Something Wicked (25 page)

A friendly voice called to her. “She’s not there, Miss Laurance. Maybe’s she’s sick. The shop’s been closed all day.”

“I said
three
dips,” a shrill young voice objected.

The cheerful girl behind the ice-cream stand waved to Annie and returned to her duty.

Turning toward Death on Demand, Annie walked swiftly. Carla hadn’t been sick that morning.

So where was she?

Annie passed her bookstore, broke into a half run. It was only a block or so to the condos. Carla lived in the same unit as Max, on one of the upper floors.

The bell pealed. And pealed.

Annie kept pressing.

Where was Carla?

Then the doorknob rattled. Slowly, the door swung open.

There were no lights on inside. She could scarcely see the dim oblong that was Carla’s face and the faintly darker outline of her body.

“Annie.” Carla’s husky voice was oddly flat, but she drew out the name like a comet’s tail. “L’il Orphan Annie. But that’s all right, folks. ’Cause she has Prince Charming.”
The shadowed face nodded with great dignity. “That’s right, folks. Cinderella herself.”

Carla was very, very drunk.

She turned away from the door, wavered, put a hand against the wall, then drew herself up and walked with drunken precision into the living room.

Annie felt, in quick succession, anger, relief, irritation, disgust, and pity. Damn. If only she’d come here from Sam’s. Was there any point in trying to talk to Carla now? Hell, in this condition she probably didn’t even remember Tuesday night!

Exasperated, Annie pulled open the door and stepped into the foyer. She flipped on a light. Carla paid no attention. She was walking with the eggshell particularity of a drunk through the living room to the open French windows and onto the balcony overlooking the sound. Annie hesitated, then followed. The light spilled into the living room, whose decor reminded Annie of the sand and gold of New Mexico, austere yet lovely. Annie paused at the French window.

Carla sat down in a white wicker chair. There was a cut-glass decanter on the patio table, a half-filled tumbler beside it. She looked up.

“You still here? Cinderella?” The sodden face twisted in a semblance of a smile. “Not fair. You have a lover, don’t you? But good girls always do. That’s right. Good girls get the love—and bad girls—” She shook her head and her straight black hair swung softly in the twilight. “I thought I had a lover. Yes, I thought I did.”

Shit. Once again, Annie felt herself confronted by the subterranean currents in other lives, buffeted by emotions she couldn’t deflect.

Tears slid down Carla’s face. She paid them no heed. Her hand moved out to pick up the decanter and pour the amber fluid into the tumbler. When she replaced the decanter, she misjudged the distance and the decanter rapped into the glass, then wobbled on the tabletop. She watched it intently, her brow furrowed, but it didn’t tip.

“Carla.”

The patrician profile turned slowly toward Annie.

“Do you remember Tuesday night? Do you remember Shane being shot?”

Carla lifted the tumbler and took a dainty sip. “I am not drunk,” she said clearly. “Do I remember? Hard to forget. Very hard to forget. It was strange. I felt so weird. Like the weird sisters. They always knew when dreadful things must happen—and that was the question, you know, whether they
had
to happen. There we all stood, and he was dead. ‘False face must hide what the false heart doth know.’” She began to laugh. “The old boy had it down right, didn’t he? A false face. Oh, God, that’s so funny. A false face.”

“Who wore the false face, Carla? Do you know?”

But Carla only smiled.

“Were you here all day?” Annie demanded.

Carla lifted her glass and drank.

“Your apartment, it’s right above Max’s. Did you see or hear anybody down there between eleven and one-thirty?”

“Eleven and one-thirty?”

“Somebody hid the gun that killed Shane in Max’s apartment. Would you know anything about that?”

“Ah, no. No. That’s silly. That’s very silly.”

“Posey may arrest Max because of it.”

Carla put down her tumbler. She began to shake her head. “No. You’re lying, Annie. You’re lying, aren’t you?”

Annie turned away. It was pointless. Poor Carla. She was past comprehending.

Carla lurched to her feet and stumbled after her, clutching the wall for support.

The last words Annie heard as she ran down the outside steps were slurred and furious. “You’re lying!” Carla cried behind her. “Aren’t you?”

When the whirring tape on the answering machine emitted only a faint hiss, Annie knew she’d heard all the messages, and there was nothing from Max, nothing from the best criminal lawyer in the United States of America, nothing from Chief Saulter. Two calls from the
Atlanta Constitution,
one from AP, one from the
New York Times,
one from Ingrid (“Annie, I can’t find out anything about Max!”), one from Vince Ellis (“Does Max have any statement for the press?”), three from Henny Brawley, and a dulcet-toned reassurance from Laurel that left Annie quivering with apprehension.

The first time Henny called, she was disgruntled and sounded as grouchy as Bertha Cool. “All right, all right, dammit. So there’s only one way in and one way out of room one-nineteen. Thought there might have been a little money dropped into the right hands. But—bartender a Boy Scout leader and desk clerk studying for priesthood. Don’t like to be foxed, but admit am stymied. Will continue to investigate. Over and out.”

In the second call, the accent was genteelly British, and the voice was soft and almost apologetic. “I know if I could think of a village parallel, it would all come clear.”

And in the third message, “Things,” Henny exclaimed sturdily, “are seldom what they seem to be. However, I see my way clearly now and, from this point forward, the guilty party shall not escape my view.”

Annie arched an eyebrow. Actually, Henny was a bit off in the last characterization. Miss Marple engaged in thought rather than action, though, to be sure, she certainly participated actively in the denouement of
A Caribbean Mystery.
Hopefully Henny wasn’t contemplating any drastic moves.
But she should be safe enough since she stubbornly persisted in stewing over what even she now perceived to be an airtight alibi.

Then she listened twice to Laurel’s melodious voice: “Annie, my sweet, do you realize the ceremony is but three months away? There is so much to be
done.
It’s time to compare our guest lists, order the invitations and your personal writing paper, make a
final
decision about the color scheme for the wedding” (Was there a note of hopefulness here?), “begin shopping for your trousseau, arrange for the photography and the bridal portrait, consult with the florist—and I do have some tiny suggestions here, it’s so
lovely
that bachelor’s button means hope and jonquils represent affection returned, oh, there are so
many
possibilities.” A light shower of laughter. “But I mustn’t go on and on, I just want you to rest assured, dear Annie, that the wedding preparations are in good hands while you are preoccupied with crime. Of course, the idea of Maxwell as a murder suspect is
so
absurd, but with your background—the store, dear—you can scarcely be expected not to be a little bit concerned. You may free your mind of fear.
I
am in charge.”

Annie flicked off the machine. She had a throbbing headache. But she had to think, keep thinking. (Only not about Laurel and the wedding. What did Laurel
mean,
I am in charge?) With every ounce of will, Annie refused to think further about what damage Laurel … It was essential to concentrate on finding
something
to help Max. She turned on every light in her tree house and wished she could find a similar switch in her mind. In the kitchen, she absentmindedly studied the contents of the refrigerator, rediscovered some pepper-speckled salami (at least she hoped it was pepper) which she anointed liberally with Dijon mustard and stashed between two pieces of rye bread. Settling on the wicker divan in the living room, she gnawed on her sandwich, which tasted a little peculiar, and drank a bottle of Dad’s Root Beer. Max would hate this repast. Dear Max. Had he had dinner? The county jail would run to ham hock and limas. Were his captors shining bright lights in his eyes and shouting at him? This possibility was always a worry for a Mary Roberts Rinehart heroine. But this line of thought was dithering.

Had she accomplished anything in her afternoon forays? Her mind felt buffeted: Arthur’s fear of exposure, Sam’s blind ambition, Eugene’s absorption in a life other than his own, Hugo’s arrogant lust for success, the tragic unravelment of the Horton family, Burt’s willingness to jettison anything and everything for himself or the players, Carla’s unhappy love affair … It was as dismal a list of miseries as any found in a Mary Collins novel.

Annie finished the sandwich and tried to decide what she’d learned. Any of them could have hidden the gun in Max’s condo. She frowned. Except Carla. Unless that final angry shout had been a masterpiece of guile, Carla believed Annie was lying about Max’s predicament. If Carla had hidden the gun, that certainly wouldn’t be her response. Unless, of course, she was acting—but Carla was too drunk to act. Wasn’t she? Or had that entire episode been staged? Slowly, Annie shook her head. No. Carla was drunk. So, scratch her from the list of possible gun hiders.

A full afternoon of work and only one name stricken from the list.

Annie felt a moment of panic. She’d spoken so grandiloquently to Jed McClanahan, blithely instructed him to get Max out of Posey’s clutches while she herself single-handedly uncovered the identity of the murderer. She wasn’t one step forward that she could see. And now it looked like the only remaining hope was the faint possibility that something on Shane’s boat would point to his murderer.

It wasn’t much to look ahead to.

But it was all she had.

She squared her shoulders. Eve Gill would be raring to go.

Max leaned back in the straight chair, his arms crossed on his chest, one loafer-shod foot draped casually over the opposite ankle. But his good humor was beginning to fray. Posey was such an ass. And so obsessed with Max as prey.

“And how can you explain the presence of the murder weapon in your home, Mr. Darling?” The pudgy forefinger waggled a scant foot from Max’s nose.

This question, or some variant of it, had been hammered
at him for much of the afternoon. Max had given up trying to reason with Posey. Instead, he watched Posey and Jed McClanahan, who marched right alongside the big circuit solicitor, matching florid phrase for florid phrase.

“My client,” McClanahan intoned, and it was an impressive noise from a little fellow whose balding head came level with Posey’s elbow, “has the constitutional right to remain silent. And I object to this continued flood of verbal abuse as unwarranted harassment. The writ of habeas corpus extends from sea to shining sea, Mr. Posey, and we shall not be deprived of its protection.” The scrappy lawyer rolled up his shirtsleeves, but he looked not so much like Clarence Darrow at the Leopold-Loeb trial as the “before” model for a bodybuilding course. Even Donald Lam would outweigh him.

Posey shook his head like a bull irritated by a gnat. “Do you deny, Mr. Darling, that you showered this morning in your bathroom?”

Pleased at a fresh question, Max opened his mouth—

McClanahan leapt to his side, a tatty leprechaun to the rescue. “My client has no comment. No comment.” He bent to Max and whispered, purveying a strong scent of hair spray and bourbon, “Can’t tell where he’s going with that one. Don’t say a word.” McClanahan needed a shave and his blue eyes were bleary, but, right now, he was having a hell of a good time. He gave Max a manly cuff on the shoulder.

Max looked from the combative McClanahan to the apparently inexhaustible Posey, and decided he’d had enough, both of the prosecutor and of the best criminal lawyer in the United States of America.
(Where
had Annie found McClanahan?) It was time to get some legal counsel that would put an end to this farce, although he hated to hurt the little guy’s feelings. But Max had no intention of spending the night in the Beaufort County jail, and it was long past dinnertime. And worse than his occasional hunger pang was the bubbling uneasiness when he thought about Annie.

Because he knew his Annie. She was stubborn, hot-tempered, determined—and on his side come hell or high water. She would batter down all opposition in her efforts to free him.

Unfortunately, that meant she was now hot on the trail of
a clever and merciless killer, who was quite pleased to deliver Max up as murderer-in-chief.

Max rose. Posey and McClanahan swiveled to look at him.

The phone rang.

Posey picked it up, then began to frown. “What the hell… I don’t see what concern it is of yours, Miss Fontaine, but yes, Mr. Darling is being questioned about the murder of Mr. Petree, and we did find the murder weapon in his—” Posey’s face darkened. “What do you mean we couldn’t have? We did. The ballistics—” He paused, then interrupted harshly, “Sounds to me like you’ve had a little too much to drink, lady, and I don’t need to talk to you about Mr. Darling or the case!” He slammed down the phone.

He turned toward Max. “You got another lady friend, Darling.”

Max smiled complacently.

“The broad that did the sets. Carla Fontaine. Not making much sense.” He cleared his throat. “Now, as I was saying…”

Max started walking.

He ignored Posey’s bellow and his lawyer’s caution, pausing at the door only long enough to announce, “Arrest me, or I’m leaving.”

Then he hurried down the hall, worry nipping at his heels. What was Annie up to? There was no telling what she might be doing—and what kind of danger she might be facing.

Fortunately, the Merchants Association of Broward’s Rock liked the romantic look, opting for a string of varicolored lights that twinkled around the harbor at night, glowing a warm pink, yellow, and aqua, and providing only faint illumination. There was good, strong, piercing light, of course, at several points around the docks, but the far end of the harbor—where
Sweet Lady
rocked at anchor—was mercifully dark. Another plus was the cloudy night. A minus was the water, which only fish would consider comfortably warm.