All But a Pleasure

by Phyllis Ann Karr

  “Angela!” he demanded of everybody in the room. “Is she here?”

  Julie took one look at his face, and stood up. “Weren’t you and Angela coming together?”

  “So I thought—or else to see ‘Foggerty’s Fairy’ one last time and here for the evening, but the house of her honorary Aunt Sally Fulbright is locked and no one seems to be within. A note on the door, obviously printed in haste, says only, ‘Family Emergency.’ The hand does not resemble Angela’s—it may be Aunt Sally’s. I have telephoned everyone whom I could think of—fruitlessly! The utmost I have learned is that she was seen at Saint Martha’s for the earliest Mass—as is her custom—but M. Fulbright failed to appear at her own church—the First Presbyterian—for its service at ten-thirty hours. Last, in desperation, I come here. You are my final hope. I—approach being frantic!”

  The game was forgotten, except that Sam still sounded like rulemaster as he stood and said, “Everybody, start checking all the downstairs game rooms, just in case she went straight to another scenario without looking in on us first. Don’t forget the snack table and the bathrooms. Paul and Curly, help me check upstairs.”

  “She’s been playing, these last two Sundays, with the group in the library,” Julie said.

  Dave stood up. “I’m a police detective. Where’s your phone?”

  Angela was nowhere in the house but, as the searchers reconnoitered in the lounge, Dave came in and told them, “It can come in handy, being a pollydeck. Angela Garvey and Sarah ‘Sally’ Fulbright caught the oh-nine-forty flight to Miami from Forest Green Airport.”

  “Are you sure?” Corwin insisted. “There can be no error?”

  “Tickets were issued in those names, anyway, just as boarding commenced. The counter lady doesn’t know them by sight, and didn’t get too good a look at them today because of the rush, but she remembers having the strong impression of a pretty young blond woman and a middle-aged brunette one. Does that fit them both?”

  “It does.” Corwin visibly relaxed a little. “I breathe easier. And Angela’s father and siblings reside in Miami. The fear remains—what emergency can have summoned them away with such dispatch as to prevent all but the most rudimentary communication of the situation?”

  They all returned to their rolegames. After trying to put a call through to Angela’s father’s number in Miami and getting only forty sets of three chimes into nothingness, Corwin joined the quest for the Seven Cities of Cibola. But he played so absently that his character ignored several chances for melodramatically painful martyrdom at the hands of either the Apaches or the lost tribes of Cibola, and actually survived to the end, when with one abstracted wave of his hand he assigned Fray Marcos’ fair share of the golden booty to the Church.

  CHAPTER 15

  Monday, October 2

  Morning. Julie yawned and stretched luxuriously, then turned on her side to gaze in sheer contentment at the long, healthy, muscular manshape sleep-breathing beside her beneath the sheet. “My Dragon Prince,” she whispered.

  Rather a shame about Corwin Poe. She really thought she might have found herself a good replacement for Dante’s Delight. Today she’d better tell Sam and the others. She hadn’t really had a chance yesterday, getting there with Dave just in time for setting up the rolegame scenario, and ducking out again so shortly after Seven Cities finished up.

  She sighed. And how about Dave keeping his head like that, calling on his workline expertise and authority to find out where Angela had disappeared to, while all the rest of them were still running around Sam’s big house like corn in the popper? She wondered if Corwin had ever gotten in touch with Angela and her family in Miama. Whatever happened, it must have been serious; but her own workline had taught Nurse Julie Whitcomb not to waste too much time speculating on the million medical and other kinds of emergencies that always could happen. Just take care of the ones that actually happened.

  She turned over again for a look at her bedside clock. Oh six hundred hours. Monday morning, October Two. A little ironic that she had awakened first, when he was the one who needed to go in early, his work day starting at 0730.

  She felt grateful for last night’s tumble. There wouldn’t be time for another one this morning. Not if they wanted to do it right. And they did. Always and forever.

  Carefully, so as to let him have another half hour, she eased herself out of bed and into the bathroom. When she had finished up, shower and all, and opened the bathroom door, there he stood waiting, with his bathrobe on as if to guard against temptation.

  “Good morning, Dragon Lady!”

  “Good morning, Dragon Prince!”

  A quick mutual grope—just a lick and a promise—and she shoved him into the bathroom, shutting the door and calling through it, “Coffee in five minutes, eggs and bacon in fifteen.”

  But it wasn’t to be fifteen minutes.

  By the time the coffee was ready, she had the bacon leisurely browning, the eggs whipped up in a bowl ready for scrambling, and the bread in the toaster ready to be pushed down. Taking her first cup of coffee, she moved to the living room so she could look down at Pankhurst Lake early on an autumn morning while waiting for her Dragon Prince to come out of the bathroom.

  Something was floating in the pond that wanted to be a lake.

  Something strange and whitish.

  Julie frowned at it for a moment, her coffee forgotten in her hands and a very odd feeling in the pit of her stomach.

  She put her cup down on the end table and got her old binoculars out of the drawer. Put them to her eyes, adjusted them, found the floating whitish thing again.

  So nearly white in the fall dawnlight. So…shaped…a mannequin of some kind? A crash dummy? A —

  The binoculars jolted away from the spot as Dave’s blue-sleeved arms clamped around her waist. “Okay, Dragon Lady, how about those eggs and bacon?”

  “Dave.” She handed him the binoculars. “Look there. In the water.”

  Seeing how sober she was about it, he dropped his playfulness at once, took the binoculars, squinted through them a moment, and said, “Oh, my God! Oh, my Lord and God!”

  “Dave? What?”

  “No—no—no—NO!” he was repeating. “Please, Lord, not another one! Julie, we’ve got to get down there!”

  He was already halfway to the door. He was mostly dressed, she was still in her long fleece bathrobe, where she had planned on staying most of the morning. She didn’t wait to change. The only side trip she made was to dash down the hall and knock on Paul Osaka’s door. “Paul! Come down to the lake right away!” Then she followed Dave.

  He was at the nearest dock, untying one of the rowboats. She climbed in after him, cold water soaking her robe to her knees. He rowed. In a few minutes that seemed like hours, they reached the floating thing.

  It was a body. A corpse. Floating face downward.

  “Keep the boat steady,” Dave told her. “Sit on the other side, over there.”

  She obeyed, leaning farther back in one direction while, in the other, he leaned forward, got hold of the body beneath the armpits, and hauled it up over the side into the boat.

  Where it lay face up.

  “Oh, sweet Jesus!” Julie gasped, her hands at her mouth, her nurse’s training useless. “Oh, sweet Jesus! Is it—Is it Angela?”

  “Can’t be. Can’t be! She’s in Florida. She and her aunt flew down to Miami yesterday.”

  “Somebody went to Miami—tickets in their names. Corwin didn’t recognize the printing on the note, hadn’t been able to get in touch… Oh, Dave!”

  “Can’t be,” he repeated, sounding as if his police training had dropped off him like her nurse’s training had dropped off her. “Death…makes them look different, Julie.”

  “But—? Oh, Dave!”

  He snapped back into a policeman, rowed back to the dock. Paul stood there, waiting for them
.

  “Paul,” said Julie.

  He took one look down into the boat and gasped.

  “Paul, is it…? Does it look like her to you, too?”

  “What? Oh…you mean her face. I was looking at… Yes, you mean… Oh my God, Julie, my God! Her or her alter ego!”

  “Look,” said Dave, “I only saw Angela Garvey once, on that double date, and then I had eyes mainly for my own date. How often have you people seen her?”

  “Twice,” Paul answered. “A week ago yesterday and the Sunday before that, at Sam’s.”

  Julie did a rapid mental review. “Three times. Twice at Sam’s and once on our double date.”

  “All right. None of us knew her well enough to make even a formal identification.”

  “I know who does.” Julie wiped tears away with her fingers. “Oh, poor Corwin!”

  “Let me get back to your phone and call this in right now,” Dave went on. “You two stay here with the body. If anyone else should come by, try to wave ’em off.”

  Dave left.

  Paul said, “Julie. Have you looked near the hollow of her right shoulder?”

  No. She had been too concentrated on the face. She looked now. Gasped again. Shuddered. Looked at Paul.

  He looked back at her.

  Her hand went to roughly the same spot above her own right breast. “Paul…what’s going on?”

  “Think your Dave noticed?”

  “I don’t know… He hasn’t said anything, made any sign… Maybe mine looks so much like part of the big dragon design…”

  “Well,” said Paul Osaka, “I’m not sure you should even think about getting naked again with him. Not in the light, anyway. Not till we—and the pollies—know what the hell is going on here.”

  * * * *

  Lestrade and Clayton picked him up. Corwin Davison Poe, Davison being the birth surname, Poe a literary nick-surname. Come to think of it, like her own. Maybe it was affectation, maybe just fashion. No, more than a fashion. Nick-surnames had been around a little too long for mere fashion. Pipes without tobacco had been a fashion. Now hers was just a prop, a toy to fiddle her fingers around. Tattoo stamps…not around long enough yet to tell. Nick-surnames…probably never were universally popular enough to be called a fashion fad, but they were hanging on, they were hanging on. She never even thought of herself as Lozinski anymore, just as Lestrade. Plodding little cog in a law-enforcement bureaucracy, dotting all the i’s, crossing all the t’s, on her way now with her partner to devastate one more poor floater with the bad news that they needed him to identify a corpse.

  It was ironic that yesterday Dave had thought he’d traced down this new victim’s whereabouts to safe with family in Miami.

  So now they had a second murder victim. Two in as many weeks. M.O. looked too close to the one used on Harry Jackson for coincidence. Forest Green had its own serial killer. National news, here we come. Lady God!

  A dozen apartments in the Marquette House, including the housekeeper’s, and half of their mailboxes had cutesy tags instead of residents’ names. The Hideaway, the Tree House, the Menagerie, Hoosier Arms, Arnheim, the Hobbit Hole… Of the surnames, no Davison and no Poe.

  They chimed up M. Esther Florsheim, the housekeeper.

  A plump, smiling lady in a floral-pattern housedress, her grizzled hair just visible in rollers where they peeked out from beneath a black and brown babushka. “Corwin Davison Poe?” she answered Lestrade’s question. “Oh, yes, he’s in Arnheim, second floor, first door on the left. It’s only ten hundred hours, though. He always sleeps till noon.”

  “Police business, M. Florsheim,” Lestrade steeled herself to say. “Won’t wait.”

  “Police?” The woman’s eyes widened. “Now, don’t tell me that one’s broken some kind of law, because I won’t believe it! The kindest, gentlest, quietest, most generous young soul I’ve ever seen living here. He’ll do almost anything for anybody, just so long as it’s in the afternoon, and so long as you let him talk. Of course, he does like his fifty-tridol words, but everybody needs a hobby of some kind. He may grow out of it. Or the rest of us may catch up, if we do enough crossword puzzles.”

  “Wordy, is he?” said Lestrade.

  “Wordy,” Dave affirmed.

  “But, Officers, whatever has he done—do you think he’s done?”

  “So far as we know, M. Florsheim, nothing illegal,” Lestrade told her. “Pollies don’t always show up to make arrests. That’s just one of the easier jobs in our workline.”

  “Can we borrow your key?” Clayton asked. “In case he’s sleeping too soundly to hear the doorchime?”

  It turned out they didn’t need the housekeeper’s key, after all. Davison came to his door at the first chime, fully dressed. Sure enough, as Lestrade had already started to suspect from Florsheim’s description, he was her eccentric young library acquaintance who always wore black and saw nothing strange about a middle-aged woman reading children’s picture books for her own amusement. Why did it have to be him? Right now, he looked like he hadn’t been to bed all night. Face pale, clothes rumpled, limbs trembling slightly.

  “Dave!” he exclaimed, looking first at Clayton. “I’ve been trying to telephone her at her father’s house all night—it only chimes and keeps chiming into a void. And I’ve been telephoning all the hospitals and police stations Information will give me numbers for—have you any notion how many hospitals there are in Miami and its immediate environs?—no one can provide me any information at all…”

  Clayton laid his hand on Davison’s shoulder. Lestrade said, making her voice as gentle as she could, “M. Davison. Can you come with us?”

  He looked from Clayton to her, back to Clayton, back again to her, his dark eyes flicking back and forth searching their faces. He grew a few shades paler. A tortoiseshell cat came up from somewhere, peered around his leg, and meowed.

  “If I might just get my jacket,” he said shakily, picked up his cat, stroked it a little, and carried it back into the apartment. He was out again in half a minute, catless but having apparently forgotten all about the jacket. Well, his tunic looked warm enough for the day, so Lestrade decided not to remind him of the jacket, and told Clayton as much with a lift of her eyebrow and a slight shake of her head.

  Glancing behind and down, apparently to make sure his cat was still out of the way, Davison closed the door and came with the two pollies. Lestrade noticed out of the corner of her eye that Clayton had a supporting hand on his arm.

  She felt like a murderer herself, just doing the job they had to do.

  CHAPTER 16

  Still Monday, October 2

  Davison was silent all the way to the station, all the way through the station to the morgue. Almost corpse white himself, he stood trembling as they rolled the slab out of the cooler. Clayton helped him into viewing position beside the slab. Thinking back enviously to when they had the family dentist in for identifying Harry Jackson, Lestrade said, “I’ll warn you, M. Davison. Death can change people’s appearance.” Then she pulled the sheet back to uncover the head.

  Davison gave a choked little cry and might have fallen if Clayton hadn’t been holding him.

  Then Davison looked again. Shaking all over, he bent forward, carefully picked up a hank of the blond hair, peered at it very closely. Then he touched one of the closed eyes, jerked his fingers back from the feel of dead flesh, grasped his right wrist with his left hand to help steady it, reached forward again… Lestrade nodded her partner to open the eye for him. Clayton did so.

  Davison bent over and peered hard at the eye, looked up at the fluorescent overhead morgue light, looked back at the eye. Hands trembling, maybe, a little less, he picked up the edge of the sheet and started to uncover more of the body. Clayton looked about to stop him, but Lestrade signaled No with a shake of her head. Right now, an accurate identification was the most important
thing. They could caution Davison afterward to keep quiet about the tattoo. If the media, and Clayton’s friends Whitcomb and Osaka, could cooperate about it so, she figured, could Davison.

  He wasn’t even looking at the tattoo. He was staring hard at the spot on the breastbone right over the heart. Lestrade guessed he hadn’t even noticed the tattoo at first. When he saw it at last he gave a violent start, but made no comment. Like he was already promising to keep the secret, without being told.

  Shaking harder again, he lifted the hands, each one in turn, and studied the fingers, frowned as if concentrating on which hand was left and which was right, and studied them again.

  Then, at last, he slumped to the floor, put his face in his hands, and sobbed. Almost soundlessly. Shoulders heaving.

  “Corwin,” Clayton said very softly, laying one hand on his back.

  Davison shook his head. “It’s not Angela! Oh, God, it’s not Angela. It’s not Angela!”

  Clayton looked at his senior partner helplessly.

  “I understand it, Detective,” she told him in a firm voice. Give him the years she’d had with this kind of thing, maybe he’d understand, too. Now she laid her hand on Davison’s shoulder. “People also cry when they’re relieved.”

  “I…I…” Davison choked. “It’s not Angela, but it could have been! Now someone else will have to…go through this…and not find relief. Only despair. It is still a dead young woman…who looks so much like her…and where is she?”

  “Probably in Florida,” said Lestrade. “Probably hidden by big-city shufflework and semi-competence. Maybe not even in the Miami area. Now. Explain how you know this isn’t Angela Garvey.”

  He got out his handkerchief, wiped his eyes, blew his nose, let them help him to his feet. “Angela has a pink birthmark,” he began, pointing, “here. Above her heart. More or less in the shape of a Valentine-style heart, if one applies imagination. I have not actually seen it…since our childhood…but she assured me only—Lord! was it only two weeks ago? that she had never seen reason to have it surgically removed. I searched for it because…because neither the color of the hair nor of the eye appeared quite to match Angela’s—Angela’s hair is a lighter gold, I think—it is difficult to be sure in this light—her eyes more definitely blue…these seem grayer…but, again, it could have been the lighting in this room. And here…on the left cheekbone near the temple…a mole just large enough to be distinctive…Angela has no such mole.”