Deadly Summer Nights

by Vicki Delany

  “Do you know his name?”

  “Sorry, no. Like so many people around here, they come, they go. Other than the family members themselves, the turnover of reporters and photographers is pretty high. They’re all aiming for a bigger and better paper, and the Summervale Gazette is nothing but a stopgap far as they’re concerned.” Lucinda looked around the Red Spot Diner, and I could tell by the longing look on her face that she was also dreaming of the bigger and better.

  I hopped off my stool. Or rather I tried to hop. I was so full of egg cream, hot turkey sandwich with gravy and fries, and lemon meringue pie, I more like toppled off. “Thanks for this. The news and the lunch.”

  “Anytime,” Lucinda said. “I’ll admit I used you for my own nefarious ends. I got to sit down for twenty whole minutes.”

  “Lucinda!” her mother called. “Table nine is waiting for their fried chicken.”

  I left her to it and went outside. I dug my sunglasses out of my purse as the sticky heat soaked into my pores. My stomach rolled over, and I resisted the urge to loosen my belt. That lunch had been sooooo good. And I was soooo going to regret it.

  The police station was to my right, the newspaper office to my left. Cars and trucks drove slowly down Main Street, and the sidewalks were full of families out for the day or people heading to and from work. I turned right and peered into the dusty window of the small police station. The blinds were up, and I could see a woman sitting at a desk facing the door. The wall behind her was covered in posters, some of them turning yellow with age. Her gray hair was pulled tightly back, and black-framed glasses perched on her beak of a nose. Her head was turned toward the papers on the desk as she pounded the keys of a typewriter. As I watched, the phone rang, and she picked it up. When she lifted her head she saw me peering at her, and her eyes narrowed.

  Anger, or maybe just indigestion, clutched at my chest. If Monahan was trying to get Haggerman’s in trouble, at the behest of some of the other hotel owners, he was playing a dangerous game. He should have some loyalty to Summervale. Did he not realize the town itself would suffer if the reputation of one of the largest hotels came under suspicion? Plenty of other Catskills resort towns around, all of them eager to take visitors’ money.

  I told myself to relax as I reminded myself that I simply didn’t know enough to get angry at anyone or anything. Not yet. Except for the person who had killed Mr. Westenham. That person, I could be angry at.

  I scurried away.

  Far more impressive than the clapboard police station, the newspaper office was a sturdy brick structure, three stories tall, with a large sign prominently displaying the paper’s name hanging above the double-doored entrance. The big red newspaper box by the door held copies of the day’s paper, with a sheet of the front page displayed behind glass. I glanced at it but saw nothing about the death at Haggerman’s, which was to be expected as the paper would have been printed overnight for delivery first thing this morning. I peered in the window but couldn’t see much because of the half-closed blinds. The door opened, and I heard typewriters clattering and men shouting. A man hurried out, short and thin, pale-faced, small chin, cheap suit, stuffing his hat onto the top of his head. He glanced at me, gave me a quick up and down, and clearly not terribly impressed, he pushed past me. I turned to see him going into the diner.

  I decided there was nothing I could achieve in the newspaper offices. I couldn’t ask them not to report on the death at Haggerman’s: that would make them suspect I was covering something up. I’d have to trust Lucinda’s belief that the paper would protect the reputation of the town.

  I went back to my car and drove to my mountain.

  Chapter 12

  That had been a mistake.

  When I finally got into my office and dropped into my chair, I leaned back and closed my eyes. I would have loved absolutely nothing more than to grab a quick nap, but the pile of message slips threatened to bury my desk beneath a pink snowstorm. I sighed, opened my eyes, plucked a pencil out of the holder, and picked up the pages. I was about to flip the stack, to start with the earliest, when the name on the topmost caught my eye.

  Lucinda McGreedy. Never mind the spelling error, my friend had called half an hour ago. That would have been only minutes after I left the diner. I picked up my phone and read the number off the paper to the hotel switchboard operator.

  “Red Spot Diner. What do you want?” Mrs. McGreevy snarled.

  “May I speak to Lucinda, please?”

  “Lucinda’s working.”

  “It’s very important. I won’t take much of her time.”

  Mrs. McGreevy’s martyred sigh poured down the line. “I’ll see if she’s not busy.”

  I crossed my fingers, hoping for the best. Lucinda was never not busy.

  “Hello?”

  “Lucinda, hi. It’s Elizabeth. Did you call me?”

  “I’m glad you got my message. I was afraid you’d have so many messages you wouldn’t see mine for days.” In the background I heard a man screaming at someone. Something about hot water, not boiling water. “Only moments after you left, that newspaper reporter, the new one, came in.”

  “It must have been him I saw on the street. Drat. I’m sorry I missed him.”

  “Too bad you didn’t see who joined him.”

  “Who?”

  “None other than our beloved chief of police, Norman Monahan Jr., who came in about five minutes later. They huddled together in a back booth, just the two of them. I tried to get close enough to hear, but all they ordered were two coffees, plus a blueberry pie for the chief, and Janie brought it to them before I could intercept.”

  “Did you hear anything they said?”

  “Not a single word. Sorry. They were keeping their voices down, and when Janie brought their bill they stopped talking altogether. That must mean they weren’t exchanging baseball scores.”

  “No.”

  “One thing I should have told you earlier. The chief’s a rabid anti-communist. Nothing wrong with that, except that he’s accused people of being reds who flatly deny it. The big hotel owners like that about him. He ran off a couple of guys from the city who were trying to organize the groundskeepers at one of the hotels to argue for better pay.”

  “Wanting better pay doesn’t make you a communist,” I said.

  “No, but it does give the bosses a good excuse to get rid of troublemakers. All of which might not have anything to do with your murder, Elizabeth, but it’s been said that the chief sees reds where none exist. Partly because of genuine political conviction, but partly because it’s a way to get himself noticed in the wider world of law enforcement.”

  “Like calling in the FBI for an ordinary murder. If there is such a thing as an ordinary murder.”

  “Exactly.”

  More background screaming. “Gotta go,” Lucinda said. “I’ll let you know if I hear anything more.”

  “Thanks. If you can get away, you and Tony come to the hotel one night. Dinner and drinks and dancing, all on us.”

  “I’d like that.” She hung up.

  I picked up the next pink slip.

  I put my head down and tried to work, but I had a great deal of trouble concentrating. I had no reason to believe Chief Monahan and the newspaperman had been discussing events at Haggerman’s over their coffee and blueberry pie. They might have been exchanging news about another story. People were flooding to our small towns by the hundreds, by the thousands. Plenty was happening in this area. My phone rang, and I glanced at my watch as I answered. Almost five o’clock. The clerks would extinguish their cigarettes, rinse out their coffee mugs, cover their typewriters, collect their purses, and go home, and the switchboard would stop putting outside business calls through to me.

  I didn’t even have enough time to finish saying hello before my caller got straight to the point. “This is Ralph McIntosh from the booking a
gency. What’s this I hear about communist activity at your hotel?”

  I sat up straight. I sputtered. “That’s absolute nonsense. Where did you hear that?”

  “Look, Mrs. Grady, Haggerman’s is almost full for most of July, but you’ve got vacancies in August. If you’re going to be shut down, I need to know before I book my clients in.”

  “Shut down? Where did you hear this?”

  “I’m not at liberty to say.”

  “Kennelwood probably. It was Jerome Kennelwood, wasn’t it?”

  “Mrs. Grady.”

  “There is no communist activity at Haggerman’s. Absolutely none.”

  “The FBI are investigating. They don’t get called in for a common murder.”

  “The FBI are doing their jobs, and good for them. They were asked by the local police to assist, but they haven’t returned. That means nothing was found that concerns us, right?” I’d checked with the reception desk when I got in, and the clerks said the deputy’d been back, poking around the scene of Westenham’s death and his cabin, but no one had seen the FBI agents since this morning.

  “Okay,” Ralph said. “I believe you, but you’d better nip these rumors in the bud and fast. You’ve got a good hotel there, Mrs. Grady, and Miss Peters’s name’s attracting well-heeled guests. But there are plenty of other good hotels, and celebrity is fleeting. Mark my words: you don’t want trouble. Now, put me through to your reservations clerk. I have a family booking for the two weeks before Labor Day.”

  “Thank you.” I pushed the appropriate buttons.

  I put the receiver down and groaned. There’s nothing on earth harder to stop than a rumor. The only thing that would have been worse would be if our suspected communist had been found in flagrante delicto with a movie star. Or my mother.

  I leaned back in my chair and thought. Might it be true that Harold Westenham was a communist? His nephew was adamant he wasn’t.

  Did it even matter?

  Other than in Monahan’s fevered imagination, nothing indicated that anyone had been meeting with the man to plot a communist takeover or anything else—at least, as far as I knew, and I had to admit to myself that the police and the FBI weren’t sharing their findings with me. Whoever killed Harold Westenham might have done it for other, more personal reasons. What might those have been? I tried to think like a killer. How did a killer think? I had no idea.

  I then tried to think like a detective, but I didn’t have much luck at that, either. One thing detectives do, which I know from reading books and going to the movies in the off-season, is decide who the prime suspects are. On the one hand, I had no prime suspects, and on the other hand, I had a hotel full of potential prime suspects. I thought it unlikely the killer had come from outside. If someone had walked up the road from the bus stop, or driven onto the property at that hour of night, they would have risked being seen by the security guards, and remembered.

  Then again, they could have parked on an adjacent road and walked in through the woods, or caught a lift with one of the staff who had his own car. The police were questioning the staff, much to the delight of gossip-loving guests. Surely if one of them had given a lift to a stranger, they would tell the police so. Unless they had their own reasons for keeping mum. The same logic applied to our guests. Many of them went to other hotels for an evening’s entertainment, and guests at other hotels came to ours. Monahan had ordered his deputy not to question the guests, but surely if one of them had seen something they’d report it. Wouldn’t they?

  Not if they’d been involved.

  About the only person I could be confident hadn’t killed Harold Westenham was his nephew Jim. I’d called Jim in New York City shortly after finding the body, and he’d answered the phone.

  I swiveled my chair and looked out the small window at the overgrown bushes scratching at the office walls. If Westenham had been killed by a person I didn’t know, for reasons unknown, I had no chance of figuring out who that person was. I could concentrate on people I’d recently encountered who’d been behaving suspiciously. Whatever “suspiciously” meant in a Catskills summer.

  One name came to mind.

  “Hi!”

  I leapt out of my skin and spun my chair around.

  “You’re jumpy,” Velvet said.

  “Sorry. I didn’t hear you come in. I’m thinking about the murder.”

  “Don’t dwell on it. Nothing you can do about it.”

  “There might be, Velvet.”

  “Hold that thought, first I bring good news.” She gave me a big bright smile. She’d pulled a short, cheerful yellow summer dress over her bathing suit, her golden hair was pulled into a high bouncy ponytail, and the tip of her nose was turning red from the sun. She looked, I thought, like summer itself.

  “They’ve caught the killer?”

  The smile faded. “Not that good. Sorry. Mrs. Berkowitz and her preschool twins are staying here for a month. Mr. Berkowitz intends to come up on weekends from the city. Mr. Berkowitz is a bank manager, by the way. They have loads of money. They’re in cabin two, one of the best, and the girls who look after the children say the kids are absolute horrors. Spoiled rotten.”

  “Get on with it, Velvet.”

  “A good story”—she crossed her arms and leaned comfortably against the wall—“deserves to be told properly. A good story cannot be rushed, Elizabeth.”

  I made Hurry it up gestures in the air, and she grinned.

  “Okay. No more teasing. Mr. Berkowitz decided to get an early start on his weekend, give his family a nice surprise, and he arrived this afternoon. He gave his wife a surprise all right, although not a particularly nice one.”

  “Velvet, if you are not telling me he found her engaging in communist activity or burying evidence in the woods proving she killed Harold Westenham, I do not care.”

  “Yeah, okay, what happened is totally predictable. He found his wife enjoying the comforts of the main bedroom of cabin two in the company of a waiter named Luke, who I’ve been told is a first-year law student at Columbia. Cabin two, as you well know, is situated in a prime location near the beach between the pool and the courts. Mr. Berkowitz and Mrs. Berkowitz did not bother to keep their voices down, and to ensure that things were even more memorable, Luke made his escape without worrying about first finding his clothes. To the delight of the bridge club ladies gathering for a refreshing dip in the lake and the teen girls in my afternoon calisthenics class. I personally, Elizabeth, am here to tell you that if one were looking for a romp in the hay, a girl could do worse than the aforementioned Luke. Not that I wanted to look, of course. I was trying to protect my girls.”

  I chucked. “Okay, I’ll admit that story was worth hearing. Shall I let the booking agencies know one of our best private cabins has come unexpectedly available?”

  “I don’t know about that. But my point is no one is talking about the death of Mr. Westenham. Fortunately, the two Berkowitz daughters are too young to understand what everyone’s saying. Because everyone is talking about it. Absolutely everyone. Anyone who’s not heard about it, soon will.”

  “Do you think it will stay that way?”

  “Oh yes. As you know, the main bedroom in cabin two is located at the front of the building, meaning next to the path. The window was open as befits such a hot day. Mrs. B. had some things to say about what Mr. B. and his secretary get up to when she’s away, and he had a few things to say about a man needing to satisfy his needs when they are not being fulfilled at home because his wife never gets off the blasted phone complaining to her shrew of a mother. Plenty of fodder for gossip for a good long time. I wonder if they’ll come in to dinner. They might have been so caught up in their own little drama they aren’t aware everyone and their dog heard them. I might have even seen Winston edging closer to listen in. My point is, Elizabeth, no one saw what happened to Harold Westenham. The few people who were
up at that time saw the police and the ambulance, but that’s about it. They weren’t personally involved. People, lots and lots of people, were witness to the Berkowitz imbroglio. I’ll take a guess that Luke himself won’t be doing anything to help the talk die down, either. The other lonely ladies will be lining up to find out what all the fuss is about.”

  “Thank heavens for marital strife.”

  “What are you planning to do?”

  “Do? About the Berkowitzes or Luke? Nothing.”

  “No, I mean about the murder. When I came in you said there was something you could do.”

  “Meet me in the lobby at eight tonight,” I said.

  “Why?”

  “Just be there. Please. I need your help with something.” I waved my pencil at her. “Do you want to go over this budget for me? I can’t balance it.”

  Her face was a picture of horror, and she threw up her hands. “I don’t do numbers.”

  “Then leave me to it. Eight o’clock. Don’t be late. Wear practical shoes.”

  I rolled my shoulders and stretched my arms out in front of me. The stack of pink message slips was down to a manageable pile. I picked up my phone. “Put me through to my house, please.”

  “Miss Peters speaking,” Olivia said.

  “It’s me. Elizabeth. It’s seven o’clock now. Are you still planning on having dinner in the hotel tonight?”

  “Yes. I am the owner of this establishment, and I will do whatever I must to keep it running smoothly and efficiently and our guests as happy as little clams.”

  Too bad Olivia didn’t consider balancing budget sheets or answering guest complaints part of what she must do.

  “I’ll also attend the dancing later,” she said. “I might even have a dance or two with the guests. That will make them happy. I took tea on the veranda earlier this afternoon in another attempt to spread cheer. As I was finishing I heard some considerable hullabaloo down at the beach and a naked man ran past.”

  “So I heard.”