by John Farrow
“Do you know who did?”
“What do you mean? Who? Who what?”
Émile’s hoping that this ploy works, knowing that it could easily backfire. Telling these two that Alfred Orrock was murdered will not merely ripple across the island and have an effect—in this community, it will be a tsunami. Shake people up. More talk might surface that way. The murderer will be surprised by what is common knowledge, and might show a hand unwittingly. Or not. Risk forms a big part of the strategy.
“Alfred Orrock was suffocated to death. People are going to gossip, I should warn you, about whether or not his nurse did it.”
“I was never his nurse.”
“Housemaid, then.”
“I looked after him, but I was never his nurse. I stood my ground on that.”
“His housemaid. You were there, though. That’s the thing. The night he died.”
“When I left him he was alive!”
“That may be true. I’m betting that you have no witnesses. Am I right?”
She starts to utter the Reverend Lescavage’s name but stops herself. That’s not going to do her any good.
“He was alive when I left him.”
“Then the minister showed up and he was killed, too. A busy night for somebody.”
“Wasn’t me!” She’s vehement about it, he’ll give her that.
“Of course not,” Pete Briscoe says.
Cinq-Mars grants them that. “He did tick you off, though, didn’t he? Feeling you up and being mean. You can see why people might talk. What they might say. They’ll think you despised the man. Not an overstatement, is it? People might say you’d had enough. A moment of rage, it wouldn’t take long, and suddenly he’s not breathing anymore. All you have to do is adjust the pillow and call up Lescavage to come on over, then if he puts up a fuss about the dead guy, off him, too. Or have your boyfriend do it.”
“Hey! You shut up now!”
“Why? I’m only pointing out what people will imagine, what they’ll say. The inevitable, don’t you think?”
Funny, Cinq-Mars notices, that the man is hot to defend himself when he is rather tepid about protecting his girlfriend when she’s accused.
“What were you burying up on the ridge the day I saw you, Mr. Briscoe?”
“My dog.”
“Why dig eight different holes?”
“What?”
“Where’s your dog now since she’s not there? What have you done with her remains?”
“Petey?” Ora asks, perturbed by the expression on her boyfriend’s face.
“I moved her. I dug her up again. Moved her.”
“Pete?”
“Never mind, Ora!” he barks. “A personal-type thing.”
“Eight holes?”
“I had trouble finding her again is all.”
“That’s not what it looked like to me.”
They’re still outside in Briscoe’s yard. Cinq-Mars wouldn’t mind going inside, talking within that confined space, which would be cooler, undoubtedly. Any moment for that shift has passed. He won’t be invited indoors now.
“What did it look like to you?” Briscoe asks him, and then to the surprise of both men, Ora asks exactly the same question, word for word. The look on her face suggests that she’s defending the honor of her man.
“I saw that digging site as an experiment,” Émile says, “a trial run, if you will. To discover where to dig your next grave.”
“What are you talking about?” Ora interjects. “Petey? Petey, what’s he talking about?”
“Bullshit,” Petey explains. “He’s talking bullshit, Ora.”
“I figured. Smart-ass detective, my royal ass.”
Perhaps by the end of the day, his island reputation may yet be mud.
“You’ll be going now,” Briscoe says.
Cinq-Mars decides that he might as well. He drives comfortably to North Head. Along the way he sees Briscoe’s pickup make an appearance, hanging back. Two can play at that game, and in North Head Cinq-Mars pulls over and Briscoe, with Ora along as a passenger, goes on by. He watches Briscoe unload at the docks with Ora’s help, then they kiss, then Ora heads off on foot alone. Briscoe greets his crew. Émile reminds himself to talk to that crew one day soon. They launch a dinghy to go fetch the fish boat, and while they do that, Cinq-Mars starts up again, and intercepts Ora down the road. He slows, and drives beside her while she walks.
“Need a lift?”
“I’m not gong far.”
“Hop in anyway. Escape the heat.”
She thinks about it and mops her forehead, then climbs in.
“Which way?” Cinq-Mars asks.
“Straight on except for the curves.”
They don’t have much to say to each other. Émile is not interested in developing a relationship that has to be advanced by his constant probing. His questions pertain only to the island, to what growing up here was like, to how anybody can ever eat dulse, let alone every day.
“It’s healthy! Loads of iron.”
“Maybe that’s why it tastes like iron ore.”
“Dulse chips beat potato chips hands down. Eat too many potato chips, they’ll kill you. Eat too much dulse and you’re Superman. Feel like him anyway.”
Turning down the sloped driveway to her home, which sits in a bit of a gulley, they are met in the yard by a woman he recognizes. She had the traffic incident with Professor DeWitt, in which she ended up in a ditch, later the hospital. Ora’s mom is coming across to see him. As he’s rolling down his window, Ora gives her an earful about who he is.
These women might be helpful someday. They might never trust him, but he feels that his cause will not be advanced if they fear him. The woman’s first words are, “Detective Big Shot.”
“I’m just trying to help out, ma’am.”
“Ma’am. Ma’am! Nobody’s called anybody ma’am around here since sharks wore bikinis.”
He doesn’t know for sure, but assumes that that means never.
“So the guy who nearly ran me down went over the cliff. You better not try to pin that one on me.”
“Mrs. Matheson, is it? Same as your daughter’s last name?”
“She’s not somebody’s doorstep drop, no.”
“You say,” Ora interjects.
“All that wailing was for you, my dear, not some figment of my imagination.”
She’s got her there.
“What are you driving Ora around for? What’s she done?”
“Aw, Mom.”
“Just saving her some walk time, Mrs. Matheson. On my way home anyway.”
“Home? Home! You mean you live here now?”
He smiles. “Temporarily. I used the wrong word. I was on the way to the rental cottage where I am temporarily residing.”
The woman seems satisfied that she’s won the day, and Cinq-Mars backs up, careful to avoid the big DULSE FOR SALE sign, underscored by the word SPECIALS! He carries on home. He’s happy to arrive, to put his feet up and have a drink. He tells Sandra so. “Good to be back in the rental cottage where I am temporarily residing.”
What? Some bee is in his bonnet about the case, she assumes.
TWENTY-TWO
Following their customary evening stroll, Émile and Sandra Cinq-Mars pile into the Cherokee and drive to the Orrock mansion. Maddy’s in the front garden snipping flowers for the funeral that’s two days off, and also to brighten the residence. Delighted to invite the couple inside, she’s demure through a tour of the house as Sandra gapes, particularly impressed by the views, while Émile strikes a removed and solemn countenance. Like Maddy, he’s of two minds with respect to the place. For him, the home is also a crime scene.
Émile inquires about her relationship with the late Reverend Lescavage and what she knows of how he got on with her dad. Both accounts are skimpy, bereft of substance, until she opines that the minister was probably her dad’s only male friend over the last twenty years.
“Friend.”
“I’m not saying he was a
good one. Dad needled him and Simon took it as a cross to bear in life. They were like that since day one. But they tolerated each other’s company. They could get philosophical without the reverend feeling he had to stick to the company line, if you know what I mean. As for my dad, ladies came and went in his life, but male pals were rare. Men either worked for him or were in competition with him or they plain didn’t like him. I thought he had no friends except for Simon, until this week.”
“What changed this week?” Émile asks.
“The skipper who brought me over here? Sticky—that’s the name he goes by—Sticky McCarran, he and my dad were close, in a way. Friends? Maybe not. An employer/hired-hand relationship, but he actually thought my dad was an okay guy. Just misunderstood.” She did a pantomime of rolling her eyes while saying this, as if even now the idea is too ludicrous to be entertained. “Anyway, they got along. My dad bullied the minister. He probably controlled Sticky, but I doubt if he’s a man who can be bullied.”
“I’d like to speak to him.”
“Sticky? I can give you his number. He lives in Blacks. He tells me he’s usually fishing. Best to get him at night, I think.”
Later the women convene to discuss the funeral arrangements which are not to be in Reverend Lescavage’s church anymore. The elders there haven’t been able to scrounge up a replacement, temporary or otherwise, and worshipers plan to fan out to various second choices among the island’s multiple denominations. A difficulty lies in divining how many people might show up for the funeral. Refreshments afterward seem appropriate. Potentially, the island’s entire population will be interested, yet some people might think a boycott an appropriate gesture. Hard to gauge, as Maddy isn’t in touch with the locals. “I used to have friends here. No more. Like me, they had the good sense to leave.”
“You say that, and yet to me, this island is paradise,” Sandra mentions.
“Yeah, it’s a great place to visit. I own it now. I ought to know.”
The statement, Sandra knows, is far more bitter than boastful.
As the women chat, Émile sits in Alfred Orrock’s bedroom and listens to the walls speak. If only they were more articulate and didn’t mumble so. He thinks what the room’s few visitors before him have already asked themselves: Why would any man require so much space to sleep in? Empty space, too. If he himself ever slept in such a room, he’d add a writing desk, a comfortable chair or two, a library. Heck, as a rich man, he’d put in a pool table, then a bowling lane. To sleep in this vast surround confounds him, although he supposes that it’s somewhat like sleeping under the stars, without the requisite mosquitoes or any threat of rain. If he lived in such a room, Cinq-Mars decides, he’d invite a few cows in to create an atmosphere around the campfire, then install a campfire.
While his initial impressions are idle, Émile does try to confront the psyche of this man. So much space, just to dream in. He might have been claustrophobic. He lived on a tightly knit island where he was disdained, yet had a sky and a sea to gaze out upon, and obviously he enjoyed the view, confirmed by the plethora of large windows. Gazing out over the dark bay, Orrock would have seen bountiful stars on a clear night. And the airliners out of New York bound for Europe which typically trace a flight path straight up the Bay of Fundy.
Orrock bullied the Reverend Lescavage, but the latter nurtured an interest in the universe and its origins—might Alfred Orrock have shared that passion, or been jealous that such a pursuit found favor in another man? A man he bullied and dismissed? Yet he needed the more timid man in his life, this foil, his only friend. To Orrock, all men must have appeared to him as pipsqueaks, their interests ridiculed, with the possible exception of members of the Irving family, who own virtually the whole province. Most people, Émile concludes, struck Orrock as trivial. They slept in small bedrooms. Hence his lack of companions. The parish minister in his humble abode had impressed him in some other way, as did the fisherman he permitted himself to befriend for no other reason, perhaps, than he lived off the island. The fisherman brought him out upon the vast blue sea. The minister—from what Maddy said, they were old and familiar disputants on philosophical matters—took him for a ride upon the vast array of the unknown.
Émile speculates on whether the restricted geography of the island did not contrast sharply with the man’s yen for distance, for the infinite, that in being stretched between the two realms he found no comfort, no happiness in life.
Cinq-Mars entertains a notion that perhaps Orrock bullied the minister not only because he could, but that he also hated his need for another’s company, for discourse, for a friend. Lescavage may have permitted the dynamic because he recognized Orrock’s motivation. If so, then the deceased minister was indeed someone willing to live his faith, or his non-faith, in that that he was willing to be punished in order to lend his abuser a measure of kindness.
Still, Cinq-Mars can’t figure out who killed Orrock, or summon a reason why. Did Lescavage do it? Why not allow a dying man to die naturally? Why help him along?
The question is no sooner asked than a curious and compelling answer arises, a new possibility. That the bullied man had had enough and killed his oppressor may be a likelihood. Certainly it’s feasible, although such a shift in a long-standing dynamic is rare in the world. Or Lescavage could have killed Orrock because he was bullied into doing so. That fit their customary dynamic. Given Orrock’s pleasure in power, his control over his island world, his penchant for vast spaces, the sea, the sky, he might have wanted out from his circumstances, from the tedious, painful, prolonged business of dying. He may have wanted to be off to the infinite unknown.
He who controlled his world may have chosen to control his own death.
Suffocation killed him. Not an easy thing to do, mentally, and difficult enough morally, but simple to accomplish physically. The killer wouldn’t need to even look at the victim. All he had to do was place a pillow over the man’s face and lie on it.
Cinq-Mars holds the pillow in his hand, the probable murder weapon. Fluffy. Down-filled. The housekeeper could have done it. The minister had opportunity. In theory, so did the daughter. Orrock was sick enough, frail enough, that any stranger seeking shelter from a storm, or anyone who wanted to move in the dark while the storm rendered him or her invisible, could have done it. Which made everyone on the island a suspect. And whether the minister did it or not, or if he merely discovered that the man was dead, the question remains: what happened to the Reverend Lescavage?
Standing in the vacuous emptiness of the patriarch’s room, Cinq-Mars reflects that the answer lies neither in how nor even by whom, but in why. Find out why someone wanted a good man dead, he believes, and the case is solved.
He has more people to talk to. More knowledge to gain.
* * *
Émile Cinq-Mars is up at the crack. A habitual early riser, Sandra stays under the covers. Outside, woodland birds and seabirds make their presence evident, yet they seem less than raucous, perhaps in deference to the idyllic beginning to the day. Soft light casts a warm radiance upon the shoreline cliffs, the rocky beach, and the swaying grasses close by the cottage.
Coffee and a bite of toast and he’s out the door.
Before retiring the previous night, Émile put in an overdue call to Sticky McCarran. What he learned interests him, although how the mystifying tidbit he gleaned fits into the overall jigsaw puzzle of this case is beyond him. Sticky was out on the water the night of the murders, ferrying Maddy Orrock across to the island. Cinq-Mars wanted to know if he had seen or heard anything unusual while crossing the bay. He didn’t want to lead him in any one direction, and purposefully chose not to mention that he was interested in radio communications, exchanges among boats that night, or ship-to-shore messages or vice versa, or anything that came across as odd or inexplicable over the airwaves. He planned to ask the Coast Guard the same question, and listen to any recordings that might have been made, if they let him, but someone familiar with the usual chatter on that r
adio frequency and familiar as well with the principals at sea might be a superior resource.
On that account, he was correct.
“A fish boat was anchored below Orrock’s house,” Sticky brought up.
“Was that unusual?”
“Any day or night, it’s a bit weird. It’s not a smart place to anchor off. The current is strong, harbor traffic is frequent, you might not be seen, and the waves can be lumpy even on a calm day, not to mention the obvious.”
“Please,” Cinq-Mars said, as he didn’t know, “mention the obvious.”
“That shore’s a shipwreck waiting to crush you.”
“Weird, then,” Émile summed up over the phone, the receiver cocked between his ear and shoulder while he scribbled notes, “but not totally out of the question. Is that what you’re saying?”
“Nope. Not saying that.”
“Okay, what are you saying?”
“In a storm, it’s beyond ridiculous to anchor there. Hell, you’re only a short hop from the harbor. If you don’t want to risk going in, and I admit, it’s not easy in those conditions, like a camel through the eye of a needle, then stand farther off, you know? Or go around to the lee. Or get inside Whale Cove. The last thing a skipper should do if his brains aren’t up his arse is anchor off close to that shore. If your anchor drags in those waves, you’re on the rocks before you can react. Totally out of the question is what I’m saying, but somebody was there anyway.”
“We don’t know who,” Cinq-Mars presumed.
“Sure we do. It was Pete Briscoe.”
Cinq-Mars listened to the silent air over the telephone a moment.
“You got close enough to identify his boat?”
“He didn’t have enough sense to stand off elsewhere, but he had enough sense to reduce the chance of a collision in the dark. He left on his AIS.”
“Sorry. What’s that?”
“AIS. Automatic identification system. More of us keep them on board these days. AIS is a device that transmits your boat name, type, speed, and position to other vessels or shoreside and receives the same data back. I never saw Pete’s boat, not in that downpour. The radar was fuzzy, at best, but the AIS let me know it was him and showed he wasn’t moving. Except for the wave action. Otherwise he wasn’t moving.”