The Dirty Duck Part 5

"All that blood. The killer must have been covered in it-"

"Sure was. We found an old raincoat tossed in a dustbin. We're checking it for prints, but its one of those slick ones. Also, cheap. Kind you could get anywhere. h.e.l.l to trace." Lasko stuck a toothpick in his mouth, and held up a small, white card, illuminated by his torch. "How about going along with me to the Diamond Hill Guest House? Have a word with the landlady?"

"I told you before, Sam, this isn't my-"

Lasko cut Jury off by asking, "What do you think of this?"

It was a copy of a theatre program for As You Like It. Across the bottom, two lines of poetry were carefully printed: Beauty is but a flower That wrinkles will devour.

"So what do you think, Richard? We're checking the original for prints. But for openers: think she wrote that?"

"No."

"Me either. Looks more like a message to us."

Resolutely, Jury handed back the copy. "You, Sammy. To you. I've got to go back to London, remember?"

But Sam Lasko still had his piece de resistance to offer. "I think you'd better come along."

"Sammy, no one's asked for our help."

"Not yet. But I'm sure Honeysuckle Tours maybe could use it." Lasko rolled the toothpick around in his mouth. "You know, the tour the Farraday kid was on." Lasko put the theatre program back in its envelope. "So was Gwendolyn Bracegirdle."

Sam Lasko let Jury stand there for a while and digest this information before the sergeant took out his notebook and flipped through the pages: "It's a terrific name, isn't it? Just makes you think of the Old South and Tara and all that stuff. You been to America, Jury?" The question was rhetorical; Lasko didn't wait for an answer before going on with his list.

"This guy runs it, Honeycutt-probably that's where they got the name-we've been looking for him ever since we found her. He's been bouncing around all over Stratford. Anyway, we got the Farradays on this tour and, according to J.C., who's only just barely speaking, there were four others, leave out them and Honeycutt: a Lady Dew and her niece, Cyclamen-talk about names!-George Cholmondeley, he deals in precious stones; and Harvey L. Schoenberg-"

"Schoenberg?"

"You know him?"

"No. But the chap I was having dinner with does."

"That so?" Lasko put his notebook away, and attempted to steer Jury down the path and-presumably-toward the Diamond Hill Guest House. "What I was thinking was, maybe after we get finished with this Diamond Hill-"

"We?" But Jury knew he'd go along.

So did Sam Lasko. He didn't even bother answering. "-I thought maybe you could go along and have a look into the Arden-that's Honeycutt's hotel-and have a word with him or find out where the h.e.l.l he is-"

Jury turned in the dark walk. "Sammy, I told you before-"

Sam Lasko shook and shook his head, holding out his arms almost heavenward. "Richard. Look at that mess back there. You think I don't have enough to do-?"

"No, I don't."

They were walking up the alley that made a shortcut from the theatre through old Stratford to the streets skirting the town, lined with B-and-B's like avenues of beeches.

"Casablanca. Now there was a film. You've seen it, haven't you?"

Jury stopped, lit a cigarette, and said, "Don't get the idea this is the beginning of a beautiful relations.h.i.+p, Louie."

9.

Mrs. Mayberry, who ran the Diamond Hill Guest House, did nothing to correct Jury's impression of women who ran Bed-and-Breakfast establishments.

"I don't know, do I? She was on one of those tours. Had the room right at the top-small, but cozy. Hot-and-cold and bath down the hall. Seven pound a night it cost her, and full English breakfast, VAT inclusive." The police might have been there for no other purpose than to rent Mrs. Mayberry's rooms.

Jury knew what the full English breakfast would be: tinned orange juice, cornflakes, one egg, bit of bacon if you were lucky, watery "grilled" tomato. Only Oliver Twist would have the nerve to ask for seconds.

"The last time you saw her, Mrs. Mayberry?" asked Lasko in his sleepy voice.

"Six-ish, I guess it was. Come back to the house for a wash before dinner. They usually do." They were climbing the stairs now, preceded by the landlady with her ring of keys. The police photographer and fingerprint man brought up the rear. "Here we are, then." Mrs. Mayberry stood aside and pushed open the door. "Shocking, it is." Jury a.s.sumed she was commenting on the murder and not the state of the room, which was small and rather barren. "Terrible thing to happen." But the comment seemed to be aimed less at Gwendolyn Bracegirdle's death than it was at the nerve of a Diamond Hill Guest House lodger giving the place a bad name.

The room was on the top floor and the tiny dormer window seemed designed to keep out the summer breezes rather than to let them in. A bed-really more of a cot-with a chenille spread flanked one wall. A washbasin sprouted from the other. Besides this there were only a chintz-covered slipper chair and an old oak bureau. On the top of the bureau, Miss Bracegirdle's things were neatly arranged: a couple of jars of cream, a comb and brush, a small picture in a silver frame. Jury was standing in the doorway so as to keep out of the way of Lasko's team, and thus couldn't see the face in the picture. But it struck him as sad, this attempt to carry some small part of home around with her. The rooms of a murder victim always struck Jury in this way: perhaps because he had been trained to observe objects so closely, they became sentient to him: the bed ready to receive the weight of a body, the looking gla.s.s to see the face, the comb to touch the hair. The presence of Gwendolyn Bracegirdle clung to these things like scent, even though she'd been in this room for only a few days.

Before Lasko started going through the drawers, he said to Jury. "Why don't you have a little talk with the landlady?" His eyes were imploring.

"Sure," said Jury. As long as he was here . . .

Mrs. Mayberry was fortifying herself with a cup of tea in the breakfast room-c.u.m-parlor. One weak bulb glowed thriftily in the rose-shaded lamp on the sideboard. The sideboard told him he'd been right about breakfast: cereal boxes sat in a row beside a brace of tiny juice gla.s.ses that would provide one large swallow apiece. There were three round tables, each with its complement of mismatched chairs, and each with its centerpiece of mismatched condiments. Mustard for breakfast?

"On the Sat.u.r.day she came," said Mrs. Mayberry. "Came at the same time as the man and wife in Number Ten. I don't mean together; she didn't know them."

"Did she get friendly with any of the others while she was here?"

"Well, now, I don't know, do I? I don't mix with my guests. In the morning I'm in the kitchen. One's got to look sharp these days to see breakfast's done proper and the rooms cleaned and so forth. We've got to do the cooked breakfasts up in advance, the eggs and such, as they will all come in at the same time, won't they? Even though we serve from seven-thirty. Spot on nine they all troop in-" She pushed her frizzy hair off her forehead and shook and shook her head. "My checkout time's eleven and the linen's got to be changed-"

Feeling as if he were being interviewed for a job, Jury cut in on her: "I'm sure it's very difficult. But there must have been someone here who pa.s.sed the time of day with Miss Bracegirdle."

"Maybe she talked with my Patsy who waits at table and does some of the upstairs work. Called in sick today, she did, and I felt like sacking her."

Jury interrupted this recounting of domestic problems: "Did she take any phone calls while she was here?"

"No, none I know of. You might ask Patsy that. She answers a lot of the time."

The guest register, which Mrs. Mayberry had been rather proud to bring in from the little hall table, was open in front of Jury. Looking down at the small but florid signature of Gwendolyn Bracegirdle, he said, "Sarasota, Florida."

"That's right, Florida." She fingered the bottle of catsup. "I get lots of them from Florida. Of course, lately there've been a lot of British going to Florida. It's ever so cheap, they tell me. I wouldn't mind a bit of a holiday myself, but as you can see, there's so much business here that I never do get away-"

"We'll have to talk with the other guests here, Mrs. Mayberry. There's evidence that Miss Bracegirdle was with someone when she met with her, ah, accident."

Her face was a sheet of horror. "Here? You're not saying-"

"Not saying anything. We're just gathering information."

But the thought that she might be giving bed and breakfast to a murderer was, to her, not the issue: "The Diamond Hill Guest House isn't going to be in the papers, now is it? Nothing's ever happened here . . ."

It brought back to Jury his own consoling words to Farraday that nothing ever happened in Stratford.

"We try to keep things out of the papers."

"Well, I should certainly think the Diamond Hill Guest House shouldn't have to have its good name besmirched . . . It certainly wouldn't do my business any good. Even with travel so expensive these days, the Americans still come. Stratford's just as popular, more popular, than ever. In tourist season, it's-excuse my language, it's h.e.l.l."

Jury gave her a level look. "It certainly was for Miss Bracegirdle."

"We'd like you to sign this, please, madam," said Lasko, who came down a few minutes later. The Scene of Crimes man had left with a suitcase full, presumably, of the effects of Gwendolyn Bracegirdle. "We've sealed off her room, of course."

"Sealed!" Mrs. Mayberry was indignant. "But I've got people booked into that room."

Blood running in the streets of Stratford should not interfere with custom.

"Not until we've had time to give that room a much more thorough going-over." Lasko pocketed the pen with which she'd signed the release form.

"Isn't that a fine thing, then! What am I supposed to tell them, I'd like to know?"

Mildly, Lasko said, "Why not tell them the last roomer got herself sliced up with a razor?"

The broad steps and the lobby of the Royal Shakespeare Theatre were packed so tightly with playgoers, Jury bet there wasn't an empty seat in the house and that some of the Standing-Room-Onlys had already ferreted out his empty seat and were making for it right now.

Melrose Plant was squashed into a corner of the bar that catered to the Dress Circle crowd.

He handed Jury a cognac and said, "I had the foresight to order the drinks before the curtain went up."

Jury drank the small portion in one or two swallows. "Curtain's going down. Come on."

Despite Plant's mumbled complaints about missing the second half of a very good Hamlet, it was clear he was only too happy to thread his way through the crowd after Jury, even though he didn't know where they were going, or to whom.

The Where, he discovered, was straight Stratford-upon-Avon stuff: the Arden Hotel.

The Whom was something else again.

10.

"My friends," said Valentine Honeycutt, his intense look suggesting he would love to number Jury and Plant among them, "call me Val."

"Mine," said Melrose, "call me Plant."

"Oh!" exclaimed Honeycutt, with a small s.h.i.+ver of excitement. "You go by just a last name? You must be hideously important!"

"Hideously," said Melrose, as he put his silver-k.n.o.bbed stick across the table by his chair.

Valentine Honeycutt redistributed the folds of the daffodil ascot that bloomed in the V of his candy-striped s.h.i.+rt done in pencil-thin lines of green and yellow. His blue linen jacket must have been chosen to complement his sky-blue eyes. All in all, looking at him was like taking a stroll through an Elizabethan knott garden. He crossed one perfectly creased trouser leg over the other in the way of one given to conversing largely through body language. "What can I do for you gentlemen? Care for a smoke?" His hand made an arc with his silver case.

"Mr. Honeycutt," said Jury, "we've come to inquire about this tour you manage-"

"Honeysuckle Tours, that's right. Sort of a play on my own name and also because our office is in Atlanta, Georgia. Honeysuckle vines and all that. Every June for six weeks it's London, Amsterdam, the English countryside and London again. Stratford's always on the agenda. Americans dote on it. The theatre and all."

"Six weeks. Sounds expensive."

"It is."

"I'm afraid I've some rather bad news for you."

Honeycutt's whitish-blond eyebrows arched over his innocent blue eyes as he reared back slightly. He looked a little like an angel who'd stumbled on a hole in his cloud. "Has something happened?"

"Afraid so. To one of your group. A Miss Bracegirdle-"

"Gwendolyn?"

"Yes. A rather serious accident. Miss Bracegirdle's dead."

"Dead! Dear G.o.d! I know she was complaining about pains in-but you said 'accident.' "

"She was murdered."

Honeycutt seemed pulled by invisible hands from the chintzy chair in which he had arranged himself like a bouquet. "What? I don't understand-"

It seemed easy enough to understand to Jury. "What were you doing last night, Mr. Honeycutt?"

Honeycutt was looking from one of them to the other with such seeming lack of comprehension that Jury wondered how the man ever managed a railway guide. "Me? Well, I was at the theatre. Like everyone else, I imagine."

"With anyone?"

"No. No, I went by myself. As You Like It. It was . . ." The voice trailed off.