Scratch the Surface (18 page)

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Authors: Susan Conant

Tags: #General, #Fiction, #Mystery & Detective, #Women Sleuths, #Detective and mystery stories, #Detective and mystery stories - Authorship, #Cats, #Mystery fiction, #Apartment houses, #Women novelists

BOOK: Scratch the Surface
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“No pets is no pets,” Trotsky responded.
Careful to avoid revealing the presence of two cats and not just one in her house, Felicity said, “The way to make sure that cats live long, healthy lives is to keep them indoors. I would never let a cat roam the neighborhood. I cannot see how an indoor cat could be a problem.”
“Enough said,” Loretta decreed. “All in favor of allowing Felicia to keep her cat, raise your hands.”
“Felicity,” said Brooke. “Not Felicia. You apparently don’t know that Felicity Pride is a well-known author.”
“Oh, what do you write?” asked a woman Felicity didn’t know.
“Mysteries,” said Felicity.
Brooke elaborated. “Mysteries about cats.”
“Oh, I’ve read those!” a woman exclaimed. “
Purrfectly Sleuthful
was my favorite. I just love Olaf and Lambie Pie! But I didn’t know you wrote under a pen name. I thought Isabelle Hotchkiss was your real name.”
Loretta cut short the discussion. “Could we vote, please? Raise your hand if you want her to be able to keep the cat.”
All hands except Mr. Trotsky’s popped up. Mrs. Trotsky lifted hers only briefly before her husband grabbed her wrist and lowered her arm. “My wife doesn’t speak English,” he explained.
Mrs. Trotsky was a short, stout woman with unnaturally red-black hair. She wore a deep purple suit that somehow looked foreign as opposed to imported. “Speak English!” she cried. “Yes, cat!”
“Well, it doesn’t matter one way or the other,” Loretta said. “The vote is overwhelmingly for the cat. Now, the letter. If you haven’t already read it, please do so now.”
Felicity had read the offending letter and now simply glanced at it. It was on Norwood Hill Neighborhood Association letterhead. A logo depicted a tree that Felicity considered in need of pruning. The text read:
 
Until the erection of the Newton Park Estates development, the narrow streets of Norwood Hill carried almost no traffic. The recent influx of vehicles traveling at high speeds disturbs the tranquility of Norwood Hill and poses a threat to public safety. Thus the Norwood Hill Neighborhood Association respectfully requests that residents of the development, which is in Brighton, enter and exit through Brighton.
“It’s no accident,” said Harry, Brooke’s husband, “that they’ve chosen this particular time to fire off this condescending missive. What’s not said here is that they see urban crime at their doorstep. Not without reason, of course.”
Felicity felt everyone’s eyes on her. “That letter requires no response,” she said. “If they have a traffic problem on their streets, they should call the police. Do we look like traffic cops?” A few people tittered. Encouraged, Felicity added, “And I am as concerned about the horrible event that took place here as everyone else is. More so. But it does seem clear that the man, Quinlan Coates, was killed somewhere else. There is no reason to suppose that we’re seeing the start of some sort of crime wave.”
Trotsky angrily shook his copy of the letter. “We are going to take this insult lying down?”
“In my opinion,” Brooke said, “Felicity is right. Our best course is to be perfect ladies and gentlemen. In other words, we should do nothing.”
“Place the burden on the opposition,” a man agreed. “I’m for that.”
“All in favor of no reply,” said Loretta, “raise your hands! Done! Same as the last vote. Mr. and Mrs. Trotsky, you’re seeing American democracy in action here. You win some, you lose some. That’s the American way. Well, we wrapped this up fast, didn’t we!”
Everyone stood up. Loretta moved swiftly to the front hall and opened the door. “So nice to see you!” she said. “Until next time!”
Hustled out, one couple headed for the next house. All the others except Brooke and Harry got into the cars parked on the street.
“Chickens,” said Brooke. “We’re not afraid to walk, are we? Sorry about that mix-up with Isabelle Hotchkiss. Your books are much better than hers.”
“Thank you,” Felicity said. “Loretta certainly knows how to run a meeting, doesn’t she?”
Harry said, “She kept that Trotsky under control. I have to give her that.”
“Actually,” Felicity said, “you were right that something triggered that condescending letter, but it wasn’t having the police here. It had nothing to do with the murder. It had to do with Mr. Trotsky. He had a nasty encounter with some woman who was walking her dog. He accused her dog of killing his grass. She acted quite entitled and supercilious, and he got nasty. I tried to smooth things over, but I didn’t have any luck.”
“As if the relationship between the neighborhoods weren’t bad enough to begin with,” Brooke said, “without him making things worse.” Like the Norwood Hill woman with the golden retriever, Brooke sounded as if she’d never had a Boston accent to lose, but Felicity didn’t resent the apparent effortlessness of Brooke’s correct vowel sounds. Brooke preferred Morris and Tabitha to Olaf and Lambie Pie, and she was as close as Felicity came to having a Newton Park ally.
“He creates a terrible image of our neighborhood,” Felicity agreed. “Among other things, the woman thinks that Russians are gangsters.”
“Gangsters?” Harry said. “Trotsky’s a legitimate businessman. A publisher. He’s an oaf, but he isn’t a gangster.”
“How do you know that?” his wife asked. “Russians are notorious for pirating American software.”
“They pirate American books, too,” Felicity said.
TWENTY-THREE
Brigitte sits on
top of the refrigerator. Her tail twitches, and her amber eyes scan the kitchen. She drops weightlessly to the floor, rockets to the front hallway, skids across the slate floor, zooms to the living room, slides across a low table, and bolts back to the hallway, up the steep stairs, and into the room where Edith remains huddled under the bed. Boring, boring, boring Edith! What that cat needs is a good bite on the head! Brigitte dives straight through the bed skirt, pounces on Edith, delivers a hard nip to Edith’s neck, and flees before Edith can retaliate.
In the upstairs hall, Brigitte follows her nose to a room heavy with the scent of cosmetics. The bed in here is larger than the one under which that fat, silly Edith is hiding. Brigitte soars upward, lands, and settles herself on a pillow. Although she goes instantly to sleep, the tip of her tail resumes its twitch. She dreams of prey.
TWENTY-FOUR
When Felicity returned
home from the condo association meeting, she saw no sign of the cats and made a mental note to herself about Morris and Tabitha, who, she now realized, had spent far too much time awake in her previous books. Real cats were dedicated sleepers. Furthermore, as amateur sleuths, they were duds. Morris and Tabitha would simply have to stay as prescient and communicative as they’d always been. After all, one of fiction’s most important functions was to misrepresent reality.
Loretta had kept the meeting short. It was now only quarter of eight, and Felicity wished that she’d delayed her dinner and could call Ronald to suggest that they meet at a restaurant. Better yet, she wished that Detective Dave Valentine would appear at her door to announce that the murder had been solved and that she was consequently free to talk about it to the press. And free to accept an invitation to go out with him? She reluctantly settled for calling Ronald, who answered his phone but said that he couldn’t talk because he was listening to Glenn Gould, with whom he was, in Felicity’s view, obsessed. Felicity had no ear for music and couldn’t tell one Goldberg Variation from the other, and although she’d enjoyed
Thirty-two Short Films About Glenn Gould
when Ronald had dragged her to a theater to see it, she’d been bored the first time they’d watched the video together and, after the third time, had refused to see it again. She did, however, manage to divert Ronald from his music long enough to make him promise to go out for dinner with her the next evening. At the end of the short call, having failed to ask her how she was, he neglected to utter any of the usual formulaic phrases about how glad he’d be to see her or how much he was looking forward to dinner, but simply hung up.
Felicity longed to call Detective Dave Valentine but could think of no pretext. She’d tell Valentine about the animosity between the Norwood Hill and Newton Park neighborhoods, but the antagonism hardly suggested a motive for Coates’s murder. Even Felicity found it unimaginable that some disgruntled resident of Norwood Hill had slain a professor of Romance languages simply to cause trouble in Newton Park by leaving his body in a vestibule. Could Quinlan Coates have planned to buy a house in Newton Park? No realtors’ signs hung in the neighborhood, and nothing in Coates’s apartment had hinted at any intention of moving. What connection could there be between Coates and Newton Park? Had he fathered one of Loretta’s children? Had a book he’d published been pirated by the horrible Mr. Trotsky? Had he allowed Edith or Brigitte to put a paw on Trotsky’s grass?
In lieu of phoning the detective, she went to her computer in the hope that someone had e-mailed her, but nothing of interest had arrived. She again searched the Web for information about Quinlan Coates but found nothing she didn’t already know. On impulse, she entered Dave Valentine’s name and, to her delight, retrieved a photograph of him in his kilt at the Highland Games. To her even greater delight, she discovered something for which the thousands of mysteries she’d read had failed to prepare her, namely, that unlike the wives of the attractive male detectives, both amateur and professional, who populated mystery fiction, the woman hadn’t left or divorced Valentine, thus making him bitter, regretful, self-recriminatory, or mistrustful. No, novels to the contrary, Mrs. Valentine had died!
The wives of fictional detectives did die once in a while, Felicity reminded herself, but the cause of death was usually cancer, wasn’t it? And in those cases, instead of developing the detective’s character by having him respond with bitterness, regret, self-recrimination, or mistrust, the author revealed the protagonist’s devotion during his wife’s illness, his subsequent grief, and thus his capacity for deep, complex emotion. Mrs. Valentine, however, hadn’t died of cancer, been killed by terrorists, been run over by a drunk driver, committed suicide, or perished in some other fashion that might be expected to add sharpness and profundity to an author’s depiction of her husband. Rather, according to the obituary that had appeared in a Boston newspaper two years earlier, she had died of endocarditis, an infection of the heart that she had contracted during a routine dental appointment. As a literary device, the cause of death had nothing to recommend it, and, indeed, so far as Felicity could remember, nowhere in mystery fiction had a detective’s wife ever died from having her teeth cleaned. Still, Dave Valentine had probably mourned her despite the unliterary nature of her demise, and to her credit, Mrs. Valentine had an excellent excuse, indeed, the only acceptable excuse, for having abandoned her reading of Felicity’s books.
After turning off the computer and shutting off lights, Felicity made her way upstairs. Entering her room, she found Brigitte asleep on her pillow. The little cat was not sprawled awkwardly on her back at she’d been when Felicity had discovered her at Quinlan Coates’s apartment. Rather, she was curled up in what Felicity saw as normal cat fashion, her head tucked in, her tail curved around her body. Inexperienced cat owner that she was, Felicity never considered reclaiming her own pillow and her own side of the bed by picking up Brigitte and moving her; although she now knew that cats slept a lot, she had no understanding of the depth of feline sleep, nor did she appreciate the capacity of awakened cats to return instantly to oblivion. Consequently, motivated mainly by the fear that Brigitte, like Aunt Thelma’s cat, would get her number and run away, she performed her bedtime preparations in near silence. Entering the bathroom that adjoined the bedroom, she left the light off until she’d gently pulled the door shut, and, after finishing her ablutions, turned off the light before opening the door. On tiptoe, she moved her book from the nightstand on Brigitte’s side of the bed, carried it to the other side, and returned for a flashlight that she kept in the nightstand drawer. Easing herself between the sheets, she curled up on her side and read by flashlight until she joined Brigitte in sleep.

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