Scratch the Surface

by Susan Conant

  Relaxed and refreshed, strong and self-confident, Brigitte eases forward, crouches, and springs on Edith, who rouses herself, hisses at Brigitte, and, propelled by her mighty hindquarters, jumps off the bed and zooms into the hallway and toward the stairs. Brigitte follows in close pursuit. Little and fast, she is a sports car to Edith’s limousine, a sports car that catches up to the limo, trails it, edges forward, and smashes into its side, determined to force it off the road.

  FORTY-TWO

  “I’ll manage,” said Janice. “I’m stronger than I look, remember? Just close the box. Don’t lock it. Now, move over there.” She gestured to the opposite side of the bed. When Felicity had complied, Janice bent over a little, wrapped her left hand and forearm around the metal box, and lifted it to rest on her hip. “Let’s go. You first. Walk slowly.”

  Felicity obediently moved to the door and into the hallway, where she scanned for the cats. Janice had done nothing to threaten them. She hadn’t aimed the revolver at either of them, hadn’t spoken about taking them hostage, hadn’t done a thing, really. Then again, she hadn’t said outright that she’d shoot Felicity before making off with the money, had she? She hadn’t needed to. Was she simply going to depart, leaving Felicity free to tell the whole story to the police? Did she expect Felicity to make so preposterous an assumption? Apparently so. Felicity knew better. Maybe Janice would kill her here in her own house, or maybe she’d force Felicity into a car, either her own clunker or Aunt Thelma’s Honda, and then commit her second murder somewhere else. Near Jamaica Pond? In the parking lot at Angell? What did it matter! This house would be her best choice, Felicity thought. Perhaps Janice would stage a suicide. She’d fire her weapon point-blank at Felicity’s heart. Or head? She’d wrap her victim’s hand around the gun to leave prints. A good forensics expert would spot the ruse, but by then, Felicity would be dead. And Edith and Brigitte? Brigitte was so annoyingly interested in everything. It would be just like her to get in Janice’s way. And both cats were so hideously vulnerable. Edith was big and solid, like an old-fashioned doorstop, but against a malevolent human being, she’d be defenseless. Where were they? Edith had probably taken refuge under the bed that had once been exclusively Felicity’s. Where was Brigitte?

  As Felicity moved toward the top of the staircase, with Janice right behind her, she experienced a sudden revelation: To her astonishment, she was more worried about Edith and Brigitte than she was about herself. Although a revolver was aimed at her back, her own fifty-three years were not passing before her eyes; rather, she was gripped by images of creatures who had just entered her life.

  She prayed silently. “Dear God, You are on the verge of letting Janice Mattingly kill me. Why You should thus have botched the plot of a cozy mystery is Your business and not mine, but I can’t refrain from pointing out that unless You’ve been publishing under an assumed name—if so, what is it?—I have more experience in these matters than You do, and it’s my professional opinion, and that of other published mystery writers, that the amateur sleuth, namely, me, is supposed to survive to the end of the book, and that the murderer is supposed to get caught. Readers like to see order restored and justice done. If Your sales are lousy, You’ll have only Yourself to blame. Anyway, I don’t have time to critique Your efforts in full because, as You can see for Yourself, I’m about to die and would consequently like to put in a few last words. First, if there’s one thing readers hate, it’s the death of animals, so You would be ill advised to kill Edith and Brigitte. Second, on the subject of my immortal soul, in writing Your review, please ignore everything my mother has to say about me. She is wrong. I am capable of love. In particular, I love Edith and Brigitte. Love counts for something, doesn’t it? If not, it should. Respectfully yours, Felicity Pride”.

  Felicity rested her right hand on the banister and began to descend the stairs. A scrap of her award-winning Latin came to her: Facilis descensus Averno. Virgil. The Aeneid. Easy is the descent to Hades. Ha! Her own route to the underworld was steep and uncarpeted. Why hadn’t Uncle Bob hired an architect instead of buying a house from a developer! Money. Always, money.

  “Slow down,” Janice ordered her.

  Only three steps from the top, Felicity paused. In the stillness of the big house, the sound of Janice’s footstep was unnaturally loud. Then, breaking the silence, came a hiss, a quick snarl, and the familiar and uncatlike pounding of Edith’s paws, followed immediately by a melee of sounds and sights as Edith rocketed down the stairs with Brigitte in close pursuit while, simultaneously, the metal box banged its way down after the cats, the revolver clattered after it, and Janice, tripped by the cats, lurched into Felicity’s left shoulder, lost her balance, and, with a short, hideous scream, plunged down the steep, hard steps to the slate floor of the hallway. Felicity, who had no recollection of saving herself, found that she was huddled against the wall near the top of the staircase, still only three steps down, with her derriere planted on the wooden tread and both hands locked on the banister. Her eyes were on Janice Mattingly, whose motionless body lay below, face down on the gray slate. Near the door to the vestibule was the fireproof box. Close to it was the revolver.

  The cats again broke the stillness. Brigitte, truly possessed of little cat feet, darted lightly up the stairs and past Felicity. The little cat’s fluffy coat showed damp patches. With the unmistakable air of a victor, Edith strolled into the hallway from the direction of the kitchen, calmly seated herself on her haunches, casually bent her head to lick her front paws, and, with a glance up at Felicity, uttered her tiny meow, a single high-pitched note that Felicity somehow found reassuring.

  With the brittle composure induced by emergencies, Felicity pulled herself to her feet, carefully descended the stairs, and stepped around the bundle of ugly greenish-yellow sweater, chinos, and dark hair that was Janice, who lay only a few yards from the spot in the vestibule where she had dumped the body of Quinlan Coates. Janice, however, might still be alive. Perhaps she was unconscious. Perhaps she’d merely had the wind knocked out of her. Felicity made for the revolver. Ever the mystery writer, she pulled the cuff of her right sleeve over her hand before touching the weapon. Knowing almost nothing about firearms, she was unable to identify the safety, but assumed that there was one. On or off? Why couldn’t murderers use poison! Slowly and cautiously, she carried the revolver to the kitchen, opened a cabinet, and hid the weapon behind six bottles of single malt scotch. Then she called 911. She needed the police, she said. And an ambulance. And please tell Detective Dave Valentine!

  After completing the call, she returned to the hallway, where Uncle Bob’s shabby old fireproof box lay on the slate floor by the door. As Felicity had already worked out in detail worthy of the Scot she was, the cash in that box represented the sale of a great many books. The cover price of Felines in Felony was $22.95. She received a ten percent royalty, that is, $2.295 per book, of which fifteen percent went to her agent, Irene, leaving the author $1.95075 for each hardcover sale. Uncle Bob’s cash, $120, 555.00, thus represented the sale of 61,799.307 copies of the hardcover edition of Felines. Even with the publicity she’d get now that she’d be allowed to grant interviews about her very own murder, she’d never sell anything close to sixty thousand copies. Furthermore, her calculations about book sales excluded the state and federal taxes she’d have to pay on her royalty income. Uncle Bob’s cash was tax free. Felicity walked briskly to the fireproof box, lifted it with both hands, walked around the motionless Janice, climbed the stairs, and put the box back in its hiding place, which is to say, back where it belonged.

  She returned to the hallway. As she had just reminded God, she was not a heartless person. In learning to love Edith and Brigitte, she had proven herself capable of love. She was also capable of decency to her fellow human beings. To her credit, she regretted never having learned CPR. She did summon the courage to lift the layer of lanky dark hair that covered Janice’s face. One eye was visible. It was open and had a frozen, flat look. Felicity quickly l
et go of the hair. She had been wrong to touch the body at all.

  FORTY-THREE

  Alerted by an anonymous caller, a major Boston television station sent a crew to Newton Park. The media arrived only moments after the police and the emergency medical vehicles. In the powerful lights, night became day. Because the corpse lay inside Felicity’s house, her abode became an official crime scene. In her interviews with Detective Dave Valentine and with the reporters sent by Boston television stations, radio stations, and newspapers, she modestly gave all the credit for solving the murder of Quinlan Coates to her beautiful Chartreux cats, Edith and Brigitte.

  In describing Janice Mattingly’s fatal fall, Felicity said nothing of the cats’ role. Janice, she maintained, had intended to hold Edith and Brigitte hostage until morning, when Felicity was supposed to go to her bank, withdraw a large amount of cash, and give it to Janice, who, she said, had never specified the amount. Intending to incarcerate Edith and Brigitte in their cat carrier until Felicity had paid up, Janice had forced Felicity upstairs at gunpoint in search of the cats. After failing to find them there, she was on her way back downstairs, just behind Felicity, when she tripped and fell. Yes, the stairs were steep and uncarpeted, and the floor at the bottom was made of slate. Yes, Janice Mattingly had been recovering from acute food poisoning. Against Felicity’s advice, she had consumed a considerable quantity of wine. And, yes, the entire story of Quinlan Coates’s murder and its solution certainly did bear a remarkable resemblance to what one found in Felicity’s own books. The latest, by the way, was called Felines in Felony. It was available wherever books were sold.

  Trace evidence recovered from Quinlan Coates’s body and from his car supported the account of the murder that Janice had given to Felicity. She had left no fingerprints, but an eyelash found on Coates’s clothing matched hers, and his car had contained several hairs from her head. The revolver had belonged to Janice Mattingly’s late father.

  “So,” Felicity said to Dave Valentine on Friday evening when the two were seated at dinner in her dining room, “there are still a few things I don’t understand. For instance, who was that weird-looking woman in the sketch you showed me?”

  Valentine had invited her out to dinner. They had agreed that a Scottish restaurant would be appropriate and had gone on to agree about why there was no such thing outside Scotland. Who really wanted spaghetti that had been boiled for thirty minutes and, for a special treat, topped with the contents of a bottle of ketchup? And cold ketchup at that. Their grandmothers had served the dish often. It was as Scottish as haggis. There being no Scottish restaurants in Greater Boston, Felicity had insisted that Valentine come to her house for broiled Scottish salmon. In reading up on mercury poisoning, Felicity had discovered that farm-raised salmon contained dangerous amounts of mercury, but she found it impossible to believe that a product of Scotland was unsafe. Also, although one of her complaints about Scottish food was the repetitiousness of the menus, it did not occur to her that she herself served salmon rather frequently.

  “The sketch,” said Valentine. “Well, you remember the funeral? How devoted Coates was to his wife?”

  “Dora. He never got over her death.”

  “In a way, he did. Dora Coates wrote the first Isabelle Hotchkiss book. When she died, he finished the book she’d been writing. When we went to his apartment, we found a room he kept locked. He had a computer in it, the usual stuff. And he also had women’s clothing. And a wig.”

  “Good lord!”

  “Not so good. It set us off in the wrong direction, looking for contacts he might’ve made wearing the wig and the dresses. But it seems like he never wore them outside that room.”

  “He became his wife. He kept her alive. Or by becoming Isabelle Hotchkiss, he became his wife. I wonder why she wrote under a pseudonym. I mean, he was the academic.”

  “Sexism? From you? She was a professor of English.”

  “So you knew all along that Coates was Isabelle Hotchkiss, but you were led astray. More potatoes?”

  Dave Valentine was a hearty eater. Felicity liked a man with a good appetite. She especially liked a caber-tossing Scot with a hearty appetite who wore his kilt to the Highland Games and had had the sense not to wear it tonight to have dinner with her. The former represented laudable Scottish chauvinism, whereas the latter would have suggested unpardonable eccentricity. As he was concentrating on his third helping of potatoes, Felicity said, “I have to tell you that I’m glad that you didn’t go after my friend Ronald Gershwin. He can be quite odd, but he’s harmless, and he’s very bright. He went to Harvard.”

  “Like your uncle,” said Valentine with a strange little smile.

  “Like Uncle Bob,” said Felicity. “What’s wrong with that?”

  “I don’t know if I should tell you this or not, but your uncle’s dead, so what does it matter? Felicity, he didn’t go to Harvard.”

  “Yes, he did.”

  “If he did, he escaped Harvard’s notice. They’ve never heard of him.”

  “You’re joking. You’re not joking. You investigated my dead uncle?”

  “Not a lot.”

  “The liar! What an idiot I’ve been! Anyone can buy Harvard chairs and lamps and knickknacks! I can hardly wait to tell my mother. It’ll give her something better to think about than what she calls ‘my’ murder. With the strong implication that I committed it.”

  “She got the profession right—mystery writer.”

  “Poor Janice. She was a horrible writer. And so ambitious. So sad.” She paused for a sip of wine. “But her cat is going to be okay. Ronald has adopted her. One other thing. This is about my neighbor, that obnoxious Trotsky. The Russian publisher.” Felicity continued to harbor the suspicion that he had pirated her books.

  “He isn’t a publisher.”

  “Yes, he is.”

  “Not a book publisher. He publishes software.”

  “Software? Computer software?”

  “What other kind is there?”

  “None,” said Felicity in disappointment. “He doesn’t publish books, too?”

  “No. Software. What were you going to say about him?”

  She had to think for a moment. “Oh, yes. This neighborhood is practically empty. But, he goes crazy when anyone goes near his lawn. So, when Janice drove Quinlan Coates’s body here and dragged it all the way to my vestibule, why didn’t he notice? Or maybe he did.”

  “He was out. Actually, his wife was still at work, and he was down the street.”

  “Down the street from here?”

  “You’ve got a neighbor named Loretta.”

  “Loretta the organizer. She runs our condo association.”

  “That’s where he was.”

  “With Loretta? What was he doing there?” Felicity belatedly remembered Loretta’s two children by two different fathers. “Oh,” she said. “Oh!”

  “Yes, oh,” Valentine said flatly. “Oh.”

  Brigitte wandered into the dining room and leaped onto the table. Janice Mattingly had been one thing; Dave Valentine was quite another. “Off! Get off right now!” Felicity scolded.

  Brigitte ignored her. Dave Valentine gently picked up the dainty cat and placed her on the floor. Edith wandered in. He patted her.

  “My hero cats,” said Felicity. “The Globe and the Herald both called them that.”

  “Those stories are going to sell a lot of books for you.”

  “I hope so. I feel motivated to write these days. I have a lot to say.”

  She told the truth. Now that she knew something about cats, she was eager to write about them. She would, of course, always be grateful to her very own late Morris, but she was also grateful to Edith and Brigitte.

  As it happened, Felicity’s cats were indirectly responsible for solving her final mystery, which was, of course, the puzzle of how Uncle Bob had acquired cash worth the sale of 61,799.307 books. While savoring newspaper accounts of her role in solving the murder of Quinlan Coates, she had also sca
nned the papers for a report of a counterfeit or stolen hundred-dollar bill left in the donation box at Angell. She had found nothing. The bills certainly looked genuine and probably were. Who had paid the sums recorded in the notebook? And why?