Murder Well-Done hf-4 Page 2

  "The camera crew won't be up until tomorrow. And I've listened to that fathead more times than I can count."

  "I'd have to agree with you about the fathead part," Quill said incautiously. "Well, you'll let us know if there's anything we can do to make your stay more pleasant."

  Nora grinned and brushed crumbs from her wool trousers. They were white wool, beautifully tailored. Quill was immediately conscious of her own calf-length wool skirt (which had never really recovered from an encounter with a damp paint palette) and the small hole in the elbow of her sweater.

  "There's one thing you can do to make my stay more worthwhile." Nora cocked her head. With her long nose and high cheekbones she looked like an elegant heron. "I need the guest list for the Santini wedding."

  Quill, with six years innkeeping experience behind her, had long accustomed herself to the necessity for small social lies. She shook her head regretfully. "We don't have it, Nora. I'm sorry. But I'm sure the senator does. Why don't you ask him?"

  "Quill'"

  Quill turned. Dina Muir, full-time Cornell graduate student and part-time receptionist at the Inn, stood at the Lounge entrance waving a sheaf of papers.

  "Mrs. McIntosh just called. There's a new guest list for the wedding, she said. What do you want me to do with this one?"

  "Um," said Quill. "I think the new one is much longer than the old one." Dina hesitated. "But before you take a look, I think you should know that there's some kind of problem in the dining room. With the fund-raiser buffet. Maybe you better take a look."

  Nora swept past Quill like the bird she resembled and dived for the list in Dina's hand. "I'll throw this out for you, kid."

  "Nora," said Quill. "I don't think - "

  "Phooey," said Nora, "I can get it from Al anytime. I just want to see what good old paesanos the father of the bride's invited before I actually cover the damn thing."

  "Paesanos?" said Quill.

  Nora hummed a few bars of the theme from The Godfather.

  "McIntosh," Quill said faintly. "The bride's family's name is McIntosh. That's Scot."

  "You've met Vittorio McIntosh?"

  "Claire's father? Well, no, I - "

  "Surely you've heard about Vittorio McIntosh."

  "Quill!" Dina said. "Honestly, I really, really think you should check out this breakfast thing."

  Quill, who'd been aware of a rising hum from the direction of the dining room, rather like the distant sound of a very large wave offshore, resisted the impulse to clutch her head with both hands. "What's the prob - never mind. Nora, it was... it was... inappropriate," Quill concluded lamely, "that's the word, inappropriate, to grab that list. Even though you have been invited to the wedding. Could you please give it back to me?"

  "Wow!" said Dina. "Hear that?"

  "Shouts!" said Nora, with a pleased air. "Damn. And I don't have a camera with me. Excuse me, guys."

  Quill took a deep breath and followed Nora through the lounge, past the foyer, and into the dining room at what she hoped was a casually unobvious pace: rapid but unworried.

  The dining room was one of Quill's favorite spots at the Inn. In the mornings, sunshine streamed in the floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking Hemlock Gorge, flooding the room with light. In summer, the light was freshly gold; in winter, the snow and icebound Falls were a crystal prism, refracting white sunlight across the deep mauve carpet and the round tables. Quill especially liked the room just before they opened for meals with the deep wine carpet glowing and the glasses and cutlery sparkling. Even now, as a fork caught a shard of sunlight as it flew threw the air and landed in front of (ex) Senator Alphonse Santini, Quill found time to appreciate the beauty of the room.

  He flung his hand in front of his face and ducked. An ominous grumbling filled the ranks of women seated before him. H. O. W.'s membership numbered around forty; forty annoyed women, Quill realized, made quite a formidable audience. She was the one who'd suggested that eight tables of five women each be arranged in a circle around Santini, his two blue-suited factotums, and his fianc‚e Claire McIntosh. Claire, blond hair stiffly teased in a sunburst around her angular face, sat pugnaciously silent.

  "If I've offended any of you ladies, you certainly misunderstood my little joke." Santini raised his hands to either side of his ears in an eerily Nixonian gesture. Like Nixon, he had jowls that were rapidly moving from the incipient to the pendulous. Unlike Nixon, he was short, with a basketball-sized belly.

  "Put a sock in it, AI!" yelled one of the supervisors from Paramount Paints.

  "So we can boot your behind!" shrieked somebody else. Betty Hall, Quill thought, although she wasn't sure.

  She hoped not. Betty was the best pitcher in the Hemlock Women's Softball League. If Betty threw forks, they'd hit the target.

  "You gonna take one percent outta my paycheck to fee-nance your next campaign?" roared a familiar foghorn voice. "Outta that paycheck you just tole us should go to some outta work man?!"

  "Doreen!" said Quill.

  "Finance," Claire McIntosh said in a nasal Long Is- land accent. "It's FI-nance. Not fee-nance. Huh!"

  Doreen rose furiously from her seat, bristling, skinny neck thrust out. "I got just as much right to work as anyone else."

  "Hoo!" said Nora, clearly delighted. "Quill! You don't think he pulled that conservative bullshit about women staying home to take care of their men with this group, do you? Santini Screws Up Again!" She dug a notebook out of her purse and began to scribble.

  "Or maybe you could send me somma that there federal housing money that built your fancy home in Westchester!" Doreen, gray hair frizzed to a righteous height, pitched a spoon after the fork. This piece of silverware struck Santini's right arm and bounced into Claire McIntosh's lap.

  "Eeew," she said. Quill turned to Dina, eyebrows raised. "How did this start, anyhow?"

  "He asked for questions from the floor, or something. Doreen asked about that business of his appearing as a character witness for the Mafia - sorry - alleged Mafia guy," Dina said in an undertone. "Then she went on about how he let his own brother use his name in that deal with the Pentagon, and that Santini should be ashamed of himself, and then Claire McIntosh said Doreen should stay home and take care of her family instead of taking up a paycheck that should go to one of the unemployed male heads of households inflicted on us by our Democratic president, then Senator Santini sort of smirked and said, 'Power to the little woman,' or something like that, then Doreen said her political movement - Doreen's, I mean - "

  "Doreen's into politics?" said Quill. She swallowed twice. Doreen's transient fancies had always involved the entrepreneurial before this. "She's into politics when we've got a senator's wedding here in four days?"

  "Ex-senator," Dina said. "And it's not just Doreen; basically he's insulted all the ladies in H. O. W. WINDBAG!" she roared suddenly.

  "Dina, for heaven's sake!"

  "Greedy guts, AI!" shrieked Miriam Doncaster, Hemlock Falls' blue-eyed blond librarian.

  "Get yer snout outta the public trough, AI!" shouted Marge Schmidt. (Hemlock Hometown Diner. Fine Food! and Fast!)

  "Yaaaahhh, AI!" chorused various members of the Hemlock Organization of Women.

  "Ladies, ladies, ladies." (ex) Senator Santini's rather watery blue eyes gleamed angrily behind thick-lensed spectacles. Quill had met him several times over the course of his stay at the Inn. It was a curious fact that although he sent his shirts out to be laundered every day (valet service courtesy of the Inn at Hemlock Falls) his shirts always looked as though they had been slept in. "If you'll bear with me just a moment, I'd like to point out that not once, I tell you not once, have I been convicted of any of these alleged crimes."

  "They aren't alleged crimes," Dina shouted indignantly. "They ARE crimes."

  "Dina!" Quill whispered. "Hush! Let's give everyone a chance to quiet down."

  "Not once have I even been indicted for a crime..."

  "It's a fine state of affairs," Miriam Doncaster said tartly, "w
hen the best that can be said of a politician is that he hasn't been indicted."

  A chorus of rumbles from the assembled women suggested a fresh outbreak of cutlery casting was imminent.

  "What are you going to do?" Dina hissed. "He'll be pitching stuff back at 'em in a minute. The way he did at that press conference in Queens when he conceded the Senate race."

  "Is John in yet?" Quill asked in a cowardly way.

  "Not till eleven or so. He drove Mrs. McIntosh to the florists in Ithaca to check on the roses for the reception. LOBBYIST!" she screamed suddenly.

  "Senators can't be lobbyists," Quill said, exasperated. "It's illegal."

  "There you are," Dina said mysteriously. Quill cleared her throat and, holding her hands up, wound her way through the tables to the mahogany sideboard where Senator Santini had fled, rather like Robert De Niro at bay in Frankenstein. He was gesturing forcefully at Nora Cahill, his voice an angry mutter.

  "Marge. Adela." She nodded to Marge Schmidt and Adela Henry, president and vice president of the Hem- lock Organization for Women. "How are you guys this morning?"

  "Just fine, till this bozo started in on disintegration of the American family," snorted Marge. Her keen little eyes, buried in an impressive amount of muscular fat, bored in on Santini. "Seemed to think it was wimmin's fault."

  "I'm certain you misunderstood, Mrs.... ah" - Santini ducked forward to glimpse at Marge's name tag - "Schmidt. If any of you ladies took any offense at what was simply meant to be a joke - "

  "It's Miss," Marge said shortly, "and I take offense where offense was meant." She rose to her feet, a truculent bulldozer, and gave Quill a friendly punch in the arm. "Good food, as usual. Tell Meg I like the idea of saffron in the scrambled eggs. Ladies, let's beat it."

  There was a general scraping of chairs. Adela Henry (who up until the disastrous elections of November 8 had been more widely known as Mrs. Mayor) nodded graciously to Quill. "Have you made a decision about joining our organization, Quill?"

  "Innkeepers," Quill said firmly, "should be apolitical."

  "It is not possible to be apolitical in these times," Adela said darkly. "A woman has to stand for something."

  "Right on," said Doreen, veering in their direction. "Power to the oppressed."

  "Amen," said Mrs. Dookie Shuttleworth, the minister's wife.

  Adela elevated her chin to a DeGaullean height. "Those who are not with us, must be against us. We will expect you, Quill, at the next meeting."

  "Can't we just have the Chamber of Commerce back?" Quill said plaintively. "I enjoyed the Chamber meetings. I liked the Chamber meetings. The Chamber meetings accomplished a lot of good. Things like Clean It Up! week, and Hemlock History Days, and the boutique mall where our restaurant..." She trailed off. Each of these events, in one way or another, had ended in some degree of disaster. "Urn," said Quill. She thought a moment. "Did I tell you I checked the Innkeeper's Code of Laws?"

  "You did not. I was not aware there was any such institutionalization of innkeeping behaviors."

  There would be by nightfall if she had a few minutes with her computer and printer. Quill gestured vaguely. "The code bars me from any political affiliation. Sort of like judges, you know." She gave Doreen a meaningful stare. "It bars housekeepers, too."

  Doreen made a noise like "T'uh!"

  "I see." Adela regarded Al Santini, who was shaking hands with as many departing H. O. W. members as would allow it, with disapproval. "We've determined, as you may know, that the fourth Thursday of every month shall be the official H. O. W. meeting date. That's the day after tomorrow, assuming that the conference room here will be free at that time. The Innkeeper's Code cannot possibly bar political meetings of ordinary citizens."

  Quill tried to concentrate. There was something about that date... She shook her head. "I'll have to check the calendar. I think it will be okay, but I'm not altogether certain."

  "I will take that as a yes. Come, Marge, Doreen. We'll retire to Marge's diner. I have a few ideas about the protest that I'd like you to hear."

  "Protest?" asked Quill. "Wait a minute. What protest?"

  "Never you mind," said Doreen. "I'll see ya later."

  "Doreen!" Quill yelled in frustration at their retreating backs. "Are you planning to come into work today, or what?!"

  "Labor troubles?" asked Al Santini in passing. "You should vote Republican."

  "It's not going to affect the wedding, is it?" Claire, tagging behind her betrothed like a dingy caboose, clutched Quill's arm. She demanded in her nasal twang, "Daddy'd be reeely upset if anything affected the wedding."

  Quill opened her mouth to assure Claire of the absolute integrity and quality of the Inn's level of service, but Claire rolled on, "You go ahead, AI. Quill? We need to talk. Where can we talk?"

  Quill surveyed the dining room. It had emptied with dismaying rapidity. Even the nosy Nora had gone - before, Quill hoped, she'd heard any intimations of a political protest to be staged by H. O. W. "Of course, Claire. Let's sit down here."

  "The tables haven't been cleared," Claire said. "I hate it when the tables haven't been cleared. You're sure that your staff is up to this? I mean, I've had my doubts about this little backwater even though Mummy said your sister is absolutely famous. But, I mean, my Go-od, there's nothing here. It's all very well for you. Mummy said everybody who's anybody knows about your painting, although I never heard of you in my art appreciation classes, and I guess you can paint on the moon or anyplace like that if you want to."

  "Claire," said Quill. "Follow me over here. To the window."

  Claire trailed Quill like a quarrelsome duckling. Quill pushed her gently into a chair at table seven, sat down opposite her, and fixed her with a firm - yet friendly - glare. "Now. How can I help you?"

  Somebody, Kathleen the head waitress, most likely, who had been taking evening courses at the nearby Cornell Hotel school, had folded the crisp white napkins into elaborate tulip shapes. Claire picked one up, unfolded it, tried to refold it, and blew her nose in it. "Sorry. Allergies. Look. You've got to think of some way to keep my grandmother out of this wedding."

  "Excuse me?"

  Claire frowned. She was a natural blonde, in her late twenties, with the dry papery skin that affects thin women who spend too much time in the sun. In a few years, she was going to need the services of Nora Cahill's plastic surgeon. "Tutti," she said impatiently, "Daddy's mother. My grandmother."

  Quill tugged at her hair, examined a curl, then said, "You don't want your grandmother at the wedding?"

  "Of course not. She'll spoil everything!"

  "This is just a little case of nerves, Claire. You'll be fine. I can't imagine how your grandmother could spoil your wedding. Is she ill? Are you afraid it might be too much for her? We have an excellent internist here, and a very fine small clinic. If she needs medical help, we'll be happy to make arrangements for a nurse."

  "She doesn't need a nurse. She's crazy," Claire said resentfully.

  "Oh, dear. Is it Alzheimer's? I'm so sorry, Claire."

  "Good grief, no. She's not certifiable. At least a judge wouldn't think so. Stupid jerk."

  Quill wasn't sure if this last referred to her, to the unknown judge, or to Tutti, and she wasn't about to inquire. Her own grandmother had been an elegant, forceful lady whom she had loved very much. "Gosh, Claire. I don't think I can do too much about your guest list. That's really the province of, um... the family. What does your mother say?"

  "You know Mummy. She doesn't inhale without Daddy's okay."

  "And this is your father's mother."

  "My grand - "

  "Yes," said Quill. Her temper - not at its equable best in the past few weeks - suddenly snapped. "I can't imagine how in the world I would prevent her from coming. Even if I wanted to. Which I don't."

  "You could tell her the Inn is full. You could give her room to somebody."

  "No," Quill said flatly. "As I said, we can suggest a good nursing service, if you really find it necessa
ry..."

  Claire sniffed scornfully. "A nurse for Tutti? Tutti can flatten a nurse in two seconds. Maybe less." She blew her nose once more in the napkin and dropped it disdainfully on the table. "All I have to say, if this wedding's wrecked..." She stood up, leaned over Quill, and hissed, "It'll be all your fault!"