Thai Die (14 page)

“Now, hold on, this may not be a murder,” warned Max. “The story I’m hearing is that this woman came here with a gun to attack an innocent guest of the inn, and they engaged in a struggle. The result was that this woman fell down these stairs.”

“So we assume the dead woman is the attacker, not the innocent guest?” asked the other female tech.

“Yes. The guest, also a woman, yelled for help and another guest came out of his room. If their story checks out, this was simple self-defense.”

“Poor Dr. Sholes,” said the female tech. “Not so juicy. Still, I’m betting he’ll enjoy hearing the story. But meanwhile we’re in for a long wait, because if he turns up in the next hour, it’ll be a miracle. The roads are about as bad as they can be.”

A loud, rough, grating noise, like a giant bicycle bell with croup sounded from the front of the house. “What the hell’s that?” demanded Max.

“Front doorbell,” said Heidi, rising. “Shall I answer it?”

“Did you lock the front door when you came in?” Max asked Amhurst.

“Nope,” said the female deputy.

The noise sounded again. “Good manners, maybe,” said one of the med techs.

“I’ll get it,” said Amhurst. She hurried out and in a few moments a man’s voice called, “Wow, it’s terrible out there! Tell me, where is it? What have you got for me?” By the sounds he was stamping snow off his boots and slapping it off his coat in the little foyer.

“We’re here by the back stairs, Doc,” called Max. “We’ve got a DOA female.”

“Don’t you want a professional opinion about that?” asked Doc.

“All right, if it’ll make you happy, come and look.” He said in a lower voice, “Though a man who can’t check for his own self whether a door is locked or not—well, I just don’t know.”

“Here, let me help,” the deputy was heard to say. More stamping and brushing noises could be heard. “Hold still, let me get your back. You look like a snowman.”

A short, stocky man in Wellington boots and a camel hair overcoat came into the dining room. He was smacking a purple knit hat into one gloved palm. The deputy was behind him, dodging flying snow and reaching fruitlessly for the hat. A snow-clogged purple scarf was already in her hand.

“All right, all right,” he said abruptly, realizing what she wanted though she had said nothing. He handed her the hat, pulled off the gloves—thick brown leather lined with fleece—and handed them to her as well. Then came his heavy wool overcoat. He sat on a dining-room chair and pulled off his Wellington boots, which dripped ice, snow, and water on the beautiful antique Persian rug under the table.

“Thank you,” said the deputy faintly, as she staggered off with her burden.

Dr. Sholes’s silver hair had been squashed flat against his head by the hat, and his cheeks were red from cold. His face was broad, his mouth wide and friendly, his big nose shapely and even redder than his cheeks, his eyes small and very blue. His voice was a gruff baritone but not harsh in tone. “Well, well, well,” he murmured, already focused on the body, intensely interested. He walked to it slowly, eyes taking in detail, then stooped with a little grunt—he was rotund—to check the carotid with two fingers and lift an eyelid. “DOA, all right.” He looked up the stairs. “Steep sucker. She take a tumble down this?”

“That’s what I’m hearing,” said Max. “Though she may have been pushed.” He spoke into his microphone. “Kelly, you done with those three females yet?”

“Yeah. I let one go back to her own room and put on some clothes. All they know is there was a fight and shots were fired. They locked themselves in this bedroom waiting for rescue. Want me to bring ’em down?”

“No, you stay up there with them. Detectives are on their way.”

“Copy.”

Officer Max looked at Phil and Doris and said, “Investigators are coming. They’re going to have a whole lot of questions for the both of you, so how about we put one of you in one front room and the other can stay in the kitchen.”

“I’ll start a pot of coffee,” said Heidi.

“No, you come here into the dining room and have a seat. We’ll want to talk to each of you separately.”

“Yes, sir.” Max stepped out of the way, but Heidi repeated her trick of going to the back of the kitchen and into the dining room through another doorway.

“The kitchen used to be two rooms,” she explained.

“Fine.” He called in that this was an official homicide and asked if a team could be sent over to process the scene. Then he raised his voice to call, “Hansen!”

“Yo!”

“Come here and take Ms. Valentine into the front room.”

“May I have the library instead?” asked Doris. “It has a fireplace, and I seem to have kind of a chill.” Phil had noticed she was shivering and wished he’d thought to make that request first.

“Sure.”

Now that he knew about the other doorway, Max took Phil through it into the kitchen and sat him at a little table under a window.

“I know how to make coffee,” volunteered Phil.

“No, you just sit tight, okay?”

“All right.”

 

 

 

DETECTIVE Mark Shindler struggled through growing drifts and wind blowing a gale full of snow into his face, up his sleeves, or down his neck, depending on which direction he was walking. It wasn’t all that many blocks from the police department, but it seemed miles in that storm.

He was joined a few blocks from the station by two investigators from the sheriff’s department. St. Peter was the Nicollet County seat, so their department was headquartered here. Having companions to share the misery did, as advertised, halve it.

The house, when they reached it, was ablaze with lights, glowing even through the twisting veils of snow whirling in front of it and around its corners.

The trio paused on the big front porch to consult—briefly, both because the routine was familiar and because the thermometer was sinking like an anchor.

“There are supposed to be five guests at the inn plus the manager,” said Shindler. “Mandy, you take the manager, she’s the one who called this in. Heidi’s her name.”

“Yeah, I know,” said Mandy. “She’s my cousin.”

“Whoops, then Paco, you take Heidi. Her last name’s Mogenson. Mandy, there are three naked women on the top floor.” He shook his head. “Don’t ask, that’s all I was told about it. There are four big bedrooms up there. Separate them before you talk to them. I’ll tackle the woman who was allegedly attacked by the victim. Whoever finishes first can tackle the man who helped her. Ready? Let’s go.” He opened the big old front door and stepped gratefully into warmth and light.

 

 

 

AN HOUR later, Deputy Paco went out to look at the cars parked on the street. He found a huge flat-backed vehicle with squared-off headlights and a severely rectangular windshield: a Hummer. There seemed to be slightly less snow on it than on the other parked cars. The grill was cold when he put a bare hand near it, but when he gently brushed at the snow in the middle of the hood he found a thin layer of ice. The same on the windshield. So it had been parked here warm, after the snow started. The first layer of snow had melted, then turned to ice.

He bent and brushed away the snow and road crud on the license plate, using his flashlight to read the three letters and three numbers. He wrote them down in his notebook and went back inside.

He told Detective Shindler what he’d discovered, was duly praised for his enterprise, and was asked to call the plates in.

In a few minutes he was told that the plates were registered to a Hummer belonging to one Wendy Applegate of St. Paul.

Shindler tried the name out on everyone in the house, but he drew another blank from everyone but the Valentine woman, the would-be victim. She thought she might have heard the name before. Then again, she was so rattled she thought she might have heard her boyfriend Phil’s name before.
Stranger and stranger
, he thought.

Eleven

“BUT they had to let us go for lack of evidence that we’d committed a crime,” said Doris to a thunderstruck Betsy. “Then they said that they would keep in touch, and they’d appreciate it if Phil and I wouldn’t take any trips out of the country.”

“Oh, Doris!” said Betsy. “This is so horrible! I can’t believe it! This woman actually tried to
kill
you?” They were in her shop on Monday afternoon—the five had ridden home in Bershada’s luxury automobile, then taken lengthy naps before coming to talk to Betsy. Shelly was with them; the schools were closed because of the snow.

“I don’t think that was her intent, not at first,” Doris replied in a low voice. She was sitting on a chair at the library table, a cup of tea sitting untasted in front of her. A white bandage was coming loose from her cheek, and she was wearing the same clothes she’d worn on the trip. “She wanted a piece of Thai silk from me. She said she’d looked for it in my apartment and couldn’t find it.”

“So the person who burglarized your apartment was this woman.”

Doris nodded. “She said in those exact words that she’d looked for the silk and it wasn’t there.”

“But the Thai silk
is
in her apartment,” said Alice, in a tone meaning she’d made this argument before. “I saw it with my own eyes when we cleaned up. Except the piece that was stolen—and it was stolen by this woman.”

Doris nodded uncomfortably. “I know, that’s what the police in St. Peter are having trouble with, they think I’m lying about why this woman came after me.”

The cordless phone on the table began to ring. Betsy had turned off the answering machine, so she had to pick up. “Crewel World, Betsy speaking, how may I help you?” she said.

“Ms. Devonshire, this is Joe Brown.”

“Mr. Brown, you have a superb talent for calling at awkward times,” said Betsy crisply. “I will consider increasing my pledge, but not at this particular moment.”

“I apologize. Look, this is important to the institute. Perhaps you could call me at a more convenient time?”

“Oh, all right,” grumbled Betsy, and she wrote down his number. She hung up and said, “Whew! Where were we?”

“Who was that?” asked Bershada, taken aback by Betsy’s short tone.

“Fund-raiser.”

“Oh,” drawled Bershada, and the others nodded comprehendingly.

“
I
think the woman in St. Peter was some kind of nut,” said Shelly, defiant on Doris’s behalf.

“I think this is a case of mistaken identity,” said Phil. “For some reason she’s confused Doris with some other person. Maybe one of the people who was supposed to be at the March Hare.”

“I’d agree with you, Phil,” Betsy said, “but Doris said the woman called her by name.”

Alice, still stuck on the detail of the silk, said, “I think she thinks Doris has some other kind of silk.”

“What other kind of silk?” asked Phil.

“The kind she didn’t find when she searched Doris’s apartment.”

Phil said, “That doesn’t make any sense!”

Betsy said, “Wait, maybe it does! Doris, remember that old silk rag you threw away?”

“Yes, you pulled it out again and showed it to me. You said the embroidery on it was pretty.” She sounded indifferent.

“I remember an old rag,” said Bershada. “It was wrapped around the statue of the Buddha. You’re telling us it’s a valuable silk cloth?”

“Well, it might be. I want to research how to clean it. I think it could be as much as a hundred years old.”

Alice said, “But you told us silk can’t be more than fifty years old, because it shatters.”

Betsy nodded. “I thought that was true. But then I did a little research on the Internet and found some pictures of very old silk.” She looked around at Doris, Alice, Shelly, Phil, and Bershada. “
Centuries
old. That rag might be just an old rag—or it might be a valuable antique worth more than the stone statue it was wrapped around.”

“Thai silk,” said Doris softly, coming into focus. “ ‘Where’s the Thai silk?’ That’s what she asked me.”

Bershada said, “Do you seriously think that raggedy old thing is the Thai silk Wendy Applegate came looking for with a
gun
?”

Betsy frowned and shifted her shoulders in an uncomfortable shrug. “I don’t know. I didn’t think that might be the reason for the burglary or for Mr. Fitzwilliam’s murder. I thought it was about the statue. But now Doris says this woman wanted the Thai silk that wasn’t in her apartment. Still, my rescued embroidery doesn’t
look
like Thai silk; I mean, the embroidery doesn’t look
anything
like the patterns in the woven silk that Doris brought home.”

“Woven patterns might not look like stitched ones,” Shelly pointed out.

Doris said slowly, “When I was buying silk from that woman in Bangkok—Ming was her name—she showed me lots of different kinds of embroidery from Thailand, Laos, and Vietnam, and I didn’t see anything like what was on that rag.”