Strangled Prose Read online

  “Why is it so important? They’re a couple of typical teenage girls, for God’s sake. They know absolutely nothing about any of this, and I won’t permit them to be harassed because you can’t find a killer!” I tried for an indignant tone, but I may have sounded a tad shrill.

  “Douglas Twiller called the station a few minutes ago to report that his house had been burglarized, most probably Sunday afternoon. Your daughter and her friend were seen near the house. I need to speak to them.”

  I really ought to have put Sheila in the clay can, I told myself with a mental snarl. And fired up a kiln. The tawny lioness, protecting the wayward cub—it would have been a great defense. I might have made jurisprudence history.

  “That’s nonsense,” I choked out, with a brittle noise that was supposed to be a laugh. “Caron and Inez are not burglars. Neither of them would dream of going into someone else’s house, much less stealing something.” And running down the street, staring at it in Inez’s hand, while looking peculiar.

  “Inez who?” he snapped, unimpressed with my logic. When I glared in response, he added, “Come on, Mrs. Malloy. If they were in the house—for whatever reason—then they might have seen someone there.”

  “They weren’t there; they didn’t see anything,” I insisted.

  “I want to question them. I don’t understand why you’re being so pigheaded about this!”

  “You always bring out the best in me,” I said, and stalked into the living room, leaving him to ponder that in private. By the time he came after me, I was on the sofa with a magazine in my lap. I looked up. “Are you still here? I thought I heard the door close.”

  His eyes were literally snapping above his white lips and jutting beak. If he’d had wings, he would have made a fine eagle—presuming the existence of a species with black, curly head feathers. His clenched fingers resembled talons, and I suspected his toes were curled as well. Fascinating imagery, but a little dangerous.

  “I need to call the station.” He wasn’t asking permission, and I had no idea why he bothered to inform me of his intentions. He muttered into the receiver, his back turned. I visualized a knife cutting into the flat plane between his shoulder blades, which cheered me somewhat.

  He made a surprised noise, glanced at me over his shoulder, and then began to whisper in an urgent voice. Although I strained, I could make out only a word or two of his conversation. It seemed to concern Douglas Twiller.

  As he replaced the receiver, I snatched up the magazine and flipped through the pages with a pretense of interest in any of one hundred ways to redecorate a kitchen for under twenty dollars.

  “Tell me where Caron is,” he said harshly.

  “I don’t know, and I wouldn’t tell you if I did,” I answered, frowning at a photograph of café curtains made from tea towels. “Do you think these might look nice in my kitchen? I can make them for three dollars.”

  “I could arrest you for obstructing an investigation.”

  “I think blue might go better with the linoleum.”

  He balanced on the balls of his feet, looking as if he were on the verge of leaping at me. His mouth was twisted, his forehead creased with deep lines; it was an admirable display of fury tempered by self-control. I almost clapped to show my appreciation, but I didn’t want to lose my place in the magazine.

  “Is there something else?” I asked politely.

  “Douglas Twiller is dead. He was found a few minutes ago, on the sofa in the den. He was strangled with a silk scarf. Now, will you tell me where your daughter is?”

  “Douglas is dead? But that’s absurd! He’s a strong man—how could someone strangle him? That’s impossible!” The magazine fell on the floor as I scrambled to my feet. My mouth continued to sputter at the same velocity, but I was barely aware of it. Douglas? Strangled? It was not a lovely picture.

  Lieutenant Rosen gently pushed me back down on the sofa. “It doesn’t take a great deal of strength to strangle someone from behind. Of course, you do have to be able to stand behind the victim and prepare a garrote. It would seem likely that Douglas Twiller trusted his murderer—or mistakenly underestimated the same.”

  “Who discovered the…?”

  “The maid, about ten minutes ago. Twiller called in the burglary about an hour ago, and Jorgeson was actually on his way there when the radio dispatcher contacted him. We’ll know more when the coroner arrives.” He crossed the room to stare out the window at Farber Hall. “As usual, we’re having trouble locating our circle of interested parties.”

  “You don’t think Caron—” I caught myself and took a deep breath. The idea was ludicrous, insane.

  “Of course not! But I do think she saw something while she was in the Twiller house Sunday afternoon. Now, where is she?”

  So much for the clever little game of evasion. I told him that she and Rhonda were at the Farber library, probably in one of the lounges where they could giggle without any dirty looks from the staff. I gave him Inez’s full name and address. He made a quick call to the station, barked out instructions to have the girls collected, then tugged me to my feet and tossed me my coat.

  “Where are we going?” I asked, stull stunned by the unexpected news of Douglas’s death. A small voice from a corner of my brain was mentioning the fact that Douglas was no longer my best candidate for Mildred’s murder. The voice was actually chortling, and I warned it to stop or risk a lobotomy.

  “I need to go to the scene of the crime,” he said, pushing me out the door. “In the meantime, I’m going to keep an eye on you until we locate your daughter. I don’t want you to change your mind and try to warn her.”

  “I wouldn’t do that,” I sniffed. When he merely smiled, I added, “How did you find out she was near the Twiller house?”

  “Miss Belinski called to say she had just remembered. It seems that someone jarred her memory. Good citizens do try to assist the police.” Barbed, but cheerfully so.

  “Then Miss Belinski ought to qualify for a gold medal,” I said sourly. “But she told me that she didn’t see Caron and Inez at the house; they were only coming from that direction. You’re not even giving them the benefit of the doubt, you know.”

  He opened the car door for me, clearly uninterested in my thoughtful analysis. We drove the few blocks in silence. I tried to find an explanation for what had happened, but there didn’t seem to be one that was at all credible. I had been so sure that Douglas was the murderer. He had, as Lieutenant Rosen suggested, choreographed the scene; he had to be the director. Now it seemed there was a second figure, whose identity was a total mystery.

  The police cars were again parked in front of the gate, their blue lights reeling in the gloom of the late afternoon. My old friend, the supercilious teenager, watched me from his police car, looking not a bit surprised to see me in the lieutenant’s custody—where he assumed I belonged.

  We went into the house. The lieutenant left me in the foyer and followed Jorgeson to the den. Unable to stop my knees from quivering, I went into the living room and sat down. The ambulance attendants were there, with the same bored expressions. A regular class reunion, I told myself as I slumped into the cushions and closed my eyes.

  “Hi,” one of them said, undaunted by my inhospitable demeanor, “weren’t you here last time? Is this your house or something?”

  I opened one eye. “I have a thing about dead bodies. Every time I hear of one, I rush over in hopes of a glimpse. I’m thinking about signing up as an apprentice undertaker. Okay?”

  “Sure, lady.”

  They moved to a far corner to whisper. I closed my eye and forced myself to think. Douglas had been killed within the last hour. I was at Farber Hall, creeping around by myself on some misguided notion that I could not explain. Maggie was out somewhere; I hoped she had an alibi for this one. I hadn’t even seen Britton in a couple of days and therefore couldn’t begin to imagine where he might be.

  Lieutenant Rosen came out of the den. He gave some terse, unintelligible orders t
o the uniformed men, then beckoned to the ambulance attendants. The man with the black bag passed across the foyer. I waited. Jorgeson came to the doorway to stare at me, then popped out of sight. The front door opened, closed, and opened once again. Footsteps, more terse conversation, the squeal of the gurney’s wheels on the porch.

  The images flying through my head were too ghastly to entertain. I went to the liquor cabinet and poured myself two inches of scotch and then went to the kitchen to hide from the noises. Camille stood in the middle of the room, her shoulders curled and trembling.

  She gave me a blank look and said, “What are you doing here?”

  “I came with Lieutenant Rosen, Camille. Why don’t you sit down in the dining room? I’ll bring you a glass of brandy.”

  Her jaw flopped for a moment, but she finally nodded and slid through the door. I filled a tumbler and followed her to the dining room. After she had tossed off half the brandy, the color returned to her cheeks and the blank look was replaced with a certain slyness. Good old Camille was back.

  “Are you under arrest, Mrs. Malloy?” she demanded, optimistically.

  “No, Camille, I am not under arrest. The lieutenant was at my apartment when he heard about Mr. Twiller. You were the one who found the body, I hear.”

  “I came back from class about thirty minutes ago. Mr. Twiller hadn’t touched the food I’d fixed for lunch, so I went to the den to see if he wanted a sandwich.” She took a second slug of brandy, choked on it, and wiped her eyes. “He was on the sofa. At first I thought he was taking a nap, but when I went in, I saw a scarf cutting into his neck. The police pulled up just as I was running to the telephone to call them.”

  “It must have been terrible for you,” I said soothingly. We sat and pondered the extent of the terribleness for a moment, which was, realistically speaking, quite a bit more terrible for Douglas than for Camille. “You must have been distraught, Camille. First Mrs. Twiller, then the burglary, and now this.”

  “What do you know about the burglary?” Her mouth tightened with suspicion, and she shoved the glass away as if I had served her a dose of amber cleaning fluid.

  “I heard about it from the lieutenant. I’m helping him with the investigation, since I know all the people involved,” I explained. If Lieutenant Rosen had heard that one, he would have laughed himself sick. However, he was safely tucked away in the den, doing whatever CID officers do in such situations.

  Camille wasn’t in on the joke. She was still wary, but eager to talk to someone. Although I surely wasn’t her first choice of confidantes, she was stuck with me.

  “Mr. Twiller mentioned it after the funeral,” she said. “He told me someone had been in his wife’s boudoir and had stolen a silver medallion she had been awarded by some romance group. She was very proud of it. He said he was going to report it as soon as he had the opportunity.”

  Oh, dear, I thought as I took a long drink of scotch. I had a fairly good idea who the guilty parties were—and so did Sherlock. “Was anything else missing?” I asked Camille. Something large enough to require a pickup truck or a moving van, I added in silent prayer.

  “No, that was the only thing Mr. Twiller could determine had been stolen. He was sure it was there before they went to the reception Sunday; he said Mrs. Twiller decided not to wear it at the last moment, and he waited in the foyer while she took it back upstairs.”

  “Maybe it was stolen the next day?” I said. I crossed my fingers tightly enough to turn them into bloodless worms.

  She shook her head, dissolving any hope I had left. “He noticed it was gone while the police were here that evening, but he was too upset to think about it. Mr. Twiller never made a mistake,” she concluded in triumph, giving me the familiar smirk.

  I stared at Camille, trying to envision her in the role of a strangler. She was slender, nearly anorexic. Her hands were white and unblemished; I suspected her housekeeping chores were done with negligence, if at all. And she didn’t have a motive. She didn’t even have a job anymore. Reluctantly, I dismissed the idle dream of seeing her contemptuous expression disjointed by prison bars.

  The answer lay in books and medallions, I decided as I finished the last few drops of scotch. Douglas must have been worried that the investigation was centering too closely around him. Once he had been confronted in my office and forced to admit he slipped the advance copy to Maggie, his only hope lay in shifting the attention. Unless he was innocent—which was absurd. He had called the police station to report the burglary, no doubt with the indignation of a homeowner returning from a vacation to a ransacked house. Then he had admitted a visitor, who knotted a scarf around his neck.

  “Mr. Twiller finally made a mistake—a fatal one, at that,” I said, sighing. Not a tender epitaph, but an accurate one.

  TEN

  Jorgeson took Camille away to get a statement. I went back to the living room, sat down, and willed myself to a sunny beach in the Caribbean, where my most pressing concern was the origin of my next drink. The palm trees were rustling above my head when Lieutenant Rosen found me. The beach receded, along with the balmy breeze, the muscular young men, and the aroma of rum flavored with fresh pineapple juice. The man simply didn’t fit in.

  “The uniforms picked up your daughter at the library. She’s waiting at the station. Would you like to be present when she’s questioned?”

  “I was going to wash my hair, but since you were so kind to invite me, I suppose I might drop by the station,” I said, with all the sarcasm I could muster. He failed to notice.

  I followed him to his car—which was worse than mine, for the record—and we drove to the yellow brick building ringed by police cars. Business was brisk.

  I had been there once before, when a cold-hearted meter maid had failed to appreciate that a certain parking meter was simply swallowing my coins without regurgitating enough precious minutes to have a prescription filled. The municipal judge had a pink nose and a kindly twinkle in his eyes, but it cost me five dollars anyway.

  “Is Caron in a cell?” I asked as I eyed the row of vagrants and drunken Farber students on a bench across from the desk. With a rapist or a drug-crazed child molester? Sobbing under a lice-infested blanket? Withdrawn and too terrified to realize where she was?

  “In the dungeon,” Lieutenant Rosen said cheerfully, “strapped to the rack. We have a toddlers’ size for children and a petite for juniors.” He led me into a lounge filled with shiny plastic couches and vending machines.

  Caron sat on one of the couches, a Coke in one hand and a half-eaten chocolate bar in the other. A young uniformed policeman was sitting next to her, enchanted by her winsome ways as she regaled him with the highlights of a high school football game. She was not overwhelmed to see me.

  “Are you okay?” I demanded.

  Caron produced a martyred smile for the young man, followed by a glare for me. Nostrils aquiver, she said, “Yes, Mother. I may get a bad grade in U.S. history, but I haven’t been beaten with a rubber hose.” We watch the same television shows.

  “Did you call a lawyer?”

  “I’m fourteen, Mother; I don’t have a lawyer. I thought about calling the accountant, but I didn’t have a dime.”

  I sat down beside her and patted her hand. It seemed properly maternal, if ineffectual. I stared across the room. “Well?”

  Lieutenant Rosen nodded at the uniform, who promptly stood up and scurried away. Caron looked longingly after him but managed to pull herself together when the lieutenant sat down on the other side of her. He did not pat her hand.

  “About your visit to the Twiller house,” he began genially. “We’ve been wondering exactly what happened.”

  Caron stiffened. “How do you know about that? We didn’t do anything wrong. We just wanted to see Azalea Twilight’s boudoir while everyone was at the reception.”

  “You and Miss Brandon?”

  “It was all Inez’s idea, anyway. You ought to arrest her—I went along with her, but she’s the one who—”
Caron broke off, but there was a flicker of satisfaction on her face.

  My daughter would not make a good spy; one Coke and she’d gladly recite her autobiography. A candy bar would produce my life story and probably my tax returns for the last decade, dubious deductions included. My accountant would commit suicide.

  “Miss Brandon will arrive shortly,” the lieutenant said, sounding as perplexed as I by her candor. “We’ve sent someone to her school to pick her up. Why don’t you tell me exactly what happened, Miss Malloy? I can decide if it has any relevance to later events.”

  I felt as though I ought to do something, but nothing came to mind. I certainly couldn’t tell Caron to shut up; the lieutenant would be less than delighted and Caron would seem guiltier than she was. If that were possible. I tried an expression that was meant to convey a stern message concerning discretion.

  Caron shot me a quick frown that was meant to convey her embarrassment over my facial contortions. “I’ll tell you everything if you want me to, Lieutenant. We were hanging around Sunday afternoon, trying to think of something to do. Inez wanted to sneak into the back of the Book Depot to get a glimpse of Azalea, but I figured Mother would see us and throw a fit. We walked around the neighborhood for a while, then Inez said we ought to walk past the Twiller house.”

  “And?” Sherlock was trying not to sound impatient.

  “As we went past, we saw the maid leave with a stack of books. A few minutes after that, the gardener drove off. Since the Twillers were at the reception, we realized that the house was empty. Inez said we ought to sneak in for a quick peek, that nobody would ever find out. She said Azalea’s boudoir was decorated in mauve and hot pink, because there was one exactly that color in Tempestuous Dreamer. I said that was silly, but Inez swore it was true.”

  Caron sat back, apparently satisfied that we now knew all the grisly details of her first escapade as a burglar. We stared at her, but she was already smoothing her hair in case the cute uniform was still in the station. I could see that she was wondering if she could pull out her compact to check her lipstick. She made a wise decision to leave her purse in her lap. I might have shoved the lipstick case down her throat, along with the compact and whatever else she had squirreled in her purse.