The final event was the pibroch, performed by the police chief of Pickax. The centuries-old tradition called for a lone piper to play a succession of pieces increasing in difficulty, all the while walking slowly about the stage. For the piper it was a challenge; for the audience it was a mesmerizing experience, almost spiritual in its effect. The crowd watched in total silence. Polly claimed to have been in a trance.
Qwilleran said, “In the Scottish community Andy is considered the master of the pibroch.” And he thought, I’ll invite him to the barn for a drink tonight.
They were walking back to the brown van in the parking lot when Qwilleran swooped down on a penny and dropped it in his pocket. Polly had not noticed.
On the way home she asked, “What are you writing for your Tuesday column?”
“Glad you asked. Thanks to our conversation on fibs, I’m planning a dissertation on prevarications of all kinds; untruths, falsehoods, canards, whoppers, taradiddles, fibble-fabble, and just plain bull. I’m asking, What is the difference between a little white lie and big dirty one?… What are the dangers of lying to your boss, your spouse, a court judge, the Internal Revenue Service?… What was the most heinous lie in Shakespeare?”
“In Othello,” she replied without hesitation. “Iago maliciously lies about Desdemona’s handkerchief, and it leads to her murder.”
“Good! Go to the head of the class. And how about Mark Twain? Did he have anything to say about lies?”
“He had something to say about everything!” She reflected briefly. “He said the difference… between a cat and a lie was that… a cat has only nine lives.”
That brought up the subject of the Mark Twain Festival. According to old letters and diaries found in Moose County, the author had lectured in Pickax in 1895 while touring the northern states, and he had captivated the audience with his wit and forthright opinions. There was no documented evidence that he had slept at the Pickax hotel; on the other hand, there was no proof that he had not! And the Mackintosh Inn had decided to rename the presidential suite The Mark Twain Suite. Already his portrait hung above the bed where Delacamp had been murdered.
Qwilleran told Polly, “The murder in the presidential suite has caused the festival promoters to postpone it until October.”
“Is that a good month?” she asked. “It could be cold.”
“There’s a meeting Wednesday to discuss the pros and cons.”
Qwilleran dropped Polly at her condo for her Sunday ritual of getting herself together for the workweek. What it entailed he had no idea, and he would never ask. He himself went home to feed the cats and talk to them: “You guys missed a good show this weekend. Next year we’ll have a Feline Gathering. Koko can toss the caber, and Yum Yum can dance the Highland Fling on the balls of her paws.”
Whether he talked nonsense or recited the Declaration of Independence, their reaction was the same: purring, looking wide-eyed, and twitching their tails. As he discovered, Koko had done a little caber-tossing of his own; the floor of the library area was littered with the fat yellow pencils that Qwilleran kept in his ceramic pencil-holder.
There were fang-marks in the soft wood. “That cat!” he said aloud as he gathered them off the rug. “One day it’s paper towels; the next day it’s pencils!”
“Yargle!” came a response from the kitchen, as Koko tried to yowl and swallow at the same time.
For his own Sunday night supper Qwilleran went to Rennie’s at the inn. It was quiet. Weekend guests had checked out, and the week’s business travelers had not yet registered. After having a Reuben sandwich, he stopped at the reception desk to chat with Lenny Inchpot.
“How’d you like the games?” the clerk asked. “My mom saw you there with Mr. MacWhannell and said you two had the best-looking knees at the whole Gathering.”
“That sounds just like your mother!”
“How’d you like Boze’s caber toss?”
“Fantastic.”
“When he went to the podium to get the gold medal hung around his neck, I was so proud, I could bust! It’s not real gold, but it’s a shot in the arm for a guy with no real ambition except to win the state lottery. One day he asked me, ‘How much is a million dollars?’ Boze isn’t smart, but he’s big, and it doesn’t hurt to have a muscleman behind the desk after midnight. Another time he asked me why the days were getting shorter. It keeps me on my toes, sort of.”
“How do you answer his questions?”
“Usually I give him a straight answer, best I can, but the other day I went for the joke. He asked me, ‘Where’s Brazil?’ I remembered that line from Charley’s Aunt and said, ‘Where the nuts come from.’ It fell flat, of course, so I told him Brazil’s in South America, which is south of North America, and I ended up drawing a map of the western hemisphere on the back of an envelope. See what I mean?”
“What’s his chief interest?”
“Eating. Never gets enough food! My mom would be willing to teach him to cook for a living, but…”
A business traveler came to the desk asking for a studio room with computer desk, and Qwilleran moved away until the transaction was complete. Then he asked Lenny, “Has the homicide had any effect on business?”
“It doesn’t seem to bother the guests. In fact, some of them find it kind of exciting. But the staff talk about it a lot, among themselves. Yesterday the day porter saw a locksmith truck from Bixby pull up to the back door. The police took him upstairs. In half an hour he left.”
“Boze must have been on duty at the time of the crime.”
“Yeah, and he told me what he told the police. Around two or two-thirty the lobby was quiet, and he heard the elevator go from the ground floor to one of the upper floors. He thought some guest was coming in when the bars closed. A little later he heard the elevator go down again, as if somebody had just come in for a nightcap or something.”
“Or something,” Qwilleran said. “Well, good to talk with you, Lenny. Keep up the good work!” He glanced at the carpet, picked something up, and dropped it in his pocket. With amusement he remembered what Iris Cobb used to say: “A whirligig is just a whirligig, but two whirligigs are a pair, and three are a collection.”
He was now a collector. It was surprising how many pennies dropped through people’s fingers or through holes in their pockets. Or were they purposely dropped by penny-droppers like Mildred?
At the barn he put the newfound pennies into the spalted maple box and checked his messages on the answering machine. He immediately returned Larry Lanspeak’s call.
“Qwill! I’ve been trying to reach you all day!”
“When did you get in from wherever you were?”
“This morning. Carol had phoned my hotel on Friday, and I couldn’t believe the news! But I met a Chicago buyer at the merchandising show, and he told me something quite interesting about Delacamp. That wasn’t always his name. His last name was Campau. That’s spelled C-A-M-P-A-U, and he was in partnership with a French gemologist whose name was spelled F-E-Y D-E-A-U. But it seems that Americans had a problem pronouncing the firm’s name and even remembering it. So Campau became Delacamp, and F-E-Y D-E-A-U became F-I-D-O… Do you follow me?”
“Woof woof!”
“Okay, wise guy! Get off the line.”
“I’ll be on my best behavior. Tell me the rest of the story.”
Larry went on. “Fido accused Delacamp of embezzling money from the firm and took him to court, but he lost his case for lack of proof. There had been a lot of nasty publicity, however, so Delacamp sued Fido for libel and won a sizable judgment! How do you like that?”
“Interesting bit of intrigue!”