The rich have many consolations.
— Plato
Dickens stood back as Grady and Annie raced down the hallway on their way to Archie’s rooms. “It’s nothing, sir, miss. Just Mr. Peevers indulging in a little target practice,” he told them.
Annie skidded to a halt in her stockinged feet. “A little what?”
Grady tugged on her hand, hard. “Keep moving. We’ll find out for ourselves.”
“Not if Archie’s playing with guns, we won’t,” Annie told him, digging in her heels. “And, if he is, what are you doing out here, Dickens? Hiding so you won’t have to let him shoot an apple off your head?”
“William Tell was last night,” Grady reminded her angrily, but he also agreed with her, he was no longer in any mood to go crashing into Archie’s rooms without first announcing himself. Maybe even waving a white flag. “Stay here,” he told Annie, then cautiously approached the closed door, knocked. “Archie? It’s Sullivan. Put down the weapon.”
He heard movement on the other side of the door before the handle turned, the door opened, and he was looking at Dr. Milton Sandborn. “Is there a problem?” the big man asked, his grin as genial as that of a grizzly bear up on its hind legs, ready to pounce.
Grady bent his head a moment, rubbed at the back of his neck, then looked at the doctor once more. Measured him, tried to read his eyes. He got nowhere; the man wasn’t exactly an open book. “I don’t know. Is there?”
“Oh, come in, come in,” Sandborn said, waving both Grady and Annie—who had come up beside him, slipped her hand into his—into Archie’s inner sanctum. “Archie,” he called out in his big voice, “put down the gun, the party poopers are here.”
“I’ll talk to you later,” Grady said, pulling Annie along behind him as he all but stomped through the small, drapery-hung vestibule and into the main chamber.
What he saw when he got there was Archie Peevers, in his usual distasteful deshabille, standing on the far side of the bed and looking toward a paper target someone—the doctor?—had taped to the wall between the windows. A Saturday night special hung from his right hand, and the idiot was grinning like... like an idiot.
“What? Not an Uzi?” Grady asked, walking over and taking the weapon from his employer, then emptying the remaining rounds, putting the bullets in his pocket He stuffed the empty gun into his waistband. “Or how about a .44 Magnum, Dirty Harry Callahan’s choice, and possibly the most powerful handgun in the world, supposedly able to blow your head clean off. You’re the movie buff, Annie, do I have that right?”
“Almost word for word, I think,” Annie said, and he realized she was right beside him. He’d been so busy looking at Archie, wanting to choke Archie, that he had almost forgotten about her. Almost, but not quite. There was a hole in the wall beside the target, a hole mere inches from the unbroken window. If Archie’s aim had been a little worse, the bullet would have smashed the window and headed out onto the lawn, in the general direction of the gazebo... and Annie.
That thought shot Grady’s heart into double time, and his hands clenched into fists. “What the hell did you think you were doing?”
Archie looked very small and very old as he crept back into his bed. “Somebody tried to kill me, sonny. I have every right to learn how to protect myself,” he said, his voice slowly gaining confidence. “And where was my bodyguard last night, huh? Comes running in here way too late, and with lipstick on his shirt collar. Looks like you’ve got more smeared on you today. Whose body are you guarding, anyway, sonny? You can’t expect me to just sit here, waiting for one of my kids to get lucky while you’re playing slap and tickle with the decoy, damn it!”
There wasn’t much Grady could say to that, so he turned to glare at the good doctor. “You brought in the gun, I suppose?”
Dr. Sandborn was busy searching in his huge black bag, not answering until he pulled out a vial of medicine and two syringes. “Ah, a lovely vitamin shot. Just the ticket.” He looked at Grady. “Yes, it’s my weapon. Bought it just this morning at a pawnshop on Hamilton Street in Allentown. You’d be amazed at how easy it is to buy weapons. There probably should be a law, or something. Here, hold this.”
Grady automatically put out his hand, and the doctor placed one of the capped syringes in it. “It is supposed to be against the law to buy a handgun the same day you come in to buy it,” he pointed out, knowing he could just as easily have been talking to Annie’s Deuce, for all the attention anyone was paying him. Money was money, and money could get you a weapon, from a handgun to a bazooka, without worrying about anything as lame as mandatory waiting periods.
Dr. Sandborn looked at Annie. “You might want to turn your head a moment, little lady. Archie’s ass is a lot of things, but a thing of beauty it ain’t.”
Annie turned her back, tugging on Grady’s arm so that he had to turn with her, something he was about to do anyway. “What do you think?” she asked him, looking up at him as if he was supposed to have some answer for her.
“I think you didn’t hear Archie a minute ago when he called you his decoy, that’s what I think. Otherwise, you’d already be packing your bags and getting the hell out of here.”
“I thought we already settled that part,” Annie shot back. “I’m doing just what you said, sticking to you like glue, and except for some juvenile scare tactics, nobody’s taken a shot at me, remember.”
“Yet. Nobody’s taken a shot at you yet. Give it time, the day is young.”
“I won’t leave him,” Annie said, looking even more mulish. Cute as hell, but mulish, stubborn. He wanted to shake her, kiss her, carry her off somewhere and finish what he’d been trying to start for two damn days. “He needs me.”
“He needs his head examined,” Grady told her. “He needs to stop making new wills every time the moon goes into another phase. He needs to stop working his children like puppets. Pretty soon, if he keeps this up, finding the person who isn’t trying to snuff him will be easier than adding up all the ones who’ve either already taken a shot at him or plan to stir some rat poison into his oatmeal. The man’s begging for it, Annie. Surely you can see that.”
“Don’t call me Surely,” Annie ventured, wincing as she knew her little joke had fallen very flat. “Okay, okay, so he’s not very lovable. We already know that. But you’re here, I’m here. Are you leaving?”
“I’m getting paid to do a job,” Grady reminded her.
“So am I,” she told him. “And I’m no quitter.”
“No, you’re not. You’re a target. I just wish I could figure out why the hell you’re doing this—and don’t give me that line about the money, because I’m not swallowing it. There’s something else, isn’t there? Tell me, Annie, come on, tell me why you’re—”
“You can both turn around now,” Dr. Sandborn said, then took the syringe from Grady and loaded it from the vial. “What’s good for the Peevers is good for the physician, I always say,” he told them as he unbuckled his belt. “You game, son, or should I call Dickens in?”
“You’re going to take a vitamin shot?” Annie asked.
“Yes, yes, a vitamin shot. Isn’t she a cutie?” Sandborn remarked, then bellowed for Dickens, who entered the room, already pulling on a pair of surgical gloves. “Good man, Dickens. And magic with a needle. Time to turn your back again, sweetheart.”
“I don’t believe this,” Annie whispered to Grady as, once more, they turned their backs. “Are those really vitamin shots, do you think?”
“I’m trying to forget everything that’s happened since I came into this room,” Grady said, his words followed closely by Sandborn’s “Ouch—ah! Let the joy juice flow. Good man, good man.”
“Sounds like a good idea,” Annie agreed, shivering as Dickens walked past them, stripping off his gloves. “Archie and his junkie doctor. They ought to be ashamed of themselves.”
“Don’t hang your hopes on that,” Grady said as he turned her back around, pointed to the high, wide bed. Archie was lying there under the covers, a terrifyingly wide smile on his face and a spaced-out look in his eyes. “Guess that answers your questions about what’s in the syringe. My money’s on Demerol.”
Grady staggered forward as the doctor suddenly slapped him on the back, grabbed his shoulder, and gave him a hug. “You taking good care of Archie? He’s a bastard, always has been, but he’s always had reason. Not that I agreed with him about this last trick, bringing in the little sweetheart here to take the heat off him for a while. And it’s not working, is it? Poor old bastard. He’s really scared this time.”
Grady disengaged himself from the man’s grip, which wasn’t easy, for the doctor was smiling now, looking more than a little vague, and he’d been using Grady as much as a prop as anything else. “So you knew about Annie?”
Sandborn blinked, shook his head. “What?”
“Never mind,” Grady said in disgust. “I had this fleeting hope I could appeal to you to exert your influence over Archie, get him to pay off Annie here and let her leave. Stupid thought. If you’ll excuse us?”
He grabbed Annie’s hand and dragged her from the room while she stumbled along, still looking at the good (and stoned) doctor.
“The mattress in your room unfortunately cannot be replaced until sometime tomorrow, Miss Kendall,” Dickens said as they walked by. “If you were to limit your fluid intake after dinner, it might prove beneficial to your, um, problem.”
“My—oh, no! I don’t have a problem. Grady—tell him I don’t have a problem,” Annie had to call back to Dickens, obviously mortified, because Grady was still on the move, still with one thought in mind, that of getting out of Peevers Mansion before he started babbling like the idiot he thought he was.
“You’ve got lots of problems,” he told her as he opened the door to her room and pulled her inside. “Sit down,” he then ordered as he closed and locked the door. “Sit down, shut up, and let me think, okay?”
“I’m not leaving, okay?” she shot straight back at him, although she did sit down in one of the pair of chairs near the window. The bed had been stripped, and only the box spring remained. “Archie isn’t going to shoot me, for heaven’s sake.”
Grady, one hand to his head as he paced, stopped to glare at her for a moment.
“Sorry,” she said, wincing. “I’ll shut up now.”
He grunted, feeling pretty much incapable of speech at the moment, and began pacing some more. Pacing and thinking. Thinking and pacing. He wished he had his putter. He always thought better with his putter in his hands.
He’d guarded diplomats, rock stars, a supermodel whose legs were insured for ten million bucks. He’d been shot at as a cop, had dealt with everyone from robbers to murders to a guy who’d wanted to take a swan dive off the Walt Whitman Bridge.
He was a seasoned veteran, kept a cool head, and possessed a sharp mind.
So why in hell did he feel like he was playing a none-too-bright straight man to a head case like Archie Peevers, a man who had surrounded himself with the most bizarre bunch of suspects this side of a Mel Brooks movie?
There was Dickens, who buttled for a hobby, with grand larceny and art forgery his real vocations.
There were the Peevers sons, A.W. and Junior, almost self-explanatory misfits: one of them whipped past any hope of ever finding his backbone unless he looked in his wife’s closet, and the other one living on his libido and the hope Archie would croak before he ran out of women to marry.
There was Muriel. Quiet, unassuming, loyal Muriel, who called Archie “Daddy,” and played the role of dutiful spinster daughter almost too well.
There was Mitzi. In another life, she’d probably been a black widow spider.
There was Daisy. Yeah, well...
And then there was Jefferson Banning, lawyer. Grady liked Banning, but he didn’t trust him. There were too many opportunities for a lawyer to insert some of his own language into a will, and the more Archie changed that will, the better were the chances that Banning could be found out, fired from his very lucrative job.
There was also Dr. Milton Sandborn, Archie’s friend and personal physician, as well as the man who probably wrote twice as many controlled-substance prescriptions for Archie as the old bastard ever received. Was that all it was? Was Sandborn using Archie in order to keep his own supply of Demerol flowing? It certainly wasn’t because Sandborn liked Archie.
Hell, nobody liked Archie. Archie probably didn’t like Archie.
“Still thinking?” Annie asked. “Because I think my foot’s going to sleep, and I have to go to the bathroom. So maybe you could hurry this up a little, hmmm?”
Annie. He’d forgotten about Annie. Not as a woman, definitely not as a woman, but he had ruled her out as a suspect in this craziness.
That wasn’t professional.
He stopped pacing to look at her. “Who are you, really?”
Annie’s smile faded slowly, even as the light went out in her eyes. “Me? You’re looking at me like that? You think maybe I’m a suspect? I’m a victim here, remember? You saw my room last night.”
Grady held up his hands as if to ward off attack. “I know, I know, but you wouldn’t be the first person to make herself out a victim, just to cover her tracks.”
“What tracks? Archie hired me to impersonate his long-lost granddaughter. I don’t have anything to hide. Oh, okay, so nobody’s supposed to know, right? But you know. You know I’m only the hired help, just like you. So how does that make me a suspect?”
“It doesn’t, sorry,” Grady said, but his radar was still tingling. Off base, malfunctioning, probably—but still tingling. “Maybe if you told me your real name...?”
“Annie is my real name,” she said, jumping up from the bed and putting the palms of both hands against his chest as she backed him toward the door. “Now, if you don’t mind, I think I’d like to brush my teeth. I have this sudden bad taste in my mouth. Good day, Mr. Sullivan!”
The next thing he knew, Grady was standing outside Annie’s bedroom door, and Dickens was standing beside him, grinning. “Well, wasn’t that unfortunate? If you wish, sir, you could just bend over for me. I’d be delighted to kick you.”
“You number listening at keyholes among your hobbies, Dickens?” Grady asked, his jaw tight. Then he took a shot, just to see the man flinch. “Besides painting, that is.”
What had he been thinking? Dickens didn’t flinch. The man probably didn’t know how to flinch. “It is my job to protect Mr. Peevers. I was only checking to make sure you also had his best interests at heart.”
“Meaning?”
The butler pulled himself up to his full height. “Meaning, sir, that you and Miss Kendall were seen—how did Miss Katharine Hepburn and Mister Henry Fonda say it? Oh yes—you and Miss Kendall were seen sucking face in the gazebo. This has led me to question your priorities, and where your first loyalties lie. Sir,” he ended, and Grady felt a small stab of surprise that the man didn’t slap his heels together and salute.
“Oh, let’s not talk about me, Dickens. Let’s talk about you, all right?” Grady counted to three in his head, then pointed to the painting on the wall behind the butler. “For instance, is this one of yours, Dickens, old sport?” he asked. “You’re doing pretty well with the Reubens, but I think you might not have caught the proper brushstroke for a Turner.”
Okay, so Dickens did know how to flinch. “So it was you,” he said coldly. “Snooping. I should have known. None of the Peeverses can find their own backsides, let alone get into a locked room.”
Grady was rather disappointed. He’d thought he’d gotten in and out without disturbing anything, without leaving any sign that he’d been there. “What did you do, Dickens? Tuck one of your hairs between the door and the frame, so you could tell if anybody had been in your room? That was sloppy on my part, not to have checked before I opened the door.”
“Have you told Mr. Peevers?” Dickens asked, avoiding concurring with Grady as to how he knew, although the slight flush in his cheeks told Grady he’d probably guessed right about the hair.
Grady scratched behind his left ear, shaking his head. “Now, that’s a good question. Here’s my dilemma, Dickens. I was hired to find out if somebody in this house wants Archie dead. Clearly, if Archie doesn’t know what you’ve been up to—and he couldn’t, or you’d be in jail now, right?—it really isn’t my job to tell him. Because, you see, with all the fun you’re having robbing everyone blind, the last thing you’d want is to see Archie dead. Plus, there is that small fact that I broke into your rooms, which also probably doesn’t fall inside the parameters of my current job description. Do you understand my dilemma?”
Dickens looked at Grady as if he’d just stuck out his forked tongue and hissed. “How much?”
Grady blinked. “How much what?”
“Money, of course. How much will it take to keep you quiet?”
Now Grady grinned. “Well, that’s nice. Your first impulse was to pay me off, not kill me. And two targets in the house at one time are more than enough anyway. Still, thanks but no thanks. I’m not real big on blackmail, unless...”
He waited for Dickens to ask him, enjoying the man’s misery.
“Unless what?” the butler finally asked, clearly hating that he had to speak, not that he was anywhere close to groveling.
“Unless,” Grady went on, “you do me a little favor.”
Dickens sighed. “Name it.”
Rubbing his hands together, Grady motioned for the butler to follow him down the hall. “Now, here’s the thing,” he said, knowing he had the man’s full attention. “I’ll be needing the fingerprints of everyone in the house. Archie’s, all the little Peeverses’s, Banning’s, Sandborn’s, Daisy’s. Oh, and Miss Kendall’s, too, as long as we’re doing this we might as well be thorough.
Fingerprints on glasses probably would be easiest, and you have to be careful not to mix them up, make sure you’ve got the right prints for the right person. Do you think you can handle that?”
The look on Dickens’s face said without words, “Do ducks swim?” But that’s not what he said. What he said was, “You’ll want mine as well, I presume. I’ll have them all for you as soon as possible. Anything else?”
Grady shook his head. “No, I think that about does it. It’s a pleasure doing business with you, Dickens.”
“Not really, sir,” the butler said, then wheeled on his heels and headed back down the hallway just as Milton Sandborn was weaving his way toward the head of the stairs.
“Toodle-oo, sonny,” the doctor called out, waggling his fingers at Grady. “Archie’s sleeping like a baby and won’t be any trouble for the rest of the day. Oh, and you’re welcome. You’re very, very welcome. In fact,” he said, lurching to a halt and fumbling to open his bag, if you want a little boost, I’d be most happy to oblige. No charge.”
“Maybe another time,” Grady told him, then looked back down the hall toward Annie’s door, wondering if he could take the chance of seeing her again right then without her beaning him with some piece of forged art.
He doubted it. He’d been doing so well, but now Annie believed he didn’t trust her. Women don’t go to bed with men who don’t trust them. And they sure don’t fall in love with men who don’t trust them.
He was pretty much striking out every way he turned. He decided to go see Maisie, make her life miserable with the news she had to go search the net for information on Charles Dickens.
After all, why shouldn’t all the women in his life hate his guts?