Murder in the Queen's Armes

by Aaron Elkins

  "Do you mean Sandra was having affairs with both of them?" This surprised Gideon. The brittle Sandra hardly seemed the sort of woman to stir up male instincts of violence or passion—not his at any rate.

  "I know what you’re thinking," Bagshawe said, "but there’s more involved than the young lady’s charms; there’s a tidy sum of money. Miss Mazur, you see, will come into a sizable inheritance on her thirtieth birthday. Both men were in grim pursuit, and each, I gather, had been unaware he had a rival. Sufficient reason for homicide, I should say, should one of them find out."

  Gideon thought it over. Leon, ambitious and bright, did seem the kind of man who wouldn’t be at all averse to marrying for money. And although it might appear that Randy, coming from a wealthy family himself, had less to gain, his position had been insecure. From what Nate had said, his father had been threatening to disinherit him. It was obvious to Gideon, knowing what he knew about Randy’s style of living, that Randy would have welcomed the advantages of a rich wife.

  "You’re saying," he said, "that Leon might have found out about Randy and killed him?"

  "Yes; without premeditation, I should think. Leon’s a clever young man. If he’d planned to do Randy in, he’d choose someplace removed from the dig to do it. But I don’t rule out an argument and a hot-blooded murder."

  "But where’s the motive for Sandra in all that? And do you really think she could have killed Randy, even armed with a mallet? She can’t weigh much more than a hundred pounds."

  Bagshawe waved dismissively. "Given the proper incentive, women have been known to kill men a great deal larger than themselves, as I’m sure you know very well. And she had an incentive. It seems she’d become disenchanted with the ways of our Randy and had, in fact, settled on the lucky Leon as her man. This, she claims, she finally told Randy, but he seems to have taken exception. He threatened to make their affair public—and a few little tidbits about certain of Miss Mazur’s, ah, unusual proclivities as well." He lowered his eyes and coughed delicately. "Well, then, Leon, you see, with his eye on a rising academic career in the Ivy League, if that’s the right term, might very well bow out and find himself a more socially acceptable wife. You see?"

  "I think I do, and I guess that Sandra might have a motive, all right. But why would she tell you all this?"

  "She didn’t, but a chambermaid at the Jug and Sceptre, where Randy was putting up, heard them shouting at each other early one morning, and told all to Sergeant Fryer—remarkable memory for details, that woman has—and with what Miss Mazur did tell me, it wasn’t hard to piece it all together."

  He leaned over, tapped his pipe against a rock, blew through the stem, and put it in his pocket. "So you see, Professor, the investigation progresses satisfactorily, and there’s no reason at all for you not to return to your bones."

  "I think I’ve just been fired," Gideon said with a grin as Bagshawe got to his feet. "And speaking of bones, I have some questions to ask Leon about still another bone that’s turned up, or rather, that hasn’t turned up."

  "That’s the ticket," Bagshawe said with an amicable lack of interest.

  "It’s a piece of a femur that seems to have been found and then lost again. You’re welcome to sit in if you like."

  Bagshawe let his expression answer for him, and very eloquent it was.

  When Gideon went to the dig, he stood for a while, watching the crew work at backfilling under Abe’s efficient direction. With newly informed eyes he took a good, long look at them, but Sandra seemed as drawn and hard-edged as ever, not his idea of a seductress—no matter how rich— and a pretty unlikely murderess, too, although she was a better bet for that. The rosy-cheeked Barry looked no less wholesome than ever, and Frawley no less ineffectual. And Leon, who was coolly lecturing Abe on some stratigraphic complexities, hardly fit the mold of Bagshawe’s hot-blooded murderer. Cold-blooded, however …that might be another thing.

  But when it came down to it, there was something unsatisfying, something inescapably spurious about every one of the hypotheses Bagshawe had advanced. And what about the left-handed mallet blow? None of them, after all, were left-handed. How could he fit that inescapable fact

  into even the few shadowy patterns that had emerged thus far? Or was he offbase in his continuing certainty that the killer was left-handed? Bagshawe disagreed with him, and Bagshawe was a pretty fair cop.

  When Abe called a halt for lunch, Gideon took him aside. "Frawley says Leon never reported finding any bone."

  "Is that so?" Abe said thoughtfully. "Maybe we should have a little brown-bag talk with Leon."

  Most of the staff were taking advantage of the fine weather to eat their sack lunches on the bluff, but Leon had made for the shed. He was at the table writing a postcard, a cup of coffee beside him, when Abe and Gideon came in. He looked up, smiling.

  "Hi, Abe. Hiya, Gideon."

  "Leon," Abe said, "you wouldn’t mind if we had a little talk? It shouldn’t take long."

  "Not at all, Abe. Just let me finish this card or I’ll never get back to it."

  Gideon went to the table in the corner to make coffee for himself and Abe. Above the hot plate, a small mirror was taped to the wall. In it he could see Leon bent over the postcard, writing slowly. There was something…

  He put down the coffee jar and whirled around. "You’re writing left-handed!"

  There was a long, frozen moment during which Leon stared speechlessly back at Gideon, and Abe stared from one to the other. At last Leon mutely lifted the hand in which he held his pen.

  It was his right hand, inarguably his right hand.

  "I… sorry," Gideon said lamely. "My mistake."

  "You were looking in the mirror," Abe said. "You saw it backwards."

  "I guess so. Sorry," he said again, feeling idiotic. "I don’t know what I was thinking of." But he knew very well; he had a case of left-handed mallet murderers on the brain.

  "What’s the big deal anyway?" Leon asked.

  "No big deal," Abe said. "So, let’s have some lunch, and we’ll have our little talk."

  He tore open a brown paper bag, removed its waxed paper-wrapped contents, and spread it out as a make-do tablecloth. He and Leon had their meals with them, but Gideon was empty-handed; he had promised to meet Julie at the George for a late lunch. Still somewhat disconcerted, he peeked once again at Leon in the mirror— right-handed, definitely right-handed—and brought back the coffee mugs.

  "Jesus Christ," Leon said. "Fish paste." He was peering into one of the two sandwiches packed for him by his landlady. He groaned and shook his head in waggish despair. "The English."

  Abe smiled tolerantly. As well he could, Gideon thought. Mrs. Hinshore had provided a thick, aromatic roast-beef-and-horseradish sandwich for him.

  "Wow," Leon said, watching him unwrap it. "I think I’m staying at the wrong place." He was relaxed and smiling, his elbow over the back of his chair.

  "Leon," Gideon said, "do you remember coming up with a fragment of a human femur a few weeks ago?"

  "Uh-uh."

  "November one, it would have been. It was never entered in the field catalog."

  "Maybe," Leon said absently, chewing slowly, "but I don’t think so."

  "You don’t think so?" Abe looked up sharply from his sandwich. "A human bone isn’t important enough to remember?"

  "Well, sure it’s important, Abe," Leon replied with some edge, "and I guess I’d remember it if I dug it up. So I guess I didn’t."

  Abe put the sandwich down on the paper sack and reached inside his cardigan sweater. His hand emerged with the find card, which he extended to Leon.

  Leon wiped his fingers, took the card, and frowned. "Huh," he said, " ‘human femur, left, partial.’ That’s my handwriting, all right….Boy, it’s hard to remember. You’re talking about a month ago; we’ve dug up a lot of stuff since." He shook his head at the card and handed it back. "I don’t know what to say, Abe."

  He took another dreamy bite of his sandwich. "Wait a minute; m
aybe I do remember." He swallowed, his eyes rolled upward. Gideon was struck with the distinct impression that some quick fabrication was underway. "Yeah, that’s right—I found something I thought might be a human bone, and I wrote it on the find card. I remember, I got all excited about it." He laughed merrily at himself. "And then when Jack looked at it, he said it was just a piece of a steatite carving." Again he chuckled at himself.

  "That’s hard to buy, Leon," Gideon said. "A couple of weeks ago you recognized the difference—a damn subtle one—between the ribs of a deer and those of a human being. Now you’re saying you couldn’t tell the difference between a stone carving and a femur?"

  Leon hunched his shoulders and spread his hands humorously. "What can I say? I’m human too."

  Abe looked at him, running a finger over his chin. "In the field catalog on November first, there is only one entry: four faience beads. No steatite carving."

  Thoughtfully, Leon reached into his paper sack, ignoring a second sandwich and bringing out a roll of mints. He offered it around. "Polos. They’re like Lifesavers." Gideon and Abe declined, and Leon popped one into his mouth and dropped the roll into a shirt pocket. "Well," he said at last,

  "I sure don’t know how to account for it. Maybe I got the date wrong on the card."

  "That’s possible," Abe said pleasantly, "but in the whole catalog there’s no steatite carving."

  Again Leon spread his hands.

  "There was something else, Leon," Gideon said. "Originally, you put down the depth as twenty-one inches, then crossed it out and changed it to twelve. What was that about?"

  "I did?" Leon asked for the card back from Abe and made a show of studying it intently. "Oh," he said with a smile, "I see what you mean. No big mystery. I just transposed the numbers by mistake. Do it all the time. I’d make a hell of a meter-reader, huh?" Still smiling, he handed the card back to Abe. "Boy, you guys are picky! And I thought Nate gave me a hard time."

  "Was Nate giving you a hard time?" Gideon asked.

  "Well, no, not exactly a hard time." Was it Gideon’s imagination or did Leon seem a little uneasy? "But we’ve been spending a couple of evenings a week over beers, having some good old-fashioned arguments about my dissertation."

  "He’s chairing your committee, isn’t he?"

  "Yeah, and he keeps wanting me to do the thing like a technician—which is just what he is, when you come down to it—but I just can’t do it. You know, that’s exactly what’s wrong with archaeology: The emphasis is all on data, on digging up things and recording them." He leaned forward intently. "If we spent half as much time thinking about what it all means as we do photographing and drawing and recording every crummy, dog-biscuit potsherd we dig up, maybe we’d know something."

  "I think you have a point," Gideon said, as willing as ever to take up an academic argument, but not unaware that Leon had rather skillfully changed the subject, "but you have to remember that archaeology is a funny science.

  Even at its best, it obliterates evidence as it discovers it. If you have poor scholarship in the field, you destroy future knowledge. Look at the nineteenth-century archaeologists. Look at Schliemann; if he had known how to properly record and catalog what he found at Troy—"

  "There, that’s just what I mean. We think in terms of catalogs, lists of things. We shouldn’t be writing catalog entries; we should be writing chapters on the social history of mankind. We’re supposed to be humanists, aren’t we?— not compilers of minutiae that nobody gives a damn about, and that don’t matter a damn when it comes down to it."

  Gideon was experiencing something close to déjà vu. This was another installment of the discussions he had had with Nate over those beers so long ago. Only Gideon had been on Leon’s side of the fence then. Leon put his argument very well, better than Gideon had at the time, and Gideon sympathized with his impatience even if he no longer quite agreed.

  "You got to remember," Abe put in, "sure, we’re humanists, but also we’re scientists, not philosophers. We got to depend on empirical data for our conclusions. If you start with lousy data, you get rotten conclusions."

  Leon laughed good-naturedly. "The two of you sound like Nate. I can see where he gets his ideas. You ought to join us at the George one night; you’d enjoy it. But I still say the proper aim of archaeology is to learn about the people who came before us, not about inanimate artifacts."

  " ‘You are not wood,’ " said Abe, " ‘you are not stones, but men.’ " He shrugged. "Shakespeare," he said apologetically. "Mark Antony."

  Leon laughed again. "You guys are really something." He closed his paper sack. "Well, I guess I’ll get back out to the dig. I really enjoyed talking to you."

  "I don’t think we’re finished yet," Abe said. "I’m still not so clear on this bone you didn’t find."

  Leon looked at both of them, his youthful, trimly bearded face showing its first indication of strain. "Look, if you’re accusing me of something, how about telling me what it is?"

  "Nobody’s accusing you, Leon," Gideon said. "We’ve found a pretty peculiar discrepancy, and we’re just trying—"

  "Well, why the hell don’t you talk to Frawley?" Leon stood abruptly and pointed at the find card. "If I said I found something, I found it. That card was in the file, wasn’t it? Why don’t you ask Frawley why he didn’t put it in the catalog?"

  "We did ask him," Gideon said. "He says he never heard about a femur, and you never turned in a card."

  "Well, he’s lying."

  "Hold it a minute," Abe said. "Let me get this straight. Now you’re saying you did find it and you told him about it?"

  Leon made a jerky, exasperated gesture with his hand. "I’m saying I don’t remember—but if I wrote it on the card, then obviously I did. Jesus Christ, that’s why we have the cards; so if we forget something, it’s down on paper." He breathed deep, closed his eyes for a moment, and smiled at them. "I’m sorry, I guess I’m a little jumpy. Who isn’t? I think I need a walk, if it’s okay with you." He made for the door without waiting for an answer.

  "Sure, why not?" Abe said, and then held up the sack Leon had left behind. "Don’t forget your fish paste."

  "THERE’S an old story," Abe said, as Leon, clutching his paper bag, shut the door none too gently behind him. "Skolnick borrows a kettle from Mandlebaum, and when he brings it back, Mandlebaum says, ‘Look, there’s a big hole in this kettle; how am I supposed to use it anymore? You got to give me another one.’ Skolnick says no he won’t, so they argue about it, and finally they agree to go in front of the rabbi to settle it. You know this story?"

  "Does a horse in a bathtub come into it?"

  "No, that’s a different story. In this one, they go in front of the rabbi, and here’s what Skolnick tells him: ‘In the first place, Rabbi, it’s a lie that I borrowed a kettle from Mandlebaum. Never did I borrow anything from him. In the second place, the kettle had a hole in it already when he lent it to me. And in the third place, it was in perfect condition when I gave it back to him. So you can see I’m completely innocent. Don’t blame me.’"

  Gideon laughed as he finished his coffee. He went to a sink in the corner to rinse both cups. "It sounds like Leon’s story all right: In the first place I never found a femur; in the second place, if I did, I don’t remember; and in the third place, I only thought I found it—it was really a steatite carving."

  "And in the fourth place," Abe said, stretching, his hands clasped behind his neck, "it must be Frawley who made the mistake in the first place, so don’t blame me."

  The find card was lying on the table. Gideon picked it up, read it once more, and waved it gently back and forth. "You know, Abe, I’m not sure what this is about, but something tells me it’s important."

  "Me, too. I agree with you a hundred percent. There’s funny business, all right, only what it is I don’t know."

  Gideon looked at his watch. "Almost one o’clock. I’m going to go down the hill and have lunch with Julie. And I think I ought to drop by the Cormorant an
d talk to Nate about this."

  "Nate? I wish you luck. Twice I tried to talk to him yesterday, just to cheer him up, and he wouldn’t even come to the door." He shook his head worriedly. "All day long he sits in his room and sulks. They bring him his meals, which he doesn’t eat."

  "Well, it’s easy to understand."

  "Sure, but healthy it’s not. Nathan’s got a depressive side to him, you know that? Maybe even melancholic. Healthy," he repeated darkly, "it’s not."

  SIXTEEN

  BUT Nate, if he didn’t look precisely healthy, was far from melancholic when Gideon saw him next, and he was certainly not sulking in his room or refusing to eat. He was, in fact, at a table in the George, with the scant remains of a wedge of pork pie in front of him, while the barmaid was exchanging the empty, foam-webbed pint glass on his table for a second one brimming with dark, creamy stout. There was also a nearly empty highball glass before him. Flushed and disheveled, he leered and mumbled at the waitress, who gave him the blind smile reserved for unwelcome attentions from such patrons and hurried away.

  This was all startlingly un-Natelike behavior. As often as the two them had huddled over mugs of weak beer in their graduate-student days, Gideon had never seen him drink enough to get sloppy. For a moment, Gideon, coming through the door with Julie, stared. Nate stared blearily back.

  "Hey, Gid! Come on over. Buy you a drink. Bring the foxy lady."

  Gideon hesitated, and then began to steer Julie toward his table. "That’s Nate Marcus. I’d like to talk to him."

  "That’s Nate Marcus? The intense, dogged scientist I’ve been hearing about?"

  "In the flesh, and stewed to the gills."

  The closer they came, the tighter he seemed. Sweating and red-eyed, he wavered as he leaned forward to push out a chair for Julie, and he moved with a drunk’s exaggerated slow motion, as if his own chair was balanced precariously on a tightrope instead of sitting firmly on the sturdy old floor of the George.