Mrs. O’Daniel stopped in the middle of the room and faced me again. “I was just about to have a gin and tonic,” she said. “Will you join me?”
“Thanks, no.”
“Something else, then? I have just about everything…”
“Nothing right now.”
“Well. Excuse me just a second?”
“Sure.”
She went out of the room through a doorway beyond the fireplace, rolling her hips a little the way she had on the way in. It wasn’t an exaggerated roll, but I thought that it was deliberate. Whatever her reasons, Helen O’Daniel was about as subtle as an elephant’s hind end.
I decided I didn’t want to keep on standing there like another piece of furniture. Besides which, the nearest tropical plant seemed to be looking at me in a hungry sort of way. So I went and examined one of the hairy items. It was large, it was oddly shaped, it had tufts of white furry stuff sticking out of it. It looked like nothing so much as a giant rabbit that had been decapitated, stuffed, and turned into a chair.
Helen O’Daniel was still out in the kitchen; I could hear her rattling ice. I wandered over to the fireplace for a closer look at the weird paintings. One of them was tolerable: it had a sort of design and at least its riot of colors-reds and blues and blacks-didn’t clash. The other one looked like somebody had vomited up a purplish succotash and stirred it around on canvas with a stick. Things like this made me glad I was a lowbrow and didn’t know the first thing about art. A name was scrawled in one corner, and idle curiosity about who had perpetrated such a piece of crap made me lean down and peer at it. Only then my curiosity quit being idle and I wasn’t thinking about art any more.
The name of the artist was Paul Robideaux.
Mrs. O’Daniel came back just then, carrying a tall glass. She saw me standing in front of the painting, blinked, and came to a standstill. Her face didn’t show much, though, not even when I pointed to Robideaux’s atrocity and said, “Nice piece of work here. I was just admiring it.”
“Yes. It’s quite good, isn’t it.”
“Local artist?”
“I imagine so. I bought it at a crafts fair a year or so ago. Shall we go out on the deck?”
I considered pushing the topic a little further, maybe coming right out and asking her if she knew Robideaux, but it didn’t seem to be the way to handle her. And I’d made enough mistakes by being blunt today as it was. So I shrugged and said, “Sure,” and we went out on the deck.
A chaise lounge had been pulled out near the balcony railing, to catch the last of the sun as it passed over to the west; Mrs. O’Daniel sat on that. The only other chair in sight was a Chinese rattan thing with a fanlike back and a narrow seat that looked uncomfortable. And was.
She said, “You’re wondering why I wanted to talk to you, of course. It’s nothing earthshaking. My husband and I were talking at dinner last night and he mentioned you were here investigating poor Munroe’s death for the insurance company, talking to people who knew him, that sort of thing, and that we should all cooperate in any way we can in order to get the matter settled as quickly as possible.”
Some sentence. Some Mrs. O’Daniel, too. She had a better reason than that for wanting to see me; and I had a pretty fair idea what it might be. She hadn’t had dinner with her husband last night, either, or found out about me that way. He’d reminded her on the phone yesterday that he was leaving from the office for some lake in the area, to spend the weekend on a houseboat.
But I said, “You knew Mr. Randall pretty well, did you?”
“Oh yes. I met him when Frank and I were married several years ago. His death was a terrible shock.”
“I’m sure it was.”
“Such a tragic accident,” she said. She had lowered her voice a couple of octaves and given it a sepulchral tremor; it sounded only about half sincere, like an undertaker sympathizing with somebody else’s loss. “That garage of his… well, it was an awful firetrap. I don’t know how many times Frank and I warned him to clean it up.”
I said something noncommittal.
“The police said that’s where the fire started-in the garage. Spontaneous combustion. I suppose your findings concur with that?”
“So far they do, yes.”
“So far? You mean you think the fire might have started somewhere in the house?”
“I mean it’s possible the cause wasn’t spontaneous combustion.”
She took a large bite out of her gin and tonic; she looked vaguely uneasy now. “I can’t imagine what could have caused it then,” she said.
“A match, maybe.”
“Match? You don’t mean arson?”
“It’s possible. I haven’t ruled it out yet.”
“But that’s absurd!”
“Your husband doesn’t think so. Neither does Martin Treacle.”
“They don’t believe the fire was deliberately set.”
“They admitted the possibility.”
“I don’t believe it either. It was an accident.”
I waited, not saying anything.
Pretty soon she said, “Those people in Musket Creek… are they the ones you suspect?”
“I don’t suspect anyone, Mrs. O’Daniel. Not yet anyhow.” I paused. “But it could be one of them; they all seem to have had good reason to hate Randall.”
“I suppose so. I know very little about their problems with Northern Development; I’m not a woman who takes an active interest in her husband’s business activities.”
I felt like grinning at her: she just wasn’t a very good liar. “You don’t know any of the Musket Creek residents personally, then?”
“Of course not.” She said it too quickly, seemed to realize that, tried to cover herself by saying something else, and botched that too: “Why would I have anything to do with anyone who lives in the backwoods?”
“Lots of people live in the backwoods,” I said. “Writers, gold hunters, homesteaders. Artists.”
She made the rest of her drink disappear. She didn’t look at me while she did it.
Time to back off on that angle, I thought. I asked her, taking a new tack, “Did your husband tell you about the threatening note he received?”
“Yes, he told me.”
“You don’t sound very concerned about it.”
“Why should I be? It was nothing but a crank note, like those telephone calls we kept getting last year. I’m sure Frank mentioned those?”
I nodded. “And did he also tell you that Jack Coleclaw attacked him in his office yesterday?”
“Well, he said there’d been a minor altercation. But he didn’t elaborate.”
“It wasn’t so minor. If I hadn’t been there, your husband might have been badly hurt.”
She looked at her empty glass, seemed to want to get up and refill it, then just sat there with it in her hand. Her face revealed nothing. Maybe she had a hard shell that was full of feeling on the inside, like a piece of rock candy with a liquid center. Or maybe she just didn’t give a damn about her husband’s welfare. I thought it was probably the latter; the way it looked to me, the only person Helen O‘Daniel cared about was Helen O’Daniel.
I said, “Let’s get back to Munroe Randall. I understand he was quite a ladies’ man.”
She stiffened a little. “What do you mean by that?”
“I was told he had relationships with a lot of different women. Intimate relationships. That’s true, isn’t it?”
“I… yes, I suppose it is.”
“Do you know any of his women friends?”
“Not really. I may have met one or two, but…”
“How about Penny Belson?”
“That bitch. Munroe should have known better.”
“You know Miss Belson, then.”
“Yes, I know her. Why? Have you been talking to her?”
“Yesterday at her salon.”
“What did she tell you?”
“About what?”
Pause. “She’s a liar, you know. And a tramp.”