Honeymoon With Murder (20 page)

The end of the middle pier. That was where Annie and Max had breakfasted, two mornings in a row. It provided a panoramic view of Nightingale Courts, the inlet, and the shore. Could Jesse have been waiting for someone to come home?

And it was Thursday night that Adele had spotted Jesse Penrick using the pay phone at Jerry’s Gas ’N Go.

Ophelia’s voice took on a singsong quality. “Malevolent old man, but he got what he gave. That’s what everyone comes to in the end, their just reward.”

“Is that what you think he got?” Annie asked. “His just reward?”

But Ophelia refused to be drawn. “As you live, so shall you die. Today. Yesterday. Or tomorrow.” Laurel nodded.

Annie’s small store of patience was rapidly depleting. Was it a sense of constantly having to deal with utter idiots that made Holmes so irritable?

“Back to Jesse,” Annie said crisply. “Did you see anything else that struck you as unusual?”

Slowly Ophelia shook her head, and the cerise turban quivered. The cat, irritated, jumped to the floor and ducked beneath a table draped in velvet. A small cloud of dust rose from the carpet.

“How about Saturday? When did you see him Saturday?”

Laurel interrupted. “We were out for a sunrise walk. To contemplate. I felt it
most
appropriate. I wanted all the forces of life to be in harmony for the wedding.”

“They didn’t cooperate, did they?” Annie asked dryly.

Laurel was too ladylike to do anything more than flash a glance of sad disappointment at her daughter-in-law. “We cannot,” she said with great dignity, “harness earthbound spirits to our will. But, on the whole, the universe was in delightful alignment at the moment you and dear Maxwell exchanged your vows.”

Annie was already sorry for lashing out. “Laurel, really, you did such a grand job. Everything was perfectly lovely.”

“After all,” Ophelia offered brightly, “he didn’t pass on the other side until just past midnight.”

That made it all right, of course.

Annie tried desperately to recapture the thread of her interrogation. “Saturday,” she repeated sturdily. “When did you see him Saturday?”

“Oh, it was during our walk. He was coming across the inlet in his boat, and Ingrid was waiting for him on the pier. She was furious!”

This was the kind of witness that could do great damage to Ingrid in court. Annie thought how artfully Antony
Maitland could get a witness to rephrase his conclusion. “Now, Ophelia, actually, Ingrid was merely informing him that she was determined that he should move. Isn’t that correct?”

“Of course, that’s what she said. And that might have been the end of it,” Laurel interjected, “until he threatened to reveal some things that were going on in some of the cabins.” A delicate frown marred her tace. “And Ingrid, I’m sorry to say, was swept by fury—and she lost her temper!”

With the very best will in the world, Laurel was sealing Ingrid’s fate!

Annie sighed. Antony Maitland never had to deal with Laurel.

Then the import of the words registered.

“Laurel! He threatened to go
public
with something he knew about the other residents?”

Laurel and Ophelia nodded.

“Could this have been overheard?”

The blond head and turbaned head bobbed in unison.

Annie whooped.

Ophelia eyed her warily, but Laurel merely nodded imperturbably.

“Don’t you see?” Annie demanded. “Now no one can claim Ingrid has the only motive! Oh, that’s terrific.” Jesse’s final nasty barb opened a nice field of suspects for study, and Posey would hear all about it, as soon as Annie could get to him.

Annie pressed Ophelia for her knowledge of bad feelings among the residents of Nightingale Courts. Ophelia confirmed what Annie had learned about Penrick and Duane, and said she’d seen Penrick knock occasionally at Adele’s back door, but she knew nothing about Penrick’s relationship with either Mavis or Smith.

“And what did
you
think about Jesse Penrick?” Annie asked finally.

“He was a nasty little man,” Ophelia snapped. “I hated everything about him.” The heavily lipsticked mouth began to quiver. “He killed Barney, I know he did. He didn’t like cats, ordered me to keep Barney away from his steps.” Tears spilled down the pudgy cheeks. “He put out poisoned
food, I know he did. And Barney came to the back door, he
dragged
himself to the door, and he was so sick, and then he died. I wish I could have poisoned Jesse. I’d have liked to watch Jesse Penrick die.”

The wind kicked up swirls of dust as Annie stood between Ophelia’s and Jesse’s cabins. She gave a quick glance toward the command table, but no one was looking her way. Hurriedly, she darted past Ophelia’s carport, then ran to Jesse’s back steps. It only took a second to use Ingrid’s master key and unlock the door.

As she slipped inside, she brooded over Ophelia’s bitter words. How would she feel if someone poisoned Agatha? Agatha! She must remember to drop by the store and put down fresh food and water before she left for the mainland to see Posey.

Annie stood with her back to the door and surveyed Jesse’s kitchen. It was the same size, of course, as Ingrid’s, but there was nothing cheerful about this dim room. It smelled sour, and she spotted an overflowing garbage pail next to the refrigerator. There were no bright yellow curtains, as at Ingrid’s, only plain off-white window shades. Annie switched on the overhead light, gave a little shrug, and opened the nearest cupboard. Might as well start there. Cans filled two shelves, boxed goods a third. She was turning away, when she paused.

How odd!

The canned goods were arranged according to contents, and they were in alphabetical order. Asparagus soup. Bean soup. Chowder. Minestrone. Onion soup. Beets. Carrots. Corn. Green beans. Spinach. Sweet potatoes. The same with the boxes. Bisquick. Oatmeal. Raisin bran.

Each can sat equidistant from its neighbor.

She poked into the broom closet. Everything in a particular spot, no higgledy-piggledy, let-things-land-where-they-might, as in Annie’s kitchen. Jesse Penrick had fashioned for himself a geometric environment. A place for everything and everything in its place. He was not only hateful, he was, to slapdash Annie, really weird.

But there were no pine needles anywhere.

In the living room, Jesse’s passion for exactitude was reflected in the precise arrangement of his pipes. Nine of them, all aligned a half inch apart along the back of a pine desk.

But the lid was ajar on the tobacco canister. On closer inspection, she spotted shreds of tobacco on the desktop.

The center desk drawer wasn’t altogether closed.

The sofa cushions were askew.

Magazines were jammed haphazardly into a rack beside an easy chair.

A man doesn’t alphabetize his canned goods, meticulously arrange his broom closet, align his pipes, then turn into a slob with the rest of his possessions.

Had the police searched these rooms?

Not in this manner. Chief Saulter demanded professionalism from his staff. Billy Cameron would never disarrange a desk, scatter pipe tobacco. Even Posey, with all his asinine traits, wouldn’t leave a mess like this.

And, had the police searched, they would have neatly docketed papers, recorded information. They wouldn’t have pawed about in the tobacco canister.

No. Not the police.

Annie felt the same unmistakable tingle she’d experienced earlier that morning on the pier when she realized the murderer had watched Ingrid and Jesse quarrel Saturday morning. Once again, she felt close, so close, to the killer, who had been here—looking for something.

She found further traces of a hurried search in the bedroom, clothes rumpled in their drawers, a lack of precision in the arrangement of the hangers in the closet.

Looking for something. Something small, obviously, if it could be hidden in a tobacco canister. And the search had to have been made by the murderer. A petty thief wouldn’t have left behind the TV or the wooden tray on the bedroom dresser with its neat piles of pennies, nickels, dimes, and quarters.

Annie couldn’t know what the murderer had sought—or whether it had been found—but she gave it a try. Twenty minutes later, she could have filled out an exhaustive report on everything from Jesse’s choice in toothpaste (Gleem) to
the depressing lack of personal mementoes. No photographs. No letters. Nothing to indicate he had not started and ended his life in this dingy cabin as an old man. And nothing whatsoever to indicate what someone else had sought here.

But she hit paydirt in the lower right-hand drawer of the pine desk, and suddenly Jesse Penrick came clear in her mind, dreadfully clear. She’d known him as a snoopy old man, poking into the trash barrels for anything of value, and she’d learned that he liked to hurt people, the crushed car on Duane’s doorstep, the scarlet A on Mavis’s mailbox. Now, she knew him for what he was, a scavenger of human frailty—for profit.

Perhaps the wonder was not that Jesse had been murdered, but that he’d lived so long.

He kept careful records, including the individual payment schedules.

The folder on Mavis made her the angriest. There were several photographs of Mavis and Billy, and the final neat notation,
Sept. 15, $5
.

The sorry, sorry bastard. So that’s what Mavis meant when she started to explain that “it was all worked out” with Jesse. No, he wouldn’t inform Mavis’s husband of her whereabouts, not so long as she paid him five dollars a week.

Tom Smith’s folder contained a single clipping headlined,
WHERE ARE THEY NOW?
It was yellowed and the dateline was in August several years ago. The story sketched the backgrounds of nine anti-war activists of the late sixties, who had disappeared after bombings or draft-board break-ins. Six were still wanted for various crimes. There were several smudgy photographs. The sums listed on this payment schedule were irregular but began about a week after the article was published and ranged from ten to forty dollars weekly.

Obviously, Jesse kept a close eye on his neighbor’s success with his miniatures and adjusted his rate accordingly.

She puzzled over Adele’s folder. It contained a list of payments, averaging a hundred dollars a month, but it was harder to discern what Jesse had found in Adele’s background
to provide a basis for blackmail. There were only two other items in the folder, a newspaper clipping and a map. The clipping was a three-column photograph of an attractive woman in her mid-thirties standing before a classic antebellum mansion. The cutline read:
Lovely Susan Prescott welcomes guests to Hounds Hill for the April house-and-garden tours
. The hand-drawn map of the island contained a half-dozen or so residential streets. Each street was marked with two addresses, one circled. And that was all. Quickly, Annie copied the map in her notebook.

There was no payment schedule in Duane’s folder, only a slender stack of news stories on the deaths of Mary and Sheila Webb, Duane’s arrest for drunk driving and his conviction (two-year sentence, eight months served, remainder suspended).

Jesse had underlined in red several dates in the obituaries, Sheila’s birthday, Mary and Duane’s wedding anniversary. That last date was September 19, the day Annie and Max wed, the day Jesse Penrick was murdered.

The wind rattled a loose shutter on the roof of Duane’s cabin. Annie knocked for the third time on the kitchen door.

He might easily be in there, sitting and drinking in that dark, overcrowded room.

Annie fingered Ingrid’s master key. She was a little bit afraid of Duane. There was an aura of unsatisfied violence and anger around him. She shook her head impatiently. Aura, indeed. Had she spent too much time around Ophelia and Laurel? Still, it took a little internal prompting to decide to open the door. (Think what Cordelia Gray would do. Or Norah Mulcahaney, if she had a search warrant.) Inspired by such stalwart examples, Annie inserted the key, unlocked the door, and poked her head inside, calling out, “Mr. Webb?” She
could
pretend she’d found the door unlocked.

She edged inside when there was no answer, her heart hammering. It took only minutes to be certain Duane was absent. His cereal bowl and coffee mug were still on the kitchen table along with a crumpled morning newspaper. A
brown cotton sweater was tossed carelessly on the telephone table in the living room, the bed unmade in the bedroom. But there was no telltale trail of pine needles.

The printer clattered, vibrating on its plastic stand. The printout dangled to the floor and began to curl.

Max relaxed in his chair, now almost horizontal, and studied the ceiling. The dossiers were done, and they contained a wealth of information, birth and death dates, job histories, gossip, personality profiles. Somewhere in all that jumble of fact and fancy, there had to be a lead to Penrick’s murderer.

Penrick himself turned out to be damned peculiar, as well as consistently unpleasant. One of those “Step on a crack, break my back” mentalities, shrilly insistent that his personal belongings be arranged with meticulous order, refusing to permit odd or irregular-shaped furniture or decorations in his house, always wearing a navy blue cotton turtleneck and tight dungarees.

Max decided to read it all from scratch, give it a fresh eye. He was just the fellow to find a revealing bit of information. Pouring himself a fresh cup of coffee, he settled down with his papers, with only an occasional pause to admire the outstanding job he’d done.

Adele Prescott’s antique-filled living room astounded Annie. Despite the rooms small size, a Bristol glass chandelier hung from the ceiling, casting a bright glow on a collection of Meissen china plates, nineteenth-century papiér-mâché trays with gold leaf and mother-of-pearl, three American rococo pier-glass mirrors, two Chinese porcelain vases, and two gilt torcheres. Each piece was the finest of its kind. Annie knew these were not reproductions.

Her cheeks flushed with pleasure, Adele pointed out several pieces to Annie, taking special pride in a pair of elaborately dressed Japanese dolls of the late Edo period and a green stone mask from Teotihuacan. “You like my things,” she observed with satisfaction, and she smiled. It
was the first warmth she’d ever exhibited, and Annie felt chilled.