Dino approached. “Is that the noise you heard?”
“Yes,” Stone said sheepishly.
“The ice machine, making ice?”
Stone sighed. “Yes. I wonder why I’ve never heard it before.”
“I think you’re a little too tightly wound,” Dino said. “Sit down and drink that bourbon.”
Stone followed orders.
Chapter 24
STONE WENT BACK to bed and tried to retrieve the dream with Arrington, but it wouldn’t come back. He overslept, not waking until after ten, and he felt fuzzy around the edges. He wasn’t accustomed to drinking in the middle of the night.
He sat up in bed and called Arrington’s home in Virginia. A maid answered.
“She’s not here, Mr. Barrington. She’s in New York, she and Peter. You can reach her at the Carlyle.”
“Thank you,” Stone said. He called the Carlyle and asked for Mrs. Calder.
“Hello?” she said, sounding chipper and cheerful.
“It’s Stone.”
“Oh, hi. I was about to call you. I’m in New York.”
“I know; I just called you.”
“Oh, that’s right. Sorry. You want to have dinner tonight?”
“I’d love to, but it’s a plane ride.”
“What?”
“I’m in Maine.”
“Why? What are you doing in Maine?”
“I have a new house on an island called Islesboro. Why don’t you summon up the Centurion jet, and you and Peter come up here for a few days?” As the widow of Centurion Studios’ largest stockholder, she had access to their jet.
She was silent for a moment. “All right, but it will have to be tomorrow, maybe the next day. I have some shopping to do here.”
“Tell the flight department at Centurion that you’ll be landing at Rockland. I’ll meet you there in my airplane. It’s only another ten minutes of flying, but the strip on the island is too short for a jet.”
“All right. What will I need in the way of clothes?”
“Nothing you couldn’t find at L.L. Bean.”
“I’ve got to run; I have a hair appointment, but I’ll call you later and give you an ETA.”
He gave her the number and hung up, feeling wonderful. He bounded out of bed, shaved, showered and began getting dressed when the phone rang. “Hello?”
“It’s Ed Rawls. I need to see you at Don Brown’s house right now.”
“Okay. Where’s the house?”
Rawls gave him directions.
“What’s going on?”
“I’ll tell you when you get here.”
Stone finished dressing and went downstairs. Dino was having breakfast in the kitchen, and Stone grabbed a piece of his toast. “Come on. We have to be somewhere.”
“Where?”
“Not far.”
It was a beautiful day, and they took the little MG, top down.
“Arrington and Peter are coming up tomorrow or the next day,” Stone said.
“You’re horny, huh?”
“Oh, shut up.”
They drove through some woods and stopped at the end of a short, paved driveway. There were other cars parked there.
The house was a shingled Cape Cod with a porch. The front door was opened by an obviously upset woman wearing an apron. Rawls emerged from another room and waved them in. Harley Davis and Mack Morris were seated in the living room, while Jimmy Hotchkiss talked on the phone. Stone introduced Dino to everybody, then followed Rawls into a bedroom.
“Uh, oh,” Dino said.
Don Brown, The Old Fart who used the electric scooter, was sitting up in bed, a bullet hole in his right temple and a much larger hole in his left. A Colt.45 lay on the bed, and brains and blood were scattered around the bedspread.
“We’ve got another one,” Rawls said.
“How long have you been here?” Stone asked.
“Less than half an hour. I’ve mostly been on the phone calling people.”
“Has somebody called the state police?”
“Jimmy’s on the phone with them now.”
“Let’s get out of this room,” Stone said. “Have you touched anything?”
Rawls shook his head. “I know better than that.”
They went back into the living room and took seats, while the woman served them coffee.
“This is Hilda,” Rawls said. “She found him when she came to clean the house.”
“What time do you normally get here, Hilda?” Stone said.
“Usually, at nine,” the woman replied. “But it was ten, today; I had to do Mr. Brown’s grocery shopping. I always do that for him.” She went back to the kitchen.
“Dino,” Stone said, “you ask the questions.”
Dino nodded. “Gentlemen, did any of you know Mr. Brown to be depressed?”
“This wasn’t suicide,” Harley Davis replied.
“Please, just answer the question.”
“Don wasn’t depressed,” Mack Morris said. “He was pissed off.”
“About what?” Dino asked.
“About being in that fucking wheelchair thing. He didn’t like it at all; he was permanently pissed off about it.”
“Did he ever talk about suicide?”
All three men shook their heads. “He wasn’t the type,” Rawls said.
“Is the gun his?” Dino asked.
“Probably; he had a.45,” Rawls said. “If the cops don’t find another one, then it’s his.”
Jimmy hung up the phone. “The state boys will be on the next ferry,” he said, looking at his watch. “They should be here in an hour or so.”
“Gentlemen,” Dino said, “I’d appreciate it if you’d all go sit on the porch until the cops get here. Stone and I will take a look around the house.”
The four men went outside, and Dino went into the kitchen, followed by Stone.
“Hilda,” Dino said, “when you got here this morning, did you find anything unusual about the state of the house?”
“Well, Mr. Brown was dead in his bed,” she said.
Dino nodded. “Yes, ma’am. Anything else?”
“Well, the vacuum cleaner is normally in the broom closet, but it was sitting in the kitchen, by the back door, there.” She pointed. “And there wasn’t no bag inside it.”
Chapter 25
STONE AND DINO WENT and stood in the bedroom door, so as not to disturb anything further by entering the room.
“He’s sitting up in bed,” Stone said, “so whoever shot him woke him up first.”
“Unless he wasn’t asleep when the guy arrived,” Dino said.
“The TV isn’t on, and there’s no book present, so he wasn’t sitting up in bed reading. Nobody just sits in bed, doing nothin'.“
“Maybe you’re right. But why would the guy wake him up?”
Stone shrugged. “Maybe he had something to say to him before he shot him.”
“Like what?”
“Like, 'Here’s one from your pal, Joe,' or whoever ordered the hit.”
“You should write novels.”
“Short stories, maybe. There’s always a little story that goes with a murder. This wasn’t the burglary story, was it?”
“Nothing seems disturbed.”
“Let’s take a look outside,” Stone said.
They walked through the kitchen, where Hilda was sitting, disconsolately, drinking coffee, and out the back door. The sea was, perhaps, thirty paces away, and they avoided walking on the path, looking for footprints.
“Got a good one here,” Dino said, pointing.
“Deck shoe,” Stone said. “See the little ridges? That narrows the suspect list to everybody on the island and everybody on the coast of Maine.”
“Big deck shoe,” Dino said. “Size eleven or twelve. There are other partials here, going in both directions, but just this one good one.”
“That’s more than the cops found at Dick’s house,” Stone said. “I’d consider that a break.” He walked down to the rocky beach and pointed. “Some scrapes on the stones here; our man arrived by boat and pulled it ashore, but only a foot or two.”