Brewing Up a Storm

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Brewing Up a Storm Page 28

by Deaver Brown


  Claudia was visibly counting months on her fingers. “Good God—Alec!” she cried.

  “Exactly,” said Benda. “When Alec pulled all that cloak-and-dagger stuff about what he was doing at the time of the murder, I figured he might have been getting himself tested in New York, so word wouldn’t leak out to the company. Of course I wasn’t sure until he started to unravel completely. And when he was suddenly on top of the world, the situation spoke for itself.”

  Charlie, listening with bated breath, nodded. “No wonder he didn’t care if he was charged with murder. The poor slob wasn’t sure he’d live long enough for a trial. That was it, wasn’t it, Paul?”

  Paul Jackson made no attempt to hide his chagrin. “Moore didn’t mention that everybody in Illinois knows about this. In general, you’ve got it right,” he said grudgingly to Benda, “but you’re wrong on details. Actually, Moore had hopped over to New York for the tests earlier. The results were supposed to be ready on the day of the murder. Then he got socked with two terrific jolts. First, when Madeleine Underwood was chewing him out, it sounded as if she’d found out his little secret. Then—”

  He was allowed to proceed no further. Claudia Fentiman had straightened with an explosive snort. “I knew she’d rocked him,” she exclaimed. “Alec wasn’t defending me when he ripped back at her. But where did he get the idea that she knew?”

  Jackson was once again in the saddle.

  “You probably don’t remember, but Underwood used the word ‘infected’ when she was ranting about his moral corruption. That was enough, particularly when she’d sicced private detectives on him. Moore was afraid he’d been tailed on his first visit to the clinic. Anyway, he was still reeling from that blow when the doctors told him that there’d been a glitch at the clinic and his test results had gone missing. He was going to have to sweat it out until they were found.”

  Many things were becoming clear to Charlie. “No wonder he started to hit the bottle. I’ll bet he’d disciplined himself to wait the standard two weeks, but the extra strain made him come apart at the seams.”

  “That was it,” Jackson agreed. “As the days went by, he managed to convince himself that he had full-blown AIDS and everything was over.”

  Claudia was staring at Benda as if she had never seen him before. “And you kept quiet about this, Theo? That was very generous of you,” she said, unable to banish incredulity from her voice.

  “No, it wasn’t,” said Benda, amused. “Alec’s been behaving like a horse’s behind. While he’s been scurrying a thousand miles for his tests, Eileen’s blabbed her head off, trying to get sympathy from everybody in sight. The only reason Dean didn’t find out was because Dottie Kichsel has been out of town. Now that she’s back, I’ll bet she got the whole story before she reached the tenth tee.”

  “And,” said Thatcher, beginning to understand Benda’s methods, “Dean Kichsel isn’t going to appreciate the fact that Alec Moore was a prime murder suspect because of an AIDS test.”

  Claudia, apparently consumed with outrage, had lost all sympathy for her superior. “To hell with that,” she said forthrightly. “Kichsel’s looking for a new CEO. The board won’t think much about the common sense of a man who doesn’t take precautions with Eileen Tyler—precautions every teenager knows about.”

  Thatcher could not tell whether her indignation was genuine or whether Mrs. Fentiman felt impelled to acknowledge the rising sun.

  Certainly Benda, his face wrapped in a beatific smile, found no fault with her prediction.

  “You know, I kind of thought that myself,” he murmured softly.

  Charlie Trinkam, bending closer to Thatcher, said in an undertone, “This should take care of Lancer’s worry about the succession.”

  “Yes, yes,” Thatcher agreed absently.

  He was thinking about Iona Perez. Her busy brain was at this very moment concocting schemes to defeat Alec Moore—schemes of a subtlety that would have been beyond Madeleine Underwood. But Iona, like Charlie’s armchair generals, might have forgotten that Kichsel could shift strategy as well. In the past the conflict about Quax had resembled a toe-to-toe slugging match. Under these two new champions, the conflict promised to become a good deal more artful.

  Thatcher looked forward to seeing who would make the first move.

 

 

 


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