Say No to Murder

by Nancy Pickard

  “Jenny,” Geof said suddenly, “I want to ask you something.”

  He looked unusually serious, uncharacteristically hesitant.

  No! I thought in a panic. Please don’t ask me!

  “All right,” I said.

  “Which Reich did you believe?”

  I breathed again.

  “He was very convincing, Geof.”

  “So you think he did kill himself out of grief?”

  I dunked a hunk of Italian bread in the drawn butter. Er, margarine. “Well,” I conceded, “he might not have intended to kill himself. But what was his reason for attacking the rest of us, if not grief or revenge or guilt?”

  “But why would she lie about him?” he insisted. He was pushing me into the position of devil’s advocate, as he did with Ailey Mason when they were on a case.

  “Maybe she didn’t lie,” I extemporized. “Maybe she only perceived him differently, through the bitter lens of their marriage.”

  He smiled, but whether at my conclusion or my imagery, I couldn’t tell.

  “Anyway,” I said impatiently, “what difference does it make, Geof? The man is dead, whether by accident or by his own design. Nobody else was hurt. It’s over and done. Right?”

  “I don’t like the unfinished feel of it,” he said slowly. “And I especially don’t like contradictory explanations of violent death.”

  “Violent?” I scoffed. “All things considered, he really went fairly quietly into the bay, Geof. I mean, nobody pushed him.”

  “Neither did he die in his sleep, Jenny.”

  “The problem with you,” I said then, “is that you’re a detective with nothing to detect.”

  He laughed, then ate the last bites of lobster. A few minutes later he said, “Well, we’re having the truck raised, so maybe we’ll find out if it was an accident or if it was suicide. If it looks as if the brakes failed, for instance, we’ll know it was accidental death, and that his wife was right, after all.”

  A thought occurred to me.

  “It could be important for her to be right,” I said.

  “Yes, if there’s insurance.”

  He refilled my glass of wine. We sipped in compatible silence. When I finally broke it, any thoughts of Ansen Reich were far away.

  “I’ll wash,” I said, “if you’ll dry.”

  “You’d think we were married,” he said blandly.

  I suddenly’ discovered a lobster claw that demanded my full and immediate attention.

  Later, in the aft stateroom, we shed our swimsuits and looked ironically at each other in the romantic light of the moon that shone down through the open hatch above the bed.

  “The mind is willing,” Geof said with, a crooked smile that should have been devastatingly irresistible, “but the body is failing.”

  “I know,” I agreed, wearily.

  We stood so close together in the cramped space that it was impossible not to hug, so we did at least take advantage of that opportunity. It was, however, more of a mutual propping up than an embrace.

  I sighed against his chest. “Tonight I feel the hot breath of middle age upon my neck.”

  “That’s not middle age,” he said, “that’s me.”

  We snickered, I into the hair on his chest, he into the hair on top of my head. Our subsequent good-night kiss was more fond than fervid. We collapsed onto opposite sides of the double bed and pulled a single sheet over us.

  His voice roused me from near-sleep.

  “Jenny, do you remember at dinner tonight when I told you I wanted to ask you something?”

  “Sure, hon.”

  “And you know the talk we were going to have this weekend?”

  “Yes.” I hoped he didn’t want to have it now. Our plans had not included this extraordinary day which had drained and exhausted both of us.

  “We probably don’t need to have that talk,” he said. “The look on your face at that moment told me everything I need to know.”

  “Geof . . .”

  “Go to sleep, darling Jenny.”

  “I do love you.”

  But he had turned to the wall. In the dark, his breathing was slow and even.

  chapter

  6

  I, however, could not sleep.

  The moon beamed too brightly through the hatch. Geof breathed too raggedly. The boat rocked instead of rolled. My eyes remained wide open like windows propped up on an otherwise sagging house. I was so tired my head hurt. Still, I couldn’t sleep. Instead, my mind insisted on reliving the terrifying moment of my plunge into Liberty Harbor Bay. From there, the synapses snapped back into a family room where giants quaffed iced tea from monstrous mugs. Then my thoughts jumped back to the man in bed beside me and feelings of frustration swept remembered fear out to sea.

  Again, I leaped into the bay.

  Back to Annie Reich’s house.

  To wed, or merely to bed?

  Quietly, I removed the sheet from my body. I swung my bare legs over the side of the bed. Rising slowly from the mattress to avoid squeaks, I looked back at Geof to be sure I did not wake him. At least one of us should get some rest on this long hot night.

  Still nude, I climbed the steps to the main deck. In the galley, I mixed myself a weak bourbon-and-water, no ice, thinking it might have the soporific effect of a glass of warm milk.

  With the nightcap to keep me company, I climbed the ladder to the bridge. I lay on the deck, rested the glass on my bare stomach and stared up at the stars in the Massachusetts sky, intending to meditate myself to sleep. I tried to manage a sip from the drink. It spilled down my bare chest.

  “Damn.”

  I sat up precipitously.

  So much for meditation under the starry night sky. Anyway, I felt itchy, as if I could ran for miles.

  “All right,” I finally said to myself, “why not?”

  The night was clear, I knew this coastline well by day or night, so why not move? Within minutes, I had the anchor raised and the engines going.

  The act of having to concentrate on running the boat relaxed me as nothing else had been able to do. By the time I puttered around the third cove into Liberty Harbor Bay, I was loose-limbed and vaguely content with the universe once more.

  I rang the ship’s bell.

  “Two o’clock and all’s swell!” I sang out into the night, and laughed. The boat and I were buoyant. She responded easily to my direction, though she rolled a bit as trawlers will. I braced my feet wide and grasped the wheel firmly to hold her steady. I was still naked as a fish.

  I throttled back still more, with the idea of anchoring just off-shore, out of traffic. On land, straight ahead, the renovation project was outlined against the sky like a stick city, all steel beams and tall cranes.

  It was beautiful, this natural harbor that was spread out before me; it was man who’d ruined it, one man in particular. I remembered old Lobster McGee, gone now two lobstering seasons after a drowning at sea, but only from the surly distance he had imposed between himself and the rest of the world. There’d been a nephew once who went lobstering with his cantankerous uncle, but the kid died in Vietnam. After that, Lobster let his stretch of bayfront property go to hell so that anyone with a sense of smell avoided his harbor, probably just as he wanted. We’d see him now and then at The Buoy, our local pub, standing apart from the other fishermen, drinking his draw in malevolent solitude. During the lobstering seasons, he’d looked healthy and strong as if the very work enlarged him; but in the off seasons, he’d seemed to shrink, his barrel chest caving in, his girth melting as if, like his lobsters, he’d shed his shell. It made him no more friendly, however, if anything, less so.

  He was a character all right, the sort who gets whitewashed into legends. The Coast Guard had towed his boat home when they found it floating without him. Now it bobbed at one of the new docks, waiting to be turned into a display for posterity. Lobster would definitely have puked.

  From my vantage point on the Amy Denise, I surveyed the property h
is heirs had sold to the developers. To starboard was his three-story house which would be transformed into a cultural center. Rumor had it that when Lobster’s bedroom was opened, all the first visitors found there were dirty clothes, massive walnut furniture, a week’s worth of newspapers, a telescope turned appropriately to the sea and three hundred and forty-two paperbags from McDonald’s. Soon that remarkable bedroom would be a pictorial gallery of the history of fishing in the Northeast. It had been suggested that we bronze one of the moldy french fries and display it with, a commemorative plaque, but our committee vetoed the idea.

  To port of the old house, and directly below lover’s leap, was the old man’s lobster pound which was actually just a small, saltwater pond which the old man had probably not drained and cleaned for all the forty years he’d lived there. Now it belonged to Pete and Betty Tower, who would use it to store fresh lobsters for their café. At the moment, however, they were continuing Lobster’s habit of keeping shedders—lobsters which are growing new shells—in it. Shedders have to be fed a regular diet of fish parts, thus adding to the unappetizing stew—and the stench on hot days.

  Past the pound and the site of the French café, a shipbuilding school was going up, and a three-story mall that was the heart of the project. In Webster Helms’ architectural renderings, the mall was a charming, old-fashioned marketplace that was alive with colors, sounds and fabulous aromas. We on the committee hoped the primary color would be green, with an occasional flash of American Express gold and platinum, and the principal sound would be, “Yes, I’ll take it.”

  I nosed the Amy Denise into the breeze that was wafting down from lover’s leap.

  A shooting star fell. It was achingly lovely, a glow of reddish white against a navy sky, arching over the construction site so it seemed to fall into the sea. I imagined a sizzle, and laughed at my fantasy.

  Quickly, another star descended, then another. I realized I was going to be privileged to witness a meteor shower. A strong gust of wind down from the hills brought the falling stars even closer, so they flared like fire coming toward me.

  “Oh my God.”

  The “shooting star” landed with a crackle on a canvas deck chair. The evening paper on the seat of the chair burst into flames.

  “Oh my God!”

  There was nothing on hand to smother the fire; we’d taken our towels below. Flaming bits of paper were floating in the wind, being carried dangerously about the deck. In a very few moments, I would have a monstrous problem on my very bare hands.

  “Geof!” I screamed, then more usefully, “Fire!”

  I ran to the controls on the bridge, looking for a fire extinguisher, but when I found it I had to stop to read the directions. The absurdity of it all nearly undid me. It was difficult to read in the darkness that was fitfully lit by fire. When I finally figured things out, I aimed the extinguisher at the bonfire on the seat of the deck chair.

  Nothing happened.

  Then with a whoosh, foam gushed out of the extinguisher. After dousing the chair, I turned the foam onto the other spreading circles of fire. In mercifully quick order, my days as a firefighter were successfully ended.

  I dropped the empty extinguisher to the deck.

  Geof plunged, late and bare-assed, over the top of the ladder. “What the hell happened?” He stared at me, then all around me at the ashtray the bridge had become.

  I took a deep breath, then let it out very slowly. “Where’s your Dalmation?” I said shakily.

  But his gaze had been diverted to the shore.

  I turned to stare, too.

  At the project, the architect’s shack was blazing like an autumn bonfire. And what was left of the rickety old pier that Reich had plunged off was ablaze as well.

  I looked up at lover’s leap with a whole new perspective on the wonders of nature. The “meteor shower” had stopped. Somebody had taken his rag-tipped, kerosene-soaked arrows and gone home.

  “Are you all right?” Geof said.

  “Yes, no thanks to Robin Flaming Hood.”

  Lights—electric ones—began to glow at the project.

  “Discretion being the better part of valor,” Geof said, “we’d better get dressed. You sure you’re all right?” When I nodded, he said, “Can you get to a phone on shore?”

  “I suppose the private guards will let me use the phone in Goose Shattuck’s office. Why?”

  “I want you to call Shattuck and get him down here.”

  Half an hour later, I did call him.

  “Goose.” I was perched on a comer of his desk. “This is Jennifer Cain. I’m sorry to disturb you at this hour, but there’s been some trouble at the harbor. Somebody has set fire to Webster Helms’ shack, and there’s some other minor fire damage as well. Can you get dressed and come on down here?”

  He uttered a remarkably imaginative curse. Then he said, sounding wide awake for that hour, “I’m already dressed, but I can’t get there from here, Miss Jenny. Some son-of-a-bitch has slashed all the tires on all the vehicles I own: my pickup; the Caddy; my wife’s car, my daughter’s minibike, for Christ’s sake. What the hell’s going on, Jenny? Huh?” His voice rose to a roar that would wake his neighbors. “My foreman’s dead. Somebody immobilizes me. Now you tell me they’ve tried to burn me out. What the hell is going on, Jenny!”

  I couldn’t tell him.

  chapter

  7

  Through the night and early morning, the cops sifted through the ashes for metal tips and bits of arrows. They searched lover’s leap for the evidence they didn’t really hope to find: footprints, tire prints, dropped belongings. The archer had been neat and careful, sweeping his tracks with a broom of pine needles.

  “Nothing,” Geof paused long enough to say about 4 A.M. And then a couple of hours later, “Nothing.”

  “At least he didn’t do real damage,” I said. “The only total loss is the architect’s shack. And Goose can build him another one in the time it takes to nail together a few boards. It’ll probably take him longer to replace his tires.” I peered into the face of the weary policeman who stood before me. “What does all this mean, Geof?”

  “Beats the hell out of me.” He shrugged.

  By nine that morning, we were at police headquarters. Nobody seemed to object to the presence of the tall blonde in the red shorts and white T-shirt who was following Detective Bushfield around the station, so I remained with him.

  After bad coffee and worse doughnuts, we dropped off Geof’s collection of ashes and burnt arrowheads at the evidence room, then walked two flights down to the police garage.

  My rubber thongs flapped noisily against my heels.

  Geof was even more out of uniform, even for a plain-clothes cop. He wore the only clothes he’d taken aboard the Amy Denise: yellow boxer swim trunks, a Mexican shirt that hung loose to his hip bones and ratty old deck shoes. He would have looked more at home doing undercover drug work in Cancun.

  When we walked into the garage, a black face appeared from under Ansen Reich’s pickup truck which was up on a hydraulic lift.

  “Detective,” said the young mechanic, and flashed a shy smile at me. He dived back under the truck as if further conversation was too much for him.

  “Belzer,” Geof replied. I decided that was the fellow’s last name, and not some arcane police greeting. He said to me, “You sure you want to stay, Jenny? This could take a good long while.”

  “I’m sure.” I opened the door of a 1952 two-tone blue Chevy and sat on the front seat. Geof followed me and leaned against the car’s back window.

  “Wonderful old car,” I remarked, killing time. I stroked the cloth shoulder of its front seat. “What’s it in for?”

  Geof smiled. “It was an accessory to a felony. Claims not to have known why it was waiting at the curb when the liquor store was robbed. We’re hoping it will turn state’s evidence.”

  I patted the car’s dashboard. “Well, be gentle with her. With an understanding judge and a good probation officer
, she might yet be rehabilitated.”

  The mechanic appeared again. This time, with an air of finality and satisfaction, he wiped his hands on a grease rag.

  “You can’t be done,” Geof objected. “You just got started.”

  “I’m finished.” Belzer spoke so softly I had to strain to hear him. “It’s the brakes.”

  Geof gave me a knowing look, and said, “Failed?”

  “You could” say that,” Belzer replied, and smiled at the floor. “You better look at ’em.”

  Geof examined the car where the mechanic told him to. When he looked back at Belzer, both pairs of police eyes held knowing expressions. “I’ll be damned,” Geof breathed. “So that’s how it was, Belzer. Jenny, come look at this.”

  I looked where he pointed.

  “What am I looking at?” I said, feeling abysmally ignorant.

  “The brake line,” Geof said.

  “There’s a hole in it,” I observed.

  “All his brake fluid drained out of that hole, Jenny,” Geof said. “That’s why his brakes went out on him.”

  I peered more closely at the aperture, then caught my breath.

  “Yes,” Geof said. “It was cut.”

  I came out from, under the car and stared at the two men. “You’re saying somebody did this on purpose, that he died because somebody tampered with his brakes and they failed just when he was driving down that hill toward the ocean. But there’s no way somebody could know that would happen, is there? I mean, how would the person who did it know the brake fluid would all run out just when Reich happened to be on a hill which just happened to lead to the bay? It’s not possible to predict a thing like that, is it? It seems to me those brakes might have failed at any time, not just at that one particular time. Hell, Geof, they might have gone out on him at a stop sign, or when he was driving on a flat road, or even in his own driveway. Isn’t that true?”