Strangled Prose (7 page)

Bewildered, I waited until I thought she could hear me. “I believe you, Sheila. You call an ambulance, anyway, and sit tight. I'll be there in a minute or two.” My brain finally began to operate. “Are you alone? Where is Camille? Where is Mr. Twiller, for that matter? He left here a few minutes ago; he should be home by now.”

“I don't know, Mrs. Malloy. There's just me and Mrs. Twiller. The little dog is going to bite me if I don't close it up in a bedroom.” She stopped to wait out another string of hiccups. “Thanks, Mrs. Malloy. I don't know what to do—nothing like this has ever happened to me before. I'll wait for you.”

The receiver buzzed in my ear. I managed to hang it up, then sat down on my desk. Mildred Twiller wasn't really dead, I tried to tell myself coolly; she was—she was just blue because of her migraine. That was why her eyes were bulgy and her tongue was—whatever it was. Okay, she was dead. That seemed unavoidable. A heart attack? A sudden stroke on the chaise?

Not the case, I decided reluctantly. Corpses did not display distasteful tongues, unless they had not enjoyed a peaceful demise. Carlton's tongue had not been found, but it certainly wouldn't have looked any better. In fact—

I stopped myself inches away from hysteria. Poor little Sheila was doing better than I, and she was babysitting for a dead body with a tongue. I yanked myself to my feet, took a very deep breath, and attempted to smile as I left the office, mentally testing various lies to see if the girls might buy any of them.

The girls were gone. I made it to the door, then stopped and went back to the office to do what had to be done. I picked up the receiver and dialed the emergency number of the police to report the death. The tongue had forced my hand.

Somehow I drove to the Twiller house. A police car pulled in behind me, and two uniformed officers came after me with grim expressions.

“Are you Claire Malloy?” one demanded. He looked as if he were about seventeen years old. Most of them did these days; they must be recruited out of kindergarten. He also looked as if he were anticipating some butterfly-brained lady to attack him with a parasol.

“I am Claire Malloy,” I replied with dignity.

“Then why don't you tell us about the body inside the house, ma'am? My partner and I are curious.” He was oozingly patronizing, and displayed a noticeable dose of amused incredulity.

“I know nothing about it.”

“Then why did you call in the report?” he countered with a gotcha smirk.

The ambulance saved me from a metaphysical discussion of civic responsibility. The ambulance attendants, lugging a gurney and a first-aid box, shoved us aside to hurry up the walk. I shot the policeman a superior look and followed them.

Everybody pushed through the front door and stomped around the foyer in a bovine ballet. I had no idea where to find Mildred's body; I shrugged in response to the terse questions coming from all four sides of me. My credibility hovered at zero when Sheila stepped into the doorway from the living room.

“The patio,” she breathed. She took another step forward, clasped her inconsequential bosom, and crumpled onto the floor at my feet.

I tapped the policeman on the arm and pointed down. “Ask her about the body,” I suggested as I trailed the ambulance attendants to the patio. A figure lay on one of the metal chairs, a full-size rag doll with floppy limbs and a rubbery neck.

Sheila was right. Mildred was dead, and her facial features were no less gruesome than promised. I took a quick look, clamped my eyes closed, and blundered back into the living room to sit down on the sofa. I was not yet ready to open my eyes when the policeman cleared his throat.

“Would you like a glass of water, ma'am?”

“No, thank you. Is Sheila—the young woman in the foyer—all right? I have a lot more sympathy than I did a few minutes ago,” I said, guilty about my earlier conduct. If I had been in Sheila's situation, I'd be on the floor until December.

“My partner is seeing to her, ma'am. But I'm going to need a lot of information about what's happened. Perhaps you could tell me who the woman was or whom we need to notify?” He was trained to be polite in such situations, but I sensed we would never be friends.

I told him Mildred's name. I explained that Douglas had left me a few minutes earlier and had presumably been on his way home. The policeman wrote it all down, then excused himself to call in his report from his patrol car.

I stayed on the sofa and tried to assimilate the scene on the patio. Mildred's body sprawled on the very chair I had sat in when we had lunch. She would never again nibble a croissant or bury her face in Twilliam's fuzz. Poor Mildred Twiller had muddled through life with the fury of a petunia. But she had been a friend—and now she was dead. I almost felt bad enough to recant all the nasty thoughts I'd been harboring for the last two hours.

Poor Douglas, I thought, would be stricken. He loved his wife in his own way; not with the conventional gesture of fidelity, perhaps, but I had seen the emotions on his face when he talked about her. Where was he?

The ambulance attendants wandered into the living room, their hands in their pockets. One of them glanced around for an ashtray, then sighed and went to lean against the wall. The other stared at me, possibly hoping for another victim to pass the time.

“Why aren't you doing something?” I demanded.

“Can't move the body until the CID and the coroner get here. Scene of the crime and all that. There isn't anything we can do to help her now. She's deader than a roast turkey on Thanksgiving.”

The second one picked up a porcelain candy dish to read the underside. “Is this an ashtray?”

I explained that it wasn't but advised him to use it anyway. Mildred certainly wouldn't care. We sat in silence until the policeman came back to the room.

“You'll have to wait here until the CID arrives, Mrs. Malloy. They'll want to talk to you and to the young lady,” he announced. His expression implied that I was getting that which I richly deserved. Arrested, sentenced, imprisoned, and ultimately hanged; I could read the rosy scenario in his eyes.

The ambulance attendants went outside to wait. The policeman and I gauged each other for a lengthy minute. I was seeing a pompous, authoritative teenager; he was seeing, no doubt, a cold-blooded killer. I escaped to the kitchen to get a drink of water. When I returned, I suspected that my actions had been noted in his spiral notebook:
Killer obsessively thirsty after crime.

It took the homicide squad more than ten minutes to arrive. Social relations had not improved when two plainclothesmen at last came into the foyer. My blue friend joined them, and after a muted discussion, they all came into the living room to look at me.

I looked right back. The first one had curly black hair, a beakish nose, and guileless brown eyes. He wore a well-cut three-piece suit and a discreet tie, as though he had dashed away from his executive suite to tidy up the situation. He lacked a briefcase, but the image was otherwise perfect. My idea of a Farberville cop included a polyester jacket, an undulating midriff, and a perpetual sneer; this contradiction rather surprised me.

The second man was paler, with a blond crewcut and a bulldog jaw. He was younger, with the eagerness of a high-school hurdler. He waited for the other man to speak. Which he did, once he had finished studying me.

“You're Mrs. Claire Malloy? I'm Lieutenant Peter Rosen of the Farberville CID. We seem to have a problem here, if the reports are accurate. A body.” A New York accent, but a pleasant one.

“So it seems, Lieutenant,” I said.

He gave me a polite nod and went out the french doors to the patio. Minutes later, a man with a medical bag went through the living room to join them. Uniformed men passed back and forth like windup toy soldiers, their faces professionally masked. No one noticed me for another half-hour. I strained to hear the mumbles from the patio but could make out only a few names—including mine, Mildred's, and Sheila's.

In the interim, Sheila staggered into the living room and flopped across a chair. Her face was white; her long, dark hair fell across her eyes like stray crayon marks. She gave me a numb glance, then sank into the upholstery to study the chintz rosebuds.

“Sheila?” I whispered, not wanting to set off a second display of hysteria. “Are you feeling better? Can I get something for you?”

Shuddering, she shook her head and burrowed deeper. I considered the wisdom of persevering with another question or two, but the reappearance of the lieutenant settled the issue.

“You're the one who called the emergency number of the department?” he asked me.

“Yes, I did. From what I could gather, Mildred had died rather abruptly, and I suppose I've read too many mysteries.” I tried to laugh. “I didn't call Scotland Yard, though. Too expensive.”

“There are indeed a few points to be cleared up, Mrs. Malloy. The attendants are going to bring the body through this room in a minute, so I thought we might all step into the den.” He waited until Sheila and I stumbled to our feet, and then escorted us to the cozy, paneled room on the opposite side of the foyer.

“Now, let me see,” he murmured as he closed the door and turned to smile at Sheila. “I spoke earlier with Mrs. Malloy, but I don't believe you were able to come downstairs at that time. You're … ah, Miss Belinski?”

Sheila muttered her full name and, with mild prompting, her dorm address and telephone number. The detective ascertained that she had dropped by to look for a friend, discovered the body, and called me. After mentioning that he would come by her dorm within the hour, he sent her away to recuperate.

Feeling like a first-grader, I raised my hand. “I need to see where my daughter is, Lieutenant. But I will be home if you need me, so why don't I run along, too?”

“I'm afraid I'll need you for a few more minutes,” he said smoothly, implying that his happiness depended on my continued presence. “But I certainly won't object if you'd like to call your daughter and let her know that you've been—well, shall we say, tied up?”

He warranted a good deal more flippancy than I could produce at that moment. I went to the telephone and called the apartment. After ten rings, I hung up and tried Maggie's number to ask her to leave a note on the door. Perhaps she was still closeted with her lawyer, I decided glumly. At any rate no one answered.

I hung up the receiver and said, “I'll try again in a little while, Lieutenant. However, I don't see how I can be of any help. I told the officer that Douglas Twiller was, as far as I know, on his way home when I last saw him. He's the one to explain the reasons for poor Mildred's suicide.”

“Suicide, Mrs. Malloy? In twenty years I've never seen anyone commit suicide by strangling himself. Pills, guns, slashed wrists, leaps from bridges—yes. Popular choices. But never by strangling oneself with a silk scarf, neatly knotted in the back.” The man flashed two rows of even, white teeth at me. A model in a toothpaste commercial would have been shamed.

“She was strangled?” I gasped, no doubt sounding strangled.

“Very thoroughly, Mrs. Malloy.” Another of those damned sweet smiles, as if he and I shared a secret. “Now, I am a bit curious about one little thing. In the majority of our cases, the citizen who discovers a dead body chooses to call us. Why did the young lady call you to report the homicide?”

A fascinating question. I gulped under his bright-eyed scrutiny, and managed to murmur, “She was terribly distraught, and I suppose she happened to remember that Mildred and I are—were friendly. I didn't stop to ask questions; it did not seem to be the moment for such irrelevancies.”

“And now that you've had a chance to think?”

I shrugged. “Your guess is as good as mine, Lieutenant Rosen.” Since mine was nonexistent, I amended to myself as I concentrated on producing a judiciously mystified expression.

FIVE

I described the reception, with an emphasis on the menu rather than the unpleasantness. Lieutenant Rosen seemed unimpressed with my story but was gentlemanly enough not to do more than raise an eyebrow. After I had run out of canapés, I crossed my legs and twitched an impatient foot. “May I leave now?”

“In just a minute, Mrs. Malloy. I understand, from what you've told me, that you were a friend of the deceased. But why did Miss Belinski come to Mrs. Twiller's house to find her friend?”

“I have no idea. Why don't you ask her?” A perfectly sensible answer, I thought. I presumed that the connection was through Maggie, but I had no intention of throwing her to the wolf. Sheila could do the dirty deed.

“And you have no idea where Douglas Twiller might be at this time?”

“None at all.”

Lieutenant Rosen gnawed on his lip. “We seem to be missing quite a few people at the moment: the maid, the husband, your daughter, this mysterious friend, the gardener who lives in the carriage house—and a killer. Any suggestions, Mrs. Malloy?”

“I earn a living selling books; I do not receive any renumeration for solving homicides, nor do I operate a missing-persons bureau for the general community. That is more your field, Lieutenant.”

“Now, Mrs. Malloy, I agree that you're not an employee of the CID, but citizens are usually willing to help us in a murder investigation. You seem—ah, a shade reticent.”

As irritating as it was, it was also true. And I had no idea why I had taken such a truculent posture with the man. I try very hard not to make rash judgments about people, but the man had provoked me into one. Madison Avenue suit, sweet smiles, deferential tone—I wasn't buying any of it. He had the look of a piranha posing as a discolored goldfish. However, it is not prudent to offend a detective who is looking around for a perpetrator.

“I apologize, Lieutenant Rosen,” I murmured, lowering my eyes as I sank back on the sofa. “Mildred was a friend, and I'm upset—quite naturally, considering the circumstances. I've never had someone I know get strangled with a silk scarf. Emily Post does not deal with such situations.”