1 Death Pays the Rose Rent (18 page)

Authors: Valerie Malmont

“I’ll be damned,” Garnet blurted out. “How did they keep that quiet all these years?”

“It was Rose’s wish that no one ever know,” Sylvia said.

“She never even told me,” Michael said sadly. “I never had a chance to know my own father.” He let his head drop and covered his eyes. Briana gently placed a hand on his knee.

“I have to ask everyone—where were you this afternoon from five until six-fifteen?” Garnet asked.

“I was rehearsing my cast,” Michael said, not looking up.

Briana said she was at the theatre, appearing in a matinee.

Sylvia had gone to bed early in the afternoon with a headache and slight fever. “I still feel sick,” she said.

Praxythea had been cooking and cleaning all afternoon. “I boiled a ham for tomorrow’s rehearsal lunch and did some dusting.”

Garnet spoke gently. “Michael, I hate to ask anything of you right now, but I need to see the framing nailer Tori said your people were using earlier today.”

Michael, eyes moist, nodded and led the way to the ballroom. At Garnet’s request, I went with them to identify the nailer. It wasn’t there. We searched every inch of the room, even lifting every piece of wood. Nothing.

“I don’t understand this,” Michael said. “We wrapped up here around noon so we could rehearse, and I told the crew to leave everything right here. I can’t imagine where it could be. Why do you need it?”

Garnet told him how the judge had been killed. It prompted another outburst of emotion from Michael. Briana, after a nod from Garnet, led her husband upstairs.

“That’s it for tonight,” Garnet announced to Praxythea and Sylvia, the only two left. “I’ll be back tomorrow. Come on, Tori. I’ll take you home.”

When we pulled up in front of the cottage, Alice-Ann jerked the door open and waited for us to come in.

“You shouldn’t open that door unless you know who’s on the other side of it,” Garnet told her.

“I know the sound of your truck. You two don’t look very happy. Didn’t you have a good time?”

We sat down in the living room and Garnet told her of the judge’s murder.

“You were right,” Alice-Ann said to me. “Things are getting a whole lot awfuller. I’ll get us some herbal tea. It always makes me feel better.”

Fred and Noel, no longer imprisoned in the laundry room, rubbed up against Garnet’s legs. He absent-mindedly scratched Fred under the chin. “I don’t usually like cats, but these are kind of cute.”

“The rose in the judge’s hand—it came from the castle, didn’t it?” I asked.

“Looks like it,” he said. “Which means it was probably someone from the castle who killed him. Or someone who’s been to the castle—which could be just about anybody. I can’t figure out why the murderer left the roses with his victims.”

“Or her victims,” I interjected.

“Okay, or her victims. And I can’t figure out why any one of those people at the castle would want to kill the old man. He was the exact opposite of Richard. Didn’t have an enemy in the world that I know of.”

“I’m beginning to think it was Rose, after all,” I said. “Maybe she hated him for getting her pregnant.”

“It’s been thirty-five years. You’d think she’d have done something a lot earlier.”

He stopped speaking when Alice-Ann entered bearing a tray with a teapot and three unmatched mugs. She poured and we all sipped the chamomile brew.

Alice-Ann stretched and yawned broadly, too broadly. “I think I’ll leave you two to clean up. I’m really worn-out.”

We heard her footsteps on the stairs, then the bedroom door closing.

“Before you ask,” I said, “we were both here from about four-thirty until you picked me up at six. Now, back to Rose—you told me earlier she just found out she has only a short time to live. Maybe she’s cleaning house, so to speak, taking revenge on people who have hurt her, like the father of her child who deserted her when she needed him. And Richard, who caused her to lose the property that meant so much to her.”

“Perhaps, but it just doesn’t feel right to me. Maybe I’m just tired. I spent all morning questioning half the people in town about Richard’s murder. This afternoon I thought I’d be able to hole up in the office and get some paperwork done, but at two o’clock Mrs. Ferguson called to report someone stole a potted palm off her porch. At three o’clock, two fire trucks, one from Chickentown and the other from Sink Hole Township, took a shortcut through town on the way to a barn fire and collided in the square, and at four, there was a fight at Daisy’s Bar and Laundromat. People expect me to be on duty twenty-four hours a day with only Luscious to help—and hell, if they gave Olympic medals for incompetence, he’d win a gold. Sometimes I wonder why I don’t say the hell with it and go back to Philadelphia.”

I touched his hand. “Because you love these people. And they love you. I could see that at the fire-house tonight. They need you. And, Garnet, being loved and needed by someone is the most important thing in the world.”

He smiled and stood up. “That was an awfully nice

thing to say. Somehow I didn’t expect you to be so sensitive.”

“There’s a lot you don’t know about me.”

I walked with him to the door. “You forgot something,” I said.

“What’s that?”

“You were going to show me your cave maps.”

He groaned. “Not now, Tori. I’m way too tired.”

“Then leave them here, please, Garnet. I’ll look at them tomorrow, and we can talk about them the next time we get together.”

I tried to look sweet and appealing by gazing up at him and gently batting my eyelashes.

“Got something in your eye? Just kidding! Okay, I’ll leave them with you. But you’ve got to promise me you won’t go down into the caves without me. It can be very dangerous down there.”

“I wouldn’t dream of it.”

I waited on the porch while he went out to his truck. In a few minutes he was back with a large folder.

“Please be careful. I don’t want anything to happen to you,” he said gently. He put his arms around me and bent down to kiss me. I turned my face up to his, closed my eyes, tilted my head to the left just as he tilted his to the right, and we suffered a painful nose collision.

“Damn trouble with being left-handed,” I muttered, rubbing my nose. “I always zig when everybody else zags.”

He smiled, took my face between his strong hands, held my head perfectly still, and planted a delightful kiss on my lips.

“Nothing we can’t work out,” he told me.

He kissed me again. His kiss was tender, but firm, and becoming increasingly passionate. His muscular body felt wonderful pressed tightly against mine, but I had to remind myself it had been a long time since I’d been kissed by anyone.

I finally pulled back. “Hey,” I joked. “Don’t think I’m the kind of girl you can seduce after one dinner of red eggs and pork bellies. It’s going to take at least one more gourmet meal—maybe some kippered herring and pickled pig’s feet.”

“You’re on for this weekend! Now, I want to see you safely inside. And Tori, stay out of the caves and leave the murder investigation to me.”

Half an hour later, I was pinned between the two cats when the phone rang. I ran downstairs to answer it before it woke up Alice-Ann or Mark.

It was Garnet. “Did you bolt the doors? Make sure all the windows are locked?”

“Of course I did,” I sighed.

I hung up, bolted the doors, checked the windows, and went back to bed.

I lay awake for a long time, staring at a hairline crack in the plaster ceiling and thinking about Garnet’s kiss. How casual had he meant it to be? Was he looking for a relationship? Was I? I was beginning to like him a lot, but maybe I was so hungry for affection that anyone would look good. I thought I’d never get to sleep, but I did.

FRIDAY

CHAPTER 17

On Friday morning, I ate breakfast in the kitchen with Alice-Ann and Mark. Alice-Ann suggested that Mark feed the cats, which he eagerly agreed to do. Tails erect, they followed him to the sun porch.

After he left the room, she said, “I didn’t have time to tell you yesterday, but Garnet called and said he’d had my hammer checked for prints. There weren’t any at all.”

“That doesn’t surprise me. It doesn’t take a great brain to know that prints should be wiped off a murder weapon.”

“What are you going to do now?”

I was running out of ideas, but didn’t want to admit it.

“I think I’ll go back to the castle and see if I can’t find that missing power nailer. If it turns out to be the one that killed the judge, it might have some prints on it, although I doubt it. Certainly some traces of blood. While I’m gone, there’s something I want you to do here.”

“Anything.”

“Look through Richard’s desk, files, drawers—wherever he might have kept papers. We need to find out what he was working on for the Historical Society. Even if he didn’t have a finished paper, he certainly must have had some notes.”

“I’ll do it. But Mark and I need to be downtown at noon for the Rose Rent rehearsal. Did I tell you Sylvia called yesterday morning and asked Mark to take Richard’s place?”

“Won’t that be hard on him?”

“That’s what I thought, but when she asked him, he got excited about being the ‘star’ of the day.”

“He’s a tough little guy.”

I showered, dressed, kissed the cats on the little soft spots between their ears, and waved good-bye to Alice-Ann, who was already digging through the desk in the living room.

As I walked down the footpath, it was hard to believe that everything could look so normal. To the east, the sun was hovering above the treetops, birds sang, bumblebees buzzed about their business, flowers released sweet scents into the soft summer air, and water rippled calmly in the tiny lake; so peaceful, one could almost forget two murders had recently taken place.

Rose opened the door for me. She looked tired, but better than I expected.

“How are you feeling this morning?” I asked her.

“I’m all right. There’s so much to do I haven’t had time to think much about what happened. Would you mind helping me prepare lunch for Michael and his actors?”

“Be glad to,” I fibbed.

At that moment, a shot rang out, and a man rolled slowly down the great stone staircase to land almost at our feet. I knocked Rose to the floor and threw my body across hers as protection.

“Get off of me, you damn fool!” came Rose’s muffled voice.

Then, to my humiliation, the “body” stood up and helped me to my feet. He knelt on the flagstones and checked Rose for broken bones.

“I’m okay,” she grumbled. “Just help me up.”

“I’m so sorry,” I murmured. “I thought we were having another murder.”

“Perfectly understandable, my dear,” Rose said with a tight smile. “This is Doug. He’s part of our murder mystery cast.”

Doug shook hands and excused himself quickly, saying he had to become another character in the next five minutes.

A tall, elegantly thin woman, wearing a tight red satin gown and a Miss America-type tiara, came down the steps, smoking gun in her hand. A young woman in a French maid’s outfit—short black skirt, fishnet hose, and preposterously high heels—entered from a side door and let out a piercing scream. “There’s a body in the front hall!” she screeched.

The detective—I could tell because he was wearing a trench coat and fedora—ran into the hallway from the front parlor and yelled, “I’ve got you now, Countess. You’ve been caught in the act, at last.”

“But you don’t understand,” she said, using a reasonable facsimile of an Eastern European accent. “I heard a shot and found this gun on the landing.”

“You’re going to jail for murder, Countess. And this time they’ll be throwing away the key,” said Trench Coat.

He was interrupted by a shrill scream from the library. “The ambassador …he’s been stabbed!”

Trench Coat and the countess fled down the hall and out of sight.

“It’s been like this all morning,” Rose said with a tired sigh. “Come on, I’ll take you to the kitchen.”

I followed her through a maze of hallways and down a flight of steps into a kitchen that was larger than most three-bedroom apartments. As big as it was, though, it was dominated by what had to be the most enormous stove in the world.

“It’s a restaurant stove,” Rose told me, noticing my stare. “When Father was alive, we did a great deal of entertaining to large crowds of people, sometimes even a hundred at a time. I suppose we could get rid of it, but once you get used to having all those ovens and burners, it’s hard to cook on anything else.”

Since it was against my landlord’s religion to repair anything, my cooking, during the past year, had been limited to what I could fix on two working burners, so I had trouble imagining what one would do with all those burners, ovens, wells, grills, and drawers. But I’m no dummy. I know life in a castle is a lot different from life in a Hell’s Kitchen fourth-floor walk-up.

There was an unpleasant odor in the room I

couldn’t identify. I finally decided there must be some rotten potatoes in the mile-high pile in the sink.

“Darn,” Rose said as a bell rang somewhere upstairs. “Now who? Victoria, can you finish up the potato salad?” She stomped out of the room, leaving me staring at the unpeeled potatoes.

Potato salad was something that came from the corner deli in little plastic containers. I groaned at the sight of all the spuds in the sink. The doorbell rang again. Poor Rose really had her hands full. It wouldn’t kill me to peel a few potatoes.

I took a deep breath and attacked a potato furiously with the little knife. The level of potatoes in the pot of boiling water grew higher, as did the pile of peelings in the sink.

“You’re throwing away enough food to feed half the starving people in Somalia,” said an unfamiliar, deep voice from behind me.

Right then and there, I learned what the expression leaped out of my skin meant. I spun around, paring knife pointed, ready to protect myself from the possible murderer who had sneaked up behind me. My knife was practically embedded in the lean belly of a Michael Rennie look-alike. Remember The Third Man?

He was at least six four and had those same piercing eyes, high cheekbones, and swept-back black hair, brightened with just the right amount of silver, so that he could be anywhere between thirty and fifty. He wore a light gray suit with a barely perceptible pinstripe, which probably cost more than I earned last year.

He raised his arms in surrender. “Watch that knife, lady. Castration would put me in a real bad mood,” he said menacingly.

“Who are you?” I raised the knife a couple of inches to just above his belt.

“George Lambroso. I just got in from New York to cater the Mystery Dinner. Nobody answered the front door when I rang, so I wandered around until I found the kitchen door. It was open, and here I am.”

I laid down my weapon, and he whistled with relief as he lowered his arms.

“Sorry. Two people have been murdered this week—we don’t know by whom—so naturally we’re all a little jumpy.”

“Naturally. Here, I’ll do the peeling and chopping. You tell me about the murders.”

He took off his jacket and rolled up immaculate white silk sleeves, revealing amazingly muscular forearms, a part of the male body I find particularly attractive. This was the third good-looking man I’d met this week. Maybe I should have left New York sooner.

While he expertly took care of the rest of the potatoes, I sat on a wooden stool and told him about Richard’s disappearance and eventual reappearance as a corpse and the judge’s gruesome death.

He wanted to know if the Mystery Dinner was canceled.

First things first, I thought. “No. They’re going ahead with everything. Michael’s got his cast upstairs rehearsing right now. Do you know Michael Thorne?”

“We’re good friends. I’ll look for him later.”

The potatoes were already cubed and boiling away. In practically no time at all, he rinsed them with cold water and drained them. Somebody had already hard-boiled some eggs and left them in the refrigerator. George added chopped egg yolks to the potatoes.

“No whites. I think it spoils the texture.” He added chopped scallions, pickles, sliced ripe olives, and a selection of herbs from a shelf of them. Then he stirred in French dressing and placed the large bowl in the refrigerator.

“No mayonnaise?” I asked, eager to show I wasn’t completely hopeless in the kitchen.

“That goes in just before serving. I like to let the potatoes marinate in French dressing for an hour or two. That’s the difference between plain old potato salad and salade de pommes de terre, and everyone knows if it has a French name it’s better.”

The ham Praxythea had cooked yesterday was in the refrigerator. George carved it into paper-thin slices. With a few deft twists of the wrist, he created a rose out of a tomato and centered it on the platter of ham. He arranged parsley and watercress around the edges of the platter, then popped it back into the refrigerator. “Good, there’s fresh fruit. With some bread and a couple of gallons of iced tea, that should be enough lunch for anybody.”

He looked at me speculatively. “Do you want to take care of the iced tea?”

“Sure. Where do you think they keep the jar of instant—”

“Never mind. Fit do the tea. By the way …what’s your name?”

I told him and was thrilled to hear he’d read my book. I was dying to ask him how he liked it, but we were interrupted by Rose’s return. After I introduced her to George, and Rose expressed her admiration of the wonderful lunch we’d prepared, George excused himself to go look for Michael.

“I’ll go with you,” I said before Rose had a chance to think of something else for me to do. I led the way upstairs, glad to escape the unpleasant odor that still lingered in the kitchen. We found Michael in the ballroom, dressed as an Arab sheikh, poring over some papers. The lovely Briana stood next to him in a white tennis outfit. I’d always thought those models in Playboy, Sports Illustrated, and the like were air-brushed to perfection. Now, before my very eyes, was the depressing, living proof that there really were women who didn’t require airbrushing.

I was acutely aware of my faded jeans, the T-shirt that read
THERE
’
S
NO
PLACE
LIKE
HOME
,
DUDE
, and stained sneakers. And my hair! As a result of the potato-boiling misadventure, it had frizzed up; I looked a little worse than Elsa Lanchester in The Bride of Frankenstein. The longer I stayed in the room with Briana, the more unattractive I felt.

Michael greeted George warmly, then turned to me. “Tori, the strangest thing has happened. That power nailer we looked for last night?—it was here all the time. Can you believe it?”

“Quite frankly, no. Where’d you find it?”

“Under this table. It was covered by some of the set designer’s sketches.”

I knew damned well I’d looked under that table last night, and the power nailer had not been there.

“Did you touch it?”

“No way. I’ve been in enough cops-and-robbers TV shows to know better than that. I picked it up with a wooden dowel and dropped it into a plastic bag. I called Garnet to tell him, but he wasn’t in the office.”