Beauty and the Beast
- Автор: Хантер Эван
- Серия: Matthew Hope #3
- Год: 1982
- Язык: английский
- Год: Holt, Rinehart and Winston
- ISBN: 978-0-03-062198-7
- Жанр: Другие детективы
Электронная книга - «Beauty and the Beast». Краткое содержание книги:
I looked at my watch. It was ten minutes to eleven.
“Give me twenty minutes,” I said.
9
I did not get to Flamingo Key until almost midnight because a northbound trailer truck had jackknifed across US 41 and the resultant traffic tie-up was a Fellini version of Hell. I-75, the new Calusa bypass, was scheduled to open in May (promises, promises!), a four-lane highway that would connect Travers to the north with Venice to the south and eliminate (we hoped) much of the tourist traffic that clogged Sarasota’s and Calusa’s main artery. In the meantime, I sat for forty minutes behind a long line of irritable motorists, listening to what Frank called Calusa’s “Old-Fart Network,” a radio station that played schlock arrangements of all the Golden Oldies of the forties, introduced by a dove-throated announcer who dropped lyric bits of poetry such as, ‘We walked the beach alone that day, you and I, picking up sand dollars like street urchins beseeching travelers. We’ve journeyed long and far since then, my love, but the treasure is still ours alone, to share.” I found the man amusing; Frank kept saying he was no William B. Williams, who I gathered was a New York City disc jockey.
Frank calls Flamingo Key “Fandango Key,” this because of the largely Spanish style of architecture favored by the residents there. If there is a Gold Coast in Calusa (and there truly isn’t), then Flamingo Key qualifies, I guess; the homes there are all in the $500,000-and-over class, and the canals are lined with sailboats and motor cruisers that in some instances are even more expensive than the houses. Each of the houses on Flamingo is on what is known as “waterfront acreage,” be it Calusa Bay itself or one of the many waterways winding through the immaculately landscaped development. Frank says that the lawns on Flamingo always look as if they’d recently been clipped by a US Marine Corps barber on Parris Island. Frank does have his prejudices.
The security guard at the main gate stepped out of the booth as I braked the Karmann Ghia to a stop. It was a few minutes to midnight, a bit late in the day for callers. I told him Miss Reynolds was expecting me, and he said, “Just a moment, please, sir,” and stepped back into the booth, where he consulted a sheet of paper attached to a clipboard. He picked up the receiver of a hanging wall phone, dialed a number, and while he waited for it to ring, said, “Your name, please?”
“Matthew Hope,” I said.
He turned back to the phone. “Miss Reynolds,” he said, “a Mr. Hope to see you.” He listened, said, “Thank you,” and then hung up. “First street on your right,” he said, “it’s 204 Crane Way, the second house in.”
I put the Ghia in gear, drove to the corner, made the first right, and found the mailbox for 204 in front of a Spanish hacienda next door to another Spanish hacienda with the number 206 on its mailbox. I pulled into the driveway, turned off the ignition, and walked up the path to the front door. There were lights burning all over the house. Kitty Reynolds opened the door the moment after I took my finger off the bell button.
“I was afraid you weren’t coming,” she said. “Come in, please.”
She was wearing another of the creations she undoubtedly sold at Kitty Corner, a blue nylon peignoir slit high on the left leg and slashed low over her breasts. Her long blonde hair was hanging loose to the shoulders. She wore no makeup. Her eyes, an echo of the pale-blue peignoir, shifted suddenly from my face, glanced out beyond my shoulder, swept the lawn outside. I almost turned to look.
“Come in,” she said again, and stepped aside to let me pass, and then closed and locked the door behind her.
“I’m sorry I’m late,” I said. “There was an accident on Forty-One.”
“I’m usually up till all hours, anyway,” she said. “Would you care for something to drink? I was just about to pour myself a cognac.”
“Cognac would be fine,” I said.
She led me into a living room furnished almost entirely in blue — pale-blue carpeting, darker blue upholstery, diaphanous blue drapes, a Syd Solomon painting in various shades of blue on the white stucco wall over the fireplace. Blue was the lady’s color, no question about it. She’d been wearing blue when I’d called on her in her shop, and she was wearing blue now in a room predominantly blue. Even her high-heeled satin mules were blue. I watched as she poured cognac into a pair of snifters. She carried both glasses back to where I was sitting on one of the modular sofas arranged before the fireplace hearth.
“Do we need a fire?” she asked, handing me one of the snifters. “It’s a little chilly, isn’t it? Would you mind making one? I’m an idiot when it comes to fires.”
I tore two sheets of newspaper into narrow strips and placed them under the grate. I put a small bundle of kindling onto the grate, and placed two logs on top of it. I struck a match and held it to the paper. The kindling caught, the logs — a fat pine and an oak — began crackling at once.
“Thank you,” she said.
“So,” I said, and rose from where I was crouched, and pulled the fire screen across the hearth, and then sat again, facing her.
“I want to apologize for my behavior last week,” she said.
“That’s okay,” I said.
“It’s just... you were raking over the past, and right then I preferred forgetting it. Is the cognac all right?”
“Fine,” I said. “Miss Reynolds, why’d you want to see me?”
“Because I’m scared.”
“Of what?”
“These murders...”
“Yes?”
“They frighten me.”
“Why?”
“Because I’m a woman living alone, and—”
“That’s not why you called me, though, is it?”
“No.”
“If you wanted protection or reassurance, you’d have called the police, isn’t that true?”
“Yes.”
“So why am I here, Miss Reynolds?”
“All right, I knew Andrew, all right?”
“Andrew Owen, do you mean?”
“Yes. And now his wife, his ex-wife, has been killed, and maybe it’s connected somehow to me—”
She cut herself short.
“Michelle?” I said.
“Michelle, yes.”
“Then you knew Michelle, too, is that right?”
“Yes, I knew her.”
“Why don’t we start at the beginning?” I said.
“That was more than a year ago,” she said, and sighed.
“When, exactly?”
“Well, it was August when Jerry got shot—”
“Jerry?”
“Tolliver. Gerald, actually. And this is December already... today’s the first, isn’t it?”
“The second already,” I said, and looked at my watch.
“So that would make it... August, September, October, November,” ticking off the months on her fingers, “that’s four full months, this would’ve been sixteen months ago.”
The name suddenly rang a bell.
“Is Jerry Tolliver the man who got shot by a cop—”
“Killed, actually. Yes, he’s the one. He owned a carpet-cleaning place on the South Trail. He was on his way to his sister’s funeral when a police officer...”
“Okay,” I said, nodding. “What about him? Did you know him, too?”
“No.”
“Then what—”
“Well, I was coming to that. Some of the people on the committee knew him — or had known him, actually — but not me. I joined the committee only because it seemed so unfair. A man gets murdered and they just let the police officer go free? That’s why I joined it. Because I thought we could do something about it.”