Strangled Prose Read online

  “Where’s your supervisor?” I demanded.

  “He’ll be back at five o’clock to pay me for raking the leaves. He’ll dock me if I don’t get done. Costs me money to talk, lady.”

  Message received. I took the lone five-dollar bill out of my purse and waved it under his nose. “Did you see anyone in the cemetery this afternoon?”

  He reached for the bill, but I retreated and tightened my grip. I repeated the question.

  “Yeah,” he said, “there was a girl over there by them dogwood trees when I got here. Sitting by a grave, moaning and rocking.”

  We repeated the dance. He reached; I retreated. I let it flutter temptingly for a second, then said, “What did she look like?”

  “A girl.” He shrugged and stared ravenously at the bill. I could almost feel his wet lips on my fingers. Yuck to the max.

  “How long ago did she leave?”

  He gave me an indignant look. “I was raking leaves, lady. I don’t make enough money to buy fancy watches on minimum wage. I can barely afford wine with dinner.”

  Wine was dinner, I thought with a grim smile. I doubted I would hear anything more enlightening, so I handed him the five and turned to leave. Dark, smoky clouds had rolled in since the morning, and now a sudden gust of wind caught the man’s pile of leaves and sent them tumbling away. Behind the distant mountains, thunder rumbled.

  I left the man to chase his leaves, hoping that it would take at least five dollars worth of added energy. My fingers curled around the medallion in my pocket, I angled past Mildred’s grave for a final glance, then went to my car before the rain could catch me.

  I sat there for a long time. Where in God’s name was Inez? She had been at the cemetery and, from the guttural description, had been more than a little miserable. Who wouldn’t be—sitting on a fresh grave under a dull gray sky?

  She had, apparently, returned the medallion in a typically Inez fashion. No doubt she had recited some of her favorite passages and scattered rose petals for effect. But now where had she gone? A tap on the window almost gave me a heart attack.

  “Lady,” my simian snitch yelled, gesturing at me to roll down the window. He held the rake like a scepter, the emperor of autumn. His fingers were all thicker than my big toe.

  “Yes?” I managed to say.

  “There was someone else.”

  “Someone else?” I goggled at him. “Who?”

  He rubbed his fingers together in an age-old sign that implied a necessary exchange, money being my contribution. I looked in my wallet. It was empty, except for a glueless postage stamp and Caron’s library card. In the bottom of my purse I found a few pennies, dimes, and nickles. I dug them out.

  “Is this enough?”

  His lips moved as he counted the meager collection of coins. When he arrived at a total, he gave me a wounded stare. “Eighty-nine cents? You’ve got to be kidding, lady. I wouldn’t tell you your mother’s name for eighty-nine cents.”

  “You don’t know my mother’s name. Besides, it is possible there is a cold-blooded killer after that girl.”

  “It was more likely your mother.” He turned around to stalk off, his massive shoulders hunched with anger. I couldn’t blame him; eighty-nine cents is not exactly an IRA. for old age.

  “Wait,” I howled in desperation, “will you take a check?”

  He stopped to consider, while I glared at his back with all the venom I could muster. At last he turned around slowly to study first my battered car and then my distorted expression. “How do I know your check is any good?”

  “It’s better than nothing,” I retorted. When he shook his head, I decided to risk it all with a grandiose gesture. I switched on the engine and let the car roll a few inches. “A twenty-dollar check,” I called in farewell.

  “You have identification?” He was moving toward me like a carnivorous dinosaur advancing on a vegetarian sibling.

  “A driver’s license and two credit cards,” I countered. “You’ll have to settle for that, unless you take MasterCard, buddy.”

  “Yeah, I suppose I’ll take a check,” he conceded. “Leave the name off; I’ll write it in myself. I don’t want no trouble from my supervisor.”

  He waited until I had written the check, then peered suspiciously at the name and address in the corner, perhaps expecting to see the name of a mental hospital. Fighting back an urge to rip whatever he knew from between his ears, I fumed until he seemed satisfied.

  When the check disappeared, I said, “Well? Who else was here with the girl?”

  “Another girl.” He found that highly amusing, if the gurgled snorts were to be interpreted as laughter. His shoulders started to heave; his eyes disappeared into folds of flesh; his mouth could have sheltered a hibernating bear. The noise sent a flock of sparrows into a treetop.

  I tried to convince myself that he hadn’t meant Caron. The world was populated by millions of girls, from the pigtail variety to those with sequined glasses and henna rinses. Farber College enrolled three thousand of them every year. The public schools were rife with them. Caron had called from school, and that was where she was. She could not have come to the cemetery. I was being hysterical, to put it mildly.

  Quasimodo finally ceased the gurgles and started to walk away. “Come back here,” I said in the voice that stops even Caron. “For twenty dollars, I think I deserve more than two words.”

  “Hey, lady, it was some girl in a raincoat and a scarf. She had a regular face, arms and legs, all the normal stuff. She sat down next to the first one and they had a long talk, then they got up and left together. They did not come over to where I was raking to tell me where they were going.”

  “What color was her hair?”

  “Blue.”

  I wondered if I had anything in my glove compartment that might serve as a weapon. “Blue?” I repeated, raising my eyebrows.

  “She had on a scarf, lady. All I saw was blue.” Again, he started to lumber off, my check clutched in his paws.

  “The information wasn’t worth eighty-nine cents,” I said to his back.

  “Raking ain’t worth minimum wage. Life’s tough, lady.”

  At this point, I was furious enough to leap on his back and cling with grim determination until he told me the entire story. I had opened the door when another car pulled in behind mine. Guess who? Lieutenant Rosen climbed out, waved to me, and walked up to the gorilla.

  “Well, Hendrix?” he murmured.

  I scrambled out of my car and stomped across the gravel. “Hendrix? Hendrix?” I screeched.

  Lieutenant Rosen smiled. “Mrs. Malloy, this is Corporal Hendrix, one of our plainclothes officers. Corporal Hendrix, Mrs. Malloy. Now, if you’ll excuse us, Mrs. Malloy, I’d like to hear the report…”

  “He’s a cop?” I was still screeching, despite the social niceties. “Is he allowed to take bribes from innocent citizens? He has twenty-five dollars of my money. In payola, or blackmail or something! I want him arrested right now!”

  “Let me hear his report first, and then we’ll discuss financial matters.” He took the man’s arm and tried to escape. Hendrix gave me a look that was, no doubt, supposed to suffice as an apology. It did not come close.

  I raised my voice to its maximum volume. “You come back here! I want to hear the report, too, or I’ll—I’ll call the FBI and tell them about the bribe! I cannot believe that you permit this swamp creature to lie to citizens who are merely trying to—”

  “Yes?” Sherlock said encouragingly. “Trying to—?”

  Well, there wasn’t a clever way to finish the sentence; we both knew that. I decided on a new ploy. “Please, I’d like to know if my daughter was in the cemetery with Inez Brandon.” Miss Manners would have been proud of me.

  When Rosen nodded, Hendrix said, “I couldn’t see the second girl well enough to determine any identifying factors. Sorry. When I moved closer, they left.”

  “But the first girl was Miss Brandon?” Supercop asked.

  Hendrix l
ooked at the distant grave. “I’m fairly sure that it was Miss Brandon. Brown hair, glasses, slender, and sort of—”

  “Cowering?” I suggested.

  He seemed pleased to find the perfect word. “Cowering, that’s right. Can I go back to the station, Lieutenant? I think I’m getting a blister.” He held up a paw to show us, noticed the check, and handed it to me with an embarrassed look.

  “Why were you so impossible?” I said coldly.

  “Orders, ma’am.”

  After he was gone, I stared at Lieutenant Rosen. “Orders?”

  “Indeed, Mrs. Malloy.” He turned on the smile, but his eyes contradicted the warmth. “You have a nasty habit of showing up wherever you’re not wanted. I realize that you’re worried about your daughter, but this is a murder investigation—and I’m in charge. You’re likely to end up with a scarf around your neck, too.”

  So he had the nerve to think I was the one who was interfering! I snorted disdainfully and spun on my heel to leave. “A pity, Lieutenant Rosen. And just when I was prepared to tell you where Inez is at this moment and with whom. But if you don’t care to listen to my theories, then I’ll go back to my little store to peddle my little books. Good-bye!”

  He should have stopped me. He should have apologized for the insulting remarks and begged me to share my insights. He should have fallen to his knees and pleaded with me.

  “Good-bye,” he said.

  TWELVE

  Caron was hovering at the door when I arrived home. She grabbed my arm before I could take off my coat. “Did you find Inez? Her mother came by the school, and then some policeman had me paged to the office to ask if I knew where she was. I couldn’t tell them anything, Mother. I haven’t seen Inez in days and days and days.” She seemed to feel she was describing centuries at the very least.

  I disengaged my arm to put down my purse. “I just came from the cemetery, where I found this.” I took the medallion out of my pocket to show it to her. “Inez left it on poor Mildred’s grave, as some sort of gesture. I don’t know where she is right now, but at least I know where she’s been in the last few hours.”

  “She was at the cemetery?” Caron yelped. “Creepy.”

  “Earlier this afternoon;” I said. “Apparently she sat next to Mildred Twiller’s grave and did a mourning routine. Then she hid the medallion under a sprinkle of rose petals.”

  “Inez is flipped out about Azalea. She was totally offended when I trashed my collection. You would have thought I had thrown away some old saint’s bones or something.”

  “Did she take my autographed copy of Professor of Passion, along with the copy on my desk?”

  Caron’s head bobbled like that of a deboned hen. “Yours, and about twelve others. When we were cleaning up the Book Depot, we found a bunch of copies hidden in funny places. There were three behind the toilet and one stuck in the fern. Four more were in the nonfiction rack. Inez thought she was in heaven, for Pete’s sake!”

  “So she did take the medallion,” I said to myself, imagining the girl pining over her pitiful booty.

  Caron’s head switched from vertical to horizontal bobbles. “I’ve been trying to remember exactly what happened, and I don’t think she did. I think I saw it in the box just as we went out the bedroom door, and she didn’t go back later. She was with me the rest of the afternoon at the Book Depot and then at the library.”

  “So she didn’t take the medallion,” I mused, frowning. Then the other girl at the cemetery had brought it and allowed Inez to bury it under the rose petals. They had left minutes later, when Hendrix—the vile gorilla—tried to creep near them.

  I made a pot of tea and sat down at the kitchen table to think. Despite my show of bravado at the cemetery, I only suspected I knew where Inez was. The other girl—thank God, not Caron—had to be one of Douglas Twiller’s objects of passion, the one who became Stephanie in his final opus. The invisible character. The one my hippie had described as “quite a bitch.”

  But I had been concerned about Douglas’s most recent slate of women, which I suddenly realized was irrelevant. Professor of Passion had been written at least nine months ago. Submission, editing, minor revisions, and then a period of time to be published—the book was a historical rather than a current-events exposé.

  No one, not even Hercule Poirot himself, can easily recite the months backward. I found a calendar in a drawer and flipped back ten months. January, give or take a month. How on earth could I find out whom Douglas was tutoring in bedroom techniques that long ago? Perplexed, I sat and idly read all the scribbled notations on the calendar while I tried to think of my next move.

  January had been a lean social month. Britton’s name appeared in a few places, along with times for cocktail parties and dinner dates. We hadn’t attended anything of importance, except for a few college functions and the inescapable gallery openings, mandatory for the faculty whenever a new set of paintings or sculptures is moved in. During the month, the Twillers had not invited us over one time to meet Douglas’s current paramour.

  “I guess I’ll have to go and see for myself,” I said under my breath. I drank the last of my tea, put on my coat, and went to the door of Caron’s bedroom. “I’m going out for a few minutes. If anyone calls, take a message.”

  She lowered a copy of Wuthering Heights. “Are you going to find Inez?” she asked in a thin voice.

  “Probably not, but I’m going to try.”

  On that dismal note, I left the apartment and walked down the hill toward Arbor Street and the railroad tracks. I turned left at the bridge, passed the second bridge, and ultimately stopped in front of the Twiller house.

  It rose behind the fence like a black monolith. I assumed that Camille had scuttled away to different lodgings once the police had finished with her; considering the proliferation of bodies in the house, I should have done the same. The window on the second floor of the carriage house was dark. The gardener, too, had gone. Twilliam had no doubt been incarcerated at the pound, or whatever is done with orphaned dogs.

  I opened the gate and went up the sidewalk to the porch, feeling increasingly silly. I had expended most of my courage to get this far; Inez was nearly twenty-five years younger than I and a good deal more timid. My theory of Inez’s whereabouts was turning to lace—full of holes. But, I scolded myself, I certainly could check to make sure the house was empty before I slithered away like the craven coward I was.

  The front door was locked. I went down the steps and around to the side yard, squinting at the black holes that were, in previous days, windows covered with delicate, fluttering sheers. No ghastly white face looked back at me. I would have instinctively dived down a snake hole had that happened. I hate snakes, but I hate ghastly white faces more.

  I continued to the backyard. The furniture on the patio had been put away; the concrete surface glistened like an ice rink. I cupped my hands on the glass door to peer into the living room. There, the furniture was already shrouded. A poor choice of words.

  Eventually, I made my way completely around the house, still very much on the outside. By this time, I did not believe there was anyone on the inside, but I had regained a bit of courage. Tapping my foot, I glanced around for the most likely place to hide the spare house key. We still do that in Farberville, despite the national trend to the contrary. After all, one does get locked out on occasion. The trick was to fool the potential burglars without tricking oneself.

  I fumbled around in the dark, checking various rocks and flowerpots. I found the key under a pot of shriveled geraniums. Mildred wasn’t terribly imaginative; my own key is taped under an eave on the porch. Don’t mention that to swarthy men in pseudo-leather jackets, please.

  The discovery left an ambivalent taste. I finally persuaded myself to unlock the door and tiptoe into the foyer. The den was on the right, I remembered, and the living room on the left. The stairs were visible in the faint glow from the streetlight, wide and inviting. Nancy Drew would have dashed right up them. I went in
to the living room to look around.

  “Inez?” I whispered. I dodged a table and went to the kitchen. The counters were bare; the refrigerator silenced by the removal of its lifeline. No one sat at the dining room table to greet me. In that I would have had a stroke, I was not dismayed.

  The ground floor was vacant. That left the upstairs—the white boudoir that wasn’t mauve and pink. “Okay, Nancy Drew,” I muttered, biting my lip unmercifully, “let’s take a look.”

  I managed to produce a few murmured Inez?’s as I crept up the stairs. I did not hear a faint Yes? whispered in response. I didn’t hear anything, and I didn’t care for the situation one bit. I despise books in which the heroine strolls into danger, humming the national anthem and not bothering to sweat. Totally unrealistic, I told myself as I wiped the copious sweat out of my eyes. I don’t even like brave spies. I prefer sensible people who wait for the police. Why wasn’t I at the nearest pay phone?

  All this drifted around inside my head as I reached the second floor. I wasn’t feeling particularly brave, but, to be frank, I wasn’t planning to meet any monsters—or murderers—on the landing. I had reached the stage of feeling downright silly as I murmured a final, “Inez?”

  “Mrs. Malloy?” Softly, frightened.

  I grabbed the banister. “Inez?” I managed to croak without keeling over on the shag carpet.

  “Mrs. Malloy?”

  We were not making admirable progress. Rather than respond once again with her name, I opted to find the source of the panicked answer. I sidled down the hallway to the last door, eased it open, and said, “Inez?”

  No luck. I retraced my path, peering into the dim interiors for a sign of life. I found a closet with folded linens, a bathroom, a guest room, and finally the boudoir. It resembled the internal cavity of a great white whale. For the umpteenth time I hissed, “Inez?”

  “Mrs. Malloy?”

  “This is not blind man’s bluff,” I snapped testily. “If you’re in here, I’d appreciate a signal. I’m tired of trailing a leaky tire.”

  She gulped wetly and said, “Mrs. Malloy, I’m in here. I’m sorry that I can’t get up to say hello.”