by Deaver Brown
This libel on the Commonwealth of Massachusetts roused no objection from Barteau.
“So, it all boils down to nothing,” Frewen continued. “Lester has lunch with the whole gang on Saturday. Then, afterwards, he hangs around for a little while, closes his deal with Quinlan, runs into the ex-wife and tells her about it. Then he goes for a walk, promising his wife he’ll be back in time to tour the site with her. He does come back but now he tells her he’s skipping the tour. And after that, the only people who see him are the construction crew, just before they quit work. From what Prohack says, Lester was avoiding the whole Fiord Haven crowd.”
“And what does the wife say?” Barteau asked.
Frewen stubbed out his cigar, recalling the hysterics, the doctor, and the sedatives that had stood between him and Amanda Lester. But that was forty-eight hours ago.
“Let’s go and find out,” he said.
“. . . sure, sure, use our office,” said Ralph Valenti, appropriately solemn.
Behind him, Mrs. Lester had tucked herself into the corner of the leather sofa. On Frewen’s entrance, she sat up, straightening her shoulders as if an act of will could dissipate her bewilderment. Her ordeal had left her pale and drawn but, for the the first time, Frewen realized that Amanda Lester was a little beauty, graceful as a doe with the same fine bones and enormous eyes.
“Yes, of course I want to help you,” she said in a voice that was low but perfectly steady. “I’d rather have Mr. Valenti and Mr. Quinlan stay with me, though. My parents haven’t gotten in from California yet. They’re coming tonight.”
Captain Frewen was not an imaginative man but the contrast between Stephen Lester’s two wives was striking enough to capture him. Eunice Lester fought her own battles. Amanda Lester had gone from being somebody’ daughter to somebody’s wife; her husband’s death had left her alone but she did not know it. Instinctively, she expected supporters.
It had not occurred to her that she might need defenders. The same examination being trained on Mrs. Eunice Lester, divorcée with son, was being extended to Mrs. Amanda Lester, housewife. Eunice, Frewen suspected, knew this. Amanda did not.
Quinlan cocked an inquiring eye at the policeman.
“Sure, we’ll stay if it makes you feel better, Mrs. Lester,” he said. “That is, if it’s all right with you, Captain?”
“Sure,” said Frewen, grimly amused. Amanda did not think of herself as a suspect; neither did she think of Eddie Quinlan or Ralph Valenti as suspects. Frewen knew why. The hysteria of Saturday night was gone; the accusation remained.
“Has Eunice confessed?” Amanda asked in a matter-of-fact voice, before the men were seated. Quinlan and Valenti froze, but she paid no attention.
Frewen cleared his throat. “No, she hasn’t confessed, Mrs. Lester. And we don’t have any evidence—”
“For God’s sake, what have you been doing?” Amanda exclaimed. “Everybody knows she did it.”
This time Ralph Valenti got as far as a muttered protest.
“We all know what happened. She hated Steve. She had a fight with him. Then—”
Amanda was still seeing things in black and white. Eunice Lester hated Steve. Steve was dead. Therefore . . .
While Frewen concentrated on framing his first question, Eddie and Ralph avoided Amanda’s eyes. She swept on:
“You can’t deny that they met each other after lunch. Eunice admits it herself. Then she trumped up this story about Steve buying a lot.”
Almost apologetically, Quinlan hitched himself forward. “Now, Mrs. Lester, I think that there’s some sort of confusion here. When I spoke to your husband after lunch, he did make up his mind to buy. I was going to have a sales contract ready Sunday. Probably he bumped into Eunice and was just being polite—”
Indignation brought color to Amanda’s cheeks. “Polite? Does that sound likely? For heaven’s sake, Eunice couldn’t see Steve without starting a fight. You saw what happened Saturday morning. Imagine what it would have been like if I hadn’t been there.”
If life was a stage for Amanda Lester, she was the star in every scene. Other people had witnessed the Lesters’ meeting on Saturday. Everyone agreed that it had been unpleasant. Not everyone, however, cast Amanda as the peacemaker.
“Okay, Mrs. Lester,” Frewen said soothingly. “Have it your way. Your husband fought with his exwife before he set out on his walk. But what did he do after that? He was gone the whole afternoon. He must have said something to you when he stopped back in your motel room.”
Amanda Lester did not like being humored. Stiffly she said, “He simply said he was not coming on the tour.”
“Did he say why?”
“No, he didn’t.”
“Didn’t you ask?”
“No, I did not.”
Almost imperceptibly, the atmosphere in the room changed, and not in Amanda’s favor. Valenti, Quinlan, and Frewen were all married men. Not one of them believed her.
“All right,” said Frewen. “He skipped out on you for the first half of the afternoon. He skipped out on you for the second half. You didn’t ask him where he was going. Did you ask him when he was coming back?”
“No,” she cried out. But three skeptical faces made her falter for the first time. “Well, if you must know, he was . . . he was preoccupied.”
Inwardly, Frewen relaxed. So Steve Lester had had something on his mind other than one of Fiord Haven’s vacation homes.
“What was he preoccupied about?” he demanded.
“He didn’t tell me,” Amanda replied almost desperately. “He wouldn’t explain anything. He just snapped at me, then he stomped out.”
“Now, Mrs. Lester, don’t get upset,” Valenti murmured uselessly.
“I am not upset,” she retorted. “I’m mad. Why are you wasting time this way! Why are you hounding me when you know that Eunice had a fight with Steve? She’s the one you should be going after—”
Captain Frewen’s long temper had limits. “Look, Mrs. Lester. Eunice may have had a fight with your husband at two o’clock. You sure as hell had one at four. And by six, he was dead!”
First she gasped at him, then she leaped to her feet, her hands clenched.
“You can’t talk to me that way and I’m not staying to hear any more! You don’t see me again until I’ve got my father on one side and a lawyer on the other.”
Head high, she marched out of the office. Frewen made no move to stop her.
Quinlan turned his crooked grin on Frewen. “Listen, Captain, I’ve got a complaint, too. Why the hell did you let us in for that?”
Valenti seconded the sentiment with a look of mournful reproach.
“Do you both good,” Frewen said robustly. “And as long as I’ve got you here, I’ve got a couple of questions for you.”
“We’ll make a deal,” Quinlan said easily. “We answer your questions and you call off the cops. Let these people we’ve got on our hands go home. We’re running up a helluva motel bill.”
“That doesn’t bother me,” said Frewen. “The owner’s my nephew. Now listen, what do either of you know about this scene when the Lesters ran into Eunice for the first time?”
Quinlan shrugged as Valenti replied, “Neither of us were there, thank God. Ask James Joel Finley for a blow-by-blow account. He told me all about it.”
“Most of the salesmen can do the same, Ralph,” Quinlan reminded him. “Frankly I got the impression that it was the women who made most of the noise. The way I got it, Lester was more embarrassed than anything else.”
That figured, everybody agreed.
“Another thing,” Frewen said, rising to leave. “I know how you ride herd on the prospects you get up here. Why weren’t you keeping tabs on Lester? If you’d been doing your job, mine would be a lot easier. Didn’t anybody notice how he was ducking most of these sales pitches of yours?”
Neither Quinlan nor Valenti was affronted. Valenti in fact took the question seriously. “I’m the one who goofed on that. Somebody tol
d me that Lester was missing around three o’clock. That’s it. Burt O’Neil told me he had cut the talk session—”
Quinlan broke in as he, too, rose. He was more lighthearted. “I guess you and Burt didn’t know that we’d already sold Lester, Ralph.” He turned to Frewen. “Captain, once they’ve signed up, they can go visit their grandmothers if they want. We’re busy trying to sell the holdouts.”
“In that case, it’s a shame Lester decided to buy,” Frewen mused.
“The real shame,” Valenti said bitterly, “was that he ever got on our list.”
Frewen was speaking more to himself than to the others. “I guess there isn’t much more to do here.”
Quinlan picked him up. “You mean we can let everybody go?”
That was exactly what Captain Frewen meant.
“It isn’t as if we have much chance to make any sales now,” Valenti remarked as he retailed the scene to Thatcher and Henry. They were sitting in the lobby of the White Mountains Motel. Around them was a purposive bustle, as Fiord Haven’s prospects got out while the going was good. The packsacks under Thatcher’s chair contrasted strongly to the matched sets of luggage piled everywhere. Their message however was comparable; everybody was packed and eager to escape.
Henry had not been listening.
“I’ve never seen so many Porsches in my life,” he said, returning from a reconnaissance of the driveway. “Everybody here seems to drive one.”
He lost Thatcher but not Valenti. “That’s right,” Valenti said. “Eddie’s got a nephew in the Registry of Motor Vehicles. We got a list of Porsche owners in the Greater Boston area. That gives you a pretty good list of prospects, don’t you think? Real smart idea—until all this popped up. Eddie’s got a million ideas like that.”
The explosion of departing exhausts momentarily deflected him. But only momentarily:
“Next weekend, we’ve got thirty medical doctors coming up. That’s even better than Porsches. If we don’t sell twenty to thirty lots—well, I’ll be surprised.”
Thatcher felt his way. “Your sales program is . . . er . . . continuing?”
Valenti was disingenuous. “Why not? This will blow over.”
Neither Thatcher nor Henry found any suitable reply. Their silence spurred Valenti on to indiscretion.
Lowering his voice, he looked around the crowded lobby. “But I’ll tell you one thing,” he said in a savage undertone. “I wish I’d been the one to find Lester’s body.”
“I do, too,” said Henry, who seemed to have taken a dislike to Valenti.
Thatcher waited.
“Because if I had, I’d have rolled it down a mountainside, that’s what I’d have done. Then everybody would have thought Lester had some sort of accident. And that would have been that.”
“Except for a murderer on the loose,” Thatcher objected.
Unheeding, Valenti continued: “It was just more lousy luck. Any other Saturday, I’d probably have been up at the site. This time I had to see about getting some blueprints changed.”
A horn from the driveway brought an end to these revelations.
“Well, good luck,” said Henry, smartly hoisting his pack.
It was an abrupt withdrawal from Fiord Haven. Thatcher softened it by a few conventional good wishes, then followed Henry from the motel.
As they left, Ralph G. Valenti was still thinking hard.
Chapter 9
KINDLING
JOHN THATCHER had not expected to be back at the Morland home in Pepperton, New Hampshire within four days of leaving it. Nevertheless, he viewed his surroundings with approval. He had always been an admirer of this kitchen. Like most women swapping New York City for Northern New England, Ruth Morland had demanded a modern kitchen. She had resisted the temptation to encase the electric range in a stove-black exterior, to surround the freezer with knotty pine paneling and to cover the vinyl floor with braided rugs. On the contrary, the only reminder of the original kitchen—a wood and oil range prudently preserved as insurance against electric failure—was concealed in a niche behind folding doors. As a result, Ruth had a genuine farmhouse kitchen. Only city people live in a sea of cranberry scoops and scorn formica and stainless steel.
The breakfast nook, in a similar move toward comfort, had been set against a wide east window through which the morning sun was now pouring. Thatcher eased his shoulders in a shaft of warmth and contemplated his hostess. Henry, busy as a beaver, had already bustled off to his warehouse. This was a golden opportunity for a few words of warning.
Happily, Ruth had few illusions about her husband.
“I’m surprised you were able to get him back here, John,” she said, putting her own interpretation on their arrival the night before.
“It wasn’t easy.” Thatcher had decided to be blunt. “And the problem now is to keep him here.” “Henry does get enthusiastic about things,” Ruth said fondly. “It’s one of his charms.”
“Look here, Ruth. It may be one of his charms for you, but I doubt if the police see it that way.”
Unperturbed, Ruth poured coffee and extended the sugar bowl. She was a pleasantly plump woman with gray hair that sprang vigorously from a center part.
“Henry told me that the police were suspicious of him at first. But after they checked with the Appalachian Mountain Club and found out how casual his acquaintance with Steve Lester was, he said they were inclined to forget about him.”
“True enough,” Thatcher conceded. “But now Henry’s started being an amateur detective. He’s been closeted with Eunice Lester, and I know he wanted to cross-examine everybody at Fiord Haven, if not everybody in New Hampshire.”
Ruth tut-tutted. “I suppose you tried to explain how the police might misinterpret all this interest of his.”
“Repeatedly.”
“And he didn’t understand,” Ruth concluded comfortably. “That’s my Henry for you.”
“Seriously, Ruth, I think it would be a worthy project for you to dampen this enthusiasm. Surely there’s some other hobby he can take up.”
“I gave up trying to dampen him thirty years ago. It’s impossible.” She smiled reassuringly across the table. “But, sometimes, he can be deflected. I suppose the important thing is to keep him away from Fiord Haven.”
Thatcher admired her confidence. “Certainly that’s the first step.”
“Let’s see, maybe I could promote a crisis at The Pepper Mill. No, I don’t think that would do much good. He’s not likely to be very interested. Or, I could tell him that he doesn’t know enough about Steve Lester’s background. That, at least, would take him in another direction. What a good thing it is,” she ended in a burst of parochialism, “that those wives were there for the police to suspect.”
“If there hadn’t been any wives, there might not have been any murder,” Thatcher said, trying to introduce a semblance of logic into the conversation.
Ruth rose above logic. “See? That’s exactly what I mean. I suppose it’s the first wife who’s the prime suspect.”
Thatcher’s agreement was not wholehearted. “She leads the field in motive, there’s no doubt about that. But otherwise, I’m not so sure. There’s no indication that she left her motel room during the critical period. And no one noticed any abnormal behavior on her part. She wasn’t seen sobbing hysterically or trembling with rage that afternoon. Nor does there seem to have been a sudden deterioration in her relations with Lester, just a steady hostility that had been going on for months.”
“What about when they met each other without warning on Saturday morning? Henry said there was some sort of excitement then.”
“Both Lester and Eunice were upset at the sudden confrontation. All the spectators are agreed on that. They came face to face without warning at the morning lecture. But some people say that the one who did the raging was Amanda Lester.”
“The second wife,” Ruth mused. “I suppose the police aren’t overlooking her.”
“By no means. The great strength of
Eunice’s position is that she tells a straightforward story which is reasonable on its surface and, insofar as it can be checked, is truthful. She was disturbed to find her exhusband in the weekend party and was determined not to buy a lot at Fiord Haven if he did. The minute he told her he was going to buy, she decided to leave.”
Ruth pounced. “But she didn’t leave. She was still there hours later.”
“She explains that, too. She had made plans to be away for the weekend. Her son was with friends, her refrigerator was bare, and she had been swept up into the treadmill of Fiord Haven activities. Lester announced his decision that afternoon. She decided to stay for cocktails and dinner, then drive home.”
“That sounds reasonable,” Ruth nodded dubiously. “But Amanda doesn’t go along with that, does she?”
Thatcher was warming to this story. “That is where the complications begin. I don’t suppose the police are ever prepared to exonerate a resident spouse without close examination. Particularly where the murder seems to have been an unpremeditated emotional outburst. And, when the spouse starts lying, they become very interested, indeed.”
“Unpremeditated?” Ruth seemed to be testing this new concept. “Yes, I’ll go along with that. You said he was hit on the head with a hammer, didn’t you? Then, the police are right. No woman would plan to kill her husband that way.”
Thatcher was amused at her air of expert judgment. “Oh? And how would you go about murdering Henry?” he inquired.
“Strangling,” she said cheerfully. “Sometimes when he goes burbling on for hours, I plan it out in great detail.”
Behind the curtain of fifteen years as a widower, Thatcher’s memories of the marital state stirred into life. “Well, never mind about that,” he said hastily, “the important thing is that Amanda denied Lester had decided to buy a lot. But the police had already questioned Quinlan, the owner of Fiord Haven, and he corroborated Eunice’s story.”
“I don’t think that’s so suspicious. This all happened on the day of the murder. Maybe Lester didn’t have a chance to tell his wife.”
“No, that won’t hold up. The police have gone into Lester’s movements that day very thoroughly. If everybody is telling the truth, this is what happened. Directly after lunch, Quinlan made an impromptu sales effort which was successful. Lester agreed to buy lot number seventy-three, and Quinlan was to have the contract ready for him the next day. Lester then left for his walk and met Eunice in the parking lot. Their encounter was seen but not overheard. He told Eunice he had bought a lot and went on into the woods. Eunice remained in the parking lot in full view until she was joined by the rest of her group. Two hours later Amanda and Lester were together for fifteen minutes during which time, so Amanda claims, Lester said nothing about buying a lot. Then Lester stormed out of their motel room, returned to the site and was murdered.”