Deadly Valentine (17 page)

Actually, Annie didn’t think the inability of the police to find the jacket indicated stupidity on the part of the searchers. The house was crammed with artwork and antiques. But she didn’t say so to Carleton.

He looked at Annie imploringly. “That Mrs. Roethke—she doesn’t think Dad did it.”

“But you’re afraid he did,” Annie surmised.

“No.” It was explosive, angry, and painfully uncertain. “God, no. But he—” Carleton licked his lips and looked up at the oil paintings over the mantel. Annie followed his gaze.

Two paintings: Howard astride a horse, a polo mallet held high, every sinew and muscle focused on the play, and a gentle-faced woman with soft brown hair and kind blue eyes playing a piano.

The first Mrs. Cahill?

Carleton’s eyes, shiny with sudden tears, clung to the woman’s portrait. “That’s my mother.” His face hardened. “How could Dad have married
her
after Mom? Mom and Dad were crazy about each other. They were so happy. Dad cried when she died. The only time I ever saw him cry.”

Poor Sydney, Annie thought abruptly. How difficult it must have been to follow in the quiet footsteps of a genuinely
mourned first wife and to be met with such unrelenting hostility from Howard’s son.

And Howard had shed no tears for Sydney. Yet, that night at the general’s house, Annie had seen such turmoil and agony in Howard’s eyes.

“Oh, for pity’s sake,” Annie exploded. “How could we all be so dumb!” But Laurel wasn’t dumb. She’d understood from the very first.

Carleton stared at her blankly.

She suppressed an urge to shake his slumped shoulders. “Don’t you see?” she demanded. “That’s why your father didn’t admit to Laurel’s alibi. He must have seen you running up the path from the gazebo, something clutched in your arms. And your face was probably a mess. You were upset, in a panic. He knows Sydney headed down that way. So he goes down to the gazebo and finds her. For God’s sake, Carleton, your dad thinks you killed Sydney!”

The young man’s eyebrows rose and his mouth half opened. A cartoonist couldn’t have broad-brushed a more classic expression of amazement. Then Carleton’s face brightened. “Sure, that must be what happened! God, I’ve got to talk to him. That damn lawyer’s got to get him out of jail.” He hurried to the desk. “I’ll call him right now.”

“Wait a minute,” Annie urged. “You’d better be careful what you say.”

He flipped through the phone book, picked up the receiver. “How’s that?” He was impatient to make his call. “It can’t get worse than it is right now.”

“Sure it can. Posey’s not going to believe a word you have to say.” Annie watched Carleton with clear, cold eyes. She wasn’t sure
she
would believe a word he—or his father—had to say. Carleton’s spirited defense of Howard could be a murderer’s crafty smoke screen. After all, he had been under no compulsion to tell Laurel about the jacket. But, once he had and once he foisted it off on her, it was quite likely that events would unfold as they had, with Laurel under arrest and even more evidence piled up against Howard.

Bitterness.

Laurel had stressed that, in her parting words.

She was right.

Carleton was bitter as hell. Just how angry was he with the father who had, in the son’s mind, betrayed his beloved mother’s memory?

Carleton slowly replaced the receiver, brushed back a lock of fine hair with a nervous hand. “You don’t think the prosecutor will understand?”

“Think about it,” she said crisply.

Any fool could figure Posey’s reasoning. Howard Cahill’s second wife was a tramp. So much of one, in fact, that she even dallied in an alcove during a party in their own home. Howard told her after the party that he intended to file for divorce. Posey would claim that Howard’s stated intention to arrange a divorce was fake, that he was a man consumed with jealousy, a man who had already decided that his wife must die, sending the fake valentine and secreting the mace within the gazebo. As for Laurel’s alibi, Posey would dismiss it out of hand. Obviously, Laurel and Howard were attracted to one another, providing yet another motive for Sydney’s murder. Posey might even think the flirtation with Laurel was contrived to hide Howard’s murderous passion over his wife’s betrayal.

Therefore, if Carleton admitted to finding Sydney dead with the jacket and mace beside her, he would only reinforce Posey’s conviction that Howard was the murderer he sought.

Eagerness and hope seeped out of Carleton’s face. He clawed again at his mustache. “Well, what in God’s name am I going to do?”

“The only hope is for us to find Sydney’s killer.”

“That’s crazy. That’s silly.”

“No. It’s necessary. And you can help.”

“Me?” He stared at her incredulously. “What am I supposed to do? Look for fingerprints? Hunt for clues?”

“No, your job is very simple. Tell me everything you know about Sydney.”

Max sensed he was close to a mother lode of succulent details on the dark side of General Colville Houghton’s life. But how to pry it loose? Melba Crawford’s snippy rejoinders to his inquiries about the man whom her husband had
served as adjutant indicated there was no love lost between Mrs. Crawford and the general. But her answers, so far, had been circumspect, even though suggestive.

Speaking very low, almost in a whisper, Max said, “Now I can tell, Mrs. Crawford, that you are a woman of the world. Sophisticated. Savvy. Deserving of respect. You know and I know that sometimes a reporter has to use background information. No attribution.” He emphasized the last. “I know you’d like to see the truth revealed about the general. Especially since he and your husband were in the same class at West Point and your husband never got his star. Which I am sure, from what everyone has told me, that he richly deserved.”

“It broke Bradley’s heart. And I
know
it was Colville’s fault. He was such a hateful man, so jealous of anyone with true ability. Yes, I would like for the world to know what Colville Houghton is really like. And I can tell you.” Hatred rough-edged her voice. “I certainly can.”

“The bitch. I knew she was a bitch.” Carleton glared at Annie defiantly. “I screwed her when I was a senior in high school. How do you think I felt when Dad said he was going to marry her?”

Annie felt a sudden sympathy for this angry, immature man. Lousy, that’s how he must have felt. At the same time, she felt ever more sorry for Sydney, who so desperately sought reassurance from increasingly evanescent encounters.

Carleton paced beneath the portraits. “Shit, I should have told him then. But I didn’t. And he probably wouldn’t have listened any better than he did—” He broke off abruptly.

Some logic problems Annie could solve. Carleton hadn’t told his father about his sexual experience with Sydney before Howard married her. But he had tried to tell him at some time. When?

“You tried to tell him Tuesday night.” Her tone wasn’t accusatory, merely thoughtful.

He stood stiffly beneath the portraits of his parents. Where his mother was gentle and lovely, he was weak and
too delicately handsome. Where his father was forceful and determined, he was obstinate. “Hell, no. I never told him.”

He and Annie both knew he was lying.

That made Howard’s decision to divorce Sydney even more understandable.

But it also added to Howard’s reasons for anger with Sydney.

“Your dad must have been really upset Tuesday night.”

“He finally saw her for what she was. A slut. And it got him, all right. But, dammit, he didn’t deserve any better. How could he have put a woman like that in my mother’s house? In my mother’s bed?” Rage shook his voice.

“Your mother is dead,” Annie said coolly.

“Yeah.” The anger was gone, replaced by weariness.

“And so is Sydney,” she added deliberately.

They stared at each other for a long moment, her eyes questioning, his wary.

“I didn’t do it,” he said sullenly. “I hated her, but I didn’t do it.”

Annie studied him, then nodded. “All right. You say you didn’t do it. And, if I’m right and your father is trying to protect you, that means he’s innocent. So who does that leave?”

“How the hell should I know?” he snapped.

Annie was tempted to say, “Hey, jerk, if you can’t put your mind together to help your father, who the hell do you expect to do it?”

With an effort of will, comparable, at least in her own mind, to Miss Marple’s restraint in dealing with Inspector Slack, she said in a reasonable tone, “Carleton, if you didn’t do it and your dad didn’t, it means someone else within this compound committed the murder. Now, I want you to tell me exactly what happened after the party was over.”

Mrs. Crawford knew enough to put Max on the right track. It took another half-dozen calls before he had the whole story. And an ugly one it was.

A cloud of yellow pine pollen swirled on the afternoon breeze. Annie sneezed. It would take a nonallergic foursome
to play tennis at this time of year on the Cahills’ secluded court, screened by pines on all four sides. She had retraced Carleton’s path from the library the night of the murder. Another path angled from the tennis court to the gazebo and yet a third ran straight to the lagoon.

She quickly followed the track from the court to the gazebo. It snaked through dense woodland and she understood better Carleton’s impatience with her demand to know what he had seen that night.

Damn little, she realized, just as he had claimed.

She stopped by the gazebo, off limits behind yellow police tape marking it as a crime scene, and turned toward the lagoon. Shading her eyes, she saw a uniformed deputy in a boat peering into the murky water.

The water swirled, and a masked scuba diver surfaced. “I’ve got it. I’ve got it!” A gloved hand broke through the surface of the water, and the sunlight glinted on wickedly sharp metal spikes.

Another nail in Howard Cahill’s coffin.

But she wasn’t giving up yet.

Although, as she slipped along the shaded path, passing her own house, heading for the next, she wasn’t altogether sure the coffin didn’t fit.

But she couldn’t let Laurel down.

T
HE
G
RAHAM HOUSE
always made Annie think of Emporia, Kansas gone mad. The two-story white frame sported so much Victorian trim that one local carpenter had retired from his earnings and moved to Key West. Annie wasn’t sure how to describe the two-story protrusion which bulged in front; it was emphatically more than a bay window. In addition, a massive cupola topped the third-floor sun deck. Overall, the house had a decidedly pregnant look. However, despite its pretensions, the porched structure, complete with cane-bottom rockers, had a certain dandyish charm. She climbed up the steps, passed the Victorian bulge, and reached the front door, which was tucked in the back of the porch.

Lisa Graham, dressed for tennis, answered Annie’s knock. The dentist’s wife was about Annie’s height, a little older, with—and Annie was proud of her own honesty—a tad better figure, more and riper curves. Her tennis dress, beige with red trim, clung to her like Bertha Cool to a retainer. She had a pleasant face, round and unlined, with widely spaced brown eyes and a firm chin. But her welcoming smile, as she recognized her visitor, slipped sideways like Sergeant Buck encountering Leslie Ford’s Grace Latham.

“Hi, Annie.” Lisa was too well bred to evince overt surprise, but this was not a kaffeeklatsch neighborhood at any time, much less at close to three o’clock on a Wednesday afternoon. Moreover, though she and Annie knew each other—they’d worked on the community fund drive last fall—they were by no means friends on a drop-in basis.

“Are you on your way to the club?” Annie asked. “I don’t want to delay you.”

“No. Just got back. Played doubles. What can I do for you?” Her tone was pleasant, but just impersonal enough to indicate that a quick goodbye was in order, given the chance.

Annie had her story ready.

“It’s the crime,” she said with apparent frankness. “Sydney’s murder. Max and I are worried about neighborhood security. I’m canvassing everyone, and Max is talking to Chief Saulter about further safety measures. So, if I could just have a minute of your time—”

At Annie’s mention of the murder, Lisa’s tanned face suddenly became as smooth and unreadable as the artfully schooled visage Carmen Sternwood turned to the world in
The Big Sleep
. But Lisa’s left hand, which could grip a tennis racket so expertly, tightened on the door frame until the knuckles ridged the skin.

“Security,” she repeated blankly.

Annie stepped into the hall, as if confident of her welcome, chattering vacuously, “Time for us to stick together. Such a
surprise
. Of course, I didn’t know Sydney very well, but it seems to me the implication is clear that she was meeting someone there. Can’t imagine who.”

Lisa stiffened, and she looked sharply at Annie.

Lord Peter himself could not have nattered on more innocuously. “Max thinks there must be some other way of getting into the compound. We wondered if you and George had ever seen any strangers around. We both agree”—should she cross her fingers?—“that it’s absurd to suspect Howard. So, it’s up to the neighborhood to come up with anything that can be helpful.”