The Silver Ghost (8 page)

“Oh, we talked every so often about having it plastered over, but for one reason or another we never did. Then Wouter died and the wall became a sort of monument to his memory. I wouldn’t change it now for anything. Yes, Chief Grimpen, did you want me for something?”

“Only to tell you that I’m going along now. I’ve accomplished everything that needs to be done here. It’s perfectly obvious what happened. Your man there,” he nodded at the robe-covered heap on the counter, “was in league with a well-organized gang of antique car thieves. He may have been blackmailed into it,” Grimpen added out of deference for Mr. Billingsgate’s feelings.

“Anyway, he let them into the car shed, helped them get the Silver Ghost away, then raked the gravel to obliterate the traces they’d left, and locked the gate behind him. At this point it must have occurred to your man that he’d put himself in an impossible position. Seeing no way out of being convicted and disgraced, he hanged himself.”

“Having rigged a hoist in advance just in case he might take the notion,” Max Bittersohn amplified.

“How am I supposed to know what the hoist was for? Maybe he’d planned to do some tree work.”

“We have professional tree people come in for that sort of thing,” said Bill. “Have you arranged for the autopsy?”

At last he’d managed to make Grimpen uncomfortable. “I—er—was just going to consult with you on that point. I assumed you’d prefer to wait until your guests were gone before we had the body removed. So as not to spoil your party,” he added hopefully.

“Most considerate of you.” Max hadn’t thought Nehemiah Billingsgate could ever use that tone toward anybody. “Tell them to come as soon as possible, please. You’ll wait for them, I expect.”

“Sergeant Myre will stay. I have pressing business elsewhere, I’m afraid. Myre, you’re in full charge as of now. Order the ambulance and arrange for the autopsy.”

Sergeant Myre opened his mouth, then shut it with an audible snap. Grimpen turned smartly and strode from the shed. Bill went after him to unlock the gate. Max looked at Myre and shrugged.

“Who’s he going to press?”

“I’d like to press him between two barn doors and run a tractor over ’em,” snarled the policeman. “He knows damn well we’ve got the in-laws coming to supper because I told him so when we started out. My wife’s going to raise hell.”

“Call her and tell her you’ve just been promoted to acting chief.”

“You tell her.”

“Okay,” said Max, “if you want.”

For the first time since he’d arrived, Sergeant Myre’s somewhat chubby face relaxed into a full-blown grin. “Thanks, but I’d better do it myself. What should I tell her?”

“Tell her your jackass of a chief has been doing his best to louse up an important investigation and you’ve been put in charge because you’ve got a lot more brains than he has.”

“So does the station cat.”

“Then tell her we’re getting the cat in to help you. Just don’t say where you are or what’s happened. We don’t want the word to get out any sooner than we can help, or we’ll have a crowd control problem on our hands along with everything else.”

M
RS. MYRE MUST BE
a reasonable woman. The policeman came back looking relieved.

“It’s all set for the autopsy and they’ll have the wagon here as soon as possible. I told my wife I’m working with this big detective inspector from Boston. Was that all right, Mr. Bittersohn?”

“Sure. I’m inspecting. What do you think of this wall?”

“Bunch of kids got loose in the wet cement, huh?” Myre ran his fingers somewhat wistfully over a crude depiction of an open runabout. “I always had a hankering to do that.”

“I did, once,” Max confessed. “They were laying a new sidewalk outside my folks’ house and I decided to leave my footprints for posterity. My father caught me and made me get a trowel and smooth them out, then he wouldn’t give me any movie money for a month. I wonder what I’ll do if my kid ever tries the same thing.”

“How old is he?”

“Six months.”

“My youngest is seven.” Myre sounded deservedly smug. “Say, you know what this wall reminds me of? They had this art festival over at the park last summer and Grimpen stuck me with extra duty as usual. He doesn’t dare ask the older guys, they’d spit in his eye. But anyway, there was this hunk of what they were calling folk sculpture that looked something like this. Beats me what anybody’d want of it, but I guess rich people pay big money for that far-out stuff, eh?”

“Some of them do,” Max agreed, “but this was just a practical joke by a mad genius who was a friend of the family. He died a couple of years ago and the Billingsgates keep the wall as a tribute to his memory.”

A beautiful light broke over Myre’s countenance. “Oh jeez, I’ll bet I ran into that guy once. I’m a rookie cop, see, it’s my first day on the job. So Grimpen assigns me to traffic duty down at the square. It’s a Monday morning. There’s a little rush hour traffic and the kids going to school, then it quiets down. I help a couple of old ladies across the street and wonder if anybody’s going to rob the bank today, but nobody does. So I’m standing there shining my new whistle when this 1932 Chevy coupe, black with red wooden wheels, comes zigzagging down the middle of the road doing about five miles an hour.”

Myre was thoroughly happy now. “So I start waving my arms and blowing my whistle and the car stops. There’s the driver up front in this dinky little coupe wearing a fancy chauffeur’s uniform and in the rumble seat’s a great big raccoon. The chauffeur sits there deadpan, looking straight ahead. The raccoon leans out of the rumble seat and starts giving me a hard time.”

“You’re kidding,” said Max, knowing perfectly well he wasn’t.

“So help me God! The raccoon’s wearing a black felt hat pulled down over his eyes and a pink and green necktie with yellow spots on it. He’s puffing on this big cigar and he talks like Jimmy Cagney. And the chauffeur’s just sitting there. Finally it hits me, I’m having a fight with a raccoon. Then I catch on. Ifs a stuffed coon. The chauffeur’s a ventriloquist and he’s working its mouth and paws with wires or something. So I go up to the front window and say, Okay, wise guy, let’s see your driver’s license.

“So he still doesn’t look at me or say a word. He just holds out his hand with a card in it. I go to take the card and the whole hand comes with it. I’m standing there looking down at this hand and thinking. Oh my God, when the Chevy takes off like a bullet and there’s the raccoon leaning over the back of the rumble seat waving bye-bye. I ought to have shot the bastard’s tires out, but I was laughing so hard I couldn’t get my gun out. So I just waved back with his hand. I’ve still got the darn thing in my locker down at the station. Do you think that was him?”

“I hope so,” said Max. “I’d hate to think there was another one like Wouter running around loose. Do you suppose we could get a little more light over here?”

“Sure, wait a second.”

Myre nipped over to the workbench, opened a drawer, and pulled out a large battery lantern. “I figured they’d have one like this around the place. Want me to hold it for you?”

“Just set it on the floor here, if you don’t mind, and see if you can find me a screwdriver or something.”

“I noticed one in the drawer.”

Myre brought back the tool and stood watching while Max probed gently at inch after inch of the concrete, like a dentist checking a patient’s teeth for sensitive spots. “What are you hunting for, Mr. Bittersohn?”

“I don’t know,” Max replied. “It just strikes me that a mere slab of concrete graffiti might be a fairly tame joke for a guy who could invent a talking raccoon.”

He went on peering and poking, occasionally using his pocket magnifier for a closer look at something that appeared to merit closer attention but turned out not to. At last he was down on his knees, his scholar’s robe making a dark puddle around his legs and picking up dust from the floor. Wouter’s literary efforts might have been amusing to those in the know, but Max was growing bored with inscriptions like JT LOVES ID, which JT couldn’t possibly if JT was one of the Tolbathys’ intelligent grandsons and ID was the obnoxious little Imogene Dork whom Max had last seen pouring maple syrup over her cousin James to sweeten him up at one of Aunt Appie’s awful gatherings. As far as he could see, he was getting nowhere except to the end of his patience.

Down at the right-hand corner, Wouter had chosen to finish off his cumbersome frolic with nothing more original than a lopsided heart not more than five or six inches high. Inside, Wouter must have used a nail or some small tool to print K.I. + C.K.

Max jumped to his feet, dusted off his robe, handed Sergeant Myre the screwdriver, and kicked the center of the heart. Instantly and silently, the entire back wall of the alcove swung out at a right angle to the car shed. Instead of scribbled-over concrete, the two men were looking at broad fields of green clover and a narrow bluestoned lane.

“Why, that crazy son of a bitch!”

Max’s cry was from the heart. Sergeant Myre yelled, too.

“Jeez! And I thought getting stuck with a waxwork hand was something. What the hell would make him do a thing like this?”

“The mere fact that he happened to see how it could be done, I suppose. Wouter wouldn’t have stopped to consider the possible side effects of putting in a door its owner didn’t know he had. I wonder how you shut it.”

“Maybe you just wait a while and a stuffed raccoon comes along and shuts it for you,” Myre suggested.

“That’s a reasonable possibility,” Max conceded. “I expect, though, that Wouter was thinking in terms of a practical operation. That means the door ought to shut automatically as soon as a car’s been driven past some point or other. Like for instance this big eye he’s put smack in the middle of the wall with ‘Here’s looking at you’ scratched around it. I thought there was something peculiar about that pupil, but since I didn’t get any action when I waved my hand in front of it, I decided it must be only a glass bead he’d imbedded in the mortar. This must be Wouter’s interpretation of an electric eye.”

Max picked up a long pole intended for opening the high windows, and waved it in front of the eye. The door swung shut. Again they faced a solid concrete wall.

“How come they ever let that guy Wouter run around loose?” Myre demanded. “For Pete’s sake, anybody who took the trouble to read that stuff he wrote on the wall might have figured this out ages ago.”

“Anybody who could get past the locked gate and the electrified fence,” Max agreed.

“Meaning friends and family, right? I don’t know about you, Mr. Bittersohn, but if those had been my Rolls Royces that got stolen, I wouldn’t go after any gang of professional car thieves. I’d start wondering which of my brothers-in-law was in trouble with the bookies.”

“Which would be a damn sight sounder premise than the one Grimpen’s working on,” said Max, “but you never know. This secret door opens up a new dimension, as you might say.”

“I’ll say it does.”

A bit sheepishly, Sergeant Myre swung his boot at the little heart. The door swung open. A woman screamed.

“What did I do?” Myre started through the opening.

Max hauled him back. “Watch it, you’ll activate the electric eye and get slammed by the door. It’s all right.”

An electric go-cart had appeared on the bluestoned path. In it sat two women. The small one in green with the hennin was perfectly self-possessed. The tall one in the scarlet gown and the padded beige satin headdress wound with pearls was close to hysterics.

“Was it a bomb?” cried Melisande.

“No,” said Max. “Come on, drive the cart inside.”

Nehemiah Billingsgate’s daughter obeyed, and the door closed behind the cart. “I don’t believe this. What did you do?”

“Discovered one of Wouter Tolbathy’s little jokes. Didn’t any of you ever take a good look at his graffiti?”

“I certainly didn’t.” Melisande climbed out of the cart, guarding her billows of flame-colored satin. She was a sturdily built woman of forty “Or thereabout, fair and rosy like her parents but taller than either of them. The flamboyant Renaissance costume suited her. “What did I miss?”

“See this?” Max bent and pointed out the small heart down at the right-hand corner of the again solid wall.

“It’s a heart. What about it?”

“There are initials inside,” said Myre.

“I can’t read them without my glasses. What does it say?”

“K.I. and C.K.”

“So what? C.K. must-be one of the Kellings, I suppose, but who’s K.I.? Can you think of anybody, Sarah?”

“Try it without the plus sign in the middle,” Sarah suggested. “Does it actually work, Max?”

“Watch.”

It was so simple when one knew how. Melisande Purbody’s large blue eyes opened wide and stayed that way. “Does Daddy know?”

“I’m sure he doesn’t,” Max replied. “Sergeant Myre here and I just discovered it.”

Melisande turned to the policeman. “Oh, hi, Reggie. I’m glad it’s you and not old Beanhead. How come your boss isn’t here, standing around looking impressive?”

“He was but he had to go. He’s in a bridge tournament at that fancy club he and his missus belong to. He left me to mind the body.”

Max cocked an eyebrow at Sarah. She nodded.

“I told Melisande on the way here. I thought she ought to know.”

“It’s awful,” said Bill’s daughter. “Poor old Rufe! I’m keeping a stiff upper lip till it’s all over, then I’m going back to Shrewsbury and bawl my eyes out. I suppose Crimpy-boy’s got the case all solved?”

“Naturally,” said Myre. “Tough luck, Mel, this happening right in the midst of your party.”

“Thanks, Reg, but the revel’s almost over, thank goodness. The parking lot’s empty, except for—” She threw a glance at Sarah. “We have another complication. Minor, I hope.”

“Melisande and I have been looking for Aunt Bodie,” Sarah explained. “We’ve asked everywhere and nobody’s set eyes on her since early in the banquet. Tick’s just got the bright idea of borrowing a helicopter they use at Station XBIL for doing the traffic reports. We’re going to take binoculars and search the bee fields.”

“What do you mean, we?” Max demanded.

“Well, the helicopter’s not very big and Bodie is my aunt, after all.”