Hugger Mugger (9 page)

She didn't respond. She was one of those people that,
if you say something they don't understand, they pretend you haven't spoken.

“Come along, Mother,” Penny said. “You really must say hello to Senator Thompson.”

Penny gave me a look over her shoulder as she moved her mother away. I smiled neutrally. I had a beer because I was sure that's how old Walt would have wanted it. I took a small swallow. A black woman in a little maid's suit passed a tray of stuffed mushrooms. I declined. Smoked salmon with endive and a dab of crème fraîche came by. I declined it too. The governor of Georgia came in. He went straight to Dolly, the bereaved mistress, and took her hand in both of his. They spoke briefly. He kissed her cheek. She gestured toward her son, and Jason and the governor shook hands. Dolly's face was pale beneath her perfect makeup, and the attractive smile lines around her mouth were deeper than I remembered.

The rain drummed steadily on the canvas canopy roof, and dripped off the edges in a steady drizzle. Dutch, the family Dalmatian, made his way through the crowd, alert for stuffed mushrooms, and found me and remembered me and wagged his tail. I snagged a little crab cake from the passing tray and handed it to Dutch. He took it from me, gently, and swallowed it whole. I watched Stonie and Cord. They stood together, looking very good, and taking condolences gravely. But when they weren't talking to someone, they didn't talk to each other. It was as if they had been accidentally placed together in a receiving line, one not knowing the other. Pud and SueSue were also receiving
condolences. But they were less grave. In fact they were now drunk. Pud's face was very red. He was sweating. He and SueSue appeared to be arguing between condolences, although SueSue's laughter erupted regularly while she was being condoled. There was a smell of honeysuckle under the canopy and a faint smell of food coming from the kitchen as the hors d'oeuvres were prepared. Dutch sat patiently in front of me and waited for another hors d'oeuvre. I gave him a rye crisp with beef tenderloin on it, and horseradish. He took that in as quickly as he had the crab cake, though he snorted a little at the horseradish.

“You'd eat a dead crow in the street,” I said to him. “And you're snorting at horseradish.”

He pricked his ears a little at me, and waited. Penny came back alone. She was carrying a glass of white wine, though as far as I could tell, she hadn't drunk any.

“I apologize for my mother.”

“No need,” I said.

Penny laughed.

“The last hippie,” she said.

“How are she and Dolly together?” I said.

“We try to see that they're not together,” Penny said.

“Was Dolly in your father's life when Sherry was around?”

“I think so,” she said. “Why do you ask?”

“Occupational habit,” I said.

“I think it's not appropriate right now,” Penny said.

“Of course it isn't.”

“Could you come see me tomorrow, stable office, around ten?”

“Sure,” I said.

Penny smiled to let me know that she wasn't mad, and moved over to a foursome who stood in the doorway looking for the bar. The women were wearing big hats. She kissed all of them and walked with them to the bar. Lightning rippled across the sky over the Clive house and in a few moments thunder followed. A small wind began to stir, and it seemed colder. More lightning. The thunder followed more closely now. Some dogs are afraid of thunder. Dutch wasn't. He was far too single-minded. He nudged my hand. There were no hors d'oeuvres being passed. I took a few peanuts off the bar and fed him. I looked at the crowd, now drunk and happy. It would have been the perfect moment to call for silence and announce that I had solved the case. Except that I hadn't solved the case. So far since I'd been here I hadn't caught the horse shooter, and the guy who hired me had been murdered. I didn't have a clue who was shooting the horses, and I had absolutely no idea who had shot Walter Clive.

Spenser, ace detective.

“I
LIKE YOU
,” Penny said. “And I think you're a smart man.”

“I haven't proved it so far,” I said.

“You've done your best. How can you figure out the mind of a madman.”

“You think all this is the work of a madman?”

“Of course, don't you?”

“Just that occupational knee jerk,” I said. “Somebody says something, I ask a question.”

“I understand,” she said.

We were sitting in the stable office. It was still drizzling outside. The crime scene tape was gone. There was no sign that Walter Clive had died there. The horses were all in their stalls, looking out now and then, but discouraged by the sporadic rain.

“With Daddy's death,” Penny said, “I have the responsibility of running things, and I don't know how it's going to go. Daddy ran so much of this business out of
his hip pocket. Handshakes, personal phone calls, promises made over martinis. I don't know how long it will take me to get control of it all and see where I am.”

“And you have your sisters to support,” I said.

“Their husbands do that,” Penny said.

“And who supports the husbands?”

She dipped her head in acknowledgment.

“I guess they didn't just get their jobs through the help-wanted ads, did they,” she said.

“And I'll bet they couldn't get comparable pay somewhere else,” I said.

“That's unkind,” Penny said.

“But true,” I said.

She smiled.

“But true.”

I waited.

“Look at me sitting at Daddy's desk, in Daddy's office. I feel like a little girl that's snuck in where I shouldn't be.”

“You're where you should be,” I said.

“Thank you.”

We sat.

“This is hard,” Penny said.

I didn't know what “this” was. Penny paused and took in a long breath.

“I'm going to have to let you go,” she said.

I nodded.

“I don't want any but the most necessary expenses. The investigation is in the hands of the police now, and with my father's death, they are fully engaged.”

“I saw the governor at the wake,” I said.

“When it was just some horses, and not terribly valuable ones at that,” Penny said, “no one was working that hard on it. Now that Daddy's been killed . . .”

“It has their attention,” I said. “I can stick around
pro bono
for a while.”

“I couldn't ask you to do that.”

“It's not just for you,” I said. “I don't like having a client shot out from under me.”

“I know, but no. I thank you for what you've done, and for being so decent a man. But I'd prefer that you left this to the police.”

“Okay,” I said.

“Please send me your final bill,” she said.

“Against the private eye rules,” I said. “Your client gets shot, you don't bill his estate.”

“It's not your fault,” she said. “I want a final bill.”

“Sure,” I said.

“You're not going to send one, are you.”

“No.”

I stood. She stood.

“You're a lovely man,” she said. “Would you like to say goodbye to Hugger?”

I had no feelings one way or another about Hugger, but horse people are like that and she'd just called me a lovely man.

“Sure,” I said.

“Give him a carrot,” she said, and handed me one.

We walked in the now more insistent rain along the stable row until we came to Hugger's stall. He looked out, keeping his head stall side of the drip line, his big dark eyes looking, I suspected, far more profound than
he was. I handed him a carrot on my open palm, and he lipped it in. I patted his nose and turned and Penny stood on her tiptoes and put her arms around my neck and gave me a kiss on the lips.

“Take care of yourself,” she said.

“You too,” I said.

The kiss was sisterly, with no heat in it, but she stayed leaning against me, with her arms still around my neck, and her head thrown back so she could look up at me.

“I'm sorry things didn't work out,” she said.

“Me too,” I said.

We stayed that way for a minute. Then she let go of me and stepped back and looked at me for another moment and turned and walked back to the stable office. I watched her go, and then turned the collar of my jacket up to keep the rain off my neck and headed for my car.

I
ARRIVED BACK
in Boston around three-thirty. By quarter to five I was in Susan's living room, showered and shaved and aromatic with aftershave, waiting for her when she got through work. I was sitting on the couch with Pearl, having a drink, when Susan came upstairs from her last patient.

She saw me, and smiled, and said hello, and patted Pearl and gave her a kiss, and walked past us into her bedroom. I could hear the shower, and in about fifteen minutes, Susan reappeared wearing a bath towel. She flipped the towel open and shut, like a flasher.

“Y'all want to get on in heah, Georgia boy?”

“That's the worst southern accent I've ever heard,” I said.

“I know,” she said, “but everything else will be pretty good.”

“How could you be so sure I'd be responsive?” I said. “Maybe I'm tired from the long drive.”

“I'm a psychotherapist,” Susan said. “I know these things.”

“Amazing.”

When we made love, Susan liked to do the same things every time, which was less boring than it sounds, because it included about everything either of us knew how to do. She was also quite intense about it. Sometimes she was so fully in the moment that she seemed to have gone to a place I'd never been. Sometimes it took her several minutes, when we were through, to resurface.

As usual, when she had come back sufficiently, she got up and opened the bedroom door. Pearl came in and jumped on the bed and snuffled around, as if she suspected what might have happened here, and disapproved.

There was the usual jockeying for position before we finally got Pearl out from between us. She settled, as she always did, with a noise that suggested resignation, near the foot of the bed, and curled up and lay still, only her eyes moving as she watched Susan and me reintegrate our snuggle.

“Postcoital languor is more difficult with Pearl,” Susan said.

“But not impossible,” I said.

“Nothing's impossible for us.”

I looked at the familiar form of the crown molding along the edge of Susan's bedroom ceiling. On the dresser was a big color photograph of Susan and me, taken fifteen years ago on a balcony in Paris, not long after she had come back from wherever the hell she had been. We looked pretty happy.

“We were pretty happy in that picture,” I said.

“We had reason to be.”

“Yes.”

“We still do.”

“Yes.”

“Would you be happier now if Mr. Clive hadn't been killed in Georgia?”

“Yes.”

“Even though you were not responsible for him getting killed, nor could you have been expected to prevent it?”

“Yes.”

“Send not therefore asking for whom the bell tolls,” Susan said.

“Well, sometimes,” I said, “it actually does toll for thee.”

“I know.”

“On the other hand,” I said, “we do what we can, not what we ought to.”

“I know.”

“And you can't win 'em all,” I said.

“True.”

“And all that glitters is not gold,” I said.

“And a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush,” Susan said.

“I always thought that saying was sort of backwards,” I said.

I couldn't see her face: it was too close to my neck. But I could feel her smile.

“Well-bred Jewesses from Swampscott, Massachusetts,” she said, “do not lie naked in bed and talk about bushes.”

“Where did you go wrong?” I said.

“I don't know, but isn't it good that I did?”

At the foot of the bed, Pearl lapped one of her forepaws noisily. Susan rubbed my chest lightly with her right hand.

“Is there anything you can do to clean that up in Georgia?” she said.

“No one wants me to,” I said.

“When has that ever made a difference to you?” Susan said.

“I have no client,” I said. “No standing in the case.”

“You think it was the person shooting the horses?”

“Reasonable guess,” I said. “I had no clue who was doing that, and no clue really about where to go next.”

“And?”

“And,” I said, “I've been away from you about as long as I can stand.”

“Good.”

“So I'm going to put this one in the loss column and start thinking about the next game.”

“Wise,” Susan said.

“After all,” I said, “a bush in the hand . . .”

“Never mind,” Susan said.