Scratch the Surface (33 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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Trace evidence recovered from Quinlan Coates’s body and from his car supported the account of the murder that Janice had given to Felicity. She had left no fingerprints, but an eyelash found on Coates’s clothing matched hers, and his car had contained several hairs from her head. The revolver had belonged to Janice Mattingly’s late father.
“So,” Felicity said to Dave Valentine on Friday evening when the two were seated at dinner in her dining room, “there are still a few things I don’t understand. For instance, who was that weird-looking woman in the sketch you showed me?”
Valentine had invited her out to dinner. They had agreed that a Scottish restaurant would be appropriate and had gone on to agree about why there was no such thing outside Scotland. Who really wanted spaghetti that had been boiled for thirty minutes and, for a special treat, topped with the contents of a bottle of ketchup? And cold ketchup at that. Their grandmothers had served the dish often. It was as Scottish as haggis. There being no Scottish restaurants in Greater Boston, Felicity had insisted that Valentine come to her house for broiled Scottish salmon. In reading up on mercury poisoning, Felicity had discovered that farm-raised salmon contained dangerous amounts of mercury, but she found it impossible to believe that a product of Scotland was unsafe. Also, although one of her complaints about Scottish food was the repetitiousness of the menus, it did not occur to her that she herself served salmon rather frequently.
“The sketch,” said Valentine. “Well, you remember the funeral? How devoted Coates was to his wife?”
“Dora. He never got over her death.”
“In a way, he did. Dora Coates wrote the first Isabelle Hotchkiss book. When she died, he finished the book she’d been writing. When we went to his apartment, we found a room he kept locked. He had a computer in it, the usual stuff. And he also had women’s clothing. And a wig.”
“Good lord!”
“Not so good. It set us off in the wrong direction, looking for contacts he might’ve made wearing the wig and the dresses. But it seems like he never wore them outside that room.”
“He became his wife. He kept her alive. Or by becoming Isabelle Hotchkiss, he became his wife. I wonder why she wrote under a pseudonym. I mean, he was the academic.”
“Sexism? From
you
? She was a professor of English.”
“So you knew all along that Coates was Isabelle Hotchkiss, but you were led astray. More potatoes?”
Dave Valentine was a hearty eater. Felicity liked a man with a good appetite. She especially liked a caber-tossing Scot with a hearty appetite who wore his kilt to the Highland Games and had had the sense not to wear it tonight to have dinner with her. The former represented laudable Scottish chauvinism, whereas the latter would have suggested unpardonable eccentricity. As he was concentrating on his third helping of potatoes, Felicity said, “I have to tell you that I’m glad that you didn’t go after my friend Ronald Gershwin. He can be quite odd, but he’s harmless, and he’s very bright. He went to Harvard.”
“Like your uncle,” said Valentine with a strange little smile.
“Like Uncle Bob,” said Felicity. “What’s wrong with that?”
“I don’t know if I should tell you this or not, but your uncle’s dead, so what does it matter? Felicity, he didn’t go to Harvard.”
“Yes, he did.”
“If he did, he escaped Harvard’s notice. They’ve never heard of him.”
“You’re joking. You’re not joking. You investigated my dead uncle?”
“Not a lot.”
“The liar! What an idiot I’ve been! Anyone can buy Harvard chairs and lamps and knickknacks! I can hardly wait to tell my mother. It’ll give her something better to think about than what she calls ‘my’ murder. With the strong implication that I committed it.”
“She got the profession right—mystery writer.”
“Poor Janice. She was a horrible writer. And so ambitious. So sad.” She paused for a sip of wine. “But her cat is going to be okay. Ronald has adopted her. One other thing. This is about my neighbor, that obnoxious Trotsky. The Russian publisher.” Felicity continued to harbor the suspicion that he had pirated her books.
“He isn’t a publisher.”
“Yes, he is.”
“Not a book publisher. He publishes software.”
“Software? Computer software?”
“What other kind is there?”
“None,” said Felicity in disappointment. “He doesn’t publish books, too?”
“No. Software. What were you going to say about him?”
She had to think for a moment. “Oh, yes. This neighborhood is practically empty. But, he goes crazy when anyone goes near his lawn. So, when Janice drove Quinlan Coates’s body here and dragged it all the way to my vestibule, why didn’t he notice? Or maybe he did.”
“He was out. Actually, his wife was still at work, and he was down the street.”
“Down the street from here?”
“You’ve got a neighbor named Loretta.”
“Loretta the organizer. She runs our condo association.”
“That’s where he was.”
“With Loretta? What was he doing there?” Felicity belatedly remembered Loretta’s two children by two different fathers. “Oh,” she said. “Oh!”
“Yes, oh,” Valentine said flatly. “Oh.”
Brigitte wandered into the dining room and leaped onto the table. Janice Mattingly had been one thing; Dave Valentine was quite another. “Off! Get off right now!” Felicity scolded.
Brigitte ignored her. Dave Valentine gently picked up the dainty cat and placed her on the floor. Edith wandered in. He patted her.
“My hero cats,” said Felicity. “The
Globe
and the
Herald
both called them that.”
“Those stories are going to sell a lot of books for you.”
“I hope so. I feel motivated to write these days. I have a lot to say.”
She told the truth. Now that she knew something about cats, she was eager to write about them. She would, of course, always be grateful to her very own late Morris, but she was also grateful to Edith and Brigitte.
As it happened, Felicity’s cats were indirectly responsible for solving her final mystery, which was, of course, the puzzle of how Uncle Bob had acquired cash worth the sale of 61,799.307 books. While savoring newspaper accounts of her role in solving the murder of Quinlan Coates, she had also scanned the papers for a report of a counterfeit or stolen hundred-dollar bill left in the donation box at Angell. She had found nothing. The bills certainly looked genuine and probably were. Who had paid the sums recorded in the notebook? And why?
On the Sunday afternoon following her Friday night dinner with Dave Valentine and their Saturday night together at the movies, Felicity, who was feeling increasingly at one with Prissy LaChatte, broiled a large piece of Scottish salmon for Edith and Brigitte. Prissy regularly cooked for Morris and Tabitha, but always remembered to set a timer. Felicity, however, burned the salmon and thus dirtied the oven of Aunt Thelma’s expensive range. In search of instructions for persuading the self-cleaning oven to clean itself, she found the three-ring binder that contained the manuals and warranties for the many new appliances in the house. In leafing through it, she came upon a collection of receipts and acknowledgments of delivery signed and dated by Aunt Thelma. The names of the months were written in the same script that appeared in the little notebook. The numbers, too, were identical. It hadn’t been Uncle Bob who had recorded those deposits. It had been his wife, Aunt Thelma, the same Thelma who had persuaded the undertaker to give her jewelry from her mother-in-law’s body, the same Thelma to whom Bob had doled out the weekly housekeeping money in cash. For decades, Aunt Thelma had skimmed off her share to amass a private fund. The money was thus Felicity’s to spend. On Edith and Brigitte.

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