Strangled Prose (10 page)

To my chagrin, the books were not swooped up by the customers who straggled by in a steady but thin flow. By noon I was beginning to regret my noble gesture. Derek and Stephanie now seemed to include me in their amorous gazes, as if inviting me to indulge a bit in a ménage à trois. I caught Derek watching me out of the corner of his eye.

“Cut it out, you lecherous goon,” I told him tartly. “Why don't you give Stephanie a little more sympathy?”

“The first symptom of schizophrenia is conversing with inanimate objects,” Britton commented from the doorway. He came in and brushed his beard against my cheek, then marched across the store to study the foreign-language dictionaries with an intent expression.

I must admit I gaped at his back for several minutes. Finally I pulled myself together and said, “I suppose you heard about poor Mildred?”

“At length this morning,” he said. He picked up a Russian-English travel guide and flipped through it, making clucking noises as he shook his head. Over the Russian alphabet or Mildred's demise—I wasn't sure which.

“And who was the bearer of the sad tidings?” I asked when I tired of trying to decipher his back.

“A cop.” Britton replaced the book and turned around. “A detective named Rosen, who seemed to feel that I might have gone to the Twiller house yesterday afternoon to scream invectives at poor Mildred. I can't imagine why.”

“Lieutenant Rosen heard all the grim details about the contents of the book. He had the very same idea about me.”

“And did you?”

“Did I what?” I snapped. Although I nurtured a few doubts about Britton, I did not appreciate the reciprocity.

“Go by the Twiller house to scream invectives at poor Mildred?”

I narrowed my eyes. “Of course not. Why on earth would I do that?”

“Well,” Britton sighed, turning back to the dictionaries, “the reference to Carlton was not easy to overlook.”

“There was absolutely no truth to it, however, so I had no reason to attack Mildred. Carlton was by himself when the chicken truck rammed him. I wasn't thrilled by her character's name, but that doesn't mean the insinuation had any validity.” I forced myself to laugh gaily at the absurdity of such an idea. Wherever Carlton was, I hoped he appreciated the effort.

“And what about the other nasty little suggestions?”

I wished Britton would turn around so that I could see his face, or at least as much as was visible above his beard. His voice was light, but his shoulders were tense. “What about them?” I asked, with equal lightness.

“Do you believe that I paid for a sleazy abortionist to tear up the insides of some little girl?”

Well, we were making some progress. I went around the counter to join him in front of the rack. He refused to meet my eyes. His jaw was squared and hard.

“No, I don't,” I said softly. “I have no idea why Azalea Twilight would ever come up with such a patently crazy story. I never believed it for a second; I know you better than that.”

The jaw receded, the shoulders eased. Britton put his arm around my waist and gave me a hug. “Thanks, Claire. I must admit I was unsettled by the parody of my name being used in a trashy novel, but the whole thing was nonsense. Now I have only to convince the rest of the faculty.” He sighed at the enormity of the chore. “I suspect I won't be appointed chairman of the department. Twiller would have gotten it anyway. He has the perfect degree of pompousness for the job. I'm too charming.”

“Is that your problem?”

“I wish it were,” he said. “The problem is actually trying not to be offered a tactful year's leave of absense.”

“I cannot believe Mildred really wrote all those horrid things. Douglas swore that there was an explanation, but we never had the chance to hear it. What on earth do you think it could have been?”

“With that woman, anything was possible—including coitus on a trapeze. But let's not worry about it, Claire. Do you still want to go to the gallery opening tonight at the Fine Arts Center? We can go back to my flat afterward to work on erasing the unpleasant memories.”

“No, Douglas invited me over for what I suppose will be a martini-soaked wake. Your presence would be in order, I imagine.”

Britton tightened his grip on my wrist and began to nuzzle my ear. I freed myself and gave him a sweet smile. “Later—maybe. But you never did tell me where you went yesterday after the impromptu reading of
Professor of Passion.
You rather vanished.”

“I made a grand tour of the bars. As a matter of record, I hit every one of them and lingered at more than a few. I was thrown out of the last one well after midnight and blearily wended my way home to pass out on my bathroom floor. ‘Not drunk is he who from the floor can arise alone and still drink more; but drunk is he, who prostrate lies, without the power to drink or rise.' Thomas Love Peacock, 1785–1866. There, love of my life, you know the worst about me. Why don't you let me demonstrate the best?”

“You went on a drunk because your name was parodied in a romance novel?” I said incredulously. “Maggie's response made a bit more sense; she went to call her lawyer.”

“Did she?” Britton mocked my tone.

“I don't know that she actually did, but she certainly was intending to when she left the Book Depot with steam curling out of her ears. Do you have a reason to believe otherwise?”

Britton gave me a boy scout salute. “Heavens, no. Now, what about tonight after this tasteless faculty version of a wake? Shall I lay in a bottle of burgundy and a piece of brie? We can build a fire in the fireplace and watch the cheese melt.”

It brought back a scratchy little memory of a comment from the previous evening. Busying myself with an invoice, I said, “I doubt I'll be in the mood, Britton. Let's save it for another time, shall we?”

He gave me an obligatory leer and left. I dropped the pencil to stare at the empty doorway, thinking about Britton's explanation of his movements the day before. It was not easy to picture him bumping elbows with the local cowboys or even drinking a beer. Britton's taste ran to dusty, obscure bottles of imported wine. It did run to drafts of beer or raucous music. I was surprised that he was even aware of the vast number of bars lining Thurber Street.

The day drifted on. I rather expected to see Lieutenant Rosen, but he did not come to the store. Caron and Inez breezed in toward the middle of the afternoon, more subdued than I had ever seen them. I raised an eyebrow at the black ribbons pinned on their blouses. “New fad?”

“It's for Azalea,” Inez explained with a stricken look. “I just cannot accept that she's really … gone.”

Caron homed in on the
Professor of Passion
on the fiction rack. She picked up a copy and stared at the cover, then spun around to flutter her eyelashes at me. “Why are these here, Mother? I thought you refused to sell them—on principle.”

“They were left over from the reception. It seemed like the thing to do,” I sighed. Although I had broken the news about poor Mildred to Caron the previous night, we hadn't had the energy to discuss that which needed to be discussed. I could almost see the electrons zipping through Caron's brain as she scanned the back cover of
Professor of Passion.
A bad omen.

Inez sniffled into a tissue. “Can we attend the funeral, Mrs. Malloy? I'd like to pay final tribute to Azalea.”

“That is between you and your parents.” I spotted Caron's lip inching out and added, “I suppose that I'll permit Caron to go, if she wishes. But it will be a dreary affair, girls. No soliloquies or readings from her work. Organ music, sermons.”

“I've been to a funeral,” Caron said abruptly. She jammed the book back in the rack and looked at Inez. “Let's go over to the Piggie Pizzeria and see if they have any new video games.”

Inez cowered, her expression as bewildered as my own. “I thought we were going to write a eulogy about Azalea for the school newspaper? How she was so thoroughly romantic, so willing to explore the essence of true love…”

“Well, we're not. We're going over to the Piggie Pizzeria to see if they have any new video games,” Caron said in a tight voice. Then, as if ashamed of her tone, she tried to smile. “I heard some of the kids planning to hang out there this afternoon. It might be fun, Inez.”

Inez shot me a look of desperation but meekly followed Caron out the door. I picked up my pencil, then let it drop again. Caron and Inez were not noted for their social skills and had never, to my knowledge, admitted enjoying the company of any of their peers. A strange day, indeed. I made a solemn promise to myself to talk to Caron before the day was over.

An hour later, I closed the store and went home to change for the cocktail wake. As I considered the proper attire, I heard a door slam below. Maggie, I deduced with customary brilliance. I hastily pulled on a wool skirt and beige blouse, ran a comb through my hair, and scurried down the stairs to catch her before she disappeared.

She yanked open the door and scowled. “What do you want?”

“I'm on my way to the Twiller house,” I extemporized, perplexed by the show of hostility. “Do you want to walk together?”

Maggie stared at me. “I can't; I'm waiting for someone. Besides, I wouldn't enter that libelous, foulmouthed bitch's house if it guaranteed tenure. Not that anything will guarantee tenure now.”

“Oh.” I took a second to think, then said, “Did you talk to a lawyer about suing?”

“Yes. I'm just sorry Mildred Twiller can't be here to suffer.” Maggie's eyes began to glitter, and drops of spittle foamed in the corners of her mouth. “I'm going to sue her estate for defamation of character. I'll take every penny of that bitch's royalties for
Professor of Passion!
”

I retreated from the acid rain that splattered across my face. “Then you did consult your lawyer yesterday afternoon?”

“Are you playing Tuppence Beresford, Claire? Would you prefer me to type up a statement of my whereabouts and slip it under your door?”

I certainly did, but I doubted it would happen. The situation called for humbleness tinged with remorse. “Oh, Maggie, I didn't mean to imply that you had anything to do with poor Mildred's death. The detective has been hounding me for an alibi, too. He acted as if I were his prime suspect, simply because I took a peaceful stroll down the railroad tracks to let off some steam.”

I paused in case she wanted to offer her alibi in response to mine. After a moment of glacial silence, I added, “Britton said he was questioned this morning. We're all suspects, Maggie.”

She mellowed a bit at my confession or at the idea of others suffering along with her. “That Rosen man was here at eight o'clock this morning, all smiles and apologies for disturbing me. He took my statement without saying much and let me leave for my first class. He seemed satisfied.”

“What did you tell him?”

“I told him where I was. Out.”

“Did he say anything about further questions?”

“No, I told him that I had no idea about the murder. I wasn't anywhere near the Twiller house and couldn't have seen anything. I didn't threaten to murder Mildred; I threatened to sue her. The detective appreciated the fine difference.”

“So you were at your lawyer's office at the time in question?” I crossed my toes, hoping the confidence would not halt until I heard the whole story. Or the lawyer's name.

“Well, I wasn't flouncing down the railroad tracks,” Maggie snorted, as she stepped back to close her door.

Clearly my hopes were not to be realized. I flipped a wave and went out the front door, depressed at my failure to learn anything at all. In whodunit novels, the suspects fall all over themselves trying to blurt out information to the amateur detective. Fiction!

I arrived at the Twiller house and was admitted by Camille. The living room was swollen with faculty people, administrators, and neighbors. The gardener had been pressed into service as a bartender in one corner. I squirmed through the crowd, murmuring polite noises, and waited for a drink. I had to pinch myself in order to avoid staring at the boy's hands for signs of soil under his fingernails. A whimsical theory, at best. Poor Mildred would not have had a tea party with the gardener.

Clutching my drink, I worked my way to a distant corner and studied the crowd for familiar faces. Britton hadn't mentioned whether he would succumb to duty and come, but he wasn't there yet. Maggie was home; that much I knew. I remembered that she had said she was expecting a visitor, and I wasted a few idle brain cells thinking about that. The scotch would do in another chunk. A few more went to wondering at what age I was apt to become a vegetable.

Douglas drifted past with the department chairman, engrossed in conversation. He gave me a quick nod, but steered his captive toward a sofa. Business before pleasure.

I wandered a few feet from my post to engage in appropriately subdued dialogue about poor Mildred, but I realized that I was again garnering smirks from those who had read the damnable book. Apparently everyone in the room, I concluded as I edged out of the living room. I considered standing in the foyer, dismissed the idea, and retreated to the den to practice disdainful looks.

I shut the door. As I turned around, I noticed a two-drawer filing cabinet. No tacky metal furniture for the Twillers; it was of a rich mahogany with antique brass pulls. I bent down to run my hand over the wood. A little square of paper was taped on each drawer, the handwriting spidery and timid. Mildred's.

The first drawer was devoted to contracts and royalty statements. The second drawer purported to contain current notes and research. My nose twitching, I opened the drawer to see if I might find any notes about
Professor of Passion,
specifically ones mentioning the Carlton character. Mildred had wanted to explain, I told myself in a self-righteous voice as I dug through the files. I would give her the opportunity to do so, albeit posthumously.