Death on Demand

by Carolyn G. Hart

  “The cases Ambrose was interested in?” Capt. Mac paused. “Let’s see. There was the explosion in the Armbruster plant in Montana, killed Old Man Armbruster. Supposed to have been a labor dispute, but he had a worthless son who inherited six million. And Ambrose was suspicious of the Vinson suicide in Hawaii. You remember that one? And, of course, the Winningham case. That happened when I was at Silver City, but I was only assistant chief, and the chief played investigations pretty close to his chest, so I didn’t know much that was helpful to Ambrose. That’s all I remember. You know how close-mouthed your uncle was. A great one for letting the other fellow talk.”

  “Did he ever mention a case that involved anyone here on Broward’s Rock?”

  “Oh. I see where you’re going. No, he didn’t, and frankly I don’t see any connection with the three cases I mentioned. That Armbruster heir lives in New York, and Mrs. Vinson’s husband stayed in Hawaii. As for the Winningham case, everybody involved is dead. Cale Winningham went down in a plane crash not long after he ‘accidentally’ shot his wife. If Ambrose was onto something close to home, he never let on to me. Sorry, Annie. I wish to hell he had.”

  She walked down the central aisle back to the coffee bar, scuffing her feet in mounting disappointment. Max was making a diligent foot-by-foot survey of the entire store.

  She called after him, “Capt. Mac doesn’t know whether Uncle Ambrose was onto a lead here, but, dammit, I know it in my bones—it all goes back to him. I’ll bet the store he found out something, and somebody pushed him off his boat to keep him from making his research trip.”

  Max was moving from table to table, then turning to sight where Elliot had stood. Annie looked at each table in turn, mentally placing the Sunday Night Regulars on the fateful evening. Elliot had been standing just there. Surely, it should be possible to figure where the dart had come from its angle of entry. Dr. Thorndyke would have been able to do it. But not, apparently, Chief Saulter. Annie wasn’t geometrically talented, but she gave it a try. She and Max and Ingrid were at the table nearest the storeroom, and the Farleys at the table opposite theirs. Capt. Mac and Fritz Hemphill had the table nearest to the watercolors on the west wall. Emma Clyde and Harriet sat next to the central corridor, and Kelly Rizzoli and Hal Douglas nearest to Elliot and the coffee bar. Of course, Elliot could have turned just the moment the dart was thrown. She gave up, and turned back to Uncle Ambrose. Had any of these people ever been involved in a case of accident or suicide that could have been murder? Annie recalled Max’s typewritten notes, and Emma Clyde’s name flashed in her mind like a six-foot neon sign.

  She whooped and told Max.

  “Yeah, that’s a real possibility. Of course, there’s the question of Hal Douglas’s wife. Where is she? It’s really too bad you didn’t have a chance to read Elliot’s disk.”

  “The killer’s too smart for us. He must have destroyed my uncle’s manuscript months ago, slick as a whistle. Now he’s wiped out Elliot’s disk. How the heck did he know I was at Elliot’s house?”

  “I don’t know. If we knew that … Think back, Annie. Did you hear anything? Was there a noise or a smell, anything that might give some hint to the murderer’s identity?”

  “Nothing. I was sitting there, reading …”

  Max looked at her sharply. “You actually started reading the disk? Did you find out anything?”

  “I certainly did. Max, why didn’t you ever tell me you had a law degree?”

  For an instant, he looked absolutely blank, then he began to shake with laughter.

  “Annie Laurance, for shame. There you are, inches from discovering a murderer’s identity, and do you call up one of the suspect’s files? No, you call up Annie Laurance’s file.”

  She tried to brazen it out. “I thought it would take only a minute.”

  “It merely proves you are human, my love, succumbing to that feminine weakness for gossip before duty.”

  “I may be weak, but you are deceitful. And chauvinistic.”

  “Did I ever tell you I didn’t have a law degree?”

  “Max, be serious. Why didn’t you say you did?”

  “Oh, that was filed under miscellaneous information. You already know all the important things about me: I’m wondrously handsome and charming, sinfully rich, exquisitely perceptive, staunchly devoted to the intellect. I have three sisters and an enormous summer house on Long Island. I’m—”

  “You are evading the issue. You are perfectly well qualified to practice law. You can have a serious career.”

  “I’ll tell you what, Annie. After we find the maniacal killer who is rampaging across wee Broward’s Rock, I will give every consideration to pursuing what you term a serious career.”

  “Do you mean it?”

  “Of course. Now look, you called up the index, and decided to check out your own file. You didn’t perchance look at anyone else’s?”

  “No. And when I came to, the disk had been erased.”

  “Rats.” He scowled darkly. “You are looking at the screen, somebody comes up from behind and biffs you.” Max paused. “Why did he—or she—just biff you?”

  “That was the only Epson on the island, and anybody looking at the index would know I had only looked at my own file.”

  “How?”

  “Every time a file is stored, the machine records the date.”

  A green expression flitted across his face. “Thank God for your curiosity.”

  Annie pondered it for a moment, then felt a little sick, too. “If I’d looked at the wrong file, read the killer’s, then … It would have been like Harriet.”

  “Harriet must have walked in on the killer.”

  Thank God, indeed, for her curiosity. Then, as her head twinged, she felt a flash of her old temper. “By God, I don’t like being slammed. Okay, so I didn’t get to read the files. We’ll still figure it out.”

  “You bet we will.” Max pulled the typewritten bios out of his pocket. “Come on, let’s get to work.”

  “What are we going to do?”

  “Prep you.”

  “Prep me to do what?”

  Max bent forward to tell her.

  Annie felt the arm on her shoulder, shaking, shaking. She blinked and struggled to turn her face away from the piercing light.

  “Come on, Annie. Open your eyes. I have to check your pupils. My God, I think you do have a concussion. This is like trying to wake a South American tree sloth.”

  “Go away,” she mumbled, thrashing out blindly. “You’ve checked every bloody hour on the hour all night long. Go away.”

  “One eye open. Just one.”

  Finally, miserably, she opened one eye, glared, closed it, and sank back on her pillow.

  Annie breathed in deeply of the hot, swirling air in her shower.

  “Need any help?” Max caroled just outside the shower door.

  “I’ll call if I do,” she sang back sweetly.

  “Always ready to help out my fellow man.”

  When she’d dried off with the thick, fluffy blue towel Max had thoughtfully draped over the wicker clothes hamper, Annie slipped into a yellow-and-blue patterned skirt and a soft yellow cotton pullover. She brushed her hair very carefully to avoid the swelling behind her right ear, wiped the steamed mirror and peered at her head. Well, she looked normal. No visible bumps or bruises. She probed the skin behind her ear and winced. It still smarted, but she couldn’t help smiling as she listened to Max bustling cheerfully around the kitchen. When she came in, he waved her to a seat.

  “Chef Darling at work. Observe and enjoy, Madame.”

  Potatoes and onions sizzled invitingly in the skillet, and Max whipped the eggs to a froth.

  “One exquisite frittata coming up.”

  They carried their plates to the wooden-planked table on the balcony outside the kitchen.

  As Max poured the coffee, he stooped to kiss the top of her head. “Just a preview of one of the myriad pleasures of connubial life.”

  “Oh, Max,
why aren’t you willing to invest this kind of effort and energy into a job?”

  His coffee cup paused midway to his mouth. His eyes widened. “What an obscene thought.”

  “I’ll have you know I’m serious.”

  “I know. That is both your great charm and your great failing, my sweet. You are very serious.” He sighed. “Annie, don’t you believe in fairy godmothers?”

  “Not really. I believe in hard work and devotion to duty.”

  He sighed lugubriously and tried again. “Annie, what if I—or your fairy godmother—slipped a freighter ticket to Singapore under that four-leaf clover? Couldn’t you take it and run away with me?”

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “I wouldn’t have earned it.”

  “Look. Think about it this way. You know the guy who won thirty million dollars in the New York raffle?”

  “What about him?”

  “Is it immoral for him to accept his winnings from a raffle?”

  “Well, no, I guess not.”

  “Annie, look on me as a great, big, loving raffle ticket!”

  She was fashioning a withering retort when the police car pulled up in front of the tree house. She slowly put down her coffee cup.

  “Remember, we were here all night,” Max said calmly.

  Chief Saulter walked heavily up the steps. He looked tired, and Annie wondered if he had been up most of the night. She rose to meet him.

  The police chief looked at her intently, then past her at Max.

  “We’re having breakfast,” she offered.

  “I want an account of your movements last night.”

  “My client has nothing to say, Chief Saulter.”

  “Innocent people don’t need that kind of advice.”

  “Innocent people need the protection of angels, Chief Saulter.”

  Annie and the chief both looked at Max in amazement.

  He smiled fatuously. “Did I understand you to ask for Miss Laurance’s movements last night?”

  “That is correct.”

  “Then I can tell you very simply. She was here. I was here. We were here all evening.” He couldn’t have been more insouciant ice skating at Rockefeller Plaza.

  “All night?”

  “Most of it. We went to the bookstore for a few minutes about eight. Why?”

  “Any phone calls? Anybody come by to visit?”

  “One phone call. We didn’t answer it. Nobody came by. Why the questions about last night, Chief?”

  The chief’s chilly eyes turned to Annie, who was pretending to nibble on her toast. “You know Harriet Edelman well?”

  “Moderately,” Annie answered pleasantly. She repressed an image of the bloodied mess she’d last seen in Elliot’s living room. “I had an autograph party for her a couple of weeks ago.”

  “She was murdered last night.”

  “Oh my God …”

  “Where? What happened? Do you know who did it?”

  “She was found in the living room.”

  Annie saw the trap, and skirted it. “She lived alone. Who found her?”

  “It didn’t happen at her house.” The chief spoke grudgingly, his suspicious eyes intent on Annie’s face.

  “Where?” Max asked dutifully.

  “At Elliot Morgan’s house.”

  “Good grief,” Annie exclaimed, “what in the world was she doing there?”

  The Porsche jolted up a sandy track. “At least he didn’t arrest me. Max, did you get rid of that towel?”

  “That towel is well-wrapped around a heavy rock and resting at the bottom of a lagoon on the opposite side of the island. Even if it floated up, there’s nothing to connect it to you.”

  “Right. But I wonder if my bike tires left a track under the bridge.”

  “Anybody could have used your bike. The shed is never locked.”

  She glanced at him grimly. “Is that counsel’s argument for the accused?”

  “We are going to make sure somebody else stands in the dock.”

  That sounded like a swell idea to her. This morning she intended to ask a hell of a lot of uncomfortable questions in her search for the real killer. Philip Marlowe, look out.

  The red Porsche curved through the twelve-foot-tall bronze gates of the Island Hills Golf Course. The crack of a cleanly hit ball carried through the fresh morning air. Annie thought regretfully of her own clubs and wished she and Max could be walking down the broad wooden steps at the Club to the first tee. Max, of course, was a scratch golfer. A club tournament tennis player. An expert scuba diver. A fixed-wing pilot. Talk about a misspent youth!

  “Nice,” he commented laconically as they drove past one imaginative home after another: a modernistic two-story gray house built on four levels, the highest flat-roofed and topped by a deck; a modern version of an antebellum mansion, with slender Doric columns supporting two verandahs; a California Mission stucco in the palest of pinks. “My God—”

  Annie laughed. “This is the one that drives the local homeowners crazy, but it’s the natural outgrowth of not being able to have your cake and eat it, too. The zoning laws here are very particular about how many square feet, maximum height, things like that. But the local board very proudly fixed it so that there could be ‘imaginative variety with artistic integrity.’ They said they didn’t want everything to look alike like Hilton Head, where all homes are built of wood and weathered to a natural gray.”

  The Porsche crept to a halt as Max craned for a better view. It was a two, no, three, could it be four stories? The building materials alternated between chrome, bronze, and quartz. Rooms thrust out at eccentric angles, and the whole was topped with a thirty-foot round tower of gleaming aluminum.

  “I’d like to meet that owner,” Max breathed.

  “So would everybody else. It was built by Marguerite Dumaney.”

  He whistled softly. The aging Hollywood star’s name was legendary. Checkout counter tabloids had whispered in recent years that she was a female Howard Hughes.

  The Porsche moved ahead, curved around a bend, and arrived at the entrance to 603 Cormorant Road.

  This home was, quite simply, lovely. Perfectly suited to the landscape, it was constructed of the unassuming native pine, softly weathered to a dusky gray. But it still had an unmistakable aura of elegance. The three-story entryway had a glass panel running from ground level to the roof beside the nine-foot front door. Beautifully tended beds of white-topped asters, tall goldenrod, and camphorweed fronted the path.

  As she got out, Max gave her a thumbs-up. Then he called after her, “Remember—keep at least two feet from each subject, don’t hesitate to use the mace, and make sure they know I’m waiting.”

  Emma Clyde wore a pink-and-white seersucker skirt and blouse and looked like summer candy. She was surprised to see Annie but gracious. Her lips, carefully painted a bright coral, parted in a smile, but the smile didn’t reach her cornflower blue eyes.

  “How nice of you to drop by, dear.” A pause. “You know, I do write in the mornings.”

  They stood in the main entryway. The green and gilt terrazzo floor glinted in the flood of morning sunshine through the roof-high glass pane. Water fell musically from a corner fountain, artfully constructed to look like a miniature Hawaiian waterfall. Sprays of orchids filled crimson-and-gold Chinese vases. Annie remembered reading about Emma’s prize collection of orchids. Shades of Nero Wolfe.

  “I’m sorry to intrude, but I had to see you.”

  It was like being a kid and going up to the top of a slide that rivaled the Empire State Building. She felt that same mixture of utter exhilaration laced with fear. Was this how The Saint felt when he began an exploit?

  “You had to see me?”

  “You see, I really don’t know what to do,” Annie began.

  Emma waited, blue eyes alert and calculating.

  “Elliot sent me the material he was going to use Sunday night.”

  Emma continued to wait. She might look like su
mmer candy, but she emanated an unyielding, icy solidity. The entryway had seemed warm and sunny when Annie first began. Now she felt as if she’d stepped into a deep freezer.

  “I don’t know what to do about it.”

  “Why ask me?”

  “Some of the information concerns you.” Did she intend to stand there like a sphinx all morning? Damn the woman, why didn’t she react?

  Emma’s face looked like a mud mask in a beauty salon.

  One more try. “Look, Emma, I don’t want to go to the police with this. I thought if you could explain it to me, I wouldn’t reveal the information about you. After all, surely what Elliot wrote can’t be true.”

  “Of course, it isn’t true,” Emma responded. “The Coast Guard ruled it was an accidental drowning.”

  So that was it, the death of her second husband. What was it Max had picked up from the man who ran the bait shop? Rumor had it that Enrique Morales was secretly meeting a Cuban girl.

  “Did the Coast Guard know about the Cuban girl?”

  If it seemed chilly before, the atmosphere dropped to glacial in the elegant foyer. The soft splash of the waterfall was the only sound for a long moment.

  Emma asked harshly, “How much do you want?”

  “Want? Oh no, Emma, I don’t want money. I’m just trying to understand what happened.”

  “It’s all in the Coast Guard report.” Emma’s voice was clipped. “Ricky and I had a few drinks after dinner at the Sans Souci Club. When we came back to the boat, he said he wanted to stay on deck for some fresh air. I went below to bed.”

  “You didn’t hear anything? A splash? A cry for help?”

  “As I said, we’d had a few drinks, and I’d worked hard that day. I was tired. I fell asleep immediately, and I didn’t realize anything was wrong until the steward brought my breakfast. I asked him to call Ricky for me, and he came back and said his cabin hadn’t been slept in.”

  So they didn’t share a cabin.

  Emma had asked the steward to call her husband. Why didn’t she call him? Was it because the very rich avoid all possible exertion? Or was it that she knew his cabin would be empty and wanted to get the search under way?