Troubles in the Brasses (23 page)

This was almost too much for them to take in. Nobody was shouting now, there was only stunned silence. Frieda Loye had her hands pressed across her mouth, perhaps to suppress a scream, perhaps because she didn’t want to throw up in front of Lady Rhys. Then Corliss Blair, quite green about me lips, emitted a hysterical giggle. “So would the real murderer please raise his hand?”

“That would be extremely helpful,” Madoc said in all seriousness, but nobody did. “Then, Rick, if you have a CB radio in your wagon, would you please go out right now and see whether you can get through to the sheriff or constable or whoever’s in charge around here?”

“She’s a sheriff.”

“Good. Ask her to come as quickly as possible. I must caution you all that she will be quite within her rights not to let us leave Lodestone Flat until she finds out who’s responsible for these outrages. If you hope to catch that plane, it behooves you all to cooperate as fully as possible. Now then, Lucy, do you stick to your story about that masked intruder who attacked you?”

“Why shouldn’t I?” The hot food and wine had put some color into the woman’s cheeks. “Did you think I was making it up?”

“I merely want to be absolutely clear as to your testimony. And it’s your impression that the attacker was a man?”

“That was my impression at the time, yes.”

“Could that man have been Rintoul?”

“I think I’d have recognized Cedric.”

“But you said everything was blurry because you didn’t have your contact lenses in.”

“Frieda said that, I didn’t. It wasn’t completely blurred. I could see you well enough to recognize. That was why I thought the man must have had a stocking over his face.”

“Thank you. Now, is there anything you’d like to add? Can you think of any way we might positively eliminate Rintoul?”

“I don’t know about positively, but I’m pretty sure, yes. For one thing, Cedric never wore perfume.”

“Perfume?”

“Shaving lotion. Men’s cologne. You know what I mean. Like that stuff Dave Gabriel’s been dousing himself in lately.”

“One of the students gave it to me,” the oboist mumbled. “And I don’t douse myself.”

“Was this in fact the same scent as Gabriel’s?” Madoc persisted.

“I can’t tell you. I just remember getting a whiff of some kind of fragrance when he bent over me. It wasn’t awfully strong. Not like those knockout drops Delicia Fawn wears, for instance.”

“Thanks, Lucy, I’ll do as much for you sometime.” The luscious soprano was yawning, not really interested in a dead man or a half-strangled woman. Hers could hardly be called a one-track mind, but it must certainly run on a remarkably narrow-gauge line.

“Let’s keep to the subject, shall we?” Madoc pleaded. “We don’t have much time left. Lucy, can you remember anything else at all about this intruder? Was he tall or short? Thin or fat?”

“I’d say he was tall. Tallish, anyway, and definitely not fat. About like Dave here.” Lucy fastened her eyes on Gabriel, her face setting hard. “Quite a lot like Dave.”

“And can you think of any reason why Dave Gabriel might have wanted to strangle you?”

“Only that he probably knows I saw him lurking around Jacques-Marie Houdon’s castor oil plants that day at the garden party. And Dave’s kind of a weirdo.”

“Would you care to amplify that observation? In what way does Gabriel strike you as weird?”

“Well, he never talks to anybody, just sits there in a corner making reeds. I don’t know what he thinks he’s going to do with them all. Cedric snitched a few one day last month to practice one of his magic tricks with, and Dave almost killed him then and there.”

“Is that true, Mr. Gabriel?” Madoc asked him.

“Yes, it’s true,” snarled the oboist. “That big bastard grabbed every single reed I had with me, and set fire to them. This was a Friday matinee, we were due onstage in fifteen minutes, and I was left without any way to play my instrument. One of the guys in the section offered to lend me one, but I can’t play with somebody else’s reed. It’s like trying to chew with somebody else’s teeth. Which makes me a weirdo, evidently. Anyway, I had to sit down and make myself another one, and you know what it’s like when you’re all upset and trying to do something finicky in a hurry. God knows what I sounded like that day. I’m sorry for swearing in front of you, Lady Rhys, but God damn it to hell, Cedric Rintoul was a bloody, rotten son of a bitch!”

“So what if he was?” Jason Jasper shouted back. “Is that any reason to go jabbing an icepick into him, eh? Does that give you an excuse to strangle Lucy, just because she happened to laugh when she saw him light the match? I laughed, too, if you want to know. I mean, here’s this gink with a million reeds and not one to play with.”

“A situation in which I personally fail to see the slightest vestige of humor,” said Sir Emlyn. “Deliberately to render a fellow musician’s instrument unplayable at any time, much less fifteen minutes before a concert, is unpardonable. Rintoul ought to have been fired on the spot. Where was your conductor? I beg your pardon, Madoc. My question is irrelevant to the matter at hand. Please go on with your interrogation.”

“Thanks, Tad. Mr. Jasper, is there any other point of information you’d like to get off your chest?”

“I was just wondering whether you knew Cedric and Dave were the last two people left in the lobby after the rest of us went upstairs.”

“Yes, I do know, but how did you? As I recall, my parents and I were still in the lobby when you yourself went up.”

“Yes, I know, but I was”—Jason hesitated—“sort of watching to make sure Cedric got to bed all right. He’d been down in the dumps ever since your father jumped on him at the rehearsal we never got to hold.” Jason was avoiding Sir Emlyn’s eye, which was the sensible thing for him to do in the circumstances. “I heard the rest of you come up, but I didn’t hear Cedric and I didn’t hear Dave.”

“How indeed could you have heard Mr. Gabriel? Mrs. Shadd has already mentioned that he never talks.”

“Well, I know his step.”

“Ah, I see. So failing to hear his step, you went back down to check on Mr. Rintoul?”

“No! No, I didn’t.”

“Why not, if you were worried about him?”

“Well, I figured Dave was with him, so—” Jason let his voice trail off into silence.

“You assumed Gabriel was offering cheerful conversation to alleviate Rintoul’s gloom? Notwithstanding the fact that Gabriel is known for his lack of loquacity?”

“He’d be a warm body anyway, wouldn’t he? Something’s better than nothing, isn’t it? Look, for God’s sake, I don’t know what I thought. I was tired and hungry and fed up with the whole damned business. I was wishing to God I’d never”—for some reason Jasper paused—“that I’d stayed the hell home and studied to be a druggist or something. I didn’t go down again because I went to bed and fell asleep. What’s that supposed to be, some kind of crime? I’m sorry I opened my mouth.”

“Please don’t feel that way, Jasper. It’s your duty to assist the police in the performance of their duties, you know. When did you go to sleep?”

“How do I know? I wasn’t timing myself.”

“Was there a lamp burning in the room? Had you been reading to while away your wait for Rintoul? Or perhaps playing solitaire? Or just twiddling your thumbs?”

“I—don’t remember. I’d had a few drinks, I wasn’t feeling too sharp. That’s it, I was drunk!”

“Jason Jasper, you were not drunk.” That was Helene Dufresne at her most schoolteacherish. “What sort of nonsense are you handing us here? You’ve never taken more than two drinks together in your whole life.”

“How do you know I haven’t?”

“I know your wife and I know she’d snatch you bald-headed if you ever tried it.”

“My wife isn’t here. For God’s sake, Helene, I’ve never been marooned with a pack of murderers before. A man can slip once in his lifetime, can’t he?”

“Certainly he can, but you didn’t last night and you needn’t try to make us believe you did. Look here, Jason, you know perfectly well you and Joe Ragovsky were playing euchre with Corliss and me from the time we finished the supper dishes until about fifteen minutes before we decided to call it a night. You had one drink before we ate, like the rest of the crowd, and one after we quit playing, to help you sleep. And those were mostly water because we were running low on whiskey. What are you trying to play at here?”

“I had more than two,” Jasper insisted. “After you went up, I sneaked out to the—” He stopped so short they could almost hear the screeching of brakes.

Frieda Loye broke in, her voice high and shrill. “To the kitchen, Jason? To get another drink, or to get hold of that icepick?”

“Frieda, for God’s sake!” he yelled back. “I told you I went to get a drink. There was about an inch left in the bottle and I picked it up and drank it right down.”

“You’re a liar, Jason Jasper! Liar! Liar! You did it, you killed them. It has to be you, there’s nobody else left. You wanted it worst of all, and we weren’t dying fast enough for you. Were we, Jason? Were we?”

For the second time that day, Frieda Loye was hopelessly out of control. Her voice was like the scraping of a madman’s bow across a loosened E-string. Her face was stark white, her eyes blazing red, her mouth a ghastly, writhing grimace. “It has to be you, Jason. There’s nobody else left!”

Jason Jasper became quite calm, strangely dignified for one who a moment ago had been determined to play the drunken buffoon. “Oh yes there is, Frieda. There’s somebody else. There’s you.”

“W
HAT ARE YOU TRYING
to do, drive me crazy?”

If that was the case, Jasper wouldn’t have far to drive. Frieda Loye was all to pieces: shaking, sobbing, barely able to talk, much less to scream. If Corliss Blair hadn’t put an arm around her, she’d have toppled out of her chair. Nevertheless, Madoc bored in.

“Why should Jasper want to do that, Frieda?”

“For God’s sake, Madoc!” snapped Lucy Shadd. “Let up on her. Can’t you see she doesn’t know what she’s saying?”

“Then she has in fact been driven crazy?”

“Of course she hasn’t. That is—oh, all right. Frieda’s been having some problems the past few months.”

“What sort of problems?”

“Oh, nightmares, spells of hysteria. Getting strange notions, delusions that somebody’s chasing her, trying to hurt her.”

“Trying to kill me, she means! Lucy, you bitch!”

“Watch that mouth, Frieda. You know what I told you last time.”

Madoc intervened. “What did Lucy tell you, Frieda?”

“She—she—”

Frieda couldn’t go on. They were all glaring at Madoc now, even Lady Rhys. “Really, Madoc,” she protested, “do you have to do this?”

“Yes, Sillie, he has to,” said Sir Emlyn. “Loye, pull yourself together. Here, Madoc, give her a sip of this.”

He pulled a brandy flask out of his coat pocket and passed it to his son. Lady Rhys looked a bit startled, but made no move to intervene. Madoc took off the tiny silver cap, poured a tot into it, and held it to the distraught flautist’s lips. Passive now, Frieda swallowed, coughed, and sucked air in shuddering gulps.

“Thank you, Madoc. They’re not delusions. I can’t tell you any more. They said they’d kill me if I talked, and they will. You know they will.”

“I see. All right then, Frieda, let’s just leave it alone for the moment. Here, take the rest of this brandy. Now Lucy, once more, who tried to strangle you?”

“Do I have to answer that?”

“I’d prefer that you did.”

“All right, if I must. My story about the masked man was a cover-up. Don’t you cops have some theory about the most obvious explanation usually being the right one?”

“Lucy, you can’t mean Frieda!” Corliss Blair protested. “That’s a crazy notion if anything is. Frieda couldn’t possibly strangle anybody.”

“Well, she didn’t, did she? You can see I’m still here. With a damned sore throat where she tried.”

“But why did she try?” said Madoc. “Was there a particular reason? Did you also catch her among the castor oil plants?”

“Yes, as a matter of fact, I did. She was picking the beans. I didn’t think much of it at the time, I thought she might be planning to make her own castor oil or something. Frieda’s one of those nature’s remedy freaks, you know. She’s got some kind of fancy grinder thing and she’s always messing around with herbs and raw vegetables. I made the stupid mistake of asking her about the castor beans after what happened to Wilhelm.”

“When did you ask her? Ace Bulligan didn’t bring the news about Ochs’s having been poisoned with ricin until quite a while after that episode in your bedroom.”

“So what? Wilhelm had been dead since the night before, hadn’t he? Look, Madoc, I’ve got a few brains, too. I saw how Wilhelm died. I watched you take that sample from the floor, though you didn’t see me watching. I knew who you were, and why you were doing it. Even if you hadn’t done that, I’d still have suspected poison from the way Wilhelm was having convulsions and spewing all over the place. He’d had stomach troubles, sure, but never like that before.”

“Was that when you thought of Frieda and the castor beans?”

“Then or a little later. I couldn’t say, exactly. I was pretty busy, as you may remember, getting the show on the road.”

“And yet you didn’t mind sharing a room with her when we got here?”

“Why not? We’d roomed together plenty of times, and she’d never tried to kill me before.”

“But you’d never taxed her with murdering one of her colleagues before.”

“I didn’t accuse her of murdering Wilhelm. I simply brought it up about the beans in a conversational way, to see how she’d react.”

“When was this, on the plane?”

“Yes, of course. That was the only time I’d have had a chance, wasn’t it?”

“Lucy, you did no such thing.” Frieda was feeling the brandy now and she’d got her voice more or less under control. “You never said one word to me on the plane except did I want my coffee regular or decaffeinated.”

“Frieda, you simply don’t remember. Look, why don’t you just try to relax, let your mind go blank. Forget the whole, thing. It’s all right, we’re going to get you out of here as soon as we can and take you to a doctor. You’re going to be fine. Isn’t she, Madoc? Tell her.”