Triple Witch (16 page)

The office door opened and a little girl appeared, about six years old and prettily dressed in a plaid smock, white stockings, and patent leather shoes. Flashing dark eyes and black ringlets framing a heart-shaped face completed the initial impression of a child straight out of an old-fashioned storybook.

But I knew little Sadie Peltier only too well, and the only story she belonged in was a horror story. Flinging the door back, she stomped into the anteroom and spun around.

“Old witch! I hate you! I’m not sorry, and I won’t say I am even if you
kill
me!” Then she raced downstairs. Moments later, I heard her in the street.

“Do you know what they did to me up there? Well,
do
you?” she was demanding at the top of her horrid little lungs. “They bashed me and crashed me and
smashed
me.”

Looking shell-shocked, Sadie’s parents staggered from the office and helped each other down the staircase without a word to me, while Clarissa waved me in.

“Good heavens,” she commented as Sadie’s voice faded down the street. “People told me about her, but I really had no idea.”

“She’s a handful,” I said. Sadie’s parents were perfectly nice people, and how they had managed to produce the equivalent of a Tasmanian devil was a mystery to everyone. “I gather she has to apologize for something, or somebody’s going to sue?”

Clarissa nodded. Since moving from Portland, she had let her hair grow and stopped wearing makeup,
except for lipstick. The effect was softer, less the career woman who would eat broken glass for a promotion and more the professional person, actually interested in doing the job right.

Her fingernails, though, were still perfect ovals, always clear-polished. She tapped them thoughtfully on her desk.

“Something like that,” she allowed. “Tell me again a little about Sadie? I need some background if I’m going to get her folks out of a mess, and I never quite comprehended …”

I nodded. “Comprehending Sadie is like trying to understand a hurricane. Either you’re in it and no words are necessary, or you’re not and you don’t quite get it. Sadie is a
terror
.”

A small V appeared above the bridge of Clarissa’s nose. “I wonder if she’s bad enough, or even strong enough, to fill the entire trunk of a car with … well, cat droppings? Because that’s what she’s supposed to have done, and she even admits it. But I’m not sure I believe …”

I had to laugh, although probably to the victim it had not been funny. “Depends on how mad she is at you. If you don’t give her candy when she wants some, or you stop her from kicking all the slats out of your picket fence, she might just fill your whole house up with cat droppings. So what did someone do to her, first? That is, what provoked her attack?”

Clarissa looked rueful. “Took away her spray paint. Which she was allegedly using to redecorate a white French poodle. The poodle didn’t mind, but the owner did. Seems it’s a show dog—the people were visiting in Eastport, just for the weekend—and the dog’s out of the running, now, for some important prizes.”

“Oh, my. And if she apologizes for the dog
and
the trunk they won’t make a federal case out of it?”

“Uh-huh. But if she doesn’t—she doesn’t appear very
likely to—then they will. And they can do it. The husband’s a lawyer, himself.”

Clarissa brightened unconvincingly. “Well, I’ll think of something. It’s not your problem. How are you, anyway? I heard you had some excitement, this afternoon.”

Actually, it might be my problem. When Sadie was upset, windows began breaking and small fires began starting, all over town. Still, I was here on another matter.

“Somebody shot my window out,” I said. “Arnold thinks it was just careless gun handling.”

“But you don’t.” She sat back a little, her attention fully focused on me, now: another reason people had come to like her.

“No. Or anyway I’m not sure. The thing is, everybody figures that just because Ike Forepaugh was hooked up with Ken, back when the two of them were in jail, that Ike must have killed him.”

“And you don’t think that, either.” Even though she’d been in Portland, Clarissa was fully up to speed on Ken Mumford’s murder. People joked that the only thing Arnold could do fast was pick up a telephone call from Clarissa; that, or make one to her.

“I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t see how Ike could’ve got to shore after killing Ken. The water’s too cold to swim in, and if he had some accomplice with another boat, who?”

Clarissa nodded thoughtfully. “But the jailhouse connection is such a good one, and Ike is such a dirtbag, and there’s really no evidence for anybody else.
And
he seems to have disappeared, a sure sign of a guilty conscience.”

“Maybe. What’s his story, anyway?”

She counted off on her fingers. “Drunk and disorderly, resisting arrest, DUI, aggravated assault, armed robbery … shall I go on? Those,” she added, “are just the highlights.”

“Moving right up the criminal career ladder. After all that, murder could be a logical next step.”

Clarissa looked thoughtful, trying to decide whether or not to tell me something. “Look, keep this under your hat. We don’t need to start a panic. But there’s also some evidence he’s been around in town, or at least that he’s still in the area.”

“Such as?”

“A cap that some fellows in town say belonged to him. And a beat-up old bowie knife. They were with a bedroll and some other things in a cave, in the cliffs at Broad Cove.”

“Interesting. So maybe he was camped out there.”

She nodded. “It does make sense, if you don’t want to get caught, to lay low. Not go out hitchhiking or something, out on the highway.”

“I guess it does. Does Arnold know this, yet?”

Clarissa shook her head. “Just happened. One of the state guys came up looking for Arnold to tell him, while Sadie and her parents were here. I told the state officer,” she grinned wryly, “that Eastport cops carry radios, just like the ones in the big city. After I weaseled the information out of him, of course.”

“Of course.” Sometime in a previous life, I thought, Clarissa had been a bloodhound. But I was forgetting my mission.

“I don’t suppose the name Baxter Willoughby has come up in the investigation? Just … hypothetically.”

Her eyes narrowed. “Not that I know of. Should it have?”

“No. I mean, probably it wouldn’t.”

Getting caught once, back in New York, would have made him more cautious. The only way to nail Willoughby for anything now would be to catch him actually doing it; he was not the kind of guy, anymore, who would just let himself happen to come up in an investigation.

“Clarissa, do me a favor, will you? Don’t tell Arnold what I’m about to say. Or at least not the way I’m going to say it.”

Her eyes grew cautious. “Jacobia, you know I can’t promise anything like that.”

“Not even if it works out best for Arnold? Because listen, the thing is this: I think there’s something funny about Baxter Willoughby. Maybe even something connected to the investigation. But if I mention Willoughby to Arnold, either Arnold won’t listen to me because he’s so set on Ike,
or
he might go roaring out to Dennysville, demanding to know what’s up.”

Clarissa smiled, recognizing the truth of this.

“And believe me,” I went on, “the prudent thing would be if Arnold could just keep his ears open. With this guy, it would be best not to let him know there’s any interest in him at all.”

I went on to tell Clarissa about my own history with Baxter Willoughby. I also mentioned that, as a candidate for secret ownership of two million dollars, I considered him top-drawer.

“He’s the only guy around here right now with a connection to big money. On the other hand,” I finished, “I have no idea why he’d stash two million bucks in cash on Crow Island. And there’s other things wrong with him in the likely-suspect department. But if, for instance, he wanted people murdered
and
he had Forepaugh working for him …”

“No physical violence in Willoughby’s history,” Clarissa assumed correctly. The switch from DA’s investigator to private law practice had done nothing to blunt her naturally sharp mental processes. “But Ike could take care of that stuff for him?”

“Exactly. If they were connected, that might be the way it would be. The thing is, though, this is all so …”

“Circumstantial.”

“Very. I could be seeing things where there aren’t
any. But if Willoughby is involved in all of it somehow, and somebody scares him without being able to arrest him, then he will scram.”

Clarissa smiled, tenting her fingers over the desk. “I see. How about if I bring it up at the dinner table, then, that there is such a guy as Willoughby? And maybe that in the past, he’s had big money, and a less-than-savory reputation. So the name will be fresh in Arnold’s mind, if it pops up somewhere else? I might get the phrase “flight risk” in there, too, just very tactfully.”

“Perfect. I appreciate it, Clarissa.” An uncomfortable thought struck me. “You do know that I’m not casting aspersions on Arnold’s intelligence.”

“Of course I do.” Her pale blue eyes, the color of ice on a pond, were luminously intelligent. “Fortune favors the prepared mind, that’s all. And sometimes certain minds have to be prepared not to charge in like a bull in a china shop.”

She rose from behind her desk. “Thanks for the heads-up.”

“No problem. Anything else going on in the investigation you can let me in on? I’d like to tell Ellie, if there is. She’s pretty upset about Ken and Tim.”

Clarissa shook her head regretfully. “No big breaks, if that’s what you mean. APB for Forepaugh, ballistics check on the weapon, toxicology tests on the bodies, all the usual.”

Then she changed the subject. “But Jacobia, there’s still no reason for Ike Forepaugh to be taking a shot at you even if he does have a gun. And even if he’s working for Willoughby—well,
he
doesn’t know you’ve got suspicions about him, does he?”

“No. I haven’t given him any reason for that. I don’t think he even recognized me when I saw him. He didn’t act like he did.”

“Good.” She walked me to the door. “By the way, Ellie might want to hear Ken’s body is coming back tomorrow. Tim’s, too.”

At my look of surprise she grinned. “The autopsies should’ve taken longer. But I used to date the medical examiner, back in Portland, and I told him he owed me one for not marrying him when he asked me, and I guess he agreed.”

I had a feeling the favor Clarissa had pulled in was a bit more substantial than that. In Portland, she’d been a mover and shaker. But she knew it would mean a great deal to Ellie, having the funerals over and done with.

“Thanks, Clarissa,” I said again as I was leaving, thinking I’d gotten my message sent cleanly and efficiently, and without any loose ends dangling. “Oh, and—listen. If the people with the painted French poodle and the car trunk full of you-know-what were to find that both those situations had been fully repaired, do you think they would …?”

“Let Sadie’s folks off the hook? Yes. But I really don’t see how that could happen.”

“I might have an idea. I’ll give you a call if it works out. But Clarissa, don’t let Sadie know about it.”

And that, I thought, was that. But when I reached the bottom step, she stopped me. “Jacobia? There is one small thing more.”

“Yes?” I replied, thinking
uh-oh
.

“About the ambulance ride with the bodies?” she went on. “Hank Henahan is awfully nervous about it. Arnold told him he’d go with him. But tomorrow’s our six-month wedding anniversary.”

She smiled: appealingly. Inexorably.

Inescapably. “And you’d like Arnold to be here for it.”

“That would be pleasant, yes. So could you …?”

I felt a sigh of resignation rising from my toes. “Okay, Clarissa. I’ll go on the morgue run while you stay home with Arnold and drink champagne out of a slipper.”

What the heck, I figured it was the least I could do. If she hadn’t expedited those autopsies, Ken and Tim
could have wound up not getting released until winter, by which time the earth would have frozen too solidly to bury them, and they would sit around until spring.

So the next morning I set off for Bangor with Hank Henahan in the ambulance, and the trip didn’t start out badly: cool, fresh breeze, coffee in a thermos, Route 1 curving south along the coastline toward Ellsworth, through green trees and past blue inlets bright and colorful as Kodachrome.

As I say, it didn’t start out badly. But by the time we were through, I was wishing for some of that champagne: one bottle to drink, and another to break over Hank Henahan’s head.

“Durned red tape,” Henahan muttered as we made our way through what passes for evening rush-hour traffic in Bangor. The Penobscot glittered in late-afternoon sunlight as we crossed the bridge, Hank slowing for the double line of cars heading out of the city. “You’d think we was adopting those poor fellers.”

The road ahead was two-lane, with plenty of cross streets, businesses, and other impediments to getting this errand over with. Hank refrained from putting on the siren or beacons, though, partly because he was a good, safe, ethical paramedic who knew his business, and partly because his hands were shaking too hard.

Driving from Eastport had been okay, and pulling into the ambulance bay of St. Joseph’s Hospital, where the bodies had been sent from Augusta, had gone like clockwork. I guessed Hank had been pretending he was delivering a live one, not picking up two dead ones. Even the long waiting around we’d had to do, with lunch in the hospital coffee shop and plenty of time to peruse the magazines in the lobby, hadn’t fazed him much.

Now, though, his pale, sweaty face and haunted expression were beginning to make me feel like someone
in a Stephen King novel. In the book I would be the character who pooh-poohs supernatural horrors, and who subsequently is devoured by one of them.

In my lap lay the large manila envelope of paperwork we’d gotten at the hospital. The secretary in the pathology department there had made a point of telling me not to lose it, as among other things it contained copies of the autopsy reports for me to give to Bob Arnold. The envelope was stamped
CONFIDENTIAL
in large red letters.