Rather Cool for Mayhem by Lawrence G. Blochman

Author:Lawrence G. Blochman
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: MysteriousPress.com/Open Road
Published: 2023-02-15T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter Eleven

We started back toward the inn, but Conchita left me before our clasped hands had achieved the same temperature. After a dozen steps she caromed off to join her husband in the corner pocket. Eddie was still under the tree, but he was sitting up now, staring at the lake.

The croquet game had broken up at last. Grace, apparently, was the sole survivor. She was standing in front of a clump of shrubs that hid the entrance to the bar. When she saw me alone, she sauntered down the path to meet me, just as nonchalant as though she hadn’t been looking for me. I had to be reciprocally surprised.

“Well, well,” I said. “You’ll catch cold without a Pennington around your neck. Where—?”

“What did she want?” Grace asked, taking me by the arm and heading me back into the garden.

“What did who want?” I asked, wide-eyed with false naïveté.

“Conchita,” Grace said. “What did Conchita want?”

“Oh, Conchita. I’m not sure. But I think she likes me.”

“I mean what else did she want?”

We were back among the dahlias and chrysanthemums. We sat down on the love seat Conchita and I had just left.

“Conchita’s worried about that broken recording,” I said. “She thinks it would have done a lot of damage if it had ever been played.”

“That’s certainly a brilliant and difficult deduction,” Grace said. “I can’t see how Conchita ever figured it out. She really had nothing to go on—except that somebody killed Norman to get possesion of the recording.”

“Conchita seems to think that Norman made the recording himself,” I said.

“Really,” Grace said. “I don’t suppose you remember, but that’s exactly the conclusion you reached about forty seconds after you found the first piece of the broken disc in the woods.”

I didn’t flinch. I just tucked in my chin a little.

“What did Conchita do before she decided to make a career of being Mrs. Westerford?” I asked.

“She was in radio.”

“Torch singer?”

“No. An engineer. She was a recording technician.”

“That’s a funny one,” I said. “She doesn’t impress me as being a second Edison, a third De Forest, or even a fourth Marconi.”

“What’s funny about it? During the war the army and navy grabbed every radio engineer with two legs and one eye. So while you were off making hay in Haymarket, the poor downtrodden radio industry had to put a lot of bored, pretty, and sometimes efficient young ladies to work at the control consoles and recording lathes. That’s where she met Eddie, of course.”

“And where did you meet her?”

“Through Norman,” Grace said. “She was pretty friendly with Norman.”

“Too friendly, do you think?”

Anybody but Eddie Westerford might think so.”

“Friendly enough so that Norman might ask Conchita for the address of a good but obscure recording studio, and that Conchita might give it to him?”

“Oh, yes.”

“I have an idea,” I said. “It’s too good to waste on McKay. He takes such a dim view of me that he goes out of his way to snafu any scrap of an idea I happen to drop in his lap.

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