I rose to the feet, gathered my robe about me—these PJs with ties at the waist are notoriously unreliable in times of stress—and pointed to the door.
“No, wait. I’m doing this all wrong. I don’t know what it is about you, Carlton, but you make me do everything wrong.”
You see? My fault again.
“I mean to say . . . The reason I’m here . . .”
“Why are you here, anyway? Why didn’t you just phone?”
“I did. All I got was a message on your answering machine. So, I thought perhaps your car had broken down on the way out . . .”
“It did, just another wonderful moment in a perfect day.”
“I know. I saw your car by the side of the road. And I came along to make sure you got home all right, and . . .”
“And what?”
“And . . .” The voice dropped to an almost demure note. “. . . to say I’m sorry.”
“You’re sorry?”
“Yes. Truly. Truly and humbly sorry.” This was followed by a giggle, rather wrecking the effect, and a request to tuck in the flap of my PJs, which Hanna claimed was peeking at her. I ignored both, and Hanna seemed to realize that her apology was not complete.
“Truly,” she said again. “And humbly.”
“Do I get a hint?”
“How do you mean, a hint?”
“Am I to know why you are truly and humbly sorry, or is this one of those guessing games?”
“Oh, well, you know.”
I did, of course. Her unspeakable, but spoken, suspicions. But I wasn’t going to let her off the hook.
“No, I don’t know. How should I know? You’ve done so many horrible things, I don’t know which one you’re apologizing for.”
Hanna jumped up. Quick to anger, this girl.
“Well, that does it. I drive miles and miles and miles out here . . .”
“Pardon me, fourteen miles.”
“At great expense . . .”
“Fifty cents, about.”
“And no little inconvenience, to apologize, and . . .”
“Apologize for what?”
“For assuming you were a queer, and then assuming you were a lecher . . .”
“Thank you. Your apology is accepted.”
“. . . when what you really are is a fathead.”
“I see, well, now that you’ve made the grounds of your apology clear . . .”
“I haven’t. I haven’t made anything clear. Carlton, sit down.”
I shuffled some debris, and sat. So did she. There we were, side by side, on the couch. Not cozy, though.
“Carlton, exactly how much do you know about Hanson Eberley?”
“I know that he is one of the finest men ever to don a policeman’s uniform, and that’s all I need to know.”
“Is it? I mean, you’re putting a lot of faith in him.”
“No more than he deserves.”
“Yes, but suppose he doesn’t solve this murder? There is a case against you.”
“Well, thank you at least for believing that I didn’t do it.”
“Of course you didn’t do it. Anyone can see that.”
“Thank you.”
“You’re utterly harmless.”
“Thank you.”
“Totally ineffective.”
“Hmm.”
“Cowardly, silly, incapable . . .”
“Look, this torrent of compliments is beginning to turn my head. Why don’t we just call it a night, and you go home, and I’ll go to bed?”
“Okay.”
Hanna started to get up, stopped, let out a soft “Ah ha,” fished down under the couch, and came up with Nora Eberley’s brassiere, cast off, I imagine, in the disrobing process before I arrived. The almost-reasonable tone in Hanna’s voice was gone in a micro-second, as she bellowed, “Who’s the tootsie?”
Upon which the closet door opened and Nora staggered out, blinking against the light.
“Who are you calling a tootsie?” she demanded, and added, “Golly, Carlton, you shouldn’t put anyone in that closet without a guide and a shovel.”
Hanna gulped twice, like a bullfrog trying to swallow something that suddenly turns out to be two sizes too large, shot to her feet, and steamed to the door, while I bayed at her heels, trying, in vain, to explain that Things Weren’t What They Seemed and You Remember How You Misjudged Me Before and other accurate but unheeded counsel.
At the door, Hanna turned and, fixing me with eyes that had assumed the aspect of a blowtorch, said, “There is no need to explain. I quite understand. It was wrong, foolish, and downright rude of me to intrude this way, Carlton.” Well, it was, you couldn’t get around that. “No, stop, don’t apologize, don’t explain. The fault is entirely my own. Your private life, perverse as it may be, is entirely your own affair. I will intrude no longer, so that you can get back to . . .” brief glance at Nora that would have ignited Kryptonite “. . . whatever it was you were doing with your valued friend’s wife.”
And she swept out, leaving me to wonder how words which, written down, made up the form of an apology, could leave me feeling as if I’d just been gone over by a triphammer in the hands of a careless operator.
In the ensuing silence, Nora gathered her other garments, which, now I looked around, pretty well festooned the place, and disappeared into the bedroom. She reappeared soon after, decently clad.
“We’ll talk later,” she said, and came over and kissed me, in a completely non-vamp manner, on the forehead. “Don’t worry,” she went on, “I’ll explain things to Hanna.”
“I wish you would,” I replied. “It doesn’t do to be at odds with a colleague.”
“Colleague?” Nora’s eyebrows rose. “Holy Christ, she’s right. You are a fathead.”
She took her leave, and not a moment too soon; I might have said something really wounding. I was too stirred up to feel like sleeping, so I decided to clear away some of the debris, just in case there were other cast-off undergarments waiting to spring out at an inconvenient moment. I didn’t find any, but I did find, behind the cushion on the couch, a battered old plastic case, quite a cheap-looking thing, and, inside, a pair of sunglasses, scratched and worn and with one lens cracked and one of the earpieces held together with a bit of masking tape.
It didn’t look like anything that Nora would have dropped. Of course, anyone else could have plunked it there, today, or any time in the last six months. My first inclination was to simply chuck the whole thing in the garbage, where it obviously belonged, but something about it bothered me slightly, so I decided it might be better to talk to Hanson first. He could at least reassure me that there was nothing surprising about finding an extra bit of unaccounted-for junk in my cottage.
I finished the tidying job—well, stuffed the saving pots in the kitchen sink—and went to bed again. This time, there were no intruders. I was asleep in about ten seconds, and awake in another ten. Or so it seemed. It wasn’t, though, because the sun was shining, again, birds were singing, breezes blowing, and all that rot. That is not what woke me, though. It was the repeated dull thud of someone whacking the front door.
Dominic Silvio, the demon developer. I’d forgotten all about him; presumably he was back. I crawled out of bed, dressed in seconds, slipped into the kitchen and out the side door, where I could get a peek at the front. It wasn’t Silvio shaking the timbers with his fist at all, but the Widow Golden, who spotted me at once.
“Carlton, my, you sleep late,” she beamed. “Say, did you know that you’ve got another body on your lawn?”
Chapter 13
This was the large, economy-size body, and it was lying on its face outside my bedroom window. At least it wasn’t out front, where Ernie had been. Mrs. Golden gave a little yelp when she saw it.
“Why, it’s Mr. Silvio!” she said.
Mr. Silvio. This was going to end in trouble. For starters, Tommy Macklin was going to be furious. Dominic’s development firm was forever building projects that required large ads to entice the gullible to lay down their dollars for a roof, however leaky, over their heads, and to Tommy, advertisers were sacred.
“I thought he’d gone home.”
“When? When, Mrs. G., did you think he’d gone home?”
“Oh, midnight, at the latest.”
“Mrs. Golden!”
I was shocked. If Dominic Silvio had been at her place from the time we left yesterday afternoon until midnight, what were they doing? No doubt she had filled him with foodstuffs, her invariable habit, but they couldn’t eat all the time.
“Oh, Carlton, don’t be such a prissy-puss,” said Mrs. Golden, using a phrase I had never heard before and hope never to hear again. And the son-of-a-gun looked pleased with herself. Pleased and proud. If there was going to be any blushing around here, it was going to have to come from me, so I blushed.
“Shall we see if he’s dead or what?” asked Mrs. G.
What, as it turned out. When we loomed up alongside the corpse, it began to stir and twitch, uttered a massive, hollow groan. Silvio sat up, holding his head.
“Wha . . .” he croaked.
The Widow was at his side in a flash, murmuring, “Poor baby.”
A twisted simper appeared on the Silvio phizz—a not unhandsome phizz, by the way, large, with fleshy lips and enough nose for several normal faces, but not unhandsome.
“Rosamund,” he simpered, “it’s you.”
Rosamund, forsooth, I thought her second name was Myrtle, that’s what it said on the voters’ list. When I taxed her with this, she said it was “Emma Rosamund Myrtle,” but she only told “special people” about the Rosamund, a name that led, among the crass, to a certain amount of teasing. Dominic Silvio had apparently quickly qualified as a special person. She bent over and hooked a hand under his elbow and then, with a cheery, “Upsadaisy,” heaved him to his feet, like a crane righting a railway car. The woman is a lot stronger than she looks.
“You just come along with me, honey,” she said, “and we’ll have a nice breakfast.”
“Not so damn fast,” I protested. “Explanations first, breakfast later. Mr. Silvio, what were you doing on my lawn?”
“You call this a lawn?”
“Never mind what I call it. What were you doing on it?”
“I dunno, I honestly dunno. I came over here after I left Rosamund’s place last night to, you know, look around.”
“Look around for what?”
“You. I was looking for you.”
“Why?”
“Let’s talk about it later.”
“Yes, I should think so,” interrupted the Widow Golden. “Here is this poor man lying out all night, catching his death and nothing to eat at all, and you want to keep him chatting away all day.”
“But why was he lying out all night? That’s what I want to know.”
“Somebody must have slugged me. Look, I got a bump.” And the big sissy lowered his giant noggin so the Widow could coo over an egg-sized lump just abaft his right ear.
“Poor baby,” she murmured again, and I told her that if she was going to kiss the place and make it better, I was going to be sick all over the lawn.
“And it’s no good glowering at me,” I said. “The man comes barging in here without a by-your-leave, using up space on my lawn that I require for other purposes, spying on me . . .”
“Hey,” Dominic cut in, “who was the popsie in your bedroom?”
“Popsie?” It was the Widow Golden’s turn to look shocked. “In Carlton’s bedroom?”
This was not a popsie, as we know, but a tootsie. “I can explain that,” I began, and then realized that, no, I couldn’t.
“A real looker,” leered Silvio. “She was asleep on the bed. I saw her there, in the moonlight. Sleeping. Who was she?”
“That is not germane to the issue,” I replied coldly, uncorking a phrase I’d picked up covering the law courts. “The issue is, why were you prowling about my house at an ungodly hour?”
“Later, later,” said Silvio, and the Widow Golden hissed, “Carlton, really. Not now.”
She grabbed the stricken developer by the arm and marched him off across the street, no doubt to stoke him up again. It looked like the tug Rosamund shepherding a container ship. I followed to where the smell of cooked bacon and perked coffee produced a perfume that obviously spoke to the depths of Silvio’s soul. He lowered himself onto a kitchen chair and proceeded to lay waste six eggs, eleven strips of bacon, and about sixteen slices of bread smothered in butter and preserves, under the sponsoring gaze of the Widow. If Silvio was our murderer, there was no need to bring him to justice; cholesterol would get him long before the courts could.
“This woman,” Dominic said to me, with a heavy wink, “she’s a marvel.”
The Widow simpered.
“None of this diet crap,” Dominic went on. “None of this soft-boiled egg and dry toast routine. None of this, ‘Now, honey, are we sure we need another piece of toast?’ and, ‘Say, sweetie, aren’t we putting on just a teensie bit of weight?’ Not like some wives I could mention.”
When I refused to prod, he went on, “My ex-wife, to be exact.”
“Oh, go on with you,” gurgled the Widow, who was expanding under his praise like a balloon filling with helium.
“My ex-wife,” Dominic continued, driving the point home, “spent her entire life, as far as I could tell, not eating. And not letting me eat. She didn’t understand about food. Rosamund,” he said, while the Widow Golden positively glowed, “Rosamund understands. Say, Withers, do you want to know what we did last night?”
“No thank you. The activities of consenting adults are none of my concern.”
“No, not that.” The silly simper died down, to be replaced by a slowly forming scowl. “Hey, are you insulting this good lady?”
“No, no.”
“Are you suggesting that this good lady and I . . .”
I was, of course, and the good lady, for reasons of her own, had led me to the suggestion with a wink and a nod, but it seemed prudent, staring into Dominic’s reddened face, noting the gathering of bulging muscles beneath the coat, and glancing swiftly at a fist bunching before me with an aspect so ham-like that it could have walked into a meat-packing plant and been stamped by a federal inspector, to lie.
“No, no, of course not. The thought never crossed my mind. What did you do last night, anyway?”
The ham-like fist unbunched. “Made lasagna. Two batches. We made one, ate it, then made another and ate some of that.” He beamed across at the Widow. “Partly my mother’s recipe, partly my own, with a few ideas from Rosamund. Delicious. You want some? Is there still some left, Rosie?”
“Why, certainly. I put it in the fridge. I’ll just go and heat it up in the microwave.”
So, while she buzzed off to fuss over the lasagna, I told Dominic, “Now is later.”
“Huh? Oh, yeah. Listen,” he said, “you work for the paper.”
“I know that. And I know you knew that. Moose told me.”
“Yeah, well, I’m sorry about Moose. He misunderstood. I guess he told you about how he mistook my meaning. Funny mistake to make, wasn’t it, ha, ha?”
I said I didn’t see what was so damn funny about it, and he said, no, he guessed I didn’t.
“But anyway,” he went on, “as you know, a group of my associates and I, we have a project we want to develop right here in Bosky Dell . . .”
“I know. I’ve heard about it. Not a chance.”
“I wouldn’t be so sure, kid. Stranger things have happened. What we have in mind is a condominium development, with special apartments for senior citizens.”
“I re
peat, not a chance.”
“And what we thought was, that if you were to write a series of articles in the newspaper, you know, boosting the idea, it would get it off to a flying start. Tommy Macklin,” he added, to forestall another protest he could see was coming, “is all for it.”
“He is?”
“Yeah. We had a little chat the other day. The usual stuff. How many pages of advertising we’d need to get things under way, that kind of thing. And he seemed to be real enthusiastic. Said the Lancer would do a special advertising section.”
It began to make a gloomy sort of sense. Tommy Macklin would promote condoms in St. Peter’s Square if he saw an advertising special in the project.
“But why do you have to talk to me about this? I just take my orders from Tommy.”
“Just wanted to fill you in. You know, get you on side. We know there’s bound to be a certain element here that wouldn’t like the idea. Some people are always opposed to progress. And we thought that you, with your roots in the community, if you came out for ‘Adam and Eve’s Little Acre’—that’s what we’re thinking of calling it, catchy, eh?—why, it would help things along.”
“Well, you can forget about it. I’ll do my job, but that’s all.”
There was a short pause. Silvio looked out the window.
“By the way, kid,” I thought this was a change of subject, but it wasn’t, “did you know there’s a place called Bosky Dell in California?”
“There is?”
“There is. Spelled different. ‘B-o-s-q-u-e D-e-l.’ That’s Spanish.”
“I guessed that.”
“They’ve got some very classy condominiums down there. So I thought, why not send young Carlton down there, first class, of course, to have a look around. You could write an article along the lines of ‘California Comes to Canada,’ you know, boosting Adam and Eve’s Little Acre.”
He had me, of course. By the tender parts. By the wallet. By the ego. A trip to California. On expenses. Not Lancer expenses, either (twenty-one dollars a day for motels and thirteen for meals and tips), but real, honest-to-god, advertising expenses.
“Sounds intriguing.”
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