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Authors: Joan Hess

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BOOK: Murder At Murder At the Mimosa Inn, The
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“What is going on?” I repeated, ready to choke off the laughter with my bare hands.
Peter produced another benign smile. “I believe you’re under arrest, Claire.”
I
t was preferable to being shot, but only by a narrow margin. I waited until Suzetta choked out a final laugh, then raised my eyebrows and politely said, “Would someone care to explain?”
“Why don’t we go in here?” Peter said, holding open the office door. “It’s—ah, complicated.”
We went in the office and found chairs. Peter was clearly loving every minute of it, and Suzetta let out an occasional chuckle. I, on the other hand, was neither delighted nor warmed by the merriment I had unwittingly afforded them.
“Exactly how complicated is it?” I said when we were as cozy as a trio of cowboys around a campfire. It came out rather nicely, considering the proximity of the coyotes and/ or rattlesnakes.
“Miss Price works for me,” he said. He smiled at the blonde, who dimpled and produced a flattering blush. When I blush, I am slightly less attractive than a withered geranium, and the only dimple I possess is not conveniently situated for public admiration.
“That’s correct, I’ve been under cover on the drug
operation for over eight months. Lieutenant Rosen is my boss.” And her idol; we could all hear the unspoken words.
“How fascinating, for both of you!” I said. “First, you were a retarded secretary, who turned into a private eye, who turned into a student, who turned into an undercover cop. How utterly, utterly fascinating. However, this is not the land of Oz, and I don’t believe in Munchkins or tap-dancing scarecrows.” I stood up and stomped toward the door.
“Claire, please come back and sit down,” Peter said. Sincerity oozed from his voice.
I forced myself to comply. Not out of any desire to cooperate, of course, but from a need to pump as much information out of the two baboons as possible. If Suzetta didn’t kill Harmon, then I needed a new direction. And for once, I could play the aggrieved victim.
“Well?” I said in a sour voice.
“Let Suzetta tell me what happened first,” he said with another dollop of sincerity
Suzetta briskly reported finding me in her room and repeated verbatim the subsequent conversation, although she embellished my bewilderment and my final ill-judged conclusion. She managed to maintain a professional tone, but it was obvious that she had found the whole scene much more entertaining than her last birthday party.
When she was done, Peter looked at me. “I thought you promised to stay out of the investigation, Claire.”
Back on the carpet in front of the principal, who was growing weary of reprimanding me. It was mutual. I shrugged and said, “I was trying to clear Mimi before Eric cracked up. You know that she didn’t bash Harmon over the head.”
Suzetta laughed. “Is she under cover, too, Lieutenant Rosen? I thought I knew everyone in the CID.”
“Claire’s beyond ‘undercover.’ She’s Farbervile’s most—”
“Sorry to interrupt,” I interrupted, my blood back to a simmer. “Shall we discuss something more pertinent—such as Harmon’s murder or even the identity of Nickie’s campus pusher? If you weren’t sneaking out last night to take a shipment of drugs from Nickie or to transport Harmon, then what were you doing?” I asked Suzetta.
Peter nodded to her. She said, “I went to search Bruce Wheeler’s room for evidence of drugs.”
“Where was Bruce at the time?”
“Bruce drove Harmon’s car down the road and parked it. Harmon was supposed to sneak away from the boathouse to meet him and then drive home. He was worried that he might be seen if he went to the stable to get his car, when the script called for him to be already dead.” Suzetta held up a finger to cut off my question. “No, I did not find any evidence that linked Bruce to Nickie. It seems as though I’d better try to search Eric’s bedroom.”
I muttered a perfunctory protest. Suzetta was no longer available to fill in any roles in my hypothesized plot. I did not want to consider the possibility that Mimi was a murderer and Eric a drug dealer, although it was looking more likely every minute. Sighing, I looked at Peter.
“Bruce did what he was supposed to do?”
“He left the car about a half mile down the road, and waited almost an hour for Harmon to appear. Harmon couldn’t make it, for known reasons. Eventually, Bruce gave up and went back to his room.”
“What happened to Harmon’s car?”
“I was examining it this morning when the Audubon group spilled out of the woods in a twitter. Later, it was examined again, then brought back to the stable. Mrs. Crundall now has the keys.”
“I don’t suppose the trunk was filled with drugs?” Grasping at straws in a hurricane, I admit.
Peter dismissed Suzetta, who gave me a wink as she strolled out of the door. I did not reciprocate. Across the
desk, Peter grimaced and said, “The trunk was empty, Claire. I don’t want to arrest Eric on a drug charge, and I would prefer to see him and his wife cleared of any suspicion. But my job is harder when I have to spend a certain amount of my time rescuing you from a variety of sticky situations.”
Familiar and tedious. I retreated to the offensive position that had worked earlier. “Why did you allow that woman to terrorize me with a gun, and pretend she was going to blow my head off and bury me in a pile of manure in the stable”?
“Her reactions were spontaneous. I did not instruct her to pull a gun on you, should she find you in her room,” he said, all teeth and honey. “I did warn her that you might decide to visit, however.”
“Good for you; maybe you can retire from the police department and earn a living as a gypsy fortune-teller.”
“Maybe I ought to. It might be easier than putting up with your attempts to emulate Miss Marple. Is there anything else you’ve discovered in your amateur, unauthorized, harebrained investigation?”
I grudgingly repeated my conversation with Nickie. “He must have gone outside to meet his contact,” I concluded, “although the person in question stood him up. It was undoubtedly Mrs. Robison-Dewitt; she has the aura of a felon.”
“But not of a student.” Peter stood up and escorted me to the door. “Claire, please let me handle this. If you insist on continuing, I may suggest to Suzetta that she file burglary charges.”
“I thought the Gestapo was disbanded at the end of World War II
.”
“That’s the current theory,” he murmured. The door closed firmly in my face.
Mentally composing prickly comments about eavesdroppers and supercilious cops, I went into the drawing room and sat down to plan the next siege. I dismissed the drug
mess for the moment and turned my thoughts to the murder. The door to the porch had been a revolving door between ten o’clock and midnight. Suzetta, Mimi, Eric, and Bruce had all left on various scripted missions. Nickie had gone to meet a no-show, who might have been any of the mentioned or someone else. Harmon was in the boathouse, playing out his wonderful scenario. Bella was in her bungalow, drinking tea and brandy. I was in the parlor, sleeping through the movie. All I needed was a blackbird to snip off my nose, if the sneezes didn’t do it first.
I decided I ought to drop a tactful word of warning to Eric. I found him in the kitchen, perched on the same stool that Mimi had occupied earlier. He was pale, too tired to do more than twitch his mouth in greeting as I joined him.
“Mimi called from the sheriff’s office,” he said. “She told me that she would probably be there all night and to call a lawyer in the morning. What can I do, Claire? She didn’t—she didn’t—kill Harmon. Why would she have done that?”
“Everyone knows about the option, Eric. It gives both of you one of the more mundane motives in homicide cases: self-preservation.”
“But Harmon wasn’t going to exercise the option,” Eric said. He sagged so violently, I worried he would topple off the stool. “I told him that. I mean, I told the sheriff that. Oh, hell, I don’t know what I told anybody … .” His voice died in a plaintive whisper.
“If you and Mimi want to keep the Mimosa Inn, you’re going to have to pull yourself together,” I said sternly, not at all sure that I could lift him off the floor if he continued in this vein. “Bella told Peter that Harmon intended to use the optioned property for a subdivision to be called Harmony Hills. That doesn’t sound as though he was planning to let it expire.”
“She’s lying,” he mumbled.
“Why would she lie about it? And while we’re on the
subject, where is this infamous option? Mimi said that it was to be burned and the ashes used as clues. Suzetta found a blank option and burned that without giving it much thought. So where is it now?”
“I don’t know, Claire, and I don’t care. I need to get Mimi out of that jail before she breaks down. She’s more delicate than she appears to outsiders. She’s like a mimosa leaf; if you touch one, it shrinks and folds up.”
Eric may have enjoyed the imagery, but I suspected Mimi was a good bit sturdier than the analogy implied. Eric, on the other hand, bore no resemblance to the quick-witted mathematician I had known. We needed to get Mimi back for his sake, not hers.
I gave him a rallying poke and said, “Tell me exactly what you said in your statement, and anything else you may have overlooked.”
“I started the movie at about ten o’clock. Before that, I went upstairs and overheard Mimi talking to Harmon, which is when the mud was supposed to fall off my shoe in the hall, except that I forgot to pick it up when I was outside earlier. So I waited until ten-thirty, when I went to the boathouse. Well, I was a minute late because of a question, and I had to go across the croquet court, and that reminded me about the mud, so I picked up a piece to leave later and—”
“Never mind,” I said. How the man ever learned to count, much less to make forays into calculus and other murky fields, was hard to imagine. Sequencing was not a visible strength. “Tell me what you saw at the boathouse—or didn’t see.”
He stared into space. “As I came out on the porch, I saw Mimi leave. I gave her time to cut across the yard to the back door, then went to the boathouse and called to Harmon. He didn’t answer, and it was too dark to see anything. For a minute or two, I thought he was fooling around. But he wasn’t there, Claire.”
“But Mimi said he was and that she talked to him,” I said patiently. “Did he fly out a window?”
“There aren’t any windows. The sheriff says that Mimi bashed Harmon on the head and hid his body in the rowboat. I didn’t look in the rowboat; it was too dark and I couldn’t have seen anything, anyway.”
“So what did you do then?”
“Well, I decided that he had changed the plans without telling me. He could have warned Mimi that he wasn’t going to be there, but that she was supposed to pretend that he was. I slipped back to the movie projector with plenty of time for the reel change.”
“But Mimi swears that he was there when she left—and that he was alive. If we accept that, we’ll have to come up with an explanation for Harmon’s vanishing act. Are you positive no one went in the boathouse between the time Mimi left and you arrived?”
“I could see the door the entire time, Claire. It was dark, but there was enough moonlight and overflow from the upstairs windows.” Eric made a strangled noise and began to tremble.
I quickly opted for a new topic. “After Mimi went in the back door, what did she do?”
“She met Suzetta in our bedroom to confirm that the option was burned, then they came back in time for the lights to go on at the end of the movie. After that, we locked up and went to bed.”
What a muddle, I sighed to myself. I did not want Eric to sense my discouragement, so I managed a jolly smile. “Don’t worry; we’ll figure it out. Up until Harmon disappeared, everyone was acting according to his or her script, right? Did anyone do anything that seemed inappropriate?”
“I don’t know, Claire; Harmon had the script. Do you think I ought to go to the sheriff’s office and tell them that I
lied, that Harmon was there when I arrived? I could say that he said something about the option, so I—”
“No, Eric,” I said hastily, “you’re likely to make things worse. The sheriff has doubts about the motive; for God’s sake, don’t drop by to confirm it. I need to get my hands on Harmon’s master script. Mimi thought it was in the office, but Peter said he searched for it. Can you think of any place else it might be?”
BOOK: Murder At Murder At the Mimosa Inn, The
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