The Man Who Tried to Get Away

  As self-effacing as ever in their distinct fashions, Amalia Carbone and Faith Jerrick stood back against the walls, out of the way. Of all the people there, only Faith didn’t look suspicious of anyone. Even Ama glowered frankly at us all from her withdrawn position. But Faith had a friend in God, and that sufficed.

  Which left—

  I twisted against my bandages to scan the room. “Where’s Mile?” I asked Maryanne. Facing Ama, I asked, “Where’s Truchi?”

  Maryanne gave a wan grimace. In a small forlorn voice, she said, “He didn’t tell me. When we heard what happened—when Sam came and got us—Houston just left. He didn’t say anything.”

  Ama was a good housekeeper. She knew her place. But she was also furious. In Italian she muttered something that sounded remarkably like, “That son of a goatfucker.” Then she answered in bitter English, “He abuses my husband.”

  Somehow I knew exactly what that meant.

  Riding the remains of my adrenaline, I headed out of the den. On my way, I commanded, “Wait here,” as if I could take everyone’s obedience for granted.

  I found Mile and Petruchio Carbone in the kitchen. Which was a good thing, because otherwise I wouldn’t have known where to look for them. Mile had his back to me; he didn’t hear me coming. One fat fist gripped the front of Truchi’s shirt. The other brandished a wad of bills. Must’ve been several hundred dollars.

  “It’s yours,” he was saying. His voice sounded like what happens when you step on a stick of margarine. “It’s all Ah have on me, but you’ll get more. A lot more. No questions asked. All Ah want is a gun. The biggest cannon you got hidden. And ammunition. Ah mean to blow me away a killer.”

  Truchi didn’t betray my arrival with any shift of his head or flick of his gaze. Under the droop of his mustache, lines of sadness shaped his mouth, and his eyes seemed to regard Mile with profound fatigue. Apparently his reaction didn’t require words. He said nothing.

  His silence didn’t bring out the best in Mile’s temper. Mile knew how to get what he wanted, and the name of that how was money. When money didn’t work, he turned frantic. Or vicious. This time, it was vicious.

  “You wop shit.” He waved bills in Truchi’s face like a club. “You listen to me, boy. You think you can say no to me, you got that wrong. Try it and you’re dead meat. The minute Ah get to a phone, Ah’ll buy me this lodge and everythin’ on it. Then your job is mine. Your ass is mine, fucker. Ah’ll make piss-sure you never work again. You and that thick slut you call your wife are goin’ to be in the crapper ’til you starve. Where Ah come from, we eat you spick and wop bastards for breakfast. You get me a gun or you’re dead.”

  Truchi looked all this in the eye without a flicker. Considering his strength, he probably could’ve beaten Mile to Jell-O with one elbow stuck in his ear. But maybe he figured that the owners of Deerskin Lodge wouldn’t approve if he pounded the by-products out of a guest. Or maybe he was just impervious to abuse and had no use for violence. Either way, he didn’t respond.

  I had a different reaction.

  Someone had already tried to kill me. Twice, maybe. I faced a series of crimes that I couldn’t understand and didn’t know how to handle. Ginny was gone, and the infection in my guts put up a good fight against the antibiotics, and too many things were my fault. On top of that, I smelled an insidious little reek of gas. Reeson hadn’t done a particularly good job on the stove.

  The odor reminded me of smoke and arsenic.

  I picked my spot. I measured the distance.

  Then I hit Mile in the back hard enough to rattle my teeth.

  Afterward my pulse hammered like it was about to split open my skull. But I didn’t care. There’s no substitute for job satisfaction.

  Mile slammed against Truchi and flopped to the floor like a bowl of overturned oatmeal. The way he arched his back and tried to crawl away from the pain worried me for a second. Maybe I’d broken something for him, or sent him into kidney shock. But I didn’t worry much.

  Truchi glanced down at Mile briefly. Then he looked at me and gave a sad shake of his head. No doubt Mile and I had confirmed his belief that everyone who ever came to the lodge was crazy.

  I didn’t worry about that, either. Stiffly I said, “Bring him,” and turned away.

  By the time I got to the den, I could feel the floorboards wobble under me, and my head hurt as if someone had buried an ax in my brain. Everyone watched me enter. Even Faith turned her head in my direction. But I didn’t say anything at first. I went to the nearest hearth to prop myself in my familiar position against the mantel. I took the .45, the symbol of my authority, out of my pocket and set it handy. While my head pounded, I glared around the room.

  “If anyone else wants to argue with me, do it now. You’ve got one minute.” Anger and blood loss left me giddy. “If you give me any more grief after that, I’ll turn my gun over to Mile and let the lot of you fend for yourselves.”

  They all stared at me.

  As if on cue, Truchi came into the den with a coughing and defeated Houston Mile over his shoulder. He dropped Mile on the couch between Maryanne and Connie, then retreated to stand beside his wife. Mile’s color suggested apoplexy or infarction. He didn’t try to talk.

  After that, no one said anything. No one dared. Maryanne studied Mile as if he nauseated her. She made no effort to comfort him.

  “All right.” Time to do my job. Now or never. “Sam probably told you what happened, but we’re going to take it from the top anyway. This is just like playing mystery camp, except now everyone’s life is on the line. Not just mine.

  “You first, Connie.”

  “What?” Connie stared at me like I’d frightened her out of her outrage. Maybe I’d been too hard on her. I wanted information from her. And I wanted access to her professional expertise, the knowledge that she’d acquired being half of Thornton Foal.

  But I didn’t go easy. “Start with right after lunch.” I didn’t plan to go easy on any of them. “Tell us what you did. Why you did it. Don’t leave anything out.

  “Then tell us why we shouldn’t think you killed him.”

  At any rate, she wasn’t in shock. And she wasn’t the kind of woman who stayed frightened. She had too much fury in her.

  “Mr. Axbrewder,” she said in a congested voice, “you’re treating me like a fool. I’m the one who discovered Mac’s body. I’m the one who screamed. Any murderer with an ounce of sense would make absolutely certain she was somewhere else when the body was found.

  “This is a small group, Mr. Axbrewder. For the most part, what we do here”—her gaze held my face—“is painfully transparent. I knew Mac was in trouble. How could I help it? For one thing, he doesn’t drink like that. Not at lunch. Not in the middle of a mystery. And for another, he doesn’t have affairs with married women.”

  In the background, Lara flushed. But no one made any comment.

  “As far as I know,” Connie continued, “he doesn’t have affairs at all.” She seemed unaware that she referred to Westward in the present tense. “He’s an inward man, a writer, not an actor. What he does is create. And he is good at it.” Outrage crowded her throat. “Our society doesn’t take the mystery novel seriously as literature, but Mac should be taken seriously. His gifts—”

  She gulped down emotion, tightened her grip on herself. The not focus of her eyes made them look almost crazy—as crazy as the flame tip of an acetylene torch.

  “I knew he was in trouble.”

  Mile coughed once more, hard, possibly trying to spit up blood. Then he subsided.

  “After lunch,” Connie explained grimly, “he went to his room. He went alone, although you had instructed us to stay together. This worried me, Mr. Axbrewder. I could understand his desire to numb his troubles with alcohol. But alcohol isn’t selective. Numbing his troubles, he also numbed himself to danger. For that reason, I decided to watch over him.

  “A short time after lunch—no more than half an hour—I went to his room to be sure th
at he was all right. I intended to stay with him until he awoke. Or until Ms. Fistoulari returned.

  “I found him as you saw him.

  “I’m not acquainted with violent death, Mr. Axbrewder. I write about it, certainly, but I have no personal experience with murder. Catherine Reverie was the first victim I’ve seen.

  “Nonetheless no one could mistake what had happened to Mac.” Without warning her voice caught, clenched around a sob. Again she tightened her grip on herself. “And only a fool could fail to draw the obvious conclusions. I am not a fool. Clearly, our reasoning—your reasoning, Mr. Axbrewder—was predicated on a false premise. Clearly—”

  I interrupted her. “Did you touch anything?” I had my own panic and outrage to deal with.

  She shook her head. Judging by her expression, her estimation of me sank every time I opened my mouth. “Of course not.”

  “You didn’t touch him? To see what he felt like?” What violent death felt like? “See if he was still warm?”

  At least I succeeded at surprising her. “What would be the point?”

  That got a reaction out of Hardhouse. “To find out how long he’d been dead. It might make a big difference if we knew when during that half hour he was killed.”

  I sighed to myself. One of the last things I wanted in life was to have Joseph Hardhouse on my side. But the issue had to be faced. I looked at Sam.

  Sam shrugged. “I examined the body.” He had his own brand of bitterness, which he made no effort to conceal. “Without an autopsy, I can’t be sure of much. I can’t even be sure he was killed by a broken neck. For all I know, that was done to him after he died, just to confuse us.

  “In addition, the gradient along which a body loses warmth-like the rate of rigor mortis—varies widely from one individual to the next, one situation to the next.

  “If he was cold, we could’ve been reasonably sure he was killed early in that half hour. But he was still warm—warm enough. It could’ve happened anytime.”

  “Which brings us,” Rock put in unexpectedly, “to the question of alibis.”

  I stared at him. So did Sam and Queenie and Hardhouse. Connie, Lara, and the rest kept their attention on me.

  “We all know the killer is one of us.” From his tone, you would’ve thought that we held guns to his head, forcing him to explain leveraged buyouts to morons. “Right? The doors are all locked. There is no one else to suspect. We all had the means to kill Mr. Westward. Who had the opportunity?”

  He faced me. He still looked like ashes and defeat, but he’d been cursed with a brain that continued to function.

  “I had the opportunity. I was here”—he indicated the den—“alone. And my wife had the opportunity. She was in our room, also alone.”

  Buffy bit her thin lips in distress.

  Rock glanced around the room, mutely asking, Who else?

  “But you didn’t have any reason,” Maryanne put in timidly. “Did you? You’ve run mystery camps for years now. Why would you suddenly start killing your guests? And Thornton Foal is famous. Once people find out Mac was killed here, they’ll never come to another Murder on Cue camp.”

  “That’s right,” Buffy breathed from the bottom of her heart. “We don’t have any motive. We don’t—”

  I stopped her. “One thing at a time. If we’re going to make sense out of this, let’s do it by the numbers.

  “Buffy and Rock had opportunity. Connie had opportunity. Lara and I didn’t. We were together.” When I said that, Lara looked so grateful that I couldn’t resist adding, “Unless she did it during the first ten minutes after lunch.

  “Maryanne, what about you and Mile?” I would’ve loved to ask Mile himself, but he was in no condition to answer.

  Maryanne’s expression made me feel like a child molester. Her fear went right to the core. “I didn’t do it.” Her voice wobbled like a frail chair with too much weight in it.

  “That isn’t what I asked you.”

  Her fellow guests seemed to hold their collective breath while Maryanne groped for courage.

  Thinly she replied, “Houston sent me to our room. I thought he wanted to look for those guns. But he didn’t tell me that. He didn’t say anything about it.

  “He came back after fifteen or twenty minutes. I was alone that long.” She shot me a pleading gaze and repeated, “I didn’t do it.”

  I ignored her insistence. “Sam? Queenie?”

  Queenie shrugged. “Sam and I were together the whole time.”

  “So if you did it,” Hardhouse remarked like he was having fun, “you did it together. That’s clever. I wonder how much easier it is to commit murder when you have a partner. You sure as hell don’t have to worry about alibis, do you?”

  “One thing at a time,” I said again. I spoke harshly, mostly because I hated Hardhouse. “You’re the only one left. What’s your alibi?”

  He faced me with fire in his eyes and a range of interesting emotions on his mouth. “What do you mean, I’m the only one left? What about them?” He indicated the Carbones and Faith Jerrick.

  Amalia snorted in disgust. But she responded before I could prompt her. “Petruchio chose to prepare boards to repair the wall in the workshop. We were instructed to remain indoors, but then he cannot do his work. He left and returned through the kitchen. Faith and I saw him. We washed dishes together.”

  Which wasn’t the best defense I’d ever heard. If anyone had keys to the doors, Truchi did. He could’ve gone out, let himself in another door, killed Mac, and retreated the way he came. But Reeson had already pointed out the absurdity of accusing the Carbones or Faith. Rock and Buffy were better candidates.

  I returned to Hardhouse. “Like I say”—friendly as a hacksaw—“you’re the only one left. Tell us why we should cross you off the list.”

  The Draytons, Rock, and Maryanne all turned to study him.

  He spread his hands as if to show us how clean they were. Despite his animation, his artificially slick hair made him resemble one of the animal trophies. “I was alone, too. No alibi. I was in my room, trying to get some sleep. After all the exercise I’ve had”—I couldn’t mistake his point—“I need rest.”

  Lara bit her lips and scrutinized the floorboards.

  Silence answered him. The only sound was the soft rush of the wind past the chimneys and the faint crackle of the fires.

  “Which brings us,” Sam said suddenly, in the hard, brittle voice I’d heard earlier, “to the question of motive.”

  “Why look at me?” Hardhouse retorted, facing Sam now.

  Sam didn’t hesitate. “Because I think you killed him.”

  Hardhouse widened his eyes as if he were actively surprised. “Me? Why me?” A second later he added, “What about Connie?”

  No one so much as glanced at Connie. Stiffly Sam said, “You killed him because he had an affair with your wife.”

  Lara did her best to melt into the floor or the tree trunk, but neither of them accepted her.

  Hardhouse laughed confidently. “Don’t be absurd.” His tone mocked Sam’s accusation. “She’s had dozens of affairs. So have I. That’s how we keep our marriage fresh. It turns us on. It makes us excited about each other.

  “Isn’t that right, Lara?”

  His wife went on trying to melt. She didn’t respond.

  “Lara?” he asked again. He had so much confidence that he didn’t need to threaten her.

  For another moment she didn’t reply. Then she said in a muffled voice, “Joseph is right. We’ve done it for years. If he wanted to kill my lovers, he should have started a long time ago.”

  “But that’s sick,” Buffy protested.

  Lara looked up. Sudden fire showed in her eyes. She may’ve been uncomfortable about being exposed, but her behavior didn’t embarrass her. “How do you know? Have you ever tried it?”

  “If it works,” Hardhouse put in, “it isn’t sick. What gives you the right to judge? Look at you, sitting there half dead. You and Rock”—he sneered the n
ame—“probably haven’t touched each other for decades. But whenever Lara goes to bed with another man, I know I’m being tested. Before and after. I’m being given the chance to prove I’m the best she’s ever had.

  “That doesn’t scare me. It doesn’t intimidate me. I like a challenge. The rest of you talk about it, but you don’t mean it. The kind of challenge you like is a mystery camp, where everyone pretends the issues are serious. There’s no pretense about what Lara and I do. Every time we have sex, we’re on the line with each other, we’re being tested, we have to prove ourselves in the most intimate way there is.

  “You only think it’s sick,” he finished almost triumphantly, “because you couldn’t handle it.”

  “No,” Connie said into the silence, as flat and sure as the blade of a knife, “that isn’t the reason.”

  I couldn’t think of an answer. Knowing the real reason that Lara had wanted sex with me made me feel demeaned and helpless. Ultimately I was irrelevant to her. I’d endured the distress of her attempted seduction for nothing. But Connie didn’t have that problem.

  I hadn’t seen her stand. Nevertheless, she was on her feet, facing Hardhouse as if this were a contest between the two of them and none of the rest of us mattered.

  “You and I, Mr. Hardhouse,” Connie said. “Only we have any apparent motive for killing Mac, you because he slept with your wife, I for essentially the same reason, because he was my partner, perhaps my lover, and he was unfaithful. I’m the one who says it, Mr. Hardhouse—I who have the right. What you and Lara do is sick.”

  Hardhouse probably wanted to retort. But Connie had too much dignity. Her controlled indignation kept him quiet.

  “Mac was a writer, Mr. Hardhouse. He understood, as every artist must, that there is no such thing as a contest between persons. Oh, competitions exist, competitions for jobs or advancement, athletic competitions. A murder mystery is a competition. But the writer of the mystery must know better.

  “It is impossible to create, Mr. Hardhouse—ultimately it is impossible to live—on the assumption that any contest can exist between persons. All characters must have the same distinctive worth, the same individual value, the same right to life, or else they have been poorly created, and the artist has failed.