by Cathy Ace
I wondered how far Dan would go with this train of thought – or gossip. ‘So was the word on the literary street that Joe had a hand in Julius’s death?’ I pressed.
Dan James peered around the room as though he were afraid of being overheard, then he drew close to me and stage-whispered, ‘I wouldn’t put it past him. It seems very convenient that he was out of town when it happened, and that it looked as though he was the intended victim; that’s such a good way to put people off the scent, don’t you think?’
I knew that sort of plan had been tried before, sometimes to great effect, but I was still working on whether Joe’s attention to detail for deal-making might have been put to use when it came to the attention to detail needed to set up the murder of his partner – and get away with it.
‘Martha had a complete breakdown after Julius’s death too – which just added fuel to the fire,’ Dan continued. ‘Went away to one of those euphemistic “Rest Homes”, they said. For about seven months.’ Dan James emphasized the time frame and raised his eyebrows in a very unpleasant manner. I felt like I needed a wash after talking to this guy. Yuk.
‘What are you two doing here? Your shirt – it is clean?’ It was Luis, carrying a tray of empty coffee mugs and pots. I’d obviously missed any chance I might have had of snapping up a second croissant.
I held up the shirt so we could all inspect it. The stain was, essentially, gone – but the shirt needed to be soaked or laundered . . . and without any power, it was likely to be the former rather than the latter. Dan took the dripping shirt from me and wrung it dry over the kitchen sink.
‘I think I’ll soak this in my bathroom,’ he announced. ‘I don’t want anything else being spilled on it. Thank you for your help, Cait – quite wonderful.’ He dried his hands and scurried out of the kitchen toward the staircase.
‘You did not want more coffee?’ asked Luis, beginning to run hot water from the kettle into the sink – there being no point in loading up the dishwasher when we had no power.
‘No, I’m fine with just the one cup, thanks,’ I lied. Usually I like to mainline caffeine until lunchtime, then buzz nicely through the afternoon, coming down just in time for a restorative Bombay and tonic in the evening. But I’d have to manage on just the one mug . . . I had more important things to do.
‘How about you wash, and I’ll wipe?’ I suggested. It seemed like a good way to get some time alone with Luis.
‘That is an excellent idea. Jean and Martha have offered to prepare lunch when I have cleared these things away. I think that Martha is trying to keep Jean busy. Jean is not in good shape.’ Luis’s formal English was charming.
‘How are you coping, Luis?’ I sounded concerned. I was concerned. Was he a cold-blooded killer who’d just dispatched his pseudo-fiancé in an attempt to prevent her from not kissing and telling? Or was he truly sorry to see someone he cared for – in a professional, if platonic, way – gone?
‘I am very sad. Meg was a special person. Very understanding.’ He smiled a half-smile and I shot back a look of commiseration. ‘Very understanding’ was quite an understatement in my book. ‘I do not know what I will do without her. We must make some plans to remember her properly; her fans would want that.’
Luis had touched upon something that hadn’t occurred to me; there’d likely be some sort of outpouring of public grief for Meg’s death. I’d been thinking of her in relationship to just the people at the lodge, and as my old school-friend. But Meg Jones had become so much more than that; I had visions of Luis accompanying a lily-draped casket through some grand Hollywood-style funeral. I suspected he’d play the part of the grieving fiancé with aplomb; it might even turn out to be just the thing to allow him to be able to stop visibly dating women for some time . . . he could portray ‘devastated by the loss of my one true love’ for years, if he played it well. I wondered if that thought might have pressed him to murder?
‘Who would take charge of such a thing?’ I wondered aloud.
‘I will oversee it all, but I have asked Joe to handle the details; Meg and I were engaged – she and her mother were not close. It would be wrong for her mother to do it. It is my place. Joe knows the people to contact. Joe will do a very good job.’
‘Joe introduced you to Meg, didn’t he?’ I asked, sounding quite innocent.
‘But yes. He knew we would be good for each other.’ Luis was being both truthful, and misleading, I noted.
‘Do you know who will run all of Meg’s business dealings now that she’s gone? Would that be Joe?’
Luis shook his head. ‘Meg has a good business manager. He will work it all out. He was against Meg firing Joe. I think Joe will once again represent Meg’s work now.’
Maybe that was another reason for Joe to get rid of Meg? Without her around he’d be put back in charge of her work, and start making a percentage on all the sales that were about to be made posthumously. I was surprised he wasn’t already on the phone ordering extra print runs of Meg’s books . . . then I realized I’d been in the kitchen for so long he could probably have done all that already, and I’d be none the wiser.
‘Have you formally asked Joe to take the reins again?’ I was now truly curious.
‘Joe has already broken the sad news to Meg’s business manager, and he is the one who has asked Joe to “take the reins” again. I have only asked him to make the funeral arrangements.’
‘There’ll have to be an autopsy, you know, Luis. There’s no way of knowing when they’ll release her body. Then you’ll have to get it from Canada to wherever you’ll be having the service.’ I didn’t want to sound like a know-it-all, but in this case I did, in fact, know it all.
‘We have discussed this already – while you were out of the room. Joe, Jean, and I have all agreed that Meg’s memorial service will be in New York; she spent many years there. It is a more literary place. She has been living in LA just a short time. People will fly to New York for the service, I am sure. She will be cremated here, in Canada. We will transport the ashes only. Her mother will stay with the Grays until it is all over.’
It seemed I’d missed quite a lot. But, then, I’d learned a lot too. And I wondered what I might still learn from Luis. He might have been Meg’s ‘fiancé’, but I was beginning to wonder how close their relationship had been; were they just social acquaintances with a fake public facade, or had they been real friends?
‘You’ve lost your best friend, I’m sure.’ I was acting innocent again, and, by now, I was wiping mugs and stacking them on the big draining board to air-dry.
Luis stopped washing and looked me straight in the eye. ‘She was a true friend, you are right. I will miss our talks . . . our closeness. I will miss her warmth.’ I guessed he was speaking figuratively, not literally.
‘You don’t have any suspicions about who might have done it, do you?’ I whispered.
‘I can only think it is Adrian,’ he spat out, hatefully. ‘He is a man with blood on his hands already, Meg told me. And I could see last night that he was afraid Meg might tell about the dead woman and the dead baby in his past. He was frightened. I saw that.’
‘What dead woman? What dead baby?’ I was shocked. Adrian O’Malley had a dark secret after all.
Luis spoke quietly – for him. ‘The dead woman? A girl, very young, a teenager, found dead after one of his concerts, in his dressing room. He was taking many drugs, said he didn’t know what had happened. He was very famous then, very rich. He made her disappear.’
What on earth did Luis mean? His slightly stilted use of English could obscure, as well as charm.
‘How do you mean – “he made her disappear”?’ I asked.
‘I do not know, Meg did not tell me everything. What I know is that the police never knew about this girl being in Adrian’s dressing room. Adrian told Meg this, that is how she knew. When they were married she was his inspiration. His famous song “The Muse You Are” was about Meg. He wrote that when she left him. It was his first big hit. She left
him because of the dead baby.’
‘Dead baby?’
‘Yes, stillborn. His drugs, she said. Then she could not have babies any more. He killed their baby.’
Wow. When Adrian had made that comment about Peter being an example of people over-compensating to make amends for their past, he could have been talking about himself; his drug use had somehow managed to cause the death of the unborn baby that he and Meg were expecting . . . and then he’d gone on to have seven children with his current wife. Everyone knew Jovita O’Malley was her generation’s equivalent of Yoko Ono – always portrayed as robbing the music world of a unique talent by stealing Dax O’Malley away for herself, but what if Jovita didn’t know about the stillborn child that he and Meg had lost? What if it came out that Dax/Adrian had no recollection of how a teen had met her death in his dressing room? Could keeping those two facts a secret have driven ‘my life’s an open book’ Adrian to kill his ex-wife?
I didn’t want to believe it. I couldn’t believe it; for all his bad-boy image at the height of his popularity, Adrian seemed to be a genuine person . . . his body language spoke of openness and acceptance of others. Could he have killed Meg? I knew, only too well from my experiences, that anyone is capable of murder . . . given the right motive, and an opportunity. Could these deaths in Adrian’s past be the motive he needed?
By now Luis and I had cleared all the dirty dishes, and I wanted to be sure there was nothing else he might be able to tell me before our chance to be alone disappeared.
‘I’m very sorry for your loss, Luis. But I don’t think that Adrian’s the type to have killed Meg.’
‘Type? What do you know about his type? Rich, famous people do not live like other people. They have their own rules.’
As I hung up the tea towel to dry, I realized that everyone I’d managed to get alone so far had presented me with at least one good reason for another guest wanting to kill Meg, and to stop her autobiography from ruining their life. The only people I didn’t have anything on were Jean and Sally, and that Sally’s reasons – if she had them – would be the same as her husband’s. So there was only Jean left.
No one seemed to have heard anything bad about Jean. I told myself it was unusual for a parent to kill their own child – very unusual – so the chances that Jean had killed Meg were slim, but I felt I had to push on and get a proper understanding of the situation. I wondered who had the dirt on Meg’s grieving mother?
I finally managed to get back to the Great Room. It was warm, and the fire was dancing merrily in the hearth. The mood in the room seemed to be more relaxed than when I had left it . . . which was about two hours earlier. I needed a sit down, and, for some reason, I fancied a Bombay and tonic; the dimness of the room, the firelight, the way people were just hanging about almost languidly – it made me feel quite ‘festive’.
‘How’s the sleuthing going?’ It was Adrian, at my elbow, with a warm smile on his face.
I couldn’t have looked happy, because at that moment I wasn’t feeling happy and making no effort to conceal the fact.
‘You’ve had your nose to the grindstone out in that kitchen, Cait, so how about a drink?’
I know my face lit up; I’m easily pleased.
‘I could kill for a Bombay and tonic,’ I said. There was another one of those silences as I spoke – it seems I can actually create them to order. I couldn’t take back my ridiculously inappropriate words, so I just added, ‘Sorry – you know what I mean,’ and hoped everyone did.
Frankly, given what I’d discovered to date about the nature of the people in the room with me, I was beginning to care less and less what they thought of me; none of them had any right to judge anyone, about anything.
‘Oh, poor Cait,’ said Adrian. ‘Stay there – I’ll get you one. Heavy on the gin?’ I nodded eagerly.
‘Anyone else?’ called Adrian to the room.
‘I wouldn’t mind a glass of sherry,’ replied Dan James, somewhat predictably. ‘It’s not as though any of us will be driving today, what?’ Honestly, the way he tried to make himself sound English, when all he did was teach it, was laughable.
‘I’ll have another brandy,’ said Jean Jones. Sally Webber looked horrified, and Jean noticed her stares. ‘There’s no use looking at me like that, young woman,’ she chided Sally, ‘I want a medicinal brandy, and I’ll have one, thank you very much.’ That seemed to be an end to the matter.
‘You’re right Jean, brandy is indeed medicinal,’ agreed Martha Gray. ‘Maybe a small one for me too, please Adrian?’
‘So – a Bombay and tonic, two brandies and a sherry. Anyone else?’ Adrian hovered.
‘How do we know you did not poison Meg? You might poison us all.’ Luis Lopez’s voice rang out across the room from the book-corner where he was all but hidden.
There was what could only be called an ‘awkward’ silence; for once, I wasn’t saying anything when it happened, which made a pleasant change. I wondered how many people were thinking that what Luis had said might be true.
‘That’s great, coming from you,’ snapped Adrian. ‘Here I am, trying to be helpful and lighten things up a bit – and all you and him can do –’ he gesticulated toward Joe Gray – ‘is put your heads together in corners and phone everyone in the world who can help you cash in on Meg’s death. Besides – if Meg had been poisoned, and if there was any reason for it to have been me who did it, then Detective Cait wouldn’t have been first to ask me to get her a drink, would she?’
All eyes now looked at me. I felt myself getting hot.
‘Don’t blush, Cait. We all know what you’re up to,’ continued Adrian. ‘You’ve been pumping us for what we know about our fellow guests. You’ve just about covered all the ground now, right Cait? I’ve been keeping an eye on you; you’ve had everyone on their own out in that kitchen . . . except Jean and Peter, and Sally, of course. I’m sure you’ll get around to them soon. Don’t think you’ve got to hide it from the rest of us; we all know what you’re up to. But you’d better be careful, Cait – if the killer thinks you know their secret, you could be next.’
Why on earth did he insist upon being so melodramatic? I wasn’t in any danger. We were all sitting in one room, together; what could possibly happen? Things only happen when groups split up . . . when two people decide to go to the cellar, or the attic, for no apparent reason . . . that’s when things ‘happen’. And I wasn’t planning on leaving the group at all. Then I realized that, at some point, I’d have to go to bed, and then I would be alone . . . and I didn’t like that idea, so I stopped thinking about it.
‘Maybe Luis is right – but maybe all I’ll do is poison your drink, Cait.’ Adrian was being wicked.
‘But there’s a flaw in your plan, Adrian,’ I said. I had everyone’s attention again . . . the group looked like the spectators at a tennis match, their heads bobbing this way and that.
‘Go on then – what?’ Adrian asked, his eyes twinkling. Deliciously.
‘You might get rid of me because you think I know your secret,’ I said thoughtfully, ‘but you wouldn’t know who’d told me . . . so there’d still be someone else, in this room, who’d know. But you wouldn’t know which one to kill, along with me, to make sure that your secret died with us.’
‘Okay then,’ rebutted Adrian, quick as a flash, ‘like Luis said, I’d just kill you all. I’d poison all the drinks. How’s that?’
‘Don’t you think it would look a bit suspicious if the police arrived to find you the only survivor of a mass poisoning?’ asked Martha Gray.
‘I guess,’ acknowledged Adrian. ‘Okay – I’ll let you all live . . . and I’ll face up to whatever it is that someone knows about me . . . though, frankly, it can’t be much of a secret.’
‘You should not be too sure,’ called Luis from his comfy armchair – then he slapped his hand over his mouth.
‘Oh dear – I think someone’s just given himself away,’ said Adrian.
All eyes turned toward Luis; he looked
terrified. Luckily he wasn’t sitting directly beneath any of the stuffed animal heads, because the similarities might have been too humorous.
Luis rallied. ‘I do not know what you mean.’
‘Oh, I think you do, Luis.’ Adrian’s voice had changed; it had lost its levity. ‘Meg told you something about me, didn’t she? Something that maybe only she and I knew about? Did she tell you about the baby we lost? Was that it? The world-famous “breeder”, Dax O’Malley, with a stillborn baby in his past? Yeah, that might be a secret, but that’s because it was the way Meg wanted it. Only two or three people even knew she was pregnant. And the bigger part of the so called “secret” is probably that Meg blamed me for the baby’s death. It’s what broke us apart. Our relationship couldn’t cope with the loss; that, and the fact Meg would never be able to conceive again. She said I was to blame because I was using; I told her that drinking like a fish and smoking like a train while she was carrying our child was like signing its death warrant. She never forgave me. I worked real hard to forgive her.’
It looked as though Adrian wasn’t going to mention the young girl found dead in his dressing room. Interesting.
There was a series of little gasps around the room.
‘That’s so sad,’ exclaimed Sally Webber.
‘She never told me she’d ever been pregnant,’ said Jean Jones, sounding angry.
‘Me neither,’ said Martha Gray, sounding equally miffed.
‘Well, you’re not her mother, no matter how much you act like you are,’ said Jean Jones tartly. ‘You’re not part of our family; and if me saying I’ll come and stay with you two in New York until the memorial service is giving you any ideas in that department, then I’ll stay in a hotel instead.’