“Three hundred dollars,” Auclair said, fingering the bills. “Then you must think—” He handed the bills back.
“No! He wouldn't kill anyone. But his record ... Who would believe him?”
“Why'd he go into the bakery?”
“I don't know. His father...” and the word died on his lips.
“What about his father?”
Petrovski hung his head, maybe troubled by revealing a confidence. Auclair gave me a questioning glance. I shrugged.
After a long silence, Petrovski looked up. “The reason Martin got into trouble, I mean before this,” and he paused, searching our faces. “It's when he came home and learned his mother'd been unfaithful.”
“His father told him that?”
“Said it's why his mother left. I know that looks bad for Martin. He didn't know who the man was. Sam didn't tell him. But when Sam got cancer...”
“Samuel Grovner has cancer?”
“He's dying of it. Pancreatic. He was lying in bed one morning crying and told Martin the man was Waldo Asker.”
Auclair gave me a look I took to mean: “That's it. That's all we need.”
* * * *
Later, on the phone in my Jeep in the parking space, Mike said, “What you're telling me is this Martin thought Doris recognized him, and he went after her, and the father was doing what Petrovski was doing—looking to help his son get away.”
“Or hoping to stop him going after Veronique.”
“Portsmouth's sending a woman up there. Can they hold Petrovski?”
“His legs are so wobbly he's not running.”
“Portsmouth police found a connection,” Mike said. “Martin Grovner was in the same accounting class with Doris Wilson. He knew who she was. She probably lied when she said she couldn't identify him, though she may not have known his name. He drives a Harley-Davidson, by the way. I'll send you the tag number.”
* * * *
With a different and more urgent reason for contacting Veronique, I headed toward her cabin and learned that she had checked out. I drove to the hospital. The Beetle was not in the parking lot. I left a message for Auclair, asking for help.
I could have driven around searching for the Beetle, but Mike had asked me to come to Portland. The woman from New Hampshire wanted to talk with me, he said. Tired of motels, tired of paying for them, I preferred to spend the night with Sylvia.
* * * *
Two people could have been on Martin's motorcycle. The passenger could have taken the Beetle, but that wouldn't explain the survival of Veronique. I could think of no explanation except that she had chased the motorcycle and been outdistanced. Why didn't she call the police?
* * * *
“If they are registered domestic partners,” Sylvia said, picking up the menu, idly turning pages, “Veronique is considered nearest of kin and has the right to dispose of Doris's remains however she sees fit, whether there are blood relatives or not. And if there's no will naming others, she can inherit Doris's estate.”
“Didn't that stuff get voted out?”
“Same-sex marriage was voted out, not the domestic partner law. That's been in effect since twenty-oh-four.”
“So Veronique could still be in Brunswick waiting for the autopsy.”
“She probably moved just to get away from you.” She looked up at an approaching waitress. “I know the feeling,” she added, laughing.
Earlier in our relationship, Sylvia threatened to move to California—not to escape me but to get away from her mother who constantly berated her for taking up with a shigetz—why Sylvia and I never married.
We enjoyed the dinner, spent the evening on her couch watching an English movie—one of those Jane Austen things—and went to bed shortly after midnight.
In the morning I learned from Mike that a psychiatric therapist from the New Hampshire Department of Corrections had taken Petrovski to Augusta to join an investigation by the state police Criminal Intelligence unit. They were able to hold Isaac because of conditions of his parole.
I wasn't allowed in on that; in fact, if I had tried to involve myself, I would probably have been locked out of the investigation. I still wanted to locate Veronique. Only now it was to protect her. If Martin Grovner had murdered Doris Wilson, he was probably looking for the roommate.
After waiting two hours next to the yellow Beetle in the parking lot at the hospital, I caught up with Veronique and had surprisingly little trouble coaxing her into having lunch with me—not that she smiled or was even friendly. But she wanted something from me and was cooperative.
* * * *
“I don't care about that,” she said, waving off my warning about Martin, holding a wet glass, wrapping thin lips around a straw. It wasn't hot in the diner or even outdoors, but when she ordered ice for her tea, I thought it symbolic.
She was cold. Her best friend had been murdered, but I found no sorrow in her eyes, no grief, no anguish, no suffering, just an intense look of determination.
Sitting across from her I felt the same discomfort I had felt standing next to a stone killer in a restaurant in Providence, Rhode Island, the bodyguard of a crime boss. He was just a guy leaning against a wall, no different from a thousand others, except that he looked lethal. I don't know why. He was a man without a soul, my father would have said. But he looked just like anybody else only you knew he didn't want to be approached: You wouldn't ask him what time it was.
“Do you know where he is?” Veronique asked.
“The police put out a BOLO on his father's car. That's all they've got.”
“That's a bulletin?”
“It means ‘Be on the lookout.'”
“What's his father's car look like?”
“It's a Ford Taurus is all I know.”
She examined my face, then looked away. I watched her bite into a tuna-salad sandwich, barely opening her mouth as her teeth sank into the bread. She wiped her mouth with the side of her hand.
“You should go to the police with what you saw,” I told her.
She gave me a reflective glance. “I want you to stop chasing me.”
“You could be in serious danger. If that man killed Doris...”
She picked something off her lip and flicked it onto the floor. “Are they looking for a motorcycle?”
“They may be.”
She thought about that, lifted a small handbag off the seat, and got up. I watched her limp toward the exit. I heard a car engine come to life in the parking lot and wondered whether the attendant at the convenience store had heard the motorcycle. He hadn't mentioned it, but Veronique just did.
* * * *
Sergeant Auclair called to tell me they had found the Taurus in a ditch on a country road north of Dexter. Although troubled by what I was getting into, I enjoyed the ride north. Fall foliage was past its peak, with yellow leaves and splashes of red in the hills that stirred memories of walks in the woods with my father—a soft-spoken guy whose sense of humor I missed. I went freshwater fishing with him a few times up this way, didn't like it; killing things for pleasure made no sense to me. We didn't talk much out in the boat, just shared the silence, and the sound of waves lapping the hull.
A young cop leaning on the front fender of his cruiser dropped a cigarette onto the pavement as I pulled off the road. I watched him grind the butt under his foot.
“Anyone hurt?”
“No sign of it,” he said, probably wondering why I had stopped. “I guess the driver took off, maybe hitchhiked a ride or something.”
“Or maybe ran into the woods,” I said. Pine trees and birches crowded the ditch. “A friend of mine from down the coast was up this way. Don't know what he was driving. He was sick, could've passed out or something. Okay if I look around?”
“All right by me. There's a wood road back there,” he said, pointing. “You can get your car off the road. Your friend wanders off?”
“Never know what he'll do. Gets confused. A little soft,” tapping my head.
/> I noticed tracks of burnt rubber on the asphalt and wanted to inspect the edge of the road but decided to look for footprints and maybe broken twigs where a man, or more than one, might have gone into the woods.
* * * *
I left my car a hundred feet into a narrow path and followed tire marks on stretches of gravel embraced by the fragrance of pines, remembering childhood fantasies of Indians running barefoot through the trees, boys my age in loincloth. I remembered taking my shoes off, telling myself I was standing where an Indian had stood, my feet on his footprints. Never thought about Indians except in the woods in the fall.
I found the motorcycle tilted against a maple tree at the edge of a pond. Martin and his father were sitting on a log, their backs to me. I managed to approach within a hundred feet before Martin turned abruptly.
He stood, not much taller than his father, more muscular, defiance on a surly face, rumpled brown hair, sideburns, a tattoo on his neck. His father twisted around to see what Martin was looking at. My appearance startled him.
“You've been paid,” he said.
“The police are looking for you, Mr. Grovner. This is your son?”
Martin stepped away from the log, glancing toward his motorcycle, walking around the log maybe to shield his father.
“They're holding your friend Petrovski,” I told him, my voice sounding flat out there in the clearing, carrying across the pond maybe, but without an echo.
Martin didn't seem to care. He kept stepping sideways toward the motorcycle, eyeing me like I was going to pounce on him. “I'm just here to tell you—” I glanced at the father. “—I've located Veronique Pascal.”
“You've been paid,” like that's what I was here for, like he didn't give a damn what I'd found.
“I have to tell the police I've found your son.”
Without warning, Martin sprinted across the grass to his motorcycle, raised it, mounted it, stomped on the pedal and, ripping gravel, roared across the clearing into the exit path.
“Marty!” the father yelled. “Marty! Don't go!”
Martin was gone.
For a long moment, Samuel Grovner stared at me as though hoping I had an explanation for what had just happened.
“My car's down there,” I said. “It'll be dark soon.”
“He won't leave me here.”
“Better wait out there than here.”
He stared helplessly across the clearing.
“It's getting dark,” I said.
The sun was in the top branches of trees. I gave him five minutes, then I started toward the path.
“Wait!”
I watched him lift a cane off the log and, without a word, stone-faced, come toward me. We walked in silence, side by side, out to my Jeep near the highway.
His car was gone. The young cop was gone.
“I'll take you into Dexter,” I said.
He didn't argue. He probably realized it would foolish to stay out there.
“Thank you,” he said, sitting next to me, the cane between his knees, both hands gripping the handle. He said nothing more until I pulled up in front of the building that held the police station.
“Drive on,” he said, eyeing the words Dexter Police Department under a shield on white clapboards.
I considered telling him he'd have to go to the police sooner or later, but he probably knew that.
“They can tell you where your car is,” I said.
“No, no. Just drive on.”
I brought him to a taxi stand outside a drugstore. He didn't thank me or say a word. Just got out and went into the store, leaning on the cane at every step, visibly exhausted.
Down the street, parked at the curb, I received a call from the woman at the hospital in Brunswick. She didn't identify herself, didn't have to. “She's here,” was all she said.
* * * *
In Brunswick I parked and walked past lighted windows of the hospital and went inside.
“I was told to give you this,” said an elderly woman at the front desk, handing me a sealed envelope. I opened it outside in my Jeep. It contained a business card, nothing scribbled on the back. It advertised the services of the Skillings Crematorium on Bacheldor Street.
The place was closed. I peered through thick glass at the darkened entrance and saw only a night-light down a hallway. Markings on the door told me the facility would open at eight o'clock in the morning.
I could have driven to Portland. I could have gone to a movie. I decided to rent a room rather than get up early to be back here by eight.
In the morning I was in the shade of an elm tree spooning applesauce off a plastic box when the yellow Beetle drove into the lot across the street. I'm not good at waiting—one of the drudgeries of this kind of work—but I managed to contain myself until Veronique came out the door, limping briskly to her Beetle.
I imagined she saw me following her and didn't give a damn. She sped south until she reached the curb outside a hardware store near the railroad station on the west side of the city. I watched her go into the store and come out carrying a small package. I nearly lost her in traffic on the freeway but found her circling down an exit in Scarborough. In less than a half hour she drove across an empty field to the parking lot of a motel and stopped next to a Harley-Davidson outside unit 108.
“Albert just peed on my leg!” I heard a child scream.
“I did not. She's lying!”
“Shut up, and get into the truck,” a woman said, carrying a child in a pink blanket out of a room, shooing the two bickering kids toward the truck.
“My leg's all wet and it stinks!” the girl said.
The boy's laughter stopped with the sound of a slap.
I was near an SUV watching blinds rising in the window of 108. I couldn't see a face. Lights came on. A man appeared in the doorway. As though invited, Veronique went inside.
I hurried across the asphalt, stepping on crumpled brown wrapping paper near the Beetle.
I crouched at the window and saw a knife in Veronique's hand, saw her drive the blade into Martin's belly. I watched him stagger backward in helpless astonishment. I saw him fall to the floor with Veronique standing over him, the bloodied knife trembling in her hand. I couldn't see her face.
I saw her limp to a large chair and sit down, looking expressionless at the dead man on the floor.
* * * *
“How'd she know where to find him?” I asked, sitting in Savarin's car a hundred yards down the street, hoping, while the crime scene techs worked the room, to escape the media people.
“Paid the manager fifty bucks to call her when he came back. I guess she originally found it looking for the name Isaac Petrovski. I guess we'll get all the details. She's not fighting us.”
“Until she gets a lawyer.”
“Yeah, there's always that.”
“They holding Petrovski?”
“He'll be available for the hearings. But he's not accused of anything.”
Because of my interest in the case and Mike's leniency, I was allowed to sit in on the questioning of Samuel Grovner, who had showed up just as his son's body was being loaded into the ambulance. They had lowered the sheet so he could identify his son.
He didn't ask for a lawyer.
“My son wanted to protect me,” he said, sitting across from us, eyes pleading to be believed. “I don't have long. I knew it when I shot the man. I didn't know Martin had gone there.”
“Martin didn't shoot Waldo Asker?”
“No! It was me. I shot him. Martin went into the bakery to see if he was dead. It was all so unnecessary. No one would have known. The police weren't looking for me. Martin was just trying to protect me.”
“But you told him you had shot the man.”
“So he wouldn't do it. He was very headstrong.”
“Eventually, the police would have found out about your wife and—”
“But I'd be gone by then! Don't you see? I had it all planned!”
Was he in pain because of
his son's death or because his plan had failed?
“Ironic, ain't it,” Savarin said as we left the conference room.
“Not a big enough word,” I said, thinking that Martin Grovner and Doris Wilson would be alive and Veronique Pascal would not be going to prison if Samuel Grovner had only kept his mouth shut.
Copyright © 2012 Jim Ingraham
[Back to Table of Contents]
* * *
Mystery Classic: NIGHT AT THE INN
by Georgette Heyer, selected and Introduced by Jane K. Cleland
THE DARK SIDE OF THE REGENCY
Georgette Heyer was a master storyteller. She wove complex tales of love and hope, stories that have resonated with readers for more than ninety years. While Heyer is best known for her romances, she also wrote a dozen mysteries and several collections of short stories. “Night at the Inn” is one my favorites, featuring the recognizable and relatable characters Ms. Heyer is known for creating.
Those of us who love Heyer's work admire her meticulous research, her pitch perfect dialogue, and, most of all, how her characters interact with their settings so naturally it's as if you're there yourself, in the moment. More than once I have felt as if I were observing the incidents as they're happening, not reading the output of one woman's imagination. It's amazing how often her characters embrace the same kinds of opportunities and face the same kinds of dilemmas that we see in our lives today.
Most of Heyer's work, including “Night at the Inn,” is set in England during the period known as the Regency, a ten-year span that ran from 1810 to 1820, roughly two hundred years ago. The Regency was, by all accounts, an age of opulence and decadence, of strict rules and loose morals, of hypocrisy and heroism, of intellectual freedom and emotional restriction. Among the ton, the elite aristocracy, fortunes were made and lost at card tables; it was a lucky son who knew his father; and you could do anything you wanted—so long as you didn't create a scandal. Against this backdrop, Heyer's characters lived their lives, some testing society's limits of acceptable behavior, others living contentedly within those limits. Ms. Heyer also drew realistic portraits of the rest of society, from a penniless chimney sweep to maids and grooms and members of the new and burgeoning middle class.
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