Murder, She Wrote--A Date with Murder Read online

  That brought me back to Mara’s Luncheonette the night before and the man who’d introduced himself as Lawrence Pyke, how his vaguely threatening nature had left me unsettled. His presence in town now made no sense, no more than why a man like Hal Wirth would squander the entire fortune he’d built up in Wirth Ventures.

  “There’s something I need to tell you,” I started.

  * * *

  • • •

  They both just stared at me when I finished my story.

  “Rather cryptic,” the real Lawrence Pyke said finally.

  “I’ll say.”

  “And you have no idea why this man claiming to be me sought you out?”

  “Information, like I said. Because he knew Babs and I were friends, or seemed to.”

  “How could he know such a thing?”

  “Cabot Cove is a small town.”

  “Only for those who live here,” Babs noted, even more discomfited now, so much so that I regretted telling the story.

  I reached over and grasped Babs’s arm anew, firmer this time so she wouldn’t be able to escape my clutch as easily. “You remember that handwritten note I was reading last night?”

  It was clear she didn’t. “What note? I don’t remember any note.”

  “Seth and I were getting dinner ready when you returned from the hospital. You caught me reading it when you came into the kitchen. I pretended it was nothing.”

  “Was it something important?”

  “It might be. We need to tell Mr. Pyke about it, because the letter clearly implied a threat. It was from someone named Eugene Labine.” I swallowed hard, feeling uncomfortable with even this small measure of deceit. “I left it on the counter.”

  “Oh, that.” Babs rose, moved to one of the kitchen drawers. “I thought it was something Hal just dropped when he . . .”

  Her voice tailed off and I could see Babs fighting back tears.

  Pyke’s expression had tightened, a look more befitting the courtroom than the kitchen, his purpose in coming here evolving. “Who was this Eugene Labine?”

  “Hal’s business partner,” Babs said, swallowing hard.

  “No such name appears in any of your husband’s financial records.”

  “Because Labine was his original business partner. Years ago, when Hal was just getting started. They had a falling-out.”

  Pyke turned his gaze briefly on me, as if I’d invented that detail in the plot of one of my books. “And when would this have been?”

  “Years ago. Before we moved up here and before Hal found success. I haven’t even heard or thought of Labine for years.”

  “Where’s this letter now?” Lawrence Pyke asked her.

  Babs opened the drawer where she must have tucked the letter after I’d seen it. Something occurred to me and I trailed her across the floor, holding her arm just as she was about to lift the letter out.

  “Perhaps we shouldn’t be handling it,” I advised. “Could be evidence now, after all.”

  “Of what?”

  “I don’t believe it was a coincidence that this letter came at the same time these revelations surrounding Hal’s business interests have surfaced. I’m just wondering who this Labine was and what his part in all this might’ve been.”

  I spotted a pair of rubber dishwashing gloves on the counter and moved to get them, intending to lift the letter from the drawer only once they were donned, when my cell phone rang.

  I missed the old flip one that had served me just fine for years. I’d upgraded to the smart variety because everyone told me I should, what with e-mail and texting, which I hardly ever used my phone to do. Should have just kept the crusty flip.

  I recognized Sheriff Mort Metzger’s number.

  “Mort?”

  “Where are you, Jessica?”

  “With Babs. At her house.”

  “Can you get away? I’ll send a car so you don’t have to bike into town.”

  “What’s in town?”

  “Remember the man you met at Mara’s last night?”

  Given we’d just been talking about him, I couldn’t believe Mort had chosen that moment to mention the man who had introduced himself as Lawrence Pyke. “Yes. Why?”

  “He’s been murdered.”

  Chapter Seven

  The deputy Mort had sent dropped me right before the entrance to Hill House of Cabot Cove, our own quaint hotel. Hill House was a step above the local bed-and-breakfasts, blessed with a rustic demeanor and charm all its own. No two rooms were alike, and with Labor Day’s passing and the summer season now gone, the rates were very reasonable.

  Mort met me outside amid a sea of revolving lights. Four cruisers, as many as I could ever recall in Cabot Cove in one place at one time.

  “Second floor, corner room,” he told me. “Manager said the victim requested it. What’s that make you think?”

  “If he heard footsteps, he’d know they were coming his way.”

  Mort nodded. “That’s what I think, too. Don’t suppose you’re rubbing off on me, do you?”

  “More likely, the opposite.”

  The exchange was meant to be light but, under the circumstances, only added to the tension fueled by the patrol cars’ spinning lights.

  “You don’t need to see the body. It’s a bit . . . messy. It could well be you’re the only person, besides the front desk clerk who checked him in yesterday, who spoke with the victim after he arrived in town. Anything stand out from your conversation?”

  “He introduced himself as Lawrence Pyke, Hal Wirth’s lawyer. I was speaking to the real Lawrence Pyke when you called.”

  Mort raised his eyebrows. “The victim could only know to do that if he was somehow acquainted with Hal.”

  “Just as he knew I must not have been acquainted with Lawrence Pyke, or he wouldn’t have bothered with the ruse.”

  “What else do you remember from your discussion?”

  Excuse me for saying this, but you don’t sound like a lawyer looking out after the interests of a departed client’s wife.

  It was the first thing that sprang to mind, those words I’d spit at him that now rang oddly prophetic. I settled myself and reconstructed the scene as best I could. It took shape in my head the way a scene does when I’m writing, though conjured from memory instead of imagination. But it formed the same way, starting with the steam rising between us from the cooling stove, which had seemed to settle over the man who’d claimed to be Lawrence Pyke.

  “He spoke of Hal’s business partner,” I recalled, reconstituting the conversation in my mind.

  There’s no easy way to say this. He was scorned after Hal screwed him out of the business they cofounded, and he has not been successful since.

  “He said that?” Mort probed.

  “Or something very close to it, yes.”

  “What else?”

  It’s in Barbara’s best interests that you share with me anything you may have learned about her husband’s business dealings prior to today, anything potentially awry, for instance.

  “He wanted information about Hal’s business dealings. He was vaguely threatening. And I remember the smell of whiskey on his breath.”

  Mort made a note on a small memo pad. “I’ll check all the local watering holes, see if our victim may have stopped in to have a drink before heading over to Mara’s.”

  “I thought he was there when I came in and joined you.”

  “My back must’ve been to his table.”

  “But it occurs to me . . .”

  “What occurs to you, Jessica? I can see that suspicious mind of yours working.”

  “What if he followed me there? What if he’d been watching my house?”

  Mort didn’t look overly concerned. “Not easy to follow someone pedaling a bicycle, I daresay.”

  “Good po
int.”

  “What made you say he was threatening?”

  “I said vaguely threatening. It was the last thing he said to me, something like ‘Be a friend to Babs and nothing more.’”

  “And you found that threatening?”

  “It was the way he said it.”

  “What else?”

  “That I should steer clear of issues pertaining to her husband. But, Mort, there’s something you need to know, something about Hal’s estate. Hal was nearly bankrupt and was being threatened with legal action by a former business partner.”

  Mort made another note on his pad. “Got a name for me?”

  “Eugene Labine.”

  His pen froze in the middle of a word. “Jessica, that’s who was murdered upstairs.”

  I heard myself speak, but the words sounded as if they came from someone else. “I think I better have a look at the body, after all, Mort.”

  * * *

  • • •

  Entering the Hill House of Cabot Cove was like stepping back in time. The big wooden door opened into a spacious, airy Victorian lobby that featured ornate furniture spread atop elegant carpeting, along with a genuine Oriental rug. A uniformed officer stood vigil just inside the door, not far from the front desk, which was actually a counter currently staffed by an anxious-looking clerk whose name I couldn’t recall.

  I followed Mort through the comfortable sprawl, passing a sitting area and built-in bookshelves toward a lavish stairway, featuring a hand-carved railing that spiraled toward Hill House’s upper levels. The guest rooms located there retained a measure of the original charm, along with some furnishings, from the hotel’s origins as the family home of a wealthy sea captain who’d gone on to run an entire fleet of merchant ships.

  “I’ve stopped counting the murders that have taken place here,” Mort said. “Too many to keep track of. You know what some of the old-timers have taken to calling Hill House?”

  “Hell House,” I said, before he had a chance to, “though I suspect the owners aren’t too happy about that, given that it may drive away guests. It’s amazing Cabot Cove still has such a thriving tourist trade.”

  “Just like it’s amazing anyone wants to live here anymore,” he added. “The murder rate must be higher than in any big city.”

  “Maybe that’s what attracts people, Mort. An obsession with the macabre, like being unable to turn away from a traffic accident.”

  He let out some breath in what I thought might’ve started as a chuckle or laugh. “We might suggest to the chamber of commerce that they start up a tour of the locales where all the bodies were found.”

  “Like a murder tour.”

  “To go with your murder sense, Jessica.”

  The second-floor corner room in which Eugene Labine had been murdered was currently being guarded by a pair of Mort’s uniformed deputies. The pair of crime scene techs Mort employed on a part-time basis as needed must have fortunately both been available, no small feat in a village the size of Cabot Cove, and, I could see, were busy at work inside the room as we neared the open entry. Their forensics cases were open and they were busy checking the room for any clues and evidence not discernible by the naked eye. One was working the area between two love seats facing each other kitty-corner to the room’s fireplace, and the other was currently moving a UV light over the drawn covers of a rumpled but still-made double bed.

  They certainly weren’t disturbing Eugene Labine, who was lying on the carpet with his arms splayed wide to either side and his head propped up against the base of one of the love seats. It looked from a distance in the ambient lighting as if the love seat were resting on his chest. A neat hole that had oozed blood, now dried, sat dead center in his forehead, surrounded by a symmetrical burn mark from the bullet that had killed him. He was wearing the same clothes I recalled from Mara’s Luncheonette, and his blank expression was remarkable for nothing other than the illusion that the angle of his fall had left his gaping eyes drooped downward.

  “Shot at close range,” I heard myself say.

  “You must be a mystery writer,” Mort said, leaving the body to the crime scene techs for now, although I recalled glimpsing outside the local funeral home hearse that doubled in these parts as the coroner’s wagon.

  Of course, an autopsy wouldn’t be required to tell how Hal Wirth’s former business partner had died.

  “I think it happened as soon as he opened the door,” I resumed. “Based on the trajectory and placement of the wound, I’d say he recoiled backward and fell just short of the couch, accounting for how his head ended up against it.”

  “Agree on both counts,” Mort said. “Anything else come to mind?”

  I glanced toward a mahogany desk, situated just beneath a wall-mounted wide-screen television, the one compromise this room in the Hill House had made with modernity.

  “His wallet and cash are still in evidence, so robbery wouldn’t appear to be the motive.”

  “Appear?”

  “We can’t see what we can’t see,” I reminded Mort. “So we can’t be sure something else wasn’t taken. He wrote Hal a letter.”

  “Who did?”

  “The victim. Eugene Labine,” I said, glancing back down at the body.

  Such scenes were nothing new for me in reality as well as in fiction. Somehow seeing the actual product of what was normally conjured by my imagination felt less real. Crime scenes were always more intense for me when I was creating them in my mind, my imagination left to connect the dots, fill in all the creases and crevices. Real crime scenes like this had a cold, antiseptic feeling to them, right down to the scent of alcohol that hung in the air from the various forensic materials. The exception was those cases where I found the body myself, having had no forewarning of what I’d been about to encounter. That left me feeling many things, but mostly a violation of the victim’s most intimate privacy, as if I were somehow intruding. More than once, I’d wondered if his or her spirit might still be lurking about to watch over my actions and efforts, perhaps trying to steer me in the right direction like a real-life muse.

  But I had no sense whatsoever of Eugene Labine in this Hill House room right now, nor did I feel as if anyone were watching me except Mort.

  “Letter,” Mort repeated. “You didn’t mention that before.”

  “He was threatening Hal. That’s what the part of his letter I glimpsed implied.”

  “You can’t be any more specific?”

  I shrugged. “Not beyond the fact that Hal and Labine parted ways as partners years ago, and Hal stopped making payments on the structured settlement agreement they had between them.”

  Mort nodded, weighing my words. “Makes you wonder about the timing of Hal’s heart attack, doesn’t it?”

  “I was already wondering. Something . . . Well, something just didn’t sit right with me.”

  “That murder sense of yours, Jessica?”

  “You never called it that before.”

  “You’ve heard the story of the cat in the nursing home that sits outside the doors of residents soon to join the dearly departed.”

  “Are you comparing me to that cat?”

  “Only in the sense you have the uncanny ability to see things nobody else can. And if there’s something about Hal’s death that set off your radar, that’s enough for me.” His eyes drifted back to the corpse. “Especially in view of the untimely passing of Mr. Labine.”

  “It’s all connected, Mort—it must be. Hal’s sudden and inexplicable insolvency, the letter he received from Labine, Labine’s coming here on his trail.”

  Mort consulted his fabled memo pad. I wondered if it was the only one he’d ever owned, somehow blessed with an inexhaustible supply of pages for him to flip over the wire top. I had my sixth sense for crime and he had his magic memo pad; now I knew why we’d made such a great pair over the years.

&
nbsp; “According to hotel records, he checked in the day of Hal’s death,” Mort informed me.

  “Before or after?”

  Another glance at the pad. “After, by all accounts. Early evening, according to the front desk.” Mort left the memo pad open and looked up from it at me. “Do you think he might have stopped by the Wirths’ party before coming to the hotel?”

  “I don’t remember seeing him there, but I suppose it’s possible.”

  Mort made another note on his pad. “Won’t hurt to flash his picture around, see if anybody recognizes him.”

  Something occurred to me, lingering at the edges of my consciousness. A disconnected memory trying to rise to the surface, something to do with the party that I’d dismissed from my mind because it bore no meaning, its progress halted when Mort resumed.

  “And the letter, what do you remember about that?”

  Hal, I’m writing to extend an undeserved courtesy by informing you that I’ll be taking legal action against you and—

  I recited the words I recalled reading before Babs appeared in the kitchen.

  “Sounds serious. Threatening, too. And connected, obviously, to these financial troubles Hal was having. We have Labine’s home address from the registration card he filled in. I’ll contact the local police down near Boston to inform them.”

  “Hopefully securing their cooperation in obtaining a warrant to search his home.”

  Mort’s expression crinkled as he stole a quick glance back at the body. “Except Mr. Labine’s not party to any crime, besides his own murder.”

  “That we know of, you mean.”

  “That we know of,” Mort acknowledged, with a nod. “And there’s only one way I can see right now we’re going to learn any more.”

  “We need to have a closer look at that letter,” I finished for him.