Neil shook his head. “Is it just me? I can’t follow that.”
“I’m a lawyer,” Roxanne noted, “and even
I
find the setup confusing.”
“It was
meant
to be confusing,” Lucy assured us. “With the various tenant farmers, the trust in Milwaukee, and finally the shell corporation in Minnesota, Ben created the illusion that the property had changed hands several times over the years—but he still owns that farm. The barn is now painted pink. It’s Star-Spangled Video.”
“
What?
” Neil, Roxanne, and I asked in unison.
Needing to verify what I’d heard, I asked, “Tenelli owns Star-Spangled Video?” As I spoke, I turned again to glimpse the video image of Rascal Tyner in the next room.
“The land,” confirmed Lucy, “not the business. In fact, the business itself changed hands some years ago, bought out by a larger outfit based in New York. The new owners assumed the cheap, ironclad long-term lease from the Minnesota corporation. They had no way of knowing who the actual owner of the land was, and Tenelli had no way of knowing that there were any serious prospects of development along the highway. Now, everything’s changed, and the land would be worth a fortune if he could get rid of the porn shop.”
“Suddenly,” said Roxanne, “it seems that the revered Dr. Tenelli had a very strong motive indeed for making sure that Carrol Cantrell would not defend the First Amendment at the upcoming obscenity trial.”
“Amazing,” said Neil, shaking his head. “This really explains a lot. Mark saw Tenelli’s car parked at the porn shop this week. I wonder what game he’s playing.”
Was a game being played? Thinking through Lucy’s revelations, following them to their logical conclusion, I again drank in the sight of the beautiful young man frozen, leaping, on the screen.
Rascal Tyner’s Hottest Hits…Rascal Tyner’s Hottest Hits…Rascal Tyner’s Hottest Hits…
Then I gasped. “My God, that’s it!”
“Well, duh,” said Roxanne. “Of
course
‘that’s it.’”
“What now?” asked Lucy, ready for action.
I thought quickly. “I need to tell Doug. Then he can call Tenelli and ask him to meet us on some pretext—anything. Does Glee happen to be at the office?”
Lucy answered, “That’s where I left her. She was working late on her report of the opening of the miniatures convention.”
“Perfect,” I said. “Swing back and get her—and ask her to phone Grace Lord. She can open the coach house for us. That’s where I want all of us to meet, there at the crime scene.”
“Let me guess,” Roxanne said playfully. “We’re all going to try to establish whether Dr. Tenelli had the opportunity to visit Carrol Cantrell on the morning of his murder.”
I paused, smiled. “Perhaps.”
Minutes later, I pulled into Grace Lord’s driveway. Getting out of the car with Neil and Roxanne, I noticed that Sheriff Pierce had already arrived. He stood near the back door of the house, talking with Grace under the porch light.
“Wait here,” I suggested to Neil and Roxanne as I stepped from the driveway up to the porch.
Pierce turned from his conversation with Grace to tell me, “Dr. Tenelli was just finishing dinner. I asked him to meet us ‘at the crime scene,’ as you asked, and he said he’d come right over.” Pierce’s words were weighted with the exhaustion of the past week. Though I’d speculated on the phone that this evening’s meeting would exonerate Pierce, he was still skeptical that the good doctor could have any involvement with the crime, and he was clearly bothered that I’d asked him to summon Tenelli.
“What
is
it?” Grace asked either of us, her voice wrought with confusion. “Why is Dr. Tenelli coming over?” She too looked exhausted. With the opening day of the convention behind her, she’d obviously planned on a quiet evening at home alone, kicking back—she was wearing jeans again, with a heavy flannel shirt to ward off the evening chill. She told us, “I’ll be happy to unlock the coach house for you, but why tonight?”
For Pierce’s benefit as well as Grace’s, I answered, “Because we now know who killed Carrol Cantrell.” My statement was unequivocal—no speculating, no waffling—and the surety of my words registered on both of their faces.
Grace studied me for a moment, glanced at Pierce, then turned back to tell me, “I just can’t believe that Ben would…” She left the thought unfinished, drew a hefty breath of night air, then said, her tone resolved, “Come what may, we have to get to the bottom of this. We have to
know.
I’ve got my key—let’s go.” And she led us from the porch.
The cool night air was still and dry. A fat orange moon, not quite full, hung low in a clear sky peppered with stars—beyond them gaped a blackened universe. Silhouetted by moonlight, trees drifted like tall ships with billowing sails on the rolling waves of the expansive lawn behind the house.
Walking from the driveway to the coach house, we were joined by Roxanne and Neil, who greeted Pierce and Grace in subdued tones, everyone aware of the gravity of our visit. As we spoke, a pair of headlights pulled in next to the house—it was Lucille Haring and Glee Savage, arrived from the
Register.
They too knew the purpose of our assembly, joining the group with mumbled good-evenings.
With the seven of us gathered at the foot of the stairs, I told the others, “Everyone’s here but Tenelli. Why don’t we go on up? He’ll find us.”
Roxanne leaned and whispered into my ear, “I’m sure he knows the way.”
Grace took the lead, pinching the key in her fingers as she started up the stairs. We filed behind her in twos—Pierce and I, Roxanne and Neil, Glee and Lucy. Our quiet procession rose tread by tread with the grim stateliness of a funeral march. As we turned the stairway’s landing, I peered out across the lawn to the tree that sheltered a grave. There lay the collie that once romped with Ward Lord, the nephew Grace doted on. The pointed shaft of the dog’s stone obelisk was dappled with moonbeams filtered by leaves.
Arriving on the covered porch, we clustered behind Grace as she fiddled with the key in the lock. “I haven’t been up here since the police left,” she told us. “You’ll have to excuse my housekeeping if things aren’t quite up to snuff.”
With a soft laugh, I assured her that there would be no white-glove test.
She swung the door open, switched on a light, and led us inside. The guest quarters had been closed up for a few days, smelling stale, feeling warm. We left the door open, Grace raised a window on the far wall, and fresh air swept through the room. Otherwise, everything appeared normal and neat—nothing suggested that a murder had been committed here.
We settled into the room, Pierce and I at the table, Grace in a comfortable maple rocker. Lucy and Glee pulled chairs to the cramped writing desk, spreading out their notes. Roxanne and Neil, who had never before set foot in the coach house, perched on the edge of the bed, where the rest of us had seen Cantrell’s body sprawled. Silence fell over us. The chatter of crickets drifted in on the night air.
Pierce cleared his throat. “Well, Mark? You called this meeting.”
Self-consciously I stood, feeling a bit professorial. I began, “I think you all know Lucille Haring, my managing editor.” (I was fully aware that everyone in the room was by now well acquainted, but I needed to open with
something,
and the statement had a preambular ring.) “Lucy has spent the day doing some background research on Dr. Benjamin Tenelli, and her digging has yielded some troubling information. It seems that Dr. Tenelli has some real-estate holdings that point to a vested interest in the outcome of next week’s obscenity trial.”
A car could be heard pulling into the driveway and parking behind the others. As the driver cut the engine and opened the door, I raised a finger to my lips, commanding silence. We listened as the car door closed. Shoes ground the gravel, walking in our direction. The walking slowed, hesitated, then stopped. After a few moments, we heard the feet climbing stairs—only three. The new arrival was on the back porch of the house. A fist rapped at the screen door. “
Grace? Douglas?
” called Tenelli’s voice. He laughed. “Where
is
everyone?”
I stepped out to the porch of the coach house and leaned on the banister. “Ben!” I called to him. “Mark Manning—up here.”
He looked up at me, shielding his eyes from the glare of the porch light. “Evening, Mark. Where’s the party?”
“Up here,” I repeated. Clearly, he had no idea why Pierce had phoned him. Also, it seemed, he had no idea how to get up to the porch where I stood. I explained, “The stairway is along the side of the garage. Careful—it’s not well lit.”
Peering into the moon shadows behind the house, Tenelli acknowledged that he now saw the stairs. Leaving the house, he crossed the path toward the garage, gripped the green railing, and started up. “Sorry to keep everyone waiting,” he told me as he climbed. For a man of seventy, he was remarkably vigorous—the steep stairway didn’t daunt him in the least. Arriving at the top, he asked, “What’s up? Douglas certainly sounded
mysterious
on the phone.” He laughed with gusto.
I simply told him, “Come on in, Ben. Glad you could make it.”
Swinging the door open for him, I followed him inside and quickly introduced him to Neil, Roxanne, and Lucy. No introductions were needed for Pierce, Grace, or Glee—they’d known Tenelli all their lives. I suggested that he take the chair in which I’d been sitting, at the table with Pierce. As the doctor settled in, everyone fell mum. In a jocular tone, he asked, “What on earth’s the
matter?
”
“Ben,” Grace said flatly, trying not to protract this encounter, “Mark has just told us that you own some real estate that relates’ to the obscenity trial. What’s he talking about?”
Tenelli’s smile fell. He hawed, “I own quite a bit of property, Grace. There’s no safer investment than land, and I’ve been lucky.”
“Specifically,” I butted in, “we’ve learned that you own Star-Spangled Video.”
“Huh?” said Pierce.
Grace gasped so forcefully, her rocker shook.
Tenelli sputtered defensively.
I qualified my statement, “You don’t own the business, just the land—and the hot-pink barn. But now you have a vested interest in getting the porn shop
off
your property. Due to your civic-minded efforts on the County Plan Commission, that land is now worth a fortune.”
“Ben,” said Pierce, crestfallen, “is any of this true?”
Tenelli paused. Then he admitted, “Yes, all of it.” He knew there was no point in denying these facts, as they were a matter of public record—if anyone bothered digging deep enough. “How’d you figure it out, Mark?”
I gestured toward Lucy. “My managing editor’s research savvy reaped the particulars just this evening, but my suspicions were first aroused last Monday morning, when Doug and I spotted a car like mine out at Star-Spangled. The next afternoon, we learned that it was yours. You said you had picked it up on Monday.”
With a slow, frustrated shake of his head, he explained, “The Commission’s study had raised some technical questions regarding zoning setbacks, and I wanted to confirm the exact property line with my own eyes. So I went out there to nose around for the original surveyor’s stakes—I presumed the new car was a perfect cover.” He sighed. “Guess not…”
Pierce raised a stickier issue. “Harley Kaiser claims that you’ve been pressuring him to speed up his obscenity prosecutions.”
“Gentlemen,” Tenelli told us matter-of-factly, “that’s the way of the world. That’s business.”
“That’s
hypocrisy,
” Grace corrected him, rising from the rocker and confronting him nose to nose. “I’m ashamed of you, Ben—collecting rent from those filthy smut peddlers all these years, then turning on
them
when it suits your needs.”
“Sorry, Grace. I never claimed to be a saint.”
Everyone
else
had claimed the doctor was a saint, though, and I felt calmly vindicated for my skepticism. Hoping this point was not lost on Pierce, I reminded him, “I had a theory all along, Doug, that Dr. Tenelli’s interest in the porn issue was less than altruistic.” Pointedly, I added, “Now we know that he also had an interest in silencing Carrol Cantrell, whose true purpose in Dumont was to scuttle next week’s porn trial.”
Grace looked confused. “What are you talking about, Mark? Carrol came here to judge the roombox competition—at
my
invitation.”
Before I could respond, Tenelli piped in, “Now see here, Manning, if you’re implying that I had anything to do with that man’s murder, I…I’ll…”
“Look, Mark,” said Pierce, rising, placing a hand on my shoulder, “these developments are troublesome, I admit. Yes, I think Ben has some explaining to do regarding his chairmanship of County Plan, but I
don’t
think he’s connected to the murder. Remember, you instructed me to phone him tonight and ask him to meet us ‘at the crime scene.’ When he arrived, we all heard him—he didn’t know where we were, and you had to direct him to the stairs.”
From the writing desk, Glee concurred, “He’s right, boss.” It was the first time Glee, Lucy, Neil, or Roxanne had spoken since Tenelli’s arrival. All heads turned, surprised by the sound from the perimeter of the room. Glee responded with a sheepish shrug.
I smiled. “I know, Glee. Doug is correct. Dr. Tenelli’s interest in the pornography issue had nothing to do with Cantrell’s murder. The murder, however, had
everything
to do with pornography.”
I paused, letting this riddle settle on the ears of my listeners. Everyone turned to one another, whispering, twisting their features. Everyone wondered what I meant. Everyone, that is, except Grace Lord, who stood near me in the middle of the room.
Turning to her, I said, “The murder was
about
pornography, wasn’t it, Grace?”
She shook her head, as if clearing her thoughts, as if she didn’t hear me.
I told her, “The porn star Rascal Tyner, who died of AIDS in the early years of the epidemic, was your nephew, Ward Lord.”
“What…?” She looked at me with a dull lack of comprehension, searching for words. Then her legs went limp, and she looked as if she might collapse. Pierce and I grabbed her by the arms and walked her to the rocker. As she sat, everyone else rose, forming a circle around the chair. The faces surrounding her bore expressions ranging from concern to astonishment. She swallowed, then told me weakly, “I don’t know what you’re talking about, Mark.”