24
“… and the maggots had a field day, I can tell you that.” Pewter perched on the hood of Harry’s truck, parked behind the post office.
Mrs. Murphy, seated next to her, listened to the un-ending paean of self-praise. Tucker sat on the ground.
“I heard you ran into the squashes,” Tucker called up.
“Of course I did, nitwit. I didn’t want to injure the evidence,” Pewter bragged.“Boy, you should have heard people scream once they realized it was real. A few even puked. Now I watched everyone—everyone—from my vantage point. Mrs. Hogendobber was horrified but has a cast-iron stomach. Poor Danny, was he grossed out! Susan and Ned rushed up to him but he wanted to go to his friends instead. That age, you know. Oh, Big Marilyn, she wasn’t grossed out at all. She was outraged. I thought she’d flip her lid after the corpse in the boathouse but no, she was mad, bullshit mad, I tell you. Fitz stood there with his mouth hanging open. Little Marilyn hollered that she recognized the face, what there was of it. Harry didn’t move a muscle. Stood there like a stone taking it all in. You know how she gets when things are awful. Real quiet and still. Oh, BoomBoom dropped, tits into the sand, and Blair keeled over too. What a night. I knew something was wrong with that pumpkin. I sat next to it. It takes humans so long to see the obvious.” Pewter sighed a superior sigh.
“You were a teeny weeny bit disgusted.” Mrs. Murphy flicked her tail.
Pewter turned her head. She puffed out her chest, refusing to be baited by her dearest friend, who was also a source of torment.“Certainly not.”
A door closed in the near distance. The animals turned, observing Mrs. Hogendobber striding up the alleyway. As she drew near the animals she opened her mouth to speak to them but closed it again. She felt vaguely foolish carrying on a conversation with animals. This didn’t prevent her from talking to herself, however. She smiled at the creatures and walked into the post office.
“Why’d Harry bring the truck?” Pewter asked.
“Wore herself out yesterday,” Tucker replied.
Mrs. Murphy licked the side of her right front paw and rubbed it over her ears.“Pewter, do you have any theories about this?”
“Yeah, we got a real nut case on the loose.”
“I don’t think so.” Mrs. Murphy washed the other paw.
“What makes you so smart?” Pewter snapped.
Mrs. Murphy let that go by.“If a human being has the time to think about a murder he can often make it look like an accident or natural death. If one of them kills in the heat of passion it’s a bullet wound or a knife wound. Right?”
“Right,” Tucker echoed, while Pewter’s eyes narrowed to slits.
“Murphy, we all know that.”
“Then we know it was a hurry-up job and it wasn’t passion. Someone in Crozet was surprised by the dead person.”
“A nasty surprise.” Tucker followed her friend’s thinking.“But who? And what could be so terrible about the victim that he should have had to die for it?”
“When we know that, we’ll know everything,” the cat said in a low voice.
25
The coroner’s conclusions, neatly typed, rested on Rick Shaw’s desk. The deceased was a white male in his early thirties. Identity remained unknown but what was known was that this fellow, who should have been in the prime of life, was suffering from malnutrition and liver damage. Larry Johnson, meticulous in the performance of his duties, added in his bold vertical handwriting that while alcohol abuse might have contributed to the liver damage, the organ could have been diseased for reasons other than alcohol abuse. Then, too, certain medications taken over many years could also have caused liver damage.
Cooper charged into the office. She tossed more paperwork onto the sheriff’s desk. “More reports from Saturday night.”
Rick grunted and shoved them aside.“You haven’t said anything about the coroner’s report.”
“Died of a blow to the head. A child can kill someone with a blow to the head if it’s done right. We’re still in the dark.”
“What about a revenge motive?”
She was tired of kicking around ideas. Dead ends frustrated her. The fax machine hummed. She walked over to it almost absentmindedly.“Boss, come over here.”
Rick joined her and watched as the pages slowly rolled out of the machine. It was Blair Bainbridge’s record.
He had been a suspect in the murder of his lover, an actress. However, he wasn’t a suspect for long. The killer, an obsessed fan, was picked up by the police and confessed. The eerie thing was that the beautiful woman’s corpse had been dismembered.
“Shit,” was Cynthia’s response.
“Let’s go,” was Rick’s.
26
Heavy work gloves protected his hands as Blair righted tombstones, replaced the sod, and rolled it flat. The trees, now barren, surrounded the little cemetery like mournful sentinels. He stopped his labors when he saw the squad car roll down the driveway. He swung open the iron gate and headed down the hill to meet them.
A cool breeze eased off Yellow Mountain. Blair asked Rick Shaw and Cynthia Cooper inside. A couple of orange crates doubled as chairs.
“You know, there are wonderful auctions this time of year,” Coop volunteered. “Check in the classifieds. I furnished my house, thanks to those auctions.”
“I’ll check it out.”
Rick noticed that Blair was growing a thin military moustache.“Another modeling job coming up?”
“How’d you guess?” Blair smiled.
Rick rubbed under his nose.“Well, I’ll get to the point. This isn’t a social call, as I’m sure you’ve surmised. Your records indicate an actress with whom you were involved was brutally murdered and dismembered. What do you have to say?”
Blair blanched.“It was horrible. I thought when the police caught the murderer I’d feel some comfort. Well, I guess I did, in that I knew he wouldn’t kill anyone else, but it didn’t fill the … void.”
“Is there anyone in Crozet or Charlottesville who might know of this incident?”
“Not that I know of. I mean, a few people recognized my face from magazines but no one knows me here. Guess that doesn’t look so good for me, huh?”
“Let’s just say you’re an unknown factor.” Rick shifted his weight. The orange crate wasn’t comfortable.
“I didn’t kill anybody. I think I could kill in self-defense or to protect someone I love, but other than that, I don’t think I could do it.”
“What one person defines as self-defense another might define as murder.” Cynthia watched Blair’s handsome features.
“I am willing to cooperate with you in any way. And I’ve refused to talk to the press. They’ll only muck it up.”
“Why don’t you tell me what happened in New York?” Rick’s voice was steady, unemotional.
Blair ran his hands through his hair.“You know, Sheriff, I’d like to forget that. I came here to forget that. Can you imagine what it was like to see that head pulled out of a pumpkin?”
The sheriff softened.“Not pretty for any of us.”
Blair took a deep breath.“I knew Robin Mangione from a shoot we did for Baker and Reeves, the big New York department store. I guess that was three years ago. One thing led to another and, well, we stopped dating other people and got involved. Our work schedules often took us out of town but whenever we were in New York we were together.”
“You didn’t live together?” Rick asked.
“No. It’s a little different in New York than here. In a place like this people get married. In New York, people can be as good as married and yet live in separate apartments for their entire lives. Maybe because of the millions of people, one needs a sense of privacy, of separate space, more than you do here. Anyway, living together wasn’t a goal.”
“What about her goals?” Cooper was suspicious about this living-apart stuff.
“She was more independent than I was, truthfully. Anyway, Robin inspired devotion from men. She could stop traffic. Fame, any kind of fame really, brings good and bad. The flotsam and jetsam of fame is how I think of it, and Robin was sometimes hassled by male admirers. Usually a sharp word from her, or if need be from me, took care of the problem. Except for the guy who killed her.”