Маргарет Миллар - The Murder of Miranda

“Grady Keaton. Is he one of them?”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“Why? Because we love each other. And I must explain to him that whatever I did was for the two of us, so we could be together.”

“I think we should avoid bringing Grady into the case if we can,” Aragon said.

“What difference does it make?”

“It may seem peculiar in this day and age, but juries are more likely to vote for a conviction if sexual misconduct is involved. The events leading up to and down from Pasoloma — or down to and up from if you want to be geographical — can do you a lot of harm.”

“I want to see Grady.”

“I’m advising you not to, for the time being anyway. If you have a message for him, let me deliver it.”

She was silent for a long time, staring at the blank grey wall as though it were her window on the world.

“I love him,” she said finally. “Tell him I love him and when all this silly fuss is over we’ll be together again.”

The front doors of the club were propped open with rubber wedges and taped with Fresh Paint signs. There was no one in the office. Aragon walked in unchallenged.

Under a shroud of late-summer fog the terrace was deserted and in the pool only one swimmer was visible, a large woman moving slowly through the water like an overloaded barge.

In the corridor Walter Henderson, the manager, was occupied at the bulletin board tacking up some of the pictures from the last party, a backgammon and bingo tournament. By Henderson’s standards it had been a dull affair, with a great deal of confusion about who was playing what, and he was trying to plan something more dynamic for the next theme party, which would fall on Halloween. Since the social-events committee had vetoed any more money for decorations, he was working on a clever way to use the life-sized plastic skeletons from the previous Halloween. A Gallows Gala might be effective, with each of the skeletons dressed as a famous murderer or murderee and strategically placed throughout the club and its grounds, hanging from the diving tower and from a limb of the cypress tree (very effective if there was a decent wind), peeking into the ballroom windows from the oleander hedge, even sitting on one of the toilets in the ladies’ powder room. (What delicious screams — he could hear them now: Help, help!)

—“could help me,” Aragon said.

Henderson was jolted back to reality as the skeletons fell from the diving tower and out of the tree and off the toilet. “Oh, damn. What do you want?”

“I’m looking for Ellen Brewster.”

“She’s in the office.”

“No.”

“Well, she’s supposed to be in the office. But of course, that doesn’t mean a thing around here. Try the snack bar. She’s been drinking coffee by the gallon lately.”

“Thanks.”

Aragon went down the corridor to the snack bar. A couple of the tables were occupied by boys and girls in tennis costume. Little Frederic Quinn was among them, his tennis racket stuck in the back of his sweater in order to leave his hands free for shooting straws out of their paper sheaths. He acknowledged Aragon’s presence by shooting a straw at him. It missed.

Ellen was sitting at a corner table with a pot of tea in front of her and a doughnut with a bite taken out of it. She looked cold.

He said, “May I sit down?”

“I guess.”

“Anything the matter?”

“I hate the summer fogs. They depress me. Winter fogs are natural, you expect them and you’re depressed anyway and — Oh hell, the fog has nothing to do with it. I feel lousy, that’s all.”

“Sorry.”

“Why did you come here?”

“To see Grady,” Aragon said. “I have a message for him.”

“Really? Well, you’re about forty-eight hours too late. He took off as soon as he heard the news about Miranda. Oh, I think he wanted to leave anyway, I could see him getting restless, bored. Miranda’s arrest simply brought it to a head. He was afraid she’d drag him into it and the whole business about the Porsche would come out and maybe a lot of other stuff as well.”

“Do you know where he went?”

“He didn’t leave a forwarding address. He just patted me on the head, told me I was a nice girl and packed his bags.” She had begun crumbling the doughnut and rolling the pieces into greasy little pills. “Want to hear something funny? I lent him fifty dollars.”

Frederic aimed a straw in her direction. It hit her on the side of the head but she paid no attention.

“Tell Miranda,” she said, “tell her he wanted to say goodbye to her but he had to leave right away because a chance for a decent job came up very suddenly. In Oklahoma.”

“A chance for a job came up very suddenly in Oklahoma.”

“Yes.”

“She won’t believe it.”

“Why not?” Ellen said. “I did.”

The indictment and arrest of Miranda also led to some less predictable events.

In early fall Cordelia, free of the restraint of her mother and to a large extent of the Admiral, who was preoccupied, bought an Aston-Martin guaranteed by the dealer to go one hundred and thirty miles an hour. Anxious to determine the accuracy of this claim, Cordelia chose for the test a side road that was practically deserted. When she floored the accelerator, only one other car was in sight, but unfortunately it belonged to an off-duty patrolman.

Cordelia’s defense was that nearly everything in the Aston-Martin was computerized and something must have gone wrong with the circuits controlling the speedometer. Her driver’s license was revoked anyway and she took up bicycling. Clad in matching jogging suits and plastic helmets the girls pedaled around town on a bright red tandem equipped with a horn on the main handlebars for Cordelia and a bell at the rear for Juliet.

Juliet had some criticism of this arrangement, which pretty well limited her view: “Your behind is enormous.”

“What do I care,” Cordelia said. “I’m in front.”

In late September, Frederic Quinn was, for a price, reinstated at Sophrosune School. For his first report in Social Studies class he chose a black widow spider. After spending two days (and a hundred and fifty demerits) in the search he found a specimen underneath a gopher trap in the garage and brought it to school in his sister April’s Lucite earring box. By this time the spider had lost a couple of legs and considerable joie de vivre as well as joie de tuer. However, the red hourglass on its abdomen was still visible, identifying it as dangerous.

“Get that damn thing out of here,” the teacher said. “You’re supposed to be making your report on a current event from the newspaper.”

“I am. It was in all the newspapers how a woman I know personally was arrested for murder just like a black widow spider stinging her mate to death, only it wasn’t her mate—”

“Put it in the wastebasket.”

“This is my sister’s best earring box. She’ll kill me.”

“You have a choice,” the teacher said. “Her or me.”

It was in mid-November, after Miranda’s trial had been postponed for a third time, that Charles Van Eyck received the letter from Tokyo. He didn’t know anyone in Tokyo, and those of his acquaintances financially able to travel in the Orient were no longer physically able.

There was no doubt, however, that the letter was meant for him. The envelope was neatly typed Charles Maas Van Eyck, 84 °Camino Azur, Santa Felicia, California, and even the zip code was correct. Still he hesitated to open it. At his age bad news outnumbered good by a considerable margin and he felt it would be wise to prepare himself for the worst with a glass of the best. He poured himself half a tumbler of Scotch from the decanter in his den.