McNally's Bluff (6 page)

“That’s what I do, Lieutenant. Put on shows. I thought this town could do with a good swift kick in the arse to get them off their high horses.”

The man was cantankerous and uncouth. The former can be forgiven, but not the latter.

“Who are the actors you hired for this show?”

“They’re not actors,” Hayes protested. “They’re carny folks, down here on tour. I hired them for the evening.”

“How many of them?”

“A dozen, give or take. If you think they hurt Marlena you’re barking up the wrong tree. They left right after their gig.”

“What time was that?” Oscar went on.

“I told them to quit at nine. Then I presented Marlena. Didn’t McNally tell you all this?”

“Indulge me,” Oscar insisted.

“I started the crowd picking names to match up for the search for the goal. You know about that?” Oscar nodded and Hayes continued. “Then Tilly came down and told me Marlena was feeling poorly and wanted to rest. She would come down for the buffet after we got back from the maze.”

“Tilly is your maid?” Oscar put in.

“Matilda Thompson,” Hayes said. “She’s been with us for a few years. Hired as Marlena’s assistant and stayed on after we sold the carnival and came here.”

Oscar was consulting his notes as Hayes talked and I could discern no discrepancies between my version of the night’s events and what Hayes was expounding.

“We were in the maze about an hour, wouldn’t you say, McNally?” Hayes now turned to me.

“A little more than an hour,” I said. “It would have been after ten when we came back in.”

“That’s when Tilly called down to say Marlena was gone. Just like that—gone. I went up and searched all the rooms on the second floor, including the attic which was locked from the outside, so how could she be up there?” Hayes sounded as if he were on the brink of hysteria. “And why would she be up there?”

“Calm down, Mr. Hayes,” Oscar advised. “I don’t know any of the answers right now and I’m not insensitive to your loss, I’m just doing my duty. It’s best to get the facts when they’re still fresh than later when our imaginations or wishful thinking color the picture.”

Somewhat mollified, Hayes told how search parties were sent to scour the house and grounds, “I hired McNally on the spot and he told me to call you which I did because you’re here, right?”

The lieutenant glared at me and I could hear Al Rogoff suppress a chuckle. “You didn’t tell me you were working for Mr. Hayes,” Oscar griped.

“It was a very informal hiring, Lieutenant,” I offered in defense of my omission.

Hayes quickly jumped in with, “What do you need to make it formal, McNally? A down payment?” And I added acerbity to Hayes’s other endearing qualities.

“We can discuss it at a more appropriate time, Mr. Hayes,” I stated with what dignity I still possessed.

“So,” Oscar said, summing up, “the maid left Mrs. Hayes resting in her room and went to her own room for a break. When she returns an hour later to rouse Mrs. Hayes, she finds that Mrs. Hayes is not where she left her. In fact, Mrs. Hayes has disappeared.

“You were all in the maze and the caterers were in the great room and the kitchen. No one could come down the stairs from the upper floor without being seen, and no one was seen coming down.”

“So how did Marlena get in the maze?” Hayes demanded once again.

Al Rogoff, whose ability to suffer fools had reached its limit, bravely said what we all knew to be the truth: “She either walked there alive, or was carried there dead.”

I
DIVIDE MY TIME
between the family manse on Ocean Boulevard and a humble cottage in Juno. The amenities at Chez McNally include my beloved parents; our housekeeper-cook, Ursi Olson, whose culinary skills are a savory blend of haute cuisine and down-home scrumptious; her husband, Jamie, our houseman of few words and many hats; and last in order but not in rank, Hobo, the family canine. My digs are on the third floor beneath a leaky mansard roof.

The Juno cottage contains Georgia O’Hara, whom I affectionately call Georgy girl, or just plain Georgy. She is a green-eyed blonde state trooper who is short on the domestic arts and long on sex appeal. If I ever find an accommodating genie in a bottle, I will ask him to grant me Ursi Olson in Georgy girl’s body. But askin’ ain’t gettin’, as the mammy of that other green-eyed O’Hara girl so wisely lectured, leaving me no choice but to commute between the two.

Of late I find myself spending more time in the cottage than the manse. It began, I remember, by bringing in a change of shorts and socks, plus a toothbrush and razor, in order to start the day without telltale signs of having camped out, so to speak. But how
tempus fugit
when you’re having fun. Now, I seem to have half my wardrobe there, commandeering the lion’s share of drawer and closet space, both of which were rather sparse to begin with. It’s cozy, to say the least.

That both Connie Garcia and I have taken up with partners some decade younger than ourselves I ascribe more to kismet than the ruthless game of brinkmanship too often engaged in by parted lovers. Connie and I enjoyed a long, open relationship wherein I was allowed to cheat and she wasn’t. Being an unabashed chauvinist I found the arrangement smashing, as our English cousins call having fun.

When Connie began talking about her biological clock and playing Golden Oldies like
Apple Blossom Time
by the sisters Andrew whenever I came to dinner, I began to cheat in earnest. It was then that I tripped over a corpse in a tacky motel and got on Lieutenant Georgia O’Hara’s most wanted list. Needless to say, I surrendered.

Connie, visiting one of her five thousand cousins in Miami, attached herself to the gyrating hips of Alejandro Gomez y Zapata on a conga line and appears to be having trouble letting go. As a clever tunesmith put it,
The music stopped, but they kept on dancing.
That I have found solace in a pretty, younger woman is, I feel, commendable. That Connie takes comfort in the arms of a handsome, younger man, I find appalling, and tell her so every chance I get. But that’s kismet, not sour grapes.

The Juno cottage is actually the guest house of a decaying antebellum mansion, Georgy’s landlady being Annabel Lee Hudson, an ancient recluse who came of age during the last big conflict and saw a German spy behind every palm tree. When that war ended she scarcely had a moment’s peace before the atom bomb and the red menace replaced the Germans in her nightmares. When Russia gave up sharing in favor of competing, Annabel Lee got some shuteye.

Then along came the terrorists to keep her on constant vigil behind her beaded curtains, scrutinizing the long driveway leading to the cottage, ready to sound the alarm should anyone in a turban drive past. Annabel Lee has grown used to my red Miata and, of course, the caravan of fast-food delivery vans that are Georgy girl’s supply line.

Gaining entrance with my very own key I saw that Georgy had left a light on for me in the parlor, or had forgotten to switch off the lamp before retiring. I closed it and felt my way to the bedroom which, given the size of the cottage, is impossible to miss, and began undressing in the dark. I have always slept in half pajamas, the top actually, but Georgy has bought me a nightshirt that is a T-shirt that comes to the knees. I find it rather comfortable except for the fact that the gesture is more the offering of a wife than a lover. This scares me.

Georgy sleeps in a variety of pastel-colored shorty nightgowns with her blonde hair in two pigtails. The overall effect is rather startling and the reason I keep transporting more and more of my belongings from manse to cottage. Tonight’s frilly gown was pink and I saw it stir as I put on my nightshirt and took down my briefs.

“You always take off your shorts after you put on your nightshirt,” Georgy observed.

“If I knew you were watching I would have reversed the process. I thought you were asleep.”

“I heard your car come up the drive,” she said, raising her lovely head from the pillow and modestly bringing the bedsheet to her chin. Georgy is so fair she seems to glow in the dark like an apparition that might fade with the dawn, but I knew the morning sun would only serve to make the dream a reality. “How was the party?”

“Not bad until the hostess dropped dead.”

“You’re kidding?” Georgy said, moving to sit up.

“I wish I were,” I told her, “and so, I’m sure, would the hostess.”

Wide awake now, she asked, “Accident?”

“The jury is still out. Why don’t you go back to bed and I’ll tell you about it in the morning.”

Glancing at the night table clock, she reminded me, “It is morning, and you know I won’t sleep until you tell me what happened.”

“I have to get a bicarb. My tummy is talking to me.”

Georgy propped herself up by placing my pillow over hers for support. “Your tummy is telling you that less is better. The bicarb is in the bathroom.”

As I made my way to the bathroom I recalled Matthew Hayes telling us that barbiturates were the staple of the carnival’s medicine cabinet. Thanks to Georgy girl’s idea of food, bicarbonate of soda is our staple of choice. I dare not say this aloud as besides her beauty, Lieutenant O’Hara is also the Annie Oakley of the firing range.

I dropped two tablets into a glass of water and as I waited for them to self-destruct, I called out, “I only picked.”

“You mean you picked the plate clean.”

I didn’t have the nerve to tell her it was a table I had picked clean. I drank the lemon-flavored brew and hoped for the best. Georgy had switched on the bedside lamp, looking like a child in her pigtails waiting to hear a fairy tale with a happy ending. I sat on the bed and told her about a party with a deadly ending. I had repeated the story so often, and rehashed it in my mind so many times, I could recite it by rote and did.

When done, Georgy opened her mouth to speak and I put my finger over her lips. “Don’t say it,” I ordered.

“Impossible.” She said it anyway.

“Then I was witness to a miracle,” I said, going to the closet and feeling shirt pockets until I hit on a pack of English Ovals, the only brand of cigarettes I used to smoke. I am down to two, maybe three, a day and felt the need for one now, thinking I would have another the next time I witnessed a miracle.

“Time of death?” Georgy grilled.

“Georgy girl, we won’t know that until the medical examiner performs the PM, but you know time of death is not an exacting science with parameters of give or take some several hours.”

“I also know that Eberhart asked the doc for a ballpark estimate and the doc gave it to him because they always do.”

“Okay,” I said, lighting up, “based on a career of examining fresh corpses, the doc guessed she had been dead some two to four hours.”

“And that was when?”

“It had to be after eleven by then, maybe closer to midnight.”

“You saw her as Venus at nine.” The little girl in pigtails was now the policewoman in pursuit of the facts. “That makes the time of death shortly thereafter or approximately three hours before the doc saw her. Good for the doc and
cherchez
la maid.”

I removed an eyebrow tweezer from a glass coaster and declared it an ashtray. “Lieutenant, we don’t even know the cause of death as yet.”

“If she had checked out via natural causes she would have been found on that chaise lounge and not in that ridiculous maze...” Georgy almost leaped out of the bed. “
The Lady from Shanghai
,” she announced with glee.

I am a Hollywood buff who can hold his own in the World Series of trivia games, but Georgy girl is a true connoisseur of celluloid. I speak of the industry’s output from inception to the middle of the last century when they stopped making movies and began making something called “films.” Connie would tolerate an evening with Fred and Ginger only to placate her biological clock while Georgy likes nothing better than to pop some corn and sing along with Nelson and Jeannette.

I am familiar with Orson Welles’s cult film noir,
The Lady from Shanghai,
mostly because he turned his stunning redhead wife into a stunning blonde for the film.

Georgy now reminded me that the film’s final sequence took place in a mirror-maze with... “The good guy and the bad guy shooting it out and hitting mirror images of each other. So many broken mirrors everyone connected with the movie had a zillion years of bad luck.”

“Interesting, but what’s the point?” I asked, happily puffing away.

“Mirror images. Nothing is what it seems. That’s the point.”

“Go to sleep, Georgy.”

“Look, McNally, if she wasn’t found on her chaise lounge she was murdered and carried to the maze, or was led to the maze and killed there.”

Which was what Al Rogoff had said. Marlena Marvel either walked there alive, or was carried there dead. But why and how was the enigma. Why kill her in one place and carry the body to another place? How could she have gotten from the second floor of the house to the goal of the maze, alive or dead, without being seen by literally dozens of people?

“You saw her on the second-floor balcony at about nine,” Georgy reiterated. “Then you all went to the maze.”

“Right.” My English Oval was near extinction and I wished for another miracle. “We were all over that damn maze. Up and down every pathway and finally inside the goal. Marlena was not there. Believe me.”

“And when the party moved out, the caterers moved into the great room which is in full view of the staircase leading to the second floor.”

“Right again,” I said. “But we found Marlena Marvel, dead, in the goal of the maze—and don’t say it...”

“I won’t say impossible,” she assured me.

“You just did.” I doused my smoke and got into bed telling her of Joe Gallo’s on-the-spot coverage of the crime. “His name will be all over the newspapers and airwaves tomorrow—or today, that is.”

“Joe? Was he there?”

“Big as life,” I said, “and with Fitz, of all people.”

“Who’s he?”

“Not he, my dear. She. Elizabeth Fitzwilliams.”

“Really? What does she look like?”

I thought a moment, then said, “Like that lady from Shanghai, only better.”