Strong Spirits [Spirits 01] (33 page)

      
Since Edie muttered, “Thank goodness,” I got the feeling she felt the same way.

      
“So,” continued Rotondo as if nothing had happened to interfere with his interrogation, “you say you were angry with Mr. Kincaid for attempting to entrap Miss Marsh by the use of the wheelchair?”

      
“Yes. The filthy bastard.”

      
“Quincy!” Edie said reprovingly.

      
As for yours truly, I thought Mr. Kincaid deserved all the filth and abuse anyone wanted to heap upon him. Nobody had asked for my opinion, however, so I kept it to myself.

      
“I was mad as hell and almost crazy when I found about it from Daisy.”

      
You ought to have seen the look I got from Edie after that revelation. She pushed herself several inches farther away from me on the sofa. Her eyes thinned into slits and she glared at me as if I’d just killed her dog.

      
I tried to placate her without words. You know, I gave her a little finger wave and a sympathetic grin, and mouthed that I’d explain everything later. She didn’t seem to value my intentions, because her glower didn’t abate.

      
Quincy resumed. “I was furious. I mean, that old geezer is disgusting. And any man who uses his wealth and power to seduce a poor working girl needs to be shot.” His face between the puffy blue parts turned as red as a autumn apples.

      
“Is that how it was done?” Rotondo asked quietly.

      
“Is what how what was done?” Quincy only looked confused.

      
“Is that how you did away with Mr. Kincaid?”

      
“What? Dammit, I told you I didn’t do a thing with Kincaid! Well,” he amended, grinning broadly (thank God for the lanolin) “I sure ripped him to hell and back verbally that night. It felt good to tell the old man exactly what I thought of miserable, not to mention married, not to mention
old
buzzards chasing around after good girls who aren’t in a position to defend themselves.”

      
“I see,” said Rotondo, frowning. “So how
did
it happen?”

      
“How did what happen?”

      
“How’d you kill him?”

      
“Dammit, I
didn’t
kill him! If you’d stop condemning me, maybe I can finish explaining what happened that night!”

      
Good for Quincy. I wanted to applaud, but since Edie had started ignoring me in a manner so pointed I felt as if she were sticking pins in me, I feared she might think I cared more about Quincy than was proper. As if. I’ve had enough trouble with the only man in the world I’ve ever loved even to consider taking up with another one. If anything ever happened to Billy, I aimed to get myself a dog.

      
Rotondo appeared to be under great stress. I liked that. He said, “Very well. Tell your tale from the fight on.”

      
Quincy shut his eyes as if he were gathering his thoughts together. I hoped none of them had got stuck in the lump on his head. “All right. It must have been after 11:00, because James had already gone to bed when I got back from Mr. Harold Kincaid’s house.” He looked around the room, presumably for Harold, but Harold had taken off with his mother. Quincy sighed. “In fact, it must have been pretty close to midnight, because I was thinking I wasn’t going to get much sleep that night and was going to be bone-tired in the morning. I was too angry to sleep, though.”

      
“And why is that?”

      
“I just
told
you!” Quincy declared. “That God damned bastard Kincaid was bothering my Edie! And then
he
, who’d been the cause of the trouble in the first place, fired
me
, who was only defending my girl!”

      
Language, language,
I thought. A little bit of bad language goes a long way, and I thought Quincy had already used up his quota for one interrogation. On the other hand, I knew he must be in great pain, so I made allowances.

      
Edie began weeping quietly into her handkerchief, and I felt sorry for her. I didn’t dare try to comfort her, since didn’t seem to like me much now that she’d found out I’d ratted on her and Quincy to Harold.

      
The door opened at that point, and Harold tiptoed in. In a stage whisper, he said, “Algie Pinkerton showed up, so I left Mother to him. I want to hear this.”

      
His smile was as ingenuous as any I’d ever seen, and he reminded me of my girlfriends when we used to sit in the mausoleum at the Mountain View Cemetery in Altadena and play jacks and gossip for hours. I guess that sounds way to pass one’s time. But it was so cool in the mausoleum, and during the summertime, believe me, you take relief from the heat wherever you can find it.

      
Rotondo looked as if he’d rather Harold had not returned, but this was Harold’s mother’s house, so he only waved him to a chair. “Please don’t interrupt, is all I ask,” he said

      
Harold held up his right hand. “On my oath as a Kincaid, Officer. Or . . . Not as a Kincaid. Most of them are untrustworthy scoundrels. On my oath as a gentleman, then.” I got the feeling his sweet smile annoyed Rotondo a lot and that made me feel much more the thing.

      
Rotondo produced an amazingly expressive scowl. I think it expressed disgust and disapproval, maybe mixed with a smidgen of exasperation.

      
I just sat back to enjoy the show.

Chapter Fifteen
 

      
Rotondo transferred his attention from Harold back to Quincy. “Please go on.”

      
Quincy thought for a minute, I presume to organize his thoughts. “All right. I went upstairs to the loft over the stable to pack up and get out of there. I was wondering where the heck I was going to sleep that night, and I was trying to be quiet, because I didn’t want to wake James up.”

      
“Did he wake up?” Rotondo asked.

      
“No. James sleeps like the dead. I was packing my stuff in a carpetbag, still mad as hell. I was aiming to get in touch with Edie the following day and tell her to quit her damned job and get another one, even if it meant working as a hotel maid.”

      
He shot a guilty look at Edie, I guess because he’d cursed again, but Edie was still crying into her hankie and I don’t think she even heard him. Or if she did, she didn’t mind. She probably thought her love was akin to a knight in shining armor for wanting to remove her from a miserable situation.

      
Ah, young love. I almost remembered the emotion from my own life, although recent years had blunted the memories considerably.

      
“So,” said Rotondo, trying to keep Quincy on the right track, “you were packing to leave the Kincaids’ employ.”

      
“Right. The bastard couldn’t stand hearing the truth, especially coming from such a low person—” He added toxic sarcasm to the “low” part of this speech “—and he fired me.” He grimaced spectacularly for a couple of seconds. There’s nothing quite like a bruised and battered face to add emphasis to a good grimace. “The moon was full. I remember it because you could see the rose garden from the stable loft. That doesn’t happen very often.”

      
I noticed Rotondo’s knuckles whitening around his pencil and assumed he didn’t care for these diversions. He didn’t say anything.

      
“Anyhow, while I was standing there, trying to calm down and also trying to figure out how the devil I was going to make a living for Edie and me now that I’d been fired from the Kincaids’, I saw a car pull up outside the door to the service porch.”

      
“Did you notice what kind of machine it was?”

      
Quincy thought for a minute. “It was a big one, and black. At least, I think it was black. It was night, you know, and even though the moon was full, I couldn’t make out a whole lot of details. But I think it was either a Maxwell or a Duesenberg. It was big, is all I know for sure.”

      
Rotondo wrote it down.

      
“Well, when I was standing there looking out the window and thinking, I saw Mr. Kincaid walk out through the back door carrying a suitcase.”

      
“He was walking?” Rotondo stared hard at Quincy. “Without his wheelchair or anyone assisting him?”

      
“He was walking,” Quincy stated firmly. “As well as any man alive. That wheelchair of his was an act. It had to be, because the bastard wasn’t even limping. And the bag he carried seemed heavy.”

      
“He carried only the one bag?”

      
Quincy squinted at Edie, I surmise to help his memory along. “I think . . . No. He also carried a satchel in his other hand. That one didn’t seem as heavy as the suitcase.”

      
Rotondo wrote it all down.

      
“I knew right then and there that something fishy was going on. I mean, why would Mr. Eustace Kincaid sneak out the back door of his own house if he wasn’t trying to hide something or get away with something? And why was he walking as if he’d never been crippled, when he’d been rolling around in that damned wheelchair for years and everybody thought he was sick?”

      
“You said the automobile was driven up and parked at the service-porch door. So there was a driver?”

      
“Yeah, the old bastard had a driver, all right. Cars don’t generally drive themselves.” Quincy’s hand lifted to the pad covering his lump.

      
“The driver’s the one who hit you?”

      
You couldn’t fault Rotondo when it came to jumping to obvious conclusions.

      
“Yeah. He was the one, all right. But you’re getting ahead of me. A lot of things happened before that.”

      
I smiled inside. Good for Quincy.

      
“Of course.” Rotondo didn’t like being told the truth when it wasn’t to his advantage. I was thinking
ha, ha, ha
. “Please continue at your own pace.”

      
“I knew something was up, and that it probably wasn’t right, because Kincaid’s a real rotter, and I never have trusted him. Sneaking out of his own house carrying luggage in the middle of the night—and walking, to boot—well, it looked mighty shifty to me.”

      
“Is there any other reason you suspected him of wrongdoing?”

      
Quincy looked apprehensive for a second, glanced at Edie and me, swiveled (undergoing great pain to do so to judge by his expression) to look at Harold, then shrugged, which made him wince. I was
definitely
going to have the men bind his ribs as soon as I could get my hands on him and dump some laudanum down his throat.

      
“Listen, Mr. Rotondo—”

      
Rotondo didn’t correct him. I mean, he
could
have told Quincy to call him Detective Rotondo. I guess even smart-aleck detectives know what’s important and what’s not sometimes.

      
Quincy went on, “—servants talk. All the time. And they usually know what’s going on in the family because rich people forget we’re people, too.” He recollected that Harold was present and almost broke his neck turning to offer an apology.

      
Harold held up a hand and smiled winningly. “No need to apologize for telling the truth Mr. Applewood. You’re right. Most of us are awful snobs.”

      
Visibly shaken, Quincy stuttered a bit when he said, “I . . . I . . . Er, thank you, sir.”

      
“Let’s get along here, all right?” Rotondo said through gritted teeth.

      
After wiping his sweaty brow with a dirty handkerchief (he hadn’t had a chance to bathe or change clothes yet), Quincy continued his story. “All right, the truth is, I’d heard from everybody in the servants’ quarters for weeks that people thought something was wrong at Kincaid’s bank.

      
“When I saw him slinking out of his own house in the middle of the night carrying a suitcase and a satchel, and when I added that to the fact that he must have been faking being crippled . . . well, I knew he was doing something rotten, is all. Probably having something to do with the bank. I could feature that satchel full of money.”

      
“So what did you do then?”

      
“I left off my packing and decided I was going to follow the machine he was in and see what was up. It wouldn’t have surprised me if he’d kidnapped Edie.” His scowl was a beauty.

      
Edie sort of yipped, slapped a hand over her mouth, and shut up.

      
Frowning heavily at Edie and me, Quincy added, “And that’s another thing. I’d like to know why nobody ever told me about that bastard Kincaid bothering Edie before Daisy let it slip. God knows, they knew all about the bank business. I’ll bet everyone in the whole house knew he was harassing Edie, and nobody bothered to tell me about it.”

      
That was an easy one, although I didn’t go into it, not wanting to incur Rotondo’s wrath. But if Quincy would only allow himself to think for half a second, he’d understand that everyone was trying to prevent exactly what had happened when he
had
learned the truth. No one in the servants’ quarters wanted him to be fired from his job.

      
“I’m sure you’ll have an opportunity to ask your friends later why they kept the information from you. Right now, let’s keep to the subject, all right?” I heard Rotondo’s teeth grinding.

      
Quincy mumbled, “Sorry.”