Scratch the Surface (20 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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“We’ll find out,” he said.
“Quinlan Coates’s obituary is in today’s paper.” She paused. “So the body must have been released.”
“That’s something I wanted to ask you about.” His eyes met hers. “Besides writing mysteries, you read them. You’d have to, wouldn’t you?”
“Not necessarily. But I do. It’s not an obligation.”
“Sorry if . . . Look, see if this sounds familiar from a book. The victim sustains a blow to the head. Then his nose and mouth are sealed with tape.”
“Duct tape.”
“Any tape. Any strong tape. And then his head is covered with a plastic bag. Is there a book where that happens?”
“Not that I can think of. Not offhand. The three methods separately, I’m sure. But all three? It’s possible, but nothing comes to mind. So that’s how Quinlan Coates died?”
So, here was Felicity seated at her kitchen table with a handsome, burly police detective who was tapping her knowledge of mystery fiction and confiding the results of a postmortem. He was eating food she’d prepared, and the two were sipping coffee. Beautiful cats added a touch of domesticity. Specifically, Brigitte was now draped across the top of the refrigerator, and Edith was crouching beneath the kitchen chair at the built-in desk near the telephone. Ah, bliss!
“The actual cause of death wasn’t head trauma,” Valentine said. “The papers got it wrong. It was suffocation.” To Felicity’s disappointment, he added, “It’ll probably all be in tomorrow’s papers.” He drank some coffee and asked, “Have you had a chance to go through your old mail? E-mail?”
“Yes. But I didn’t find anything, really. I’ve refused to blurb some books, to write things to be quoted on the cover, but I’ve always been tactful about saying no. I usually say I don’t have time, and in most cases, that’s been true. I’ve declined some invitations to be on panels at libraries, do signings at bookstores and events, and so on, but I’ve never said anything to offend anyone, I think. And every published writer gets requests to read people’s manuscripts, and sometimes new writers want me to recommend them to my agent, that kind of thing. I just can’t read
everyone’s
manuscript. I don’t have time. And I’m a writer, not a book doctor or an unpaid editor. But the letters and e-mail I’ve sent have been apologetic. Gentle. Polite.” She shrugged her shoulders. “If anyone has a grudge against me, it’s an unjustified grudge.”
“Most grudges are. Do you ever write book reviews?”
“No.”
“Anything else?”
“Well, not about books, but there is something. There’s a lot of conflict between this neighborhood and the adjoining one in Newton. Norwood Hill. The Norwood Hill Neighborhood Association sent a letter to our condo association to complain about traffic. The Norwood Hill people want us to enter and exit through Brighton. There’s resentment on both sides.”
“Does that have anything to do with you? With you personally?”
“No. The only personal animosity, I think, is with the guy who lives next door, Mr. Trotsky. He just cannot get along with anyone. I overheard him being very nasty to some woman from Norwood Hill who was walking her dog here. And last night, there was a condo association meeting about the letter. Also about me, in a way. Our condo agreement has a no-pet clause, and Mr. Trotsky complained that I had a cat, but he was outvoted. Anyway, there are probably a lot of people who can’t stand him.”
A little smile crossed Dave Valentine’s face.
Felicity gave him a knowing look. “Including whoever interviewed him about the murder. That must’ve been a challenge. He’s a difficult person. Crabby. His wife seems nice enough, but she doesn’t speak English. But there’s one other thing about Mr. Trotsky, and this is pure speculation. About five years ago, a Russian publisher wanted to buy the rights to some of my books. The contracts arrived, they were signed and so on, and then my agent and I were told that the deal had fallen through. The Russians were in bad shape. They didn’t have any money. End of story until just recently, when someone turned up at a signing I did with a book of mine in Russian. It was a hardcover edition of my first two books. So, the deal fell through in the sense that I was never paid an advance and haven’t been paid any royalties, but the Russians went right ahead and translated and published my books. It’s called pirating. Well, someone at the condo association meeting last night told me that the Trotskys are publishers. So, I couldn’t help wondering. . . .”
“If that’s the case, it sounds like you’d have something against them and not vice versa.”
“That’s true. I just thought I’d mention it.”
Valentine looked inexplicably uneasy. “There’s one other thing.” He reached into one of the pockets of his pullover, extracted a folded sheet of paper, unfolded it, and smoothed it out on the table. “I want you to take a good look at this sketch and see if it’s anyone you’ve ever seen.” He slid the paper toward Felicity.
Even before she had picked it up, she knew that there was only one person she’d ever encountered who resembled the woman shown in the black-and-white drawing. “The obituary didn’t mention a sister,” she said. “Why on earth doesn’t she do something about the eyebrows?”
Eager to please the detective, she silently studied the sketch, which hit her as a bit too sketchy even for a police sketch, as it obviously was. It showed the head and shoulders of a woman with shoulder-length brown hair, regular features, and thick, bushy eyebrows that were even more bizarre on a woman than they’d been on Quinlan Coates. The effect was ludicrous.
“Who is this person?” she asked.
“Have you ever seen her?” he asked flatly.
“No. Never.”
“At a bookstore?” he prompted. “A meeting? A conference?”
“I don’t go to many mystery conferences. They’re expensive. Authors get a little break on registration fees, but we pay for airfare and hotel rooms and so forth. I can’t afford to go to all that many of them. Until I inherited this house from my uncle, I lived in a little apartment in Somerville. Anyway, I’ve been to a few conferences, and there were lots of people at them, but I don’t think I could have forgotten this woman. She’s so weird! Who could forget her?”
“Just asking. Doing my job.” He rose and again thanked her for the bagel and coffee.
“You’ll remember about Angell. The blood bank.”
“It’s next on my agenda,” he said. Looking embarrassed, he said, “One other thing. Men in your life.”
“Right now, there aren’t any,” she said. “Except Ronald, who doesn’t count. Ronald Gershwin. From the bookstore. But he’s just a friend. He came over the night . . . You met him then. But as I said, there’s no one else.”
After Valentine left, Felicity out got her notebook computer and sat at the kitchen table, where she spent many hours in the world of Prissy LaChatte. Morris communicated an important piece of information to Prissy, who handed it along to the grateful chief of police. When he announced his intention of following up on the tip by interviewing a suspect, he invited Prissy to come along. Prissy happily accepted.
TWENTY-SIX
Whenever Ronald and
Felicity wanted to eat out together, they confronted one of the many incompatibilities in their friendship. Ronald favored small ethnic restaurants that Felicity dismissed as “third-world holes in the wall.” She claimed to be more than happy to eat anywhere else, but habitually rejected suggestions of establishments she considered to be either shamelessly expensive or suspiciously cheap. She also insisted that a restaurant be within a twenty-minute drive of her house and that it offer ample parking, by which she definitely did not mean valet parking, a service that she viewed as a form of legal extortion. She insisted that she loved food and enjoyed almost anything, with such minor exceptions as broccoli, cabbage, hot peppers, curry, fennel, shrimp with the shells left on, and all seeds and nuts, including oils and extracts, especially sesame oil and that detestable almond flavoring that ruined so many potentially delicious chocolate desserts. If pressed, she admitted to disliking bitter flavors. She was none too crazy about rice.
On Friday evening, Ronald and Felicity compromised by choosing a restaurant in Brookline that neither of them particularly liked, a seafood place with branches throughout the city. Although Newbright Books was open on Friday evenings, Ronald had left an employee in charge, but instead of driving the short distance from the store to his apartment in Lower Allston to change clothes, he arrived wearing the hopelessly stretched out green sweater and faded jeans that he’d had on all day. His hair looked clean and was neatly gathered in its ponytail, but Felicity was irked to notice that he had on Birkenstock sandals over woolen socks. Was it necessary for him to be so annoyingly counterculture?
“You look nice,” he said as he greeted her in the crowded bar where would-be diners waited for tables. “Silk.”
“Basic black. Thank you.” Felicity had bought the dress on eBay (“new with tags”) for a fifth of its retail price: NWT Eileen Fisher Silk Dress Sz S.
Unable to find seats at the bar, they settled for ordering drinks and standing near a wall. In what struck Felicity as a moment of unusual connectedness, Ronald chose the title of her new book as a toast:
“Felines in Felony!”
For a moment, she felt embarrassed and wished that her books had serious, dignified titles like
War and Peace
or
Pride and Prejudice,
even though she knew nothing about any war except Caesar’s campaign against the Gauls and could hardly use a title that contained her own last name. Besides, neither title would be suitable for a cat mystery, would it? On impulse, she said,
“Cats!”
Ducking his head as if making an improper inquiry, Ronald asked in a near whisper, “How are they?”
“Edith is providing valuable assistance in solving the murder of Quinlan Coates,” she announced. Then, in less dramatic fashion, she caught Ronald up on her discoveries. As she was finishing, the bleating of an electronic device in Ronald’s hand signaled that their table was ready.
When they’d been escorted to a comfortable booth and presented with menus, Ronald turned his attention to making his dinner selections and, to Felicity’s disgust, chose littleneck clams on the half shell and a curried shrimp dish with rice. Raw seafood could transmit hepatitis, and the shrimp probably had shells on their tails. When a waiter appeared, she ordered clam chowder and a lobster casserole, and then, hoping to set a good example for Ronald, asked him about himself and his cats, George and Ira, even though listening to people drone on about their pets was an onerous hazard of her occupation.
Ronald’s initial response was ideal: “We’re fine.” He went on to say that George and Ira had inspired him to think about writing a mystery. “A cat mystery. I have a lot of notes for it. When I have something to show, I wonder if you’d be willing . . .”
“For you? Of course.”
Without thanking her, he launched into confidences about the ghost writers who had actually written two current blockbusters. After that, he told her everything about an author who was suffering from chronic fatigue syndrome and panic attacks attributable to the capricious behavior of her notoriously volatile editor. Finally, when he said a few words about authors who’d be signing at Newbright, Felicity took the opportunity to encourage him to install an espresso bar and to think creatively about planning events at the store to enable him to compete successfully with chain stores and online booksellers.
“I’m not Starbucks,” he said, “and I like the store the way it is.”
“I do, too! Everyone does. Ronald, really, I’m not criticizing. I just worry, that’s all.”
“Don’t. So, how’s your murder? We got interrupted.”
“Actually, the murder itself was very odd. Listen to this: Coates was hit on the head with a blunt instrument, and then his nose and mouth were sealed with duct tape, and then his head was encased in a plastic bag. The police asked me if all that sounded familiar from a mystery. I couldn’t think of one. Can you?”
The appetizers arrived. Ronald chewed a raw clam and apparently mulled over the murder at the same time. After swallowing, he said, “No. You know what it sounds like to me? You know what it suggests?”
“No,” said Felicity, who was averting her gaze from the raw clams and concentrating on her chowder.

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