Death on Demand (14 page)

She stood and swayed as if the floor moved beneath her feet.

She was going to be sick.

Moving heavily, one hand clasped to her mouth, she reached the doorway. Elliot’s tree house was built to the same pattern as hers, the only difference was his second bedroom. She turned left toward the bathroom, flicked on the light and made it just in time to heave violently into the toilet. Sick. Sick. Sick. Finally, clinging to the edge of the lavatory for support, she knew the sickness was past.

Breathing unevenly, she stared down into the basin.

Then she saw the reddish stickiness on her left hand. Slowly, she turned her hand, looked down at the palm, at the blood smeared across it. Blood streaked the whiteness of the lavatory where she had gripped it.

Blood.

Her head.

Annie looked up and saw her face in the mirror. A smeary face. Blurred vision. Clumsily, she moved her right hand up to her head, gingerly touching her scalp behind her right ear. The swelling felt spongy. But her fingers located no cut or fresh wet blood. She turned the spigots and thrust her hands under the cold rushing water, ridding them of the unpleasant stickiness, then patted water on her face. She used a pale yellow towel to dry her hands. It was pink where she had touched it.

Her head. Somebody hit her. That’s what had happened to Jill Kearney. But Jill had a skull like an eggshell. Annie’s head felt like hell, but it must be as thick as Max had always maintained it was. No blood. Where had the blood on her hand come from? Must have been a little cut, already dried.

Dried. God, how long had she been here? She’d better get—

The disk. She was reading the disk.

Annie moved like a drunken June bug, misjudging distance. Swaying unsteadily, she reached the hall, started up it toward Elliot’s office.

She saw the blood first, spatters of it dark and ugly against the ridged bamboo wall. As if blood had sprayed upward, clots of it, then finer particles …

The head was shattered, unrecognizable. Blood and tissue were smeared across the back of the pale yellow t-shirt. One hand was outflung. Even in the dim light, Annie recognized the large red ruby ring that Harriet always wore.

Bludgeoned. That’s what Harriet had said had happened to Jill Kearney. Harriet was wrong. Jill had been struck once. Harriet had been bludgeoned, the entire side of her skull was a pulpy mass—bone, tissue, blood, and hair indistinguishable.

Annie jolted around and again made it to the bathroom just in time.

Harriet dead. Why? Crazy, crazy … Saulter called it nutty when Elliot was killed. Elliot was dead, and Saulter suspected her of his death and of Uncle Ambrose’s. Now here she was at the scene of another crime. Good luck, Annie Laurance. Who would believe she hadn’t done it? Just like Pam Frye in
Octagon House.
But she didn’t have Asey Mayo to save her. Then the fiery pain in her head gave a measure of relief. Her own head. That was it. Someone had struck both her and Harriet down.

Resolutely, Annie once again faced the hall. This had gone too far. This time she had to call Saulter. She moved sideways down the hall, like a reluctant crab. God, she couldn’t get past Harriet, get past all that blood. Elliot’s office. There would be an extension in there.

She stepped into the office and turned on the light. She was stumbling across the room, her hand outstretched to pick up the telephone when she saw the blackjack. Her shoulders hunched.

A blackjack. And then she knew. Someone had killed Harriet with that blackjack. There was blood on it and hair. The blackjack lay where she had been. Heavy. Blackjacks were heavy. The blood on her hand. She had awakened with the blackjack in her hand. Her fingerprints would be on it. She remembered what Capt. Mac told them, that Sunday evening. Leather holds fingerprints very well. Very well indeed.

Moving in a thick gray fog, the only reality the pounding
ache in her head and the thick crimson spatters on the bamboo wall, Annie returned to the bathroom. Her movements were slow and clumsy. She used the towel hanging on the rack and carefully scrubbed the toilet, the lavatory, and the light switch, pausing occasionally to retch.

What else had she touched there? Nothing.

She rubbed the walls in the hall, then went to the kitchen. She leaned out to wipe the window, the sill, and the area around the sink.

In Elliot’s office, she took time to turn on the monitor. At first she was hopeful. There was a disk in the right-hand drive. It took only a moment to discover it was blank. It must have taken her attacker forty seconds to erase the files forever. Annie wiped the disk, the disk jacket, the side of the CPU, the keyboard, the chair.

Her head throbbed and furious tears burned in her eyes.

What else had she touched?

The doorframe, the floor where she had lain, the light switch.

Although nausea threatened again, she used one end of the towel to pick up the bloodied blackjack, and the other to wipe it clean. She bent down to pick up the towel she’d brought to cover the disk.

A thunderous knocking erupted at the front door.

Beneath the low-flung skirt of a pine, Max crouched. The whirling red light atop the police car threw scarlet flashes around the clearing and against the dark masses of foliage.

Max strained to see. Saulter thumped again on Elliot’s door, then waved a hand behind him. Max lifted his head. Another man waited on the other side of the clearing, and Max understood. Saulter thought someone was in Elliot’s tree house, and he intended to flush out the intruder for his deputy to grab.

From his vantage point, Max could see the deputy waiting near the police car, Chief Saulter at the top of the steps, and a slender form outlined against a window on the side of the tree house.

Saulter couldn’t see Annie. But if the deputy turned his head, he would.

Max reached down, scooped up a large pine cone, and heaved it as hard as he could. It splatted against the back of the police car.

The deputy immediately dropped out of sight on the ground.

“Halt, or I’ll shoot!”

Max smiled. That shout would forewarn Annie nicely. He scooped up five cones, nice solid ones, and, wriggling backwards, began to move toward the bike path he knew she would take.

The second and third cones landed on top of the tree house.

“Come out with your hands up,” the deputy yelled frantically, and ran, crouching, toward the back of the house.

Max moved to intercept Annie, a slight silhouette momentarily limned by the flashing police light.

He hissed urgently, “Annie—this way.”

She was moving oddly, a kind of drooping shamble. He caught her as she stumbled and fell.

A shower and a clean cotton nightgown helped. But best of all was the double whisky Max thrust in her numb hands.

“What if I have a concussion?”

“Best thing in the world for it.”

It did ease the throbbing pain. But not even telling Max eased the horror of that evening.

Max looked as grim as she had ever seen him—and that was scary.

Annie rested against the bright cushions of the wicker divan, a patchwork quilt across her knees. She shivered, though her blue terrycloth beach robe was warm and soft. “He’ll arrest me, won’t he?”

“Hell, no.”

It had a hollow ring. Max managed a smile. “Look, Annie, this is the truth. We were here all evening. We never left the place.” His dark blue eyes narrowed in thought. “The phone rang once, maybe about six-thirty, but we didn’t answer. We didn’t give a damn about the phone. Come on, Annie, stop brooding about it. We’ve got to figure out how to solve this.”

He handed her the notes he’d made from his calls while she was at Elliot’s, then rolled up his sleeves and fixed ham sandwiches and brewed fresh coffee, black and strong. He brought her a tray, then plunked down in the easy chair next to her and fussily insisted she eat every bite as she read the bios. This wasn’t her old, familiar, cavalier Max. There were dark shadows under his eyes, a stubble of beard on his chin. He stayed very close and occasionally reached out to touch her, but his voice remained crisp.

“All right. Let’s go at it from the first—from the murderer’s side.”

“The murderer’s side?”

“Sure. Let’s figure out what the killer did when and why and fit that against the suspects. We know Elliot’s murder was premeditated, of course.”

“Because of Jill and the poison?”

“Right. The murderer needed to do several things. Get a dart, steal the poison, and set it up so the lights would go out at precisely the right time Sunday night.”

Annie shot up straight, then winced. “Max, the murderer is a woman.”

“Why?”

“Because the dart had to be carried into the store Sunday night. A woman could bring it in a purse, but there’s no way for a man to get a four-inch dart in the store.”

“No. I don’t see it that way. That would be too risky. The dart would already have the wad of cotton soaked in succinyl-choline on the end. That would leave traces. No, I see it this way. The murderer got into the store sometime Saturday night or Sunday morning …”

“Sunday morning,” Annie interrupted.

“What time?”

Annie figured for a moment. “About nine forty-five. I heard the cabinet slam, and that meant someone had closed the back door. I was all set to beat it out the front door, then I saw that Agatha wasn’t upset, so I thought it was some other noise. That means that Agatha knows and likes the murderer.”

“If Agatha could only talk.”

Max grabbed a sheet of paper and scribbled out a timetable:

Annie took the sheet. It didn’t help a hell of a lot, though Archie Goodwin would probably have deemed it a creditable effort. But Archie was awfully good-humored.

“How did the murderer get in?”

“How?”

“How? I had the place locked.”

His face crinkled in thought. “Okay. Keys. Presumably the Island Hills Clinic doesn’t leave its doors open for the world to enter, so the killer had keys there. It isn’t hard to come up with keys, and there’s nothing special about the locks at either place.”

The idea that a killer could come and go in her shop at will wasn’t exactly a cheering one.

“The killer came into my place about nine forty-five. The phone rang about ten minutes earlier, but I ignored it. Whoever called figured the place was empty.”

“You wouldn’t normally be there Sunday morning?”

“No. I was trying to decide what to do about the Sunday evening session.”

“It would only take a couple of minutes,” Max reconstructed. “Nip into the store, hide the dart on the floor by the wall, then tie thread to the breaker switches, and run that along the floor into the cafe area. Presto, the stage is set for a murder.”

Annie couldn’t help admiring the plan. “Whoever did it was damn smart. It was beautifully plotted. You know, I told Elliot those cigarettes would make him sick someday. And they really did, because the murderer counted on the
red tip of his cigarette to serve as the target for the dart. Hell of a throw.”

“Avoid talking about good throws,” Max cautioned. “Let’s hope Saulter doesn’t dwell on your softball prowess.”

“I skunked his pitiful team, eleven-zip.”

“Poor planning.” Max absently rubbed his bristly jaw. “Unlike our murderer. It all went like clockwork. During the confusion of the blackout, all he had to do was yank on the thread until it broke and reel it in. When the lights came on, he could drop it unobtrusively into the wastebasket, along with the cotton soaked in polish remover. Voilà: one corpse and nothing to link the murderer to the crime.”

Annie pulled the quilt up to her shoulders. “I’ll bet Dr. Thorndyke could have found some traces if he’d been there with his small green box.”

“He didn’t have to trifle with search warrants,
et al.”

“Lacking the good doctor’s expertise, let’s try to ratiocinate, like Sherlock Holmes. Okay, Dr. Watson, why was the back door open when I came to check the circuits?”

“Just a little bit of insurance. It would have been easy for the murderer to slip into the storeroom and open that door while everyone was squabbling over the coffee and snacks. That open door was to make sure Saulter considered the possibility of an outsider.”

“But Saulter didn’t look past me,” Annie said bitterly, “much less outside.”

“Well, you have to admit it was brilliantly thought out.” He sighed and got up to pour himself a drink. “And we don’t have an iota of proof to show Saulter.”

Annie gingerly massaged her temples. If only her head didn’t ache quite so much. Words jiggled in her mind: scraps, proof, papers …

“My God, Uncle Ambrose’s book. Max, his
book!”

“You told me about it,” he said soothingly. “He was working on a book about accidents that just might have been murder.”

Annie threw back the quilt, pulled herself to her feet, and wobbled, but her words came fast as shotgun pellets. “Don’t you see? We said Elliot might have picked up on what Uncle Ambrose suspected. Well, somebody beat us
to the disk at Elliot’s, but we can go through Uncle Ambrose’s papers!”

When Annie unlocked the front door and turned on the lights at Death On Demand, Agatha rose, stretched leisurely, and focused two luminous, quizzical eyes on them. Annie scooped up the cat from atop the bookcase and rubbed her cheek against the ebony fur. “Who came in Sunday morning, Agatha?”

But Agatha wriggled free and stalked down the center aisle. It wasn’t the proper time for Annie to be in the shop, and her tail indicated her disdain for Annie’s unprofessional hours.

Her nagging headache was forgotten. They were nearing the end of their hunt. She felt almost lightheaded as she led the way to the storeroom. The chalked outline was no longer in front of the coffee bar. Dear Ingrid. She was holding down the fort in every way.