The Nantucket Diet Murders (30 page)

Briefly she winced as he probed the base of her index finger. “A little arthritic condition there,” he told her
gravely. “Possibly you write a great deal? We shall take this into account.”

The otherwise agreeable hand-examination ended, almost to her regret, and Tony, with slow courtesy., returned her extended hands to the arms of her chair.

With the toe of a well-made English boot, he now pushed a low footstool into place at her feet. “And now the feet,” he said quietly. “There is no need to undress—only to remove the heavy shoes.”

In the warmth of the small room it was good to be free of her walking shoes and the thick woolen knee socks. Mrs. Potter reminded herself comfortably that she was encased in nylon from toe tip to waist, and over that by a pair of well-secured woolen trousers.

Tony’s fingers gently probed and moved each toe within the nylon-stockinged foot, moved heel and ankle, stroked each area of sole and instep. His touch seemed increasingly more insistent, more deeply pleasurable.

Again to her regret, the manipulation of her feet was over and Tony was handing her woolen socks and walking shoes, again with the same grave courtesy. She put them back on, almost reluctantly.

“Now it is only the hair of the head,” he said. “Please to remain seated as you are.” As he spoke, he circled candle-stands and footstools to a position behind her wing chair. Gently, carefully, he removed the white wool beret.

The touch was impersonal, in no way intrusive, and yet again infinitely agreeable. Tony’s fingers lifted the hair gently from the nape of her neck and ran lightly beneath the over-tight, now over-warm layers of scarf and sweaters at the base of her throat.

Mrs. Potter could not restrain a tiny sigh of pleasure as she loosened the scarf. Here, she thought, was a man who could really know what you meant when you asked would he please scratch your back. She moved her shoulders slightly, in frank enjoyment, against the crewel-worked back of her
chair, as Tony’s fingers explored lightly in a circle about the base of her throat.

She closed her eyes. From a height above her head and behind her, she heard (later, she was not sure she had heard—or, to her private, half-embarrassed amusement, if she had imagined—words that might have come from a Vicki Sands novel), “Naughty Eugenie. We shall have to punish you a little, I think, before we make you beautiful.”

There was a brisk rap at the sitting room door.

“Yes?” Tony asked, his fingers gently following the shape of Mrs. Potter’s skull.

“Just me” was the response from the hallway as Peter Benson, smiling, half apologetic, pushed open the door. “Thought you’d like to know Carpenter’s downstairs, Tony, old boy, and Latham’s on the house phone. Says your line must be off the hook—she’s been trying to get you.”

Mrs. Potter stretched easily in the wing chair as Tony excused himself, then started upright in total disbelief. She had come here to find reasons for her mistrust of Tony Ferencz. She had remained to find herself beginning to accept him as what Gussie and the others thought him to be—an authority skilled in diagnosis and therapy and in matters that would eventually relate to her diet, her health, perhaps to her looking younger and living longer.

She shook herself. Nobody looks better and lives longer because they enjoy having their hands and feet massaged, she told herself severely, or because it feels good to have the back of the neck stroked so lightly. And if Tony has diet secrets, other than eating fresh foods in variety, other than eating less and drinking less, which we all know anyway, I haven’t yet discovered what they are.

However, Larry had spoken of vitamin injections, and others had hinted at special treatments. This had to be Tony’s secret—vitamins, or some other kind of chemical or hormonal medication. And Peter, bless him, had given her time to break Tony’s almost hypnotic spell, time to look for some real evidence. He had been telling her, as clearly as he could, that he no longer trusted Tony.

Quickly she crossed the room and lowered the front of the old Winthrop desk. There, in the multiple pigeonholes across its back, were ten—perhaps twenty—syringes of various sizes, filed in neat order. In the center drawer her hasty fingers found sterile packets of hypodermic needles. She remembered the secret, false-bottom drawer that every such desk has. In it was a box of ampoules labeled in a language she was unable to recognize.

The door to the room closed again briskly before she was able to restore the hidden drawer.

“So,” Tony Ferencz was saying, “at last you think you have found bad things to use against me with your beloved Gussie?”

With courage born of knowing that Peter Benson was below and within call, Mrs. Potter managed to regain her beret, to retrieve her coat, and to leave with what she later assured herself was dignity, although dignity in haste. She nearly tripped over the sailboat stair tread as she reached the bottom of the narrow stairway and rushed out into the slightly salty breeze of the small winding street.

“March is supposed to be trumpery season around here, not January,” Gussie said as she looked up from reading Mrs. Potter’s yellow-pad notes, from which only the mention of Lolly Latham had been removed. Her voice was indignant.

Local folklore held that Nantucketers, imprisoned on the island through a long winter of limited company and ingrown interests, would enliven the drab days before spring by inventing gossip about their neighbors. “Trumpery season” had been its designation as far back as anyone Mrs. Potter knew could remember.

“I didn’t say any of those things about Tony were
true,”
Mrs. Potter defended herself, “and they’re only for my private speculation. I don’t
publish
them, and I just decided to let you see them, since I wanted you to know what I’ve been worrying about.”

“They’re still hateful,” Gussie said. “Honestly, Genia, you’re going too far. And you’ll feel terrible when I tell you this—Tony called just before you got back. He said you’d had a delightful first consultation and he’s already planning his program for you. I don’t know
what
he thought when you rushed off. He and Peter must have decided you were batty,
running down the stairs like that. And I can’t imagine why you went out bundled up that way, just to walk to the Scrim.”

Gussie grimaced at Mrs. Potter’s notes, to which she had made hasty additions after her return from seeing Tony. In them, she had summed up how Tony Ferencz might be served by his present Nantucket followers. A diet clinic, whatever it was to be called, required more than adulation. There was money, first and foremost. A suitable location. Impeccable references. Dignified promotion in the world of potential clients. Skillful management. Money. More money.

“First you suspected Tony of poisoning Ozzie and his secretary because of that old story of Dee’s about Ozzie’s daughter,” Gussie told her. “Now you’re trying to prove he’s a fortune hunter, trying to get all of us to support his clinic. To top that off, you seem to think he might have pushed you off my roof walk, and as a last straw you seem to think he was threatening you some way this afternoon in his office.”

Mrs. Potter was silent as Gussie continued her diatribe. “Genia, use your head! You poked into his desk and found—what? A drawerful of vitamin preparations and the hypodermic syringes for injecting them. Perfectly innocent. Too bad you can’t read Romanian.”

Although these notes of Mrs. Potter’s had not included Lolly’s name, there were other questions Gussie had not seen before. Was Bo Heidecker dead when Mary Lynne beached the boat, and if not, was everything possible done to resuscitate him? Did Ozzie have suspicions about this?

Mrs. Potter now admitted she had already pursued that as far as; she could. However, it meant something that Peter shared these doubts about Bo’s death, and so did his intimation that Tony had given medication to Gordon Van Vleeck.

Gussie was suddenly furious. “Of course Tony met Gordon,” she said, “but Gordon hated Tony the first time he set eyes on him. He was positively rude, and he refused to talk with him about any treatment at all.”

As Mrs. Potter recalled, Gordon Van Vleeck had been rude to almost everyone at one time or another, including his wife.

“It’s
monstrous
to hint that Tony had anything to do with
Gordon’s death, any more than he had with Bo’s heart attack on the boat,” Gussie said. “Gordon’s emphysema was too far advanced for help, and he refused to give up smoking. Arnold Sallanger would tell you that, Genia, if you weren’t so intent on proving Tony is going around murdering people. You might as well think Mary Lynne murdered Bo for his money.”

“Women
do
kill their husbands,” Mrs. Potter reminded her, suddenly thinking of pale, plump, serious Lester Latham and the demands of an ambitious, possibly overpowering wife.

Gussie was now quiet and thoughtful. “How do you know I didn’t kill Gordon myself, then?” she asked. “He really was rather a pain in the neck, Genia, although I’ve never admitted this to anyone before.”

Mrs. Potter declined to consider the idea.

“How do you know if I challenged Jules Berner to some kind of crazy stunt that caused
his
heart attack?” Gussie persisted. “For that matter and for all you know, it might have been my gun that shot your own cousin Theo in the woods all those years ago.”

This was getting a bit out of hand, Mrs. Potter realized. “For heaven’s sake,” she said quickly, “for all you know I strangled Lew Potter in his sleep! There were certainly times when I felt like it!”

“Okay. For all we know Mittie bashed in Ab Leland’s head with one of his tennis trophies,” Gussie said, her voice slightly tremulous with both laughter and tears. “Or Leah maybe decided she’d had quite enough of dear sainted Fanwell.”

Mrs. Potter realized that, while tensions were eased, both she and Gussie were overwrought. “I think we’re both hungry,” she said. “That
sopa de ajo
was a long time ago. Let’s have a glass of carrot juice, and then I challenge you to a game of cribbage.”

“I suppose you’ll say it’s for the championship of North and South Dakota,” Gussie said with resignation. “You always offer a medal for that one when you’re feeling lucky.”

As she brought out the juice and Mrs. Potter set up the
cribbage board, Gussie spoke of her morning. “I forgot to tell you about Ozzie’s New York nephew. He brought my files from the office, the way they do when there’s no partner to take over. Helen called to ask about it while you were at the Scrim. You know how she thinks none of us can take care of things without a little help from her. Her files were complete, and so were Mittie’s and Leah’s and Mary Lynne’s. She hadn’t checked with Dee yet.”

“That’s nice,” Mrs. Potter said. “Now, do you want to try for the championship of North Dakota first, or South, or shoot the works for the two together?”

That Gussie won the double two-state trophy (invisible and imaginary) may have been due to Mrs. Potter’s thoughts of Dee. There was another story she wanted to know, and as soon as she could she persuaded Gussie to curl up with a book before dinner.

“I’m going to look in on Dee for a minute,” she said. “After the miles I have to drive in Arizona to see someone, it’s a marvel to be able to walk a couple of blocks to make a call. I’ll be back in time to help with dinner.”

Lights shone from every window of the carriage house apartment as she arrived there a few minutes later. (Mittie pays the light bills, she told herself. She might have to chivy Dee again about this, as she had the other day.)

Dee, as she had been before, seemed glad to see her. “I can give you a glass of champagne!” she said, with hospitable satisfaction. “I’m just looking over what seems to be a solid contract for the property I was showing on Thursday—remember? The buyers sent over a bottle to celebrate the purchase before they flew off-island. To thank me, they said, for finding them such a bargain—only four ninety-five.”

Mrs. Potter repeated the numbers rather blankly.

“The sellers were asking five twenty-five,” Dee told her, “but: even I had to tell them that was a bit high. Anything over five hundred seems hard to move at this time of year.”

Mrs. Potter gulped mentally, realizing that “five hundred” meant five hundred thousand dollars, and at the same time trying to guess what the commission on this might be for
Dee. “That’s wonderful,” she said. “You’ll be buying one of those half-million-dollar houses for yourself soon, at that rate.”

Dee’s back was toward her as she took glasses from an almost empty cupboard in the small kitchen, and as she deftly opened the wine. She did not answer, other than to put glasses and the bottle on a tray and to lead the way to the living room, where a fire burned comfortably beneath Ab Leland’s picture of a four-masted schooner in a blue and unthreatening sea.

Mrs. Potter toasted Dee’s current sale and her continuing success in island real estate. “We’re all very proud of you,” she said honestly. “You’ve made a wonderful second career for yourself after leaving the magazine business.”

Dee’s gaze was penetrating, but she made no reply to the implication that she must be doing well financially.

However, Mrs. Potter had not come to pursue Mittie’s problem, that of her need of money while Dee stayed on as a nonpaying guest. She had come for only one reason, to learn more about Tony Ferencz. Dee was far too intelligent for indirect approach.

“I told you I was concerned about Gussie,” she said, “and the more I learn about Tony, the less I think he’s the man for her.”

Dee sipped her wine and looked at the fire.

“The first day I was back on the island, you said everyone at the lunch table would be sorry they knew him,” Mrs. Potter continued. “Then the next day, when I asked you, you told me the story of what happened to Ozzie deBevereaux’s daughter, and I was appalled. But I told myself that people do make mistakes in life, and then can be sorry and perhaps even very much better afterward.”

Still Dee was silent. Then, seeing that her glass was empty, she rose quickly to fill Mrs. Potter’s only partially empty one and to refill her own.