Murder Came Second

by Jessica Thomas

  We found Martha in the kitchen, making out next week’s breakfast menus and consulting cookbooks. According to her, Ophelia had gone to a rehearsal. Elaine wasn’t needed till later and was in their room.

  Reluctantly leaving the wonderful kitchen smells, I went up the back stairs, Fargo equally reluctant at my heels. I knocked lightly on the door of their room.

  “Come in,” Elaine called pleasantly.

  She sat in a comfortable chair, feet propped on the bed, reading a book. Immediately upon our entrance, the feet came down, the book snapped closed, the smile faded and she drew herself slightly away from Fargo.

  “Could you please leave the animal outside? I have allergies.”

  She also apparently had memory problems. She had always known “the animal’s” name before, and she had not hesitated to pet him, with no noticeable discomfort. Obviously this scene would be played to the hilt.

  I walked back to the hall and called down the back stairs. “Martha, could you guard my ferocious animal for five minutes? Ms. Edgewood has developed acute allergies. She thinks it is the dog. I rather imagine it is I.”

  Martha looked up the stairs, grinning. Clearly she had understood my tone if not the words. “Sure. C’mon down, Fargo, you can help me plan tomorrow’s breakfast. Good boy.”

  Turning back into the room, I sat uninvited in the other chair. “This won’t take much of your time,” I began mildly.

  “It needn’t take any of it,” she said. “You have either told, or are about to tell your detective brother all that I imparted to you in complete confidence, thereby casting unnecessary suspicion on my brother and me around this unfortunate incident involving Terese. Good-bye.”

  “Let’s just say I am about to provide Detective Lieutenant Peres with information I can neither legally nor morally withhold from him in his efforts to solve a vicious, brutal murder. It bothers me more than you apparently can understand to break a promise of confidentiality, especially one of such a personal nature. You have my deepest apologies. You also have my assurance that Lt. Peres will never make any of this information public unless it proves to have direct bearing on the case. But he has to know it. You can believe none or all of that as you please. Good day.”

  We found Sonny in his office, surrounded by blackboards holding lists and notes. This was the way he always studied a confusing case. He said it let him see everything at once without shuffling through piles of paper or dragging stuff around on a computer. It also let him prop his feet on the desk, lean precariously back in his chair and allow his thoughts to roam. It was a system that worked well for him. He usually came up with the answers.

  His first list held the names of those he felt the most likely suspects and their alibis, if any. Carlucci was head of the pack, with no alibi. Hamlet was a close second, also with no alibi. Polonius was apparently clear. He had been at the all-night diner with the lighting crew. Nick’s garbage had yielded up a receipt showing he picked up his takeout order at nine fifty-two, which proved nothing except that at some point, he brought the bag back to his room.

  Horatio had been with two of the stagehands, out drinking. Noel seemed to have the least motive, and had been extremely cooperative. Too much so? Elaine and Ophelia were possibilities, but Sonny had marked them “Unlikely.” Well, one of those was about to change.

  At the bottom of the board was “Unknown burglar,” with the added notation of “Unlikely” crossed out. I wondered why that had changed.

  Beneath it had been added the name “Harmon!” A joke, to tease him? Surely not serious.

  One board showed that the hours in which Terese was presumed to have died had been narrowed to today—Wednesday— between one and three a.m.

  A note followed saying “Seminal fluid and clear liquid sent to lab for DNA checks.” I wondered exactly what that meant.

  There were other cryptic notes. “Check boots with Sears.” “Dumpsters?” “Raincoat & hat?” “Zilch computer.”

  I grinned and asked, “Is Zilch a new brand of computer?”

  “Zilch is what is left on Terese’s laptop. Not a word. The whole hard drive is clean as a whistle. And something tells me it wasn’t Terese housecleaning. Although maybe it was. We didn’t find any faxes either.” Sonny sounded disgusted.

  “No. I can’t believe she dumped everything. I doubt she knew she was going to be killed. But for one thing, I don’t get the idea that bunch of artistes is very big on today’s technology, for one thing. For another, who would have time to do it? We cleared the place out pretty quickly.”

  “Alex, almost anybody today can turn on a computer and start hitting the delete key. It doesn’t take long. I’m just hoping Nacho can retrieve something of interest from the hard drive. The faxes are my fault. We did not personally search the suspects before they had a chance to dump them. Hell, they may have gone out in your garbage.” We looked at each other and shrugged.

  Finishing up Sonny’s blackboard display was a smaller board with a rough, amateur sketch of a woman’s torso with red chalk marks where the six stab wounds had been. Somehow the very unprofessionalism of the drawing made it seem more personal and the red marks somehow more invasive and cruel.

  Sonny pulled a pack of cigarettes from his shirt pocket and actually offered me one. I clutched at my heart and let him light it. He nodded at the boards. “Any additions? Disagreements? Questions?”

  I nodded at him. “Unfortunately, all of the above.” I filled him in on the gory history of the Leonard family and ended by explaining that Terese had told Elaine’s brother she had dug up an old school chum of his. He and Elaine were both afraid that would lead to the entire ghastly story surfacing and appearing in the A-List next week.

  “And you’re saying that David Willem—Hamlet—is actually the grown up Leonard boy, Bobby? How many names does he have, for God’s sake? You’re sure about all this?” Sonny made a note.

  “Oh, no doubt about it when you recall them as children,” I assured him. “If you can get an old copy of The Tell-All that had the original story in it and photos of the kids, they look then just like they do now. His adoptive family changed his first name, which Elaine’s didn’t. She says she still has trouble not calling him Bobby. Also, I have some vague memory of that bio-drama saying that Papa Leonard was stabbed six times. Not sure. But it could be significant in some ritualistic way.”

  “I’ll get Nacho on The Tell-All right away,” he said. “She could get the original of the Magna Carta in an hour if we needed it. Okay, what else?”

  “Have you had lunch? I’m starving and I promised Fargo a hamburger.”

  “No, I haven’t. You buying?”

  “After what you did to my house this morning?” I snorted. “You owe Cindy and Fargo and me a six-course dinner starting with Beluga caviar and a magnum of Krug!”

  “Please!” He sounded insulted. “The town of Provincetown will gladly reimburse you for any expenses up to fifty-nine cents. Just file seventeen copies of each receipt and have two men of the cloth attest to your honesty.”

  “I’ll settle for my usual and a Bud, plus an extra rare hamburger, plain.”

  Without discussion we started walking toward the Wharf Rat Bar. I brought up the questions Sonny’s blackboards had raised in my mind.

  “Hey, Sonny, why was that Unknown Burglar crossed out and Harmon’s name put in? Are you just pulling his leg?” I turned to look at my brother and was surprised to see deep lines of worry appear around his nose and eyes.

  “God, I wish I were, Sis! I wouldn’t blame him if he did kill Terese, after that article she wrote, and then threatening to tell the world that Rob, the brother he worshipped so much, was yellow, shot in the back while running away, saying the whole medal thing was a cover-up! He’s right. Nobody should be allowed to tell those kinds of lies! Did you hear about it?” Sonny slammed one fist into the other, and an elderly lady skipped briskly into the gutter to give him way.

  I nodded and recalled Harmon’s wo
rds to me, “I shall take action.” I should have paid more attention at the time. I decided not to mention that statement right now. Right now I would concentrate on not limping.

  “We’ve got a real problem with Harmon, Alex. There is a work boot print that’s quite clear in the mud on the dining room rug. It does not match any of the boots worn by any of the Hamlet crew. And none of them are sporting brand new boots today. Harmon readily admits to wearing that type of boot for protection when he does heavy yard work. He says he kept them in the garage next to the mower. We can’t find them.”

  “Oh, God.” My stomach was now feeling emptier than ever.

  Sonny went on, his voice harsh with anxiety. “He says he bought them last winter at Sears. Hatcher has gone down to the store with the dining room photos to see if they match up with the style Harmon bought. Alex, I’m scared to death they will.” He wasn’t alone.

  “Then,” Sonny continued, and I wondered how much more disaster he had to relate. “When Mitch went over the cellar, he found the padlock on the storage closet forced, and what looks like two cartons of whatever the Brownlees had stored in there are missing. Harmon took one look and said it was two cartons of their silver. He said Bob Brownlee gave him a key and asked him to keep an eye on it. We haven’t found any trace of the cartons.”

  I felt a little brighter. “Well, if Harmon meant to steal, which I will never believe, he didn’t have to break the lock. He had a key, and he might as well have taken it all.”

  Sonny shook his head. “I think it was a ruse. I think someone— I fear Harmon—broke in through the dining room doors, went down to the cellar, and forced the lock. Harmon would be too smart to use his key, I think. Then he took two cartons, apparently the smallest and easiest to carry, which will turn up in one of the vans or a dumpster or somewhere. Then I think he waited outside for Terese to come out of Paul’s room. But she came out earlier than he had figured on, and Paul was still awake then and might have seen him. So he waited some more, and finally Terese came back down, and he killed her.”

  We were almost at the Rat and I was glad. My ankle was beginning to throb. Why had I never managed to get a bandage on it? Fargo was glad, too, whuffling noisily, wondering what goodies were in store.

  I turned to Sonny. “That seems like taking a chance—hanging around at that hour just hoping Terese would show up. What if someone woke up and saw him? And if Harmon was smart enough not to use his key, why wasn’t he smart enough to scuff out his footprints?”

  He shrugged. “Nobody is smart all the time. Maybe he heard a noise. And he had to have been under a lot of stress. Stress means mistakes.”

  “Well, he seems to have made some, skipped some. How did he know Terese would come back downstairs at all? If he didn’t realize he left footprints, how come he made his boots disappear? And why did he have them on in the first place, in the middle of the night? Was he going to mow the lawn at three a.m.? In the rain?”

  “We don’t have all the answers yet,” he answered stiffly. “But Dr. Gloetzner raised an interesting point. You see that torso on my blackboard? It shows the approximate locations of the six wounds. Five of them were not deep and would not have been fatal if she’d gotten help. Gloetzner thinks they were done immediately after she died, though. The first, where the knife was apparently replaced in her chest, was deep. In fact, it nicked the heart. That accounts for nearly all the blood, and the swift, quiet death. But back to the other five, they were small, almost decorative. That’s a total of six wounds, if you figure the knife was placed back in the first, fatal wound. Not counting Terese, six people live in the house. You don’t suppose it’s one of those things where everyone stabs her so no one can squeal on the person who actually killed her, do you?”

  I slowed down as if I were thinking. “I could possibly believe it of everyone except Hamlet. He’d be too scared to prick her with a pin if anyone else was going to know about it. He’d be afraid someone would somehow blame it on him. I can see him losing his temper and killing her, but not as part of a ritual.”

  “Okay,” he said. “I can buy that. Then consider this, if you connect the dots, as it were, the wounds could be said to form a rough letter ‘R.’”

  I tried to think of where he could be going with this. Finally, I tried, “R for revenge? R for rage? For retribution?”

  “Or for Rob.”

  “Sonny, are you trying to put this onto Harmon?”

  He left me tying Fargo to the big anchor in front of the Rat and stormed through the door. Inside, I stopped at the bar to order Fargo’s burger. The Blues Brothers were out in full force at the front table, minus Harmon. They all watched Sonny move across the room toward a table for us. Their eyes were not friendly.

  I waited at the bar for the burger and took it and some water out to my patient pooch. By the time I got back inside, Sonny had us a beer and had ordered lunch.

  Just getting off the ankle made me feel better. A large swallow of Bud helped even more. I broke the silence. “I’m sorry, Sonny. I shouldn’t have said that about you and Harmon. I didn’t mean it. You must be terribly upset.”

  “Yeah. And there’s one more thing. Dr. Gloetzner has confirmed sperm in Terese’s vagina. The sperm’s gone off to the lab, along with a clear liquid, which is not seminal fluid, but a fluid which some men ‘leak’ when they have sex. Before they ejaculate, or even if they don’t. We are pretty sure the sperm is Hamlet’s. We’re going to be real interested in the leaker. We’ll have DNA on both in a few days.”

  “Well, maybe Carlucci wasn’t as impotent as everyone thought, unless it is Hamlet’s.” They seemed the most obvious. “Hell, that only leaves Nick and Noel in the Brownlee building.”

  “Uh-huh,” Sonny gave me a weary smile. “Or Harmon.”

  “Sonny, just hush!” I chewed a bite of my sandwich viciously. “Oh, all right. I might as well tell you.”

  “Tell me what?”

  I told him of Harmon’s practically wrecking my backyard, and of his final statement, “I shall take action.”

  Sonny looked puzzled. “Now that isn’t like Harmon. That sounds like something out of a book or a movie. Harmon would say he’d get her for this, or she’d pay for this, not ‘I shall take action.’”

  “Look, Sonny, he didn’t necessarily mean he’d kill her. Maybe he meant to get a lawyer and sue the A-List. Or get Carlucci to throw her out. Hell, maybe he meant to put a dead bluefish in her bed.”

  “Now that sounds like fun! Can I play, too?” I looked up to see Noel smiling above us.

  “Hey, Noel, sit down,” Sonny said. “We could use a little cheer.”

  “Did you say beer?”

  “That, too.” Sonny stood up and waved for Joe’s attention. “Hey, Joe, three Buds please. And a pastrami and fries for Noel.” He turned and asked belatedly, “That okay?”

  “Absolutely. I apologize for interrupting your lunch, but your office said you would probably be here, Sonny. I have a couple of things to tell you. They may not be important, but . . .”

  I picked up my sandwich and beer. “I’ll finish eating at the bar so you two can have some privacy.”

  “Not for my sake,” Noel said. “They aren’t anything secret as far as I’m concerned.”

  Sonny waved me back to my chair. “Stay here. You’ve been making brilliant comments all morning. I can’t wait for more.”

  Noel looked as if he wished he’d picked another time, but began bravely. “I called my ex-wife when we got to the motel. I like her to know exactly where I am, because of the kids. She has my cell number, but I’m just overcautious, I guess. Karen, my ex, is a good friend of our wardrobe mistress, Diane Hoskins. They had been speaking on the phone yesterday. Do you know Diane?”

  I shook my head, Sonny nodded. “Slightly.”

  Noel smiled his thanks as his lunch and beer arrived. “When Terese first got involved with Paul and being embedded up here, she wrote a sidebar on the duties of the wardrobe mistress and how
important she and her assistants are to any stage production. Keeping costumes fresh and clean, mending, getting the right costumes to the right dressing room for every performance, etc. It was a well-done article.”

  Noel dragged a french fry through some ketchup and chewed for a moment. “Diane wanted to do something to thank Terese. Diane and her husband George own a farm just over the border into Connecticut. One of those farms where you can go and pick your own tomatoes or pumpkins and whatever. It’s a great place. I’ve had the kids there. Well, Diane called George and asked him to bring up a bunch of produce for Terese, enough for all of us, actually. George and the three kids came up yesterday morning.”

  “What did Terese do?” I asked. “I know it was something awful.”

  “Yes, worse than you can imagine, and I’ll bet you’d never guess. As George was unloading the stuff from the truck, Terese asked if he didn’t get lonesome with Diane away so much. He said he did, but that the kids kept him company. Terese said they were certainly beautiful children, but wasn’t it strange not one of them looked like him, or with Diane traveling, was that to be expected? Then she laughed and walked away.”

  “She never missed a chance, did she?” Sonny shook his head in disbelief.

  “It may not all have been her fault,” Noel said. “Terese had a single mother, father unknown. As a kid, she interfered with mom’s ‘social’ life, so mom farmed her out to a grandmother, whose coat of arms was, Do unto others before they can do unto you.

  “Terese thought any sign of kindness was a sign of weakness that would be used against her later.”

  I lit a cigarette and left the pack on the table. It would save Sonny asking. “That’s sad. She did goof once, though. At the cemetery the other day she told Harmon she was sorry about his brother. Of course, she made up for it later.” I was curious. “How did you know all this?”