Diplomatic corpse, p.1
Diplomatic Corpse, page 1
Table of Contents
COPYRIGHT INFORMATION
PART ONE
CHAPTER 1
CHAPTER 2
CHAPTER 3
PART TWO
CHAPTER 4
CHAPTER 5
PART THREE
CHAPTER 6
CHAPTER 7
PART FOUR
CHAPTER 8
CHAPTER 9
COPYRIGHT INFORMATION
Copyright © 1951 by Phoebe Atwood Taylor.
Published by Wildside Press LLC.
wildsidepress.com | bcmystery.com
PART ONE
Dress Rehearsal for Murder
CHAPTER 1
If you summed up the whole silly situation in a nutshell, John Orpington decided, he was stripped and living in a pea-green folder. Stripped of his last cent, stripped of all his clothes except the shorts and shirt he stood in, and living in a crazy eight-page folder named Picturesque Quanomet—the FRIENDLY Cape Cod Town.
And he’d walked into it all by himself. Nobody shoved him.
“Picturesque Quanomet, the friendly octopus,” he said aloud with irony as he paused on the sweltering rut lane to wipe the perspiration from his glasses. “Picturesque Quanomet, I didn’t know it was loaded. Yah!”
In a sudden gesture of irritation, he jerked the pea-green folder from his pocket and pitched it toward the roadside grove of scrub pines. But the flimsy pamphlet only flapped two feet away to dangle on a bayberry bush, with the picture of View Number One, his immediate objective, face up and leering at him.
It certainly looked innocent enough, Orpington thought resentfully. When that folder was thrust into his hand, last night as he stepped off the bus on Main Street, he’d accepted it as a pleasant gesture. He’d even felt flattered by the accompanying greeting from Quanomet’s one-woman Welcoming Committee, a fragile-looking, white-haired, definitely lavender-and-old-lace type. No town in his previous experience ever bothered to welcome chance visitors with what amounted to a Whistler’s Mother character!
He was touched when she insisted on reading him the folder’s subtitles. “Quanomet—Where Old-Time Hospitality Abounds.”
“Quanomet—Where Home Folks Take a REAL Interest in You!” He was moved to the core by her dismayed tongue-cluckings on learning that he had no advance room reservation. And he’d poured forth heartfelt gratitude when she generously proffered her best spare room, the last available bed in town.
Congratulating himself on his good luck, rejoicing in the cool salty air after New York’s unmitigated August heat, he’d strolled down the moonlit street with Whistler’s Mother pattering along beside him. He’d grinned and said “With pleasure,” when she suggested he call her Aunt Thamozene instead of Mrs. Sturdy. He’d nodded in complete agreement at her assurance that he’d enjoy his Quanomet vacation.
But his genial glow began to wane a few minutes later when they arrived at the square, white-frame Sturdy home on Church Street. For the first time it dawned on him that Aunt Thamozene’s sole aim in life was to prove that every word of the pea-green publicity folder was true, if not a downright understatement. Within half an hour, he had a sense of being swamped by Picturesque Quanomet, and folksy interest, and old-time hospitality.
Over his vain protests, she personally unpacked his suitcase, viewing with mounting horror each successive garment she unearthed. Before he could grasp her intention, his entire wardrobe had been whisked away to be darned or mended or washed or sent to the cleaner’s. His wallet was whipped into the sanctuary of Grandfather Sturdy’s safe, and the iron door banged shut. Somehow, as he’d followed her around the house in bewilderment, she’d managed to extract from him a variety of pertinent data, like his college, his war record, his mother’s maiden name, and his age. He looked lots older than twenty-eight, she announced, but charitably ascribed his tired appearance to the bus trip and his bachelorhood. Then she’d made him drink a nice glass of hot milk, and returned to tuck him into Captain Obed Sturdy’s canopied bed after he’d fled to it in desperation.
At seven this morning he’d been roused and forced to, face a breakfast of oatmeal, fishcakes, fried potatoes, waffles and hot doughnuts. When he refused pie, Aunt Thamozene had commented tartly on his queasy appetite. A couple of weeks of good home care, she said in ominous tones, and she’d have him eating more like a man and less like a sick canary.
Whereupon she’d bundled him off to see View Number One, referred to in the pea-green folder as a “First Must” for every new Quanomet visitor. To prevent his confusing it with other and lesser views, she pointed out the illustration and kindly read him the descriptive paragraph underneath.
“Just drink in that scene for a few hours,” she added briskly as she held open the screen door for him. “It’ll rest you, like the folder says. And be home at noon sharp for dinner.”
Of course, he’d protested. At least, he told himself defensively, he’d tried to. On three triumphant occasions he’d got as far as “See here, Aunt Thamo—” before she interrupted him with more facts and anecdotes of Old Historic Quanomet.
Reaching gingerly across a patch of poison ivy, Orpington removed the folder from the bayberry bush and replaced it in his pocket. He might as well face this idiotic situation with calm and detachment. Short of knocking out Aunt Thamozene and blowing up Grandfather Sturdy’s iron safe, there was no easy way of retrieving his wallet and his clothes. Until he recovered them, he was stuck.
“Quanomet Gives You Sports and Games.” He quoted the first page from memory as he trudged up the lane. “A Veritable Hiker’s Paradise. Terrific Scenic Views and Vistas. This Vacation Will Be the Jolliest Ever! Fun. Fun! FUN!”
When he rounded the curve at the top of the hill ahead, he stopped short and whistled softly.
View Number One wasn’t bad at all! Even though the panorama of Quanomet Bay had been so often reproduced in photographs and paintings that little element of novelty or surprise remained, View Number One was actually something to look at. Below and in front of him stretched the vivid blue water of the harbor, with marshmallow clouds billowing against the pale, postcard-blue sky. Everything duly noted in the folder was present, too—the glistening sand dunes, the white strips of beach, the scallop boats anchored of the old whaling wharf, the weatherbeaten fish houses, the cluster of tiny sailboats racing out against the horizon.
There was even an artist at hand, Orpington discovered with considerable amusement as he concluded his survey and glanced around him. Not just an ordinary fellow with a paintbrush, either, but a bearded artist wearing yellow slacks and a pink shirt, daubing paint with a palette knife at what would probably turn out to be a somewhat frenzied version of View One.
“Hired by the Board of Trade?” he said conversationally.
The artist never turned his head.
“Because the Quanomet folder,” Orpington raised his voice, “says there’s rarely a time when some artist isn’t painting this spectacular view from this specific vantage point. So I wondered if they’d hired you to provide general atmosphere and local color.”
The artist continued both to ignore him and to slap away at his canvas as if he had some deep-rooted grudge against it.
Orpington grinned, and sauntered over toward the easel with the intention of kibitzing until he achieved some sort of response. He hardly expected to find any conventional rendering of the scene. Neither did he expect that his first sight of the canvas would stop him, as it did, cold in his tracks.
For the fellow wasn’t working on another interpretation of View One. He was painting what appeared to be a swarm of infuriated ants running excitedly over a splotch of spilled molasses. He seemed, furthermore, to be painting something he actually saw, because he paused every few seconds to peer anxiously down the hill.
Following the line of his intent gaze, Orpington located what he’d previously overlooked—a baseball park in the meadow below, and a throng of people milling around it.
“I think,” he said judicially, after watching a moment, “you’ve got something here. That’s exactly what they do look like, ants on molasses. And I admire your conception of the sun as an enlarged fried egg. Truly a terrific vista!”
Without waiting for an answer, he strolled on along the lane. Part way down the hill, he stifled an impulse to return and inform Pink Shirt that from a lower angle the crowd ceased being ants and looked more like a small, dispossessed Balkan nation.
Down on the meadow, Orpington leaned against the boundary railing of the ball park and stared at the scene before him, fully conscious of the fact that his eyes were popping and his mouth gaping idiotically.
At least, he told himself, he clearly was no longer living in the pea-green folder.
At this point he had departed from Picturesque Quanomet and was out of the world entirely.
It wasn’t the fault of his glasses. He’d wiped them again, put them back on, and found he was seeing the same thing. It wasn’t a touch of sun. This was no mirage.
Slowly, because he was almost afraid to hurry, he hoisted himself up on the rail and proceeded to devote himself to a close, incredulous appraisal.
He began negatively, since it seemed easier to figure out what it couldn’t be. It wasn’t a circus, although there were a couple of circuslike tents in center field. Nor a carnival, although someone was selling balloons over by first base. Nor the folder’s Quanomet Indians gathering for a reunion—or possibly a massacre—although there were half a dozen assorted braves in war paint sitting on a tier of
“Okay,” Orpington said. “Okay. Now tackle a positive approach. What the hell is it?”
It was a quartet of women in absurdly bustled skirts and perky Victorian bonnets—and strapless bras. It was a WAC in uniform, with two rows of campaign ribbons—and a pair of oars over her shoulder. A man in antsy-pants and a stovepipe hat. Three girls in hoopskirted crinolines and lace mitts—bearing among them an orange-striped beach umbrella and an assortment of collapsed camp chairs.
It was an elderly man wholly Pilgrim from his leather belt to his brown knee breeches and buckled shoes, but wearing a Hawaiian shirt stenciled with hula girls. It was a trio of Revolutionary War redcoats, one of them pushing a wheeled golf-club cart filled with muskets. It was George Washington, bewigged and tricorned, carrying a clam hoe. And General Grant with a bashed-in forage cap and a brass-buttoned blue frock coat—and gray flannel Bermuda shorts. It was a Red Cross nurse of World War One vintage. A pantalooned and helmeted fireman toting a bass drum. A black-garbed, beaver-hatted preacher with a long white beard in his hand.
And it was children. Children of all ages and all sizes, dressed and undressed in every conceivable costume. It was sunburned children, tanned children, parboiled-looking children. Screaming children, laughing children, sulky children, and every last one of them in constant and perpetual motion.
Just about all this terrific vista lacked, Orpington decided, was a Pied Piper.
Suddenly, and somewhat to his own critical dismay, he found his attention focusing once again on a plump, middle-aged matron dressed in a trailing pink lace gown with leg-of-mutton sleeves, and a picture hat as wide as a cartwheel. He’d noticed her several times before as the center of a huddle near third base, but now she had abruptly detached herself from the group and was scurrying toward the crowded parking space to his left.
There was almost a sense of flight in her hasty retreat, Orpington thought reflectively, and wondered what there was about this Madame-President-of-the-Thursday-Club character which should rouse such interest on his part. He didn’t know her, after all. He didn’t know anyone in Quanomet except Aunt Thamozene. And to the best of his recollection, the trailing lace dress and the feathery picture hat didn’t conjure up any tender or nostalgic memories.
Why should he be completely unable to take his eyes off this plump matron who was trying so unsuccessfully to spring from the scene in high-heeled pink satin slippers?
“Mrs. Henning! Mrs. Henning!”
After a quick, nervous glance over her shoulder at the sound of what was obviously her own name being called out, the Pink Lady put on a very creditable last-lap spurt.
“Mrs. Henning!”
Another woman, a very much younger woman, emerged from the third-base huddle and headed in a beeline for the Pink Lady. To judge from the beaded moccasins on her feet, the tall feather sticking bolt upright in her brown hair, and the strings of Woolworth glass beads draped around her thin neck, she had probably hoped to achieve the general effect of an Indian Maiden. Without those overt clews, Orpington decided he would unhesitatingly have described her costume as something unfortunately compiled in haste from a couple of old fringed burlap bags.
What with her brandishing a scroll of paper in her right hand, and hanging onto the nose bridge of her shell-rimmed glasses with her left hand, her pursuit wasn’t too graceful or too efficient. What she lacked in speed, however, she made up for in sheer tone volume and persistency.
At the sixth piercingly shrill repetition of her name, Mrs. Henning gave up, and Orpington heard her unhappy sigh as she paused a few feet away from his perch on the railing. Yet the smile which she summoned up to greet Indian Suit was the proper and traditional clubwoman smile that could be seen a thousand times a day in the newspapers. Probably any senator would have been warmed and mollified by that smile, and responded in kind.
Indian Suit wasn’t, and didn’t.
“Look, Mrs. Henning!” Completely out of breath and curiously tense, she continued to brandish the scroll. One of the braids coiled around her ears had fallen down, and her head-feather was unattractively askew. “Mrs. Henning, look here!”
“Yes, Muriel, dear?”
It was a most conciliatory coo, but dear Muriel wasn’t being placated.
“Mrs. Henning, if you want posterity to think that the Reverend Phineas Winter was blond, all right! But my records and all the other records prove definitely and beyond any peradventure of a doubt that he was not—”
A trumpet flourishing in a badly executed fanfare and a ruffle of assorted and off-beat drums drowned out the rest of the conversation. When the tumult subsided, dear Muriel had a firm grasp on Mrs. Henning’s leg-of-mutton sleeve, and was propelling her back toward third base.
Then a slim girl in blue shorts and a blue denim shirt strolled into view from behind the grandstand, and at the sight of her, John Orpington teetered on the railing. By the time she passed in front of him, the collar of his shirt had been jerked neatly into place, and he was smoking a cigarette with great calm.
“No guards,” he said, in a voice pitched just loud enough for her to hear.
It was Kay Pouter, all right. She swung around and recognized him immediately.
On the whole, it wasn’t as bad a moment as he’d anticipated. She said quickly it had been good of him to write when Bob was killed. “And how are you, Buff?”
He said quickly that he’d meant to write her again only it had been a busy war, and how was she? “And the baby?”
“The baby’s seven,” Kay said, “and will probably come as something of a shock to you. He’s temporarily mislaid in this shuffle, and I’m hunting him—he has a strong tendency to sample box lunches if he knows they’re in the car. Whatever did you mean, no guards?”
“This can’t be the annual outing of a madhouse,” he said. “No guards. No strait jackets. Kay, was is it? What goes on here?”
Before she could speak, a small, black-haired boy in dungarees and red sneakers came rushing up to her.
“Mother, can I have a portable Geiger counter for my birthday? Why not?”
“Because”—her composure didn’t appear to be shaken in the least by the request—“you can’t. Bobby, this is Mr. Orpington—no, this is the time you don’t shake hands, you’re much too greasy. Mr. Orpington was a friend of your father’s. They did their flight training together.”
“How do you do. I know,” Bobby said. “I know him. He’s in the wedding picture. You said he was best man. But Mother, if someone finds a uranium deposit around Quanomet, I’m going to look dumb! And Miss Babcock wants to know where Gramp is, and Auntie Maude says what did you do with that flintlock?”
“I gave it to her half an hour ago, tell her,” Kay said. “And I couldn’t guess where your grandfather is. When I last saw him, he was teaching what he claimed was a sea chantey to those teenage Benson girls. Go find your group, they were yelling for you.”
“Mother, can I have a Popsicle first? A raspberry Popsicle? Why not?”
“Because from the evidence smeared around your mouth, you’ve already had at least three Popsicles—”
“Only two!”
“Then,” Kay said, “you don’t need any more for a while. Hop along to your group.” She watched him as he raced away, and then turned to Orpington. “What’re you doing here, Buff?”
He didn’t bother with any of the elaborate explanations he’d concocted during the bitterness of that long train and bus trip. The truth came out quite naturally. “Pettingill, Watrous and Company fired me yesterday morning because I’d irked their favorite pet-food account—I went into advertising when I came back, you know. So I decided to take a vacation, and told the man at the window to pick a town, any town. The ticket said Quanomet—Kay, what is this?”
“This? Oh, you mean all this mess. This is the Quanomet Associates.”
“Associates what?” He offered her a cigarette and she perched on the rail beside him.
“Well, originally there was the Quanomet Neighborhood Association, but a great schism divided it into the Quanomet Summer Residents Club and the Quanomet All-Year-Rounders—sounds raffish, doesn’t it? I’ve never been able to find out why the split occurred. Maybe it had something to do with Roosevelt’s trying to pack the Supreme Court, maybe it was just someone’s ordering banana instead of peach ice cream for refreshments. Anyway, those two limbs withered and died, and out of the dust and ashes came the Quanomet Associates. We’re just one big happy family of summer people and natives, currently bound together by a vicious interest in zoning, and no more overnight cabins, and where is the new, new state highway going?”
