The Dead Cat Bounce

by Sarah Graves

  If they were on it, they’d be on it from day one.

  “The kind of guys I mean would all have short haircuts,” I continued, “and they’d wearing good, dark suits but not too good, not tailored or anything. And they would give the impression that they thought all the local folks were ants, that they could step on them with their wing-tips if they wanted to. A sort of aura of controlled contempt,” I went on urgently.

  Toby listened intently; that’s the thing about Toby. Through the telephone, you can feel him listening, and in person you almost have to be sitting down or the force of it would knock you over.

  “You know,” said Toby, “I’ve been wondering about that, myself.”

  Which, unfortunately, was my answer. For whatever reason, the Justice Department had liked Mcllwaine. They’d found—and Clarissa’s slip confirmed me in this—a reason to treat his murder as a Federal crime.

  And while Maine courts don’t hand down the death penalty, Federal ones do.

  30

  “Listen, George, I’m sorry I upset your applecart. About the trouble you had.”

  We were down in my cellar, trying to keep the house from floating away.

  “Don’t worry about it,” George said reassuringly. “Would’ve come out sooner or later, anyway. I’m not mad at you about it.”

  He gave the pipe wrench a final twist and eyed the result.

  “That ought to hold you for now. I’ll be over soon to replace all this stuff, put in copper.”

  “Fine,” I said, following him to the stairs. “Meanwhile, can we drink the water?”

  Once the horrible Clarissa had departed, I had gone down to the cellar to check on the floor jacks that the men from Guptill’s had put in, on the theory that one disaster follows another, and sure enough there was a pool of water under the steps. I’d touched the pool to make sure it was water and not heating oil, since the fuel tank in my house consists of old oil drums linked in series, an arrangement that has been in place since 1938.

  “Oh, sure,” said George. “Might want to take a couple teaspoons of Rustoleum, though. Keep your innards clean.”

  My finger had come up red from the spreading pool, which was when the phrase “heavy metal poisoning” had begun flashing in my brain like a neon sign.

  “Only kidding,” George relented. “Put a filter on the tap, you’re worried about it. I’ve got one out in the truck.”

  “Thanks.” I watched gratefully as he hefted his toolbox and went up. The basement was cool and damp, its ceiling underslung with old hand-hewn beams from which most of the whitewash had long ago powdered away. There was a root cellar, its interior smelling mustily of potatoes, a room where slabs of meat had hung from iron hooks, and along the walls, numerous swatches of deer hide nailed randomly here and there, evidence of long-ago hunting seasons.

  “When it happened,” I began again when I got upstairs. “When Mcllwaine died, where were you?”

  Before answering, he positioned himself on his back with his head inside the cabinet under the sink. I thought that if an atomic bomb were to go off in Eastport, George would be poking his face up out of the shelter before the ash had finished falling, peering around to see which plumbing to fix first.

  “Working on the Whites’ house.” His hand emerged, landed accurately on the basin wrench, and disappeared. The gritty sound of old metal turning came from under the sink.

  “Yes, I know, but working where, exactly?”

  “Don’t know. I don’t know when he got killed, so I don’t know where I was at the time.”

  Which was reasonable but unhelpful. “Okay, so let’s go on the theory that you didn’t do it yourself.”

  A bang from under the sink. “Yeah, let’s.”

  “You must have seen something.”

  George eased out of the cabinet, as he has often done before. The plumbing in the house has been jury-rigged so many times over the years that I sometimes think I ought to install a roller under there, of the kind that Gerry Porter uses to slide in and out from under automobiles.

  “I saw the Mcllwaines’ blue Lincoln pull up.”

  I also sometimes think I should install dental equipment, for use in extracting answers out of George Valentine.

  “What else?”

  “Mcllwaine got out. His wife was driving, the pretty blonde woman. Nina. Then she drove away.”

  “She didn’t get out?”

  “Not that I saw. It wasn’t my job to watch her,” George added, unhelpfully.

  “Right. What did you see after that?”

  He positioned the filter on the sink top. “That’s it. I was busy fixing the vent pipe. Up on a ladder, or getting stuff from the truck.”

  Vent pipes insure that water exiting the plumbing system will be matched by an equal volume of air entering the system, and without going into messy detail, may I just say right here that you do not want troubled vent pipes. “Did you hear anything?”

  “Alvin White and Mcllwaine arguing.” He tightened the nuts on the sink, and gave the faucet handle an experimental twist.

  “Could you hear what they were arguing about?”

  “Nope.” The faucet spat wheezily twice and began to run water.

  “You will have to buy cartridges for this filter.”

  Which was no surprise. The amount of equipment required to make a two-hundred-year-old house run properly in the twentieth century makes operating a space station look economical by comparison. In fact, I have sometimes wondered if shooting the house into space might be a viable plan, or at least an eminently more restful one.

  He closed his toolbox and wrote me up a bill from the pad of printed slips he kept in his pocket, and put it on the counter as he headed for the back door.

  “George, why do you suppose Alvin and Mcllwaine stayed in touch? I mean, I know they grew up together. But it doesn’t seem they’d have gone on having much in common.”

  “Don’t know,” George answered thoughtfully. “My old man used to say he liked his old friends best, ’cause they remembered the same things he did.”

  Which to me made sense. That morning, for no particular reason, I’d woken up thinking about a night when Sam was a baby. He’d had croup, and when he tried to breathe he made a sound like a strip of wet bedsheet being ripped lengthwise, violently. I’d been so sure he was dying that I baptized him in the back seat of the car on the way to the emergency room, using a bottle of Perrier from my shoulder bag. And now the only person besides me who remembered that night was my ex-husband.

  George put his hand on the door, looking woebegone. “I wish I had done it, tell you the truth. I’d go right on down and confess, get Ellie out of jail.”

  “I know you would. You’re sure you didn’t see anything else. Another car, or someone else going into the house?”

  He shook his head. “Like I said, I was up on the ladder. Only other person I saw was Bobby Taylor, up on his own ladder, halfway across town up against the Heddlepenny House. The one,” he added, “that those two women from Bangor are putting all that work into, trying to turn it into a bed-and-breakfast.”

  I knew the house he meant. It was the talk of the town, what color they would paint it and whether they would recondition the old wooden windows or go for brand-new thermopanes—more practical but less attractive and a third the cost.

  I was betting on the former; from what I’d seen—the Heddlepenny House had eight chimneys, and all of them were being repointed, relined, and in one case rebuilt from the cellar up—the women from Bangor were backed by the Sultan of Brunei.

  But what interested me now was what else Bobby Taylor could see, high on his ladder against the Heddlepenny House. Nearby, the white clapboard clock tower of the Congregational Church stood tall over all the other buildings in town; so tall, in fact, that you had to crane your neck up just to see it.

  Unless, of course, you happened to be perched on a ladder, in which case you could tell the time merely by turning your head, and if you didn’t want t
o do that you could simply listen, because the clock rang the hour and once on the half and the quarter every day from six in the morning until ten at night.

  “Bobby Taylor,” I said slowly, “saw you.”

  “Yep. He waved to me,” George agreed. And then he got it. “He saw me, and he knows when he saw me.”

  Then he frowned. “But the idea isn’t to clear me. Nobody’s saying I did it. Except,” he added, “you, for a little while. I’m still not quite sure how I feel about that, Mrs. Tiptree, having you think I might be such a sneaking kind of a person.”

  It was typical of George that he minded less being suspected of bloody murder than he minded being thought a sneak.

  “You said yourself you would confess if it got Ellie out of trouble. I was just thinking along those same lines, trying to be helpful.”

  “Yeah. I’d hate to be around when you weren’t trying to be helpful. So now what?”

  “Now I talk to Bobby Taylor, make sure he says what we think he’s going to say: that you were up on a ladder in his plain sight during the time when Threnody Mcllwaine was having a little unscheduled ventilation work done on his head.”

  He nodded enthusiastically. “And after that, we tell Ellie that I was, and she stops trying to confess to something she didn’t do. And then she comes home, and we get the whole wedding thing over with.”

  Then he sighed. “I swear, Mrs. Tiptree, I don’t care if we have to live in a tent in the backyard, if only we can get all this murder business done and finished.”

  “It might not be as simple as all that,” I cautioned.

  In fact, it definitely wouldn’t. George opened his mouth to say that once Ellie withdrew her confession, and especially once she had explained the reason she had confessed—her desire to protect George—surely any right-thinking, open-minded, halfway decent prosecuting attorney worth even a modicum of his salt would believe her, and release her immediately.

  Which was precisely what was not going to happen, on account of all the blood evidence and other stuff that Clarissa Dow was so excited about, and I had no idea how to get around that.

  At this point, Ellie could recant her confession until the cows came home, but it wouldn’t do her a bit of good.

  What I needed was for her to recant and for me to find who really killed Mcllwaine, and then to present that person to Clarissa Dow in a way she would believe.

  Just at the moment that didn’t feel very likely, but Bobby Taylor was a start.

  “What,” George asked, seeing my face and deciding not to express any optimism after all, “are you going to do, now?”

  “Well, right now I’m going over to Heddlepenny House, get Bobby down off of his ladder, and make him confirm what you just said. Also, I’m going to ask him what else he saw, if anything.”

  Such as, for instance, whether Nina Mcllwaine was doing something other than driving swiftly and harmlessly away; such as her going into the house and killing her husband.

  “You know what should’ve happened,” George said, looking grim. “Ellie should’ve said that old witch Hedda did it. That’d get Hedda out of everybody’s hair.”

  He hefted his toolbox meaning to go on, but then came the sudden din from out in the street: the roar of an engine, a shriek of brakes, the sound of a car speeding off down the street very fast, and the clatter of bottles and cans.

  Lots of bottles and cans.

  31

  “Did you see it? Did you see who it was?”

  George shook his head, bent over the prostrate figure of Can Man sprawled a few feet from the gravel pile. I had already called the ambulance, and the police. A crowd was beginning to gather, including some of the reporters who were still hanging around—many of them, now that Ellie was gone and Mcllwaine’s body transported off the island, had begun packing up and leaving like vultures headed for the next carrion-feast—but when they discovered it was only Can Man, the reporters lost interest.

  “Is he dead?” Sadie Peltier demanded. “Is there blood?” Her bright eyes peered avidly as she shoved herself forward between the legs of the grown-ups.

  “Is there,” she asked insistently, “any blood and guts?”

  Somebody shushed her, and when she protested, seized her by the raggedy fur on her jacket collar. “You,” somebody brave growled at her threateningly, “pipe down.”

  The child subsided, rebellious but silent for once. Behind her tangle of dark curls, her eyes were full of vengeful mischief that she clearly intended to accomplish as soon as possible, and I felt sorry for whoever had disciplined her.

  “Sticks and stones,” Can Man said, struggling up. “I can do it. I can do it myself.” He looked around dazedly.

  “Hey, buddy,” George soothed him. “Take it easy.”

  Can Man tried standing, then sat down defeatedly again. “My cans,” he mourned, seeing them rolling everywhere.

  There was a moment of silence. Then people looked at each other and began collecting cans, putting them into Can Man’s bag.

  “Thank you,” Can Man said politely, beginning to get his wits about him again. But fresh alarm crept into his eyes as the ambulance arrived, with Bob Arnold following in the squad car.

  “Someone knocked Can Man off the road,” George said as the ambulance fellows got out their first aid kit. Can Man’s hands were scraped, and the knees torn out of his pants, but he seemed otherwise unhurt and was refusing to get into the ambulance.

  “I don’t think he was hit,” George added. “I think somebody just gave him a scare. Took a run at him, made him jump.”

  “Anybody see it?” Arnold asked.

  The people gathered around the scene shook their heads. It was nearly dinnertime, and the kitchens in the old houses were at the back, away from the street. Somebody propped Can Man’s bag of cans up beside him.

  Arnold crouched beside Can Man. “Hey, Whitfield”—that was Can Man’s real name, Whitfield DeSautell—“who did this to you?”

  Just then Hedda White arrived home from some errand, with Janet Fox sitting beside her in the passenger seat of the Whites’ red Buick. Hedda stalked straight in the back door, her head in another piece of outlandish headgear—today it was a green paisley turban—and held disdainfully high, with Janet right behind her. Meanwhile, not seeing them, Alvin White came out the front door and across the street, to find out what was the matter.

  “Whitfield, who knocked you down?” Arnold asked again. “Can you tell me?”

  Can Man’s eyes widened in terror. “No,” he moaned, “oh, no. Cat’s got my tongue.”

  He gazed in frightened appeal at Alvin, who had always liked Can Man and made a point of saving returnables for him, even though Hedda said cans and bottles were dirty, that they attracted vermin, and that Can Man—she had threatened him directly with this several times—ought to be locked away in an institution.

  Can Man’s mouth worked as he swiped tears with his wrists.

  “What is it, Whitfield?” Arnold put a hand on his shoulder.

  Can Man stared at Alvin. In the Whites’ upstairs hall window, Hedda stood glaring furiously down at the scene, looking as if she could have fired the pearl-handled revolver quite happily if she’d had one, and if she were able to.

  I saw her frown at my gravel pile. Probably she would write a letter to the editor of the Quoddy Tides about it, complaining about the unsightliness and squalor, dictating her missive while Janet laboriously penned the thing. Hedda, when she wasn’t causing other unneeded trouble, was a great one for letters to the editor.

  Can Man’s gaze turned from Alvin, to Hedda up in the window, and away. His fists clenched the rolls of gauze the medical technicians had given him to staunch the bleeding. I noticed uneasily that Sadie wasn’t around anymore, which for Sadie was unusual, since even when she was not provoking a crisis herself she liked to be at the center of one. I turned back to Can Man just as a word popped from his lips.

  “Buh … buh … blue!” he said.

  32
/>   “Nina Mcllwaine’s Lincoln Continental is blue,” I said.

  Wade looked skeptically at me. The storm had not damaged his house—he’d had his hatches battened—but it had wreaked havoc on his neighbors, many of whom were also his relatives.

  “So,” he noted, “is the sky, sometimes.”

  He had spent half the day nailing shingles back onto the roof of his aunt Priscilla’s cottage, and the other half chainsawing a cedar tree that had blown onto the marine supply annex run by his cousin, Lester. Now he was shaved, showered, and dressed in clean Levis and a blue plaid work shirt, looking so strong and appealing, I wanted to drape myself on him as if I were ivy and he were a trellis. But I thought this would delay dinner pretty severely, so I made a mental note to do it later.

  “And everybody knows that car,” he said. “Wouldn’t somebody have seen it, if it ran Can Man down? Known it was Nina?”

  He sat at the kitchen table where he was carving a scrap of cedar into a rose the size of a baby’s fist. When he had finished a dozen of them, he would drop one into each of the small muslin bags filled with lavender blossoms that Ellie and I had grown in my back garden the previous summer.

  “No one,” I pointed out, “saw any car. It happened so fast. Nina was in town, though. At the Bottle Shop. Apparently all her newly arrived relatives like American whiskey.”

  Word around town had it that since the murder, Nina’s relatives had stormed the little airfield west of town as if they were taking a beachhead, flying in on private planes they had chartered and establishing themselves in Mcllwaine’s mansion. Not that I begrudged her, in her grief, the comfort of her relatives’ presence, but the word “opportunistic” had crossed my mind, especially since I had decided she was probably the murderer.

  “And there weren’t any paint chips,” I went on, “or tire marks to trace to anything. Apparently Can Man was scared badly, but not actually hit.”