Murder Came Second (30 page)

“What about a gun?”

“Big artillery.” He grinned. “An air pistol with rock salt to discourage rabbits and squirrels and hedgehogs from his crops.”

“Are you going to tell Harmon?” I asked.

“I shouldn’t. It’s evidence and it’s still not my case.”

“Sonny, I think he’s literally dying. He looks ten years older than he did last week.”

“He’s in the bank,” Cindy said. “Painting one of the file rooms. Shall I go get him?”

“No,” I said. “Sonny, you go bring him outside by the fountain and call Fargo over when you get him there.”

“Why?” He stood up.

“He’s going to cry. He’ll need to hug Fargo so you won’t see.”

As we sat that late afternoon, having iced tea in a yard that was still warmed by a summery afternoon sun, Cindy was as happy as I about Harmon. Theoretically, Harmon could still have stabbed Terese, but his odds had dropped dramatically. Even Carlucci was not the semi-favorite he had been on the killer tote board. Cindy and I agreed that Hamlet was the killer—Bobby gone berserk— and Elaine his accomplice. Perhaps not accomplice in the usual sense. Maybe misguided protector was a better phrase.

Our pleasant silence was broken by the sound of a car, followed by the arrival of Sonny. I was surprised to see him again today. He seemed much in evidence lately, and I was doubly surprised at the way he looked. My usually well-groomed brother was wearing no jacket. The top button of his shirt was undone, and I could see sweat stains under his arms. His tie was askew and his chinos wilted and baggy. And, horror of horrors, the shiny black boots had a sizeable smudge on the left toe! Something serious had happened.

He looked so longingly at the pitcher of iced tea, I thought he was going to pick it up and drink it. I hurriedly filled my glass and gave it to him. He nodded thanks and downed about half of it before he even sat.

“Would you like a real drink? Or some food?” Cindy was eying him with concern.

“No, thanks. I’m going home to shower and collapse but”—he turned to me—“I thought you would want to hear the rest of the day.”

“Sure.” I gave him a cigarette and took number four for myself. From the way he looked, number five might not be far behind.

“I got back to the police station after lunch to discover that Anders had decided Mr. Dermott was our transient killer/robber. Anders said Dermott had turned in the silver, which he had stolen from the Brownlee B&B, because he feared someone had later seen
him
taking it out of the dumpster, where he had temporarily left it, to give to the woman with him who was really his local accomplice in the robbery, if not the murder. So he arrested Mr. Dermott and demanded to know who the woman was.”

“Probably the town manager’s wife.” Cindy giggled.

“Damn near as good!” Sonny took another swig of my tea, and I snuck a sip of Cindy’s. Cindy stared at the empty pitcher. Soon, I guessed we’d all be into Fargo’s water bowl. “When Dermott finally got browbeaten enough to admit who he was with, he said he only knew her name was Cleo and she lived on Alerton Street.”

“Cleo McKinley Smith!” Cindy and I shrieked together and burst into laughter. Cleo Smith was a not very attractive woman in her late forties with a stiff hairdo, a tight mouth and pale blue eyes that didn’t miss a trick. She left no stone uncriticized and had been my personal candidate for Provincetown’s last living virgin over twelve. Oh, yes, she was Choate Ellis’s personal secretary at the bank.

The fact that she had been in a liquor store and then in a motel with a strange—and married—man struck me as about as likely as my Aunt Mae opening a massage parlor complete with handcuffs and whips. Sometimes my record in judging people really worried me. Would I have considered Attila the Hun the Teddy Roosevelt of the Dark Ages?

Even Sonny managed a weak grin. “Our beloved Cleo in the flesh. All ninety bony pounds of it. And by the time I got there, Anders had already sent a car with Hatcher and Jeanine to the bank to arrest her and bring her in.”

By this time Cindy and I had collapsed halfway out of our chairs and into each other’s arms in complete hysteria.

“They brought Cleo in, weeping, with Choate Ellis and the bank attorney sputtering right behind them, demanding to speak to Chief Franks, who was up in Hyannis testifying at a trial. Dermott was alternately screaming for a lawyer and begging us not to tell his wife about Cleo. That seemed to bother him a lot more than being arrested for murder. Cleo took up the cry, saying she had never done anything like this in her life. Whether she meant killing Terese, robbing the Applebee’s or getting picked up for a roll in the hay, I don’t know.”

He ground out his cigarette. “And Anders had already called a press conference for four o’clock.”

“Lord, help us,” Cindy managed to gasp. “Was he going to put those poor people in little cages and show them as trophies?”

“Just about, I guess. We finally got Franks pulled out of the courtroom and on some phone. You have to turn your cell phones off in court. I told him what happened and that we now had less than an hour to face the press. I suggested releasing the two prisoners and putting Anders in a cell. I think Franks actually considered it. There was a long silence. Then Franks said he couldn’t make it back in an hour. Of course he could have but, well, you know how he hates the media people.”

“Like you like ’em.” I grinned.

“Not always, but they can be helpful. Anyway, Franks chews out Anders, right on the speakerphone, and tells him he’s on unpaid leave. Then he tells me to straighten things out and go play meet the press and hangs up.”

“What on earth did you do?”

“Told Cleo it was all a terrible mistake, that Anders got the wrong name, and then sent her off with Choate patting her shoulder, saying, ‘There, there, my dear. We all knew it could never be you shacked up in a motel with some picked-up John from a liquor store.’ I thought that was a nice delicate way to comfort her. Oh, and I had Nacho send her two dozen roses with apologies from Anders.”

He stretched, the fatigue showing. “Dermott was a little trickier. I told him Anders wasn’t well and apparently forgot his pills. I gave Dermott my two tickets to
Hamlet
and told him he and his wife could have a lovely pre-theater luncheon at the Inn, courtesy of the Ptown PD.”

“Not bad for a rush job,” Cindy said. “Did he buy it?”

“Yes, especially after I asked him to be with me at the press conference. I introduced him and announced that he couldn’t sleep last night and happened to look out his motel window and saw the dumpster caper. Then I really expounded on how he worried about a baby being alive in one of the cartons, and then how honest and what a help he was in turning in the silver. He was grinning and bowing by that time.”

“What did you tell the media about the boots?” I was right. Cigarette number five met its match.

“Nothing. I just said that finding the silver and other items had put us much closer to a solution, and we’d keep them posted.”

“Are you going to talk to any of the cast about this discovery? Especially the boots?”

Sonny yawned. “I’m not sure. Maybe Elaine. I’d almost bet she’s the one who staged the whole robbery thing, footprints and all, to lead us away from baby brother, but it doesn’t make much sense to accuse her of that when we’ve yet to accuse Bobby of anything.”

“Be nice to find the plastic raincoat and to get the DNA results on the semen. Not to mention finding Willie, wherever—whoever—he is.”

My answer was a light snore. Diplomat Peres was asleep.

Chapter 23

Some people thrive on a certain amount of stress. I know I do my best work when there’s some amount of pressure. Cindy does well when she’s got several balls in the air at once. Cassie and Lainey both do well when a nice neat schedule starts falling apart here and there. Sonny usually wallows in stress like a pig in mud, the worse it gets, the wider he grins.

But not this time. I think the whole situation was somewhat foreign to him. God knows it was to the rest of us.

While any of us might occasionally read a scandal sheet like the A-List, we simply took the stories as gospel if we were naïve, or as so much scurrilous amusement if we were not. The real threats it could impose on the subjects being pilloried throughout its pages had probably never occurred to any of us before now.

And the sheer, gleefully malicious investigators and writers who turned out the smoking pages were a breed completely alien to most of us.

It seemed that no one in the cast of Carlucci’s play was left untouched. From Hamlet on down there was a little something for everyone. Even the young man who played Laertes apparently had a juvenile record—a record which is
supposed
to be sealed—for assault and robbery. And one of the electricians had an entire bedroom in his home turned into a Katharine Hepburn shrine of photos and artifacts, including a threadbare terry robe stolen from the set of
Adam’s Rib
, which he used as a bath towel.

These appetizing tidbits were Terese’s current notes and had come to Sonny via the
A-List’s
editor, whom Sonny had at last reached Saturday morning, at his Long Island home. The editor had solemnly declared that the public “had the right to know.” And when Sonny had asked “Why?” had seemed genuinely confused.

Fortunately, the publisher either had better sense or had come under some pressure from high places, however, for after speaking with Sonny, he had ordered the editor to dump all the Hamlet printed files plus any other of Terese’s files or notes already transferred to the main office computer, right down to any stray grocery lists. The editor was then to write a brief, but praise filled and fact sparse obituary of that dedicated journalist for next week’s issue. When Terese’s body was released,
A-List
would provide a private funeral. Terese was being gently erased.

Willie, he added, was on extended vacation in the South Pacific and could not be reached. And whoever had blanked out Terese’s laptop was still unknown. My bet was still Elaine. Before or after the murder, she still was the one with the best opportunities before the murder. After the murder, quite possibly, she was awake early, found Terese’s body, went back upstairs and erased the hard drive, made her trip to the dumpster and then waited patiently for someone else to “find” the body. She would have taken the risk in a heartbeat to protect Bobby and, perforce, herself from Terese’s account of their lives.

While Sonny, like the rest of us who knew of his conversation with the publisher, was relieved that next week’s published
A-List
would contain no spurious anecdotes for Ptown, its citizens or visiting players, the editor’s information simply broadened the field of those with reason to kill Terese.

Sonny was keeping this information quiet and urged us to say nothing. He was hoping the worry of what they feared might be published the following week would cause one of the players to reveal information. Either accidentally or to incriminate someone else.

We agreed not to tell anyone, whomever that might be, but personally, I thought he was being overcautious. The players were now concerned about presenting a play to a large audience, hoping for good reviews and eager for a reasonable run in New York. Murder came second.

Still, they were a nervous group. I estimated, among actors, chorus, technicians, stagehands and musicians, they had at least thirty-five people who were totally innocent of murder and had the usual reasons for wishing the show to be a success. They had one, and probably two, people involved in Terese’s death, who had an extra reason for hoping for a triumphal presentation. They wanted to look innocent.

After all, if they dressed and acted their parts to perfection, who would
dream
of thinking them capable of bloody murder only a few days prior? If they were relaxed, handled their lines and songs or other activities with obvious competence and ease, who would ever think they carried the weight of a brutal killing on their conscience?

There’s an old superstition among theater people that a bad dress rehearsal means a good opening show, and vice versa. Paul had scheduled the final dress rehearsal for Saturday afternoon.