The Christie Caper (40 page)

Achieve was underlined three times.

There was a scrawled postscript:

Bledsoe dead! The mills do grind—

It didn’t matter how many times Annie reread the simple missive, she couldn’t fathom Lady Gwendolyn’s intent, yet she felt certain that she held in her hand the signpost to a murderer. “The solution is clear….”

The elevator door opened. Annie stuffed the note in the pocket of her white pants.

A skinny, high-energy redhead in faded Levis, sneakers, and a ratty old army sweatshirt charged up the hall, her arms full of paraphernalia She skidded to a stop in front of Annie and Saulter. “You did call me, didn’t you? I haven’t dreamed this?”

Annie and Saulter watched as Rhonda Kinkaid dismantled the heating-cooling unit in the living room, then put it back together. They followed her into each bedroom. Kinkaid worked swiftly. Annie envied her dexterity. It took less than five minutes to search those units. The kitchenette offered more scope. Beneath the refrigerator. Behind it. Even a quick survey of the cabinets. “Sometimes there are holes you don’t notice,” Kinkaid explained. It took longer to disassemble and restore the stove.

Saulter had hung close at the beginning, but finally, yawning wearily, he stretched out on the couch in the living room.

Annie glanced at her watch. A quarter to four. Maybe there wasn’t anything to find.

Kinkaid started on the living room curtains next, then both bedrooms.

Annie leaned against the doorjamb to Bledsoe’s room. Almost every square inch of the suite had been covered.

Kinkaid stood in the middle of the bedroom floor, hands on hips, her eyes flicking about the room. She looked up,
and her mouth curved in a grin. Moving with frenetic energy, she dragged a desk chair next to the canopied four-poster. Hopping up, she stood on tiptoe. “Oh yeah,” she cried. “God, what a beauty.” She glanced down at Annie who’d hurried to the bedside. “Would you get the cage, open it, please.”

Kinkaid swung a pronged stick over the top of the canopy and in one swift, competent move transferred the sleek reptile into the opened box and immediately slid shut the top. She grinned with delight. “Sometimes it’s neat to be the island’s best-known herpetologist. Now, tell me—what the hell is that red rat snake doing here?”

The adrenaline pumped. Annie didn’t even consider going back to bed. So she’d guessed right. Murder by snake. Chancy, to be sure, but it had succeeded superbly. But she still didn’t know who. Or why Bledsoe hadn’t been wary enough to avoid the trap.

The list of suspects was shorter.

Not Derek Davis. He was in the county jail when Bledsoe died.

Who did that leave?

Annie sat down at the desk. She looked at her notebook and Max’s, at the stack of biographical sheets, at Bledsoe’s crumpled flyer promising the “truth” about Christie, at the copy of the autopsy on Honeycutt (Saulter was treading on dangerous ground to make it available), at the puzzling missive from Lady Gwendolyn,
“What did the murderer achieve
…” Lying atop the bio stack was the key to Meeting Room D where Ingrid had stored all the odd bits and pieces turned in by the conference “detective teams” in their search for clues.

Annie picked up a pen and found a clean sheet. She wrote swiftly:

Nathan Hillman

Margo Wright

Victoria Shaw

A short list. A very short list.

After a moment’s hesitation, she added:

Natalie Marlow

And, in a moment:

Emma Clyde

Fleur Calloway

Some problems with the last three. Natalie, so far as anyone knew, was thoroughly caught up in Neil’s spell until the evening of the Agatha Christie Trivia Quiz, which was long after the shooting at Death on Demand, the dumping of the vase, and Stone’s murder. So, Natalie was very unlikely. Annie thought a moment, scratched through her name.

And, of course, Fleur had been in full view of Annie and Saulter when the shots rang out that night at Death on Demand. Annie’s pen hovered over her name. But did anyone on this island have more reason to hate Bledsoe than Fleur? Annie left the name untouched.

Emma Clyde. Emma was tough, smart, and crafty. Her name stayed on the list.

All right, all right. Look at the more likelies.

Margo Wright. One imposing woman. Clever. Strong. But strength had nothing to do with Bledsoe’s death. Still, on the night Kathryn was killed and Neil shot, the murderer had to move quickly, decisively. That fitted Margo, certainly. But was the loss of respect and affection from Margo’s boss and mentor reason enough to kill? Of course, Bledsoe had compounded her injury by maliciously destroying two of her clients, Bryan Shaw and Pamela Gerrard. Had that moved Margo to murder? Annie added a string of question marks after the agent’s name.

Nathan Hillman. He’d loved Pamela. Reason enough for him to hate the man who had driven her to death. Bledsoe said Hillman didn’t have enough guts. Had Hillman proved him wrong?

Victoria Shaw. Oh, surely not. Yet Annie remembered the look in her eyes Friday afternoon in the meeting called by Posey. Hatred. Unforgiving, implacable hatred. Bledsoe had taken from her life all the joy, all the meaning. And
weren’t the somewhat ineffectual attacks almost a parody of murderous intent, the use of a .22 pistol and a vase and fireworks and smoke bombs? Weren’t those attacks the kind that a desperately unhappy, sheltered woman might mount?

Annie threw down her pen. Dammit, how was she ever going to figure it all out? The pen clinked against the key atop the stacks of paper—all the information they’d gathered. Annie looked at the stack without enthusiasm. Maybe if she read it all, one more time, maybe she would see something wrong, something odd, something to set her on the trail.

The first pink slivers of dawn streaked the sky as Annie put down the last sheet.

She stared down at her scratch pad on the desk. She’d written one single word:
VALIUM.

Because that was wrong, all wrong.

It was in the autopsy report on Kathryn Honeycutt. Not mentioned as important, merely a part of a thorough report. Kathryn Honeycutt had taken a Valium, probably at bedtime, no more than the commonly prescribed five milligrams. No evidence, of course, of drug abuse. Nothing of that sort. Saulter had seen nothing peculiar in it. Kathryn’d had a difficult week, an unpleasant evening. Why not take a tranquilizer at bedtime?

But it was a false note, the one really peculiar fact Annie had found. Kathryn Honeycutt was a Christian Scientist, one so committed to her principles that she was losing her eyesight because of cataracts, yet she would not agree to an operation. Poirot would have sniffed round this fact, just as Annie was.

Would Kathryn Honeycutt take Valium?

No. Annie knew it just as clearly as Miss Marple knew Gladys was innocent in “The Case of the Perfect Maid.”

One false note.

If that was false, what else might be false?

Murder by snake. Absurd. Yet, it had succeeded. But—Annie rubbed tired eyes—the person who placed the snake in that hamper had no assurance whatever that it would succeed. A different matter indeed from gunfire and a plummeting vase. And why, dammit, had Bledsoe opened the
damn basket? Whatever the man had been, he was not stupid; he was, despite his offensive views, indeed an expert on the mystery. Of all people—

Annie sat very, very still. Another false note. Though it could be argued from Bledsoe’s behavior during the week—his attempt to run after the gunman at Death on Demand, his swift scaling up the pillars to the roof after the vase fell—that he was indeed fearless.

But perhaps fearlessness had nothing to do with it. Perhaps the answer was simple, very, very simple and much more illuminating.

But if Annie’s surmise were true, it meant that nothing was what it seemed to be.

She picked up Lady Gwendolyn’s note:

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

Look at what actually happened, the canny author was saying.

The shots—They were seen as the start of a murderous campaign against Bledsoe.

The vase—Further evidence of deadly intent against the critic.

Stone’s death—Stone is silenced. If he knows more than he has admitted about the attempts against Bledsoe, that knowledge is forever lost.

Honeycutt’s death—An innocent victim if Bledsoe is the killer’s quarry.

Neil Bledsoe wounded—The killer stymied again.

Neil Bledsoe—A man pathologically afraid of snakes. But who could know he would fall to his death to escape one?

Scaled back
to
the bare bones, what did they have?

John Border Stone dead in his room.

Kathryn Honeycutt murdered.

Neil Bledsoe wounded.

Neil Bledsoe killed in a violent fall from his balcony.

In that order.

Suddenly, Annie understood. Oh, yes, Lady Gwendolyn. Yes, yes, yes. But how had it been managed? Annie closed her eyes for a long moment, picturing again the Bledsoe suite the night Kathryn died and Neil was wounded. For just an instant, she had to admire the guile and care and, yes,
courage involved. Not impossible. Difficult, yes. Complicated, yes. Untidy, yes. But life was difficult, complicated, and untidy. Just like rivers running to the sea, human emotion wasn’t contained within narrow bounds. It was of these kinds of human emotions, so often doubling and twisting within civilized confines, that Agatha Christie wrote.

Annie knew at least a part of the answer. Now all she had to do was prove it. She got to her feet and restlessly prowled around the living room area, but this time she was looking, studying, imagining. Finally, she stopped to stare at the iron grillwork that separated the foyer from the living room.

And she could almost hear a high, clear voice joyously announcing, “Bully for you, my dear, you’ve got it.”

O
h, Lord.” Annie stared in dismay at the tables in Conference Room D. Each table was littered with an assortment of rubbish. Three-by-five cards were taped next to each piece.

Max looked over her shoulder. “Can’t say they didn’t give it their all.”

Chief Saulter sighed heavily. He hadn’t been pleased to be recalled to the hotel after only four hours sleep, but that was four hours more than she had enjoyed, Annie had pointed out.

“I thought they kept a clean hotel here,” Saulter groused.

The collection of trash demonstrated just how much waste people discarded even in a carefully policed environment. Although perhaps the gatherers of this motley mess had been a trifle overenthusiastic. Indeed, the conference-goers who had participated, two by two, in a search of the hotel, the terrace, and the surrounding terrain yesterday must have left the areas sparkling clean.

Ingrid, of course, had directed the careful deposit of the materials along with the accompanying notes on the tables.

Annie glanced at her watch. It was early, to be sure. Annie had awakened Max with the news of her conclusions, and together they’d planned their approach, then called Saulter. Max insisted upon breakfasting first (he and Inspector Dover scrupulously believed in regular mealtimes), but Annie had scarcely been able to eat. There was so much to do and so little time. The conference ended today with the noon luncheon.
Their little comedy must be played out by then. But the evidence came first. That was essential.

It took time, so damn much time. Max started at the back of the room, Saulter in the middle. Annie was still on her first table: cigarette packages and butts, crushed drink cans, wadded tissues, pennies and nickels and dimes, buttons, combs, slips of paper, fishing weights, a subway token, lipstick case, chewed gum, a paperback mystery (Graham Greene’s
Stamboul Train),
five assorted bookmarks (where authors gather, bookmarks appear as if by magic), an empty condom package, a man’s ornate class ring (Annie must remember to announce its finding at the luncheon), a pair of broken sunglasses, a thimble, a single silver hoop earring (ditto), a pocket-size New Testament, a pair of tweezers—

“By God, here it is. Here it is!” Saulter boomed.

Annie and Max reached him at the same time.

The loose coil of wire was among the more nondescript items on that table. It was a dark gray, perhaps a quarter-inch thick, flexible.

Saulter leaned over to read the notation on the three-by-five card. “Found 9/14/90 atop shrubbery in center of the Palmetto House Hotel terrace. Alleyn J. Forman, 1733 North Eighteenth Street, Little Rock, Arkansas. Annie, damned if I don’t think you’re right!”

“Don’t you want to come?” Max asked in surprise, standing by the chief’s car.

Annie yawned and rubbed her eyes. “You and the chief can take care of it. I know what the results are going to be.” She glanced at the paper sack on the front seat of the car. In it reposed the treasured wire, on its way to the mainland and tests for nitrate residue. She bent to look in the driver’s side. “Chief, you will bring it back for the meeting, won’t you?”