Read Murder At Murder At the Mimosa Inn, The Online

Authors: Joan Hess

Murder At Murder At the Mimosa Inn, The (6 page)

BOOK: Murder At Murder At the Mimosa Inn, The
5.47Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads
“Sorry, dear. High tea has never been my style.” I told her about the encounters with Hercule and Sam Spade, which resulted in a round of uncontrollable giggles from her and a few from me. Mrs. Robison-Dewitt was good for a second round. Then Caron returned to her book, and I opted for a soothing bath with my notebook propped on a soapy knee. Afterwards, I put on a wool dress and we went downstairs for dinner.
Some of the guests had changed clothes, but many of them were still in costume. Nickie sat at the head of a table of Marples as though he were the captian of a cruise ship. In one corner, the blond bartender tossed olives in the air between orders; Eric was busy uncorking bottles of wine. Mimi caught Caron and me at the dining-room door and led us toward a table for eight.
“Found any clues?” she asked as we moved between the tables.
I made a noncommittal reply. Caron and I found ourselves sitting with a depressed Marple, a food-splattered Dover, the Oriental Hercule—and the Peter Wimsey-Rosen. While Caron tired not to giggle, I avoided everyone by escaping into the menu. After orders had been given, we began a desultory conversation about the scheduled croquet tournament.
“Oh, Harmon,” trilled a voice from the doorway, “isn’t this just terribly nice! Wherever shall we sit?”
A shudder went around the table, since there were two
empty chairs. Inevitably, Suzetta spotted them and dragged an anesthetized Harmon Crundall across the dining room. She wore a scarlet dress, slightly more conventional than the harem outfit. The neckline was more of a waistline, however, and the flesh count still hovered above the seventy-percent mark.
Peter sucked in a breath as she leaned over him and said, “Do you mind if we sit here?”
“By all means,” he managed to say, once his eyeballs returned to their proper location.
Harmon thudded into one of the chairs. He tried to pat the seat next to him, but his hand swished past the edge and he almost toppled over. With a faint squeak, Suzetta sat down.
When the waiter came, she ordered for both of them, although it was obvious that Harmon was far beyond the food-as-redemption stage. His face was blotched, his lips flecked with spittle. It was only a matter of time before the fall from grace.
Those of us at the table again took up the topic of croquet rules, politely ignoring the occasional belch from Harmon and the increasingly acerbic whispers from his companion. Caron was mortified by the adult antics; I could sense her bristle with indignation. When dinner arrived, we began to eat with ravenous concentration, as if we hadn’t been stuffing ourselves with tea-party food earlier.
Harmon looked at his plate. “Waz that?”
“Dinner, Harmon. Please try to eat something, honey bear,” Suzetta said, nudging him upright and tucking a napkin in his collar. A bib did seem appropriate.
“Can’t eat thiz. Might be drugged, ya know. Lez ask that man—he’s a cop and he oughta know about that stuff. Isn’t that right, Mr. Policeman?”
“I believe it’s safe,” Peter said, puzzled.
“Eat, Harmon,” Suzetta commanded in a low voice. “It may help you feel a teensy bit better.”
Harmon managed to find his fork, but its purpose eluded him. He was tapping it on the edge of the table and
humming an accompaniment when Mrs. Bella Crundall came into the room, spotted him, and crossed to his chair.
“Oh, Harmon, how could you?”
“Waz that?” Harmon blinked at the shadow across his plate. “Iz that some kinda eclipse?”
“You’re drunk,” said Bella Crundall, her expression surprisingly harsh. She rapped her hasband’s sagging shoulder. “You ought to lie down, Harmon—and you ought to be ashamed of yourself! I have already accepted the fact that our marriage is over, ruined by your self-centered, piggish desire to recapture your youth by taking up with some girl young enough to be your daughter.”
“Suzetta my sec’ertary,” he protested petulantly.
“You’re hopeless, and the only thing I can do to avoid being pulled into your whirlpool of degradation is to divorce you.”
He gave her a crafty, albeit lopsided, smile. “You better not divorce me, Bella. I’m going to divorce you first, and then I’m going tell my policeman—I mean my lawyer—whoever … Anyway, I’m going to put ever’thing in Suzetta’s name. You won’t get a penny of my money. You’ll be a pooper!”
“I doubt I’ll be a pauper, Harmon Crundall. You, on the other hand, are apt to end up in a hospital with a terminal liver ailment. I hope this girl will be at your bedside when your time comes. I shall not!” Bella shot Suzetta a pitying look and swooped out of the dining room, a schooner under full sail.
I wanted to applaud, but it seemed inappropriate. I went back to my broiled trout, carefully keeping my face lowered. Gradually, the murmur of conversation started up once more. Harmon was befuddled but quiet, and Suzetta, her cheeks pink, began to eat.
As soon as I was finished, I nudged Caron and we stood up. We took a few steps toward the doorway, but were
stopped by a peculiar, slushy sound from behind us. Mystified, I looked over my shoulder.
Harmon Crundall had taken a swan dive into his plate. His nose was embedded in the potatoes au gratin; a tidbit of lettuce dangled from one ear. The rhythmic drone of a chainsaw filled the air as he began to snore.
Suzetta looked at him, then methodically ate the final bite on her plate and folded her napkin. “Poor Harmon’s exhausted from all his work. He just works so hard, and then needs a tiny nap,” she explained in a serene voice, as if he weren’t in immediate danger of suffocating on a lungful of cheese sauce.
Mimi hurried over, and the two women managed to extricate Harmon from his dinner. Suzetta flicked the lettuce leaf off his ear, dabbed his chin with a napkin, and took his arm. Grimacing under the inert load, they steered him out of the dining room and up the stairs. The rest of us gaped like craniate vertebrates. Caron was visibly appalled; I could hardly wait to hear her condemnation of the episode and of adults as a species.
Nickie Merrick tapped his fork on a glass and said, “Please don’t worry about Mr. Crundall; he’s on his way to bed, I’m sure. The movie will start promptly at ten o’clock. The busboys will have to move the chairs into the drawing room, so please wait on the porch. Bruce will be serving cordials to those who wish an after-dinner drink.”
We all went to the porch, where our juggling bartender poured generous belts of brandy. My dinner companions formed a circle on one end of the porch and all agreed that Harmon’s behavior was disgraceful. The absent Bella received a great deal of tongue-clucking and sympathy. When the subject had been thoroughly analyzed, I asked if anyone had solved any cryptic clues. The group disbanded as if I’d mentioned herpes.
Only Peter remained. “So who do you think is to be the ill-fated victim?”
“Harmon, possibly,” I said. “If anyone deserves to be murdered, it’s that horrible man. But I’m not sure whether he’s who he says he is, or is an actor in the mock murder. I’m nurturing a wild hope that Mrs. Robison-Dewitt will be discovered in the classic death pose. She purports to be from some magazine, but I’ve never heard of it. Do you think she’s legitimate?” I mentally gave myself a pat on the back for the timely red herring.
“Can’t tell the players without a scorecard,” Peter said. He started to add something, but looked over my shoulder and closed his mouth.
I followed his eyes. Suzetta and Mimi stood in the middle of the staircase, deep in conversation. Suzetta looked almost human; her eyelashes were at rest and her kittenish expression had been replaced with a pensive frown. Mimi shook her head in response to something Suzetta said. Suzetta put her hands on the other woman’s shoulders and repeated something with noticeably urgency. Again, Mimi shook her head, then pulled away and ran back upstairs.
Suzetta stared after her, now indecisive and quite worried. Then, as if cued by a whisper from off stage, she resumed the brainless pose and pranced down the stairs. “Is it show time?” she asked, loudly enough to be heard on the porch, or across the lake if the bullfrogs were listening.
Before she reached the door, Nickie Merrick strode into the middle of the room and grabbed her arm. He muttered something in her ear that unsettled her, then shoved her toward the door that led to the porch. I caught a glimpse of her white face before she moved out of view. Seconds later, I heard her announce that the movie would begin in only a teeny little second and that she just adored movies, didn’t everyone?
I carefully avoided looking at Peter as we went into the drawing room. Caron informed me that she was not about to watch some horrid old movie and went upstairs to call Inez, or so I suspected. Praying the telephone bill would not rival
that for the room, I allowed Peter to find chairs for us. Nickie made a few introductory comments about Agatha Christie while Eric took charge of the projector. The lights went out; the movie began.
I tried to keep my eyes open as the fabled Orient Express roared down the tracks, but I dozed off before Hercule could twirl his mustache over a bona fide corpse. From time to time I was aware of shuffled movement in the rows behind us, and I dreamily imagined parallel scenes of mayhem taking place in the dark room.
I was in the middle of an improbable scenario in the boathouse, complete with oversized spiders using all eight legs to strangle a red-nosed Harmon, while Bella rapped him on the shoulder with a pooper-scooper and demanded a divorce, when Peter shook my shoulder.
“Is he dead yet?” I grumbled.
“Not that I know of. In any case, the movie is over and you’re ready for bed.”
“This time you may be right—but don’t let it go to your head.”
Peter pulled me to my feet and kept one arm around my waist until we reached the safety of the second-floor, landing. At my door, he gave me a quick kiss on the cheek and pushed me inside. I muzzily noted that Caron was asleep in the middle of the bed. The telephone was on the floor nearby—a bad sign for my checkbook.
I undressed and collapsed beside her. Caron protested but at last ceded two or three inches. I pulled the pillow under my head, punched it into shape, tugged the blanket under my chin, and blissfully closed my eyes.
“Night,” I murmured through a yawn.
Thirty minutes later I was still wide awake. I turned on the bedside lamp and read for a while. That managed to rouse me to a state of total alertness. I turned off the light and lay back to listen to the cacophony of crickets, owls, whippoorwills, tree frogs, and other equally dissonant
serenaders. After I had tried every sleep-inducing technique I knew short of suicide, I got out of bed and put on a robe.
It was, I discovered, almost one o’clock. I decided the fresh air was responsible for my restlessness and resolved not to breathe any more of it than necessary. In the meantime, I had several hours of free time on my hands—and no late movie to watch.
My stomach made a frivolous suggestion. Unable to think of anything more diverting, I decided to go to the kitchen and see if there might be a neglected plate of scones on the counter. I closed the door behind me and crept down the hall in my bare feet, guided by a dim light from each end of the corridor. Snores and snaffles now joined the outside music. The bucolic countryside, I realized wryly, was more populous than I had ever suspected—and a good deal less peaceful.
A mischievous urge to scream came to mind. Bedroom doors would fly open; sluggish faces would peer into the corridor in hopes of a blood-drenched corpse and a hovering suspect. I would make a pretense of having just dashed out of my room, and would offer a garbled story about a man in a black cloak. Then—
A door closed in the darkness below.
My foot jerked off the first step as though it had touched a burner on a stove. I peered over the bannister at unmoving, misshapen humps of furniture. Squinting did not help. I wiggled my toes. My foot had decided not to cooperate and was firmly entrenched in the sanctuary of midair. If I held the teetery pose much longer, I was apt to fall down the stairs, but I couldn’t bring myself to move.
In the middle of all this internal debate, a blond head moved across the area at the bottom of the staircase. The small lamp on the desk caught the swish of Suzetta’s scarlet skirt before she vanished from view. The door that led to the parking area opened and closed with diminutive clicks.
Relieved, my foot agreed to meet the carpet. I crept down
the stairs to follow the blonde, all the while smugly picturing Peter’s expression when I announced that I had solved the mock murder in the middle of the night. I had suspected that Suzetta did not ring true, and now I had proof. Dopey blondes do not prowl under the cover of night.
I went to a back window and looked out at the depressingly deserted parking area beside the stable. As I stared at the scene, I heard a low rumble that echoed like a distant thunderstorm, although no flicker of lightning had preceded it. I continued to watch, hoping for a flash of scarlet, but Suzetta had vanished—permanently, it seemed. Her destination was as puzzling as the cryptic clues. No light shone from the upper story of the stable, nor did anyone slither from shadow to shadow. No one did anything that I could see.
After ten futile minutes, I reluctantly gave up and started for the kitchen. If I couldn’t solve a crime, I could at least console myself with a scone and a glass of milk.
BOOK: Murder At Murder At the Mimosa Inn, The
5.47Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

Other books

The Awful Secret by Bernard Knight
The Queen of Cool by Cecil Castellucci
L.A.WOMAN by Eve Babitz
Crimson Fire by Holly Taylor
Tomahawk by Erica Hale
Walking Shadow by Robert B. Parker
Irresistible? by Stephanie Bond
The Troubled Air by Irwin Shaw