“My dad owned a string of Caribbean hotels. My mom predeceased him and I was their only child. I still own the chain and this was bought with some of the profits.”
“You mean you’re rich and dissect bodies cause you want to?”
“How else do I add to my penis collection?” Gill said drolly. “It’s a long story and there’s food to eat. Remind me later to tell you about the corpse in Cole’s Cave.”
“Sounds like Nancy Drew.”
“And you’re not Frank Hardy? You have your puzzles. I have mine. We both seek to know why people died. I find pathology more challenging than asking Ms. Quigley why she wants to change her room. Sir Bernard Spilsbury’s my idol. Not Conrad Hilton.”
“Bet your mom was shocked?”
“I doubt it,” Gill said dryly. “She was the first female pathologist in the Commonwealth.”
Ouch, thought Nick.
The first thing he noticed when she unlocked the door was the solarium-cum-aviary. Inside the huge greenhouse, all to themselves, two spoiled parrots eyed him suspiciously. “The servants?” said Nick.
“The greenwinged macaw’s Binky. Gabby’s the West African gray. Binky’s a little conceited because he cost twenty-five hundred dollars. Live with a gray parrot, you don’t need anyone else. Gabby’s so intelligent, he speaks with the ability of a seven-year-old child.”
Gabby glared at Craven, then cocked his feathered head. “He’s not for you, Gill. Poor breeding,” the parrot said.
“Hush,” Macbeth scolded. “Don’t mind him. Gabby gets jealous around handsome men. Both are captive-bred so they know no other life. If they were born in the wild, I’d set them free at home. With these two that’s impossible. Neither would survive. We’re one big happy family, aren’t we, boys?”
Gabby scowled at Craven, unimpressed. “He’s not for you, Gill. His nose is too big.”
“How long do African parrots live?”
“Up to a hundred years.”
“That one won’t see tomorrow if he doesn’t shut his beak.”
“Empty threats. Empty threats,” Gabby taunted.
“How does he do that?”
“Good breeding,” Gill replied.
While she spooned Yum Pla Moug onto salad plates, and reheated Moo curry, Kai Pad Ma-Mung Hin Ma-Pan, and Bamei Rommitr in the microwave, Nick approached her bookcase with trepidation. The shelves were home to Shakespeare, Austen, the Brontës, Wordsworth, Dickens, Conrad, Proust, Faulkner, Maugham, and Greene, while he was currently reading Grisham’s The Firm. Oh, oh, Nick thought, testing some of the books, hoping they were a false front hiding her dope supply, but no such luck. As he moved knock-kneed toward her CD collection, Gill placed the food on the table in the adjoining dining room.
Yep, that asshole Tchaikovsky was here to mock him again, along with those gangsters Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, and Brahms.
“Who’s your favorite composer, Nick?” Macbeth asked.
“The Killer, the King, or the Fat Man,” he replied.
“You’d be what in Fifty-six? Minus one? That hearing of yours is remarkable, retro man.”
“You gotta be retro these days. The shit in the music stores.”
“Bottom shelf. Your pick. Fats, Elvis, or Jerry Lee.”
Macbeth’s rock collection was high-end and refined: King Crimson, Pink Floyd, Bonzo Dog, the Fifties roots. Her Jerry Lee Lewis was a German box set with 246 songs: multiple takes of “Breathless,” “Break Up,” and “Milkshake Mademoiselle.” “Pink Pedal Pushers”—Wow! Things were looking up.
The Killer in the background.
The food five-alarm hot.
Sweet Little Six … Forty opposite.
That’s when they’d hit the books.
Early Anglo-Saxons referred to both witches and owls as “hags.” “Owl” comes from the Old English word ule, an onomatopoetical reference to its witchlike cries. If an owl perched on a castle, a family member was doomed. The barn owl was called the “death owl” in medieval Britain. Edmund Spenser, the 16th-century poet, dubbed the bird “death’s dread messenger.” Shakespeare wrote in A Midsummer Night’s Dream:
The screech-owl, screeching loud,
Puts the wretch that lies in woe
In remembrance of a shroud.
Early Christian churches seized upon the owl as a perfect symbol for demonic possession. Religious illustrations combined owls and apes, for apes represented the Devil himself. Just as the Devil cunningly trapped human souls, so the ape sent the owl to possess the unwary.
“Today in North America,” Macbeth read aloud, “the owl’s a spooky symbol for Halloween. In darker rituals still performed on Witches’ Sabbaths, ‘sending the fetch’—the ‘fetch’ being an owl—is how demoniacs perform astral projection. The owl is the sorcerer’s Doppelganger.”
Nick made a note as Gill closed the library book.
“Work done,” she said.
“Good,” he replied.
“Time to unwind. Follow me.”
She slid back the glass door between the dining room and outside deck where a pool and hot tub overlooked the bay. Blitzkrieging east as die storm gained force, wind rippled the water while rain hammered the deck. Macbeth cranked a knob and the hot tub bubbled, then, sheltered by the eaves, she stripped off her clothes, padding through the downpour to sink into the steam.
“What you waiting for, Nick? A bathing suit?”
Their toes played footsie under the water as Gill said, “How do people react when you say you were born in Medicine Hat? That’s one step up from Moose Jaw.”
“I’ll have you know Medicine Hat is a very cultured place. Where were you born? Holetown, Barbados?”
Gill laughed. “A little south. So where’s Medicine Hat?”
“Crossing from Saskatchewan into Alberta, you pass through dry short-grass country where wheat farming gives way to cattle ranching, then descend an incline into The Hat, which Rudyard Kipling described as a town ‘with all Hell for a basement.’ ”
“It’s the Bible Belt?”
“It sits on natural gas. Still, the town’s not without its supernatural legends. Story is a gust of wind caught the magic hat of a Cree medicine man during a battle with the Black-foot and sent it flying into the Saskatchewan River. The Cree saw it as a dire omen and fled.”
Mouth open, Gill tilted her head back to catch some of the rain. The wind was blowing so fast the city was stripped of its pollution. “Your turn. What do you want to know about me?”
“Why am I here? We’re hardly two of a kind.”
“I’m bored by predictable men and you puzzle me.”
“I think I’m straightforward.”
“Dream on, retro man. I see this picture in the paper of a Hell’s Angel with a kiddie tucked under his arm, so I ask myself why a man like that risked death to save the girl?”
“She was in the way and blocked my arm.”
“Why’d you become a cop?”
“To legally beat people up.”
“Crack on the head. Broken fingers. Joke’s on you.”
“My dad was a Mountie. So was his dad. It all began when my great-grandfather won a V.C. at Rorke’s Drift in the Anglo-Zulu War.”
“Is that why, gun blazing, you kicked in Tarot’s door? I think you’re addicted to danger and thrills.”
“Don’t see why that interests you.”
“So I’m not puzzled later. The way you’re going, odds are you’ll end up on my slab. Glean the facts now, and I’ll know why you died.”
Nick laughed. “Spider woman. Madame Defarge.”
Gill ran her foot up his submerged calf. “I’m not looking for ties. I’m looking for excitement. I want to whitewater raft and skin-dive for treasure. I want to downhill race and zoom on a chopper. I want someone wild to electrify me in bed.”
“And I thought you lived to curl up with a good book?”
Gill paddled across the tub and slithered up his chest. “Tell me your secret?” Face-to-face. “What dri
ves you?”
“My dad shot himself the day I was born, and I don’t know why.”
(One day soon he would.)
HANGMAN’S NOOSE
Deadman’s Island
8:07 P.M.
While Chandler, Yates, and Quirk were in the Banquet Room solving how the ice-rigged crossbow fired itself, the other sleuths moved in a group toward the Receiving Hall, discussing Cohen’s murder and trying to figure out why they were lured here. Alex was in the lead as they approached the dogleg stairs, left hand on the newel post as she commenced the climb, Bolt and Darke closing fast like racehorses from behind, Lou mumbling “Nothing relieves tension like a wild three-way fuck” in her ear, the steps wide enough for three abreast the whole way up, now cresting the zig to round the landing and climb the upper zag, everyone together as they neared the second floor, the night outside as dark as death and the windows drummed by rain, the iron doors of the hearth below which Yates had lit earlier shut to kill the embers’ glow, when—without warning—the lights all doused at once.
“Hey!” someone shouted, as Alex was goosed from behind.
Pissed off, she whirled in the pitch dark and shoved the gooser away.
The push had a domino effect on those below, someone missing the next step to fall to one knee, which tripped the person behind who grabbed someone else, the climb turning into a rugby scrum near the top of the stairs, when Leuthard yelled, “What the—”
… cut off by the snap of a cord jerked taut … …
a bell ringing .… . .
and a sickening crack!
***
There are those who maintain death by hanging is a painless way to go—a quick wrench of the spine that separates one vertebra from another, causing severe nerve damage followed by strangulation, resulting in instant unconsciousness before the body unstretches, producing few spasms except a slight clenching of the hands, muscle tension in the arms, and twitching in the belly (unless, of course, the “drop” is wrong, so the head is torn off or the throat rips open)—but Zinc thought that was death-penalty-advocate bullshit. And from the grimace on Leuthard’s face, cocked at an odd angle, so did he.
Hanging, let’s face it, is a barbaric way to go.
And that’s why its advocates like it.
The commotion on the stairs had brought Chandler to the hall, candles from the banquet table burning in both hands, where he stood squinting up at the sleuths near the gallery, and the hanged man swinging freely from a ceiling beam. The hangman’s rope was the servants’ pull rung by Alex as she and Zinc came down to dinner. The trapdoor opened sideways, not under the dead man’s feet: a section of the banister which swung out from the stairs like a gate. Lost in the dark of the power failure and hidden by the melee, someone had unhooked the velvet noose from the staircase wall, slipping it over Leuthard’s head as the fake banister was released, before pushing him to plummet into the stairwell gallows below.
So what killed the lights? thought Zinc.
Pete Leuthard was the perfect “drop.” According to Elvira’s thumbnail sketch in the cab, he was an environmentalist who wrote young adult thrillers on the side. His latest book involved conflict between Homeys and Skaters, so Leuthard, fine researcher that he was, borrowed a skateboard and was off like Bart Simpson. Within a block, he was simply off, and consequently had flown to the island sporting a broken arm in a sling and a badly abraded forehead. Of all those on the staircase, he was least equipped to grab the noose with both hands to break his fall.
The sleuths showed signs of cracking under the strain, their faces etched with fault lines from two deaths in an hour. The first murder could be a question of who’s on the island with us, but the second was definitely an issue of who’s the killer beside me? And did it matter to him or her which neck got snapped by the noose?
Professional cop though he was. Zinc was disturbed, too, for none of what was going on here made any fucking sense. He might as well be cast in a rip-in-reality episode of The Twilight Zone. The barracks instructors at “Depot” Division hadn’t trained him for this.
Climbing the stairs toward them, Zinc searched the sleuths’ faces for signs one of them was relishing the others’ terror. Devlin had thumbed his Zippo and Leech had struck a match, the flickering flames joining the glow from the candles ascending the stairs. The sleuths looked like cave dwellers huddled against the unknown: face muscles jumping, eyes darting this way and that. “The good news is one of us doesn’t have to share a room,” cracked Bolt.
“Shut up,” Alex flared.
Motioning the group to the top of the stairs, Zinc examined the trapdoor in the banister. Hinges were hidden behind the lower post. Under the railing he found a hook that latched the trapdoor to an eye in the upper post. Recessed in the upper post, his fingers located a toggle switch. Wires from the switch fed into a recently drilled hole on the outer edge of the stairs.
“Who primed the generator while I stoked the boiler?” Zinc asked.
“We did,” Leech replied.
“Who’s we?”
“Colby and I. A small generator powers our summer place.”
“Hard to get it going?”
“No,” Smith said flatly. He was mesmerized by the body hanging in the stairwell, one of those gazes that takes a fingersnap to bring around.
“He’s dead, Colby,” Leech said. “Concentrate on the question. The officer wants to know what we did in the. shed?”
Smith came around with a shudder.
“The island uses a World War II surplus relic,” said Leech. “Thirty kilowatts housed outside. Should have been a son of a bitch to get going, but someone had cleaned the fuel system, refilled the tank, oiled the valves, and installed a new battery. All we had to do was crank it over, tug the compression release lever so the engine could build up speed, then let the lever go, and presto, there was light.”
“Check the junction box?”
“No need to. Lights were on in the house by the time we returned from the shed. We met the others in the bath and you came up.”
“Anyone know where the junction box is?”
“Yeah,” Devlin answered. “We passed it when we carried Cohen to the far end of the cellar.”
“Okay,” Zinc said. “Here’s what we do. Devlin, Bolt, catch the body when I cut it down, then carry Quirk and his chair to the upper floor. The rest of you—except Leech and Smith—wait in your rooms. Don’t discuss either death among yourselves. I want each person’s recollection untainted by what anyone else recalls. As planned, I’ll be up shortly to question you. Those afraid to be alone, band together. Doctor, it’s obvious, but please confirm Leuthard’s dead. Then we’ll take him to the cellar and check the junction box. Any questions? Good. Let’s go.”
Bracing one foot in the open trapdoor and gripping the banister, Zinc leaned into the stairwell to cut Leuthard down with his pocketknife. The man’s head lolled like a rag doll’s as he dropped. Bolt and Devlin caught the dead weight. Holyoak pronounced him dead from a broken neck, then followed the wheelchair upstairs to tend to Quirk’s wound.
A candle before him to light the way, Chandler led Bolt, Devlin, Smith, and Leech down the cellar steps, each man lugging one of Leuthard’s limbs. The makeshift morgue was against the chipped-rock wall beneath the west end of the Ballroom where the cold wind off the ocean chilled the cliff. A concrete pillar ten feet square ran from the cellar’s floor to its ceiling, under the hooves of the Satan idol by Zinc’s reckoning. They placed Leuthard’s body beside Cohen’s corpse in the narrow space between the pillar and the wall.
The junction box was near the angle where the Ballroom joined the Banquet Room. Five wires fed into the box from the generator shed. Someone had installed a switching device between two of the “hots,” which, touching the wires together, had shorted the circuit before it reached the fuses. The short had sent flames and power arcing back to the generator to burn out its guts. The short had been tripped, Zinc had no doubt, by the toggle switch recessed in
the post of the dogleg stairs.
“Can it be fixed?”
Leech and Smith shook their heads.
“So we’re without power for the rest of the time we’re here?”
“Yep,” Leech said.
“You got it,” Smith agreed.
And anyone on the stairs could have killed the lights, thought Zinc.
BOOBY TRAPPED
8:39 P.M.
Al Leech and Colby Smith were a modem Ellery Queen, two men who created one alter ego: Whip Calhoun. But Calhoun, unlike Queen, didn’t also double as their hero-sleuth, a task that fell to identical twins: Rip and Cal Sanders. Rip, the gay, and Cal, the straight, ran The Eyes Have It Detective Agency in San Francisco, the city Leech and Smith also called home. Like Spade, Marlowe, Archer, McGee, Warshawski, and Millhone, their tough private eyes related their adventures in the first person: Calhoun’s gimmick being the twins got alternate chapters in which to do it. The success of the novels lay in the fact every social setup was assessed from both gay and straight points of view, the twins using this double-barrel to catch the bad guys in a crossfire of perspective. Smith was gay and Leech was straight, according to Elvira’s thumbnail sketch in the cab.
“I need a drink,” Leech said as the five men climbed the stairs to the Kitchen from the “morgue” in the cellar.
“Me, too,” Smith said, casting a resentful eye at the bottle of Cragganmore tucked in Bolt’s belt.
“Not enough here to go around,” Bolt said. “But there’s a bar in the Drawing Room.”
“Poor idea,” Chandler said. “Could be poisoned.”
“I know my booze,” Leech said. “If the seal’s been tampered with, it’ll squeal to me.”
“I want to question you sober.”
“Then do it quick. And do it at the bar. I plan to lock myself away and drink this nightmare out. With me, Col?”
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