Strangled Prose Page 11

  Lieutenant Rosen and Douglas Twiller slowed down as they noticed the light. Finally, with a few parting snarls, they pushed away from each other and retreated to their respective corners. Their faces were both scarlet, their mouths both twisted and wet, their eyes glazed by the sudden light. They panted in unison.

  “Douglas, what are you doing here?” I asked, when he seemed to have begun a recovery. The lieutenant made a rude noise at me, but I ignored him and kept my eyes on Douglas.

  “Claire, Lieutenant Rosen,” Douglas murmured, nodding to each of us. “I must say I didn’t expect to find you sitting here in the dark. Very peculiar of you.”

  It was eerie, this repetition of the conversation we had had previously in his den. Lieutenant Rosen raised his eyebrows at me, then came out of his corner. “Were you looking for something, Mr. Twiller? A stray copy of Professor of Passion, perhaps?”

  “How perceptive, Lieutenant. I came by to pick up the carton of unsold books,” Douglas said with dignity. Despite the tone, it was almost a question.

  “And let yourself in the back door with a key you had accidentally pocketed the day of the reception?”

  Douglas slapped his forehead in mock dismay. “So that’s how it happened to find its way into my pocket! I’ve been worried about that since Sunday afternoon, although I did find it fortunate. Here, Claire, you must need this more than I.” A key clattered onto the desk.

  I admired the effort. No admission of anything more damning than a bout of absentmindedness. “Thank you, Douglas,” I said softly. “You might have called so that I could have opened the store for you, if you truly needed the extra copies of Professor of Passion. Or asked me at the funeral.”

  The reference to the funeral deflated him. His hand fell to his side and he had the grace to look ashamed, though by no means guilty. “I didn’t have a chance to speak to you at the funeral, Claire, since I had to deal with Mildred’s great-aunt. She did so dodder. Later, I didn’t want to disturb you with my petty mission.”

  “That won’t work, Douglas,” I said. “We’re all here for the same reason: to find the copy of the book that Maggie discovered in her mailbox Sunday. About noon, she told me. The cartons at the Book Depot were not yet opened at that time, and those were the only copies of Professor of Passion in Farberville. It couldn’t have come with the shipment, yet she had it before the reception. I should have realized it had to be one of the advance copies and, therefore, a gift from the author.”

  The author began a protest, but I frowned him into silence. “The copy can be traced, Douglas; no doubt it’s marked ‘Advance.’ You left it in the office by mistake and came today to look for it. But why sneak a copy to Maggie?”

  Lieutenant Rosen cleared his throat. “I think I can answer that, Mrs. Malloy. It was necessary so that the actors would play their roles with precision. The entire script was written by Mr. Twiller some time ago, and the scenes unfolded exactly as he had hoped.”

  “Actors?” I said, my frown deepening.

  “Actors,” the lieutenant said firmly. “But of course they had no idea of the existence of the script—Mr. Twiller’s little drama in three acts. First, he set up his wife as the victim by making tacit accusations in the book. Then, aware that Maggie Holland was preparing to lead the FWO, he slipped the advance copy into her mailbox before the reception. She discovered the libelous material and provoked the ensuing scene at the reception. Mildred went home to weep, everyone else stormed away with murderous expressions and lovely motives, and Mr. Twiller went home to strangle his wife.”

  Douglas gurgled and had to grab the edge of the desk to keep his balance. “Not bad, Lieutenant. But what about my alibi? I went from the Book Depot to the—the, er, tutorial session.”

  “Your wife was already dead by that time,” he countered. He took a pair of professional-looking handcuffs out of his coat pocket and moved toward Douglas with a guarded expression.

  Douglas’s eyes widened and turned a metallic color that matched the handcuffs. “I stayed at the Book Depot until three-thirty. Claire will tell you that I was in her office on the telephone. I came out a minute or so after she returned.”

  They both looked at me. “I saw him go toward the office, but I can’t swear that he stayed there. Maybe he went out the back door?” I said, oddly defensive.

  Lieutenant Rosen paused to consider my suggestion, then shook his head and said, “But you didn’t see him on the railroad tracks. Miss Belinski was above you on Arbor, with a clear view of the street all the way to the end of the block. Even if he did slip out the back door, how could he have gotten to the house and back without being seen?”

  “I don’t know,” I admitted darkly.

  “Well,” the lieutenant said, “Mr. Twiller does have a point. Unless you can figure out how he could have slipped past you and Miss Belinski, my theory won’t hold up.”

  “Aren’t you supposed to be the detective?” I sputtered. “Figure it out yourself, Sherlock—that’s what you get paid for!”

  The scene was unraveling at an alarming speed. I swung back and glared at Douglas Twiller, whose pallor had improved to a mottled cerise. “What about the book you left in Maggie’s mailbox?”

  “I left it there by mistake. I meant to put it in your mailbox; Mildred thought you might like to read it before the reception. I couldn’t explain that I—I rather doubted that. But I didn’t kill Mildred, Claire. She was my wife!”

  “It wouldn’t be the first time,” the lieutenant cut in. We were all beginning to foam about the mouth, and I’m sure an observer would have called for the psycho squad to bring their nets. I would have welcomed them.

  “Then why did you put that filth in the book?” I snarled at Douglas.

  “I told you that I wanted more depth!”

  “That’s nonsense!” I shrieked.

  “I can’t help that!” he shrieked back.

  “Then why did you steal the key so you could sneak into my bookstore? That seems pretty suspicious!”

  “I came by to pick up the unsold books to take to the bookstore at the mall. They’ve sold out and wanted all the copies they could get!”

  “Oh, yeah?” I was running out of accusations. I glared at Lieutenant Rosen, who had the nerve to shrug in response. “Do something!”

  “What?” he asked mildly. “I’m open for suggestions, but I’m afraid Mr. Twiller does have a legitimate argument.”

  “Just do something!” I turned my back on him to attack Douglas Twiller. But he was occupied with straightening his tie and checking to see that his jacket was buttoned. I swore to never, ever be involved with the male species again, no matter how persistent the hormonal pleas.

  “I must run along,” Douglas said, when the tie met his approval. “I’ll pick up the unsold copies in a day or two, Claire—whenever you’re open for business.” He gave me the famous Twiller wink and strolled out the back door. Humming, for God’s sake.

  I heard a muffled sound behind me. I took a deep breath and turned around. “What’s so damned funny?”

  The lieutenant’s chin trembled, but he shook his head and started for the front of the store. I dearly hoped he would trip over a display shelf and chip every one of his pearly white teeth. Every one of them. And I hoped his dentist was trained by the Marquis de Sade.

  NINE

  I went home again, motivated by a fanciful dream that I might find Caron there and eager to discuss whatever she and Inez had seen. She wasn’t there. I heard no noises from downstairs, so I presumed Maggie wasn’t there, either. People did seem to have an unnerving habit of not being handy when I wanted them—with the exception of Sherlock, who managed to be wherever I didn’t want him to be.

  I considered trying to finish Professor of Passion but couldn’t find the necessary discipline for that distasteful a chore. Adverb-laden lust was unpalatable. It was time for action, if I could concoct something more strenuous than flipping pages or drinking tea.

  Finally, I put on jeans and a tu
rtleneck sweater, ruffled my hair into disrepute, and walked across the campus to the fine arts building to see if Sheila might be there. Nancy Drew, undercover agent, was on the prowl again—if no one noticed the crow’s feet around my eyes or the sprinkling of gray hairs. After the events of the last few days, it was more of a deluge.

  The classes were over for the day, but the studios were occupied by would-be Picassos and Rodins, slapping paint on canvases or chipping away at blocks of marble. Aside from their sporadic invectives, the building was peaceful.

  I poked my head into all the studios and at last found Sheila in the pottery lab on the third floor. Her clothes were coated with clay; her hair was prematurely gray from the dust. She perched on a stool in front of a pottery wheel, intent on the pot that rose with mystical symmetry from the lumpish mass of clay. Her face glowed with satisfaction, and she looked surprisingly pretty.

  I waited at the door until she noticed me. She sat back and took her foot off the treadle. Without her encouragement, the wheel whirled a few more times, then gradually stopped.

  “Mrs. Malloy?” she said with a cautious inflection.

  “Hello, Sheila. I came by to speak to you, but I’ll wait if you need to finish the piece.”

  She rubbed her forehead, leaving a thick slather of clay. “No, I was about ready to quit for the day. If you don’t mind, we can talk while I clean the wheel.”

  “It’s about Mildred Twiller’s death,” I said. I came in and sat down on the corner of a scarred workbench. “The lieutenant doesn’t seem to be making any progress on the case, and in the interim several of us are suffering. Do you know that Maggie has resigned?”

  Sheila scraped up a handful of clay and threw it into a plastic garbage can. It disappeared with a glutinous, sucking sound. “Yes, she told me that it was inevitable once the board of regents heard about the book. She’s not some kind of pervert, Mrs. Malloy; she has an unconventional sexual preference, but that doesn’t make her an incompetent teacher—or a cold-blooded murderer.”

  “No one has accused her of that,” I said, surprised. “She was at her lawyer’s office during the time in question.”

  “It’s just awful,” Sheila said, avoiding my eyes. She scraped up the last of the clay, put it in the can, and found the lid. Then, subdued and clearly miserable, she leaned against the sink and stared at the straw-littered floor. “I wish I had never gone over there to look for Maggie. It’s all my fault.”

  “Not precisely. Mildred’s body would have been discovered in due time, and I suppose it would have given Douglas a heart attack if he had been the one. Luckily, he was involved all afternoon. He has an alibi of sorts.”

  “I heard he was just driving around.”

  “He was with a woman. It took him a while to admit it, but it seems he’s in the clear. Between three and three-thirty, I was walking down the railroad tracks and didn’t see him; you were above me on Arbor Street and didn’t see him either.” I gave her a chance to contradict me, but she merely picked a scrap of dried clay off her sleeve and flicked it to the floor. “You didn’t see anyone else, did you?”

  “I saw your daughter and her friend.” She gave me an entreating look, as though in apology for the damning words.

  “I saw them, too. They were on the bridge above the tracks,” I said coolly. “That would have been about three-fifteen.”

  “No, I saw them earlier, just after you left the Book Depot. They were running down the street from the direction of the Twiller house, and they looked peculiar. I don’t think they even noticed me, but not everyone does.”

  I forced out a laugh. “You don’t mean to imply that they were actually in the Twiller house, do you? Two fourteen-year-old girls, strangling their most cherished author? That’s absurd!”

  “I wasn’t implying anything of the sort, Mrs. Malloy. I don’t even know that they had been in the Twiller house. They just came from there.” Sheila blinked earnestly at me, and her throat rippled several times. She busied herself picking clay off the knee of her denim pants.

  “Looking peculiar,” I repeated grimly.

  “Not peculiar, exactly. They were giggling madly and looking at something the skinny one had in her hand. Maybe they found a dollar on the sidewalk or something.”

  It was time to change the subject, I told myself in a thin, scared voice. Dr. Spock had never offered any advice on keeping one’s child from being implicated in a felony. On the other hand, I hadn’t read the most current edition. “If Maggie told you that she was going to her lawyer’s office, why did you go to the Twiller house?”

  “She was angrier than I’ve ever seen her. I went to her apartment to try to calm her down, but she wasn’t there. Then the lawyer’s service called to say that he would be on the golf course all afternoon and couldn’t see her, so I … decided to stroll by the Twiller house.”

  “Maggie didn’t go to her lawyer’s office?” I struggled not to squeak. Bad memories. “Where did she go?”

  “I didn’t see her at all after the reception, and she wouldn’t tell me afterward.” Sheila dabbed at the corner of her eye with the tail of her shirt. A drop of moisture formed on the tip of her nose, and she blotted it before it could fall. “I went all over the campus trying to find her, but nobody had seen her. I wish I had gone home instead of going to the Twiller house. I really do, Mrs. Malloy. I’ve caused trouble for everybody.”

  She certainly had. Now, her newest bit of observation had thrown Caron and Inez into the middle of things, which was the one thing I was trying to avoid. I wondered if she had mentioned it to Lieutenant Rosen, but I couldn’t think of a prudent way to broach the matter. Maggie wasn’t faring any better. If I hadn’t sworn off murderous thoughts, I would have stuffed Sheila into her garbage can of clay. Less than charitable, but timely.

  “Well, it’s been enlightening.” I stood up.

  “I’m glad to know Mr. Twiller has been cleared, anyway,” she snuffled. “He seems like such a kind man.”

  It did not reflect my personal sentiments, but I nodded and murmured a good-bye. When I left, Sheila was still leaning against the sink; it would be convenient if she burst into tears. From the expression on her face, it seemed a matter of seconds.

  I walked back toward my apartment, but on a whim turned and went into Farber Hall. I knew the route to the English department on the second floor, having spent many an hour waiting for Carlton to escape a faculty meeting or to finish a seminar. Or what I now knew to be a tryst under the seminar table. I hoped he had the decency not to demonstrate his sexual prowess during an actual seminar; graduate students are always looking for an erudite role model.

  The building was deserted. I listened to my footsteps as I climbed the first flight, lost in memories of fonder days. The office door was closed but not locked. I went inside and crossed to the wall where the boxes sat in tiers. Most of them had a few odd memos and letters; some had been neglected for days.

  I looked for Maggie’s name and found it above a pointedly empty box. No memos for the scandalous Holland, I thought with a grimace. Britton’s box was just above it, and it too had only a thin veneer of dust. It occurred to me that I hadn’t seen him for a day or so. Knowing what I did about him, I felt no big loss, but a sense of guilt sent me to a secretary’s desk to find a piece of paper.

  After several minutes of effort, I tore up the paper and lobbed it into a wastebasket. There wasn’t anything to say, I decided as I let myself out of the office and continued up the stairs to the third floor. The hallway was bleak, decorated with yellowed grade sheets from the previous semester and the flyers that promised overseas employment or assistant-ships at unfamiliar colleges.

  The fourth floor was deserted as well. Carlton’s office now housed a janitor, I noted without interest. If some poor, unsuspecting instructor was assigned that office, he would never comprehend the noises the ghosts might make. The moans would hardly be of the traditional sort.

  I went back down and walked home. While I started t
he teapot, I tried to think of some way that Douglas Twiller might have murdered his wife, but I couldn’t get past the fact that he would have been seen if he had gone home.

  He had to be involved; the book was proof enough. He was acting as if he were guilty, damn it! He was my prime candidate, damn it! I wanted Britton and Maggie to be able to leave unobtrusively, to have the chance to find teaching positions somewhere else. Hardly anyone was hiring murder suspects these days. The interviews would be hedged with tactful questions about possible involvement: “Have you submitted any articles since you strangled your colleague’s wife?”

  I also wanted to get Caron and Inez out of the mess without any scars to their fragile, pubescent egos, if such a thing were possible. But I couldn’t do anything until I knew what they had done. It looked grim. I looked grim.

  Lieutenant Rosen looked grim when he knocked on the door in the midst of my second cup of tea. “I need to talk to you,” he said, walking in as if he were welcome.

  “Please come in,” I said acidly to his back. “Did you drop by to raid the refrigerator?”

  “Where’s your daughter?”

  “Studying with a friend.” I couldn’t get out a why? with a properly light tone, so I settled for a slightly bewildered smile as I took refuge in the kitchen.

  “I’ve never seen her. I was wondering if she has your red hair and freckles.” He wasn’t.

  “A fascinating topic for a police investigation, Lieutenant. I could find her yearbook and save you some time,” I retorted. It was increasingly difficult to maintain the smile; I felt as though it might slip off my chin and splatter on the floor.

  “Do you know where she’s studying?”

  I assumed she and Rhonda were at the Farber library, but I wasn’t about to offer idle speculation. He was Sherlock; he could deduce her whereabouts without my help. “No, I don’t. Is that all?”

  “Then what about the friend with the meek expression? Do you have her address?” He wasn’t smiling in response to my valiant efforts. He came up behind me, close enough for me to feel his breath on the back of my neck. “You’re going to have to tell me, Mrs. Malloy. This is important.”