Bones of Contention (10 page)

This time, Mack took a stern line. “That’ll be all, Tanya. I’ll ring when we’re ready for the meat course.”

She gave him a stony look and pushed her cart back toward the kitchen.

Fisher bent over his plate and inhaled. “Ahhh. Like spring rain on a warm rock.”

Dinah had never seen an uglier piece of cod, but it was the barra going begging in front of that vacant chair that worried her. She searched Cleon’s face. What would make a dying man’s eyes twinkle like that? What would make this particular dying man so happy? Oh, God. What if he’d sweet-talked her mother into putting in an appearance after all?

Minutes went by and the only sound was the plinking of cutlery against plates. Neesha picked at her fish. Lucien played with his, drawing scallops in the remoulade with his fork. K.D. minced. Fisher gourmandized. Margaret sawed angrily at her fish and masticated each mouthful very slowly without taking her eyes off Cleon’s face.

Dinah couldn’t stand another second of his cat-and-mouse game. Whatever discombobulation he planned to spring on them, he should man up and get it over with.

“Uncle Cleon, do you have another heir, or what?”

His jaw dropped. “Well, if that don’t beat all. Did you have one of those witchy premonitions of yours, Miss Dinah?”

Neesha clutched her throat melodramatically. “Another heir?”

Cleon hefted himself out of his chair. “Well, the cat’s out of the bag, so I may as well fess up. It seems I got a son I didn’t know I had. He’s another peculiar duck—no address, prone to wanderin’ around in strange places. But I hired me a detective and like Eduardo’s wont to say, vi-ola. I was expectin’ him in time for dinner this evenin’, but…”

“You’re changing your will for a bastard?” Margaret was livid.

“Reparations to the wronged,” said Lucien. “Money’s all he knows how to give.”

Cleon pounded his fist on the table making the glasses and flatware judder. “I can see how my sins stick in y’all’s craw.” Glowering, he pointed his spoon around the table. “Neesha blushin’ and flushin’ like she’s comin’ down with the diphtheria, Maggie squabblin’ over my money and her lingerin’ emotional wounds, Lucien spoutin’ off about how I neglected him, Wendell so mealymouthed I can’t hardly stand it, Thad sassin’ me, Dez dancin’ on my corpse. It’s a sorry verdict on a man’s life.”

He squinched up his face and rubbed his jaw, as if reconsidering, and slowly his glower morphed into a grin. “Aw, but y’all are overwrought. A man forgets how disturbin’ his death can be to the ones he’s leavin’ behind. There ain’t nothin’ I can do now about your old wounds and grievances, but rest easy about the ‘reparations.’ Everybody’s gonna get his just deserts. Bastards notwithstandin.’”

Chapter Seventeen

“Seems like my news has killed y’all’s appetite,” said Cleon. “We may as well adjourn this powwow to the bar in the big room.”

Chairs screaked against the floor as everyone pushed back from the table and stood up. Thad bolted out of the room like a paroled convict and charged noisily up the stairs. Cleon pulled out Neesha’s chair for her. Dinah diagnosed the glint in her eyes as stark hatred, but her back was to Cleon and it was gone in a second.

Tanya began to clear the table, scraping the uneaten pieces of barra into a pail. “Waste of life,” she muttered.

The doctor blundered to his feet, swaying dangerously. He reached for his bottle of Scotch and staggered backward into Tanya. “Clumsy Abo! Wash what you’re doing.”

Tanya fell hard against the table. A glass tipped over and Dinah caught a lap full of red wine. She jumped up, dripping.

Cleon said, “Help him up to his room, Mack, and let him sleep it off.”

“Sod off, Cleon. I’m done taking orders from you. Shtime…time you’re dead.”

Mack hastened around the table and took the doctor firmly around the shoulders. “Come with me, Desmond.”

“Bloody hell, I will.” He shook off Mack’s arm.

“Dez, you’re way over the line,” said Margaret. “Let Mack help you.”

“Shtick it up your jumper, Mags.” He regained his balance and reeled toward the door, bumped into a chair, reoriented himself, and staggered on.

Tanya righted herself and glared after him. “Galka.”

Mack flashed her a look of such alarm that Dinah did a double take. Whatever the word meant, it must be vicious.

He said, “We can clean this up later, Tanya. Please go and make us some coffee.”

“Temperance ain’t Dez’s for-tay,” said Cleon, shaking his head. He wrapped one arm around Neesha and the other around K.D. and squired them out of the room.

Like a vapor off dry ice, Margaret huffed out of the room behind them.

Mack gave Dinah’s dress a helpless, afflicted look, handed her a stack of paper napkins, and hustled Tanya out of the room as if he saw snakes crawling out of her hair.

Dinah sopped up as much of the spilled wine as she could, but the dress was done for. It was her big Christmas splurge, and she was still paying for it.

Wendell said, “You realize, don’t you, Lucien, that this could reduce our share of the estate big-time?”

“I realize,” said Lucien. “I thought you didn’t care about the money.”

“I wouldn’t if he were going to leave it all to Neesha and the kids. But for all we know, this Johnny-come-lately is a confidence man.”

“What if he is? There’s not much we can do about it if Dad decides to leave him the whole caboodle.” The worry lines above Lucien’s nose belied the airy reply.

“Don’t be too sure,” said Wendell. “He hasn’t changed anything yet.”

Lucien’s eyes met Dinah’s briefly as Wendell left the room.

She said, “What did Cleon mean about you not playing straight with him?”

“Nothing. What is this? Get Lucien Day?”

“I would pay to see Wendell slug it out with Cleon,” said Eddie, rolling Lucien’s wheelchair away from the table. “But I don’t care who’s dying or how utterly shattered you are, pumpkin. Next year we’re summering in St. Tropez.”

“Christ Almighty.” Lucien batted away Eddie’s hands and rolled himself toward the door. “I’m going to see what other surprises the patriarch has up his sleeve.”

Eddie rolled his eyes, made a moue of martyr-like forbearance, and went after him.

Left alone, Dinah sat back down and rubbed her tight neck. She’d once watched Nick hot-wire a car. She wondered if she could do it right now. She could be up and dust before anyone noticed. Tempting. But, to cite the estimable K.D., not very mature.

Shit. She pushed herself up, pulled her sticky, wet dress away from her thighs and followed the crowd. She straggled into the great room as Fisher, standing apart from the others, blew a low, wheezing noise through a long, cylindrical tube with Aboriginal symbols painted in shades of ochre.

Cleon was mixing martinis behind the bar. Margaret and Wendell leaned across the barricade, breathing fire.

“You’ve gone too far this time, Cleon,” said Margaret. “How old is this alleged son? Who’s his mother?”

“Have you tested his DNA?” demanded Wendell. “How do you know he’s not conning you?”

Neesha sat across the room, her lips compressed. Her eyes jumped hither and thither as if mapping the fastest route to the exit. It might be in her interest to gloss over unpleasantness, but she was clearly at pains to put a shine on this puppy.

K.D. was nowhere to be seen. It must have taken a dire threat to oust the Constant Observer from the center of the action. Probably off drilling a peephole, thought Dinah.

Lucien had parked his chair beside Neesha. He jiggled his good leg and looked daggers at Cleon. Or was it Eddie?

Eduardo rifled through the liquor bottles, murmuring epithets. “Espèce d’idiot. Espèce de merde.”

Not knowing from which direction the fireworks would come, Dinah installed herself on one of the bar stools.

The doctor wrapped his swollen lips around the long pipe and wheezed again just as Mack appeared in the door.

“Put that down, Desmond.” Mack marched up to him and wrested the instrument out of his hand. “Have some respect.”

“Gimme the bloody thing.” Fisher fumbled the instrument out of Mack’s hands.

Cleon poured himself a martini and sauntered across the room to join Mack. “He can usually hold his liquor better than this.”

Mack was outraged. “You’ve lived in Australia, Cleon. You know the didgeridoo is like a deity to many Aborigines. It represents the phallus of an ancestor.”

“Is blowing it fellatio?” taunted Eddie.

Mack gave him a dirty look and so did Lucien.

“Buncha bloody meddlers,” said Fisher, mouthing the didgeridoo again.

“Here, now, Dez.” Cleon set down his drink and grabbed at the instrument. As he did, Dez began to drool and choke.

“Kkcchhh! Kkcchhh! Kkcchhh!”

Margaret started across the room. “Something’s wrong with him.”

“He’s skunk-faced is what’s wrong.” Cleon righted him and slapped him on the back. “Scotch go down the wrong way, Dez?”

“Kkcchhh!” Fisher’s eyes bulged. He tore at his beard and his throat.

Lucien leapt out of his chair on one leg. “Somebody give him the Heimlich.”

Mack tried to get his arms around him, but he flailed and rasped and writhed, hitting out wildly, fighting for air.

“Kkcchhh! Kkcchhh! Kkcchhh!”

“It’s a fishbone!” cried Margaret.

“Or a heart attack.” Wendell elbowed her aside as Fisher toppled to the floor.

“Does he take digitalis?” Eduardo knelt down and loosened his collar.

“I don’t think so,” said Wendell. “Does anyone have aspirin?”

“I’ll get them,” said Dinah, running for the door.

“No, here.” Lucien took a bottle out of his pocket and pitched it to Wendell.

Wendell pried apart the doctor’s jaws. “His tongue is huge. He can’t swallow.”

“Somebody start CPR,” cried Margaret. “Clear his throat.”

“I’m CPR certified,” said Mack. He pushed Eduardo and Wen out of his way and knelt beside the doctor. He tilted his head back, held the doctor’s nose closed and blew into his mouth. Nothing. He pumped the doctor’s chest, counting each compression aloud. When he got to thirty, he stopped.

Nothing. The doctor lay stone still, his eyes staring up at the ceiling.

Mack laid an ear against the doctor’s chest, felt for a pulse. “He’s dead.”

Margaret slumped onto the sofa, her hands over her mouth.

Cleon leaned over the body for what seemed a very long time. He closed Fisher’s eyes and when he looked up, his own glittered with vitriol. “One of you geniuses poisoned the wrong man.”

Part II

Chapter Eighteen

Dinah woke with a crick in her neck and a muddy taste in her mouth. She opened her eyes. Motes of suspended dust glinted in the gray sunlight and a prodigious cobweb glistened in the corner of the ceiling. The smell of mothballs assaulted her nostrils. Somebody had covered her with a stinky wool blanket. She sat up and flexed her neck. Nothing looked familiar. She swiveled her eyes around the room and met the glassy stare of a stuffed boar.

Jerusalem’s bells!

She threw off the blanket and stood up. How could she have fallen asleep in her wine-drenched dress three feet from the spot where Desmond Fisher had died in agony? How could Lucien have let her? The fiasco came back in a flurry of confused images—the doctor’s purple face, distended tongue, and rasping breath. Then shouting, the futile attempt at CPR, the interminable wait for the police who never came.

She heard Cleon’s voice outside the window.

“Since nobody had any quarrel with the doctor, I reckon I was the one supposed to die.”

She hurried to the window. Keeping out of sight behind the frowzy-smelling curtains, she looked out onto the veranda and saw him gesturing and orating as if he were summing up to a jury. He was unshaven and had dark circles under his eyes, but his voice resonated with confidence and conviction.

“I’ve let it be known that I mean to alter my will. I expect somebody tried to put the quietus on that plan and bungled the job.”

She moved to the other side of the window for a look at his audience. The cavalry had arrived, or two of them anyway. One sported three white chevrons on his sleeve and a pair of horn-rims on his nose. He looked serious and intellectual. His colleague had two chevrons, sloping shoulders, and ropy arms. He kept his head down and took notes.

The extra chevron asked the questions. “Do you have reason to suspect a specific individual, Mr. Dobbs?”

“No. I can’t hardly stand to think…no.”

“If it was poison, as you think, sir, do you have any idea how or when it was administered?”

“We did have a house full of open wine and liquor bottles. But I’m just an ol’ country lawyuh, constables. I’ll defer to your forensic experts.”

Dinah stifled a sneeze and left the window. Cleon’s poor-old-country-boy shtick sounded affected and phony in the circumstances. If he believed somebody had tried to poison him, he needn’t be coy about the rest of his assumptions. Whatever the cause of the doctor’s death, one thing was certain: without him, Cleon’s suicide was a no-go. Cleon would be forced to go home and avail himself of one of his guns, or stay here and die on God’s clock. And if an autopsy of Fisher’s body did detect poison, how could they know who the intended victim was? Every member of the family including Cleon, himself, would become a suspect.

You’re having a nightmare, she told herself. In another minute you’ll wake up in Seattle and every rotten thing you think has happened over the last three days will have been a figment of your sick imagination.

The smell of coffee seeped into the room. It’s part of the dream, she told herself. The verisimilitude part, like the plastic cigarette holder she descried on the floor next to her foot. Had it been poisoned? For no sane reason, she kicked it under the sofa.

Her dress was a mishmash of stains and wrinkles and her hair felt like a rat’s nest. She hoped she didn’t encounter any policemen before she had a chance to make herself decent, but what the hell. The need for caffeine trumped vanity.

She followed her nose to the kitchen. It was deserted. There were three pots labeled reg, decaf, and tea and a tray of mismatched mugs. She helped herself to a mug of reg and sat down at the wooden table in the center of the room. The sun burned through the dirty windows and the caffeine began to burn through the fog in her brain. Sadly, she had to conclude that she was awake in real time, in the Northern Territory of Australia, in what was shaping up to be a very nasty predicament.

Why was Cleon so sure it was murder? Desmond Fisher was well into his sixties. Old birds dropped off the twig every day for all kinds of reasons—salmonella, for example. Maybe his cod had gone off. And hadn’t he mentioned a liver condition? He drank like a fish. Maybe it was a case of self-poisoning by alcohol.

But if it was murder, who was supposed to die and how and when had the poison been administered? There’d been lots of wine breathing on the sideboard, but they’d all drunk from the same bottles. And if it was the liquor that was poisoned, everybody knew that Cleon drank gin and Fisher drank Scotch so there could be no mistake there. Maybe the didgeridoo was poisoned. She tried to recall whether anyone had done anything furtive or odd at dinner, but it was all a blur.

Her eyes fell on a large metal box at the end of the table with the words “POLICE PROPERTY” stenciled in black. She got up, tore off a paper towel from the roll beside the sink and used it to lift the lid. Inside were two long-bladed knives bagged in plastic.

Knives? She must be hallucinating. Why would the police bag knives? Had somebody been stabbed while she dozed? Surely Lucien would have woken her up for a knife fight.

Knives. She racked her brain. The kitchen was Tanya’s jurisdiction and she’d be the one in charge of the knives. Could she have shivved the doctor when he plowed into her in the dining room and he was too drunk to realize it? But that wasn’t possible. There’d have been blood. The doctor choked. He gagged. He turned purple and wheezed, but he didn’t bleed. She’d definitely have noticed if he was bleeding. So why did the police bag these knives?

“What’re you doing?”

“Nothing.” She swung around as a rangy guy with uncanny green eyes strolled into the room.

“Nothing’s an underrated occupation. In relation to the infinite, we are as nothing. But in relation to nothing at all, we’re everything.” He smiled an enigmatic smile. “Even after we die, we’re something. Me, I believe in karma. What you do in this life determines your phylum in the next. Reincarnation. I see myself coming back as something friendly and vegetarian, maybe a koala. I didn’t have the pleasure of meeting the murder victim. What do you think he’ll come back as?”

She arched an eyebrow. “Are you a policeman?”

“Not in this lifetime. I’m Seth Farraday, long-lost son of Cleon Dobbs.”

Fisher’s death had driven the new heir completely out of her mind and at this hour of the morning, she didn’t have the bandwidth for this egotistical sage-of-the-Orient. She went back for more coffee. “What do you want?”

“In the cosmic sense?”

“In the kitchen sense.”

“Tea. And you needn’t look so guilty.”

“I don’t. I’m not.”

“You do, even if you’re not.”

He was annoyingly attractive. She raked her hair out of her face and tried to bring off an air of nonchalance. “There’s the pot. Pour it yourself.”

He poured himself a mug of tea and sat down, smiling.

She sat down across from him. “When did you arrive?”

“I don’t know. Two-ish. I got delayed.”

“And the police? When did they arrive?”

“Around five-thirty, I think.”

Over an hour ago, according to her watch. She drank some more coffee. “Have the police questioned you already?”

“Oh, yes. Caught hell for moving the body. Of course, everyone thought the old geezer had died of natural causes.”

“That isn’t what Cleon thinks.”

“Everyone except Cleon. Isn’t that what you think?”

“I don’t know. If Cleon thought Fisher had been murdered, why did he let anyone move the body?”

“Margaret sent up a hue and cry.
Don’t let him just lie there, Wendell. Close his eyes
,
take him to his room, cover his body, the children mustn’t see this.
A compulsive tidier-upper, the first Mrs. Dobbs. Classic anal personality.”

“You psychoanalyze people rather quickly.”

“I find most people are pretty scrutable. I’d say Wendell is a textbook mama’s boy and Lucien is an aging paradigm of the angry young man.” He nodded toward the metal box. “What’s in there?”

“I don’t know.” Maybe it wasn’t his mouth that smiled so much as the corners of his eyes. She resolved to concentrate extra hard on disliking him. “What was it that delayed you, Mr. Farraday?”

“Seth. Or call me cousin if you like.”

“No thanks.”

He shrugged. “My meeting with Cleon’s P.I. ran late and, truth to tell, I wasn’t all that eager.” He turned his mug around and around in his hands, a thoughtful look on his face. “Do you believe somebody in the family tried to kill Cleon before he could change his will?”

“No.” She sounded more emphatic than she felt.

“Maybe Wendell or Lucien liked their get under the old will better.”

“Maybe you want Cleon to think that so he’ll leave their share to you.”

“Kill the doc, delay Cleon’s death, and throw suspicion on the rest of the field. That’s clever. Are you a lawyer?”

“No.”

“Detective?”

“No.”

“Fiction writer?”

“Very funny.”

“What then?”

“I do a lot of things.” Why did she feel so defensive? She couldn’t care less what this supercilious article thought of her or her career path. “And what, pray, do you do?”

“I’m a freelance photographer. I mostly take pictures of clear-cut left by unscrupulous loggers, mountain gorillas butchered by poachers, elephants slaughtered for their ivory. That sort of thing.”

By extreme dint of will, she kept her face neutral.

His eyebrows went up. “Sorry if I’ve grossed you out.”

She’d obviously overshot neutral. The addition of a greenie to the plot hit her like a wind shear. Not that a few photos and an aggrieved tone made him a fanatic. He was probably citing a few random examples from his portfolio. A butchered gorilla would stick in anyone’s mind. But he probably took pictures of weddings and horse races, too. “You must work for a lot of different people and take a passing interest in whatever they’re paying you to photograph.”

“Protecting the earth isn’t a passing interest. It’s a core value and it has nothing to do with money. I only work for people who care about the planet, and against those who don’t.” His eyes had hardened and his tone was devoutly aggrieved.

Dinah had one of her bad feelings. “I don’t suppose you care for dragnet fishing.”

“It sucks. Why?”

“Forget it. I’m going upstairs to shower.”