An Owl Too Many (6 page)

“In every particular, Miss Binks.”

Fanshaw had been lying perfectly still, keeping his eye on the gavel. Now he reacted as though he’d been given a dose of strychnine: his face turned purple, his back arched till only his head and heels were touching the floor. Then he went limp and didn’t say a word.

Peter and Winifred observed the phenomenon without comment. After a moment, the latter asked, “Shall you need help getting him into your car?”

Peter shook his head. “I think you and I can manage him. His feet are tied so that he can’t run, but he should be able to walk after a fashion and perhaps with a modicum of persuasion. Fortunately I’m—er—packing my rod. Would you care to get up, Mr. Fanshaw, or shall I start persuading?”

Without waiting for an answer, Peter jerked the prisoner to his feet, turned him around, and set him hobbling toward the door. “You’re coming, aren’t you, Miss Binks?”

“Oh yes, I wouldn’t miss it. Mr. Fanshaw and I will do nicely in the back seat. Once we’ve got him fastened into his seat belt, I’ll just nip back and leave a note for Viola and Knapweed. I may as well fetch the gavel while I’m about it, don’t you think? You wouldn’t care to mess up your nice upholstery with a lot of bullet holes. Sorry, I should have thought of the gavel before we came out.”

“That’s quite all right, Miss Binks, I’m sure Ottermole would rather have Mr. Fanshaw rapped than riddled.”

Peter was relieved that his mere allusion to a firearm had been enough to cow Fanshaw into cooperating. In fact he didn’t own one and was carrying nothing more potentially lethal than the horn-handled jackknife his father had given him on his tenth birthday. He drove as fast as he dared to Balaclava Junction and pulled up in front of the trim white frame house with the blue trimmings and the star cutouts in the shutters, where Edna Mae and Fred ran their tight little ship. Half a second later, Cronkite Swope pulled in behind them.

“Hi, Professor! I phoned here and Mrs. Ottermole said you were on your way, so I thought I’d buzz over and see what’s cooking. Our darkroom guy says your film is coming out great, Miss Binks. Hey, what’s that you got in your car?”

“A present for Ottermole,” said Peter. “Mr. Fanshaw’s not talking to us, perhaps he’ll open up for you. Slide in and be ready to bop him with this gavel if he tries anything funny while I go to the door. Would you care to join me, Miss Binks?”

“With pleasure. I have a recipe for sassafras jelly that Edna Mae wants to try.” Winifred picked up her tote bag and preceded Peter into the house, leaving Swope happily taking angle shots of the man in the back seat.

Fred Ottermole was out of bed and into a fancy bathrobe, being plied with coffee and jelly doughnuts by his solicitously hovering spouse as he sat in an armchair reading the comics to his four young sons: one in his lap, two perched on the arms of the chair, and one doing handstands on the back. Peter hated to disturb so charming a tableau of family life, but duty called.

“Sorry to interrupt you, Ottermole, but there’s a delivery for you out in my car. Is your lockup available for use?”

“Far as I know. How’d you make out last night, Professor?”

Peter could see that Fred was all wound up to brag about his own owl count, but now was not the time. “That’s what I came to talk to you about. I gather you haven’t heard about Emory Emmerick?”

“Emmerick who? Hey, you don’t mean that new guy over at the field station? What happened to him?”

“He’s been—er—netted. You’d better get dressed and shaved, Ottermole. I expect Swope will be wanting to take your picture.”

“WHAT DO YOU SUPPOSE
he’ll do now?” asked Miss Binks.

She and Peter had helped Ottermole get the alleged Fanshaw tucked away in the village lockup. Now they were on their way to tear Helen away from her literary pursuits and treat her to lunch at the Plucked Chicken, a fairly soigné new eatery that Bathsheba Monk and her sister-in-law Gert had opened in what had formerly been Bouncing Bet’s Beauty Barn.

“Fanshaw?” said Peter. “He’ll yell for his lawyer.

“Oh dear!” Miss Binks’s long face grew longer. “That reminds me, I was supposed to meet Mr. Debenham—my own lawyer, you know—and some of those people from Grandfather’s trust in my office at half past eleven. It completely slipped my mind. Understandably enough, I suppose, but they must be there now, wondering where I am.”

“Maybe they forgot, too,” Peter consoled her.

“Not a chance. Lawyers don’t break appointments with clients as rich as I am. If that sounds a trifle cynical, I assure you it’s meant to. May we stop at your house and give them a buzz to say I’ll be along shortly? That is, if you’ll be kind enough to take me. Perhaps Helen would like to ride out with us, then you and she can go along to lunch together. I shan’t ask you to wait, you know what lawyers are like.”

That Winifred Binks could break the appointment herself would never have crossed her mind, Peter realized. Mr. Debenham and the people from the trust had, after all, given up their Saturday to her when they might have been out playing croquet or at home polishing their writs of attainder. Himself trained to put duty before pleasure, Peter agreed without demur and drove on to the old rosy brick house on the Crescent where his wife, as it turned out, was entertaining another man.

“President, I’m glad you’re here,” he lied. “We’ve had some interesting developments. You’d better go make your phone call, Miss Binks. Tell them we’ll be along as soon as we can. Helen, would you care to drive out to the field station with us? We’d intended to take you to lunch, but Miss Binks remembered she’s supposed to meet with her lawyers. Maybe you and I could—”

“Shandy!” roared Svenson. “Developments.”

“M’er, yes. Putting it in a nutshell, Emmerick was an impostor. Nobody at the Meadowsweet Construction Company ever heard of him. When I took Miss Binks back to the field station this morning, another one showed up calling himself Fanshaw and pretending to be Emmerick’s superior. He clammed up when he heard Emmerick was dead, so we arrested him and delivered him to Ottermole.”

“But couldn’t you get anything at all out of him?” Helen demanded.

“Nary a yip. Fanshaw was genuinely surprised to find out about Emmerick, I’d bet my Sunday boots on that. Cronkite Swope’s been taking his picture, we’ll get one over to the state police and maybe they can get an identification. Fred Ottermole’s handling that end of the business. Maybe you ought to stroll down to the station and see how he’s making out, President.”

Peter had already inquired of Officer Dorkin, who’d been holding the desk while his chief slumbered, whether there’d been any report from the barracks. Dorkin could only tell him that the alleged Emmerick had in fact been stabbed through the back of the neck, which didn’t get them anywhere that he could see. Peter had made the suggestion mainly in the hope of getting Svenson off their backs, he might have known it wouldn’t work.

“I’ll go with you,” the big man grunted. “Might snare another impostor.”

“I should hardly think so,” Peter demurred, but of course it didn’t do any good.

The upshot was that Helen decided to stay home and work on her article because her editor was growing snappish. Miss Binks mentioned a trifle fretfully that she hoped they might get started soon because those lawyers had already been cooling their heels at the station for the past half hour. While she didn’t much care about Mr. Sopwith and his minion, she was solicitous for Mr. Debenham, who’d been kind to her even when she hadn’t had two cents to rub together.

Thorkjeld Svenson offered to drive, but Peter had fortitude enough left not to let him. “No, you don’t, President. My hair’s falling out fast enough already. Sit in back and rest your brain.”

By the time they got to the field station, Peter was beginning to understand how a long-distance bus driver must feel at the end of an imperfect day, even though this day was just hitting its stride. At least, as Miss Binks had prophesied, her visitors were still waiting. She entered the lobby briskly but without undue haste and didn’t strain herself on the apologies. She then turned to young Calthrop, who sat at the long table picking at an alien Tyrol knapweed with a pair of needle-pointed tweezers.

“Where has Viola gone?”

“She said she felt like a walk. She’s coming back to check the rain gauges and fill the bird feeders.”

“Good, they need it. Oh dear, that wretched red squirrel’s caught inside the big feeding station again. You’d better go find her and help her cope before he tears it apart trying to get out. Now, gentlemen, what is it you want to talk to me about? I mustn’t waste too much of your time.”

“Ah, could we go into your office?”

Mr. Sopwith, the speaker, had recently inherited from a retired senior officer managership of the immense estate which the late Jeremiah Binks had left in trust for his granddaughter. He looked to Peter like the sort of banker who ought to have a heavy gold watch chain strung across his paunch and his thumbs stuck into the armholes of his waistcoat. It was disappointing to find him in flannels and a sports jacket with a discreet but perceptible windowpane check. The garb, Peter supposed, had been selected to remind Miss Binks that Mr. Sopwith was giving up his Saturday in her interests. Debenham, on the other hand, wore a dark business suit much like the suits Peter himself generally wore on occasions when work pants and a flannel shirt wouldn’t be quite the thing.

Sopwith had brought along a small, slim, silent individual in unbecoming brown with a self-effacing tie. This was Mr. Tangent, accountant for the trust. Mr. Tangent was carrying a ledger, a couple of file folders, and one of those colored booklets with plastic pages in which presentations to important clients are apt to be arranged. Miss Binks’s was green, perhaps in deference to her ecological interests, or to celebrate the magnitude of her inheritance, or possibly even in tribute to her late grandfather. Or else, Peter mused, since he liked to examine all sides of a question, because green was the color of the one they happened to have kicking around the office.

Getting back to the subject of offices, Sopwith’s suggestion that they adjourn to Miss Binks’s was plainly an attempt to exclude Dr. Shandy and President Svenson from the discussion. Winifred was having none of that. She seated herself at the table near the big windows that was used for such things as examining architects’ plans, mounting specimens for the museum, drinking dandelion-root coffee, eating daylily-pollen muffins, and sundry other activities, and motioned for the men to join her.

“Let’s stay right here, why lug chairs around if we don’t have to? Dr. Svenson, you’d better sit beside me and lend a few extra fingers to count on. I’m hopeless at arithmetic. All right, Mr. Sopwith, what’s so pressing?”

“It’s a question of your portfolio.”

“But I thought my investments were doing quite nicely.”

“On the whole, they are,” Sopwith conceded. “Tangent, show Miss Binks the figures.”

Silently the accountant handed over the green folder, open to a pageful of figures. Winifred scanned it, then nodded to Dr. Svenson. “Satisfactory, on the whole, wouldn’t you say, President?” she said. “But there’s one I want to get rid of right away.”

“Ah yes,” Sopwith replied. “You’re referring, of course, to Golden Apples. You doubtless recall my mentioning to you a while back that the company, while holding steady and continuing to pay a small dividend, hasn’t increased its profits for the past several years. This is a very shaky situation, Miss Binks. I strongly suggest we dump Golden Apples before it takes a nosedive and reinvest the proceeds in a company that offers a more satisfactory return.”

“Indeed?” said Winifred. “And what would you recommend?”

“Well, I’ve given that question a good deal of thought. Considering that Golden Apples is a packer and distributor of what are currently known as—ah—natural foods, and considering the current popular interest in healthful nutrition, I should say we ought to reinvest your proceeds with a similar company in which you already have a relatively small holding. Lackovites is a younger, more aggressive firm which has leaped far ahead of Golden Apples in sales during the past few years. Show Miss Binks the figures on Lackovites, Tangent.”

Wordlessly the accountant opened one of his file folders and handed the heiress a balance sheet on Lackovites. She took a cursory glance and handed it over to Svenson.

“Very impressive, but they fail to show one factor which you also don’t appear to have taken into account, Mr. Sopwith. You mentioned Golden Apples once before. Since then, I’ve done a bit of looking into the matter myself. I find that Golden Apples products are highly regarded by nutritionists as being of exceptional quality and flavor. The company’s packaging, distribution, and advertising leave much to be desired. This seems to be because their rigidly maintained quality standards require them to buy top-quality ingredients that raise their overhead and eat into their profit margin, leaving them without the capital to compete aggressively. The consequence is that while they hold on to their customers, they don’t attract enough new ones.”

“That’s why I—”

“Let me finish, Mr. Sopwith. Lackovites, on the other hand, has superb packaging, extensive advertising, and an extremely aggressive sales force. They’ve been taking advantage of that growing interest in natural foods you mentioned to attract a great many new customers, and they’ve been succeeding so far because people are often too ready to accept ballyhoo as fact. However, the word’s begun to get around that their so-called secret magic ingredients are mainly cornstarch and sawdust. Inferior-grade sawdust, at that.”

“But Miss Binks—”

“In short, Mr. Sopwith, that Lackovites bunch are nothing but a pack of opportunists out to make a killing. They can still attract customers but they can’t keep them because their goods are deplorably bad, and I’m mortally ashamed to have any connection with them. What I want you to do the very first thing Monday morning, Mr. Sopwith, is to dump every share of Lackovites I own before the market starts to fall, and reinvest every penny in Golden Apples.”