Honeymoon With Murder

by Carolyn G. Hart

  How odd!

  The canned goods were arranged according to contents, and they were in alphabetical order. Asparagus soup. Bean soup. Chowder. Minestrone. Onion soup. Beets. Carrots. Corn. Green beans. Spinach. Sweet potatoes. The same with the boxes. Bisquick. Oatmeal. Raisin bran.

  Each can sat equidistant from its neighbor.

  She poked into the broom closet. Everything in a particular spot, no higgledy-piggledy, let-things-land-where-they-might, as in Annie’s kitchen. Jesse Penrick had fashioned for himself a geometric environment. A place for everything and everything in its place. He was not only hateful, he was, to slapdash Annie, really weird.

  But there were no pine needles anywhere.

  In the living room, Jesse’s passion for exactitude was reflected in the precise arrangement of his pipes. Nine of them, all aligned a half inch apart along the back of a pine desk.

  But the lid was ajar on the tobacco canister. On closer inspection, she spotted shreds of tobacco on the desktop.

  The center desk drawer wasn’t altogether closed.

  The sofa cushions were askew.

  Magazines were jammed haphazardly into a rack beside an easy chair.

  A man doesn’t alphabetize his canned goods, meticulously arrange his broom closet, align his pipes, then turn into a slob with the rest of his possessions.

  Had the police searched these rooms?

  Not in this manner. Chief Saulter demanded professionalism from his staff. Billy Cameron would never disarrange a desk, scatter pipe tobacco. Even Posey, with all his asinine traits, wouldn’t leave a mess like this.

  And, had the police searched, they would have neatly docketed papers, recorded information. They wouldn’t have pawed about in the tobacco canister.

  No. Not the police.

  Annie felt the same unmistakable tingle she’d experienced earlier that morning on the pier when she realized the murderer had watched Ingrid and Jesse quarrel Saturday morning. Once again, she felt close, so close, to the killer, who had been here—looking for something.

  She found further traces of a hurried search in the bedroom, clothes rumpled in their drawers, a lack of precision in the arrangement of the hangers in the closet.

  Looking for something. Something small, obviously, if it could be hidden in a tobacco canister. And the search had to have been made by the murderer. A petty thief wouldn’t have left behind the TV or the wooden tray on the bedroom dresser with its neat piles of pennies, nickels, dimes, and quarters.

  Annie couldn’t know what the murderer had sought—or whether it had been found—but she gave it a try. Twenty minutes later, she could have filled out an exhaustive report on everything from Jesse’s choice in toothpaste (Gleem) to the depressing lack of personal mementoes. No photographs. No letters. Nothing to indicate he had not started and ended his life in this dingy cabin as an old man. And nothing whatsoever to indicate what someone else had sought here.

  But she hit paydirt in the lower right-hand drawer of the pine desk, and suddenly Jesse Penrick came clear in her mind, dreadfully clear. She’d known him as a snoopy old man, poking into the trash barrels for anything of value, and she’d learned that he liked to hurt people, the crushed car on Duane’s doorstep, the scarlet A on Mavis’s mailbox. Now, she knew him for what he was, a scavenger of human frailty—for profit.

  Perhaps the wonder was not that Jesse had been murdered, but that he’d lived so long.

  He kept careful records, including the individual payment schedules.

  The folder on Mavis made her the angriest. There were several photographs of Mavis and Billy, and the final neat notation, Sept. 15, $5.

  The sorry, sorry bastard. So that’s what Mavis meant when she started to explain that “it was all worked out” with Jesse. No, he wouldn’t inform Mavis’s husband of her whereabouts, not so long as she paid him five dollars a week.

  Tom Smith’s folder contained a single clipping headlined, WHERE ARE THEY NOW? It was yellowed and the dateline was in August several years ago. The story sketched the backgrounds of nine anti-war activists of the late sixties, who had disappeared after bombings or draft-board break-ins. Six were still wanted for various crimes. There were several smudgy photographs. The sums listed on this payment schedule were irregular but began about a week after the article was published and ranged from ten to forty dollars weekly.

  Obviously, Jesse kept a close eye on his neighbor’s success with his miniatures and adjusted his rate accordingly.

  She puzzled over Adele’s folder. It contained a list of payments, averaging a hundred dollars a month, but it was harder to discern what Jesse had found in Adele’s background to provide a basis for blackmail. There were only two other items in the folder, a newspaper clipping and a map. The clipping was a three-column photograph of an attractive woman in her mid-thirties standing before a classic antebellum mansion. The cutline read: Lovely Susan Prescott welcomes guests to Hounds Hill for the April house-and-garden tours. The hand-drawn map of the island contained a half-dozen or so residential streets. Each street was marked with two addresses, one circled. And that was all. Quickly, Annie copied the map in her notebook.

  There was no payment schedule in Duane’s folder, only a slender stack of news stories on the deaths of Mary and Sheila Webb, Duane’s arrest for drunk driving and his conviction (two-year sentence, eight months served, remainder suspended).

  Jesse had underlined in red several dates in the obituaries, Sheila’s birthday, Mary and Duane’s wedding anniversary. That last date was September 19, the day Annie and Max wed, the day Jesse Penrick was murdered.

  The wind rattled a loose shutter on the roof of Duane’s cabin. Annie knocked for the third time on the kitchen door.

  He might easily be in there, sitting and drinking in that dark, overcrowded room.

  Annie fingered Ingrid’s master key. She was a little bit afraid of Duane. There was an aura of unsatisfied violence and anger around him. She shook her head impatiently. Aura, indeed. Had she spent too much time around Ophelia and Laurel? Still, it took a little internal prompting to decide to open the door. (Think what Cordelia Gray would do. Or Norah Mulcahaney, if she had a search warrant.) Inspired by such stalwart examples, Annie inserted the key, unlocked the door, and poked her head inside, calling out, “Mr. Webb?” She could pretend she’d found the door unlocked.

  She edged inside when there was no answer, her heart hammering. It took only minutes to be certain Duane was absent. His cereal bowl and coffee mug were still on the kitchen table along with a crumpled morning newspaper. A brown cotton sweater was tossed carelessly on the telephone table in the living room, the bed unmade in the bedroom. But there was no telltale trail of pine needles.

  The printer clattered, vibrating on its plastic stand. The printout dangled to the floor and began to curl.

  Max relaxed in his chair, now almost horizontal, and studied the ceiling. The dossiers were done, and they contained a wealth of information, birth and death dates, job histories, gossip, personality profiles. Somewhere in all that jumble of fact and fancy, there had to be a lead to Penrick’s murderer.

  Penrick himself turned out to be damned peculiar, as well as consistently unpleasant. One of those “Step on a crack, break my back” mentalities, shrilly insistent that his personal belongings be arranged with meticulous order, refusing to permit odd or irregular-shaped furniture or decorations in his house, always wearing a navy blue cotton turtleneck and tight dungarees.

  Max decided to read it all from scratch, give it a fresh eye. He was just the fellow to find a revealing bit of information. Pouring himself a fresh cup of coffee, he settled down with his papers, with only an occasional pause to admire the outstanding job he’d done.

  Adele Prescott’s antique-filled living room astounded Annie. Despite the rooms small size, a Bristol glass chandelier hung from the ceiling, casting a bright glow on a collection of Meissen china plates, nineteenth-century papiér-mâché trays with gold leaf and mother-of-pearl, three Americ
an rococo pier-glass mirrors, two Chinese porcelain vases, and two gilt torcheres. Each piece was the finest of its kind. Annie knew these were not reproductions.

  Her cheeks flushed with pleasure, Adele pointed out several pieces to Annie, taking special pride in a pair of elaborately dressed Japanese dolls of the late Edo period and a green stone mask from Teotihuacan. “You like my things,” she observed with satisfaction, and she smiled. It was the first warmth she’d ever exhibited, and Annie felt chilled.

  “You certainly have an eclectic taste,” she said, straining to reconcile her initial assessment of Adele, while simultaneously making a surreptitious survey for pine needles.

  “I’ve always liked only the best. All my life.”

  Then how did you end up in Nightingale Courts? Annie wondered.

  The big woman caressed a Russian straw work box. “Once I had a lovely setting for my treasures.” She scowled. “A man will always go after a younger woman, especially a wealthy man. You’d better remember that.” She picked up a jade letter opener.

  Annie’s face froze, then she contained her irritation. People see life through their own experiences. Obviously Adele’s past was full of betrayal. Had she always been strident and overbearing? And how to reconcile Adele’s appearance with her obsession for beautiful objects? Had her collector’s regard for precious things made Jesse Penrick even more odious in her eyes? Why had Jesse clipped the article on Hounds Hill? Had Hounds Hill been Adele’s “lovely setting”? Who was the Susan Prescott who stood on the steps of the antebellum mansion?

  “Did you once live at Hounds Hill?”

  Adele’s nostrils flared. A vein began to pulse in her throat. “Who’ve you been talking to? That hateful Duane Webb? Yes, I lived there. It was my home. Mine. And someday I’ll have a beautiful home again—then I’ll have room for my things. Is that why you’ve come? To throw Hounds Hill in my face?” Her thin voice rose shrilly.

  “Oh no, not at all. I just heard someone say something once about Hounds Hill, but no, that’s not why I came.” For an instant, Annie was tempted to tell her about Jesse’s folder. But not yet. No need to put her on guard. Annie flashed her a conciliatory smile. “I’m trying to find out more about Jesse’s activities. You told me you saw him at the Gas ’N Go pay phone Thursday night. Did you see him on Friday or Saturday?”

  Adele shook her head impatiently “I certainly didn’t spend my time keeping track of him!”

  Time to try flattery. “Mrs. Prescott, you are obviously a woman of intelligence and cultivation. I know you would never have invaded your neighbors privacy, but I’m just asking you to take a moment to look back. Anything at all you might have noticed about Jesse Penrick this past week might be helpful.”

  “Why should you care about that disgusting creature?”

  “I don’t care about him at all. But his murderer abducted Ingrid. Finding the killer is the best way to find Ingrid.”

  Adele replaced the letter opener on a small Hepplewhite mahogany console table and picked up a silver music box inset with a delicate rose-quartz filigree. She lifted the lid. As a Strauss waltz tinkled, sounding like a melody distantly heard in the night, she stroked the quartz, her blunt fingers gentle. Either the music, the soothing touch of her possession, or Annie’s mention of Ingrid touched her, because she finally answered grudgingly, “I saw him Wednesday night. Couldn’t sleep, so I went out on the pier. It was late, I think, around midnight. He’d been out in his rowboat. He tied up at the pier, right under one of the lights. When he climbed up the steps, I got a glimpse of his face. He had a nasty, pleased look on his face.”

  “What did you think he’d been doing?”

  “Peeking. Like he always did. I told him once he was a voyeur. He had nasty eyes.”

  Annie gave a final hasty glance for pine needles, knowing as she did so that they would be impossible to spot against the dark patterns in the Oriental rug. She felt she’d managed all she was going to learn through subtlety and indirection. So—

  “Tell me, Mrs. Prescott, why did you pay Jesse Penrick a hundred dollars a month?”

  A broadside to the head couldn’t have startled the woman more. Her face was suddenly as white and ridged as bone. “What did you say?”

  “What did he have on you?” Annie pressed.

  But that was the wrong question. With a sinking heart, Annie knew it when she saw relief flame in those dark eyes. Relief followed by fury, quickly controlled.

  “I don’t have any idea what you’re talking about,” Adele Prescott announced. “You’re confused.” But the hand reaching out for the doorknob trembled.

  * * *

  Barbie’s voice on the intercom was cheerful, as usual, and informal, as always. Max suppressed a sigh. How could he expect clients to be awed, as Annie assured him they were when approaching Nero Wolfe, if Barbie always called her boss by his first name and played country music on her radio? As Waylon Jennings bemoaned the loss of another love, Barbie said, “You awake and everything? Some guy named Alan Nichols is here to see you, and he’s in a swivet.”

  Max could care less about impressing Alan Nichols. Or about Alan’s state of mind. But his not to reason, his merely to serve mankind. “Sure. Send him in.”

  Max rose, held out his hand, and forced a welcoming smile. He didn’t know what irritated him the most, Alan’s haberdashery-perfect appearance (white silk blazer—white, mind you!—pink shirt, blue silk tie with white polka dots, and navy gabardine slacks), or his billboard-perfect looks. What could Annie see in the curly-haired creep?

  But, Max realized abruptly, Alan wasn’t his usual ebullient self. In fact, the scared, sick look in his eyes was unmistakable. “Max, listen, I’m really worried! I met Betsy’s plane—she was due back from Frisco at nine-fifteen—and she wasn’t on it!”

  Ominous clouds pressed closer from the west. An occasional flash of lightning indicated the storm was near. In its second day, the Tent City had acquired a down-at-heels, ragged appearance. The plastic trash cans overflowed, the mosquito netting billowed in the wind, and an occasional yellow plastic cup rattled across the dusty ground.

  Across the courtyard, most of the residents of Nightingale Courts stood sullenly near the command table. Annie glanced at her watch. Almost ten. Time for the fingerprinting. Madeleine Kurtz appeared to be checking the residents off a list. She swung about and looked impatiently toward Adele’s cabin. Spotting Annie, she made energetic hailing motions.

  Quickly, Annie nodded affirmatively, then made elaborate just-a-minute motions and turned away to trot toward the last cabin. She hadn’t spotted Tom Smith among Madeleine’s group, and she wanted to ask him a few questions in private. When she knocked on his front door, it swung open.

  “Mr. Smith?” She pushed the door wider. Her nose wrinkled at the room’s heavy odor, that not very pleasant mixture of paints, smoke, leather, and wood. “Mr. Smith?”

  Light spilled from the kitchen. The living room was dusky. The door to the bedroom was closed.

  Annie raised her hand and rapped firmly against the door panel. The sound was loud enough to wake the dead.

  No answer. She stepped inside, leaving the door open behind her. But, abruptly, she felt certain he wasn’t there. The cabin had an empty air. There was no sense of another human’s presence. Still, she opened the bedroom door cautiously, again calling out his name. She preferred not to come face to face unexpectedly with the cabin’s odd occupant.

  The bedroom was as bare as a monk’s cell. A single narrow bed, with a woolen army blanket pulled up neatly over the pillow. One maple chest. One straight chair. Not a mirror, not a book, not a picture. It was in odd contrast to the living room, with its innumerable shelves and boxes containing his workstuff. The door to the bathroom was ajar. She crossed the room cautiously until she could see within. It, too, was empty.

  So was the kitchen. Empty and clean, with no dishes out to indicate when he’d last eaten there. The back door stood open.

  Annie shivered. Wher
e was Tom Smith? Why did this cabin have the feel of a place long emptied of life?

  Laurel smiled benignly, apparently quite willing to assume a hostess’s duties even in the most unlikely of circumstances.

  “Annie, my sweet, so nice of you to join us. I’ve been reassuring Ophelia. It isn’t at all difficult to have one’s fingerprints taken. A bit messy, but not difficult. I was last fingerprinted in Budapest, and the dearest little inspector told me I had the most divine hand. Quite sweet, and very helpful to international relations.”

  Duane Webb ignored Annie’s arrival and stared broodingly out at the whitecapped waves in the sound. Adele Prescott shot her an icy glare, then resumed her angry pacing by the tent entrance. Mavis jounced Kevin on her hip. She smiled shyly.

  Madeleine bounded up to her. “Got everybody corralled but that miniature man. Searchers report no trace. Storm coming. May call everybody in.”

  Annie nodded and opened the note Madeleine thrust at her. She raised an eyebrow at the lengthy missive. Goodbye Green Hornet, hello—?

  I know if I just had a moment to take my shoes off, I’d feel much better, but duty calls. Continuing to trace Jesse’s actions Saturday. He arrived Parotti’s Bar and Bait Shop approx. 7 p.m. and was in, for him, a jovial mood. Jesse described with relish to Sam Hinchley (shrimp fisherman) the movie he’d seen last week in Savannah (Locker Room Lovers). Talked about big plans, going to go to London, looking at a new car. Approx. 11 p.m. telephone rang, a call for Jesse. First time Ben Parotti ever remembered anyone calling him. A hoarse voice. Parotti not sure whether man or woman. Jesse to phone, apparently message made him angry. He swore, “Goddammit, better not be,” and hurried out into the night. Feel Jesse’s actions on Saturday now well documented. Expanding scope of probe. On Friday afternoon, Jesse stopped in Island Five-and-Dime, bought a wedding anniversary card. Next stopped at Hennessey’s Marine, where he priced a new motorboat. Progress of investigation gratifying. As you know (proven by the Second Law of Thermodynamics): “Everything wears out. Everything breaks down. Something’s got to give.” And I’ll be there when the truth outs.