Flynn's In (17 page)

“Shall we go open the vault now?”

“No.” Flynn sat on the bed again, near the pillows. “No more complicity for me. It is well past time to summon the local authorities. I believe it a fair assumption that the playful members of The Rod and Gun Club again have avoided turning themselves in. I am about to do so.” He picked up the telephone receiver.

The telephone was dead in his ear.

“Oh, my,” Flynn said after waiting a moment for an
operator to answer. “They’ve done this, too. Cut off the phones. Cocky, please go to your room and try that phone.”

Flynn listened to the silence coming from the telephone. He might as well have been holding a shoe to his ear.

Cocky limped back into the room.

“Nothing?”

“Nothing.”

Flynn put the phone back in its cradle and reached for his boots. “Get your coat, Cocky. We’re going for a ride.”

“I
think the car that was there was a Cadillac.”

“Whose?”

“I don’t know.”

In the short walk from the clubhouse to the car park, Cocky had begun to shiver. Flynn realized that Cocky was outdoors seldom nowadays. He had become acclimated to the overheated police building on Craigie Lane.

“What’s the make of the car that left and came back?” Flynn asked.

“A Mercedes.”

In the five or six centimeters of snow that had fallen, tire tracks made it perfectly clear that some time ago two cars had left, probably at the same time. One car had returned, very recently. The tracks went down the slope, around the lake toward the main gate.

“This old beauty has a marvelous heater,” Flynn assured Cocky as he started the engine of the ancient Country Squire station wagon. He fiddled with the dashboard knobs. The wipers cleared the windshield of snow. Cold air blasted their faces and knees. “In a moment you’ll feel as warm as a politician being audited by the Internal Revenue Service.”

“I wonder who left,” Cocky said into his coat collar. “Who came back.”

Flynn backed the car around. In the snowing dusk he turned on his headlights. He followed the tracks down the slope and around the lake.

“Frank?” Cocky asked. “Do the great variety of murder weapons puzzle you?”

“Indeed they do.”

“A shotgun,” mused Cocky. “A piece of rope. A club.”

“Different methods of operating altogether,” agreed Flynn.

“That usually means different people are doing the murders.”

“It could mean that,” said Flynn. “Or it could mean one person taking whatever opportunities present themselves.”

“Are half the members of The Rod and Gun Club killing the other half?”

“What for?” asked Flynn. “Some traditions are better not started.”

The car slipped a little going around a curve in the woods.

“Obviously they’re not all of the same political party. Dunn Roberts-”

“Ach, no, it’s not that. People who play with power so stratospherically support all parties. They cover their bets. They don’t care so much who is in power, so long as they have influence. And they make sure they do.”

“Then what issue would divide them?”

“To the point of wholesale murder? I don’t know. Maybe somebody’s grandfather insulted somebody’s grandmother. Maybe somebody put frogs in somebody’s bed at school a million years ago.”

“Maybe it’s a kitchen revolution. We’ve paid little attention to the kitchen help.”

“A Vietnamese was in the front of the house when Wahler and I came back from our walk. He was coming down the stairs as we were going up.”

“Somebody has to make the beds, I guess.” With the fingers of his right hand, Cocky turned the heater down. They were now being blasted with equatorial air.

“I keep thinking of blackmail.” Flynn slowed as they approached the fence. “The situation is rife for blackmail. All these important men runnin’ around dressed anyway at all, or no way at all, drinkin’, gamblin’, shootin’, and swearin’, havin’ these meetings they think aren’t being overheard…” A few meters from the gate he stopped the car. “But for the life of me, I don’t see how blackmail ends up with three men murdered.”

“By different methods.”

“By different methods, yes.”

The gate was closed, of course. The tire tracks travelled under it and continued into the woods beyond.

Flynn blew his car horn.

No guard appeared.

No light shone from the windows of the guard’s hut. No smoke came from the chimney.

“Are we captivated?” asked Flynn.

He blew the car horn again. No guard appeared from any direction.

“No one’s here,” Cocky said.

“You might as well stay here.” Flynn got out of the car.

He walked forward in the headlights of the car. His shadow was enormous against the fence, on the snow beyond.

Behind him, the car door closed.

There were three stout chains locking the gate, one at head height, one at waist height, one at knee height.

“I could pick the locks,” Cocky said from behind Flynn, “if we could reach them.”

Flynn reached for one of the chains with his gloved hand, to try pulling the padlock nearer, tight against the other side of the fence.

Something chopped the back of his neck.

He found himself sitting in the snow, his right leg under his left knee.

Cocky’s right hand was gripping Flynn’s elbow.

“Electrified,” Cocky said. “The fence is electrified.”

“Shockin’,” agreed Flynn. He shook his head.

Cocky kept his hand on Flynn’s arm until he regained his feet. Then Cocky stood back and studied the gate.

“Ramming it with the car…” Cocky said.

“…would make an awful mess. And get us nowhere. I think such is called an accident. You’d need a tank…”

Cocky considered the whole fence. “Can’t go through it or over it.”

“We’re prisoners,” admitted Flynn. “Should have guessed it when the phones didn’t work.”

Cocky was shivering again.

“Let’s get back in the car,” Flynn said. “As long as we’re now prisoners of The Rod and Gun Club, there’s something else I want to check out.”

As they approached the clubhouse, Flynn turned the car lights off. There was enough light in the snow for him to see their way.

Beyond the clubhouse, he turned onto the forest road he had travelled that morning with Taylor.

Just after he turned on the headlights again, the car hit a snow drift. Flynn swung the wheel and the car straightened itself.

“Do you think we dare chance it?” Flynn asked. “I’m headed for the Rumble de Dump.”

“Sure. Why not? Might as well freeze to death in a snow drift as be shot, strangled or bludgeoned.”

“A positive point of view.”

“They say people freezing to death hear celestial music.”

“Oh? Do you get to pick your own tune?”

“What music would you choose?”

“Something by Tchaikovsky, I expect. Warms the blood.”

“You’re a practical man, Frank.”

The car skidded going up a hill. Flynn raised his foot from the accelerator and it straightened out.

“Evidence being destroyed almost as soon as it is created by our murderer or murderers…” began Flynn.

“Surely not murderess.”

“… I find myself excusing my usual comfortable method of detection.”

“Which is?”

“Seeking the controlling intelligence. The one mind controlling the current situation, capable of doing these murders, destroying the evidence, etcetera, regardless of apparent motive, apparent opportunity.”

He pumped the brake going downhill.

“Which is?”

“Rutledge.”

The rear end of the car swerved into a drainage ditch. Its own momentum bounced it out again.

“Frank.”

“Yes, Cocky.”

“It isn’t that I don’t want to hear your theories.”

“Oh?”

“All very interesting.”

“Thank you.”

“Enlightening.”

“Good of you to say so.”

“And, I’m sure with a very few more logical steps, will lead us to the right conclusion.”

“Your faith in me is edify in’.”

“But, at the moment, I’d rather have you concentrate on your driving.”

“I thought you were driving.”

“No, Frank. You’re driving.”

“I see.”

“I’m not all that fond of Tchaikovsky myself.”

“Prokofiev?”

“I’d rather hear the children singing carols a month from now.”

“Are you sure? Think of what you’re sayin’, man.”

“I’m sure.”

“Sleigh bells ring; are you listening?
All that again?”

“Furthermore,” Cocky concluded, “in my humble opinion, Wahler controls Rutledge.”

The trip to the Rumble de Dump took more than twice the time it had taken that morning.

Flynn turned the station wagon around in front of the cabin before getting out. He left the engine running.

“You might as well stay here,” he said to Cocky through the open door. “You’ve only got street shoes.”

Cocky stayed in the car.

Flynn walked through the clearing in front of the cabin, into the woods where he and Rutledge had rushed that morning at the sound of shouts and shots. Steadying himself with the odd birch sapling, he slipped and slithered down the steep hillside.

“Hewitt?” he called.

Except for the crinkling of the landing snow, the woods were silent.

With more snow, the woods looked different.

Flynn was certain he had found the place where Ashley had been killed. His body had lain face down under that tree. Hewitt had settled down under that other tree. That is where the tree branch used as a club had been.

Except Ashley’s body wasn’t there.

Neither was Hewitt.

In the fresh snow there was no evidence either had ever been there.

There was no evidence anything unusual had ever happened there.

Overhead, a tree branch cracked cold.

The snow was wetting Flynn’s face.

“So.” Flynn knew talking to the trees was exactly as good as had been his talking to the men assembled under these trees a few hours before. “Hewitt is in on this, too.”

“W
ho’s missing?”

Cocky and Flynn stood in the doorway of the great hall of The Rod and Gun Club.

The fire was roaring. Naked, except for a book on his lap, Wendell Oland nodded asleep in his usual chair by the fire. Around the poker table in boisterous play were the once-and-future Governor Edward Buckingham in a tattered old bathrobe, Senator Dunn Roberts in a sweat jacket, smoking a cigar, Boston Police Commissioner Eddy D’Esopo, in black shoes, also smoking a cigar, Ernest Clifford, his pile of chips looking huge against his dark blue sweat shirt, and banker Philip Arlington, despite his glasses, peering myopically at the cards on the table. In his white jacket, Taylor was filling the beer glasses on the table from a pitcher. Dressed in full shirt and necktie, Paul Wahler sat under a reading light away from the poker table, absorbed in a large book entitled
Contemporary Estate Planning
.

Clifford, Buckingham, Roberts and Taylor each glanced at Cocky and Flynn in the doorway. None offered any sort of greeting.

“Rutledge,” Flynn answered. “Rutledge is missing.”

“But I thought you said Rutledge’s car is a Rolls Royce—not a Cadillac.”

“Wahler drove me to Timberbreak in the Rolls. I assumed it was Rutledge’s. Let’s go see.”

Upstairs they went to the end of the corridor. Flynn knocked on the door of Suite 23.

No answer.

Flynn knocked again, louder.

Still no answer.

He tried the door handle. The door was unlocked.

Flynn pushed the door open with his fingertips.

A hunting knife, inserted at an upward angle from the base of Rutledge’s rib cage, pinned him to the big blossoms of his chair.

His eyes were closed. His hands were folded neatly in his lap.

The front of his woolen hunting shirt, his hands, his lap were thick with blood.

“Why do they need to keep us?” Flynn asked testily. “It seems the process of elimination is working perfectly well all by itself.”

He touched the blood in Rutledge’s lap with the tips of his fingers. “Not too warm.”

The reading lamp on the table beside Rutledge was lit.

Putting his glove back on, using only his index finger and thumb, Flynn picked up the telephone receiver by its mouthpiece and held it near his ear. The line was dead.

Also on the table was a note pad. Leaning over it, not touching it, Flynn read:

Arlington—

in capitol—too much

Buckingham/frame

2)Brigadoon 100

“Can you make out if that’s an
o
or an
a
in
capitol?”
Flynn asked, moving aside.

After looking, Cocky said, “I can’t be sure.”

“I make it out ano.”

Looking around the room generally, Flynn said, “He was attacked from the front.”

“By someone he knew.”

“Of course.”

“The handle of that knife should give us some nice fingerprints.”

“If you notice, Cocky, we’re both carrying gloves.”

“So, probably, was the murderer.”

“Someone entering this room, wearing or carrying gloves, when it’s snowing out, would not have caused either alarm or suspicion on Rutledge’s part.”

“I suppose if the murderer thought there might be fingerprints, he would have taken the knife with him.”

“He’s done nothing wrong so far—unless you consider the antisocial aspects of the murders themselves.” Flynn snapped on
the light in the bedroom of the suite. Everything was orderly. It looked as if the room had just been cleaned. Turning back to Cocky, he said, “And, you notice, another method of murder: stabbing.”

“Frank, you said you saw a member of the kitchen staff coming down the stairs when you were going up.”

“Yes.” The gong sounded. Flynn looked at his watch. “Our playful polar bears now repair to the sauna, I guess.”

“Should we stop them? Do the who, where, when and why immediately?”

“No.” Flynn turned off the light in the bedroom. “Let’s take this opportunity, while we know where everyone supposedly is, to put you and your curiosity to work in that vault.”