Something Rotten, page 10
The street was empty, and I hurried across it. I did a quick check of my car to see if Candy had found it and knifed the tires, now imagining him to be every kind of hood in every kind of gangster movie I had ever seen. The Volvo looked to be in good working order, though, and I slipped behind the wheel and drove away with one eye on the rearview mirror. I didn’t even use my turn signal.
Closer to Denmark, when I was sure nobody was behind me, I flipped open my cell phone. That was going to be a long, wet, painful night for nothing if I’d managed to mess up the picture. I smiled. There on my phone were Candy the Cowboy and Ford N. Branff, together at the motel by the interstate.
Funny thing was, I think the flash actually helped.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
I slept long and hard, and woke up feeling like a map that had been refolded wrong and stuffed in the glove box. My legs were pretty angry about my squat-fest the night before, and they let me hear about it. I stayed in the shower an extra ten minutes, and that seemed to help. I had a few scrapes and bruises too, but not so much as anybody would really notice.
Before I went downstairs in search of food and answers, I took one more look at the picture on my camera phone. I wasn’t sure what to do with it yet. Candy and Branff were in bed together—figuratively and maybe literally—and that meant Branff’s takeover attempt might have been more hostile than he wanted people to know. I made a note in my mental PDA: Candy the Cowboy and I were going to have to have a chat sometime soon.
I had finally memorized a path to the kitchen. It may not have been the shortest path, but I wasn’t about to mess with something that worked. On the way, a door to one of the guest rooms opened and I stood face-to-face with Candy himself. This morning he was wearing brown denim pants and a shiny red cowboy shirt with white trim, which was partially obscured by the stack of pillows and sheets he carried. I wanted to ask him if there was a matching red cowboy hat somewhere, but the real question was whether he knew I was the parking lot paparazzi he had chased around a ditch with a gun. I waited to see what he would do.
“Well?” Candy said finally. “Are we just going stand here and stare at each other until one of us passes out from your cologne?”
So he didn’t know it was me last night, after all. I grinned and I stepped aside.
“Say hello to Tonto for me,” I told him as he passed.
The master of the house must not have ordered anything right then, because there wasn’t anybody in the kitchen when I got there. I shook my head. The one time I wanted there to be somebody around, and I had the place to myself. That’s the problem with servants—whenever you need one to make you a sandwich, they’re off doing your laundry.
There was a bell—not a real one, but a button—but I couldn’t bring myself to push it. It felt too much like whistling for a waiter. Instead I did the only other thing I could think of to bring a servant running: I started to help myself.
I banged around in the cabinets until I found a loaf of bread, and I had just stumbled on every kind of mustard there is except Colonel Mustard when a maid came hurr ying into the room. She was squat and round and middle-aged and looked Mexican.
“I make you something?”
“Gracias, no,” I told her. “I’m really not hungry. Ah, no tengo hambre.”
She looked at me strangely. “Then why you make sandwich?”
I liked her already. “I really wanted to ask some questions. Is that all right?”
She frowned, but apparently couldn’t think of a reason not to. “Sí. All right.”
“Me llamo Horatio,” I said, finally putting my three years of high school Spanish to some kind of use. “Como se llama?”
“Catalina.”
“Catalina, when Mr. Prince was alive—Hamilton’s father—did you make all his food for him?”
“Ah, no. Sometimes, but others make food for him too.”
“Other staff? Ah, sirvientes?”
“Sí.”
“Nobody else cooked for him? His wife? Claude?”
She smiled, like I was being funny. “No.”
“So all the food he ate went right from the kitchen to the table?”
Catalina kicked that one around. “Sí,” she decided.
Of course there was always room for an exception here or there, but Hamilton’s father had said on the video that he had been poisoned little by little, over time. That meant someone had to have regular access to something he was eating or drinking.
“What about alcohol. Um . . . cervezas. Did he drink much?”
“Not cervezas. Licor.”
“Liquor? Like tequila?”
“Johnnie Walker Black Label. Neat.”
“Ah, right,” I said with an embarrassed grin. The trouble with trying to talk to somebody in a language you barely know is that you come off sounding like a child, or worse, like a condescending American who had to take Spanish to graduate. I blushed, but her smile told me she was amused, not offended, by the effort.
“He drink as much as his son does now?”
Catalina looked sad at that. “No. Almost, but Mr. Hamilton drink too much these days.”
“Sí. I’m with you on that one. Did he drink alone? By himself?”
“Mostly. Sí. But Mr. Claude drank with him.”
“Often? Muchas veces?”
“Sí. Every Friday night.” She hesitated. “Mucho entoxicado.”
Entoxicado wasn’t on any vocab list I had memorized, but I could guess it meant drunk. Very drunk. I nodded. “Every Friday?”
“Sí. Candy would tell us stories.”
“Candy? As in Candy the gaucho?”
Catalina laughed behind her hand. “Sí,” she said. “He always volunteers to stay late, serve Mr. Prince and his brother.”
Of course he did.
“Muchas gracias, Catalina. You’ve been very helpful.”
“De nada, Mr. Horatio.”
“Just Horatio. Thanks.”
Catalina left me alone with my thoughts, and I got busy. It turns out I wanted that sandwich after all.
It was unexpectedly quiet when I went back upstairs. Hamilton wasn’t in his room, and the Wonder Twins had vacated the entertainment room. I stood for a while, debated playing a baseball game on the big screen, then thought I’d go back to my room and try to sort things out instead. I had promised Hamilton results tonight, and I wanted to make sure I could get some.
There was a pile of clean sheets on my bed when I got to my room, which should have been my first clue that something was up. You never saw the work being done around here, just the end result, like little house elves came while you were gone and made everything in your room right again. I was stupid. I should have expected what happened next, but instead I walked right into it like some freshman poindexter strolling into the senior hall bathroom.
Candy whipped the door closed from where he hid behind it and sucker punched me in the side. It hurt worse than getting hit by a pitch, and I doubled over.
“Tonto sends his regards, jackass,” said Candy. For some reason, the Mexican accent was completely gone, but I wasn’t in much condition to ask him about that right then. He held me up to hit me in the same place again, and I dropped to my knees. He kicked me in the small of my back with one of those hard red cowboy boots, and I buried my face in the carpet and tried to keep my sandwich down.
“Can’t the farmer and the cowman be friends?” I said with effort.
I expected another kick, but instead Candy pushed me over on my side and fished my cell phone out of my pocket. He sat down in an upholstered chair by the door while I coughed and sputtered on the floor.
“Don’t get blood on the carpet,” he told me, again without any accent. I felt like spitting up a great big phlegm-ball of blood and snot just for spite, but it seemed like an awfully uncomfortable way to get back at him. I watched as he opened my cell phone, clicked his way through a few menus, then deleted the picture I had taken last night. When he was finished, he flipped the phone closed and tossed it on the bed behind me.
“Nineteen new messages,” he said. “You must be popular.”
I pulled myself up straight using the corner of the bed. “My family,” I told him. “First time I’ve been in range all week was when I followed you to that motel.”
Candy nodded and lit a cigarette. “Reception out here is a bitch.”
“Remind me to complain about the room service too,” I said.
Candy laughed. It was the first genuine laugh I’d heard all week.
“I like you, kid. A lot of the staff do. You’re different from the jerks who live here, and they know it.” He blew a puff of smoke at the ceiling. “They also know you’re trying to figure out who killed Mr. Prince. They know just about everything that goes on in this house.”
I worked myself the rest of the way onto the corner of the bed, and Candy didn’t stop me. I tested my stomach. It felt like I’d slammed it in a car door.
“Do they know who killed him?” I asked.
Candy shook his head. “Neither do I.”
“Sure you don’t.”
“Come on. Use your brain for something besides smart-ass comebacks,” he said. “Okay, yeah, I’ve been spying on the Princes so Ford could get a little leverage in his takeover bid. But that’s all I’ve been doing.”
I tried to straighten my back, which opened up whole new worlds of pain.
“Like all that business Branff knew about Elsinore losing market share,” I said.
“See? Isn’t Candy good at his job?”
I grunted. “Branff must be paying you pretty well to play servant out here in the middle of nowhere.”
Candy shrugged. “He’s paying me, but it’s . . . a personal favor too. The thing you need to understand is, I didn’t have anything to do with Mr. Prince’s death. And neither did Ford. All he’s interested in is the paper plant.”
“And Mrs. Prince.”
Candy laughed. “He’s not interested in Trudy.” He crossed his legs and took another drag on his cigarette. “Trust me on that one,” he said.
“So why not kill Rex Prince? Doesn’t that get him one step closer to owning the place?”
Candy made a tsking sound. “Haven’t you seen the way Claude acts? He’s just as much in love with this stinking place as his dead brother was. This is his dream come true. He’s finally king of the castle, and he doesn’t want to sell any more than his brother did.”
Candy was talking sense, but I generally didn’t like to agree with people who had just beaten the snot out of me.
“You know, we could have had this conversation last night except you didn’t want to get your fancy boots wet,” I told him.
“But isn’t this so much more comfortable?”
I tried to find some way to sit that didn’t hurt. “Says you,” I told him. “So now that your job’s done, are you going back to Charlotte?”
All I had done was add Candy’s North Carolina license plate to his connection to Branff, but his impressed look told me my math was right.
“If there is a God. My little tour of duty in this hellhole was almost over, and then Rex Prince up and died,” said Candy. “Ford made me stay on to find out whatever I could, but I don’t know what more there is to find out. Besides, I start rehearsals for Don Quixote at Actor’s Theatre next month.”
I nodded, finally understanding. “The accent.”
“Method acting, señor.”
“What about the getup?”
Candy looked hurt. “Well, I am roughing it out here.” He stood to leave.
“So if you didn’t kill Rex Prince,” I asked him, “who did?”
Candy smiled, pushed a last burst of smoke out the side of his mouth, and stubbed his cigarette out on the back of the chair.
“If I knew that, sport, that information would be for Ford Branff’s ears only.”
“Which means you don’t know.”
Candy smiled again. “Anyway, sorry about the beatdown. I had to let you know that I can get to you whenever I want to, just in case you decided to tell your friend Hamilton about me and Branff.”
“Message received,” I told him. “But you should have known better too. I couldn’t care less whether Elsinore Paper gets sold. I’m just looking for a killer.”
“Buena suerte then, amigo,” he said, slipping back into his role. “You’re going to need it.”
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
I was a little surprised to see Candy’s Miata in the parking lot of the Denmark Community Theater that afternoon. The play didn’t start for another couple of hours, so the only people inside were the actors and stage crew preparing for their opening night performance. I kept an eye out for him and went inside the makeshift lobby. He had already said his piece, but my back and my ego were still bruised and I wasn’t looking for an encore.
A middle school girl was working behind the ticket counter when I walked in. She had pigtails and a mouthful of braces that would set off airport metal detectors.
“Oh, hello! I’m sorry, the box office doesn’t open for another hour,” she said.
“I’m here to volunteer,” I told her. “Mrs. Prince told me you needed someone to hand out programs.”
“Great!” she said, a little too perky for my tastes. “What’s your name?”
“Horatio. Horatio Wilkes.”
“Hey! There’s a character named Horatio in this play!”
“No kidding.”
“Yeah, he’s only a minor character, though.”
I tried to smile. She consulted a list and frowned. “Well, I don’t see your name on the volunteer list, and we already have someone coming in to do programs . . .”
“You know how it goes. People never show up for volunteer work.” I put on the charm. “Unless they really care about theater. You do any acting?”
She blushed. “Nothing here. Not yet. But I was Anna in The King and I at Denmark Middle.”
“I’ll bet you were a hit,” I told her. I made like I was looking around. “So where are those programs?”
“Oh,” she said, still a little too loyal to that list. “I don’t know—”
“Its okay, Lynn,” said a familiar voice behind me. Candy stood in the passageway to the theater, GQ-ing it against the doorframe. I wasn’t happy that he’d snuck up behind me twice that day, although this time he wasn’t delivering any messages with his fists. “Mrs. Prince sent him here,” he told the girl. “He’s okay.”
Lynn blushed again, but this time she was swooning. Candy had done with a lean what I couldn’t do with words. Not that I wasn’t grateful, but I wondered why Candy had helped me at all. Maybe he wanted to see where I was going with this, or maybe he was just feeling guilty over damaging my liver. Whatever the reason, I told him thanks and the girl with the braces went into the back to get the programs. Candy dropped the accent again while she was gone.
“I didn’t expect to see you here,” he told me.
“And imagine running into you in a theater,” I said.
He shrugged. “Figured it couldn’t hurt to stay sharp, pad the resume. It’s a two-bit production, but what the hell—I was already here, and God knows there’s nothing else to do in this town. It’s a juicy part too—I’m the Player.”
“I could have told you that.”
Candy smiled. He looked me over, trying to figure out what I was up to with the programs but not seeing the angle. “Just remember what I told you.”
“Parts of me remember very clearly.”
Candy disappeared into the theater behind him as Lynn returned with a box full of staple-bound programs.
“It’ll be a while before anybody gets here,” she told me. “You can hang out in the greenroom with the actors if you want.”
“I’ll just grab a seat in the theater,” I said. I had something to do, and the fewer people in on the gag the better.
Claude and Trudy Prince were the first suspects to arrive. While Lynn did a lot of fussing around over their tickets, Claude gave my presence by the door a wary look. He was starting to see enemies everywhere, and I couldn’t blame him. Mrs. Prince thought it was wonderful—wonderful!—that I was so involved, and squeezed my arm to prove it. I told her Hamilton would be here soon and got another squeeze. I was shameless. I dealt them two programs off the bottom of the stack and considered the pair as they made their regal way to their reserved seats.
Claude was the easy answer to the puzzle. If becoming the CEO of a six-and-a-half-billion-dollar company wasn’t motive enough, there was a lifetime of anger and resentment and envy to consider. What sweet revenge it would be to turn his brother’s advice against him, to finally see something through to its completion, then slide into Rex Prince’s job, his money, and his bed. And he had plenty of opportunity to poison Hamilton’s father too, during those Friday night booze sessions.
Mrs. Prince hugged some friend from town, and waved to a few people who had already found seats in the back. She was the reigning queen of Denmark, to be sure—but she had been before her husband died as well. What did she stand to gain from Rex Prince’s death? Loving her previous husband so much that she needed to marry his brother a couple months later was an odd way of explaining away the fact that she had jumped into bed with someone else pretty quickly. Had she and Claude been squeezing each other in private while Rex Prince was alive? Was his death one of passion, not finances? And while she may not have been cooking her husband’s food, there were other ways to poison somebody. For all I knew, she’d been spiking his mouthwash with arsenic.
I shook my head. One week in Denmark and I was the one starting to see enemies everywhere.
A few people I had never met and therefore didn’t suspect (yet) of killing Hamilton’s father came in and got programs from the top of the stack. Then Ford N. Branff arrived. He did a double take when he recognized me. If Candy had known last night that I was the one snooping around the parking lot, Branff knew too. I gave him a smarmy smile. “Enjoy the show,” I said, passing him a playbill from the bottom of my stack. He took the program warily and strode into the theater.
