Death of a Cozy Writer: A St. Just Mystery (19 page)

Seeing him and the maid hovering at the entry to the drawing room, Chloe waved away the old woman with one hand while signaling him to enter with the other, like someone guiding a plane in for landing. A Pekinese teetered over to inspect him—one of those dogs he always felt looked like it came with batteries—and apparently finding nothing amiss, disappeared on unknown canine business.

Still without a word, she indicated that St. Just should sit in an unyielding wooden structure that resembled nothing so much as the executioner’s chairs he had seen in American documentaries on the telly. The chair proved to be lower than he had calculated and he fell into it hard, like a collapsing bridge.

She herself chose to remain standing—rather, weaving, though ramrod-straight—by the fireplace. She was a stout woman, her figure sheathed in unyielding foundation garments, her bosom a shelf-like, impenetrable Latex fortress. Two round earrings the size of walnuts eclipsed the lobes of her ears. Pouches of fat padded her chin and cheeks—perhaps she was hoarding the rest of the nuts. But her face in profile as she turned to gaze out the window was flat, the nose nearly bridgeless. She wore a coral shade of lipstick, carelessly applied—a difficult color for any woman to wear, an impossible one in her case.

He looked around. There was little else in the room on which to rest the eye, excepting a large Japanese screen hung over the fireplace in place of the traditional painting. Beneath it sat a glass of what probably was vodka, and a waterless vase holding one stark, dried tree branch.

Her voice when she spoke was deep, seductive, whiskey-soaked, like Lauren Bacall doing voiceovers for cat food. It also conveyed a distinctly American accent, overlaid by a British upper-class drawl.

“What are you doing to catch my son’s killer? Anything?” she asked. The words might have been belligerent; the tone conveyed only shocked anguish. Her eyes struggled to bring into focus this bearer of bad tidings in the form of an oversized plainclothes detective.

It was possibly St. Just’s least-favorite question from the public, and he was not yet ready to answer.

“All that we can,” he said at last, adding: “I didn’t realize you were American.”

“Oh, yes. Well, of course, I became a British citizen years ago.”

What she actually said could best be rendered as, “became a Brishish zhitizhen,” but St. Just could just about catch the spirit of what she was trying to say. Good lord, the woman was boiled as an owl, and it was just on two in the afternoon. Even allowing for the extra rations allotted for grief, he felt somehow that with Chloe, this was no rare occurrence.

She was looking about the room now, as if wondering where on earth she’d left her British passport. Like St. Just, she found little to divert her gaze, and after awhile she dropped her eyes to study the contents of the glass she was now clutching like a crystal ball. Silence hung in the room, except for the faint, annoying tinkle of some chimes on the balcony just visible through glass doors.

St. Just might not have been in the room; Chloe had retreated into some foggy area where, possibly, she mulled the problem of interest rates, global warming, or the death of her son—it was difficult to tell from her battened-down expression.

“Fucking chimes,” she said, finally, looking up. “The decorator said they would keep the bad spirits away. Guess not. Poncy little creep. I keep meaning to … Would you like a drink?”

He surprised her by nodding. She seemed to want company, but he felt it would be a delicate balancing act to keep her just sober enough to answer his questions. Maybe if he joined her he could control the pace of her consumption.

“Drinking on the job? Good for you,” she said. “That’s precisely why the sun never used to set on the British Empire. Don’t know what could have gone wrong. I’ll just ring for Augusta.” She lurched toward a bell pull at the side of the mantel. St. Just, who already had spied an elaborately carved drinks cabinet in one corner, stopped her. If Augusta was the woman who had admitted him, it would amount to cruelty to make her shuffle all the way back in here.

“Don’t bother. I can manage.” He walked over to the cabinet, which proved to contain a large array of bottles and glasses on the shelves inside, along with a recently filled ice bucket. He poured two weak ones on the rocks, ignoring her scornful look at the ice cubes as she accepted the drink.

“Cigarette?” She indicated the lacquered case on the glass coffee table.

He retrieved two, igniting them from the matching lighter. It had been months since he’d had a cigarette, and tended only to do so when trying either to annoy or relax a suspect. If it relaxed them enough to make them cough up the truth, so much the better. Chloe, although she seemed to him unlikely as a suspect, almost certainly held background information that might be useful.

“Lady—” he began. Then he realized he didn’t know what to call her. Surely Violet was Lady Beauclerk-Fisk now; there couldn’t be two of them holding the title at once. He wondered how Debrett’s would handle this one. He decided to err on the side of respect.

“Lady Beauclerk-Fisk,” he began.

“Oh, for God’s sake, call me Chloe.”

That settled that.

“The correct form of address would be Chloe, Lady Beauclerk-Fisk, it you want the whole shootin’ match,” she added. “That other one is now Lady Beauclerk-Fisk.” She flicked cigarette ash in the general direction of the tray on the coffee table. “I read somewhere that during the thirties, when divorce was all the rage, there were something like three times as many Duchesses as Dukes in the land. It must have been tremendously confusing for everyone.”

“I see. Interesting. Well, Chloe, I take it this means you knew about your husband’s—your former husband’s—remarriage?”

“Yes. Ruthven called me that night. Thank God I’d had the sense to stay away from that wretched dinner.”

“What time did he call you?”

“I don’t know. Ten. Eleven. Afterwards.”

St. Just imagined that time for Chloe was rather elastic, one hour warping into the other.

“What did he say, exactly?”

“Exactly? I couldn’t tell you
exactly
. Just that he—Adrian—had got them all up there using this engagement ploy, but that the deed had already been done some days before in a registry office in deepest Scotland.”

“Gretna Green, actually.”

“Ah, yes. The Las Vegas of the United Kingdom. The whole thing is classic Adrian. I should have seen this one coming, but he always could surprise me. Seldom pleasant surprises either, I assure you.”

“Did Ruthven mention his suspicions regarding Sir Adrian’s new, er, wife?”

“They were hardly suspicions, Inspector. Ruthven dealt in facts. Yes, he told me what he’d dug up.”

“And?”

“And what?”

“What was your reaction? His?”

“Similar reactions, Inspector. If you want the truth, we were both rather hoping she’d do a repeat performance. Serve the old bastard right.”

“You don’t feel there’s any possibility it was, well, a genuine attachment?”

“True love, you mean? No. You’d get more affection from a goldfish than from Adrian. The whole thing—it’s preposterous.”

Or perhaps, so she needed to believe.

“You received an invitation to the wedding? Or the post-wedding event, as it turned out?”

“Oh, yes.”

“That’s a bit unusual, isn’t it?”

“I don’t know the etiquette of these things, inviting the ex-wife. In California, I imagine it’s standard procedure.”

“But here?”

“Here I imagine it’s not.”

He waited for her to say more—there must have been more she had to say on the subject—but whatever damage had been done to her pride she was not going to invite sympathy by sharing it with him. He found he admired her for her reticence, or was it caution? Perhaps, she just had other things on her mind now.

“You were here last night?”

“I was at the theater. That play about the white painting.”

“
Art
. Yes, I’ve seen it as well. Quite a short play, isn’t it?”

“Yes, Chief Inspector,” she said, eyes suddenly in focus, the churning sadness behind them diverted by anger. “Quite a short play, leaving me plenty of time to nip up to Cambridge and kill my own son and scamper back home. I can’t imagine what the motive would be, though, can you?”

No, he couldn’t. But it was clear that no matter how far blootered Chloe might become, she was more than capable of quick reaction. He wondered if Albert shared, along with her capacity for drink, her capacity for sudden focus where needed.

“Tell me a bit about your other children. How did they all get along?”

He knew the answer, but was curious as to whether the mother’s point of view in this case would be objective. It so seldom was. But so far, oddly, she had evinced no curiosity as to the reactions of her children to being on the scene of the murder—or even as to their safety. Or their possible guilt.

“When Adrian wasn’t busy setting them all against each other, you mean? I hardly know. You’ll hear sooner or later that I left my children, for the most part, when I left that wretched marriage. But I don’t myself recall a day when they all got along, even as toddlers. Constantly fighting from the day they could wave a spoon about; quite vicious they were. George probably still has a scar from when Albert brained him with a choo-choo.” She sighed, tapping varnished nails against folded arms. “Where to start? I can tell you Sarah, the youngest, was the strangest of the lot. Fey. What the kids today would call a nerd, I imagine. Her school’s headmistress told me once Sarah would sit in chapel every Sunday and take notes on the sermon—didn’t half get on the minister’s nerves. She also tends to weigh every thought until she’s completely paralyzed herself into inaction. Hardly a chip off the old block, mine or Adrian’s.

“Then there’s Albert. Those two at least seemed to get along: he and Sarah. Both of them—all of them—jealous of Ruthven, of course. He was the favorite and no mistake. Dynamic, gifted, charming. Well, charming when he wanted something, but whatever else is the point of charm? Anyway, parents do have favorites, Chief Inspector, although they may try to hide it. Ruthven was mine.”

“I see. And Albert? You say he was jealous of Ruthven?”

“Albert.” Sigh. “He really does have talent, you know, but he seems to spend his life forever snatching defeat from the jaws of victory, in both his career and his private life.”

“You’ve seen him on stage?”

“Yes,” she said reluctantly. “I snuck into several of his plays when he was performing in London.”

“Snuck in?”

“I relinquished my rights to him long ago, so, yes, I snuck in. I just wanted to see how he was doing.”

St. Just, catching a glimpse of the despair in her eyes, thought:
Needed to, more like
.

“As for George—I haven’t seen George in an age, so I couldn’t tell you. I doubt he’s up to much good.”

Off his look, she said:

“You’re surprised, are you? To hear a mother speak this way about her own brood? Sentimental lies from me won’t help your investigation—but then again, neither will the truth. I’ll tell you what: I don’t think you’ll ever be able to prove who did this. Because they
all
could have done it, any of them, killed my boy. That includes Adrian, that includes this Violet person, that even includes Lillian, although she must realize Ruthven’s death is the end of all her wild dreams of avarice. Adrian won’t leave her a cent with Ruthven gone.

“But whoever did it, that bastard Adrian was behind it; you mark my word on that. Go on, investigate all you want. But even if you do think you can prove something—if you can’t bring Ruthven back, I don’t much see the point.”

“You speak of Sir Adrian with … dislike. Yet you had four children by him.”

“Four,” she repeated, wonderingly. She might never have stopped to count them before. “Yes. Hard to understand, I imagine, if you weren’t of our generation. Worse if you were raised by nuns, as I was. Raised by wolves would have been better. Took me years to slake off all that nonsense.” She peered into her nearly empty glass—“Years,” she repeated—before drinking off the last inch in one go.

By now most of her lipstick had been washed away, except for a trace around the edges of her mouth. Her lips were trembling— pale, nearly white. She looked as if a child had drawn the outline of her mouth in crayon but forgotten to color inside the lines. He remained quiet, hoping she would continue, that letting her run on would at best tell him more, at least release the pressure she was under. The jangling chimes filled the silence, diverting his attention out the balcony window; he could see storm clouds chugging steadily across a sullen sky.

“God, but that racket drives me crazy,” she said.

She suddenly beelined toward the balcony. Before St. Just could reach her, he heard the sound of tearing wood, the shattering of glass. He caught up with her just in time to see the mangled chimes land in an ornamental pond in the front garden below.

Chloe stood dusting off her hands, sobbing as if her heart would break.

RUMOR MILL

_______________________

ST. JUST HAD BEEN
reluctant to leave Chloe. He doubted the antiquated dog or housekeeper were much company, even though he had left her in their protective circle. They’d paused in their ministrations only long enough to glare at him (
What have you done to
her?
) on his way out.

He sighed, riffling through the notes Sergeant Fear had provided him. He had Manda Croom to talk with next. She was Ruthven’s girlfriend and corporate comrade-in-arms, as his e-mail account on the laptop had revealed.

St. Just was feeling the sting of urgency on this otherwise quiet Sunday—a full awareness that the clock would not stop while he interviewed suspects at leisure. It didn’t help that there were so
many
suspects. Something had been unleashed in Waverley Court, and although he had left the place guarded like Buckingham Palace, his policeman’s instinct told him the something was not over yet.

He navigated central London, making a deliberate pass in front of the offices of Ruthven’s company, which were housed in an Orwellian structure of what appeared from a distance to be an enormous ice tray propped against a pyramid, but on approach resolved itself into an intimidating structure of reflective silver glass cut by exposed steel beams. It was on occasions such as this St. Just felt Prince Charles’ anti-growth stance was possibly more than the dilettantish messing about of the underemployed. St. Just pictured himself being hoisted skyward in the outside lift that would carry him to the top floor, where Ruthven had been king of all he surveyed. Inside, St. Just imagined, would be a rat’s maze of cubicles housing hundreds of people toiling in front of computer screens, to what object St. Just could only guess.