An Owl Too Many (9 page)

Hers was already the true beauty of spirit and intellect, and then there was all that money. Might a tale of rival passions explain Emmerick’s sudden demise? Peter thought not; but there again, one never knew. He bade the hypothetical siren an affectionate good-bye, threw a curt nod in the general direction of the sulky Knapweed, and prepared to take the still visibly upset Viola to her place of abode.

Fortunately the distressed damsel was boarding over in Lumpkin Corners, which was more or less on Peter’s way home. He saw her safely to her landlady’s presence, realized he was starving since he’d had nothing since breakfast except one daylily-pollen muffin, and debated the advisability of stopping at the Plucked Chicken for something to eat.

No, he’d wait till he got home. He wanted that shirt, he wanted the familiar hospitality of his own kitchen, most of all he wanted Helen. He was more than a little distressed to find Jane Austen in sole charge of the domicile and a note on the kitchen, counter telling him that Helen was up at the college library doing some research for her paper.

Feeling bereft and exhausted, Peter fixed himself a salami sandwich and took a bottle of beer out of the refrigerator. He carried them upstairs for company while he changed into a somber brown-and-gray flannel shirt to match his mood and added a thick gray cardigan to warm him up. There was by now a decided nip in the air; running around in his underwear had raised a pretty fair crop of goose bumps, even though he’d kept the heater on in the car. He scribbled a PS to Helen’s message saying he’d be in the hoosegow should she care to drop around with some hot soup and a file, and went on down to the police station.

Officer Dorkin, whom Peter had known as Budge ever since the days when he’d been the boy who mowed the Shandy lawn, was not supposed to be on duty now but didn’t intend to miss out on the excitement. Fred Ottermole and the large tiger cat named Edmund who belonged to Mrs. Lomax up around the corner but liked to hang out with the boys in blue were also waiting for Peter in the office, and welcomed him as one of their own.

“Fanshaw’s in there with his lawyer.”

Ottermole jerked his head toward the other half of the police station, another small room behind the office. As the town lockup, it boasted bars dating from the Civil War era. Indoor plumbing had been installed during the Coolidge administration. The interior and the exterior woodwork of the small brick building had been given fresh paint by a WPA work party under the aegis of Franklin D. Roosevelt. Thus the Balaclava Junction Police Station was not without historical interest; although Fanshaw’s lawyer, when he was let out of the lockup, appeared to be unimpressed.

“I wouldn’t keep a dog in this place,” he remarked testily.

“I wouldn’t either,” Ottermole reassured him. “So what’s your verdict? Are you planning to try for bail or do we bung your guy along to the county jail?”

“You have nothing on which to hold Mr. Fanshaw.”

“The hell we haven’t.” Ottermole reached for a zipper.

The lawyer took a giant step backward. “This is harassment!”

“What’s harassment? Me getting out my handkerchief so I won’t sneeze in your face?” The chief did in fact produce a real linen one, exquisitely clean, freshly ironed, bearing his monogram in the corner, hand-worked by Edna Mae in blue with a little pair of handcuffs underneath. “Sorry, it’s the cat, though I hate to say so in front of him. Edmund’s sensitive.”

“So is my client sensitive.” The lawyer was a scrapper, Peter decided, you had to hand it to him. “What was the big idea, bringing every kid in town to gawk at him?”

“Those were my kids.”

“All seventeen of them?”

“Only the first four,” Fred admitted. “The rest are in my Sunday-school class. They came on a field trip to learn what happens to guys who go around bearing false witness, like your so-called Mr. Fanshaw in there. For your information, the Meadowsweet Construction Company’s going to stick Fanshaw with a charge of misrepresenting himself as a member of their staff as soon as we get through sticking him with whatever we’re going to stick him for, like maybe accessory to murder. I’ve got every right to hold him on suspicion and that’s just what I’m doing. So shove that in your habeas corpus, mister!”

“Well, you didn’t have to take away his belt and shoelaces.”

“Sure we did. That’s how we get all our belts and shoelaces. Save a penny here, a penny there, it adds up. Look, we’ve got work to do if you don’t mind. Why don’t you drop back tomorrow around noontime and bring some Chinese food? Edmund’s partial to bean sprouts. Aren’t you, old buddy?”

Ottermole rubbed the big cat’s head, Edmund put out a paw and flexed his talons. The lawyer started to say something. Edmund hissed. The lawyer got a good look at his fringe of fangs and backed toward the door.

“I’ll be back, all right,” he snarled.

“Wear your shin guards next time. Edmund’s hell on pant legs.”

The door slammed. Fred Ottermole grinned. “Cripes, if I wasn’t chief, I’d arrest myself for disorderly conduct. Help yourself to Emmerick’s luggage, Professor, it’s all right there beside my desk. Edmund’ll keep an eye on you. Budge and I’d better check on the prisoner, he may need to go to the kitty box or something. Not that he’d tell us if he did, he’s still not talking.”

“Not even to the lawyer?”

“Oh, he talked to him, I guess. Budge and I weren’t supposed to listen, so we switched on the TV and watched a demolition derby for a while. It was depressing as hell. There wasn’t a car on the course that didn’t look to be in better shape than our cruiser, not even the wrecked ones.”

“Hey, Chief, how about if I enter the next race driving the cruiser and see if I can win us the price of a new one?” Budge Dorkin volunteered.

“Why not? It’s our only hope. Turned up anything, Professor?”

“I don’t know yet. Go ahead and tend to your prisoner, why don’t you?”

Ottermole and his officer went into the lockup, Peter squatted on the floor and opened Emmerick’s suitcases. They were crammed with what looked to Peter like pretty spiffy clothing for a soi-disant site engineer to be toting around. On top of a sumptuous Turkish toweling bathrobe bearing the monogram of a luxury hotel, Ottermole had dumped a bunch of papers, most of them building-trade publications intended, no doubt, to lend credence to Emmerick’s role. One loose sheet of paper caught Peter’s eye; not because of its content, which was only an advertisement from an expensive gentlemen’s outfitter, but because of a doodle in the margin.

Somebody, presumably Emmerick himself, had executed a sketch of a stemmed dish that Helen would have called a compotier and Mrs. Lomax simply a compote. He’d filled it with crudely drawn apples and carefully colored in each penciled circle with one of those yellow markers that Peter’s students used to spotlight the paragraphs in their textbooks that they thought he’d be likely to quiz them on. Peter deplored the practice; in his undergraduate days, students had kept their textbooks clean in order to increase their resale value. Peddling your own last term’s books was your best chance of having money enough to buy somebody else’s leftovers next semester.

But such maunderings were beside the point. To Peter today, such a dishful of such a fruit could mean just one thing. What would a man who’d been passing himself off as an employee of a construction company have had to do with a food-packing firm called Golden Apples, run by a family named Compote?

Such hairs as were left on the back of Peter’s neck began to prickle. Who was Emmerick, anyway? Could it possibly be only a coincidence that Sopwith should have taken time out of his weekend to raise a question about Miss Binks’s majority holdings in Golden Apples on the very morning after the man who’d apparently made this doodle had been so bizarrely murdered? Or that the bird now caged in the next room had come looking for Emmerick, too?

One must not jump to conclusions. Maybe Emmerick had merely been a compulsive doodler of compotiers full of golden apples. People did have pet doodles. Peter himself was partial to fat rabbits. Rabbits were easy enough, one simply made a big circle for the body and a smaller one for the head, then added ears, whiskers, and two dots for eyes. Sometimes he attached legs, sometimes he didn’t, depending on his creative mood of the moment. Sometimes he drew his rabbits back-to, omitting the eyes and scribbling a fluffy round scut in the appropriate place.

Helen drew daisies in the grass with fleecy summer clouds overhead, frequently adding butterflies with triangular wings and long, curly antennae. Occasionally Helen also added bumblebees, though she drew the bees disproportionately large in order to make room for googly eyes and horizontal stripes. Helen was always meticulous about the feelers with little knobs on the ends and the fuzzy legs hanging down. Helen really spread herself when it came to bumblebees, Peter thought fondly.

He reminded himself that compotes, not bumblebees, were the issue at hand. Further search of Emmerick’s effects revealed no evidence that the man had been a frequent doodler of compotes. He didn’t seem to have been any great shakes as a doodler, by and large; all the others Peter could find were prosaic squares, rhomboids, and equilateral triangles such as might reasonably have been expected from an engineer, even a fake one. Emmerick had drawn these with precision and shaded them in carefully, often using a different-colored pen. So his having used yellow on the apples would not have been out of character, Peter supposed.

However, the only pens Peter could find were a red one and a blue one. Red and blue were the colors most frequently used on the squares, rhomboids, and triangles, although a few doodles were red and black, along with one or two that were blue and black. Emmerick might have taken the black pen with him on the owl walk to make notes with. It seemed hardly likely, however, that he’d have carried a yellow marker, unless he’d picked it up by mistake thinking it was a roll of lemon-flavored Life Savers.

There was, as far as a determined search could reveal, no yellow marker among the stuff Ottermole had brought from the inn. No yellow had been used on any of the geometric doodles. One could deduce from this that Emmerick had drawn the dishful of golden apples before coming to Balaclava under false colors; ergo, that Golden Apples had been the real reason why he’d come. One might even be correct in one’s deduction. Then again, one might be altogether wrong. It behooved one to get a line on Emmerick’s true identity before one started deducing anything at all.

About all Peter could say of Emmerick so far was that he’d taken his wardrobe seriously, that his tastes had been expensive, though, by Peter’s standards, somewhat outré, and that he had in fact indulged a secret passion for Life Savers. However, the flavor he’d fancied was not lemon but root beer. Peter had excavated no fewer than eighteen rolls, these from sundry pockets, most of them opened and more or less depleted. Emmerick had kept a bottle of bourbon, no doubt for medicinal purposes; Peter didn’t see anything outré about that.

Emmerick had lied about the car he’d been driving. He’d claimed it belonged to the Meadowsweet Construction Company and was a perquisite of his position. Documentary evidence now revealed that he’d rented the vehicle from the Happy Wayfarer rental car service over in Clavaton only one day before he’d arrived at the field station.

How Emmerick had got to Clavaton was a question but would not have been a problem. He could have flown to Boston or the Hartford-Springfield Airport and taken a bus or a taxi from there. He could have bummed a ride from some easily gulled motorist, or hijacked a motorcycle with a sidecar for his luggage. He could have been ferried under cover of darkness in an unmarked van by a sinister accomplice with one eye and a nasty scar. He could have been let down on a rope from a hovering helicopter. He could have paddled up the Connecticut River in his little red canoe and made an overland portage to the Clavaclammer, which was Balaclava County’s one truly navigable waterway; though Peter doubted he had.

The car-rental place listed New York City as Emmerick’s place of abode. Peter assumed the state police must still have his driver’s license along with whatever else they’d taken from his pockets when they’d carted him off in the ambulance. Perhaps they also had that yellow marker. Ottermole had better deputize Professor Shandy to go and collect these effects, they ought to be kept with the rest of this stuff until it could all be turned over to the next of kin, or the county district attorney, or whomever protocol decreed. Monday would be time enough for that, unless Ottermole got sick of tripping over the suitcases.

Speaking of Ottermole, what in tunket were he and Budge doing in there all this time? Giving the prisoner a flea bath? Peter stood up, eased the kinks out of his legs, and poked his head around the corner. The door to the lockup stood wide open, as did the bathroom window. Side by side on the iron cot that was its sole furnishing sat Fred Ottermole and Budge Dorkin. They were playing cat’s cradle with a piece of string, and making a thorough mess of it. The prisoner was nowhere in sight.

“
WHAT THE FLAMING PERDITION
do you two clowns think you’re up to?”

“Huh?” Fred Ottermole looked up at Peter, his face blank as a new police blotter. “Oh hi, Professor. What’s cookin’?”

“Where’s Fanshaw?”

“Who?”

“Your prisoner, drat it.”

“What prisoner?”

“Great balls of fire! Ottermole, do you know what you’re doing?”

“Sure, playin’ checkers. We often do. No harm in it, is there?”

“This is checkers?”

“Isn’t it?” A note of doubt had crept into the chief’s voice. He stared at his hands, snared in the string that Budge Dorkin was still patiently and senselessly winding in and out through their wildly conjoined fingers. “What the hell? Budge, what do you think you’re doing?”

“Huh?”

The young officer had the same blank look on his face as Ottermole’s had shown. He quit trying to do whatever it was he’d thought he was doing, but didn’t do anything else. Peter reached down and began trying to disentangle their hands.