Carolyn G. Hart (60 page)

“Last night, did you leave here between nine and ten?”

“Is that when you think Idell was killed?”

“Just answer my question.”

She fought down the impulse to back away from his bulky, dominating figure.

“I went down to the Inn once. Most everybody took at least one break during that time,” and she waved
her hand at the suspects, all of whom were watching avidly. She talked too quickly, trying to crack through the glower that seemed a permanent part of his face. “I was with Jessica Merrill. She can tell you. We walked down there and back together.”

“You could’ve gone back.”

“Anyone could have,” she retorted angrily.

He stumped off then, moving heavily to each Mystery Night suspect. Was he asking about their movements—or hers?

Lucy frowned in concentration and looked as if she were conscientiously struggling to remember. There were dark shadows under her eyes. The bright patch of lipstick on her mouth and the round circles of rouge on her cheeks had aged her decades. She had tried to dress for her role, a silk dress with a gold-and-red flowered pattern and crisp short white gloves. The overall effect was garish.

Roscoe’s face was as bland as that of a poker player with a big pot, but the wariness in his shrewd eyes made it clear he was answering carefully. He looked comfortable and assured in his dinner jacket, a man of means, innocent of anything more damning than a regretted romantic interlude.

Jessica smiled and replied briskly. Only the quick slant of her glance toward Annie revealed uneasiness. She wore a silk dress with interlocking shafts of crimson, purple, and cobalt blue, which emphasized her slim grace.

Max glanced once toward Annie, then shook his head sharply and spoke persuasively.

Dr. Sanford smiled lazily. He didn’t seem discomfited by Wells’s questions. He was his customary arrogant, confident self.

Edith’s huge green eyes flicked nervously from the
chief to Annie and back again. She smoothed back a vagrant red-gold curl and answered in monosyllables.

Any one of them could have stepped into Idell’s office from the Inn grounds and accepted an offer of sherry. She looked up at Prichard House. The bottom floors were dark, but light streamed from both front and back on the second floor. More than likely, Leighton and Gail were at home and had been at home last evening. Either of them could have walked through the shadows of Swamp Fox Inn and a final visit with Idell. And Bobby Frazier had come by the tent, looking for Gail. As for Sybil and Tim, it would have been simple enough to reach Idell. And Miss Dora was omnipresent.

Whose face had been the last seen by Idell Gordon?

21

A
nnie put down her coffee cup with a click and craned her head to peer through the pillars supporting the patio to the garden outside the Inn. Popping up, she told Max, “I’ll be right back.”

Bobby Frazier bent in a half-crouch, photographing the door to Idell’s office. When he lowered the camera, Annie approached.

“Won’t you join us for some coffee?”

He looked tired this morning, and he’d nicked his chin shaving. He had the air of a man struggling with an inner crisis, his brown eyes abstracted, his mouth drawn in a grim line. Now, he stared at her, his face neither friendly nor hostile. Then he shrugged. “Yeah. I’ll have a cup.”

She led him back to their table. He and Max shook hands, exchanging curt greetings.

As he pulled out a chair and it scraped noisily
against the flagstones, Frazier looked around the empty patio. “Got it to yourselves this morning.” He dropped his camera bag beside the chair.

“They checked out in droves yesterday,” Annie explained, then added, as she sipped the pale yellow coffee, “Wish we could have. But tonight’s the last night.” And how much fun would the Denouement Ball be, under the circumstances?

She tried for a light tone. “How do you like being tied with me as Wells’s favorite suspect?”

“Oh, yeah.” He wasn’t interested.

Annie looked at him sharply. That was funny. He’d tried every way he knew to make it look as though he had no interest in Gail, and, ergo, had no motive. So why did he shrug away Wells’s suspicions as unimportant?

But Bobby seemed preoccupied with his own thoughts. He picked a pencil from his shirt pocket and tapped it in an uneven rhythm on the table, but, obviously, he wasn’t even aware of his action. “Have you heard about the autopsy report?” he asked abruptly. But he didn’t wait for an answer, and his voice was grim as he summed it up for them.

Idell Gordon had a meat pie, orange sherbet, and coffee for dinner, eating alone in her apartment on the second floor. Analysis of the foodstuffs was negative, but the laboratory report found a heavy concentration of cyanide of potassium in the dried wine residue in the sherry glass and in her stomach. Idell Gordon had died of acute cyanide poisoning. Her fingerprints alone were on the wine glass. The remaining sherry in the decanter contained cyanide of potassium. The crystal top of the decanter yielded smudged prints identified as those of Idell Gordon.

“Cyanide.” Annie had just picked up her coffee cup. She put it down again. “Oh, my God.”

“Yeah.” The pencil beat a frenzied tattoo. “They figure she invited somebody to have a glass of sherry while she put the bite on them. She must’ve decided she could get more than the $5,000 from Leighton.”

“Oh, hell yes,” Max exclaimed. “That makes all kinds of sense. Idell went after the murderer and threatened to tell Wells unless she were paid off.”

“Money’s all she ever talked about,” Annie agreed. “Money and what a tough time she was having meeting her expenses.” She pictured that fat face, the spriggy orange hair and protuberant, greedy brown eyes. “Blackmail.” Only this time, Idell’s reach had far exceeded her grasp. “She must have contacted the murderer, made an appointment for Wednesday night.”

“But the murderer brought cyanide, not money,” Max concluded grimly.

Bobby jammed the pencil so hard against the table-top that it snapped, then he stared down at it in surprise. “Stupid bitch. And I should have known. I should have taken Wells by the scruff of his goddamned neck and insisted he talk to her.”

“Why? You had no reason to guess she was onto the murderer.”

“She called me Wednesday, asking about the reward, how it was going to be handled, what a person would have to do to get it. I rattled it off, then I came down on her, asked what she knew. She backed off, said she was just curious, one of her guests had asked her. I thought that was phony, but I was busy, had a deadline, so I said oh sure, give us a call anytime. But I should have kept after her.”

“You didn’t go to meet her?”

There was an instant of stiff silence. Bobby stared at Annie. “No.” He spoke carefully and distinctly. “I did not meet her.”

“I didn’t mean—” She flushed and started over. “I saw you at the Mystery Night, and since it’s just next door …”

“I was looking for Gail.”

Max poured fresh coffee for all of them. “Did you find her?”

“Yes. We had a nice talk.” He sounded like a high school principal describing a Kiwanis luncheon, but the muscles in his jaw were rigid.

Annie squashed a desire to tell him to come off it. She realized more and more that she lacked the finesse needed to inveigle answers from sullen, angry, or frightened people. If only she had the suavity of John Appleby or the unassuming, quiet manner of Father Bredder.

Max, however, excelled in finesse. He propped his elbows on the table and smiled with the blandness of Lord Peter Wimsey. “Is Gail doing okay? What did she have to say?”

“Oh, she thanked me for the stories in the
Courier
, said they were well done. I thanked her. You know, we became acquainted when I did a series on the programs and outreach of the Prichard Museum. She’s a very knowledgeable curator, and she’s done an outstanding job with limited resources.”

Oh, my God, Annie thought. Next he’d list her degrees and publications. She’d had enough.

“When did you fall in love with her?”

His head jerked up; he glared at Annie. “You’ve got it all wrong. We’re friends, that’s all.”

“Then why did you tell her it didn’t matter whether
she had any money, that you were going to keep on seeing her no matter what her aunt did?”

“As friends,” he reiterated stubbornly. “That’s all.”

Understanding exploded in her mind, like Fourth of July fireworks. “So Gail didn’t have any reason to kill her aunt. Is that what you’re saying?”

“Right. It’s absurd to even think so. It’s laughable, a gentle girl like Gail.” But he wasn’t laughing, and Annie knew that a frightful scene lurked in the dark corridors of his mind: Gail and Corinne, a quarrel, a burst of white-hot anger, Corinne face-down on the path, Gail standing there, a mallet in her hand.

Behind the tough newsman facade, fear for Gail ate at him. He tried to hide behind bluster. “Any idea Wells has about Gail, it’s crap. That’s all. Just crap.”

As much to distract him as anything else, she said, “I guess they’re sure about the autopsy report?”

Frazier looked at her blankly.

“Was it really cyanide that killed Idell?”

If possible, Frazier looked even grimmer. “Yeah. Cyanide of potassium.”

“That ought to clear Gail. How could she possibly have access to cyanide of potassium?”

Bobby looked like a man who had opened a door and walked into hell. He didn’t seem to be aware of their presence for a long, agonizing moment. Finally, he said dully, “That’s a good point.” He managed a travesty of a smile. “Of course, nobody with any brains would even consider Gail.”

Except Bobby, obviously.

He drank some coffee, put down the empty cup. “Well, I’d better get back to the newsroom.” He jerked his head toward the grounds. “Now that I’ve got a picture of the Death Door.” He gave a mirthless laugh. “If you see Gail—Never mind. See you later.”

As he strode away, Max sighed. “Poor devil.”

“He thinks she did it.”

“Yeah.”

Annie looked at Max, unaccustomedly somber across the table. He looked tanned and fit, his thick blond hair cut short, his dark blue eyes alert and thoughtful. All as usual, except for the furrow of worry on his brow.

“Dammit,” he said, “maybe you should go back to Broward’s Rock.”

This was so unexpected that she stared at him, momentarily speechless. “Why?”

“Cyanide is nothing to fool with. How do we know the murderer won’t sprinkle it everywhere?”

She poked the half-eaten spongy croissant. “It might add a little flavor to this.”

“For God’s sake, Annie, be serious.”

This was such a turnabout that she couldn’t repress a grin.

In a moment, he broke into a reluctant smile. “Okay. I know. You
are
serious. Your virtue and your defect.”

“I don’t know who wrote that damned letter. Or who pinched some cyanide. Or who murdered Corinne and Idell. I’m perfectly safe.”

That diverted him. He jammed a hand through his hair. “That’s what we need to work on. Where could Gail get cyanide?”

“Bobby obviously has a very clear idea where she might have obtained the poison.” And she concluded thoughtfully, “If he knows where Gail could have found cyanide of potassium, that means he knows how to get it, too.”

•   •   •

Gail led the way up the magnificent staircase. It rose for three stories, the banisters carved at top and bottom, the railing a gleaming mahogany, the ornate fretwork glistening white. Her room was on the top floor, a bedroom and sitting room that overlooked the front gardens. A group of garden club women snapped pictures of the sweeping azaleas, with occasional furtive snaps aimed at the cane that hid the pond where Corinne died. The sitting room was papered with a mid-eighteenth century Chinese wallpaper with orange-tiled pagodas and tan mud-brick walls. Annie and Max sat on a Chippendale loveseat. It had delicate Chinese fretwork and was upholstered in tan and cream satin. Annie looked for reflections of Gail in the lovely, almost period-perfect room. An open copy of the April
Vogue
lay face down on the woven wicker coffee table. A modern black rocker with a Clemson crest sat beside the fireplace. A collection of miniature pottery dogs decorated half the Adam mantel. Portrait photographs sat at each end, one of Corinne, and the other of a man Annie felt certain must be Cameron, Gail’s father. It was the same strikingly handsome face, auburn hair, sky-blue eyes, but there was an air of resignation in his face and perhaps a touch of weakness in his mouth. A chairside booktable held an extensive collection of art books, along with three booklets from the Prichard Museum. The top one pictured a magnificent silver punchbowl. The cover blurb advertised historic reproductions.