Cat With a Fiddle (9781101578902) Read online

  I slid open the door of the shed closest to the creek. It was musty and frigid inside. A central aisle, very narrow, led from one end of the structure to the other, and on either side of the aisle were trunks and cartons—a vast array of assorted junk, including old clothes tied into uneven bales.

  All of it had been left behind, intentionally or unintentionally, by the artists who’d resided at the colony over the years.

  At the very end of the aisle, I found a space where someone obviously had pushed some cartons away and heaved others onto a neighboring pile. This afforded only a small space, but there were two blankets on the floor, an old pillow tied at the ends, and two empty brandy bottles.

  Was this the place where, according to Miranda, Beth and Will had made love and then fought? It certainly could be. The bedding and the bottles seemed to hint at some kind of tryst.

  I had to wonder why they would meet here in this cramped, dirty, cold place. Why hadn’t they gone to any of the half-dozen motels in the Northampton area? Or even better, to one of the perfectly comfortable cabins right here on the grounds, where they could build a cozy fire in the wood-burning stove?

  I stared down at the blankets. Maybe, I thought, Will Gryder had been one of those men who love illicit sex . . . who get turned on by stolen sex accomplished at the wrong time in the wrong place for the wrong reason . . . sex as a kind of adventuring theft. There were men like that. Even my friend Tony Basillio would, on occasion, rather make love in a phone booth on the Jersey Turnpike that in a suite at the Plaza. It was some kind of twisted behavior that many men exhibit. And many women accept it, even if they find it absurd.

  Absurd? My response to this trysting place—I had looked away—suddenly made me feel very uncomfortable. Was I becoming a total prude in my middle age? My goodness! There was a time in my life when I had made love in much more illicit places and thought it perfectly natural. And rather exciting. And I had been the one who had initiated it. I looked down again.

  There was something very sad about those soiled old blankets. They didn’t say that Beth had killed Gryder, but they did point to her as a suspect. And that wasn’t the only sad thing about this place. There was just something so . . . seedy about it.

  I closed up the first shed and went on to the other one. The door of that one was harder to open. Something seemed to have caught on one of the sliding hinges. But finally it yielded and I walked inside. Like the other hut, this one was filled with the detritus of the decades—things tossed, wrapped, bundled. I wondered if Will and Beth had made love in this shed as well. I walked to the center aisle, ready to start my inspection. But I had to stop. It was too dark to see much of anything. There was an overhead bulb as in the other shed, but there was no wall switch for this fixture. I flailed around, searching for a pull of some sort, and when I found none, I stood on tiptoes and managed to reach the bulb and turn it gently. The light was weak, but it illuminated the room just fine. I turned down the aisle.

  Suddenly I froze in absolute horror. I threw my hands up in front of my face, between me and the hideous face that loomed in front of me.

  Then my shock dissolved into embarrassed laughter. I was staring into the eyes of a camel. A big, brown, goofy-faced camel, on a rocker! An enormous stuffed animal, the kind some girls cherish from cradle to college dorm. It was perched on top of a dusty carton.

  I reached up and squeezed its dark brown nose.

  I was once going to buy Basillio just such a toy; that was right after he’d broken up with his wife. He was so terribly lonely, and I had a few dollars in radio commercial residuals coming to me. So I went into FAO Schwarz and found this wonderful rocking camel. I fell absolutely in love with the thing. The only problem was the price tag—two hundred and ninety-seven dollars. I didn’t buy it.

  Well, Basillio didn’t need this kind of company any more, thankfully. I reached up to give the dear old thing one last pat. And as I did so, my hand brushed against its underside, which was wet and gritty.

  I stepped up to take a closer look. Not only was the camel’s belly wet, the rocker on which he stood was streaked with mud, as if it had been dragged through slush of some kind.

  I went cold all over. I was remembering the marks I had found yesterday when looking for the injured dog. Like a sled, I had thought then, like a sled pulled across the muddy road.

  So this was the mysterious brown dog! This silly toy camel was what had caused the accident. Someone had pulled it across the path in front of us, to make us crash. But who? And which one of us did that someone want dead?

  The camel was moving almost imperceptibly, peacefully rocking. But my fear was increasing with its every movement.

  Enough cute stuff, I decided right then. Enough exploring and dabbling. This was serious, and I was getting mad. It didn’t matter whether he thought he was Clint Eastwood or Joel McCrea—I needed to speak to Ford Donaldson.

  Chapter 7

  “You’re a very hard man to reach, Lieutenant Donaldson.”

  “Is that so?” Donaldson turned his impassive face to me. “Well, I’m sorry if I kept you waiting, but we’re pretty busy these days—whether you and your friends believe it or not.”

  “Please don’t misunderstand. I—” I started to explain. I wanted to assure him I realized he was working hard to solve the Gryder killing. But he didn’t let me finish.

  “This town isn’t quite as sleepy as some folks might think,” he said sarcastically.

  “No,” I said carefully. “And obviously neither are you, Lieutenant.”

  My rejoinder startled him into a minute’s silence. Long enough for me to go on to make my point.

  “As I was going to say, there are a few things I think you’ll want to know. I thought it was best to tell you in private, but it’s been a little difficult reaching you.”

  A little difficult, to say the least. I’d had to go through all kinds of channels before this audience was granted. I had to speak to the officer on duty on the premises at the house, who’d given me a phone number to call. Then there was a secretary to get by. And another policeman, who agreed to pass on the message to Donaldson only after he’d phoned the house to speak to the one on-duty there. Finally I’d been instructed to wait for a call from the man himself. When it finally came, I’d had to convince Lt. Donaldson that I knew something important enough to make it worth his while to see me alone. It was all so Byzantine—needlessly so, I was betting.

  By the time Ford’s newly washed, gas-efficient, no-nonsense car stopped on the road just off the Covington Center property, the heat seemed to have been turned up a notch under whatever the personal crisis was that made him so touchy and sour.

  His mood had not affected him sartorially, though: he was as fastidiously put together as that first night we met. This time he was a symphony of brown—shoes, trousers, shirt, and all in subtly differing shades. As I settled myself on the passenger side in front, I noticed a beautiful Stetson on the back seat.

  The car moved off noiselessly.

  “Well,” he said, “alone at last.”

  “Yes,” I said. “Thank you for taking the time.”

  “There isn’t that much of it, I’m afraid. By the way, from what I hear, you were lucky to walk away from that thing yesterday. Accident like that—could’ve been much worse. I hear your friends are going to walk away from it, too.”

  “The Polikoffs are not my friends,” I said testily, knowing how that sounded but unable to stop myself. “I’m sure you had other things on your mind, Lieutenant, when you spoke to us after the killing. But I thought I explained my position in the house then.”

  He did not respond. I saw him look up at the road sign that announced ENTERING HARRODSVILLE, and then he made a swift turn. A half-consumed pack of LifeSavers rolled gently across the dashboard toward the wheel.

  “I guess I could us
e a cup of coffee,” he said then. “You can tell me in the diner just as well as here. This time of day Miss Edna’s is just as . . . private . . . as anywhere else.”

  I hoped this signaled a break in the man’s stoic frontiersman bit. He helped himself to one of the candies, and I wondered vaguely if sugar was playing some part in his mood shift.

  Miss Edna’s Diner was truly a piece of living nostalgia—soda fountain and worn leather booths and a lone waitress in orthopedic shoes. I wondered if any film companies had discovered it. It would make a wonderful location for a period movie.

  Donaldson took his time getting around to asking for my information. What with his amiable chitchat with the short-order cook and his minute scrutiny of the pie case before he made his selection, I got the message: I couldn’t possibly know anything crucial to his investigation.

  But finally he was ready to listen. First I improvised thumbnail sketches of the personalities of Miranda and Beth—to the extent that I could do so with any authority. I went on to tell him, as succinctly as possible, about Miranda’s revelation to me: that Beth and Will were lovers, and had fought violently not long before the murder. Then about their dusty trysting place in the shed, which seemed only to lend more credence to Miranda’s story.

  “Well,” he said when I’d concluded the recitation, “that certainly is interesting.”

  It was hard to know what to say. My mocking little laugh came out in a kind of snort. “Right. I agree it is ‘interesting.’” I waited while he drank more coffee. And waited.

  “You know,” he said at last, “two things occur to me. First of all, it looked to me like the members of that musical group are none too fond of each other. Something’s seriously . . . amiss with those friends of yours.”

  I didn’t take the bait this time, so he continued. “And then, number two, I have to figure a story like that is full of . . . a lot of . . .”

  “A lot of what, Lieutenant?”

  “A lot of wild exaggeration, Miss Nestleton.”

  My heartbeat picked up by a few blips. Ford Donaldson was one of the most infuriating people I’d ever encountered.

  “What are you saying, Lieutenant Donaldson? That I’ve gotten hold of a few seamy rumors and I’m carried away with them? That I’m guilty of wild exaggeration?”

  I had delivered the last line to the back of his neck, because he was signaling the waitress for a refill. I suddenly understood how satisfying it must be for one man to tap another on the shoulder and then knock him to the ground.

  “Oh, no,” he said when he’d turned back to me. “Not necessarily you. The exaggeration could be all Miss Bly’s.”

  “And what would the exaggeration be: that Beth and Will might have slept together, but their fight wasn’t serious at all?”

  “Maybe. Maybe something like that.”

  “But I have no reason to distrust Miranda’s story. If I confirmed one part of it, why shouldn’t I also believe the other part?”

  “But you didn’t confirm anything,” he said simply. “Not only are you having a problem going from Point A to Point B here, you haven’t even got a Point A.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Look,” he said, not unkindly, “you have no way of proving those blankets you saw in the shed were used by Beth and Gryder—or any other two people, for that matter.”

  “But the story fits!” I insisted.

  “Let me explain something to you, Alice. You don’t mind if I call you Alice, do you?”

  I shrugged. “Anything. Just go on—please.”

  “You don’t know this area very well, Alice. Matter of fact, you don’t know it at all.”

  “No, I don’t.”

  “If you did, you’d know that the local kids like nothing better than violating the ‘No Trespassing’ signs around that property. They go onto the grounds. They use the creek as a toilet and the unlocked cabins as motels. They steal tools. They write on the side of the house. They make a general nuisance of themselves, ‘cause they’ve got nothing better to do. They’re out of school or out of work or they’re just plain stupid. Are you starting to get the picture, Alice?”

  “You mean, the local people have never liked the Center and all it represents. That they resent the city people coming into their community with their pretensions . . . and their cars . . . and their ‘art.’ ”

  “No, Alice,” he said wearily. “I don’t mean that at all. I said some kids get up to all kinds of nonsense. Dumb punks. Not the people in ‘the community,’ as you call it. Most people appreciate what the Covington School has done for the town.

  “Why do you keep calling it a school?”

  “Because that’s how it started out, in the twenties. A local woman who’d been a dancer in Boston came back here and started a school for the children—the children of this community—to teach them dancing and painting and every art you can think of. At one time we had artists from all over the world up here teaching us hicks about the finer things.

  “The School has been a part of life in these parts for some seventy years. Ask the grocer if he doesn’t want their business. Ask Paul Fiske in the liquor store. You think the school doesn’t pay property taxes like anybody else? Water bills? People who’ve stayed there tend to come back up here to vacation. They rent cars, they stay in the bed-and-breakfast places. They buy books in the bookstore. They—”

  “All right, Lieutenant Donaldson! I think I’m beginning to see.”

  “Hope so.”

  He had made some points I couldn’t brush off. And not merely the socioeconomic lecture he’d just delivered. Yes, I supposed it was possible that it could have been local teenagers who’d made love in the shed. Except for the empty brandy bottles. How likely was it that out-of-work or minimum-wage kids would take Martell’s cognac along on a joyride, like a six-pack of Budweiser?

  At any rate, I was still convinced that Miranda’s story was true. And that the relationship between Beth and Will might have played an important role in the murder.

  “Lieutenant Donaldson,” I said, “I have to admit everything you’ve said is also ‘interesting.’ But I have something else to tell you.” I was ready to drop the bombshell now.

  “Something else?” he said distractedly, counting out change for the waitress’s tip. “What’s that, Alice?”

  I said somberly, “That accident yesterday was no accident. Someone was trying to kill us—or me—or Roz—or whomever.”

  That shook him.

  I moved in quickly and told him all about my search for the injured dog; about the strange sled-like marks I’d found in the road; and then about the big toy in the shed with the mud on its rocker.

  He said not a word to interrupt me. And when I’d finished he burst into laughter.

  I sat there, furious all over again, waiting for his merriment to subside.

  It did stop, after a few more choking guffaws. And finally his face settled into its old unreadability.

  “All done, Ford?”

  “Yep. Yeah, Alice, I am.” He checked his watch, then asked me very politely, “Need a little more coffee?”

  “No, I do not!”

  Donaldson leaned forward, toward me, and took on a toneless, very professional air. He then began to fire a series of questions at me.

  “Was the car trip into town planned for days in advance?”

  “No,” I answered, “of course not—that is, I don’t see how it could’ve been. Ben just decided on the spur of the moment and I decided to join them. It was so gloomy in the house . . . ”

  “How could an elaborate plan like that have been set into motion on the spur of the moment? It would have required a conspirator somewhere on the road—right?—someone waiting with your stuffed camel and a car phone.

  “Somebody would have had to call him f
rom the house, the moment the three of you left, and then he would have had to hide the car somewhere, station himself at a strategic place on the road, wait to catch sight of the Mercedes, and then at the last minute run across the road—or better yet, slide the toy across the road at just the right moment.”

  He paused briefly, waiting for my response. I had none. He was right: the conspiracy would have had to be almost absurdly elaborate.

  “The guy in the car gets a call on his fancy phone saying you three are underway. Okay—how does he know which way the car is going to turn once it leaves the property? You can’t even see the road from the house. You can make a left turn or a right turn. There are at least two ways to get into Northampton from Covington—one leads right into the highway, the other takes longer but is more scenic. And what if Polikoff had decided to take the back road, behind the school and through Cheltonham?”

  Again, I had no answer.

  “Sounds like the man and his camel would be left high and dry, doesn’t it, Alice?”

  ***

  We were mostly silent on the drive back.

  Donaldson pulled up close to the gate and waited for me to leave the car. I had blown it with Good Soldier Ford. He obviously didn’t think much of me or my theories. I was terribly embarrassed at not having worked things out more convincingly, and my feelings were hurt, too. But I knew I’d get over all that. Logic might be on his side right now, but it was me someone had tried to kill, not him.

  I didn’t get out of the car just yet. Seeing me linger, he waited in silence.

  “One other thing,” I said quietly, not knowing how he’d take what I was about to say. “In spite of today, I . . . I do have some experience . . . as a criminal investigator. Professionally, I mean.”

  He stared at me in puzzlement.

  Should I tell him about the cases I’d solved? Should I list my credentials, say that I had once been a paid consultant to an elite arm of the New York City Police Department? No. I decided not to try to prove to him that I was no fool in these matters.