The Christie Caper (39 page)

Just for an instant, his tired face looked cheerful. “Oh, yeah. Did you see the way the caboose on the Orient Express lights up?”

“No,” Max exclaimed, craning his neck to look. Max was a train
nut.
He could recite innumerable facts about the fabled Orient Express, which first left the Gare de Strasbourg in Paris for Constantinople on October 4, 1883, and made its final regularly scheduled run in May 1977.

Annie was determined to forestall that. “Chief, wait a minute. Has Posey had Lady Gwendolyn arraigned for murder?”

Saulter shoved his hands into his trouser pockets. “Yep. Four o’clock this afternoon. Charged with the murders of John Border Stone and Mrs. Honeycutt, attempted murder of Neil Bledsoe.” Saulter kept his voice even. “You’ll read all about it in the paper in the morning.” Annie could imagine the Class A press conference Posey must have held.

Max peered over the heads of the crowd, looking for the caboose.

“What about Derek Davis?” she asked.

“Oh, sure. Attempted murder of Bledsoe. They found the pawnshop in Savannah where Davis bought the gun—”

Max looked back at the chief. “First murderer, second murderer,” he murmured skeptically.

“Which gun?” Annie demanded.

“The one he pulled this afternoon in the meeting room. Now, sorry as you may feel for that young man, Annie, I’d like to remind you that he rented a car, drove thirty miles, used a false name, and purchased a gun, a gun that he pulled out of his coat right after threatening to kill his stepfather.”

“Former stepfather,” Annie clarified.

Max was impatient. “Seems like too many guns in this case. What about the gun that killed Kathryn Honeycutt? Have they linked it to Lady Gwendolyn or to Derek?”

“Nope.” It was a wry, dry disclaimer that spoke volumes about Saulter’s attitude toward Posey’s theories. “A search
warrant didn’t turn up anything in Lady Gwendolyn’s suite. Anyway, nothin’ more we can do tonight, so we might as well have some fun.” He didn’t look like a man embarked on a delightful social evening. His face creased in a frown. “That young woman, the writer, Miss Marlow, if she’s not careful Posey’s going to throw her in jail. She raised all kinds of hell, swore Derek never did it, that even if he bought a hundred guns, he couldn’t have killed anybody, said we were blind fools, that Derek was so drunk he wouldn’t have gotten the gun pointed at Bledsoe before Bledsoe would have decked him, told Posey she’d see him in hell before she’d ever let Davis stay in jail, then she stormed out. Made Posey damned mad. If you see her, you might tell her to lay off. No sense her going to jail, too.”

“Yeah, we will.” Max had restrained himself as long as he could. “Hey, Where’s the caboose to the Orient Express?”

“This way.” Saulter jerked his head.

Doors appropriate to the various murals—a pantry door beneath a staircase in a village house, a stateroom door aboard a ship—opened between the screens so revelers could slip from area to area, perhaps pretending for a moment that they were walking into one of Christie’s novels. (Annie was sure she detected Laurel’s hand. Another of Laurel’s enthusiasms was Andrew Lloyd Webber. “My dear, he is to stagecraft what Von Braun was to rockets!”) Annie was smiling as she followed Max and Saulter. She was almost to the door when a hurrying figure brushed roughly past her.

Startled, she looked around.

“Chief!” Ed Merritt, the hotel manager, kept his voice low, but he couldn’t control the tremor. “Chief!”

Saulter jerked to face him.

“Chief, oh, Christ, it’s awful—on the terrace—that guy, the one all the trouble’s about—”

“Bledsoe?” Saulter looked older than time, his yellow, wrinkled skin taut with foreboding.

“Jesus, the way he fell—blood and—”

“Fell? Where’d he fall from?” Saulter snapped. “When?”

“Now. Just now. From the balcony of his room,” the hotel manager said. “You didn’t hear the scream in here? God, I’ll hear that scream the rest of my life.”

“A doctor? Have you called a doctor?” Annie demanded urgently.

“Doctor?” Merritt’s eyes skimmed over her vacantly. “What for?”

It was hard to remember, looking at Neil Bledsoe’s broken body, how much bigger than life he’d seemed.

Annie held tight to Max’s hand. After one quick look—and that look remained indelibly in her mind, the blood pooling beneath the crushed head, the unnatural angle of the neck, the splintered bone protruding from his calf—she stared up at the balcony. It was easy to spot the place—a portion of the railing was askew, bulging out from the balcony. Bledsoe must have fallen almost headfirst.

Saulter swore in a tight, hard monotone, then, crisply, he issued orders: “Merritt, get some of your people out here, arrange the tables and chairs as a barricade—oh—ten feet each way. That’s first. Second, call the mainland, get word to Circuit Solicitor Posey, tell him we need the homicide crew and at least a half-dozen deputies. Max, with Billy in the hospital, I’m damn short on staff. Will you and Annie serve as deputies, secure Bledsoe’s room? Make sure no one enters, nothing touched or changed until I can get people up there. You know the drill.”

A white-faced bellboy turned the key in 301. As the lock clicked, Max, using his handkerchief, eased the knob to the left. The door opened an inch, then jolted to a stop.

“I’ll be damned,” Max murmured. “The chain’s on.”

It took time. A call to maintenance. The hinges removed, the door propped to one side.

To Annie, the suite smelled of death, though, to her surprise, almost all vestiges of the bloody shooting had already been erased, the carpet shampooed (damp splotches still evident). Of course, once the investigation of a site was complete—photographs made, surfaces dusted for prints, sketches done—there was no need to maintain the appearance of the crime scene. This was, after all, a hotel, and these
rooms, after Bledsoe’s departure, would be routinely readied for new guests.

Bledsoe’s departure.

Via the balcony.

So the murderer had, after all, triumphed.

But, at the least, this should mean Lady Gwendolyn’s prompt release and perhaps even Derek Davis’s.

The bedroom door to the left of the living area was closed; the door to the bedroom to the right of the main portion of the suite was open. Max poked his head in that bedroom. “Bledsoe’s stuff’s in here. Let’s check out the balcony first.”

Annie paused in the entryway, picturing the scene the night Kathryn Honeycutt died and Bledsoe was wounded.

The physical layout of the suite was exactly that of Annie and Max’s.

A small square entryway, a closet to the right, the decorative wrought-iron room divider to the left, separating the entryway from the living room.

Straight ahead a short hall. A door to the right opened into, a bedroom. Bledsoe’s room, Max said.

To the left of the divider was the living room. A closed door in the far wall led to the second bedroom; Kathryn’s room.

The suites were arranged with a bedroom to each side of the living room. Balconies opened off of both the living area and the bedrooms.

Late Thursday night. The fire alarm. Smoke. No lights. Bledsoe had opened the door to the hall. A flashlight glared in his eyes. Shots. Hit in the left shoulder, he’d reeled backward, taken refuge behind the couch. Even wounded, Bledsoe could have covered that distance in one stride.

Kathryn must have turned
her
flashlight toward the door at almost the precise moment Bledsoe was shot. Otherwise the attacker could have pursued Bledsoe and pumped more bullets into him.

Instead, Kathryn aimed her flashlight at the attacker, and the gun was turned on her. Bledsoe was saved.

Annie knew where Kathryn had fallen. Just a foot or two past her bedroom door. The shampooed rug told the story.

By then the hotel was in an uproar. The killer fled, running
down the stairs. Once on the terrace, mingling with other guests rousted by the alarms, the killer tossed the gun and gloves.

In the suite, Bledsoe staggered to his feet, found Kathryn, and carried her out onto his balcony. Annie could see the damp carpet splotches leading into his room.

As for tonight, there was nothing disarranged in the living room, and the only item not ordinarily in place was the open picnic basket on the coffee table. From here, it appeared—

“Hey, Annie, come on out here.”

As she walked through Bledsoe’s room, she noted that the mattress on the bed was askew, a chair in front of the desk overturned, one of the French doors to the balcony hung unevenly. On the balcony, a chair and the table were overturned. The railing bowed out sharply.

“A hell of a struggle,” Max said. “Who was big enough and strong enough to manhandle Bledsoe over the edge?”

“How did the murderer escape?” Annie looked back toward the living area. “The door to the suite was not only locked, it was chained.”

They looked through the suite. Annie had noted the signs of struggle in Bledsoe’s room. Otherwise, it was the room of a man who had packed his bags in preparation for checking out the next day, an open suitcase neatly filled, his shaving kit on the dresser, litter discarded in the wastebasket, a
New York Times,
a
Business Week
magazine.

Kathryn’s room—the room she had used—was bare and clean, as devoid of personality as all untenanted hotel rooms. There was no evidence anyone had entered it.

The kitchenette, too, was clean. A single glass, ice melting, sat on the counter. Max sniffed. “Scotch.”

In the bathroom, used towels hung from the rack. On the lavatory lay a toothbrush, paste, shaving cream, razor, stick deodorant.

Nothing was knocked over in the living room. Annie walked to the coffee table. The picnic basket was nothing out of the ordinary, woven brown wicker, rope handles, a red-and-white checked cloth inside and—she looked more closely. A single yellow rose lay on the somewhat rumpled cloth.

Behind her, Max said, his voice puzzled, “Annie, I don’t get it. Where the hell did the murderer go? And how?”

“Accident!”
Annie erupted.

Posey rocked arrogantly back on his heels in the center of the suite’s living room, but his blue eyes bulged dangerously. “Mrs. Darling, I am fully capable of carrying out the duties of circuit solicitor for this county in the great State of South Carolina w
ithout
assistance from either you
or
Mr. Darling, notwithstanding your sudden commission as deputies. In fact, Chief Saulter can now relieve you of this burden since I have arrived on the island with sufficient law enforcement personnel to complete our investigation into this unfortunate accident.”

“Accident!” Annie repeated furiously. Max would have to restrain her if she got much angrier. The man was an idiot. “Someone’s been trying to murder Bledsoe for almost a week, they finally succeed, and you call it an accident!”

“Mrs. Darling, you have been misled, intentionally misled, as it were, by the crafty and cunning perpetrator of these crimes. Have we a shred of proof that Mr. Bledsoe’s demise was ever the murderer’s goal?”

“The bookstore—the vase—Bledsoe shot first—”

Posey raised his hand imperiously. “Ah, the vase. A red herring, I believe that’s what crime writers call it. And should it surprise us that this particular crime should contain such an element of deception? I believe not. Further, there can be no other reasonable explanation of the unfortunate death of Mr. Bledsoe. The door to the suite was chained on the inside, as you yourself, Mrs. Darling, will have to testify. Moreover, we have an eye witness, a waiter stacking chairs on the terrace, who saw Bledsoe storm out onto the balcony, crash into the railing, and such was the force of that collision, he shot over the railing—‘almost like a dive’—and crashed down to the terrace. Headfirst. And there wasn’t another living soul on that balcony.”

Annie tried not to wriggle. But she couldn’t sleep; absolutely couldn’t. She thumped her pillow furiously. That
pigheaded, idiotic, infuriating moron Posey! He was so determined not to be proved wrong in his arrest of Lady Gwendolyn that he wouldn’t even consider that Bledsoe had been murdered.

For it was murder, she knew it in her bones. Even if no one else
was
on the balcony when Bledsoe dived over it. Not even Posey had tried to suggest suicide. No one would ever believe Neil Bledsoe was a suicide. Annie’s thoughts continued to churn. Accident! Somehow that “accident” had been staged. But how? There wasn’t, and Annie wasn’t even grudging in admitting it, a man or woman in the world from whom Bledsoe would have run in terror—

Annie sat bolt upright.

Max stirred. “Hmmph.”

Annie evaded his touch. Talk about waking Max up, that’s all it would take. She edged out of bed, dropped to the floor (the height of old-fashioned four-posters always surprised her), and padded softly into the living area, easing the bedroom door shut.

Annie paced.

The chained door.

The picnic basket.

Bledsoe careening over the railing.

Was it possible that the secret to Bledsoe’s death might even yet be in that suite?

She frowned at the wall clock. Twenty minutes after two o’clock in the morning. A hell of a time to call someone she didn’t know well.

But time might be critical.

She fumbled with the telephone directory, flipping the pages until she found the name she sought. She didn’t need to look up the second number; she knew it by heart.

Saulter got there first. A Leica hung from a leather strap around his neck. His eyes were bright and eager. “I think you’re onto something. Damn clever.” He rubbed the back of his neck. “Posey’d have my ass if he knew I was here.” The chief didn’t sound overly worried at the prospect. “So, might as well be hanged for a sheep as a lamb.” He dug into his khaki pants pocket and pulled out a
wrinkled, many-folded sheet of notebook paper and handed it to Annie.

Annie stopped her nervous pacing—what if Rhonda Kinkaid didn’t come?—and took the small square of paper. She unfolded it and strained to read the spidery, oft-underlined message:

The solution is clear. Apply logic. What did the murderer ACHIEVE with shots, vase, Stone, Honeycutt?