McNally's Bluff (9 page)

We Pelicans are famous for our pools that go from the sublime—sporting events—to the ridiculous—the number of inches between the hem of Priscilla’s miniskirt and her knees which draws estimates that prove the imagination is far more ingenious than the eye. Most of Palm Beach and vicinity had got the details of last night’s gala-cum-tragedy from the Macurdys’ show. Between the show and the morning papers, the circumstances of Marlena Marvel’s death were the talk of a town whose citizens thrive on dividends from gilt-edged securities and scandal. It was, in short, fodder for a Pelican pool to guess who done it.

“Aliens?” Al Rogoff scoffed.

“Correct, Sergeant,” Mr. Pettibone told him, polishing a glass and gazing into it as if it were a crystal ball. “According to the boys who lunch, the wee people beamed this unfortunate woman up to their waiting saucer for her annual checkup that went awry as happens more often than your local GP cares to admit, then beamed her back down to the center of that maze doohickey thinking it was a cemetery.”

In answer, Al drank from his pilsner goblet and licked the foam from his upper lip.

“Do you go along with aliens, Mr. Pettibone?” I probed.

“Not at all, Archy. Given the lady’s arcane leanings, I suspect Voodoo. You take a chicken, wring its neck...”

I raised my hand to silence him. “We await lunch, Mr. Pettibone.”

With a toothy smile and a sly wink he retreated to the far end of the bar and delved into the arcane postulations of
The Wall Street Journal.

Knowing that Al worked last night and wouldn’t report back for duty until this evening, I had invited him for a late lunch at the Pelican. Aside from a few stragglers in the dining room lingering over their coffee, the clapboard dwelling that houses the Pelican was quiet and even Priscilla had vanished to the Pettibones’ apartment upstairs or, more likely, to catch a few rays on the beach in her itsy-bitsy bikini designed to drive innocent men to wrack and ruin.

“If you think the alien connection is goofy,” I said to Al, “wait till you hear what your new neighbor is about to impart to his listeners.”

“Joe Gallo?” Al mused. “Nice kid but a little verbose, if you know what I mean. I saw him at the party last night but I didn’t know he was broadcasting live until this morning. Did you catch the Macurdy show?”

I said I hadn’t but mentioned that Binky gave the entire staff at McNally & Son a taped viewing this morning. “Gallo is going to stress the occult, Al, and play it for all it’s worth.”

“I know,” he answered. “I talked to the palace this morning and they’re already getting crank calls thanks to Mack Macurdy’s close that linked the Marvel dame to dark forces.”

The palace is Al’s name for Palm Beach police headquarters on South County and Australian Avenue that resembles a Palm Beach villa, replete with acres of barrel clay tiled mansard roof, making it worthy of Al’s sobriquet.

“And you may as well know,” I warned, “that Joe has talked Binky into joining him in the witch hunt which I’m sure is being masterminded by Mack Macurdy.”

Al laughed. “It’ll keep the two from trick-or-treating all over the Palm Court come Halloween.”

Leave it to Al Rogoff to cut to the source of Mack’s ignoble scheme. Halloween was indeed fast approaching, a fact I’m sure influenced Mack’s decision to play up the dark forces angle. Matthew Hayes would admire Mack’s timing—or was the amazin’ one the puppeteer who had the media dancing to his artful manipulations? I never knew a case to have so many questions the morning after the night before.

“You gonna take the case, Archy?”

“Everyone is asking me that. I don’t know, Al. Hayes hired me on the spot to find his wife last night, but that was before your gang found her dead in the maze. The guy is a flake, so who knows if he’ll even remember who I am today.”

“How come Binky is deserting you for Joe Gallo?”

“It’s a question of compensation, of all things.”

“You mean you ain’t never given him a dime for services rendered, right, pal?”

“No, Al, I ain’t never, but I bought him many an expensive lunch and dinner.”

“Hint, hint,” Al teased, downing the rest of his beer.

“I got Binky out of my back pocket, Sergeant, but he and his new sidekick will nestle right into yours in search of classified information.”

Al told me what they were likely to find in his back pocket but prudence prevents me from putting it in print. However, he did add, “You know my doormat that tells visitors to
GO AWAY
in big black letters?”

“I do, Al.”

“Well, since Joe took the trailer next door I’ve added a second line to the message.”

“What’s that?”

“
BOTH OF YOU
.”

With that Leroy arrived with our repast. Mr. Pettibone had set us up at the bar and due to our tardiness we simply ordered the day’s lunch special which was fish and chips.

This is the granddaddy of fast food, invented in England where it is served to go wrapped in the London
Times,
or
The Mail,
or the daily of your choice. Leroy’s came on a plate and the cod was sparingly breaded and sautéed rather than fried. There is a difference. The chips (french fries to Americans) were of the shoestring variety, prepared from scratch and rendered neither soggy nor brittle, but crisp.

Two monkey dishes containing coleslaw and horseradish, which is a root vegetable of all things, accompanied the meal as well as a fat kosher dill for each of us. Not bad for latecomers to the feast.

“You in on the pool, Archy?” Leroy questioned.

“I may be disqualified, Leroy, on the grounds of inside trading, according to your father. Did you take a plunge?”

“I did,” Leroy confessed.

“Aliens?” Al asked, drowning his chips in ketchup.

“No way,” said our chef.

“Demons?” I speculated.

Leroy shook his head. “A rope ladder,” he prophesied. “You know what I mean. You’ve seen them advertised in magazines. You hook it on the windowsill, roll it out and climb down in case of fire. That’s how she got out, Sergeant. Dig around and you’ll find the ditched rope ladder.”

Not bad, I was thinking. I had suggested last night that Marlena went out the window but I was thinking more of a free fall than a portable fire escape. At any rate, it beat being beamed up to a flying saucer.

“How did she get in the maze?” Al asked him. “There were people standing outside the entrance.”

“Those people, Sergeant, were puffin’ and chattin’ and so busy looking at each other an elephant could have tramped by and they wouldn’t have noticed.”

Leroy certainly knew the Palm Beach Smart Set. When deprived of a mirror they did tend to gaze upon their companions, looking for flaws.

“She got to that goal thing because she knew the secret,” Leroy declared. “Lordy, her husband done built the zigzag cabbage patch. Right, Archy?”

“He did, Leroy. But why did she climb down a ladder and go to the goal?” I asked, rather impressed with Leroy’s theory. “And how did she die there?”

Leroy summed it up in two words. “Carny folks. She goes down that rope ladder, he says she’s disappeared. The search is on and they find her in the center of that maze. How did she get there? Magic, of course. It’s like the three-card-monte scam. How did the pea get under that middle shell when you saw it go into the one on the left? Carny folks, Archy.”

Al listened to every word but did not pause in his noshing to do so. “So how did she die?” he wanted to know.

“Ain’t figured that out as yet,” Leroy said with a shrug. “But the pool has two parts. Who did her in and how did she get into that maze. I think I’ll take half the prize as nobody thought of a rope ladder.”

When Leroy departed I intoned, “Not bad, Sergeant, you must admit. A rope ladder could be the answer.”

“Sorry, pal, but it ain’t.”

Sensing I was about to learn something not yet known to the public at large I cautiously asked why.

“She was dead when she was dumped in the maze.”

“Is that a fact, Al?”

“I told you I talked to the palace this morning. I wanted to see if they needed me to come in early but they were covered. It’ll be on tonight’s news so I ain’t telling no tales out of school. The PM showed that she was moved after death.”

“But how?” a little voice inside my head kept asking. How? Then came the jackpot query. “How did she die, Al?”

“Digitalis poisoning,” came the jackpot answer.

I aborted the delivery of a crispy chip from plate to mouth. “Say again?”

“You heard right,” Al said. “Digitalis poisoning, ingested orally.”

“Isn’t that a medication taken by heart patients?”

Al nodded. “So they tell me, and before you ask, she wasn’t on any medication for her heart. In fact she was in good shape for a dame her age.”

“I don’t get it,” I groaned.

“You ain’t alone, so don’t get puffed over it.”

I signaled Mr. Pettibone for refills. He pulled our beers and served them with the utmost discretion. A good bartender knows when to prattle, when to listen, and when to disappear. Mr. Pettibone, a master of the craft, always knew which of the three was required and acted accordingly.

“You made a thorough search of the house last night.” It was pure rhetoric but one had to start someplace.

“We were there till daybreak,” Al said, “and found nothing for our pains. Eberhart posted a man at the entrance to that maze all night and as we speak the boys are raking those paths with a fine-tooth comb.”

“What about the attic? Hayes claimed the door was locked from the outside when he looked up there but we only have his word, and the maid’s, for that. It seems to me that up is the only way anyone could have gone without being seen. No one could have come down those steps, I’ll swear to that to my dying day.”

“The attic held what you would expect from the owners of a traveling carnival, Archy. Props, costumes and a dozen steamer trunks full of more of the same. There’s even a wooden Indian up there, remember them?

“There were barbells that looked like they weighed a ton but Pete, our rookie, picked it up with one hand. Decks of cards that were all the ace of spades, mirrors that distorted images, jackets with hidden pockets, magic wands, and one of those boxes you put a pretty dame in and saw her in half. It had a pair of wooden legs sticking out of one end and a bald head sticking out of the other end. The ankles of the legs opened and inside was a tiny battery-operated motor. You know why, pal?”

“Press something and the toes wiggle like they belonged to the lady being sawed in half.”

“Give the guy a cigar. And there was even a trunk full of Marlena’s tonic for men, guaranteed to put lead in grand-pop’s pencil.”

Unable to resist, I quipped, “I always wondered where Viagra got its start.”

“There was everything you’d expect to find in Hayes’s attic but no human being or escape hatch anyplace up there except the windows.” Al finished his spiel as well as his lunch. The man eats like Smokey the Bear and in many ways he resembles the cartoon omnivorous mammal.

“Back to the rope ladder,” I sighed.

“Forget the rope ladder, pal. Can you see anybody carrying that big lady down one? And who was up there to do it? The maid? She’s like two inches taller than her boss who’s a glorified midget.” Al shook his head. “Everything connected with this crowd is pure hoke. Pick a card, any card, and you’ll always pick the ace of spades. Someone poisoned the lady and carried her down to that confounded maze.”

“Eberhart is treating it as murder?”

“Archy, suicides don’t roam around after the fact. They are always found
in situ.
”

“Forget how she was moved from bedroom to maze,” I advised. “That’s the ruse, the smoke screen, the hocus-pocus, engineered to keep us all from working to discover why Marlena Marvel was killed which would lead us to who done it. In short, Sergeant, keep your eye upon the doughnut and not upon the hole.”

Al gave this careful consideration before answering, “You think Leroy got one of them glazed doughnuts for dessert?”

“Mirrors,” Ursi uttered the moment she saw me peeking into the kitchen for a sneak preview of the evening’s bill of fare. “They do it with mirrors.”

The magnificent bouquet wafting out of the oven door as she opened it for inspection told me this prodigal son’s fatted calf was to be a rib roast. Ursi spooned the juices emanating from the meat and lovingly poured them over the quartered potatoes and sliced onions surrounding the ribs. I had picked a good night to touch base with those I loved.

“Have the good people of Palm Beach nothing better to do with their time than speculate and postulate on the death of Marlena Marvel?” I scolded.

“Of course not, Archy,” Ursi readily admitted as she darted from refrigerator to cupboard to chopping block. “And why not? First that maze and now a suspicious death inside the creepy thing. Why, it’s replaced Carolyn Taylor versus Laddy Taylor as dinner table conversation in better homes all over the island.”

Should you be wondering why our Ursi is privy to dinner conversations in better homes, it is because Ursi and Jamie are the unofficial heads of the nonexistent domestic confederation of Palm Beach. With a communication system that would dazzle the Pentagon, the chefs and butlers, the parlor maids and au pairs, the chauffeurs and valets, report to the Olsons every nuance of the life and times of those they serve.

And how right Ursi was. Her comment made me realize that I had not thought of Carolyn and Laddy since reporting their encounter at Le Maze to father earlier in the day. “How do they work the mirrors, Ursi?”

“Well, how should I know that?” she snapped. “But Felicity, she’s the laundress over at the Stuart house, has a brother who ran away from home to join a traveling carnival, and it was him that told her they used mirrors to make you think you were seeing one thing when all the time you were seeing something else. Makes me dizzy to think about it.”

Watching Ursi organizing dinner made me dizzy but I didn’t let on.
Seeing one thing when all the time you were seeing something else
stuck in my craw. Obviously they (whoever they are) had us all hoodwinked last night. What had we seen that wasn’t there or what had we not seen that was there? Believe nothing of what you read and one half of what you see I have always thought to be sound advice, but which half of what we saw last night was real and which wasn’t? It was more than intriguing, it was unsettling to those of us who believed in a logical universe.