Seven Days Dead (27 page)

He studies them first, the six-inch heels and the five-inch soles. He smiles, as though to concede that they look ridiculous. “When I take them off, my normal height seems small. That provides me with two advantages. One, I feel small, so my natural height is no longer a point of pride. I’m helped to feel humble. And two, I feel that I should be higher, as though I’m sinking when I should feel as though I’m—”

He stops.

“Flying?” Cinq-Mars coaxes him. “Levitating?”

“I feel as though I’m sinking when I should be elevating my consciousness.”

“Good save,” Cinq-Mars opines. “I hope you won’t be offended, or mind my saying so, but you might be a lesser kook than I first imagined.”

That wins him a smile.

“I’ll need to speak to the others, specifically to the two men who saw the body, then to everyone in your group.”

“Not two men,” Brown corrects him. “One man, one woman. The woman is still on the island. The man, I’m afraid, is deceased.”

Cinq-Mars stares down his imposing beak at him. “Don’t tell me,” he says.

“Professor DeWitt,” Brown admits.

“And what can you tell me about that?”

“Nothing. We’re in shock. That’s why no on is here today. We don’t understand it. Honestly, he gave us no indication. I’m sure it was an accident. Had to be. Unless—. Did someone kill him, too?”

Cinq-Mars is unsure of his own response. He proceeds slowly. “What is it, Mr. Brown, that requires you to be here today? Why aren’t you with the others? What are you protecting? You’re obviously guarding the place.”

Geoff Brown from Pawtucket raises an eyebrow and purses his lips briefly, nothing more. Cinq-Mars is being informed that that is none of his business, and a murder investigation doesn’t change that opinion.

He rises. “Thank you,” he says. “I’m sorry for your loss. And I hope you get off the ground soon.”

“Sure you do,” Brown says.

At the front door, while being ushered out, Cinq-Mars surprises him. “I agree with you, by the way. I find that especially true in my profession. If you think about it, you might understand why.”

“What’s that?” Brown, tall in his shoes, is stumped by his comment.

“Always good to remind the soul how fleeting life is. Thanks, Mr. Brown.”

He hates it when he comes to respect someone he’s previously dismissed, but he imagines that he’ll get past his umbrage with himself soon enough.

*   *   *

At the height of his powers as a big-city detective, Émile Cinq-Mars wouldn’t have done this, and he wonders if he’s being lazy, hazy, or caving in to a pending old age. Perhaps, after a long career, he’s finally being efficient with the public purse. He’d normally line up witnesses and suspects in an order that permitted his investigative prowess to step along a path taking him from pillar to post logically. Later, should he find it possible to connect the dots with a thread, the line might show circles closing in around the culprit. Perpetually tightening. He never minded crisscrossing the city daily, or getting stuck in traffic, or missing a meal because of a zany schedule. What mattered more was to proceed along a preconceived, virtually ordained, pattern. On this job, he is not dipping into any public purse, so even his willingness to be efficient makes no sense, yet he’s finding that he prefers to interview people according to their proximity, not according to any plan. Pending old age is the answer he selects. What else accounts for the shift? That, and saving on gas money, which is now a personal expense.

So the next person he seeks to interview is Pete Briscoe. He’s closest.

His mental preparation with respect to Briscoe has been halfhearted, in part because he doesn’t really expect to find him in. Don’t fisherman fish? They’re in fishing season, the man should be out on the water. He’s surprised when he finds him puttering outside his house, packing his pickup before heading down to the waterfront. Mildly cross with himself for not performing his due diligence on this guy, Émile warns himself to be circumspect, to make this an initial fact-finding tour only. He can always bring a keener focus once he has his ducks in a row.

The man greets him warmly. They no sooner shake hands than Ora Matheson pokes her head out from behind the screen door onto Pete’s porch. “Petey? Going yet?” Then she sees Cinq-Mars. “Oh. Hello.”

Not as a question, Cinq-Mars looks at Briscoe, who shrugs. “Girlfriend,” the fisherman states, an explanation neither requested nor required.

Ora bounces down the steps. “You’re him, aren’t you? Tall, with a big—” About to say
nose,
she censors herself, something that Émile determines is uncommon for her. To bring attention to what is already an attention grabber crosses a line that she recognizes as a social barrier. Émile now knows how complete strangers are managing to identify him so confidently. “I mean,” she says, “you’re tall. Petey told me you’re so tall.”

Briscoe is embarrassed. Cinq-Mars couldn’t care less.

“Yes, I have a massive honker. So did my dad, and his dad, and so on, going back who knows how many generations. I wear it with pride.”

“Oh my God,” she says, “it is
huge
!”

“Ora,” Briscoe snaps back.

She checks in with him, then looks at Cinq-Mars. Then makes a comic face, as though to suggest that some people are too uptight to suit her, although nothing’s to be done. “Aren’t I the stupid mutt,” she says.

Catching them together is unfortunate, he thinks initially, yet Cinq-Mars quickly calculates an alternative strategy to take advantage of this development.

He addresses Briscoe. “You’re not fishing.”

“On my way. Crew’s on the dock. I’m not late, but I will be.”

“Oh, you can give the great detective—we heard you’re a really great detective, that you sent the Mafia packing—we can give him the time of day, Petey.”

“I suppose,” Briscoe says.

Cinq-Mars is adding up what’s been said about him lately and understands that his reputation has probably ignited and is now a brush fire. By dusk, he’ll have been responsible for solving the Jack the Ripper crimes, and in a week he’ll have been credited with arresting twenty of the world’s worst serial killers and uncovered that Osama bin Laden remains alive, living on the dole in Wichita.

“He’s trying to register for health care,” he says, but the young couple has no clue what he’s talking about, and can only glance at each other.

“You were Mr. Orrock’s housekeeper?” he asks, returning to seriousness.

“He was a slime bucket,” Ora claims. “You know? Really. There’s no excuse to treat good people the way he treated good people. I had to stand my ground with that man. Always trying to feel me up, he was.”

“If you’d’ve told me that, I would’ve throttled him myself,” Briscoe brags.

“Do you know who did?”

“What do you mean? Who? Who what?”

Émile’s hoping that this ploy works, knowing that it could easily backfire. Telling these two that Alfred Orrock was murdered will not merely ripple across the island and have an effect—in this community, it will be a tsunami. Shake people up. More talk might surface that way. The murderer will be surprised by what is common knowledge, and might show a hand unwittingly. Or not. Risk forms a big part of the strategy.

“Alfred Orrock was suffocated to death. People are going to gossip, I should warn you, about whether or not his nurse did it.”

“I was never his nurse.”

“Housemaid, then.”

“I looked after him, but I was never his nurse. I stood my ground on that.”

“His housemaid. You were there, though. That’s the thing. The night he died.”

“When I left him he was alive!”

“That may be true. I’m betting that you have no witnesses. Am I right?”

She starts to utter the Reverend Lescavage’s name but stops herself. That’s not going to do her any good.

“He was alive when I left him.”

“Then the minister showed up and he was killed, too. A busy night for somebody.”

“Wasn’t me!” She’s vehement about it, he’ll give her that.

“Of course not,” Pete Briscoe says.

Cinq-Mars grants them that. “He did tick you off, though, didn’t he? Feeling you up and being mean. You can see why people might talk. What they might say. They’ll think you despised the man. Not an overstatement, is it? People might say you’d had enough. A moment of rage, it wouldn’t take long, and suddenly he’s not breathing anymore. All you have to do is adjust the pillow and call up Lescavage to come on over, then if he puts up a fuss about the dead guy, off him, too. Or have your boyfriend do it.”

“Hey! You shut up now!”

“Why? I’m only pointing out what people will imagine, what they’ll say. The inevitable, don’t you think?”

Funny, Cinq-Mars notices, that the man is hot to defend himself when he is rather tepid about protecting his girlfriend when she’s accused.

“What were you burying up on the ridge the day I saw you, Mr. Briscoe?”

“My dog.”

“Why dig eight different holes?”

“What?”

“Where’s your dog now since she’s not there? What have you done with her remains?”

“Petey?” Ora asks, perturbed by the expression on her boyfriend’s face.

“I moved her. I dug her up again. Moved her.”

“Pete?”

“Never mind, Ora!” he barks. “A personal-type thing.”

“Eight holes?”

“I had trouble finding her again is all.”

“That’s not what it looked like to me.”

They’re still outside in Briscoe’s yard. Cinq-Mars wouldn’t mind going inside, talking within that confined space, which would be cooler, undoubtedly. Any moment for that shift has passed. He won’t be invited indoors now.

“What did it look like to you?” Briscoe asks him, and then to the surprise of both men, Ora asks exactly the same question, word for word. The look on her face suggests that she’s defending the honor of her man.

“I saw that digging site as an experiment,” Émile says, “a trial run, if you will. To discover where to dig your next grave.”

“What are you talking about?” Ora interjects. “Petey? Petey, what’s he talking about?”

“Bullshit,” Petey explains. “He’s talking bullshit, Ora.”

“I figured. Smart-ass detective, my royal ass.”

Perhaps by the end of the day, his island reputation may yet be mud.

“You’ll be going now,” Briscoe says.

Cinq-Mars decides that he might as well. He drives comfortably to North Head. Along the way he sees Briscoe’s pickup make an appearance, hanging back. Two can play at that game, and in North Head Cinq-Mars pulls over and Briscoe, with Ora along as a passenger, goes on by. He watches Briscoe unload at the docks with Ora’s help, then they kiss, then Ora heads off on foot alone. Briscoe greets his crew. Émile reminds himself to talk to that crew one day soon. They launch a dinghy to go fetch the fish boat, and while they do that, Cinq-Mars starts up again, and intercepts Ora down the road. He slows, and drives beside her while she walks.

“Need a lift?”

“I’m not gong far.”

“Hop in anyway. Escape the heat.”

She thinks about it and mops her forehead, then climbs in.

“Which way?” Cinq-Mars asks.

“Straight on except for the curves.”

They don’t have much to say to each other. Émile is not interested in developing a relationship that has to be advanced by his constant probing. His questions pertain only to the island, to what growing up here was like, to how anybody can ever eat dulse, let alone every day.

“It’s healthy! Loads of iron.”

“Maybe that’s why it tastes like iron ore.”

“Dulse chips beat potato chips hands down. Eat too many potato chips, they’ll kill you. Eat too much dulse and you’re Superman. Feel like him anyway.”

Turning down the sloped driveway to her home, which sits in a bit of a gulley, they are met in the yard by a woman he recognizes. She had the traffic incident with Professor DeWitt, in which she ended up in a ditch, later the hospital. Ora’s mom is coming across to see him. As he’s rolling down his window, Ora gives her an earful about who he is.

These women might be helpful someday. They might never trust him, but he feels that his cause will not be advanced if they fear him. The woman’s first words are, “Detective Big Shot.”

“I’m just trying to help out, ma’am.”

“Ma’am. Ma’am! Nobody’s called anybody
ma’am
around here since sharks wore bikinis.”

He doesn’t know for sure, but assumes that that means never.

“So the guy who nearly ran me down went over the cliff. You better not try to pin that one on me.”

“Mrs. Matheson, is it? Same as your daughter’s last name?”

“She’s not somebody’s doorstep drop, no.”

“You say,” Ora interjects.

“All that wailing was for you, my dear, not some figment of my imagination.”

She’s got her there.

“What are you driving Ora around for? What’s she done?”

“Aw, Mom.”

“Just saving her some walk time, Mrs. Matheson. On my way home anyway.”

“Home? Home! You mean you live here now?”

He smiles. “Temporarily. I used the wrong word. I was on the way to the rental cottage where I am temporarily residing.”

The woman seems satisfied that she’s won the day, and Cinq-Mars backs up, careful to avoid the big
DULSE FOR SALE
sign, underscored by the word
SPECIALS!
He carries on home. He’s happy to arrive, to put his feet up and have a drink. He tells Sandra so. “Good to be back in the rental cottage where I am temporarily residing.”

What?
Some bee is in his bonnet about the case, she assumes.

TWENTY-TWO

Following their customary evening stroll, Émile and Sandra Cinq-Mars pile into the Cherokee and drive to the Orrock mansion. Maddy’s in the front garden snipping flowers for the funeral that’s two days off, and also to brighten the residence. Delighted to invite the couple inside, she’s demure through a tour of the house as Sandra gapes, particularly impressed by the views, while Émile strikes a removed and solemn countenance. Like Maddy, he’s of two minds with respect to the place. For him, the home is also a crime scene.

Émile inquires about her relationship with the late Reverend Lescavage and what she knows of how he got on with her dad. Both accounts are skimpy, bereft of substance, until she opines that the minister was probably her dad’s only male friend over the last twenty years.