Ed nodded. “That and murder,” he answered. “Somebody here decided to prune the family tree last night.”
At that several handcuffed individuals started to scream denials and point at Gilbert.
“Mother” Carver silenced them all with some choice verbs from her vast vocabulary of juicy expressions.
Later, by questioning each person separately, we found that they were all unrelated except by their interest in other people’s jewelry. We also learned that Violet had started to set up a spinoff business for herself by stashing some of the loot away instead of turning it in to Mrs. Carver at the nursing home. She intended to use it as a kind of dowry so that she and Reggie could run off to a tropical isle and live happily ever after — after she got Reggie to agree to this plan, which she hadn’t yet shared with him. Apparently her feeling for him was true love after all — in her fashion.
Mrs. Carver had become suspicious of the short returns Violet was bringing in and had instructed the others to put pressure on her to reveal her hiding place. Gilbert, the others agreed, had pressed too hard, forcing the group to make a run for fresh territory.
When it was all over, my worst problem was how to break all this to Reggie before it flashed on the front page of every newspaper. But I needn’t have worried.
After my gentle explanation to him of the basic facts, he sat in my office staring straight ahead and not blinking.
“My emotional responses are a bit flattened by all that has happened,” he said stiffly. “Please understand if I don’t openly exhibit the proper affect. In time I’ll adjust although the trauma will leave an indelible mark on my psyche.”
I concluded that he meant that it had hit him flat in the face and he needed a while to get over the jolt. That Violet was actually part of the gang and had never told him her real occupation seemed to preoccupy him most.
“It must have been due to her unhappy childhood,” he said.
“What happened to her as a child?” I inquired gently.
“I don’t know. She never mentioned it,” he admitted. “But she must have suffered an early-life trauma or she wouldn’t have tried to compensate for it with a life of crime,” he concluded, rounding out his circular logic.
Of the Five Who Came
by Fletcher Flora
I think now, looking back, that I had a feeling of trouble from the moment they came, but I had no feeling at first that the trouble was death.
They came early in the afternoon of a day in May. There were five of them. Two pairs and a single. They came in a 1958 Chrysler station wagon with flaring fins and a Kansas City license and a luggage rack on top. Behind the wagon, on a trailer, was an inboard motor-boat, sleek and polished and with a look of power. The wagon stopped in the drive behind my cottage. I went outside and started toward it, and a man got out from under the wheel and started toward the cottage, and we met between starting places.
He was a tall man with a hard, square face and heavy shoulders and big hands with long spatulate fingers. The nails of the fingers were manicured, and the hands looked fleshy and soft; actually they were very strong, and they felt, I noticed when we shook hands, like expensive and pliant cowhide.
He looked familiar. I had a notion he was someone I should remember from another time and place. His name was, I thought, Ira Boniface, for that was the name of the man who had reserved three cottages, and I had never seen him or heard of him before to my knowledge. He was wearing a soft cloth hat with little air vents in each side above the band, and a light leather jacket over a red and brown plaid shirt. His trousers were brown, some kind of tough twill, and his shoes were darker brown and pebble-grained with moccasin toes and thick soles.
“Welcome to Laird’s Point,” I said. “I’m John Laird.”
“Thanks,” he said. “I’m Dan Grimes.”
He said it as if he expected to be recognized, and he usually was. He would have been recognized, by name if not by sight, by almost anyone in the state, and by many people outside it. The boss of the dominant political party, he had never run for office or been appointed to one, but he was the man who controlled the men who did, and he exercised an incredible power and authority that had been developed through violence and a kind of magical persuasiveness and managed to survive by a complex system of alliances and loyalties and threats that no one could quite analyze or understand.
“I was expecting a Mr. Boniface,” I said.
“Ira’s in the wagon,” he said.
He turned half around toward the wagon from the hips, and this was apparently a sign for the others to move, for they got out of the wagon and came toward us, two women and two men. One of the men was as tall as Grimes, but not so heavy in the shoulders nor quite so broad in the hips, and he moved like a big cat. The other man was short and slight by comparison, though not much shorter or slighter than I, and there was about him an odd and incongruous effect of force and frailty that made you instantly aware of him. Both of the women were attractive, each in her own way. One of them was a brunette with a clear brown skin, and the other was a blonde with a clear brown skin.
Grimes began without preface to introduce the four, and it turned out that the big catlike man was Ira Boniface, the one who had made the reservations, and the brunette was his wife and was called Rita. She had the kind of looks that hit you at once and hit you hard. She was wearing a red cashmere sweater tucked into the waistband of a pair of fancy black pants that fit her a little looser than her clear brown skin.
The other couple, the slight man and the blonde woman, were Mr. and Mrs. Jerome Quintin. Her Christian name was Laura. Her head was bare in the bright sun, her hair so pale that it seemed in the light to be almost white. It was sleeked back without a part and held in a knot on her neck, and it seemed naturally the pale color that it was. She was very slender, almost thin, and she had the special and rather gaunt seductiveness of a high-fashion model. She nodded to me without speaking or smiling, and afterward she looked immediately away, down the slope behind me to the blue lake glittering in the sun. In her face, I thought, there was a kind of petulance that was not actually an expression but only the suggestion or shadow of one.
After the introductions, I pointed out the three cottages that had been reserved for them. They stood in a line along the lake shore about twenty feet apart and about fifty feet up the slope from the water, and they were the best three of the four that I had to rent. The fourth cottage was considered not so good because it was farther up the slope with the others between it and the lake, and it was not at this time either reserved or rented.
Grimes moved off toward the cottages, the others following, and I unloaded the luggage and tackle boxes from the rack on top of the Chrysler and separated it according to the identification tags. While I was doing this, I kept watching to see how the cottages were claimed. Ira and Rita Boniface went into the first, Grimes into the second, and the Quintins into the third, the last on the far end of the line near the point.
I gathered up the Quintins’ luggage, a leather bag and a metal tackle box and a long aluminum rod case, and carried it down past the first cottage and the second cottage to the third cottage on the end. I kicked against the screen door lightly, and someone said to come in, and I pushed the door open with a shoulder and went inside and set the luggage down on the concrete floor of the screened-in porch. Laura Quintin was sitting in a chair on the porch, staring out through the screen and down through the scrub oaks on the slope to the lake. Jerome Quintin came to the door and stood leaning against the jamb.
“Thanks,” he said, looking at the luggage.