Nine Man's Murder (9 page)

“And from six innocent suspects. No,” Bryan said darkly, “I think we’re going to have to wait him out.”

Reeve, with the sullen silence of a chastised child, receded further into the sofa. Silence tightened its grip on the room like a tourniquet, until loosened by Jonas.

“That’s it!” he exclaimed, slapping his thigh. “Movies.” The word was directed at Reeve, whose face remained blank. “You told Gideon he had been watching too many movies. Nine Man Morris was the name of the movie. Our graduation assignment. When we apprenticed with Damien.”

“The movie set—”

“You mean the string of accidents we had been sent to investigate?”

“But that was fifteen years ago.”

“You’re right,” Amanda said. “Nine Man Morris was the name of the film they were shooting.”

“But that was where—”

All eyes darted to Gideon.

“What could all this have to do with some assignment we undertook as novice detectives fifteen years ago?” Jill asked.

Gideon fingered the facts like pieces of a puzzle. “Remember how the note was phrased? We were being challenged as detectives. And that assignment on the movie set was like our final exam. It was immediately afterwards that we graduated as fully credentialed investigators.”

“Not all of us,” Bryan said, looking at Aaron.

Silence.

“Bennett Nash,” Amanda finally murmured.

“The only one who didn’t graduate.”

“I’d forgotten all about him,” Jonas said.

“You know, it’s strange,” Reeve added. “The fact that we were all invited to this reunion, and he wasn’t.”

“Wasn’t he?” The question had come from Bryan. “What do you think, Aaron?”

Whatever secret Bryan was trying to extract from Aaron, the latter would concede nothing but an inscrutable grin. The situation proved more intense for Jill, who sat opposite an end table from Aaron. She was mirroring his watchful scrutiny of Bryan, and with eyes thus engaged, her hand groped blindly for a glass of red wine she had set on the table. The inevitable collision struck down the unsuspecting glass, which bled across the table onto the leg of Aaron’s white overalls.

“Oh, I’m so sorry,” Jill exclaimed, springing from her seat. “Let me get something to wipe it up with, before the stain dries.”

Then Aaron did something that, with one exception, astounded everyone in the room.

He spoke.

“That’s all right,” he said with a dismissive sweep of the right hand. “Don’t bother.”

“You can talk!” Jill gasped.

Bryan looked impassively on the face of this miraculous healing.

“I thought you were a man of too few words, Aaron … or should I say, Bennett?”

29

“H
ow did you
know?” Bennett, abandoning his masquerade as “Aaron,” asked Bryan.

“That you were really Bennett Nash? It’s my job to know things.” A favorite quote of Bryan’s from the old days. “Something about you was familiar, though I must say you’ve changed a great deal over the years.”

“I would never have recognized you,” Jill agreed.

Indeed, a full head of hair had overgrown Bennett’s formerly crewcutted skull, while a moustache and beard had matured his once-boyish face.

“But there were two other points, as well,” Bryan continued. “First, that scream we heard outside, which drew us all from the inn. We found no one out there but you. Of course, you were supposedly mute, which disqualified you as its source. The problem was, none of us could have gone outside to make that noise and then returned to the inn undetected—except Carter, and he appears to have been ruled out. And, as we later discovered, we are the only ones on this mountaintop. Which meant there was only one person who could possibly have been responsible for the scream. You. Hence, your muteness was a fabrication.

“Second, the disappearing guns. We were all working under the assumption that the purpose of that scream had been to draw us from the inn, leaving the weapons unprotected. We had all assumed that that was when the guns had been taken. But we later determined that it was impossible for anyone to have removed them at that time. Therefore, I concluded, that was not when the weapons had been stolen—which meant they had to have been taken earlier.”

Bennett’s eyes neither confirmed nor denied, offering merely a grudging appreciation of Bryan’s reasoning.

“I remembered that several of us had observed you skulking around the inn earlier,” Bryan continued, “just prior to your second departure from Moon’s End. I don’t know where you went the first time, but the second time, you entered the work shed.” Bryan had spoken no more than the first half of his final sentence when the light of composure in Bennett’s eyes, for once, seemed briefly to flicker.

“I think what you had been doing—before departing the inn the second time—was collecting everyone’s guns. Then, later, to give yourself an alibi, you created the diversion of the scream to draw us from the inn and make us think the weapons had disappeared then—at a time when you could not possibly have taken them, because you were in the shed.”

“All right, I suppose it’s time for me to come clean,” Bennett said. “A few days ago I received a telephone call from Damien—or at least someone claiming to be Damien. After fifteen years, I could hardly be expected to recognize his voice.”

“That makes sense,” Jill said. “If Bryan hadn’t just told us who you are, I would never have deduced it from your voice.” Although, Jill thought, there was something familiar about that voice.

Bennett glossed over the interruption. “Damien—or the person purporting to be Damien—told me about the reunion. I told him I wasn’t interested. I had no desire to see any of you again—not after the ac— the way you had all treated me. The ridicule … The mockery … But he kept trying to persuade me. He told me he wanted to play a practical joke on all of you, and he needed my help. We would create a mystery none of you could solve—the disappearance of the guns—to remind you that he was still the best, still our teacher. It sounded kind of childish to me, and I told him so.

“But then he reminded me of how you all used to tease me, calling me a human Xerox machine, incapable of an original thought.” A cold fire sparked momentary silver in Bennett’s eyes. “I told him I would do it. That’s when he explained to me the masquerade as Aaron.” Bennett turned to Bryan. “You were right about the diversion—the scream. Its purpose was to mislead you as to the time the guns were taken. Because I was pretending to be mute, my role as the source of the scream would go unsuspected. You would all be looking for someone who had called you outside in order to gain access to the guns. None of you would be able to explain how the guns had disappeared. When the truth was finally revealed, you would all look like fools.”

The speech was delivered as if rehearsed.

Reeve was watching Bennett with unveiled suspicion. “You say you thought it was Damien who had arranged all of this with you?”

“Over the phone. Yes.”

“Surely, once we discovered Damien’s body, you must have realized the truth. Yet you kept up the charade.”

“Once the body was found, I was afraid to reveal myself. For fear of how it would look.”

“And after you took the guns,” Jonas asked impatiently, “what did you do with them?”

“I did what I had been told to do. I hid them.”

“Where?”

“Down in the basement. In the old furnace.”

Moments later Bryan and Jonas were bounding down the basement staircase, with Bennett and Reeve close behind. Carter had mentioned that the furnace no longer worked; it was, therefore, the ideal place in which to hide the guns.

Jonas’ hand reached into the furnace but came out empty. The guns were gone.

30

“T
hen I played
right into his hands,” Bennett said. “He used me to get to the guns, and I obliged him.”

The guests had returned to the drawing room, on time to witness Hatter’s shaky recovery.

“Well, at least we’ve established one thing for certain,” Amanda said, branding each male guest with an accusing glare. “Our killer is a man.”

“What makes you so sure?” Jill asked.

Amanda addressed Bennett. “You told us yourself. You said it was a man who called you, pretending to be Damien.”

“You know better than that,” Jonas told Amanda. “A woman could have gotten a man to make the call for her.”

“I don’t suppose you’d recognize the voice?” Reeve asked Bennett.

Bennett extended his hands helplessly. Looking at Bennett’s face, Jonas noticed its lifeless, inexpressive quality. The strain of having pretended to be Aaron, Jonas decided.

“Ohh …” Hatter groaned like a maimed horse, attempting to lift himself into a sitting position.

“Are you all right?” Gideon asked.

“I’m fine, I think,” Hatter said unconvincingly. He surveyed the room. “Where’s Carter? Is he—”

“He’s dead,” Amanda replied.

“And you were lucky,” Gideon said.

“From now on,” Jonas advised, “we must avoid any food that could have been tampered with. I checked the kitchen, and luckily there’s plenty of canned food.”

“And everyone should prepare their own meals,” Bennett added.

“You talk!” Hatter exclaimed.

“A long story.” Jonas and the others chronicled Bennett’s masquerade as the mute caretaker.

Bryan turned to Bennett. “You know, in light of recent developments, that cigarette lighter Carter gave you might be significant. Let me see it.”

Bennett stared at him blankly.

“The one Reeve found on the floor when we first arrived. You put it in your pocket, remember?”

“Oh,” Bennett said dully. “I forgot all about it.” His hand burrowed into the right front pocket of his wine-stained overalls but emerged with nothing. The other pockets yielded the same.

“I … I don’t seem to have it,” Bennett stammered. “I must have lost it.”

“Or it was stolen,” Jonas suggested. “If that lighter was dropped by the killer when he murdered Damien, it might provide a clue to his identity.”

“Which of us smokes?” Bryan asked the assembly.

“I quit a month ago,” Reeve said.

“You smoke, Bryan,” Amanda said. “I saw you offer a match to that truck driver, Bill, who brought us here. A match—not a lighter. Had you lost yours?”

Reeve swept an accusing eye over Bennett. “Or Bennett is lying about not having that lighter.”

Bennett looked amused. “You’re welcome to search,” he said.

Reeve frisked Bennett hastily and found nothing.

“Of course,” Bryan said, “the lighter may mean nothing at all. It may have been a plant. A red herring. Left intentionally by the murderer to incriminate someone.”

The fire in Reeve’s red face nearly scorched his onlookers.

“You mean like …” Gideon began.

“The ring,” said Amanda. “The one Reeve found in the stunt car.”

The conversation seemed to make Hatter dizzier than the trauma he had suffered. “Stunt car? What are you people talking about?” The unraveling of the murderer’s note had transpired while Hatter was unconscious.

“Remember, at the end of our apprenticeship at Anderson’s, how Damien had wanted to think up some final project for us—a chance to put our training to the test? Carter knew someone on the set of—”

“Yes, I remember. That movie they were filming. Nine Man Morris, right? Wait a minute! The note …”

The others confirmed the link between the note’s “Nine Man’s Murder” and the title of the film.

“That was the set that had the string of unexplained accidents involving the stuntman—”

“Julian Hayward.”

“That’s the one. The guy with the younger brother on the crew, the chubby makeup artist with long blond hair …”

“William Hayward,” Bennett said.

“Wasn’t he the one with that weird theory of Pinocchio?” Reeve asked. “That Pinocchio didn’t become a real boy until Gepetto was swallowed by the whale?”

“A real oddball,” Hatter said.

“William had a rough life,” Jill pointed out in William’s defense. “Always taken care of by his older brother, Julian. When they were children, Julian saved William from drowning in a stream. When William later torpedoed an artistic career by alienating his art teachers, Julian, a successful stunt man, got him hired in the industry as a makeup artist.”

“What does all this have to do with Reeve and a ring?” Hatter asked.

Jonas summarized the sequence of events. Carter had a friend working on the crew of the film, Nine Man Morris, who had told him about a string of accidents involving Julian Hayward, whose stunt props were being sabotaged. Damien considered an investigation of the set a fitting final project for the graduating class.

Reeve’s prime suspect had been another stuntman: Adam Burke, Julian Hayward’s protégé. Hayward’s mentoring had helped build Burke’s reputation among producers and directors. There was even talk of replacing Hayward with the much younger Burke. Some thought Burke’s debt to Hayward would inoculate Burke against disloyalty, but his ambition proved more potent than his gratitude. Reeve’s theory of the accidents construed them as attempts by Burke to hasten his predecessor’s retirement.