Murder in the Queen's Armes (20 page)

"Christ," Gideon said. "And you bought it, Jack?"

Frawley made a motion with his head that was part denial, part assent, part frustration.

"He not only bought it," Bagshawe said, "he presented a paper on it to the Eastern Missouri Anthropological Society and was thereby made—so my informants advise me— an object of some ridicule."

Gideon felt a wave of compassion for the visibly sagging Frawley. That kind of joke was every anthropologist’s nightmare, and if Randy was in the habit of playing merry little pranks like that, it was a wonder he’d lived as long as he had.

"All right, Inspector, you’re right," Frawley said, seeming to drag the words out of himself. "I was jealous of Nate. I’ve behaved like a fool—but I
didn’t
kill Randy! As God is my witness, I never thought in my wildest dreams that Nate… that anybody…would murder Randy." As if he didn’t already look sufficiently abject, Frawley had taken off his hat and was crushing it in both hands. "I’ll try to make amends. Please believe me when I say you’ll have my complete cooperation in any way you want."

Bagshawe sucked his teeth and studied him. "I think it goes without saying, Professor Frawley, that I’d take a very dim view of it if you attempted to leave the vicinity of Charmouth without my permission."

"Yes, of course, Inspector. I wouldn’t think of it. I want to do everything I can to help solve this terrible tragedy."

Gideon felt like going away and washing his hands somewhere, but he asked another question. "Jack, before you go—we’ve found a discrepancy in the excavation records from November one. There’s a find card on a partial human femur, but it was never entered in the field catalog."

Frawley looked uncomprehendingly at him. "What?"

"You make the entries in the field catalog, don’t you?"

"Yes, every night; sometimes the next morning. A femur, did you say? That’s impossible. We’ve never found a human bone—not until Poundbury Man. We thought we had some ribs, but you straightened us out on that."

"You’re positive?"

"Of course I’m positive. I’d know about it if we had, wouldn’t I? No, we never found one. Ask anybody."

Gideon remembered the scrawled signature in the lower right-hand corner of the card: Leon Hillyer. He would indeed ask somebody.

GIDEON and Bagshawe remained near the edge of the cliff, looking out toward the water. The sea was a flat, summery blue, and a white, picture-book passenger liner steamed eastward from Plymouth, riding the horizon toward France.

Bagshawe took out his pipe and lit it with a wooden match, using his wide body to block the breeze. Then he sat down on a chair-high boulder, first arranging the skirts of his coat like the tails of a cutaway.

"Nasty piece of goods, our man Frawley," he said cheerfully. "Do you think he told us the truth about what Alexander said to him?"

"I don’t know," Gideon said, "but I don’t see Jack Frawley as a font of veracity."

Unexpectedly, Bagshawe guffawed. "No, you’re right there. Still, if it’s true, it provides us, doesn’t it, with a plausible motive for your friend Professor Marcus—who, by the way, continues to proclaim himself innocent of both murder and fraud."

"I take it Nate’s still your prime suspect?"

"Prime suspect? Oh no, I wouldn’t say that. There’s Professor Frawley, isn’t there, and then the others as well. Five in all, and all prime."

"Five? You mean all the people on the dig?"

"Just so, Professor. A single day’s work—interviews with the lot, and a few calls across the Pond—and we’ve turned up, I’m sorry to say, credible motives for every man-jack of them, and Miss Mazur, too. And none of them took much digging. Young Barry Fusco, for instance, owed Randy some three thousand dollars, which he was having a hard time repaying. Randy, so it’s said, had been making nasty noises at Barry, threatening to go to the lad’s father when they go back home."

"His father? Why would he go to his father?"

"Well, you see, Barry borrowed it in the first place to keep his father from finding out he’d wrecked a new car that had been a present. Apparently, the father’s a stern old gent of whom Barry lives in considerable awe."

"And so Barry might have killed Randy to keep his father from finding out?"

"Exactly, Professor, but I can see you’re not taken with the idea. Well, neither am I, but there it is. Now, Sandra Mazur and Leon Hillyer each present a bit more potential; two points of a steamy little triangle, with Randy being the third." He smiled with the metaphor.

"Do you mean Sandra was having affairs with both of them?" This surprised Gideon. The brittle Sandra hardly seemed the sort of woman to stir up male instincts of violence or passion—not his at any rate.

"I know what you’re thinking," Bagshawe said, "but there’s more involved than the young lady’s charms; there’s a tidy sum of money. Miss Mazur, you see, will come into a sizable inheritance on her thirtieth birthday. Both men were in grim pursuit, and each, I gather, had been unaware he had a rival. Sufficient reason for homicide, I should say, should one of them find out."

Gideon thought it over. Leon, ambitious and bright, did seem the kind of man who wouldn’t be at all averse to marrying for money. And although it might appear that Randy, coming from a wealthy family himself, had less to gain, his position had been insecure. From what Nate had said, his father had been threatening to disinherit him. It was obvious to Gideon, knowing what he knew about Randy’s style of living, that Randy would have welcomed the advantages of a rich wife.

"You’re saying," he said, "that Leon might have found out about Randy and killed him?"

"Yes; without premeditation, I should think. Leon’s a clever young man. If he’d planned to do Randy in, he’d choose someplace removed from the dig to do it. But I don’t rule out an argument and a hot-blooded murder."

"But where’s the motive for Sandra in all that? And do you really think she could have killed Randy, even armed with a mallet? She can’t weigh much more than a hundred pounds."

Bagshawe waved dismissively. "Given the proper incentive, women have been known to kill men a great deal larger than themselves, as I’m sure you know very well. And she had an incentive. It seems she’d become disenchanted with the ways of our Randy and had, in fact, settled on the lucky Leon as her man. This, she claims, she finally told Randy, but he seems to have taken exception. He threatened to make their affair public—and a few little tidbits about certain of Miss Mazur’s, ah, unusual proclivities as well." He lowered his eyes and coughed delicately. "Well, then, Leon, you see, with his eye on a rising academic career in the Ivy League, if that’s the right term, might very well bow out and find himself a more socially acceptable wife. You see?"

"I think I do, and I guess that Sandra might have a motive, all right. But why would she tell you all this?"

"She didn’t, but a chambermaid at the Jug and Sceptre, where Randy was putting up, heard them shouting at each other early one morning, and told all to Sergeant Fryer—remarkable memory for details, that woman has—and with what Miss Mazur
did
tell me, it wasn’t hard to piece it all together."

He leaned over, tapped his pipe against a rock, blew through the stem, and put it in his pocket. "So you see, Professor, the investigation progresses satisfactorily, and there’s no reason at all for you not to return to your bones."

"I think I’ve just been fired," Gideon said with a grin as Bagshawe got to his feet. "And speaking of bones, I have some questions to ask Leon about still another bone that’s turned up, or rather, that hasn’t turned up."

"That’s the ticket," Bagshawe said with an amicable lack of interest.

"It’s a piece of a femur that seems to have been found and then lost again. You’re welcome to sit in if you like."

Bagshawe let his expression answer for him, and very eloquent it was.

When Gideon went to the dig, he stood for a while, watching the crew work at backfilling under Abe’s efficient direction. With newly informed eyes he took a good, long look at them, but Sandra seemed as drawn and hard-edged as ever, not his idea of a seductress—no matter how rich— and a pretty unlikely murderess, too, although she was a better bet for that. The rosy-cheeked Barry looked no less wholesome than ever, and Frawley no less ineffectual. And Leon, who was coolly lecturing Abe on some stratigraphic complexities, hardly fit the mold of Bagshawe’s hot-blooded murderer. Cold-blooded, however …that might be another thing.

But when it came down to it, there was something unsatisfying, something inescapably spurious about every one of the hypotheses Bagshawe had advanced. And what about the left-handed mallet blow? None of them, after all, were left-handed. How could he fit that inescapable fact

into even the few shadowy patterns that had emerged thus far? Or was he offbase in his continuing certainty that the killer was left-handed? Bagshawe disagreed with him, and Bagshawe was a pretty fair cop.

When Abe called a halt for lunch, Gideon took him aside. "Frawley says Leon never reported finding any bone."

"Is that so?" Abe said thoughtfully. "Maybe we should have a little brown-bag talk with Leon."

Most of the staff were taking advantage of the fine weather to eat their sack lunches on the bluff, but Leon had made for the shed. He was at the table writing a postcard, a cup of coffee beside him, when Abe and Gideon came in. He looked up, smiling.

"Hi, Abe. Hiya, Gideon."

"Leon," Abe said, "you wouldn’t mind if we had a little talk? It shouldn’t take long."

"Not at all, Abe. Just let me finish this card or I’ll never get back to it."

Gideon went to the table in the corner to make coffee for himself and Abe. Above the hot plate, a small mirror was taped to the wall. In it he could see Leon bent over the postcard, writing slowly. There was something…

He put down the coffee jar and whirled around. "You’re writing left-handed!"

There was a long, frozen moment during which Leon stared speechlessly back at Gideon, and Abe stared from one to the other. At last Leon mutely lifted the hand in which he held his pen.

It was his right hand, inarguably his right hand.

"I… sorry," Gideon said lamely. "My mistake."

"You were looking in the mirror," Abe said. "You saw it backwards."

"I guess so. Sorry," he said again, feeling idiotic. "I don’t know what I was thinking of." But he knew very well; he had a case of left-handed mallet murderers on the brain.

"What’s the big deal anyway?" Leon asked.

"No big deal," Abe said. "So, let’s have some lunch, and we’ll have our little talk."

He tore open a brown paper bag, removed its waxed paper-wrapped contents, and spread it out as a make-do tablecloth. He and Leon had their meals with them, but Gideon was empty-handed; he had promised to meet Julie at the George for a late lunch. Still somewhat disconcerted, he peeked once again at Leon in the mirror— right-handed, definitely right-handed—and brought back the coffee mugs.

"Jesus Christ," Leon said. "Fish paste." He was peering into one of the two sandwiches packed for him by his landlady. He groaned and shook his head in waggish despair. "The English."

Abe smiled tolerantly. As well he could, Gideon thought. Mrs. Hinshore had provided a thick, aromatic roast-beef-and-horseradish sandwich for him.

"Wow," Leon said, watching him unwrap it. "I think I’m staying at the wrong place." He was relaxed and smiling, his elbow over the back of his chair.

"Leon," Gideon said, "do you remember coming up with a fragment of a human femur a few weeks ago?"

"Uh-uh."

"November one, it would have been. It was never entered in the field catalog."

"Maybe," Leon said absently, chewing slowly, "but I don’t think so."

"You don’t
think
so?" Abe looked up sharply from his sandwich. "A human bone isn’t important enough to remember?"

"Well, sure it’s important, Abe," Leon replied with some edge, "and I guess I’d remember it if I dug it up. So I guess I didn’t."

Abe put the sandwich down on the paper sack and reached inside his cardigan sweater. His hand emerged with the find card, which he extended to Leon.

Leon wiped his fingers, took the card, and frowned. "Huh," he said, " ‘human femur, left, partial.’ That’s my handwriting, all right….Boy, it’s hard to remember. You’re talking about a month ago; we’ve dug up a lot of stuff since." He shook his head at the card and handed it back. "I don’t know what to say, Abe."

He took another dreamy bite of his sandwich. "Wait a minute; maybe I do remember." He swallowed, his eyes rolled upward. Gideon was struck with the distinct impression that some quick fabrication was underway. "Yeah, that’s right—I found
something
I thought might be a human bone, and I wrote it on the find card. I remember, I got all excited about it." He laughed merrily at himself. "And then when Jack looked at it, he said it was just a piece of a steatite carving." Again he chuckled at himself.

"That’s hard to buy, Leon," Gideon said. "A couple of weeks ago you recognized the difference—a damn subtle one—between the ribs of a deer and those of a human being. Now you’re saying you couldn’t tell the difference between a stone carving and a femur?"

Leon hunched his shoulders and spread his hands humorously. "What can I say? I’m human too."

Abe looked at him, running a finger over his chin. "In the field catalog on November first, there is only one entry: four faience beads. No steatite carving."

Thoughtfully, Leon reached into his paper sack, ignoring a second sandwich and bringing out a roll of mints. He offered it around. "Polos. They’re like Lifesavers." Gideon and Abe declined, and Leon popped one into his mouth and dropped the roll into a shirt pocket. "Well," he said at last,

"I sure don’t know how to account for it. Maybe I got the date wrong on the card."

"That’s possible," Abe said pleasantly, "but in the whole catalog there’s no steatite carving."

Again Leon spread his hands.

"There was something else, Leon," Gideon said. "Originally, you put down the depth as twenty-one inches, then crossed it out and changed it to twelve. What was that about?"