Murder Well-Done (18 page)

Despite herself, she gasped and jumped back, her heels skidding in the slush. Her voice was unexpectedly harsh. "Get out of there!"
Robertson Davies? Wearing my coat?
She raised her hand to her forehead, shielding her eyes from the sun. "Mr. Blight?"
"Yes?" The voice was unexpectedly gentle. Somehow, Quill had expected a gravelly rumble or a stentorian shout.
"Um. How do you do? I'm Sarah Quilliam."
"You are."
This was a statement. Not a question. Quill wasn't certain whether this was acknowledgment of her existence or mere inattention to the requirements of the spoken word.
"Mr. Blight? I'm sorry. I don't mean to be rude, but... where did you get that coat?"
Evan Blight stepped vigorously into the sunlight. The picture on the book jacket had smoothed out the wrinkles in his sun-beaten face and not really done justice to the impressive beard. There were bits of things in it - small sticks, a clot of scrambled egg, and possibly bird droppings, although Quill wasn't certain. Her down coat concealed the rest of him, but Quill had the impression he was thin and wiry. He could have been anywhere from sixty to ninety.
"Ms. Quilliam! Delighted. Delighted!" He grabbed her hand and shook it. His own was hard, muscular, and calloused, the fingernails blunt and dirty. "The irony implicit in the heart of the Flower series. The sardonic comment on the state of humankind! I saw the 'Chrysler Rose' in a traveling exhibit in New Jersey. Wonderful. Wonderful! There is a strong streak of the primordial male in you, Ms. Quilliam. The thrust of brush strokes! The intensity - if I may say so, the masculinity of the color - wonderful! Wonderful!" Quill felt an immediate (and cowardly) impulse to tell Evan Blight she was proud of her breasts and really missed sleeping with Myles McHale. She suppressed these politically incorrect (and socially inappropriate) responses and thanked him, in as hearty a voice as she could manage.
"You have read my Book," he asserted. "There could be no other explanation for the quality of your work. How pleasing to see the effects of my own small efforts to stem the tide of corruption of our basic, most natural drives."
Quill, who had recently read a most interesting book on the way that men verbally dominate social and business conversations, interrupted firmly, loudly, and with a terrific feeling of guilt. "Mr. Blight?"
"Call me Evan. Not Urban, if you please, which was the highly charged response to a review of my Book by the female reviewer of the San Francisco Chronicle. I was not offended. No, not offended. Was Hannibal offended by the piteous mewings of the Romans when he swept down on Trebia? I think not. Was the Khan himself dismayed by the pleas of the reindeer people as he led the mighty charge against their tents?"
He paused, either for breath or agreement, and Quill said hastily, "That coat, Mr. Blight. Have you had it long?"
He looked down at himself. "This coat? A gift of the forest, my dear." He shrugged himself out of it with a decisive movement. "But your softer flesh clearly is more in need of it than I. The garment you yourself are wearing must have clothed you as a child."
"It's my sister's," said Quill. "She's shorter than I." She took the coat, holding it by thumb and forefinger. He was wearing a baggy, hole-at-the-elbows gray cardigan, a knitted vest underneath that the color of a bird's nest, tweed trousers, and a pair of sensible boots. He shivered in the cold air. "Oh, dear, Mr. Blight. Don't you have a coat of your own?"
"Nature's embrace is all that I need." Any forensic evidence that might be in the folds of the down was already tainted, and Quill handed it back to him with a resigned sigh. "Here. Take the coat back and get into the car. I'll turn the heater on."
Blight accepted the down coat with an intolerant air, although what he was intolerant of, Quill couldn't imagine, since he'd been wearing the coat only moments before. He lowered himself into the passenger seat of the OIds with the tenderness of the arthritic.
"Why don't I drive you around to the front of the Inn so you can go inside?" Quill suggested. "Then I'm afraid that I will need my coat back, Mr. Blight."
"I am moving toward a profound Change," he announced, "an experience of a unique and perhaps Life Enhancing Kind. The Inn's My Destination."
"You Bester," said Quill, who occasionally read science fiction. She curbed her irreverence (but he would speak in capitals!) started the OIds, and backed carefully out of the garage. She pulled into the circular drive leading to the Inn's front door.
"Ah," said Mr. Blight. "They await."
"They sure do," said Quill, eyeing the crowd outside. "My gosh. It's all of S. O. A. P. and Alphonse Santini. And Vittorio McIntosh."
"They are waiting for Me. I am scheduled for an Address. Stop here, please."
Quill braked. "An address? You mean a speech?"
"On the link between the generosity of Nature and the generosity of the human spirit."
Quill thought this through. The crowd of men, seeing Mr. Blight in the passenger seat, began to murmur and shift, like crows in a cornfield. "Is this a fund-raiser for Alphonse Santini?"
Evan Blight's eyes were deep-set, gray, and, Quill realized, very, very sharp. "That is very acute of you, my dear. Not what one would expect of the softer sex. Not what one would expect at all." He maneuvered himself out of the down coat and opened the passenger door. "I leave you now for whatever may be your Destination."
"Syracuse," Quill said absently. "Channel Seven. My coat, Mr. Blight. Where did - um - nature present this to you?"
"At the base of the Root," said Blight. "Near the seed of the tree."
"Beg pardon?"
He clasped her wrist with strength. "Each Conclave of Men has a Center. A Totem. A Signal which - er -signifies the heart and thrust of male power. There is one such Totem here. Perhaps more. I will discover that in future."
There was only one even remotely totemic item in Hemlock Falls, which also happened to be five minutes swift walk from the sheriffs office. "The statue of General Hemlock? That's where you found my coat?"
He patted her cheek. Quill hated anybody patting her cheek. "Let no man gainsay the occasional wisdom of women." He pulled himself out of the car, slammed the door shut, shouting, "Farewell! And on to Syracuse." And turned to meet his fans.
"Aagh!" Quill muttered. "And aaagh again." Alphonse Santini must have heard Blight shouting out that she was headed to Syracuse. Most of the village must have heard Blight. She returned the wave and drove down the road to the turnoff for Route 96. She turned south instead of north, toward Buffalo, on the off chance that this would confuse Santini and discourage anyone from following her.
The only problem with this particular diversionary tactic was that it took her twenty minutes to get to an exit to turn around to head south, and she lost nearly an hour before she was on Interstate 81 to Syracuse.
She lost another half hour trying to find the proper exit to Genesee Street, where the television station was located. For some years in the late eighties Syracuse had been a dying city, its major employers having fled the punishing New York State taxation system for the better business climate in the South. But lately there'd been a resurgence, and a great many streets were undergoing repair. Quill passed work crews red-faced with cold, flagmen who seemed to have been recruited for the amount of ill temper they vented on drivers, and innumberable, irritating, annoying orange cones, which blocked each shortcut to Genesee with fiendish regularity.
By the time she reached the KSGY parking lot, the wind had risen and Bjarne's mashed potato clouds were thickening the blue sky. Quill parked in a space marked KSGY EMPLOEES ONLY. ALL OTHERS WILL BE TOWED!
She'd worked out a cover story. It was risky, but, as she'd told Meg, time was running short. What she hadn't told Meg - or John - or anyone - except Myles - was that Howie wasn't all that certain she was in the clear. They way in which she spent the next twenty years, he'd suggested, was dependent on how believable John's testimony would be to a jury. Nothing would be gained at the moment, Howie had added, by ruminating on the fact that the new governor had promised to reinstate the death penalty once in office.
Quill took a deep breath, got out of the Olds, and sloshed through the inadequately plowed lot to the lobby. A middle-aged security guard sat behind a glass-walled kiosk. Quill pulled off her knitted cap, smiled, and rapped on the sliding glass window.
The guard raised her eyebrows and slid the panel open. "Can I help you?"
"Hi. I'm Sarah Cahill. Nora's sister." She bit her lip and thought about twenty years in jail.
The guard looked at her face sympathetically.
"I'm not too certain about whom I should see regarding Nora's personal effects. Has - um - any of the family arrived yet to take them? I've been out of the country and haven't had a chance to talk to any of our relatives."
"I thought your folks had passed on," said the guard. Her name tag read: "Rite-Watch Security, Rita."
"You must be Rita," Quill said warmly. "Nora's told me so much about you."
"She did? I on'y met her the two times."
"She said that the one who'd been here before... "
"Paula?" The guard looked smug. `I guess so!' She shook her head briefly. "You know how many jobs Paula's gone through on account of that mouth? I told her. We all told her. But here you are. So Miss Cahill remembered me, huh? Well, I remember her. Poor thing. Poor, poor thing. And you're her sister, huh?"
"We were quite close," said Quill. "I'm sure she's told you all about me, too."
:Yeah. Yeah. Look. I doan want tot hurt your feelings or nuthin', but she never did say much about any of the family."
"Given her schedule," said Quill, "I can understand." She sighed, "All the same, it hurts."
"Poor thing," said Rita, "poor, poor thing. Well. I'll tell you. Mr. Ciscerone packed up all her stuff and said to wait sixty days and if nobody showed up, to ditch it."
Quill, who was beginning to feel genuinely sympathetic on Nora Cahill's behalf, said, "And no one's come yet? No one except me?"
"Nope. You hang on. I'll get her stuff for you." Rita reached through the open panel and patted Quill's hand, then disappeared through a door at the back of her kiosk. Quill shifted nervously from foot to foot. Nero Wolfe always told Archie Goodwin to conduct his investigation based on his intelligence guided by experience. There was never any indication that either detective felt terrible about pulling the wool over various people's eyes. Quill tried hard to feel she wasn't taking advantage of Rita's warm heart and didn't succeed.
Rita reemerged from the back with a large cardboard box and set it on the ledge of the kiosk. It was stuffed with papers, disk files, a Rolodex, a flower vase with four dead daisies, a photograph of Nora with two other women on a beach, and a stack of magazines. Quill made a cursory examination. The computer disks were parts of software packages; the papers mainly office memos, clippings from magazines, and letters from fans and critics of Nora's show.
"Nora was really proud of an investigation she was conducting just before she - you know..." said Quill. "Did Mr. Ciscerone mention that? Nora would have been so happy to know that it had been reassigned."
Rita shrugged. Quill, under pretext of neatening up the box, lifted the magazine pile out. Bingo. A set of keys, marked "spares."
Quill reached over the box, hand extended. Rita got out of her chair and shook it. "Thank you so much! I feel a little closer to Nora, now that I've talked to you. I'll just take these, shall I?"
"Gotta sign for 'em," said Rita. "Hang on." She produced a manifest, marked an empty line with a large X, and handed it to Quill. She signed the first name in an illegible scrawl and the last, Cahill, in readable but sloppy script.
"Thanks, Rita. I'll be off."
"Poor thing," said Rita. "Poor, poor thing."
Back in the Oids, Quill turned the engine on and turned up the heat. There was no address book - presumably the police had taken it - and the Rolodex was almost empty. It wasn't going to do a bit of good if she had the keys to Nora's apartment and car without her home address; no celebrity - especially an investigative reporter - was going to risk an open listing in the city phone book.
Quill turned to the papers; there, under a calendar for the coming year marked "compliments of Mac's Garage," she found a letter from Nora's HMO, addressed to 559 Westcott St. Quill hesitated a moment; it was getting late. She didn't want to risk returning to Rita to ask directions to Westcott. But it couldn't be too far; Nora had mentioned being able to walk to work.
Nora hadn't mentioned the fact that Syracuse was an old city, by American standards, and the streets a bewildering labyrinth, twisting around buildings that didn't exist anymore, truncated due to the building of newer roads, blocked by renovations to entire city blocks. She found Westcott after a series of frustrating dead ends.
This whole area, Quill realized, was oriented to nearby Syracuse University. Most of the students had gone home for the holidays, and the parking was relatively easy. She pulled up at the curb next to a row of storefronts that gave her a pang of nostalgia for her days in SoHo in New York: a pizza parlor with the phone number painted on the window in screaming red letters; a small gallery, filled with student work; a boutique clothing store; a business sign for a company called Oddly Enough. She scanned the store numbers and found a door marked 559. She fumbled at the entrance, going through three of the four keys on the ring before she found the right one. Inside, scanning a row of metal mailboxes she found N. CAHILL #3.
The single door at her right was marked 1. Quill mounted the steep stairs. At the top of the landing, #3 was on the left.
The interior of the apartment belied the student atmosphere. Nora had comer rooms, with windows on two sides overlooking Westcott and Argyle. The style was Euro-Tech: Berber carpeting, a black leather couch, plain wrought-iron shelving, and a display of hand thrown pottery. A very nice copy of a de Kooning hung on the wall over the couch. The kitchen was through an open archway on the east wall; the two closed doors on the south wall probably led to bedrooms. The first Quill opened was to a room with a sofa bed and a desk. A window looked out over the back of the building, letting in dim gray light. Quill glanced out; light snow was falling, like spume from a breaking wave. She hesitated, a hand on the overhead light switch, and decided to work in the dimness as best she could.