CHAPTER 11
Grisly Discovery
Murder is an act of infinite cruelty, even if the perpetrators sometimes look like playboys or college professors or nice motherly women with soft graying hair.
—Raymond Chandler, “The Simple Art of Murder: An Essay”
“FIONA! HEY, FIONA!”
We looked up from the paper to find Seymour Tarnish’s big, heavy shoes clomping across the wooden wraparound porch. He wore his summer post office attire, a bulky mail sack slung over his rounded shoulders, his tree-trunk legs protruding from the blue uniform shorts.
“Fiona, come with me! Quick!” Seymour called, sweat glistening below his receding brown hairline. “Pen, Sadie!” he added when he saw us. “You come, too.”
“Come where?” I asked. We’d all assumed he’d arrived to deliver the mail, as usual. Instead, his skin looked flush, his eyes excited. Then he was turning and moving off the porch again. “You won’t believe it if I tell you. Just follow me.”
Outside the Finch Inn, the wind had kicked up and the low-hanging branches of the surrounding willows hissed ominously. An errant cloud crossed the afternoon sun, casting a sudden pall over the Inn and the manicured grounds around it. On the nearby shore of the Quindicott Pond, the tide had receded and the air smelled faintly of drying seaweed and rotting flotsam.
As we stepped off the porch and onto the footpath leading to the lake, the bark of a siren sounded. Just a short burst, like the cry of a wounded animal. Then a Rhode Island State Police car raced up the drive, its roof lights flashing. But instead of pulling up to the Inn’s front door, the vehicle abruptly swerved off the roadway, across a swath of Barney’s carefully manicured grass, and onto the narrow birder’s trail that roughly paralleled the shore of the inlet. In a cloud of dust and a cascade of willow leaves, the squad car zoomed farther, past the wood frame and masonry foundation of the restaurant’s construction site.
Only then did I notice that far down the trail, just before the path was completely obscured by thick, wild greenery, a Quindicott Police cruiser was already on the trail, and its emergency lights were also flashing. Yellow tape emblazoned with the words POLICE LINE—DO NOT CROSS had already been strung across the path to keep out the public.
When the State Police car halted, the cloud it kicked up rolled over it, coating the black and white vehicle with a fine powder. Out of that same billowing dust a figure emerged. Fiona’s husband, Barney Finch. Tall and gangly, his bald pate shiny under a sheen of perspiration, the older man seemed agitated, and he was stumbling as he walked up the path.
Sadie and I hurriedly followed Seymour, meeting up with Barney just where the trail grass ended and the unpaved wilderness trail began. Fiona saw the stunned expression on her husband’s face.
“Barney! My God, what happened?”
Barney’s lips moved, as he gestured toward the police cars, but no words were forthcoming.
“Please tell me what’s wrong,” Fiona begged.
Seymour was the one who obliged. “There’s a corpse floating in the Pond. Old Lyle Talbot was angling up the trail there, and he saw something fishy in the shallows . . . only it wasn’t a fish.”
Barney nodded weakly. “It was a dead body,” he finally gasped. “Lyle pointed it out to me.” Then he shook his head and fell into silence again.
The grisly discovery had turned Fiona’s husband so ghostly pale that the sparse patches of red hair on either side of his bald head were the only hint of color on the man’s waxy features.
I tugged at Seymour’s mailbag. “How did you find out?”
“I was walking up the drive to deliver the mail when I saw Chief Ciders fly past in his Chief-mobile. He wasn’t using his sirens, but he was in an awful hurry—which got me interested.”
“Did either of you see . . . the corpse?” I asked.
Seymour shook his head. “Apparently only Lyle and Barn actually saw it. Lyle called nine-one-one on his cell phone, and Ciders responded himself and roped off the scene first thing.”
“I wonder if the dead person is anyone we know?” I asked.
Seymour shrugged. “I tried to get a peep at the stiff, but Ciders shooed me away. All I saw was a blanket.”
Barney shook his head. “I didn’t look close enough to see the face.”
I stared down the trail, at the twin police cars. I was tempted to walk down there and find out the identity of the corpse for myself. Then I noticed one of the State Troopers, standing at the door of his cruiser. The man was talking on the radio, no doubt summoning reinforcements. I knew then that nobody without official clearance was going to get close to that scene for a long time.
“Come on, Barney,” Fiona said as she tugged on her husband’s arm. “You look like you have sunstroke. Let’s get you home and I’ll pour you a nice glass of iced tea.”
I watched as Fiona and Barney hobbled off, Barney leaning on his wife for support.
“I’d better go with them,” Sadie declared. She immediately hurried off to catch up to Mr. and Mrs. Finch. Seymour and I remained behind, watching the police secure the scene.
“Sunstroke my tired butt,” said Seymour. “Old Barney took this dead body thing a little too hard. Usually the guy’s a lot of laughs, but the floater really threw him. You’d think he’d have picked up one of his old lady’s true crime books once in a while. Most of those things have photo inserts.”
“You can’t blame Barney for being upset,” I replied. “A photo is one thing. A real corpse is another. And the thing turned up in his own backyard. I’m surprised you’re not at least a little disturbed.”
Seymour waved his hand. “You forget. My route takes me along Pendleton Street—Quindicott’s very own Mold Coast. Hell, I found three stiffs in two years trying to deliver Social Security checks to retirement row. It got so bad my supervisor offered to send me to grief counseling. Maybe I should have taken him up on the offer, I could’ve claimed a disability.”
“Yeah, but then you wouldn’t be able to afford the mint-condition issues of G-8 and His Battle Aces that just came into the store,” I pointed out.
“You’re joking. When?”
“Don’t drool, Seymour. Sadie set them aside for you already.” Seymour’s only discernable passions—besides trivia, which had helped win him $25,000 on Jeopardy!—were old pulp magazines.
“Fan-tastic!”
A siren, distant at first, then suddenly blaring, heralded the arrival of another official Rhode Island State Police vehicle, this one a Mobile Crime Investigation Unit. Seymour and I moved clear of the trail to let it pass.
“Geeze, Louise . . . Who’s in those woods? Hannibal Lecter?”
“It sure didn’t take Ciders long to call in the Staties,” I said sourly. My own experience with them hadn’t been pretty, considering last fall one Detective-Lieutenant Marsh had planned to arrest me on suspicion of murder. (Thank goodnesss, with the help of Jack, the friendly ghost, I delivered them the true perpetrator.)
“The Staties were a foregone conclusion, Pen, and you know it,” said Seymour. “Ciders is in over his head when it comes to anything beyond handing out speeding tickets, littering fines, and keeping the peace at high school football games. Besides, this town can’t afford more than three police cars. So how’s it supposed to pay for a murder investigation?”
“So you think it’s murder, too?”
His mouth snapped shut for a moment. “Well . . . when you put it that way. You’re right. It could be something else. I mean . . .” he hesitated. “What do you think?”
Suicide was my first thought—most likely because of my own experiences with my late husband. But it could have been a tragic accident, too.
“I don’t know” is what I finally told Seymour as I watched the forensics team emerge from the State vehicle and begin to speak to Ciders. “But for now I’m keeping my distance.”
Displaying too much curiosity might once again land me on a State Trooper’s suspect list.
ON
MY WAY back to the Inn with Seymour, I spotted Ashley McClure-Sutherland and Kiki Langdon in the parking lot. They had just piled some luggage into Ashley’s silver BMW and were about to depart. I hung back a minute until they had rolled down the drive and out of sight.
From Fiona’s front desk I phoned the bookstore to let Mina know she hadn’t been forgotten. The girl didn’t answer until the sixth ring, so I figured the store was busy. When she finally did pick up, I could hear customers’ voices in the background.
I explained to Mina that we were delayed, but would be getting back to the store within the next hour. She gamely reassured us that things were under control. I could hear a strain in her voice, as if she suspected—or feared—that something was amiss with Johnny. I kept my mouth shut, figuring that this wasn’t the time or place to tell Mina that a corpse was found floating in the inlet, especially since I hadn’t a clue as to the identity yet. Not even if the body was male or female.
I’d no sooner hung up the Finch’s phone than in strode Chief Ciders, his big black boots clomping officiously along the Victorian inn’s polished hardwood floor. Typically, a large, commanding presence, Ciders was meaty but not fat, his dark blue uniform fitting snugly around a barrel chest. He was in his fifties, and he’d been on the Liliputian Quindicott police force for thirty years now. He had a broad nose and small eyes, and his graying hair had receded, leaving a round visage tugged down at the jowls by time, gravity, and a repeated disinterest in lifting his expression into anything remotely resembling a happy face.
Why his manner was seldom pleasant, nobody could say. He was, by all accounts, in a long-standing, happy marriage with three children and a number of grandchildren. My own theory was that he’d spent too many years devoted to the kind of petty law enforcement that trained him to constantly suspect somebody of being up to something. To put it bluntly, after so many years on the job, his immediate response to any violation of the law, small or large, appeared to be not a gleam in the eye for the thrill of a crime-solving challenge, but a weary scowl as he calculated how much time the confounded case would end up taking away from his poker nights and fishing trips.
“Mahnin’,” said the chief, removing his battered hat.
“Hey, Chief, what brings you here?” said Seymour. “Let me guess . . . you saw all those leaves blowing around outside and decided to slap Fiona with a littering citation?”
The chief narrowed his pale blue gaze at Seymour as if he’d just watched a dog owner stroll away from a public sidewalk without pooper scooping. Then he saw me and his expression changed. Now he looked like he’d accidentally swallowed a wad of chewing tobacco.
“Is Mrs. Finch around?”
“Oh, Chief, let me get her for you,” Seymour declared.
On the carved wooden counter Fiona had placed a decorative antique brass bell. Seymour bounced his hand up and down on it several times. With each strike the bell clanged loudly.
“Innkeeper! Innkeeper!”
Fiona hurried through the doorway that led to the kitchen. “What is all that noise about?” she demanded.
Then Fiona saw Chief Ciders and her spine stiffened.
“Can I help you, Chief ?” she asked as she tactfully moved the bell away from Seymour’s reach.
“You can tell me if you have any guests missing,” the chief replied, almost accusatorily.
“Hmm. . . . what sort of guest?” Seymour asked, as if he were back at his contestant’s podium on Jeopardy! and trying to clarify a question from Alex Trebek. “A man? A woman?”
“Not talking to you, Tarnish,” said Ciders tersely. “Besides which: I do questions, you do answers.” He speared Fiona with his gaze.
“Well, ah, that depends on what you mean by ‘missing,’ ” Fiona replied.
“Come on, Fiona,” Seymour goaded, “this isn’t an impeachment hearing. Do you have a missing guest or what?”
“Well . . .”
“One guest is missing,” I interrupted. “Her name is Angel Stark. She didn’t sleep in her room last night, and she was supposed to check out an hour ago but she hasn’t turned up to do that as yet.”
Chief Ciders slapped his hat against his knee. “Dog-gone it, Pen, that is not the answer I wanted to hear.”
“Of course not,” I replied, deciding to take a leap. “You were hoping the young woman you just pulled out of the Pond was Victoria Banks, the Brown University student who vanished from the Comfy-Time Motel last night around midnight.”
Suddenly the foyer got so quiet you could hear the buzzing of a fly tapping the window, and the sound of the wind rustling the willows outside.
“How in hellfire did you know that?” Chief Ciders said.
My shrug obviously didn’t satisfy Quindicott’s top cop.
“This Angel Stark,” he said, continuing to eye me. “Was she in town for a particular reason?”
“She’s an author. She gave a reading of her new book with us last night. Her publicist, Dana Wu, dropped by this morning when I opened up and reported Ms. Stark missing.”
“Yet this Dana Wu didn’t drop by my office and file a missing person report. Now why is that?”
“Dana thought maybe Angel had run off with . . . some guy she met at the reading.”
Ciders gave me a sidelong glance. “Local guy?”
“Er . . . Not really.”
Again, Chief Cider’s hat slapped against his trousers.
“I should have known you’d be involved,” he barked.
“So who’s the stiff you just fished out of the lake?” Seymour asked.
“Don’t you have mail to misdeliver, Tarnish?”
“All finished for the day, just like you . . . Now that the Staties are here to do your job you can go back to issuing littering tickets.”
Chief Ciders shot Seymour a withering look that was formidable enough to intimidate Seymour into silence, at least temporarily. Unfortunately for Ciders, that look did not work on me.
“So who is it?” I asked. “Do you have any clue? Do you want me to try to identify the body?”
“It might come to that,” Ciders conceded. “But right now I need the phone number of that woman you mentioned. This Dana Wu.”
Keep pushing. I could almost hear Jack’s voice back at the store. “Do you think you’ve found Angel Stark’s body?” I pressed. “The author I told you about? You can’t tell me there’s nothing to go on.”
“The corpse was missing any ID.” Chief Ciders admitted with a frustrated sight, “but we did find something in her pocket.”
So it’s a her, I thought, relieved for Bud and Mina’s sake that it wasn’t Johnny Napp.
Ciders reached into his jacket and drew out a small clear plastic evidence bag. Inside was an old-fashioned long-stem brass key attached to a small wooden placard. Burned into the wooden tab were the words “Finch Inn” and the number nine.
“Can you identify this, Mrs. Finch?” said the chief, almost mechanically, since it was obvious that anyone who lived within twenty miles of Quindicott could.
“That’s one of our keys,” Fiona cried. “Room nine . . . The room where Angel Stark was staying.”
CHAPTER 12
Fall Guy or Felon?
Thanks to you and yore meddlin’, we finally got us a clue.
—Merle Constiner, “The Turkey Buzzard Blues,” Black Mask magazine, 1943
I’D BARELY DIGESTED the surprise of seeing the key before I was rocked by another shock. Bud Napp rushed through the Inn’s open doors, looking nearly as pale as Barney Finch.
Chief Ciders hitched his fingers in his belt and faced him. “Thanks for coming in, Bud.”
“You said it was urgent,” Bud replied. Then he noticed the rest of us standing around with funereal faces. “What the hell is going on here, Chief ?”
“Bud . . . are you still selling that bright yellow lawn rope?”
“You hustled me over here for an inventory report?”
“Just answer the question.”
“No,” Bud replied. “I told you last week when you came to buy some to tie up your tomatoes, the company stopped making it. Some issue with the dye. They’re switching to neon orange.”
“Have you sold any yellow rope in the past week?”
Bud shook his head. “I have a few bolts in my truck, that’s all. And I’m using them for my building business.”
“Let’s go on out into the parking lot, Bud. I need to get a look inside of your truck.”
“Are you looking for something in particular?” Bud asked suspiciously. “Maybe I should ask to see some kind of warrant?”
“You can give me permission to search your truck now, or wait until the State Police get a warrant issued,” Ciders replied wearily. “Getting that warrant should take all of about five minutes—and then the Staties might want to do more than search your truck. If they have to go to all that trouble for the paper, they’ll probably include your garage, your business, your home.”
Bud swallowed. “I didn’t bring the truck. I drove over in my Explorer.”
Now it was Ciders who was suddenly suspicious. “Where is your truck, then?”
“Johnny has it,” Bud replied uneasily. “He had a date last night, I told him he could borrow my truck.”
“And where is Johnny right now?”
When I saw the look in Ciders’s eye, I knew this was the question he’d been itching to ask all along. I still didn’t figure out how a yellow rope was involved, though I’d seen some of it strung around the restaurant’s construction site—no surprise since Budd was supplying the crew.
“Johnny . . . He hasn’t come home yet.”
“What about his date? Who was she? Was she staying at this inn?”
“Hell, no. Johnny was dating a local girl. Mina Griffith. Works at Pen’s bookstore.”
Now Ciders turned to me. “And is Mina at work today?”
I nodded. “But she doesn’t know where Johnny is either.”
“And why is that?”
I snapped my mouth shut and kept it that way. Ciders was grilling me, and I didn’t like it. He studied me—and obviously didn’t care for my attempt to remain uncooperative. “Okay, don’t answer,” he told me. “I’ll just have to track down Mina and ask her.”
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