Читать книгу Murder, Take Two - Carol J. Perry - Страница 15

Chapter 7

Rupert Pennington had arrived early, impeccably dressed as always. Tonight he sported a tweed jacket with leather elbow patches and a melon-colored ascot. By seven o’clock he’d arranged five chairs around the kitchen table and placed a copy of our outline, along with a brand-new notebook and pen, in front of each place. Aunt Ibby stood at her kitchen counter, putting the finishing touches on a plate of dainty sandwiches. A nice Merlot chilled in a hammered aluminum bucket, coffee would be ready with a touch of a button, and assorted exotic tea bags awaited boiling water.

I stood in the front hall, facing the big mirrored hall tree, listening for the doorbell. I peered at my reflection. Usually after work I’m makeup-free, wearing comfortable sweats or even pajamas. Tonight I dressed up a little, knowing that Betsy would be a model-perfect fashion plate and Louisa would be understatedly elegant. I didn’t want to embarrass my aunt by looking tacky, so I’d chosen a nice, middle-of-the-road blue denim jumper with a white blouse. Good enough, I decided, and hurried to pull the door open as the first chime of “The Impossible Dream” sounded.

Betsy whirled through the door in a cloud of Flower-bomb, looking fabulous in pink shantung, long platinum hair in a perfect upsweep. She gave me a side hug and an air kiss. “This is so exciting, Lee,” she said. “Thinking outside the box is so me! I can hardly wait to see what Ibby has in mind.” Louisa Abney-Babcock, immaculate in a gray linen pantsuit, arrived shortly after Betsy, and the two hurried to the kitchen with me right behind them.

After Mr. Pennington had bowed graciously, kissed hands, and pulled out chairs for all of us, Aunt Ibby got down to business. With her usual appropriate “word choices,” she laid out the problem.

“You’ve all read or heard about the recent heinous murder of Professor Samuel Bond,” she began, “and are surely aware of the name of the prime suspect in the matter—Cody McGinnis.”

There was a murmur of “dreadful thing,” and “terrible, terrible,” along with a subdued “tsk-tsk.” Aunt Ibby proceeded. “We—Maralee and I—learned yesterday that the suspect is the nephew of two dear friends of ours. They believe wholeheartedly in Cody’s innocence. I’ve asked you, Betsy, and you, Louisa, to join me in doing some unbiased digging to see what we can learn about Samuel Bond. Our friends, retired police officers, by the way, don’t believe Professor Bond is as perfect as the media make him out to be. Rupert, I know you’ve been friends with both the victim and the accused, so this doesn’t have to involve you. Maralee is of course a journalist and must try to maintain neutrality. But we three girls”—those green eyes sparkled—“we three can do all the digging we like!”

“Like The Golden Girls!” Louisa clapped her hands. “Wonderful!”

“No. We’ll be like Charlie’s Angels!” Betsy exclaimed. “And Rupert, you can be Charlie!”

Mr. Pennington colored slightly and made eye contact with my aunt. “There are some things,” he said, “a man just can’t run away from.”

Betsy and Louisa looked puzzled. My aunt winked. “John Wayne. Stagecoach. 1939.” Those two have been quoting old movie lines, trying to stump each other for years.

And so, as Julius Caesar said, the die was cast. I wasn’t sure whether the Charlie’s Angels thing was exactly what my aunt had in mind, and it undoubtedly wasn’t what the twins had asked for, but there it was. Three women and one gentleman “of a certain age” were about to take on a real time life-and-death challenge.

Aunt Ibby stood, picking up her pen. “Let’s each write down what we know—personally—about Samuel Bond. Good, bad, and in between. Lee, you and Rupert are excused from this part if you don’t want to do it.” She glanced around the table. “Then we’ll share what we’ve written and see what we come up with.”

“I don’t know anything about him,” I admitted. “Does anyone want coffee, tea, or wine? I can handle that.”

Everyone agreed on wine. Mr. Pennington uncorked the bottle and poured. I put the plate of sandwiches on the table, sipped my wine, and watched the others write in their notebooks. The room grew quiet, except for an occasional muffled giggle from Betsy as she bent over neat backhand script. Louisa alternated between minutes of frantic scribbling and moments of elbows on the table, hands covering both eyes, deep thought. Aunt Ibby worked steadily for five minutes or so, then closed her notebook with a firm “that’s that” slap, poured a cup of coffee, and nibbled on a cream-cheese-and-olive-on-rye-bread mini-sandwich. Mr. Pennington followed my aunt’s lead—coffee and sandwich—then stood, apparently studying the Hood’s Milk calendar on the back of the kitchen door.

When all of the erstwhile Golden Girls/Charlie’s Angels had closed their notebooks, the digging up dirt on poor, dead, unable-to-defend-himself Professor Samuel Bond began in earnest. From the start it was a gossip fest.

Betsy went first. “The first time I met Sam Bond was around ten years ago at a benefit auction for the Animal Rescue League. Mr. Leavitt and I had donated a lovely Emile Gruppe painting. I wish I had it back now. Well, anyway, Sam was working that crowd as though he was running for congress. Practically begging for invitations to the various A-list events represented in that room. Such a climber! It worked for him to a certain extent.” She laughed. “Got himself invited to a couple of hundred-dollar-a-plate dinners.”

Louisa nodded. “I sponsored one of those dinners. It was at Hamilton Hall. We were raising money for a new pediatric outpatient facility for the hospital. We had to redeposit his check twice. Bounced the first couple of times.” She shook her head. “Why people spend money they can’t afford to impress others, I don’t know. But it seems to me Samuel has been living beyond his means for a very long time.”

I’ve rarely ever heard my aunt speak disparagingly of others—excepting certain politicians—and this occasion was no exception. “His late wife was a library volunteer years ago,” she said. “A sweet woman, but she always seemed so sad. I had the impression that the marriage was not a happy one.”

“For years I didn’t even know he was ever married,” Betsy said. “He sure didn’t act it. Almost every time I saw him he was hanging around with his students or trying to crash an A-list party.”

“Ever see him with Cody McGinnis?” Aunt Ibby wanted to know.

“I’m not positive,” Betsy put in, “but when I saw the newspaper photos of Cody, he looked familiar. It may be because I’ve seen him with Sam. Have you ever seen Cody, Lee?”

“Not really. I only saw the back of his head when he was going into the courthouse with his lawyers. All I’ve heard about him lately is that apparently the police have cleaned out his locker at a gym he belongs to.”

“That might be important,” my aunt said, “since the police are involved. Did Pete tell you that?”

“No,” I admitted. “It’s thirdhand information. I haven’t seen anything about it in the papers or on the news. Might be just gossip.”

“Let’s make a note of it anyway,” Aunt Ibby said, and scribbled in her notebook. “But back to Betsy’s point. Have any of you seen Cody and Sam together?”

Mr. Pennington stopped his perusal of the cow-of-the-month portrait. “I’ve seen them together,” he said. “Many times.”

All heads turned in his direction. “Where?” Aunt Ibby wanted to know. “When?”

“It was usually at school functions, of course,” Rupert Pennington said. “That was most often where I saw Samuel. He and Cody McGinnis were, as you know, associates in the university’s history department.”

“Nothing unusual there,” Betsy said. “What we need is dirt. Or at least suspicion of dirt.”

“I don’t know if this qualifies at that level,” he said, “but Samuel, Professor McGinnis, and that poli-sci professor you interviewed, Lee, often dined together, went to the theater together, and occasionally traveled together.”

“I knew they traveled together,” Louisa said. “I ran into them a year or so ago on an Alaskan cruise.”

“I’m generally pretty tight-lipped about library business,” Aunt Ibby said. “What happens in the library stays in the library. Some folks in Salem wouldn’t like the type of books they read to be common knowledge, if you get my drift. But since Samuel is dead, I guess I can tell you that those three men were collaborating on a book. They asked for my help with the research.”

“That’s interesting,” Louisa said. “When I met them on that cruise, they were with another man. Occasionally I sat with the four of them at dinner. And now that you mention it, their conversations were always about writing.”

“Aunt Ibby,” I asked, “do you know what their book was about?”

“As far as I could tell by the questions they asked, I don’t think it was exactly a textbook. I believe it was a how-to book showing students how to study for exams, how to take notes effectively, how to research and write a term paper—that sort of thing. They called it You Can Do This.”

“Cute title. It sounds like a worthwhile project.”

“I agree,” she said. “They apparently had a contract with a well-known publisher. Now, I don’t know if this is important or not, but someone else was working with them. They had an editor. I overheard them talking about ‘the editor.’ Somebody who was putting the thoughts and ideas of the three into publishable shape. Maybe that was the man Louisa saw them with. They were pretty secretive about it, as if they didn’t want people to know that they needed help to write this book. And between us, they needed a great deal of help!”

“It sounds almost as though they’d hired a ghostwriter, doesn’t it?” I asked.

“Could be quite important, I should think,” my aunt said. “Whoever that is might hold some extra insight into all three of those men.”

“Brrr.” Louisa pretended to shiver. “Ghostwriter sounds strange—under the circumstances, doesn’t it? So it looks as though we three women need to find him. Or her.”

“We can do it, I’m sure,” Betsy said. “And if we’re going to be Charlie’s Angels, can I be Farrah? I have the best hair.”