Death on the Mississippi (18 page)

She took a sip of instant coffee and grimaced. “Then it's now a police matter and we are out of it. Which leaves me with two questions. Where does this leave Pan, Sam, and Dice?”

“It's hard to believe that they're all part of a conspiracy.”

“And two, what about Carillo's granddaughter?” she asked with interest.

“Carillo was released on five hundred dollars' bond, but children's services has stepped in. Rocco says that maybe the FBI or Attorney General can't get Carillo, but he's never delt with real troublemakers like social workers.”

“You guys did all you could.” She stared out the window at the overgrown grass. “Have we decided to turn our lawn into an African savanna?”

“I had to avoid certain areas last time I mowed,” Lyon said. “There was a family of rabbits by the pines, and some woodchucks were working near the garden, so I certainly couldn't mow there.”

“And deer have probably taken up by the shed,” she said. “It's animal eviction time. Thumper has to go.” She marched out of the kitchen and across the lawn to the small shed where they kept the sit-down mower and other lawn tools. She was a staunch feminist who believed in complete equality between the sexes. She was more than willing to stand on a bus, or to have men snap doors in her face, but she still maintained two last vestiges of Fifties baggage. Men took out the garbage and did the grass. She was perfectly willing to shingle the roof, replace plumbing, or do wallpaper, but garbage and grass were strictly male domains. It suited her present state of mind to do grass as a self-inflicted punishment for her poor mood.

She squinted in the bright mid-morning sun, and snapped off the latch on the shed door and stepped into its dark interior. The instant change from bright sun to dim interior radically reduced her vision. A board squeaked under her foot as she reached toward the seat of the mower.

The figure in the stocking mask catapulted over the mower. Two powerful hands reached for her throat.

She was shoved harshly back against the wall. The door frame caused a sharp pain in the small of her back. The hands closed over her throat. It was becoming difficult to breathe. She thought she could feel his fetid breath against her face. She was gasping for her life.

She tried to break the strong grip at her neck. Her fingers rasped against the rough texture of heavy gloves. During an inappropriate minisecond, she recalled that she needed a new pair of gardening gloves herself.

She tore her right hand away from the killing grip, and scratched it across the wall of the shed by her side. Her fingers closed tightly over the handle of a tool, and she swung the implement in a wide arc that fell across her attacker's back. She struck again, and then again. The pressure on her neck loosened as her attacker recoiled.

Bea swung the weapon again. As it passed across the door opening, sunlight glinted from the razor-edge blade of the hand scythe.

Her attacker rose before her. Bea screamed and with both hands swung the scythe directly at the figure's neck.

A severed head rolled across the shed floor. Bea screamed again and stumbled from the shed. She knelt in the grass with retching gasps.

Lyon, holding a kitchen utensil, ran across the yard toward her.

She looked down at her hands still gripping the deadly scythe, and she let the weapon fall to the ground. She had just decapitated a man, and her husband was running to her rescue carrying a spatula.

13

They stood in front of the shed and looked at the body. The head had fallen in the shadows within the shed, and Lyon stepped across the threshold to lift it by the stocking mask and throw it out on the lawn where it rolled to a stop by Bea's feet. “At least it was a relatively bloodless slaying,” Lyon said as he kicked the torso.

“That's not funny,” she said.

He went back inside the shed to squat near the floor. He ran his fingers over certain objects he found there, and then returned to sit beside her on the grass. “It was triggered by a spring under the loose floorboard. It was mounted over the mower so that when released it came right at whoever was standing near the door.”

She picked up the head. “It was dark. I thought someone was killing me, and I cut off his head.”

“Without the stocking mask, it looks like one of those dummies they use for automobile testing. When it jumped out at you in the dark, you had no way of knowing he wasn't real.”

“And you rushed to my rescue with a spatula. Were you going to turn him over easy? Couldn't you have at least grabbed a butcher knife?”

Lyon looked at her in mock horror. “And be a party to a beheading?”

“Thanks a pile.”

He pulled her gently to her feet and led her toward the house. “Let's leave this whole mess. I'll take you to the Murphysville Inn for one of their famous Sunday brunches complete with an extra-strong Bloody Mary.”

“With that in mind, my disposition has already begun to improve. I know it's not nice to speak ill of the dead, but that rat fink Dalton set up that trick before he left.”

For three hundred years the Murphysville Inn had either been a stagecoach stop or inn. It sat on a small hill above the river on the outskirts of town. The Murphysville Yacht Club's rustic clubhouse and boat slips were at the base of the hill. The inn offered lodgings in a dozen antiques-furnished rooms above the restaurant, and the dining facilities included the Forge Room, the Bar Room, or the larger dining area known as the Taproom. The ceilings were low, and the walls were covered with Currier and Ives lithographs. The food was plain generic New England, and the prices were high.

On Sundays, a long table was installed in the Taproom laden with warming dishes of eggs, breads, hams, and turkeys.

Lyon asked for a table by the window in the Forge Room, and their Bloody Marys were quickly served. Bea drank with gratitude. “The day is already looking a mite better.”

“Pandora is the one who put a microphone in our box springs,” Lyon said.

“Is that a non sequitur?” she asked.

“I'm trying to imagine who else in the world would pull a trick like the lunging strangler. It required a good deal of strength to set the springs on that dummy,” Lyon said.

A pitcher of Bloody Marys was put on the table. Bea looked across the room to see the inn's owner, a distinguished, white-haired man, standing in the room's archway. He waved and mouthed the word “compliments” to her.

“I think it was rigged by Dalton,” Lyon continued.

“The day was improving, Went, don't spoil it.”

“I was in that shed two days ago,” Lyon said. “Nothing sprang out at me then. The dummy was rigged within the last forty-eight hours.”

“You saw Dalton dead on Red Deer Island before the fire. He was hanging, if you will recall.”

“I saw him dead in our living room a few days before that, but he was resurrected.”

Bea poured another Bloody Mary. “Now we're into the occult.”

“How about sleight of hand instead?”

“Did you see him hanging?”

“Yes, I did.”

“Then finish your drink, and don't spoil my enjoyment of the buffet.”

A wheelchair, pushed by a nondescript man in a dark suit, appeared in the archway. The chair's occupant had a robe tucked around his lower body, but his torso was clothed in an Oscar de la Renta tailored suit. The patient had an extremely large head topped with a wave of yellowing hair. His facial features were accentuated by deep craggy lines. His left arm and the left side of his face were rigid and frozen, the result of a stroke. Lyon watched with interest as the man with the interesting face was pushed to a table across the room.

“The man in the wheelchair looks familiar,” Lyon said.

Bea took a quick glance at the other table. “I met him on my last visit to the Murphysville Convalescent Hospital. His name is …” She searched her memory. “Lawrence Thorndike. I believe he was a stage actor before he had a stroke and retired.”

“I must have seen him in some play.”

The deep and sonorous voice carried clearly across the room. “I do not want juice, Melvin. I do not want a Shirley Temple. I want a goddamn strong martini.”

Bea covered the lower part of her face with her hand to hide the smile. “I think they told me he was nearly ninety.”

“I hope I want a drink when I'm ninety,” Lyon said. “That voice is familiar, but I don't identify it with a Broadway play. It was something I heard as a kid. Larry Lash!” Lyon raised his voice so that it boomed across the room. “There's trouble on the prairie tonight!”

“But Larry Lash on Flyer will ride!” the actor's sonorous voice returned with equal volume.

At the archway, the inn's owner held up his hands in a plea for quiet.

“Get over here, young fellow,” the actor called to Lyon.

“Bring your drink,” Lyon said to Bea as he pushed back from the table. Bea picked up her glass, looked at the nearly full pitcher, and took that also.

After introductions, they sat at the Thorndike table. “Not many remember Larry Lash,” the actor said. “Made a hundred of those damn things. I went out to Hollywood in thirty when they needed voices. Never been on a horse except for carriage rides around Central Park with a little slap and tickle with some ingenue. We made those Larry Lashes in a week. Used to see them on the TV in the Fifties. Terrible.”

“I heard you did some stage work for O'Neill, Mr. Thorndike,” Bea said.

“Sure in hell did. Joined them when the Provincetown Players moved to New York. Now you take Gene. He was a real man's drinker. Mean son of a bitch when drunk, but a hell of a writer when sober. I played with the Lunts in
The Guardsman
, great actors those two.”

“Do you remember the movie,
Guns at Gut Creek?”
Lyon asked.

“Can't say that I do,” Thorndike answered. “All those damn things were alike, and sometimes we made them up as we went along.”

“Guns at Gut Creek
starts out with a sheepherder getting hanged for rustling cattle.”

“Did Larry Lash say there was trouble on the prairie tonight?”

“You always said that line in all those movies, Grandfather,” his companion said.

“Who'd you say got hanged?”

“A sheepherder.”

“Hell, son, I know that. Sheepmen always got the short end, but who played the part? I might recall it.”

Lyon thought a moment. “Harry Carey. Harry Carey Senior, that is. It was a small part, but he had some good lines when he had to write a last letter to his little girl and told her that he'd meet her in the great-prairie-in-the-sky.”

“Hell, yes. I remember it. Only time I ever worked with Harry. He became a great character actor in his later years.”

“There's a scene where they slap Harry's horse and the rope tightens around his neck, and well, he's hanged. How do they do that?”

“You mean how they hanged him? There's no big trick to that. They put a waist harness under his shirt, and from that a wire runs up the back and through the center of the rope and around the tree limb. It looks good, but he's not really hanging at all. Which makes it refill time. I need another martini, and make it a double this time.”

Bea had just finished mixing a huge batch of Bloody Marys when she realized that they had never eaten the inn's buffet. In fact, they hadn't eaten anything all day. As soon as they had left Thorndike's table, Lyon had made several phone calls on the inn's phone and then rushed her to the car for a fast drive back to Nutmeg Hill.

Rocco Herbert now straddled a chair on the patio with a drink of straight vodka in his hand. Captain Norbert, dressed in what he perceived as a Scottish golfing outfit, waited impatiently for his drink. He did not appear pleased. A diminutive man sat uncomfortably in a chair near the parapet. He was so short that his feet barely touched the ground. He was dressed in a suit that Bea was convinced had to have been purchased at a department store's prep shop.

Lyon took the pitcher from Bea and poured drinks for everyone except Rocco, who replenished his own.

“I want to thank you for coming, Doctor Mellin,” Lyon said.

“Senator Wentworth has always been most supportive of the Medical Examiner's office,” Mellin replied in a voice that was in keeping with his stature.

Captain Norbert tapped his glass on the edge of the parapet. “Can we get this moving along, Wentworth? I'm scheduled to play golf with the major today.”

Doctor Mellin giggled. “One good thing about my job is that the patients are never in a hurry.”

“And never pay their bills,” Norbert said and guffawed at his own joke.

“I hope what you've turned up is important,” Rocco said.

“Something happened to us this morning that I consider significant,” Lyon said. “Specifically, it happened to Bea when she went out to the shed to start the mower.” He told them in detail about the incident of the attacking mannequin. They were silent when he finished. Rocco looked bemused. Doctor Mellin looked puzzled, as if waiting for the punch line. Captain Norbert looked annoyed.

“Let me get this straight,” Norbert finally said. “You probably want Rocco, as the local police chief, to give you protection. You want Doctor Mellin to autopsy your dummy, and me to get a State Police SWAT team looking for marauding mannequins. Come on now.”

“I know of only one person in this state who concocts elaborate tricks of that nature,” Lyon said levelly.

“It could have been set up weeks ago,” Rocco added.

“I was in that shed two days ago and nothing happened then,” Lyon said.

“Jesus, Wentworth, lots of people play jokes,” Norbert said. “It could have been set by anyone. Dalton Turman is dead. Do you understand, dead?” He bounced his glass on the stone parapet and it shattered in his hand. He looked down at the pieces in surprise.

Lyon replaced the captain's drink. “Another thing,” Lyon went on. “Dalton was in bed with loan sharks, and yet remarkably they are suddenly not interested in repayment of their money.”