Say No to Murder

by Nancy Pickard

  She shifted in her chair, as if moving into another gear. It must have been from park to first, because it sure wasn’t overdrive.

  “Then a couple of years ago, after Ansen had been back from Vietnam for years, and we were living in Springfield, he ran into McGee again. Knew who he was right away. Atheneum tried to pretend it was all a mistake, that he’d been taken prisoner, and only barely managed to escape with his life. But Ansen figured it out, and McGee finally admitted the truth and begged him not to turn him in to the army.” She shrugged. “Ansen wouldn’t have done that anyway. What did he care? Why would he do that?”

  I said, “So then your husband took the job here, at Liberty Harbor. And when he got here, he heard the story about how the property used to belong to a man named Lobster McGee.”

  “Yes.” She wet her lips. “It was easy after that. I mean, Ansen knew McGee’s family was from around these parts, so he figured Atheneum might be a relative of the old guy. So he went back to Springfield and looked him up and told him about his great-uncle’s death. And the estate. Ansen said he’d back Atheneum’s story about Vietnam if Atheneum would give us a percent of his inheritance.”

  Geof stirred to life on the couch. “So when your husband died, you took up the cause, is that right, Mrs. Reich?” His voice was blank, devoid of judgment.

  “Of course,” she said, and a look of vexation crossed her broad features. Both men had failed her, and she was annoyed. I was trying to hold on to my sympathy for her, but it was a losing battle.

  I snapped my fingers. “That’s what he meant, Geof! When Reich came to my office, he talked about some power I couldn’t fight! I thought he was threatening to vandalize the project, but it wasn’t that at all. He was talking about the power that Atheneum McGee had, as a rightful heir, to halt the construction of the project!” But then I turned back to her. “Why did he bother with that charade, Mrs. Reich? Why did he pretend to threaten us because of the death of your son?”

  She sighed, as at a boy’s antics. “Ansen said we were going to have to live here, and he had to keep his job until Atheneum’s inheritance came through. Ansen didn’t want people to think we were after the money because of greed. So when Philly died, he saw a chance to make it look as if he was a grief-stricken father who was acting out of revenge. He thought people would be sympathetic to us, that he could keep his job that way.”

  “But Mrs. Reich,” I said, “if Atheneum had brought an injunction to halt the work, your husband would have been out of a job anyway.”

  “Oh no. My husband just wanted Atheneum to sue his relatives. It was my idea to sue the town and everybody else we could. Ansen was already dead, you see.” That smirk of a smile appeared again. “He couldn’t lose his job, could he? He was such a fool, Ansen was, caring about appearances the way he did.”

  Ailey Mason, who had been silent up until then, looked insultingly around the dirty room. He had long before set down his glass of iced tea as if he didn’t want to drink anything she had touched. He said, “You don’t care about appearances, do you?”

  “They won’t buy me a condominium in Florida,” she said tartly, then faced Geof. “I earned a share of that money. It’s still mine. I want it.”

  Geof stood to go. Looking straight into her blue raisin eyes, he said quietly, “You don’t have anything coming to you, and if you did you’d have to climb over me to get it. If I could find charges worth bringing against you, I’d do it, but it’s not worth the time and expense. You haven’t asked a single question about McGee’s murder. Aren’t you interested at all?”

  She stared dully back at him, resentment pinching the doughy face. “What good does he do me dead? What good do any of them do me dead?”

  We left her there, in her own mess.

  chapter

  18

  Instead of returning to the police station, Geof invited Ailey home with us. We fixed strong coffee, then retired to the redwood deck that was attached to the back of the house. It was too muggy to enjoy being outside, but it beat sitting on the floor in the living room. Wife Number Two, Melissa, had taken her furniture with her. Geof, expecting to sell faster than his realtor could manage, never replaced it. There were two kitchen stools, enough furniture for one bedroom and a few patio chairs.

  Ailey, Geof and I chose the latter. We had to talk quietly. It was one of those subdivisions in which large houses are jammed as close together as apartments and in which trees are considered natural enemies to that friend of civilization, the bulldozer.

  “The course to take now,” Geof told us, “is to concentrate on the points of connection between McGee and Reich. They were members of the same platoon in Nam.” He ticked the points off on his angers. “They were connected, whether purposely or not, by Reich’s scheme for going AWOL. Connected by their pursuit of a share of Lobster’s estate; by having lived in Springfield, Illinois; and now by murder. Anything I’ve missed?”

  His investigative subordinates shook their heads.

  “All right,” he continued. “We should be able to draw lines between all those points of connection and make a picture out of it. Now”—he shifted in the webbed chair—“what about the fire at the harbor, and the vandalism of Goose Shattuck’s property? What about the charges of racism, and Webster Helms’ idea that somebody is trying to prevent the construction of Liberty Harbor? Are those connections we should include in our picture?”

  Mason leaned forward and spoke carefully. “You always tell me to keep my eye on the ball. And it looks like the ball we need to watch is murder. Not arson, not vandalism. They might be connected to the murders, but they might not. I think I’d keep my eye on those points you listed, the ones between the two men who were killed,” He looked up quickly, then back down at the redwood floor.

  “It would be different,” I contributed, “if it were only the members of my committee who might have killed Atheneum. That would seem to connect the whole thing irrefutably to Liberty Harbor. But that second door opens to . . . practically anybody.”

  “It’s important to keep in mind,” Geof said, “that Reich’s murder may have been an accident. At least in the sense that the person who tampered with his brakes had no way of knowing for sure it would kill him.”

  Mason snorted. “You can’t say the same about McGee’s death.”

  We had not turned on the deck lights, but in the darkness I could sense Geof’s smile, “No, It’s unlikely that somebody tripped into McGee’s back with that cross.”

  “The cross was in the sanctuary, right?” asked Mason.

  “Propped against the pulpit,” Geof replied.

  “Against the back of the pulpit,” I reminded him. “When Barbara got up to speak, she moved it there, remember? So it was kind of out of sight, I guess somebody came in, picked it up, then walked into the choir room. How many ways are there into the sanctuary?”

  “How many petals in a peony?” Geof said gloomily. The figure of speech was so unlikely for the man that Mason and I exchanged glances and laughed. Again, I sensed Geof’s smile in the shadows. He said, “One double door to the center aisle, two side doors to the side aisles, the choir room door, a backdoor for the organist, a side door on the west wall for latecomers to the service, and for all I know a trapdoor under the pulpit and a stairway to heaven in the roof.”

  “There’s another possibility,” I said slowly, having just thought of it. “We’re assuming the murderer came into the sanctuary from outside, picked up the cross, then entered the choir room. Isn’t it also possible that he went into the sanctuary from the choir room and then returned to it?”

  “Yes,” Geof said, “it is.”

  “Can I have some more coffee?” Ailey inquired.

  “Help yourself,” I suggested, and he got up from his chair to do that. “Why don’t you bring the pot back with you, Ailey, and we’ll plug it in out here?”

  When he was gone from the deck, Geof said softly, “I’ll have to go back to the station tonight.”

 
“I know.”

  “It’s been a long time, Jenny.”

  “I know that, too.”

  “Somehow,” he said, “it seems morally indefensible that murder should take precedence over making love to the one I love.”

  “There’s your motive.” I got up and walked over to him in the darkness. “Somebody wants to keep us apart.” I leaned down to kiss the top of his head, then his forehead, then the bridge of his nose, the space between his nose and his upper lip, one cheek, the other cheek, the point of his chin . . .

  He grabbed my face in both of his hands and placed my lips, finally, on his. “Tease,” he whispered. “You’re such a tease.” He pulled me down on his lap. My back pressed uncomfortably against the metal armrests of the patio chair. “Don’t tease me about love and marriage, Jenny.”

  “I wouldn’t do that.”

  “Make up your mind, please. We’ve had our experiment in living together without benefit of matrimony. And it’s been fun, all right, but so are amusement parks and I wouldn’t want to live in one. Even this place . . .”—his arm swept the deck—“it’s just a halfway house between my last wife and you.”

  “I thought we weren’t going to talk about this yet.”

  “How can I buy furniture until I know if you’re going to sit in it, too? I want to go shopping for furniture, for God’s sake, with you! I want to get the hell out of this temporary shelter for the inadvertently single and . . .”

  “My state of singleness is not entirely inadvertent, Geof. Neither, I think you would admit, is yours.”

  “Don’t interrupt me when I’m twisting the facts to my own purpose.” He kissed a curve of my neck, sending goosebumps down to my groin. “I want a third chance at marriage, Jenny. Just think how you’ll benefit from all the experience I’ve gained with the first two wives. I made my mistakes with them, and God, knows they corrected a multitude of my faults. You can have me as I am now . . . perfect.”

  I giggled.

  “Kiss me there again, please,” I requested.

  He did, murmuring into my clavicle, “I want to move out of this house and into a house of our own.”

  “Ted’s your realtor,” I said gently. “You’d better talk to him about that. It’s not my indecision that keeps this house on the market.”

  “Come on, Jenny.” Suddenly he was impatient. “We can afford to support two houses if we have to; hell! at one time I was paying the mortgage on this one, and part of the rent for both Melissa and Roberta.”

  “Oh Geof, that’s the most depressing thing you’ve ever said. If I were your sister instead of your lover, and I told you I wanted to marry a man who was twice divorced, what would you say to me?”

  “Talk about depressing,” he said, and slumped back in the chair. His grip on me loosened, as if the tension had evaporated from his muscles.

  His beeper broke the silence.

  I jumped off his lap so he could get to the damned thing.

  “Ailey,” he called. The young detective came through the back door with the coffee pot in one hand and his own mug in the other. “Call the station, will you, Ailey? See what they want from me.”

  Mason wheeled again, taking pot and mug with him.

  I reclaimed my chair.

  We sat in the darkness waiting for Ailey. It was not a particularly companionable silence.

  “Geof.” Ailey had forgotten to lower his voice. “They’ve got him! Those damned vigilantes have caught somebody vandalizing the harbor! It might be our man.”

  Geof rose quickly and made for the door.

  “Uh.” Mason blocked his way into the lighted kitchen. “We have to take her.”

  “Me?”

  “Jenny?”

  “Yeah.” Even in the dim light from the kitchen I could see the suspicion in Mason’s eyes. “The suspect says he won’t talk to anybody until he sees Jennifer Cain.”

  chapter

  19

  “He rowed up to the dock in that little boat.”

  The pretty young policewoman pointed to a Boston whaler that bobbed in the bay, tied to one of the new docks by lines aft and stern. It was identical to every other one of those beloved, sturdy boats; in fact, it struck me as obscene for that symbol of childhood adventure to have been used to commit an adult criminal act, I hung self-consciously back, feeling inexplicably guilty as if the suspect’s insistence on seeing me had linked me to his crime.

  The policewoman was an inch or two shorter than I, but broader, stronger, with a tough-looking body that belied the pleasant sweetness of her round face. Her unlikely name was Ashley Meredith.

  “They caught him sneaking around the construction site,” she was saying to Geof and Ailey. She uttered a short, sharp laugh. “Those damn fool vigilantes damn near killed the son-of-a-gun. The guy who caught him pulled out a gun and fired twice in the air to alert his vigilante pals. You won’t believe this. One bullet hit a steel beam. It ricocheted off that. Hit a loose wood plank. Plank fell down and clobbered the suspect. Knocked him cold on his ass.”

  “Keystone Kops,” Ailey muttered.

  “Well-intentioned citizens,” Geof echoed, “will be the death of themselves. Was the gun registered, Officer Meredith?”

  “Yes,” she said disgustedly. “So next these guys, they slap him awake again, they tie him up with bunge cord . . .”

  “How,” Geof interrupted, “in God’s name do you do that?”

  “I guess it all depends on where you put the hooks,” she said, and grinned. “Anyway, they put him in the contractor’s office over there. And then they finally got around to calling us. Twenty minutes after the fact, mind you. I’ll tell you, sir, they’re so damn smug it makes you want to punch ’em out.”

  “Please,” advised Geof, “don’t.”

  We started moving in the direction of Goose Shattuck’s office, which was really only a battered trailer that had seen many construction sites in its day. The lights had been turned on inside it. A man’s head and torso were silhouetted against a window. His chest looked immense, out of proportion to the sleek head which suggested baldness and which he held stiffly upright as if in defiance or pride. In silhouette, he was unfamiliar to me. How did he know me? Had he seen my name in the local newspaper? Was this the one who had called, spouting racial and sexual filth? Or had he heard of my association with the project? Picked me at random out of a phonebook? I seemed to be attracting the crazies, starting with Ansen Reich. And now this bald, proud felon.

  “Who caught him?” Ailey Mason was saying.

  I expected Officer Meredith to mention Webster Helms or even Pete Tower, but she named two strangers, a pair of Webster’s recruits. His Citizens’ Watch Committee had become a popular cause, with so much riding on this project; no doubt they’d been galvanized afresh by the murder of Atheneum McGee. Reluctantly, I gave them credit for accomplishing what the police had not been able to do. Even if this suspect was not the murderer of Ansen Reich and Atheneum McGee, his capture would put an end to the troublesome vandalism. I then wondered why I tended to think of the murderer as one and the same person, rather than two people with, perhaps, separate motives.

  We crunched over sand and gravel, the policewoman leading the way, I bringing up the rear.

  “When I got here,” she said, “I read him his rights, you know, and asked him to identify himself. You’d have thought some peasant had asked the Queen of England for a light! He clammed up like a . . . clam. Acted like I was the damn criminal. Wouldn’t say if he wanted a lawyer, wouldn’t give a name, didn’t have a piece of ID on him. Well, I mean, you’ll see why . . . he’s wearing a wet suit, and there ain’t much room for a wallet. He just kept saying he wanted to see this lady.” She jerked her thumb over her shoulder at me. She would have had to be deaf and blind not to have heard the gossip at the station about Geof and me; this escapade would surely feed fresh grist to the rumor mill.

  Our hike was lighted by floods that Goose had installed to discourage troublemakers. It was hard to
imagine how anyone could manage to hide in all the glare. I said as much to Ashley Meredith.

  She barked with laughter again. “I think he thinks he’s invisible,” she said, and her brown curls shook under her regulation cap. “I’ll tell you one thing, if there’s one thing this guy is it’s visible.” There was a surprising undercurrent of admiration in her voice; maybe the intruder was another giant of a man, like Reich?

  “What was he up to this time?” Geof wanted to know.

  We watched her shoulders rise and fall. “Had a wrench in one hand, they tell me, and a fishing knife in the other. What does that tell you?”

  “That maybe we’ve got our murderer after all,” Geof said, a more intense and grim edge to his voice. I wasn’t crazy about entering a small room that contained a violent stranger who knew my name. I felt an overwhelming urge to grab Geof’s hand and walk away from there, but sternly restrained myself. It did seem to me, however, that civic duty ought to have its limits.