Diane Davidson - The Main Corpse

We rang. We knocked. We called. The front door was locked, as was the back. Marla traipsed around to a wall lined with windows.

“Albert! Albert Lipscomb!” she shouted. The more Marla called, the sicker Lena looked.

“Isn’t there something else we can do?” Macguire asked me. “The neighbors are going to call the cops if Marla keeps hollering like that.”

“I have a key, just wait a minute,” said Lena. She pawed through her purse and pulled out a key hanging on a chain decorated with a red plastic heart.

Within two minutes, we were all through the front door. Macguire loped up the stairs as if he owned the place. After a moment, he returned, smiling uncertainly.

“I don’t think there’s anybody here,” he reported to us.

As we walked through the first-floor rooms, I tried to calm Tom’s voice in my inner ear, something along the lines of not getting into trouble.

“Albert!” Lena called. “Al! It’s me!” There was no answer.

“Everybody wait here,” said Lena. “I know this place and I … know where Al keeps his things. If anyone’s going to pry, it should be me.”

Marla and I settled in the living room, which was decorated in brown, black, and beige. Along one wall were shelves full of books with fancy names like Driving Venture Capital on the Information Highway.

“Don’t touch anything,” Marla warned.

“We’re already in trouble, just for being here,” I informed her sourly. After the stunts she had pulled in the past few days, this hardly seemed the time for her to advise caution.

Macguire gazed out one of the floor-length windows. “The neighbors came out, anyway. They’re all gathered around like there’s been some kind of accident. Man, people are so nosy,” he said without a trace of irony.

Lena returned, looking even more anxious and ashen-faced than she had outside. Her blond cloud of hair appeared deflated. “He’s gone.” Her voice was vacant. “His suitcase, his clothes…” Her voice cracked. “His passport. We … he and I … He’s gone.”

“What?” Marla shrilled.

Wordlessly, Lena sank into a chair. I walked out to the kitchen, retrieved a Waterford glass from a cabinet, and filled it with water. Maybe I should have filled it with whiskey. Upon my return, Lena looked closer to fainting than when I’d left. She took an absentminded sip of the water, then said: “His closets are empty. His suits are all gone. Ditto his suitcases.”

Macguire interjected with, “Oh, man. I mean, can you believe this?”

“Wait,” I said. “What do you mean, gone? How do you even know where he kept his suitcases?”

“We… used to go to Estes Park together… .” Lena’s voice trailed off:

Marla addressed me tersely. “Call Tom.”

I gave her a helpless look and tried to think. Albert’s clothes and passport were gone? Where was he? “I will call Tom,” I said, “but I can tell you what he’s going to say. The cops won’t take an official missing person’s report yet. They have to wait forty-eight hours.” It was just shy of four o’clock. If Macguire and I didn’t hustle back to my kitchen right now, the Aspen Meadow Women’s Club would be out of luck.

A car honked out front and Macguire leapt to check the window.

“It’s Mr. Royce.”

Marla greeted Tony at the door and gave him the bad news. He choked and then he howled and insisted we were being ridiculous. Albert had to be somewhere around, he said firmly. Lena managed to struggle to her feet and confirm that Albert had absconded.

Tony looked wildly around the room. “There has to be a reason!” he cried. “This is absurd! He must have left a note or something!”

“You and I should go,” I said to Macguire. “We have an appointment to do food.”

“Well,” my ever-committed assistant protested, “who’s going to call the sheriffs department? They should jump right on this.”

I exhaled patiently. No question about it, Macguire was romanticizing police work. Once he spent a couple of months trying to track down drivers’ licenses and reports of missing persons’ vehicles, he’d change his tune.

When we came out to the stone foyer, Marla was slumped on the floor next to Tony. Both faces were studies in misery. Lena kept murmuring into a cellular phone about Albert being gone.

“I’ll call you,” Marla promised me. But she did not. At least, not for the rest of that day, Monday. Macguire and I were so busy with the chicken dinner for the Women’s Club, I didn’t have time to talk anyway. On Tuesday Marla did phone and say Lena had gone through Albert’s files at the office and the house. His datebook revealed nothing unusual planned, except for the partner meeting with Sam Perdue, which Albert missed. Tony confirmed that Albert’s passport and all his best clothes were indeed gone. Albert appeared to have packed and departed in haste. His Explorer was gone. None of the neighbors saw him leave. They hadn’t heard anything either, but of course it had been raining. Probably nobody even wanted to look outside.

Marla didn’t call again on Tuesday. I hoped her silence meant she’d spent most of the day at the hospital doing her rehab, the way she was supposed to. In any event, on Tuesday I was tied up preparing a last-minute vegetarian picnic for the board of the Audubon Society – under porch eaves, because of the rain – and came home so totally wiped out I slept for twelve hours straight. On Wednesday morning, Jake got loose. Arch and I spent several pleasant hours traipsing through damp pines and over soggy grass locating him. On our return, I pondered grinding up his dog biscuits in the disposal.

Marla showed up on my doorstep late Wednesday afternoon. Her frizzy hair was unkempt, and she was not wearing makeup. She was wearing a denim skirt and flowered T-shirt. Both her outfit and her appearance were totally atypical. Her skin, usually peaches and cream, was pale. I was afraid to ask if she was again short of breath.

“May I come in?” Instead of her usual bounciness, she sounded frighteningly subdued.

I invited her to sit down and gave her a glass of Dry Sack. The hand she took it with was trembling. For once it was good to have no jobs. I asked her to stay for dinner. She declined and drank her sherry in silence.

“Let’s go for a walk,” she said finally.

Arch was in the next room. I told him we were leaving. Even though the sun was finally shining intermittently through towers of white cumulus clouds, I put on a slicker, tossed Tom’s raincoat over Marla’s shoulders, and picked up two umbrellas. It would be good for Marla to walk. We emerged into the cool, wet-scented air.

I waved to a few neighbors as we moved down the sidewalk. Now that the rain had momentarily let up, the entire neighborhood, it seemed, was either out in their gardens putting in flowers, or out on their decks trying to soak up a little sun, dermatologists be damned.

“I feel totally depressed,” Marla offered glumly as we rounded the corner and started up a graveled foopath put in by some earnest Boy Scouts about ten years previously. The path was lined with pine trees and white-barked aspens, their buds still tightly closed because of the late spring. A sudden burst of sunshine made raindrops glisten sharply on each pine needle.

“What’s going on?” I asked. “Did Albert Lipscomb ever show up?”

“No.” She chuckled bitterly. Her fingers brushed pine needles and sent a shower of drops onto the gravel. “No indeedy. Tony filed the missing person report. this morning. The cops started looking for credit card usage, the usual. The Denver police department is mobilized now, too.” She took a deep breath, then moaned, “Oh, God.”

I tried to think. Had Tom mentioned anything unusual going on at the department? He had been tied up testifying in a forgery case he’d been working on for over a year. But I hadn’t heard a thing about what was going on at the department except for the usual complaints about Captain Shockley.