by Mary Daheim
Renie was forced to come to a halt. In agitation, she ran a hand through her short, homely hairdo. Then she grinned at Judith. “You’re right—I’m acting like a brat. But so are you. If you won’t stop being an idiot about competing with Joe, at least go easy on this detective stuff.” Renie paused again, and her brown eyes widened, then narrowed. “Okay, I get it. For you, chasing killers is a vacation. Everybody has to have a hobby. But don’t be so damned obvious. Let’s keep a low profile. Face it, coz, Penreddy’s sharp. He may already be on the right track.”
Thoughtfully, Judith nodded. “You’re right. It doesn’t pay to advertise. Not in this kind of situation.” She gave Renie a belated smile of gratitude. “I’m still an idiot. But you’re good enough to forgive me for it.”
Renie shrugged. “Always have. Fifty years of forgiveness.” She shot Judith a sidelong glance. “It works both ways. Big deal.”
Slowly, the cousins walked back to the Chevy, which was parked next to the wood-frame city hall building that housed the police station. Renie was backing out when Judith spoke again:
“You missed hearing the part about where Agnes was killed.”
Renie didn’t respond at once. She was concentrating on entering traffic. “Huh? Where, did you say?”
“You got it—where.” Judith felt faintly smug. “The police found her purse and a bottle of champagne and Rover’s doggie bag at the top of the lift.”
Renie’s head swiveled. “You mean Agnes was murdered on Liaison Ledge?”
Judith gave a shrug. “Think about it. Agnes is walking to the lift. She gets on. The killer comes up behind her and—bam! Hits her on the back of the head. It’s getting dark. The chairs are spaced at a fairly long interval. Wayne Stafford told us he didn’t think anyone was right behind Agnes on the lift. So the killer had time to get away. And, of course, Agnes dropped her belongings. It also explains why she was wearing Dagmar’s things. As we thought, she had her hands full.”
“Gosh.” Renie’s face was sad. “Poor Agnes. She would never have gotten killed if she hadn’t been wearing that blasted turban.”
Judith didn’t respond immediately. “No…I suppose not. The killer came up behind her. He thought she was Dagmar.”
Renie had literally reached the fork in the road. “The village or Clarges Court? Do we disport ourselves or shop?”
Judith’s black eyes sparkled as she turned to Renie. “We do neither. Not just now.”
Resignedly, Renie headed for the road that led up Fiddler Mountain. “Okay,” she said on a sigh.
Judith didn’t say a word. The cousins understood each other very well. They were headed for Clarges Court, but not to their own condo. A sympathy call was required, as much by etiquette as by curiosity.
Five minutes later, Judith was pressing the bell for Karl and Tessa Kreager’s unit. They half-expected a uniformed maid to greet them, but Karl came to the door. He looked very cool and comfortable in his white open-neck shirt and custom-tailored blue jeans. He also looked rather surprised.
Judith explained that she and Renie had come to offer condolences. They had heard that Dagmar was very upset. They had also understood that Tessa was overwhelmed with unexpected duties. Was there anything they could do to help? After all, Judith and Renie were their neighbors.
If Karl Kreager believed any or none of Judith’s long-winded introductory remarks, he gave no sign. Instead he graciously ushered the cousins into the living room. While the condo’s layout was identical to the one that Judith and Renie were occupying, the furnishings and decor were quite different. Judging from the period details, the original art, and the color scheme in varying shades of white, the Kreagers had put their personal stamp on the Clarges Court unit.
“Do sit,” Karl Kreager urged, indicating a sofa covered with delicate, pale pastel floral upholstery. “May I offer you a drink? Rum, perhaps?”
Renie started to decline, but Judith accepted for both of them. Karl Kreager, she reasoned, couldn’t throw them out on their ear if they were drinking his liquor.
After Karl had left the room, Renie made a face. “Rum on top of French onion soup? Gack! I’ll be sick as a dog!”
Judith frowned. “Speaking of which, where’s Rover? And Tessa? Maybe Freddy is with Dagmar, in the next-door unit. That’s where he came from when I saw him in the courtyard.”
Renie, of course, couldn’t answer Judith’s questions. The cousins spent a few moments studying the ivory-colored Louis Quatorze mantel, the Tlingit Indian masks, a Boudin oil painting, and the spotless eggshell carpet.
“Two minutes in our house, and this thing would look like it was one of the major food groups,” Renie murmured, moving her left foot over the carpet’s plush pile. “Can you imagine anybody keeping a place like this clean? Tessa must hire help.”
Judith agreed. “I see now why they had to put Rover in the condo next door. He’d have ruined this place.” She shuddered, recalling the damage the dog had done to Hillside Manor.
Karl Kreager returned with three rum punches on a tray. They were colorfully decorated with orange and pineapple slices, as well as the inevitable maraschino cherry. Judith congratulated Karl on his bartending skills.
“It’s my one talent in the domesticity department,” he said in a genial voice as he seated himself on a damask-covered fauteuil chair. “To your health.” He raised his glass in a toast.
The words gave Judith an opening. “Speaking of health, how is Dagmar this afternoon?”
Karl’s tanned forehead creased. “She’s still feeling unwell. I hope she starts to recover by tomorrow. Dagmar has deadlines to meet, you see.”
Renie set her drink down on a coaster which had already been provided to preserve the bleached pinewood coffee table. Three copies of Dagmar’s book were on display next to a nineteenth-century Chinese cachepot. “For the column?” Renie inquired.
Karl nodded, his brow still furrowed. “Yes, she does them two days in advance, though of course we always have to allow for late-breaking news. Dagmar finished Wednesday’s piece yesterday afternoon. But the newspapers should have the Friday copy sometime tomorrow.”
Judith made a sympathetic noise. “It’ll be hard for her, under the circumstances. She’s emotionally distraught, she’s lost her secretary, she’s three thousand miles from home. By the way, how does she get her information when she’s on the road?”
The answer didn’t come right away. Karl Kreager was staring off into space, somewhere in the direction of an Emily Carr forest scene. His recovery, however, was smooth, typical of a successful, poised man of affairs:
“Isn’t it remarkable how Carr caught the quintessence of British Columbia’s raw, natural landscape? In a way, Dagmar is an artist, too. She paints word pictures of celebrities, and captures their core in a few brief lines of copy.” He shifted his weight in the exquisite chair. A less graceful man his size might have looked awkward. But Karl Kreager seemed as at home with the eighteenth century as he did with the twentieth. “Dagmar’s information is generally culled from a wide variety of sources who phone in on her voice mail. She can access it from anywhere. That’s not the problem. It’s the writing of it that only she can do, in her customary witty style.”
Judith considered the often scandalous messages that must await Dagmar on a daily basis. The vast range of sources probably explained the long-distance phone calls from Hillside Manor. Judith was scarcely appeased, but at least she understood. Certainly she was justified in billing Dagmar for the toll charges. They must be a tax write-off for the columnist. “These sources must be reliable,” Judith remarked. “That is, Dagmar must trust her informants. Otherwise, there would have to be a great deal of verification.”
“Oh, definitely,” Karl agreed. “And occasionally there is an item or a person lacking in credibility. She’s always most cautious. Her readers probably wouldn’t agree, but as a publisher, I assure you that she’s invariably on solid ground.”
Renie had picked up a copy of Chatty Chats
worth Digs the Dirt and was flipping through the pages. “Dagmar seems to cover all the bases. Movie stars, singers, models, athletes, politicians, other writers, even business types. I was trying to figure out if the book is a rehash of her columns or new material.”
“Both,” Karl replied, again looking worried. “In Dirt, she uses items from her columns as a springboard, then goes on to update them, or to dig much deeper. That’s my primary concern. After all, I’m not responsible for the newspaper columns per se. But the second manuscript is due at the end of September. When we picked her up in Port Royal, she assured me it would be ready, even though she was only halfway finished. Now she says we have to postpone the deadline by at least a month, maybe two. That’s not possible, not if Thor is to keep to its production schedule.”
“Can’t she hire another secretary?” Judith asked, then winced a little, finding the question heartless.
A faint smile played on Karl’s lips. “She’ll have to, of course. But she depended so much on Agnes. They’d been together forever.”
Renie exhibited surprise. “Really? Dagmar strikes me as the sort who hires and fires every six months. From Agnes’s point of view, I would have thought that working for Dagmar would be difficult.”
“I’m sure it was,” Karl allowed. “But when my brother Kurt hired Dagmar fifteen years ago to do a cooking column for his paper in the Twin Cities, she already had Agnes in tow. That’s why Dagmar is so bereft. She’s never had a different secretary.”
Judith’s eyes were wide. “Dagmar started with a cooking column? How odd!”
Karl flicked at a piece of lint on his jeans. “Not really. It wasn’t your ordinary cooking column. Dagmar concentrated on recipes from good restaurants—especially the ones that were supposed to be industrial secrets. It wasn’t much of a stretch for her to insert gossip about chefs and mâitre d’s and, eventually, customers. Kurt realized that what had started out as a mere filler had become one of the best-read features in the paper. After a while, he asked her to expand and cover the entire Midwest. He ran the columns in all seven of the Kreager dailies. Then, about eight years ago, Dagmar wanted to broaden her horizons, to do an all-purpose gossip column and become nationally syndicated.” Karl’s expression was wry. “She got her way, and thus was journalistic history made.”
“Fascinating,” Renie declared, and sounded as if she meant it. “Your brother—Kurt—he died a year or two ago, right?”
Karl bowed his head, a very formal gesture. “He did. A heart attack. Untimely, but not unexpected. Kurt did nothing in moderation. Often, his attitude was good for business. But not for his health. Excess has taken many a man too soon.” The statement was made with a certain amount of satisfaction.
In her mind, Judith was trying to sort out the Kreager publishing empire. It seemed that Kurt had run the newspapers, while Karl had taken over at the book-publishing helm. There were, however, the magazines and the TV and radio stations for which they had not yet accounted. Boldly, Judith asked who was in charge.
“Kirk,” he replied. “He’s the youngest of us, the one who shuns publicity but carries on the tradition of America First.” Karl’s expression was dour. “Oh, neither Kurt nor I courted the public eye—that was our father’s style. He firmly believed that if you wanted to sell news, you had also to make it.”
Vaguely, from childhood and adolescence, Judith recalled Knute Kreager, a flamboyant man who had made his own headlines by marrying a series of showgirls, grinding the competition under his heel, and, reportedly, holding hands with The Mob. The senior Kreager might have come from Minnesota, but his behavior was atypical. He was material by nature, outrageous by design. The two sides of his character conflicted with standards in the heartland, yet they had worked. Knute Kreager was known for waving the American flag, for beating the drums of anti-Communism, for supporting any national cause whether his country was right or wrong. He had ridden the tide of patriotism and made it pay. Knute Kreager had been a big success, and had thus earned acceptance by his fellow Midwesterners.
“Knute Kreager,” Judith echoed. “He was something of a legend.”
“Oh, indeed he was.” Karl’s smile was cynical. “Part of his legend lives today. My brothers and I all had different mothers. A blonde, a brunette, and a redhead. My mother was the blonde.”
The statement didn’t court comment, which was a good thing, because the cousins didn’t seem to have one. Judith was cudgeling her brain, trying to think of a tactful way to ask Karl about the threatening letters, when Tessa burst into the room.
“She’s impossible!” Tessa announced, then saw Judith and Renie. “Oh! What are you two doing here?”
Karl saved his guests the arduous task of explaining. “Mrs. Flynn and Mrs. Jones came over to ask about Dagmar and to see if they could help in any way. Would you like to have them relieve you of your nursing duties for an hour or so? We could go for a swim.”
The proposal caught Tessa by surprise. It was obvious from her initial reaction that she would have preferred tossing Judith and Renie out into the courtyard. But Karl spoke so smoothly and coaxingly that Tessa was forced into a corner.
“Well…why not? I’m getting sick of trying to feed chicken broth to Dagmar.”
Judith finished her drink, then got to her feet. “We’d be glad to spell you for a while,” she said, trying to tone down the eager note in her voice. “Just point the way.”
Tessa did more than that, leading the cousins downstairs, into the parking garage, and over to the door to the neighboring condo.
“She’s upstairs, in the big bedroom,” Tessa said as Rover ran to greet the newcomers. “Freddy was here for a few minutes, but he’s worthless. See if you can get Dagmar to eat a soft-boiled egg.”
The door closed firmly behind the cousins. Panting excitedly, Rover adhered himself to Judith as she went up the stairs. The layout was again familiar, yet looked quite different: Whoever had decorated the unit next to the Kreagers had been partial to Japanese design.
The furnishings were spare and tasteful; the walls appeared to be decorated with rice paper; the smaller windows were shielded by shoji screens; the floors were covered with tatami mats. Rover had chewed up several of them.
Renie had started up the stairs, but Judith hissed at her to wait. “Come here,” she whispered, going into the downstairs living room. “This is where Agnes was staying.”
“So?” Renie scowled. “We shouldn’t snoop. Don’t you have any respect for the dead?”
“I do,” Judith declared. “I think they should be vindicated.” She pointed to a big electric typewriter. “Agnes?”
“Maybe.” Renie seemed indifferent.
“Why not a laptop?” Judith strolled from room to room, occasionally giving an ineffectual kick to free herself of Rover’s adhesivelike presence. She wondered if the dog could pick up her cat’s scent, which must have clung to her clothes.
Renie hung back, impatiently tapping her nails on the rice-paper-covered walls. In her cursory reconnaissance, Judith found the typewriter, a stack of fresh paper, a notebook, and the metal strongbox Phyliss Rackley had mentioned. A quick flip through the notebook showed that a fine hand had written down very small jottings which Judith couldn’t read without her glasses. The preponderance of numbers and dates looked more like bookkeeping than juicy gossip items. Judith assumed that the precise penmanship belonged to Agnes Shay.
The rest of the downstairs unit was neat as a pin, except for Rover’s various rips and rumples. Too neat, Judith thought, returning to the staircase and Renie’s sour expression.
“Where are the notes? The copy? The…whatever? This doesn’t look like the boiler room for a syndicated columnist.”
“They’re on vacation.” Renie resumed climbing the stairs. “Why do you get hung up on trivia? Sometimes you drive me nuts.”
“There’s no such thing as trivia in a murder case,” Judith replied, faintly irritated. “Everything means something. Why, for example, is all the w
ork stuff in Agnes’s quarters?”
“Maybe Dagmar didn’t want to sully her unit with drudgery,” Renie replied indifferently as she rapped on the door to the upstairs unit. There was no answer. She rapped again, then gave the door a hefty kick.
Dagmar’s voice was barely audible. Renie stomped into the hallway; Judith tiptoed, with Rover scampering at her heels. Renie headed down the corridor which, she assumed, led to the big bedroom. Sure enough, Dagmar was lying on a futon, propped up by pillows. She wore an apricot peignoir, its lace-edged collar done up to her chin. A faint breeze stirred in the sparsely, if tastefully, furnished room, indicating that although the shoji screens were closed, the windows were partially open. Still, the sun was shut out, and the pervading mood was one of gloom.
“We came to sit with you for a while,” Judith said by way of greeting, then glanced around the room. A lacquered bench in front of a mirrored dressing table provided the only seat. There wasn’t room for two.
“I’ll get a chair,” Renie mumbled.
“How kind of you to come,” Dagmar said in a lifeless voice. She twisted her beringed fingers on the pale blue down comforter. Rover jumped onto the futon and gazed at his mistress with sad, adoring eyes. Dagmar gazed back. The two seemed to be sharing some deep communion of the soul. “I can’t forgive myself,” Dagmar murmured, now sounding utterly miserable. “Agnes never harmed a soul. She was selfless, devoted, and without guile.” Dagmar was still staring at Rover. Judith wondered if she was mentally comparing her late secretary with the dog. The litany of virtues could have applied to either or both. Except, of course, that Rover was destructive.
“Are you absolutely certain you don’t know who sent those threatening letters?” Judith asked, trying to steer Dagmar off her course of guilt.
Dagmar sighed and made a jittery, impatient gesture. “Of course I don’t. The local police took them away. Futile, I suspect. How do you trace a computer?”