by Deaver Brown
“. . . variety of plans,” another persuasive voice inundated a cowed foursome. “You’ve seen the James Joel Finley-designed lodge. That proves it. Fiord Haven will consist of show places . . .”
Under the best of circumstances, cocktail parties were not Thatcher’s favorite form of social intercourse. He had however learned to cope with them with only minor vexation of spirit. Unfortunately, the lessons learned over many years were singularly inapplicable here in the Pine Cone Lounge. It was, for example, a practice of his to discharge his obligations by speaking briefly to the guest of honor or the host, then to blend into the background and let the ebb and flow of guests camouflage discreet withdrawal. Furthermore, that withdrawal was as early as possible.
At Fiord Haven’s party, his hosts were either closeted with the police or, alternatively, bent on selling him a half-acre lot. In addition, there was damned little ebb and flow; most of the guests had been nailed down by voluble salesmen. And finally, he could not delude himself that he and Henry were susceptible to camouflage. Boots, whipcord pants, flannel shirts—and in Henry’s case an ancient sweater of vaguely Oyster Bay provenance—all suggested that the management had hired them to provide local color.
As for early withdrawal—well, the police had been quite firm about that.
So, instead of contentedly settling down in the Spartan surroundings of the Dunster Shelter to a meal made by adding water to a freeze-dried concentrate, he and Henry were doomed to the untimely comfort of two units at the White Mountains Motel, with inner-spring mattresses, showers and other amenities. With roast beef and lobster to come. It was all highly unsatisfactory.
“Strange setup, isn’t it?” Henry said. He was still indignant at both fate and the police but, being Henry, he was incapable of remaining uninterested in his surroundings. Psychologically speaking, Henry often reminded Thatcher of a beaver.
He did not have a chance to ask if Henry was referring to Fiord Haven’s sales methods, or to the discovery of Steve Lester’s dead body at the main lodge which was being described as “the heart of Fiord Haven, where Havenites will enjoy an Olympic-size indoor swimming pool, a magnificent library, and a fun room for year-round socializing.”
“Hi,” said a young man brightly. “I’m Gerry Wahl. You gentlemen just get here?”
“We are not part of your group, Mr. Wahl,” said Thatcher stoutly.
But anything that lived and breathed was a potential sale to Gerry Wahl and Fiord Haven. Ignoring a lackluster response, as well as costumes that did not suggest year-round socializing in fun rooms, he rattled on “. . . nine hundred and seventy-two of the most beautiful acres in New Hampshire, with one of the best ski areas ever developed. And a private bathing beach . . .”
“But Mr. Thatcher isn’t interested in buying a lot, are you, Mr. Thatcher?” a youthful voice interrupted. “Mr. Thatcher is only here because—”
“Sukey!” warned Alan Davidson. He then assumed an expression of extreme solemnity. Both the Davidsons had not only recovered from their misadventures, they had blossomed under them.
“Oh yes,” said Sukey very guiltily.
Smiling determinedly, Gerry Wahl ignored this provocative byplay and switched targets: “I’ll bet you’re about ready to sign up, eh, Mr. Davidson?”
“Well now,” said Mr. Davidson, metaphorically drawing on a pipe.
“Besides,” said Sukey, “we haven’t seen this Fiord Lake.”
“That’s because the access roads to the lake aren’t in yet, Mrs. Davidson. Here, let me show you the photographs of the lake in our brochure.”
He had hooked them neatly and just as neatly drew them away.
Thatcher was amused. “That’s really quite a sales routine,” he observed to Henry. “Let-me-call-you-Oscar to the elderly, and Mr.-and-Mrs. to the very young. Nice touch.”
Henry, too, had certain professional responses.
“Wonder how they assembled this bunch.”
“I understand they’re all from the Boston area.”
That was not enough for a specialist in mailing lists. And now that Thatcher came to think of it, potential Havenites showed an unexpected range; there were one or two couples clearly thinking in terms of retirement, many more young parents all too obviously offspring-oriented, together with some newlyweds.
“Home owners in the wealthier suburbs?” he suggested.
“I don’t think so,” Henry said. “Lester lived somewhere out in Weston, didn’t he? And the Davidsons seem to have an apartment in Cambridge. It’s probably one of those special lists—you know, like subscribers to Life magazine, or owners of common stock. There’s Valenti. I’ll ask him.”
“Looks as if he has other things on his mind,” Thatcher said, watching Ralph Valenti smilingly circulate through the lounge with a non-stop flow of comment.
“Hi there, Phil! . . . sure is a beautiful building, isn’t it? . . . well, we want nothing but the best up here at Fiord Haven, and James Joel Finley is the best you can get. . . . evening, Mrs. Falks . . . did you and your husband like that site Burt showed you? Now listen, folks, don’t let him talk your ear off. . . . We want you to ask any questions you have . . .”
This practiced patter was delivered in a warm friendly voice that seemed to deprecate the insistence of Gerry, Burt, Barry, Walter and other young men. They, in turn, grinned dutifully, then resumed their pitch the minute Valenti had passed by. It was a good performance in itself, the more so since Thatcher guessed that Valenti’s partner, Eddie Quinlan, was still trying desperately to convince the police that murder should not be allowed to disrupt the Fiord Haven Fun Weekend.
Valenti had a round hopeful face and a vague air of benevolence. He dropped very easily into a confidential tone of voice with Thatcher and Henry.
“Terrible thing,” he said. “They’ve told Mrs. Lester. Got hysterical, poor woman. Eddie’s trying to calm her down . . .”
He sounded more worried than sympathetic, and Thatcher could understand why. Stephen Lester’s death was not going to do Fiord Haven any good.
But officially Fiord Haven, in the forms of Valenti and Quinlan, was doggedly optimistic.
“The police will have this wrapped up within hours,” Valenti assured them. “Probably some psycho who got loose . . .”
Thatcher kept a firm eye on Henry Morland. There was very little to be gained by pointing out that New Hampshire woodlands do not act as natural magnets for unbalanced personalities driven by irrational lusts to kill. If this was the line Valenti and Quinlan had decided to take, the New Hampshire State Police could be relied upon to provide a severe test of their salesmanship.
“You’ve got a remarkable merchandising operation here,” said Thatcher, to keep Henry from pursuing the topic. Valenti took this ambiguous observation as a compliment and brightened.
“That’s just what I’m saying tonight in my talk after dinner. It is a remarkable merchandising operation. That’s because Fiord Haven really is a remarkable place.”
Here was a born salesman. Every time he spoke, he convinced himself. No one, not even John Thatcher, could doubt his sincerity.
“We’re not peddling anything cheap or shoddy. Eddie and I decided that we’d settle for nothing but the best. We could have gotten a lot of architects for less than James Joel Finley—but no cutting corners for us.”
“Quality always pays off,” Henry offered cunningly.
“That’s right,” Valenti said, hailing a new truth.
Thatcher would have preferred more facts and fewer homilies, but just then Eddie Quinlan joined them to sink wearily into a chair.
“Whew! I don’t want to go through that again,” he declared.
“Amanda?” Valenti asked.
Quinlan nodded. It was a moment before he replied to his partner. “Of course, you can’t help feeling sorry for the kid. She’s having hysterics. She doesn’t really know what she’s saying.”
Valenti looked worried. “Who is she saying it to?”
�
�Who do you think?” Quinlan smiled tightly. “The police are getting an earful.”
Valenti’s confidence needed reinforcement.
“Eddie,” he shook his head, “I don’t like the sound of that at all. It could mean real trouble.”
Quinlan shrugged. “There’s nothing much we can”—He broke off, looking across the crowded room. “Oh, oh! Maybe there is something we can do, Ralph. Look! There’s another one of our problems.”
There was an exchange of glances and the two men were making their apologies. As they moved away, Valenti called to a trim blond woman in her thirties: “Oh, Mrs. Lester. Do you have a minute?”
This was too much for Henry.
“Did he say Mrs. Lester?” he asked.
“He did,” Thatcher replied cautiously.
Henry was thinking, and that was always dangerous. “I thought he said Mrs. Lester was having hysterics in the office.”
“She’s not only recovered, she’s stopped being a kid,” Thatcher replied. “Tell me, Henry, how would you rate the likelihood of selling any of these people a lot here once they learn about the murder?”
Henry responded to the spirit of this rhetorical question. “Quinlan and Valenti are just keeping the machinery in working order. And Valenti may be right. If this gets cleared up fast—well, people do have short memories.” Suddenly he narrowed his eyes at a tall man who had entered the lounge. “Who’s he? And why’s he wearing those things?”
Henry did not regard hiking gear as a sartorial solecism. Jabots and velvet smoking jackets, however, were something else again.
“That,” said Thatcher, “can only be James Joel Finley, the eminent architect.”
If James Joel Finley was not an eminent architect, he was very much a great man. He accepted admiration from the ladies who crowded around him with a regal condescension. Lean, hawk-like, white-maned, he had piercing blue eyes in a deeply tanned face. He had also a resonant voice.
“. . . values. No, my dear Mrs. Carruthers, what we must do is tie each building to its site. We cannot violate the integrity of nature . . .”
He had casually raised his voice so that he was addressing the entire room.
“. . . fundamentals of honest design. In this kind of situation, the first thing we have to preserve is the organic unity.”
They were going to get that lecture after all, Thatcher thought irately.
He was wrong.
James Joel Finley was in full flight when he suddenly realized that he had lost the rapt attention of much of his audience. With stately displeasure, he turned to the entrance behind him.
There stood Captain Frewen. Beside him were two uniformed officers.
Joining them was Eddie Quinlan. Without apology, he interrupted James Joel Finley and said, “Ladies and gentlemen. I’m afraid that I have some bad news . . .”
“Well,” said Henry in an undertone. “If this does nothing else, it will put an end to this selling.”
Thatcher thought he had taken the measure of Fiord Haven.
“Temporarily, Henry. Temporarily.”
Chapter 5
WEEPING WILLOWS
IT WAS some hours before John Thatcher or anybody else saw that luxurious buffet with roast beef, lobster and other delicacies.
Like the hour of sociability, it was not a howling success. The delay interjected by the news of Stephen Lester’s murder and the first round of police questioning had disheartened the chef: the roast beef was dry, the broiled lobsters were cold and the other delicacies were variously limp, sodden or scorched.
Then, too, the human components showed signs of distress. Stephen Lester’s death may not have taken away all of the appetites whetted by crisp New Hampshire air, but there was, Thatcher saw, a general feeling that hearty feeding would be in poor taste.
Even those relentless automata, Fiord Haven’s salesmen, had been instructed to suspend operations for the time being. They were gathered into a group apart, far from the groaning board. At Fiord Haven, Thatcher would guess, every rib of beef, every lobster claw, every scoop of coleslaw, was expected to produce sales results. The guests saw social awkwardness; the staff saw waste.
“Try one of the watermelon pickles,” Henry advised. “Not bad.”
Thatcher took one. He and Henry, by virtue of their attire, were exempted from the prevailing atmosphere of genteel abstinence; they were hearty outdoorsmen and, hence, trenchermen. Insofar as he could, Thatcher proposed taking advantage of this.
He joined Henry at their table and looked around the dining room. Most of those lining up for food looked sheepish. Those already seated pecked unhappily at their plates.
He and Henry were certainly the only persons at ease in the dining room.
Thatcher was not misled into confusing this mass discomfort with guilt. For, in the preceding hour, it had become fairly apparent that none of these unfortunates knew much about Stephen Lester, or his death. Or, he amended, if they did, they were successfully concealing the fact.
“I’m beginning to feel sorry for Frewen,” he remarked.
Henry was having none of that. “Frewen!” he exclaimed, eviscerating a lobster ferociously. “Of all the stubborn, stiff-necked—”
Thatcher was used to Henry’s view of the universe. “Oh, come on, Henry. You can’t blame him for wanting to keep you here, at least until he checks you out. After all, you did discover the body. And you did know Lester. At the moment, that appears to be almost all the information poor Frewen’s got.”
Henry downed knife and fork and looked balefully at his old friend.
“In the first place,” he said, “it is technically impossible for me to have murdered Lester—”
“Of course. And as soon as Frewen confirms it with a medical report, he will allow us to move on,” Thatcher replied. “Unless, Henry, you are hiding a powerful motive for wanting Lester dead.”
Henry ignored this. “Why focus upon the fact that I was acquainted—barely acquainted, mind you—with the man? Why does Frewen detain us when endless possibilities leap to mind immediately?”
This elevated strain, Thatcher knew, was Henry telling the Supreme Court that The Pepper Mill might be small, but there were those who loved her. He tried to divert the Dan’l Webster across the table.
“I wonder how soon he will let this whole Fiord Haven crowd go.”
Henry was single-minded. “Of course, we don’t know what he learned from the wife—or that other woman.”
“Mind if I join you?” said a new voice.
Eddie Quinlan stood before them, plate in hand.
Thatcher and Henry invited him to sit down. Quinlan’s streak of self mockery was to the fore. “You’re the only two people in the room who don’t have anything to do with Fiord Haven,” he said frankly. “Right now, I can use that.”
“Just the man I want to talk to,” Henry said alertly. “Who’s having hysterics if it isn’t Mrs. Lester?”
Quinlan frowned. “Oh, there was some sort of foul-up in our mailing list. Too many of Lester’s women showed up. It’s the kind of mistake that shouldn’t happen.”
He did not sound very interested and Thatcher, if not Henry, could understand why. Quinlan was only marginally concerned with Stephen Lester. His energies were monopolized by Fiord Haven. And at the moment, Fiord Haven was in trouble.
“. . . couple of sales,” Quinlan was saying. “Now they aren’t sure they want to buy. Of course, I’ve told everybody who signed a contract before this happened that we won’t hold anybody against his will. But my God, does Frewen know how much damage he can do to us? And what’s he got to show for it? Not a damned thing! I could have told him that.”
Eddie Quinlan might want to sit with people who had nothing to do with Fiord Haven, but he could not keep from probing the sore tooth.
“I told him it must have been a tramp, something like that . . .”
“Frewen said there was no sign of robbery,” Henry pointed out. “Lester’s wallet had a couple of hundred
dollars in it. And he was wearing an expensive watch.”
Quinlan might have been seeing Henry for the first time.
“You probably scared the murderer away,” he said. Again he was not much interested.
Thatcher watched a white-hatted chef back through the swing doors from the kitchen with a tub of tossed salad. It was Quinlan who could not remain silent.
“Whatever happened,” he said impatiently, “I wish we could convince Frewen that it doesn’t have anything to do with Fiord Haven. Otherwise, he’s going to cost us a fortune. It’s bad enough that we’ve already lost one sale—”
Henry pounced. “Was Lester going to buy?” he asked.
“Yeah,” said Quinlan with that crooked smile. “Hell, I can’t complain about that—not when the guy got himself killed. But, God knows how many other sales it’s going to cost us if Frewen drags this thing out . . .”
He looked around the dining room, gulped his coffee and jumped to his feet, saying something about talking to Valenti. It was more fundamental than that, Thatcher thought; Eddie Quinlan was finding it hard to sit still.
They watched him thread his way through the close-set tables, stopping here for a brief conversation, there for a word or two.
“He may be right,” said Henry grudgingly. Obviously, anything as simple as a homicidal tramp held no appeal for him.
“Give him the benefit of the doubt,” Thatcher urged. “For the moment at least.”
Certainly it did not appear that Frewen and the police had unearthed any hard information in their questioning of Fiord Haven’s guests and personnel.
Mr. and Mrs. Stephen Lester had arrived at the White Mountains Motel Friday evening. Lester was New England sales manager for a large pharmaceutical firm. He lived in a comfortable suburb outside Boston.
Had anybody noticed anything unusual about him? Captain Frewen had asked the room at large.
Nobody had.
Had anybody talked to him?
A lawyer from Haverhill cleared his throat. “I exchanged a few words with him this morning,” he said, flushing as he became the focus of many eyes.
“What about?” Frewen asked.