She made a mental note to remind Max how much one could learn about human nature from reading mysteries.

  Lisa abruptly recalled herself. She picked up her half-full glass of iced tea and drank. She added another spoonful of sugar and sipped again before saying, her voice once more perfectly controlled, “Of course, that’s what it looked like, that night. I don’t know anything firsthand.”

  “Perhaps it was one of those men who met her in the gazebo,” Annie said brightly. “Now, this is so critical. Did you and George hear anything—any kind of disturbance that night? Do you think anyone could have trespassed on your property?”

  Lisa paused, the glass midway to her lips. Then, slowly and deliberately, she drank the rest of her iced tea.

  Annie tried hard not to come to attention, like a bird dog on point. Lisa was stalling. Why? Had they heard something? Why did that question alarm her?

  Lisa placed the glass precisely on its coaster. “That night?” Her effort to be casual rang as false as Mike Hammer sipping a sherry. “Oh, I don’t think we would have heard anything—if there was anything to hear. And she wasn’t shot, was she? We watched a movie. You know how it is sometimes when you get in from a party. It’s hard to unwind.”

  Hard to unwind? Annie plummeted into sleep like John Putnam Thatcher welcoming a balance sheet. With alacrity.

  “Of course,” Annie replied insincerely. “Max and I love movies, too.” She didn’t add that her favorites were made before 1940. She was nutty about Woman in the Dark, based on the Dashiell Hammett short story and Jamaica Inn, drawn from the 1936 Daphne du Maurier novel. “What did you watch?”

  It was painful to see Lisa try to come up with a name. “Oh, one of the police academy ones,” she said finally.

  Sure, Annie thought, and I’m a little green man from Mars, too.

  “They’re so noisy,” Lisa said with more assurance.

  “Have you heard anything strange on other nights?”

  “Oh no, no. It’s awfully quiet out here.” She was completely at ease now, her hands loose in her lap.

  So her tension was directly connected with Tuesday night. What had happened in this house on Tuesday night? Annie was willing to bet a
first edition (very fine) of James M. Cain’s The Postman Always Rings Twice, worth a cool fifteen hundred dollars, that it wasn’t a private viewing of Police Academy number whatever.

  “You can’t think of anything that would be helpful in the investigation?”

  Lisa’s apologetic shrug was perfect. “But you know”—and her voice reflected increasing confidence—“we’re so far away from the Cahills. I’d certainly help if I could. Such a dreadful thing to happen. And Howard’s so nice.”

  The shoe in the hall lifted, rubbed against an ankle encased in a thick white sock.

  Annie had a good idea who lurked out there.

  She lifted her voice just a little. “I don’t suppose it’s true, but I did happen to hear someone say they saw Sydney with Joel at the club recently.”

  “Joel.” His stepmother’s tone was thoughtful.

  Annie waited patiently, giving her every opportunity to mention the interlude both she and Lisa had observed at the Valentine dance.

  “Oh, it would have been a tennis game, something like that,” Lisa said finally. “Joel scarcely knew her.” She glanced at her watch. “I’m sorry, Annie, but I have some things to do …”

  Annie rose. “Of course, it’s getting late. Thanks for talking to me. If you think of anything that might help—or if any noise that night comes to you—just give me a call.”

  The shoes in the hall were gone.

  When they reached the door, Annie paused. “Do you suppose Joel’s home from school yet? Perhaps he heard something that night …” She let it hang.

  “Oh,” Lisa’s reply was careless. “I doubt it. Joel’s always listening to that hideous loud music. But you can ask him. He has the quarters out on top of the garage. Because of the music. It drives George crazy. If Joel’s jeep is at the end of the drive, he’s home.”