A Romantic Way to Die (12 page)

Rhodes turned the light to the floor, trying to see if there were footprints in the dust. He couldn’t make them out if they were there.

“I’m going over to the window and have a look,” he said. “This time, you stay put.”

Chatterton nodded, and Rhodes walked around the edge of the room, not wanting to disturb any footprints if they existed.

When he got to the window, he looked it over. The ceilings in the room were quite high, ten or twelve feet, the way ceilings had been in the time when the building had been constructed, and the windows were also quite tall. Each one had two columns of three panes on the bottom and on the top. The panes were separated by wooden strips from which most of the paint had flaked away.

The strips that Rhodes was looking at were broken. There were shards of glass on the floor and the windowsill, and a few jagged pieces remained stuck around the edges of the frame.

“I don’t see how that could’ve happened,” Chatterton said at Rhodes’s elbow.

Rhodes turned and said, “This is the second time you haven’t stayed where I asked you to.”

“But this is my building. Someone’s been vandalizing it, maybe even breaking into it and doing some other kind of damage. I have a right to inspect it.”

“Not if you’re interfering with an investigation.”

“What are you investigating?”

“That’s what I’m about to find out, I’m afraid,” Rhodes said.

He almost hated to do what logically came next, but there was no way to avoid it. Being as careful as he could not to destroy any possible clues, he leaned out the window and shined his light at the ground three stories below.

Someone lay very still down there, staring up at the starry night sky. A piece of glass by the body winked back at Rhodes when the light passed over it.

Rhodes couldn’t make out the face of the person who was lying down there, but he was pretty sure he’d found Terry Don Coslin.

16

“W
HAT A WASTE,” RUTH GRADY SAID, LOOKING DOWN AT THE body of Terry Don Coslin.

Rhodes privately agreed, though maybe not for the same reasons.

“I want you to go up to the third floor and see what you can find,” he said. “I’ll look here, and after the ambulance comes, I’ll talk to the writers and have a look in his room.”

“I have a fluorescent lantern in the car, but that might not be enough light.”

“It’ll have to do,” Rhodes said. “We can come back in the daylight and go over things again.”

He’d already called Hack and had him send Buddy Reynolds to talk to the caterers from the Round-Up. He wanted Buddy to find out if they’d seen anything. Hack had protested that some of them might be in bed. Rhodes had said he didn’t care, though he didn’t really think Buddy would learn much from them.

“What does it look like to you?” Ruth asked.

“I think Terry Don went up to the third floor with someone, got into a scuffle, and fell through the window,” Rhodes said. “Or, more likely, he was pushed. You can see a couple of cuts from the glass if you look close.”

“Couldn’t it have been an accident?”

“It could’ve been. But you don’t really think it was, do you?”

“Not after what happened to Henrietta. Who would’ve been up there with him? And why?”

“That’s what I’d like to know,” Rhodes said.

Everyone in the dormitory seemed dumbstruck. Henrietta’s murder hadn’t seemed to touch them, maybe because most of them didn’t like her. But Terry Don’s death was a different story. The women all sat quietly, some of them crying, some of them twisting tissues in their hands, some of them just looking blankly at each other or at the walls.

“I can’t believe something like this could happen,” Jeanne Arnot said. “I don’t know about the others, but I’m not staying here any longer. I’m going back to New York where it’s safe to walk the streets.”

Rhodes wasn’t sure whether she was joking or not. If she was, it seemed like an odd time to be attempting humor.

“I’m afraid I can’t let you leave,” he said.

“What do you mean ‘let me’? This was still a free country the last time I checked. I can go anywhere I please.”

“Not when you’re a suspect in a murder case.”

There were gasps in the room.

“You have to be kidding,” Jeanne said. “I can’t possibly be a suspect. I’m a respected literary agent.”

Having read Henrietta’s manuscript, Rhodes was pretty sure that
respected
wasn’t the right word, not if Henrietta had been anywhere near the truth about Jeanne’s personality.

“I’m not kidding,” he said. “I’m not trying to trample on your constitutional rights, but nobody’s going anywhere until I say so. You can go right on with your workshop if you want to, but you can’t go back to New York.”

“I don’t see how we can go on with things,” Vernell said. “Not after what’s happened.”

“That’s up to you,” Rhodes said. “But I’m going to want to talk to everyone about tonight. If you’ll go to your rooms, I’ll call you out one at a time.”

Rhodes had long ago learned that eyewitnesses were the worst kind. Of all the people who had been at the dinner that evening, not a single one had noticed Terry Don’s leaving, nor had anyone seen who might have left with him. Or so they all claimed.

Lorene Winslow swore that she hadn’t seen or talked to Terry Don all evening, but she did have a few things to say.

“I wasn’t at Terry Don’s table,” she said. “Why don’t you ask Tom?”

“Chatterton?” Rhodes said.

“That’s right. Tom. Terry Don was at his table. If anyone knows where Terry Don went, Tom should.”

“He doesn’t know.”

“That’s what he told you. But do you believe him?”

“Shouldn’t I?”

“How much do you know about him and Vernell?”

Rhodes knew nothing at all about Vernell and Chatterton. It was becoming apparent to him that he was a long way out of the mainstream of gossip in Clearview.

“What should I know?” he asked.

“Well, for one thing they were becoming an item.”

Rhodes couldn’t remember the last time he’d heard any couple referred to as an
item.

“That’s how this whole writers’ workshop came about,” Lorene said. “Henrietta told me all about it.”

“You and Henrietta must have been pretty good friends,” Rhodes said. “Since you were roommates and all.”

Lorene brushed her improbable red hair back with one hand and tucked it behind her ear.

“I’m not sure Henrietta had any friends,” she said. “Sometimes I think she went out of her way to make enemies.”

“You’ve read the manuscript,” Rhodes said.

“Good guess, Sheriff.”

“But she seemed to like the character named Lorraine. She didn’t try to make an enemy of you.”

“We knew each other for a long time. But that doesn’t mean we were friends.”

“Did she talk to you about Terry Don?”

“Sometimes. But we didn’t spend much time alone here at the workshop. So she didn’t reveal any of her girlish secrets.”

“And she didn’t mention who might have been dropping by to see her last night?”

“Not to me,” Lorene said. “I might have walked right in on them if I’d gone back to the room. Maybe she wouldn’t have died if I had. Too bad I was over talking to Claudia and Jan.”

Rhodes noticed the reestablishment of Lorene’s alibi, but he didn’t remark on it. He just agreed with what she said and returned to what interested him.

“What did Henrietta tell you about Chatterton and Vernell?”

“That Vernell was using Tom to get this workshop put together. She couldn’t afford to pay the writers and the agent if she had to rent the campus facilities, so she started working on Tom. Vernell’s not bad-looking, you know, and before long, she had Tom convinced that he needed to host something here to get things off the ground. The publicity would be good for him, and she could guarantee the publicity.”

“She’s going to get that, all right,” Rhodes said. “One murder was bad enough, but this one is going to bring in the big boys.”

Lorene gave him a puzzled look.

“The big boys?” she said.

“The city papers,” Rhodes said. “And the TV crews. If Terry Don was as famous as I think he was, there’ll be trailers and satellite dishes all over this place by morning.”

“He was as famous as you think he was,” Lorene said. “He was even about to get a TV commercial.”

Rhodes hadn’t heard that, either.

“Did Henrietta tell you that?” he asked.

“No. Terry Don did. He was telling everybody. He thought it was going to be his stepping-stone to a series.”

“What kind of series?”

“He didn’t care. He would’ve settled for a guest shot on
Xena
.”

Who could blame him?
Rhodes thought. But he didn’t see why Vernell’s relationship with Chatterton would have had anything to do with Terry Don.

“You read the manuscript, too, Sheriff. So you know what Terry Don was like.”

“You mean—”

“Yes.”

“Oh,” Rhodes said.

Vernell was irate that Lorene had mentioned her relationship with Chatterton.

“That redheaded filly,” Vernell said. “As many husbands as she’s had, you’d think she wouldn’t criticize anybody else.”

“Two,” Rhodes said. “That’s not many.”

“Who cares? She even married the same man twice. And divorced him twice.”

Rhodes admitted that was interesting if not excessive.

“Would Terry Don have been jealous of you?” he asked.

Verneil’s eyes flashed.

“What makes you ask that?”

“Well, knowing what Henrietta said about him in her manuscript, I thought he might have approached you.”

“‘Approached.’ That’s one way of putting it.”

“Did he?”

“Did he what?”

“Approach you?”

“If he did, that’s my business. It certainly doesn’t have anything to do with his death, or with Henrietta’s for that matter.”

“What about you and Chatterton?”

“What goes on between Tom and me, if anything does, is private. It has nothing to do with anybody else.”

Rhodes decided to let it go for the moment. Maybe it would come to something later on, maybe not. He would wait and see.

Rhodes finished interviewing the women and went to the president’s house to see Chatterton. Chatterton didn’t mind talking about Vernell. He thought she was a lovely and creative woman.

“I’m proud to be associated with her,” he said.

“In more ways than one,” Rhodes added.

“I know what you’re thinking,” Chatterton said. “But you’re wrong. Vernell and I have a business relationship, and I owe her a great deal. If it hadn’t been for her, I might never have gotten this place off the ground.”

“You’re going to get some bad publicity after what’s happened,” Rhodes told him.

“I’m sure you’ve heard this line before, Sheriff. But I’ll repeat it anyway: there’s no such thing as bad publicity.”

“Being arrested for murder might be the exception.”

Chatterton’s mouth didn’t quite drop open, but his eyes widened and his hands fluttered.

“What do you mean by that?” he asked.

“I mean that you might have killed Terry Don out of jealousy. Did you know he’d made sexual advances toward Vernell?”

“Who told you that?”

“It’s confidential,” Rhodes said.

Chatterton’s face was slowly turning red.

“It doesn’t matter who told you,” he said. “It’s a lie.”

“I don’t think so, and I think you know better. And I think you have more than a business relationship with Vernell. The question is, did you see anyone go upstairs with Terry Don tonight?”

“No. Why would I notice something like that?”

“And you didn’t go up there with him yourself?”

“Don’t be stupid, Sheriff.”

“Thanks for the advice,” Rhodes said.

Rhodes sent Chatterton to the dormitory while he looked through Coslin’s room. His talk with Chatterton had given the sheriff a couple of things to think about.

How far would a man go to get publicity for a struggling business venture? Rhodes was pretty sure that some men would kill for the kind of media coverage Chatterton’s campus would be receiving, and Chatterton had an additional motive: jealousy, one of the classics. Chatterton might claim that he was involved with Vernell only in business dealings, but his body language and facial expression said something different.

The problem was that Chatterton and everyone else seemed to have been at the dormitory while the fight was going on. Rhodes thought back to what had happened. It was hard to remember who had been there when he arrived because of all the confusion. And he’d been flat on his face there for a while, not the best position to be in if you were trying to look at people’s faces. Feet, maybe, but not faces.

Rhodes used Chatterton’s telephone and called Hack.

“Have you heard anything from Buddy about the caterers?”

“They don’t know a thing,” Hack said. “They just cleared the tables and left. They brought all the dishes back to town so they could wash ’em in the dishwashers, so they were out of there in ten or fifteen minutes after the meal was over with.”

“Nobody heard anything?” Rhodes said.

“Nothin’ out of the ordinary. If Terry Don fell out of that window while they were there, he fell real quietlike. I woulda yelled, myself. How about you?”

“Me, too,” Rhodes said.

17

T
ERRY DON’S ROOM WAS NEAT AND ORDERLY. HIS SHIRTS AND pants were hung in the narrow closet, and sitting on the floor beneath them was a cloth duffel bag. In the room itself, there were no clothes flung on chair backs or lying on the floor. The bed was made, and there wasn’t a single wrinkle on the bedspread.

There was a dresser against one wall and a low table beside the bed. An imitation Tiffany lamp sat on the table by a small clock radio. There was a book on top of the radio. Rhodes was amused to see that it was a mystery novel. Terry Don might like being a cover model for historical romances, but he wasn’t very loyal in his choice of reading material. The title of the book was
Masquerade.
Rhodes wondered if that was a clue, though he was pretty sure it wasn’t.