Dead at Breakfast Read online

  “Gotta point,” said Shep. “Let’s talk about the night the snake disappeared.”

  “Fine,” said Rexroth. He uncrossed his legs, then crossed them the other way. He looked like an irritated bird, with his chest feathers ruffled.

  “Where did you keep your snake rig?”

  “In the closet.”

  “In a bag, or a case or something?”

  “No, just up on the shelf.”

  “And who knew it was there?”

  Rexroth paused, thinking. “Gabe Gurrell, of course.”

  “Why ‘of course’?”

  “I felt he deserved to know the truth about me. He was offering me a home.”

  “All right. Who else?”

  “Earl Niner.”

  “You are friendly with Mr. Niner?”

  “I wouldn’t say that. We are neighbors,” said Rexroth stiffly. “But I wanted him to know the equipment was there, in case he ever had need of it.”

  “He didn’t have his own?”

  “He just used a hook. Grommet was very tame.”

  Shep looked at Buster, as if to say, you can explain this to me later.

  “Housekeeping knew. They’d come in to clean when I took Clarence for his walk. I mean, I’m sure that they saw the equipment. You’ll have to ask them if they knew what it was for.”

  “All right. Now, do you know when the equipment disappeared from your room?”

  “No. I discovered it was gone when Earl told me the snake had disappeared. I went to look for my equipment, so I could help him to get him back.”

  “Wednesday evening, this was?”

  “Yes. He spoke to me in the hall when I came upstairs after dinner. He was hoping—well I believe he was hoping that I had the snake for some reason, since he knew . . .”

  He stopped.

  “What, Henry?” Shep pushed.

  “Nothing. Earl told me the snake was missing, and I went to my closet and found the equipment gone.”

  “And you hadn’t in fact taken the snake yourself?”

  “Of course I hadn’t!” Rexroth snapped. “I knew you were going to think that! I already told you, I will not handle a serpent ever again. I swore an oath!”

  “But you were willing to use the equipment to help recapture the missing snake.”

  “I was going to lend the equipment, I wasn’t going to . . . oh forget it. Are we done?”

  “Not quite yet. The equipment was gone by Wednesday evening but you don’t know when it disappeared? When was the last time you saw it?”

  Rexroth was now looking sullen. Finally he said, “Last Sunday morning.”

  “Sunday morning. You’re sure?”

  Rexroth nodded.

  “What was special about Sunday morning?”

  “Nothing.”

  Another silence, until Shep said, “Henry, would you rather finish this conversation in Ainsley?”

  Rexroth looked at his watch and muttered, “It’s time for me to walk the dog.”

  “Sunday,” said Shep.

  Finally Rexroth said, “I see it every Sunday. Before I go to church, I get it down, and I say a prayer for my wife and ask her forgiveness. Then I pray for understanding for myself, and put it away again.”

  “Like your hair shirt, or something,” said Buster.

  “If it makes you happy to think so. If I don’t walk my dog there’s going to be a mess to clean up. Is one of you going to do it?”

  “One more question,” Shep said. “In the days before the fire, did you see anyone in your part of the hotel, on your hallway, who didn’t belong there?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well?”

  “Wednesday afternoon. I went up to my room by the back stairs, and ran into Cherry Weaver in the hall outside my room.”

  There might as well have been a giant thud in the room.

  “Did you speak?”

  “I said good afternoon. She seemed nervous, and she said Mrs. Antippas had sent her up with a bowl of scraps for her horrible dog.”

  “Did she have a bowl of scraps in her hand?”

  “No.”

  “So she had delivered the bowl?”

  “Ask her.”

  “But how would she get into the room?”

  “I have no idea! Maybe she cut herself a key.”

  “We will ask her.”

  “Can I go now?”

  “For the moment. But don’t leave town, Henry.”

  Rexroth was up and pulling the sliding door. “If Clarence has messed in my room, I’m going to put it into a bag and leave it in your car.”

  Maggie and Hope passed Shep on his way out as they were driving into the hotel parking lot.

  “You know what bothers me?” Maggie asked.

  “No.”

  “The way everyone uses grieve as a transitive verb. You can mourn a loss, or grieve for a loss, but nowadays—”

  “Oh darling, shut up,” said Hope. “I don’t even remember what ‘transitive’ means. I’m just sorry we had to watch the whole thing on the radio. Look, Buster’s car is here. I wonder what’s going on.” As if on cue, Buster emerged from the side door, carrying the big black evidence bag. They were on him before he got to the end of the path.

  “What are you doing here?”

  “Just checking a witness’s story with Mr. Gurrell,” said Buster.

  “What have you got in the bag?”

  “I bet it’s Glory’s suitcase!”

  “Where did they find it?”

  “Who took it?”

  Buster thought about telling them he couldn’t discuss it, but into his head flashed the image of a torture he’d read about when he was ten in which bushmen bury you in sand all the way up to your neck, then pour honey on your head and watch ants swarm into your hair and eyes and ears and nose until you go straight out of your mind. He decided to give up without a fight. They hustled him into the sunroom, which had become their own personal headquarters. He told them about Earl and the compost pile, and the snake gear and Mr. Rexroth.

  “Show us,” they demanded as one.

  “The snake stuff?”

  “Of course. Come on, open up.”

  He put on gloves and opened the suitcase and they contemplated the bag, the gloves, and the snake tongs. Maggie was about to reach for the tongs, when Buster gave a cry of distress. He fished out the ball of latex gloves he had in his pocket and handed each of them a pair. Both women seemed rather thrilled at this development. Once gloved, Maggie took the tongs and extended the telescoped handle. She tried the weight of it and opened and closed the snake-grabbing jaw with great interest. She offered it to Hope, who made a face, as if she’d accidentally bitten into mold. Ignoring the snake gear, she turned to the rest of the contents of the suitcase.

  “La Perla undies,” she reported, after examining everything.

  “Oo la la,” said Maggie.

  Buster told them what Henry Rexroth had said about seeing Cherry outside his room the day of the fire. They grew instantly serious.

  “Will someone ask Mrs. Antippas whether she really sent Cherry there?”

  “Shep will have someone from LAPD go talk to her. Not today, though.”

  No. The family was otherwise occupied today.

  “Have you talked to housekeeping yet?”

  “No, that’s up to Detective Gordon.”

  “Where is he?”

  “I think he went home.”

  “That’s right, we passed him on his way out,” said Maggie.

  “Let’s go see if Mrs. Eaton is still here,” said Hope.

  The housekeeper’s domain was in the basement, in a big clean room adjacent to the laundry. Mrs. Eaton herself was taking the evening shift tonight, not wanting to pay her girls for working on the holiday. The three of them found her just arranging her cart, piled high with cleaning equipment, boxes of little wrapped soap bars, two-ounce bottles of shampoo, body lotion, and mouthwash, and a carton of foil-wrapped chocolates for the guests’ pillows. Hope ha
d been stockpiling hers for her granddaughters, whom she planned to see on her way home.

  “Could we have a minute, Mrs. Eaton?” Hope asked. She felt they were old friends, since she had waylaid Mrs. Eaton several times to explain with perfect politeness why duvets were an invention of the devil and no sensitive person could sleep under them. A properly made bed had sheets, blankets, a pretty blanket cover (Hope’s were monogrammed) and a bedspread. You could choose or discard any of these layers yourself as conditions demanded. With a one-size-fits-none duvet, how could you adjust for changes in temperature during the night, your own or the thermometer’s? Surely this was a simple proposition.

  The hotel had blankets, Mrs. Eaton conceded. Hope was so glad; she confided with a cheerful laugh that she’d stayed in more than one upscale hostelry that had gotten rid of every blanket in the place in celebration of this new trend in bedding. Really, whose idea was this? It might or might not make sense in Sweden, but what about a summer in, say, Pittsburgh? Or San Diego?

  Mrs. Eaton had let it wash over her, privately thinking that if a hotel threw out its bedding there had probably been bugs involved. It had been years since anyone had asked her for blankets. She had spent more than she should to give her newly married daughter and son-in-law a duvet for Christmas, and they just loved it. She had ordered it on the Internet. Her daughter used her old blankets to line the dog’s bed.

  The Oquossoc blankets were neither new nor fresh, and Mrs. Eaton had had to cycle them through the dryer with sheets of Bounce to get rid of the aroma of ancient closet that clung to them, before she made up Mrs. Babbin’s bed. And then the next night she had to do it again because the new girl had taken Mrs. Babbin’s blankets back to the basement and given her a nice duvet again.

  The other one seemed to be relatively sane, and Mrs. Eaton had admired her nightgown, which had ribbons laced into the hem. It was the other one who spoke to her now.

  “When the upstairs girls go into the rooms to make them up, how do they open the doors?” Maggie asked. Like most hotels, the inn had installed electronic readers instead of old-fashioned locks, and the “keys” were thin plastic wafers the size of a credit card.

  Mrs. Eaton took a card from her pocket and held it up. It looked exactly like the key card Maggie had in her own pocket at the time.

  “I take it that’s a master key? What does it open?”

  “All the bedrooms,” said Mrs. Eaton. “And the linen closets on each of the corridors.”

  “But not the doors to, say, Mr. Gurrell’s office?”

  “That too. Someone’s got to run the vacuum in there.”

  “What doesn’t it open?”

  “The kitchen. The pantries. The food and liquor storerooms. Kitchen staff keep those clean themselves.”

  “I see. And where are the master keys kept?”

  Mrs. Eaton gestured toward a battered metal desk against the wall, where she kept her record books. There was a phone on it and a wheeled desk chair, and several clipboards on which requests from the guests were tracked. “That top drawer locks.”

  Maggie walked over to the desk and tried the drawer. It opened easily, and in the left-hand corner among the tangle of ballpoint pens, rubber bands, and paper clips that always fill such drawers, she saw a neat stack of apparently identical room keys.

  “I don’t keep it locked when I’m the only one here,” said Mrs. Eaton, as if she’d been criticized. “Obviously.”

  “And when you do lock it, where is the key?”

  Mrs. Eaton fished a small metal key out of her pocket. It was on a ring at the end of a chain with a tiny wooden lobster buoy attached. She saw Maggie notice it. “Grandson,” said Mrs. Eaton. “Christmas present.”

  “So you keep the master key cards here, and when your girls clock in, you give them keys, and they give them back when they leave?”

  “That’s about the size of it.”

  “And where do the master keys come from?” Hope asked.

  Mrs. Eaton didn’t seem to follow the question.

  “If you needed more master keys, what would you do?”

  “Ask Mr. Gurrell and he’d make them, or have the front desk make them.”

  “So,” said Buster, stating the obvious, “anyone who worked the front desk could have access to any guest room.”

  “That’s about the size of it,” Mrs. Eaton repeated. There was a cold note of disgust under the flat sentence, and Maggie thought again of how many people in this hotel feared they were going to lose their livelihoods because of Cherry Weaver.

  They thanked her for her time. As they were at the door, Maggie asked, “Do you keep this door locked, Mrs. Eaton?”

  “Of course,” said Mrs. Eaton.

  “Just when you leave for the day, or whenever you leave the room?”

  “When I leave for the day, or when I’m on duty alone and have to go upstairs. When we’re busy, the girls are in and out of here all day, but someone in charge is always here to answer the phone.”

  Maggie and Hope had persuaded Buster to stay at the hotel for dinner. He had called Brianna to see if she was home, but Brianna was having supper with Beryl Weaver, which he very much did not wish to join, so he accepted his mother’s invitation. They were sitting in the sunroom, and Hope and Maggie had returned to the jigsaw puzzle. They had the boat and the fools in it filled in, but the background sea and sky were going slowly.

  “What about a cocktail?” Hope asked.

  Buster jumped to his feet and said, “I’ll go. What’ll you have?”

  Maggie had just put together two pink pieces of the banner that floated from the boat’s mast, and was intently scanning what looked like acres of little bits, looking for other shards of the same color. She looked up at Hope, and was just in time to see over Hope’s shoulder Gabe Gurrell drive out of the parking lot with Chef Sarah in the passenger seat.

  “Cook’s night out,” she said. “Don’t order anything complicated for dinner.”

  “I was thinking of thin gruel anyway,” Hope said. “That was a big lunch.”

  “It was. I’ll tell you what I was thinking. Isn’t that beast of Mr. Rexroth’s a bloodhound? A tracking dog?”

  “You know, I think it is,” said Hope.

  “Yes, it is,” said Buster, still hoping he was on the way to the bar to order drinks for them. He considered himself officially off duty, as of about four hours ago.

  “I was wondering if the dog could tell us anything about who took the snake gear. He was probably in the room at the time.”

  Buster sat back down. He wanted to dismiss this suggestion as something a professional would disdain, but frankly he wondered why he hadn’t thought of it.

  Hope asked, “Would there be any harm in trying?”

  “He might lead us straight to Cherry’s locker,” said Maggie.

  “Oh. Yes. I don’t suppose we can suppress it if we don’t like what happens?”

  “No,” said Maggie. “But nobody listens to us anyway.”

  “That’s true,” said Hope. “Buster?”

  Buster wanted to say “I’d like a quart of Budweiser, please” but instead agreed that it was worth a try. Big slobbery Clarence was practically the definition of an underdog, and Buster was always in favor of surprising people who underestimate underdogs. They might solve this thing themselves, right now, while the Great Detective was off having his dinner. He went out to his car to retrieve the evidence bag from where it was locked in the trunk.

  Mr. Rexroth was in the library. He looked smaller than a week ago, Maggie thought, as she paused in the doorway. He looked up, startled, as they came in, as if they were a herd of bison thundering into his sanctuary. Maggie apologized, and explained what they wanted.

  “Clarence is not really a working dog,” he objected. “I don’t know if he’s had any training. He’s not used to strangers.”

  “Do you know that he hasn’t?” Maggie had interrupted because she could see that he would keep piling on excuses out of sheer a
nxiety.

  “No, I don’t, but . . .”

  “Every dog needs a job,” said Hope. “They like to be useful. I think he’d enjoy the opportunity.”

  “Let’s go see,” said Maggie. And Mr. Rexroth, apparently unable to think his way around this fast enough to stop it, stood to be swept along in their wake, and Buster knew exactly how he felt.

  Clarence was glad to see them. He’d been asleep on the bed, which caused Mr. Rexroth to act cross and make excuses, but Hope and Maggie fussed over the dog and told him what a brilliant handsome boy he was. Clarence faithlessly gave them his full and slobbery attention. Mr. Rexroth crossed the room and sat down on the oak chair at the tiny desk where he usually did his writing.

  “Now Clarence,” said Hope, “we have a job for you. Get down now, and sit.” Before the men could tell her this was a ridiculous way to talk to an animal, Clarence scrambled off the bed and sat at her feet, looking up at her, as if he’d been waiting for someone to recognize his gifts for years.

  “Buster,” said Hope, “give us the snake bag.”

  Buster passed out gloves again, then put the suitcase on the bed, opened it, and handed the snake bag out to his mother. Hope put it to Clarence, who was instantly passionately interested.

  “Here now. Good boy. That’s right, sniff,” she said as Clarence worked the thing over with his large wet nose. “Now Clarence,” said Hope reasonably, “we need to know who came in here and took it. Understand?” She withdrew the bag from the dog and said, “Clarence, work.”

  “Mom, that’s not how the handlers do it,” said Buster.

  But Clarence wasn’t standing on ceremony. He went straight to Mr. Rexroth and sat down, staring at him.

  “Good boy!” said Hope. “Clever boy! Now come here. Here, Clarence.”

  Clarence abandoned Mr. Rexroth and went back to sit at Hope’s feet again with a happy expression that said “What’s next, boss?”

  “Now. That was very very smart of you, but not what we needed. Now smell this again.”

  She presented the bag again, moving it so he’d smell the handle as well, then gave him the tongs. Clarence studied them assiduously with his large mobile snout.