Murder on High (13 page)

The introductions over, Partridge urged them to sit down. He hadn’t inquired as to the reason for Charlotte’s being there. Mainers were too polite for that, which was one of the pleasures of living in Maine, as well as one of the frustrations. Charlotte had once been attending a movie in Bridge Harbor when the screen had gone white. The audience had sat there patiently munching on their popcorn until Charlotte had finally gone to the back, and discovered that the projectionist had fallen asleep. Had she not taken the initiative, the audience probably would have sat there all night long for fear of appearing presumptuous by getting up to see what the matter was.

“What can I do for you?” asked Partridge, once they were seated. Despite the peculiarity of his appearance, he had about him an air of old world elegance like the game bird whose name he bore, and a gracious manner that served to put his visitors immediately at ease.

“We’re here about Iris Richards,” Tracey said. “As you probably know by now, she was murdered on the Knife Edge Trail on Mount Katahdin. Her companion, Jeanne Ouellette, told us that you’re her lawyer, and we wondered if you could tell us about her will.”

“Certainly,” Partridge replied. “It’s quite straightforward. She left everything to Miss Ouellette: house, property, bank accounts, business, and so on. The house and property make up the bulk of the estate; what she had in liquid assets will go to pay the estate tax.”

The fact that Jeanne was Iris’ heir gave her a motive, thought Charlotte. But it wasn’t much of one. She had lived in the house for thirty-three years. Why should she all of a sudden have done away with her employer?

“What’s the value of the Hilltop Farm property?” asked Tracey. He had taken out his notebook, and was poised to make notes.

“It’s assessed at four hundred and fifty thousand,” said Partridge. “But if you were out there, you could see for yourself that it’s unique. It’s hard to put a price tag on a property like that.”

Tracey nodded, and made a notation.

“We’re also interested in an organization called the Katahdin Foundation that was supposedly funded by Mrs. Richards,” Tracey continued after a minute. “The foundation runs the Katahdin Retreat Center. We’d like to find out how it was set up financially. Do you know anything about it?”

“I’ve heard of the retreat center,” Partridge said tentatively. “But I wasn’t aware that Iris had anything to do with it. I thought it was a tribal endeavor.” He looked puzzled, as if he were wondering why he didn’t know about it, if it indeed was funded by Iris. He shrugged his thin shoulders. “Sorry.”

Tracey leaned forward in his seat and looked the lawyer in the eye. “Now for the next question,” he said. “It’s a humdinger. Did she ever confide to you that she wasn’t really Iris Richards?”

Partridge’s Adam’s apple took a dunking and then popped back up again, like a bobber after a fish has taken a nibble. “What!” he said.

“Her real name was Iris O’Connor,” said Tracey. “She was a novelist”—he named her best-known book—“who went on to become a successful Hollywood screenwriter. She wrote the screenplays for a number of Miss Graham’s movies.”

Partridge looked from Tracey to Charlotte, his mouth agape.

Tracey went on to list some of Iris’s better-known film credits.

“I had no idea,” Partridge said at last, adding, “But I guess there’s quite a bit about Iris’ life that I wasn’t privy to.”

“She changed her name when she came here,” Tracey explained. “There was a locked room in her house in which she kept the memorabilia of her other life. Miss Graham, who has a summer place in Bridge Harbor, told us who she really was. There were a number of pictures of Miss Graham in the room.”

“But … why?” asked Partridge. “I know she came here because her aunt left her Hilltop Farm, but why erase her previous identity?”

“I think it was probably because she was blacklisted,” Charlotte explained. “Maybe she wanted to write under another name—a lot of blacklisted screenwriters did that. Or maybe she just wanted to start over.”

Partridge leaned back in his tobacco-brown leather swivel chair. “I’m flabbergasted, to tell you the truth. She certainly kept her two lives completely separate. Did Jeanne know?”

“She says not,” said Charlotte.

Partridge gazed out the window for a minute, and then said, “This explains the literary executor. I wondered why she needed a literary executor. Not to disparage her achievements, but the articles that she wrote for
The Pumpkin Paper
were hardly literature.”

Of course! thought Charlotte. The books she wrote would still be generating royalties, and would go on producing income for years to come. A film had been made just last year from one of Iris’ books.

“Who is her literary executor?” Tracey asked.

“I don’t know. She left a note instructing me to contact another lawyer about it.” He riffled through the papers on his desk with his long, thin, curved fingers, and finally pulled out an envelope, which he passed to Tracey. “I’ve had this in my safe for years.”

Tracey showed the envelope to Charlotte. Typed on the front was the sentence “To be opened in the event of my death.” Below that, it was signed “Iris O. Richards.”

Opening it, Tracey pulled out the sheet of paper inside, and read aloud: “In the event of my death, I wish my attorney, Ellsworth H. Partridge, of Partridge & Partridge, Old Town, Maine, to contact Ronald A. Polito, Esquire, of Hollywood, California, in regard to my literary estate.”

“Ron Polito!” Charlotte exclaimed.

“Do you know him?” Tracey asked.

“Everybody in Hollywood knows him. He’s the old man of Hollywood entertainment law.” She didn’t say “grand old man” because there was nothing noble about Ron Polito. He was a hired gun, the best there was. “He’s the lawyer who everyone turns to when they’re in a scrape.”

“Is that how Iris hooked up with him?” asked Tracey.

Charlotte nodded. “I would imagine so. The biggest scrape that ever hit Hollywood: The House Committee on Un-American Activities. He represented the unfriendly witnesses.” Then she added, “He represented the friendly witnesses too, for that matter.”

“Whichever side you were on,” said Partridge disapprovingly, as if the manner in which most lawyers operated was completely foreign to him.

Charlotte nodded. “I remember going to a party with him once. He looked around the room and said ‘There isn’t a person in this room whose neck I haven’t saved.’ Including my own, I might add. He got me out of jail once after I’d decked an obnoxious
paparazzo
.”

“Seems to me I recall hearing something about that incident,” said Tracey, with one of his dimpled grins.

Tracey had discovered this skeleton in Charlotte’s closet when he’d run routine checks on the police records of everybody who was acquainted with the Bridge Harbor professor who’d been poisoned eight years before. He’d been ribbing her about it ever since.

“An odd choice for someone to oversee your literary affairs,” said Tracey.

“Not really,” Charlotte said. “A lot of people who turned to Ron when they were in trouble were so grateful to him that they ended up using him for everything. I have for years. He’s one of my oldest and dearest friends.”

“I’ve been trying to get him on the phone ever since Iris died,” Partridge said. “Without success. I’ve written too, but I haven’t gotten a reply.”

“He’s hard to reach,” said Charlotte.

“Maybe Miss Graham could get through to him for you,” suggested Tracey.

“I’d be happy to try him when I get back to Bridge Harbor. I have a couple of things I want to talk with him about anyway. I’ll suggest that he give you a call as soon as possible.”

“Thank you,” said Partridge.

“I’d like to know what he has to say,” said Tracey. He pulled a card out of his wallet, and handed it to the lawyer. “I’d appreciate it if you’d give me a call after you talk to him.”

They stood up and said goodbye to Partridge.

“By the way, can you tell us how to get to Sawyer Street?” Tracey asked as they headed for the door. “Miss Ouellette told us that it’s off of South Main, but I’m unclear how far down it is.”

“Where are you going?” asked Partridge.

“To see someone named Mack Scott. Apparently he was a friend of Mrs. Richards. He was on the mountain with her that day.”

“Ah, Mack,” said Partridge. He checked his watch. “He should be getting home from work just about now.”

“Miss Ouellette told us that he lived in a trailer on South Water Street.”

“A trailer,” Partridge repeated. “Yes, I guess you could call it that,” he said with a smile, and proceeded to give them directions.

Sawyer Street came to a dead end at South Water Street, a narrow lane that paralleled the railroad tracks. Though the lane had once been paved, the pavement was so broken up that it was more like a dirt road, and what pavement was left was scarred with deep potholes. To their right, a string of a dozen or so modest homes overlooked the tracks, and beyond the tracks, the river. The view to the distant south was dominated by the giant tissue mill they had passed on the way up, which produced a considerable share of the nation’s toilet paper. The mill lay sprawled out like some huge and complex erector-set construction on a point that jutted out into the river, the effluent from its smokestacks filling the air with the foul smell that spelled j-o-b-s for the area. At the opposite end of the street stood a ramshackle Victorian railroad station that had been converted into a redemption center for recycled cans and bottles, while directly ahead stood the Maine Central switching terminal, its rows of track filled with colorful freight cars whose signs conjured up images of distant locales: Santa Fe, Boston & Maine, Delaware & Hudson, Wisconsin Central. One siding held a string of flatcars stacked with pulpwood destined for the tissue mill; another held a string of old Maine Central boxcars, whose green-on-orange sign proclaimed, “The Pine Tree Route.”

After parking in a vacant lot, they got out of the car and walked up the street in the direction of the railroad station. Jeanne had said that Mack’s trailer would be on their left, but there was nothing on their left except a vacant lot filled with rusting yellow snowplows that lay half-buried in the tall grass. For a moment, they looked around in bewilderment. The only trailer was an old horse trailer half-hidden in the sumac and chokecherry at the back of the lot. Then Charlotte noticed a board nailed to its side, with the name
SCOTT
neatly carved on it in an italic script, and realized that it was a horse trailer and not a house trailer to which Jeanne had referred. She should have suspected when Jeanne had described it as being gray and maroon. What house trailer was ever those colors?

“Look,” she said, pointing at the horse trailer. “I think that may be Chez Scott. Gray with maroon stripes, right?”

Looking at the lot, Charlotte now noticed a shelter made out of a tarpaulin supported by four bamboo poles of the type used for rolling up rugs. This shaded an old picnic table and three metal lawn chairs, and overlooked a fair-sized vegetable garden in which a healthy crop of peas had already climbed halfway up a wire support, and in which the seedlings of lettuce, beets, and other vegetables were peeking out of the rich black soil.

Tracey squinted to read the sign, and then said, “I’ll be damned. I guess it’s a trailer all right. No wonder Partridge looked so amused when we said we were looking for a trailer.”

“I think I saw a path back there when we drove by,” said Charlotte, nodding in the direction from which they had come.

Walking up Sawyer Street, they came to the path, which led through the scrub to the trailer. This was set parallel to South Water Street. A stack of cinder blocks propped up the front end to make the trailer level, and a set of wooden steps had been appended to the back end to make it easier to reach the gate that covered the bottom half of the rear opening. A sign painted in maroon on the side read “Heritage Farms.”

Receiving no answer to his greeting, Tracey mounted the steps and pulled aside the plastic shower curtain, printed with a gold and silver shell pattern, that hung over the top half of the opening.

As he looked in, Charlotte considered what message they might leave on the pad that hung, along with a pencil, from a nail at one side of the opening, a primitive version of the telephone answering machine.

“Take a look,” Tracey said as he stepped down a moment later, letting the shower curtain fall back over the opening. “It’s not a bad little place.”

Charlotte mounted the steps and pulled the shower curtain aside. Light from two small windows high on either side helped illuminate the interior, which was as neat as a pin. On one wall was an old metal cot with a sleeping bag and pillow on top of it and a cast-off mahogany table beside it. On the table were a frayed toothbrush and a tube of Colgate, a set of nail clippers, a tube of Chapstick, a container of fly dope, a Swiss Army knife, a water bottle, a ballpoint pen, and a pair of sunglasses. Next to the table was a small pot-bellied stove. The opposite wall was occupied by a bookshelf and a coat rack, the latter holding a canteen, an orange daypack, a green and black Buffalo plaid jacket, two pairs of blue denim overalls, and a couple of plaid flannel shirts. Two pairs of black engineer-type boots were neatly lined up underneath.

At the foot of the bed, which was to say immediately to Charlotte’s left, was a white metal storage cupboard with a Formica top, above which was mounted a set of shelves. These held an assortment of canned food, mostly beans. Tacked on the wall next to the shelf was a Form 1040 from the IRS. Scrawled across it in red magic marker were the words “Does not apply.” There was also a framed antique sign that read “For your good health, barrel-picking is prohibited.”

“I wonder why someone would live like this?” said Tracey as Charlotte examined the interior. “Obviously, he’s not your typical homeless person. At least, judging from the books.”

Charlotte’s first glance had taken in the poster of Walden Pond taped to the wall above the bookshelf, and she was now scanning the titles of the books:
Walden, Natural History Essays
, and
The Maine Woods
, all by Thoreau; the
Bhagavad-Gita
, one of Thoreau’s favorite books; and books by Emerson and Carlyle, as well as a stack of back issues of
The Pumpkin Paper
.