Mallets Aforethought (33 page)

At last, Trooper Colgate took the long curve into town with the casual flair of a man who is accustomed to hundred-mile-an-hour highway pursuits.

Swiftly I explained to Wade. “Bonnet’s going to be charged with three murders and a whole raft of other stuff as soon as we get there. So . . .”

“He is, huh? Well, then, hang on a minute.” He put the phone down; then his voice came from a distance.

“. . . Will? C’mere a minute. Yeah, just stand right there.”

Next came the flat, meaty
swock!
of a fist connecting hard, the crash of a chair overturning, and the
thud
of someone hitting the hardwood floor.

Finally Wade came back on. “I don’t think our pal Will is going anywhere for the foreseeable future.”

“Oh, good. See you soon,” I said.

We drove some more. Fast, but not quite as fast as before since Hollis Colgate apparently had just as much confidence in Wade’s right hook as I did.

“What I don’t understand is why Eva Thane killed those three girls,” I said. Partly it was to take my mind off the rate at which we were still rocketing along, light-speed being only a bit less terrifying than warp-speed.

Colgate chuckled. “You know, I’ve been hoping for a chance to talk to you about that. Because her name sounded familiar to me and I couldn’t figure out why. But eventually it hit me, so I called my mom in Lewiston and she reminded me.”

“Your mom knew Eva Thane? But . . .”

“Nope. My mom’s not old enough. But her mom did. Eva Thane was a Lewiston girl.”

“Ohh,” I breathed, beginning to understand.

“And Eva was not a poster girl for mental health,” Colgate went on. “Not,” he added, “that she had any reason to be. She had a family right out of a Tennessee Williams play. Booze, incest, the whole nine yards.”

I turned curiously, thinking of Colgate reading Tennessee Williams. It is absolutely astonishing what people find to do in the winters around here.

“And she’d done it before,” I guessed. “Killed someone. And that’s why she ran.”

“Yup.” He slowed at last for the speed zone across from Bay City Mobil. “She’d wangled herself a boyfriend from the rich side of town. Figured he was her ticket out, I suppose.”

“But then another girl butted in?”

Colgate nodded. “That’s the story my grandmother told. Eva took care of that problem with the blunt end of a fire axe. Then she got scared, I guess, and took off.”

We crested the Washington Street hill and headed downtown past the white-clapboard Methodist Church and the granite-block Post Office. Out on the water some little sailboats were having the season’s last regatta, bucking a stiff, cold breeze.

“Eva must’ve latched onto Chet Harlequin somehow,” Colgate continued, “charmed his socks off. She was good at that. But from what I understand, police were about to move in on her here in Eastport when she vanished again.”

A spindrift of grit and the last of the summer’s cheerful litter whirled lonesomely in the middle of Water Street. Colgate turned right, up Key Street toward my house.

“And that,” he finished, “was the last anyone ever heard of her until now.”

“Huh. Poor Eva,” I said.

He glanced at me. “Sure,” he replied, his voice hardening in a trooperish way. “I guess you could think of it like that.”

Moments later Colgate swung into my driveway. By the time I got my seat belt off he was striding toward the house and the handcuffs were already unclipped from his utility belt. He passed Wade as Wade half ran to the squad car but didn’t stop to talk.

“Okay, take it slow,” Wade warned me, opening the passenger door and catching me as I fell out. “You,” he added as he wrapped his arms around me, “have had quite a day for yourself.”

“Is Ellie okay?”

He nodded. “She’s going to the hospital in a minute, so she can be there when George arrives. Victor called the ambulance guys, they’re transferring George up to Calais from Machias Hospital so Victor can check him out. But they say he seems fine, so in a little while we can all go up there, too.”

In the kitchen, Trooper Colgate hauled a groggy Will Bonnet up off the floor and snapped the cuffs onto him, and recited the warning. “Anything you say can and will be used . . .”

But the warning wasn’t needed. The shock of being found out must have paralyzed Will’s vocal cords because for once he didn’t have anything to say. He just cast a surly glare at us as the cop muscled him roughly out.

We all watched him go; all but Ellie, who seemed preoccupied with something else, her brow knit into a frown of concentration.

She got up, walked in a circle, and sat down again. “I’m not going in the car,” she announced. “To the hospital.”

“But why not?” The dogs had romped joyously up to greet me, their nails clicking on the hardwood floor, and even Cat Dancing uttered a grudging meow from her usual perch.

Ellie took a breath, let it out slowly. “You’re sure George is okay? And you are, too? Your poor hands.”

They were raw meat. “Never mind that. I’m sure. But Ellie, what’s wrong with you?”

As I peered at her it occurred to me that in the space of a few hours I’d been drugged, tied, and walled up in a room, not to mention my experience with a stomach-emptying concoction that for prompt, effective action, I’d rank right up there with dynamite.

But compared to the way she looked I was fresh as a daisy.

“I’m not going in the car because there isn’t time. Just now while Wade was outside getting you, I called the ambulance. It’s on its way,” she said.

“You mean . . .”

She nodded, wincing. From outside came the distant but fast-approaching
whoop-whoop
of yet another siren.

“But you know,” she said, an odd, insistent look coming onto her face, “I might not be going in the ambulance, either.”

It screamed up outside. Moments later two EMTs hustled in, pushing a gurney.

But Ellie wouldn’t get on it. “Never mind the gurney,” she told them. “And never mind the ambulance, either.”

Her eyes met mine: wide, frightened, and exultant. Her hair was wild, her face sheet-white and pasty-looking. A bolt of pain snapped her head back, blue veins pulsing visibly at her temples.

“You
said
. . .” she began accusingly to me.

Then she seemed to relax. But not for long; gripping my hand so hard I could practically hear the bones crunching, Ellie spoke clearly, distinctly, and as it turned out, absolutely correctly:

“Jake, this baby is coming
now
.”

“Wow,” said Tommy, his eyes huge with wonder, as Ellie put the baby into his arms. “It sure is
new
.”

“She,” Ellie corrected proudly. She touched a tissue to a bubble on the infant’s rosebud mouth. “Her name is Leonora and she’s two weeks old today.”

Two eventful weeks: Will Bonnet had been arrested, George had been released, and Will’s astonishingly resilient Aunt Agnes was out of the hospital. Now we were gathered at the gala celebration of the reopening of Harlequin House.

All around us rose the delightful spectacle of sparkling windows, fresh new paint, and the mellow patina of old woodwork rubbed to a honeyed glow. The house positively shone with the love that had been denied it for decades and poured so unstintingly into it over the past fourteen days. I turned back to what Trooper Hollis Colgate was saying.

“. . . What you have to realize is that when the medical examiner said twenty-four to forty-eight hours, that’s just what he meant,” Colgate went on. “You
assumed
a time because it fit your problem. Cops, too. But Hector didn’t die while George and Bonnet were away in Boston.”

“Will killed Hector Thursday night,” I said. “Not Friday night. But we all got so focused on the time when George was gone . . .”

“Right. You figured it must be the time of death, just the way Will planned. The last thing he did before leaving town on Friday was hustle over to Gosling’s place, slip inside, and call Ellie from there so the number would show up on her caller ID. Saying he saw Gosling
alive
on Friday afternoon put the cherry on the cake.”

Little Lee gazed up at Tommy and gurgled pleasantly. “Wow,” Tommy breathed again, his expression melting.

“Later,” Colgate went on, “he killed Therese Chamberlain. He’d seen her in the parking garage in Boston and he recognized her, of course, at the hospital. But until he spotted Therese talking to you, he hadn’t realized
she’d
seen
George
.”

“So she really
did
know George couldn’t have killed Hector that night. And if she said so, it would’ve spoiled Will’s whole plan.”

Ellie came up beside us. “Will knew George wouldn’t rat on him by revealing that he was on probation,” she said. “Will had set things up that way, by asking George not to. Meanwhile George was waiting for
Will
to step up to the plate and tell the truth. It never even occurred to him that Will wouldn’t.”

George would have tumbled eventually, of course, and spoken up. But Will never planned for George to live long enough to tell anyone. And George nearly hadn’t.

“He still thought Will was his friend,” Ellie said, her tone indignant. “When all along . . .”

George had already recited to us the litany of Will’s lies. First he’d begged George to take him to Boston for the probation visit, saying his aunt’s car had conked out again. That the car was in fine shape the next morning he’d explained away by saying it’d turned out to have a bad spark plug wire, and that he’d fixed it.

Then there was the probation visit itself; fictional, too. Will hadn’t kept a date with a probation officer in more than a year. But that hadn’t stopped him from pretending to go to one and swearing George to secrecy, Will’s story being that he didn’t want his fresh start in Eastport destroyed by news of his old bad deeds.

In short, Will Bonnet had spun a tangled web and eventually gotten ensnared in it. “But why didn’t he just kill George himself if the whole idea was to get rid of him?” I asked.

Colgate shook his head. “He’s been questioned about that. And at different times he’s given quite a few different reasons. Sometimes he says it would’ve been too easy. He’s got a pretty high opinion of himself, you know.”

“You think?” Fresh fury at Will made me clench my fists for what he’d done.

And for the way he’d fooled me. If he hadn’t, Therese might still be alive.

“Other times,” Colgate said, “he gets a little closer to what I suspect is the real story. He says it wouldn’t have been enough for George just to die, that George had to be ruined first, his reputation demolished.” Colgate finished his drink. “Will knew you two would be working in that parlor but if you hadn’t found Hector he meant to ‘discover’ the body himself.”

“Sure,” I said. “Makes sense. Bad enough for a jerk like him being compared with George alive. It would’ve been even worse if George ended up being turned into a saint.”

“Right,” Colgate agreed. “Myself, though, I think it’s more complicated even than that.”

His brow knit. “I’m not sure he knows it, but I think it was the one thing he couldn’t quite bring himself to do. In a screwy way he still looked up to George almost as much as Tommy does.”

“Killing his old friend with his own hands would’ve been like murdering the last, vestigial little bit of good in himself,” I agreed. “Not that there was a lot of that.”

Another question occurred to me. “Therese was already high when he got to her house?” I asked, theorizing aloud. “So he’d have talked his way in easily and slipped her the same mixture he gave me?”

Colgate nodded. “After which it was also easy to smother her and set things up to look as if she’d simply OD’d. If your ex-husband hadn’t gotten on the horn and expedited her autopsy, though, I’d never have known it wasn’t a simple heroin overdose.”

“He did that? Expedited the autopsy?” Victor hadn’t said anything about it. What he had said, emphatically and at length, concerned using baking soda during a resuscitation attempt.

In short, don’t. It hadn’t helped George; that it had seemed to was the only coincidence in the whole sorry affair. But it had messed up George’s body chemistry enough so that if things had gone differently—if he’d needed further resuscitation once he’d reached the hospital, for instance—it might have killed him.

“Will set the Harlequin House fire, too, I suppose?” Ellie asked. It was a part of Will’s scheme that had gotten overshadowed by other events. But it could have been a disaster in its own right.

“Oh, yeah.” Colgate nodded at her. “Back in Boston he was an arsonist among other things, so he knew how. Cute little device, no wonder no one found it the first time they looked.” He grimaced. “You two triggered it,” he added, “when you forced that door open. Once the body was found, the fire was meant to take care of any self-incriminating details Will might have missed. Didn’t spread quite as fast as he expected, that’s all.”

Just then another well-wisher came up to Ellie and guided her away. “Why did you ignore me at the jail?” I asked Colgate. “I thought I was finished for sure when you came out of that office and saw me.”

He looked wry. “Well, for one thing I’d just heard from your ex about Therese’s autopsy result. And I’d also just found out Bonnet had a warrant in Massachusetts for probation violation. I’d asked him if there was anything I should know and he’d said no. He probably figured with George already on the hook, I wouldn’t check anyone else’s background.”

“But you did.” If my opinion of him got any higher it would shoot right through Harlequin House’s mansard roof.

“Talked to Massachusetts and they wanted him,” he agreed. “I had the order to drive up and grab him when I ran into you.”

I drank some champagne. “That still doesn’t explain why you didn’t say anything. . . .”

“Yeah, I guess it doesn’t,” he conceded. He sipped lemonade, having explained that he only drank on airplanes. “But I already felt like I was missing something, things not zeroing out, when I got a load of the look on your face.”

“And you got the message,” I interrupted, pleased at having transmitted it to him so flawlessly via my expression.