The Pied Piper of Death Read online

  “I would never have used those terms.”

  “A few years ago I found myself as a contract college instructor without a tenure track. My affairs were becoming further apart, my drinking was increasing, and my cute little figure was filling out. Peyton bounced in for a second chance after his first wife was killed in the airplane accident.” She waved her hands expansively. “I traded my going nowhere career for this place and Peyton.”

  “And picked up a heavy dose of cynicism along the way.”

  “That’s the rate of exchange for these trades, Went. Turn down this drive and Rabbit’s house is behind those trees.”

  Lyon stopped the cart in the darkened drive not far from the cottage nestled in a grove of trees. He turned off the ignition and the lights flicked off. Rabbit slept soundly in the backseat. Katherine Piper put her hand lightly on Lyon’s arm and brushed her lips across his cheek. “It’s pass time,” she said. “Don’t worry, I’m easy. No fuss. No bother. No phone calls the next day and no repeats required unless you do the asking.”

  “You know I find you attractive, Kate. But there’s …”

  “That sounds like a Bea but. Are you one of those strange birds that actually loves his wife?”

  “Not so rare.”

  “You don’t travel in my circles.”

  “Question time,” he answered. “Why did you have the affair with Markham?”

  She gave a small laugh. “Because he was here. No, I mean that. He paid attention to me. When he first arrived at Bridgeway for his research on that great literary event, The Piper Contribution, I was given the assignment of touring Markham around the grounds and library. Peyton did not seem to realize that such activities for Markham were the equivalent of issuing a prepaid hunting license.”

  “You were that easy?”

  “I was willing to be, but I restrained myself. It was delicious having that much attention paid to me after all these years. Markham worked diligently at my conquest and I rewarded him suitably.”

  “Then you had no reason to be angry with him?”

  “But I did. He threw me over the day before yesterday. I know, of course, that this was not an unusual occurrence for Mark. Once conquered the prey becomes carrion and fresh flesh is required.”

  “Then you hardly hated him enough to kill him?”

  “I didn’t? What makes you think that?”

  As Lyon levered the sleeping Rabbit from the rear seat, Katherine eased behind the wheel and sped down the drive in the nearly silent cart. Lyon watched her go as Rabbit awoke.

  “She didn’t do it,” Rabbit mumbled as he leaned his head against Lyon. “She was with me the whole time.”

  “Nice try, Rabbit.”

  Rabbit leaned heavily against him as they moved in lockstep down the drive toward the house.

  It was a tiny dwelling obviously built on half a normal scale for the exclusive use of little people. The miniature house had a steeply pitched roof tiled with white slate that glistened in the moonlight. Dark timber supports spaced evenly along the walls gave the dwelling the appearance of a Bavarian forest cottage. A welcoming shaft of light fell through gaily colored cafe curtains in the two front windows and cast a bright swatch on the path before them.

  “Who’s out there?” A woman leaned out the open portion of the Dutch doors. “Is that you, Rabbit?”

  “Yes, Frieda, light of my life. I am with a friend who cannot stand loud noises or violence. So please be on your good behavior.”

  “If you’ve been drinking, I’ll violence both of you. You can bring your friend in if he isn’t throwing up all over the place,” she said.

  Frieda was a busty woman of sharp features and Rabbit’s height. Her long straw hair was wound around her head in long braids. She wore a floor-length sheath mostly hidden by an embroidered apron that fell past her knees. She held a cast iron frying pan in one hand and glared at the two men in her doorway.

  “Hello, honey,” Rabbit said. “Love you.” He kissed her cheek.

  “We will see about that,” she said in a perfectly normal voice that belied her height.

  Lyon stooped to enter the tiny kitchen. The room’s proportions were for a child or adult who happened to be under four feet tall. He could see past the kitchen into the front parlor, where the furnishings were also built to this small scale.

  “Sit over there,” Rabbit said with a gesture toward a lone straight chair of normal size that sat in a corner.

  “Thank you.” Lyon sat in the chair while Frieda continued glaring at her husband.

  “I was held up working the party,” Rabbit said as he pulled himself erect.

  The frying pan clanked on a chopping block with a loud crack that made Rabbit jump.

  “You were into the Piper brandy again. They sent you to the wine cellar and you brought back some of the Napoleon for yourself. You cannot be trusted in the wine cellar, Rabbit.” The pan whacked down on the chopping block again and Rabbit shivered.

  “I’m sorry, Frieda. It won’t happen again.”

  “I know it won’t happen again. I’m going to make sure of that.”

  “No, Frieda, please.”

  It occurred to Lyon that Rabbit had made an extremely poor career choice when he decided to hold up gas stations. He seemed to have a low threshold of fear as this threatening little woman in front of them now proved. “It is punishment time.”

  “Come on, Frieda. My stomach won’t take it.”

  “You want brandy, you get brandy.” Frieda reached into a cupboard and grasped the neck of a liquor bottle. She opened it with a flourish and plunked it down with a thump in front of Rabbit. A large empty water tumbler quickly joined it. “Drink.”

  He squinted at the bottle’s label. “This is a very bad year.”

  “And it gets worse. Drink!” She poured the large tumbler half full of brandy and folded her husband’s hand around its base.

  Rabbit glanced imploringly at Lyon. “My wife believes in aversion therapy.” He took a large gulp and gripped the edge of the table with both hands as his cheeks began to balloon. His face turned florid before he stumbled frantically toward the bathroom.

  “Drunk,” Frieda said as she looked toward the closed bathroom door with concern. Then she turned toward Lyon. “Coffee, Mr. Wentworth? It’s all made and I was just about to have a cup.”

  “Yes, thank you.”

  “I know your wife from her politics. Sometimes on the television I’ll see you by her side.” She poured coffee from a small pot on the stove into demitasse cups. “Has Rabbit been playing up to Mrs. Piper again?”

  Rabbit stumbled from the bathroom. “She needed my help again.” He visibly winced when he rejoined them at the table and Frieda handed him the remains of his brandy.

  “I’ve heard about the goings-on at the big house,” Frieda said. “Cook stopped in on her way home and told me about that man Swan. Mrs. Piper is very foolish and should not have been involved. As you can guess, Mr. Wentworth, there are no secrets from the servants in a large establishment like Bridgeway.”

  Lyon watched with macabre interest as Rabbit slowly choked down the final two ounces of brandy. He clenched the table’s edge, but this time was able to retain the liquor. “The Pipers serve better booze than this kerosene. They know how to treat a dwarf,” he said as the new alcohol laid a carpet of slurred sarcasm over his speech. “We get to live in this house that the first colonel built for my great grandfather. We all grew up here and are attached to the property like serfs.”

  “If we had children they would grow up here,” Frieda said wistfully.

  “And be exploited like the rest of the little people,” said Rabbit with an ineffectual thump to the tabletop.

  “You don’t have it so bad,” Frieda said. “You aren’t exactly working in an underground mine like the seven dwarfs. The only time you go underground is to ransack the wine cellar.”

  “If I were one of those exploited seven dwarfs I’d be the one they called Grumpy. All the littl
e people should be grumpy because we got what’s called the short end. You notice that Snow White didn’t stick around the little people. After her nap she couldn’t wait to run off with the Prince.”

  Frieda sighed. “After a couple of drinks my husband goes into his ‘Great Speech,’ which sometimes includes how he might have been president if he could see over the podium.”

  “They force us to stay here, you know,” Rabbit said in a drunken conspiratorial tone. “The Pipers are the ones who keep us here.”

  “Now, Rabbit, that’s just not true,” Frieda objected.

  “You do not know the history, it goes back generations,” Rabbit said. “Some of us try and leave, but it doesn’t work. We always come back to Bridgeway. My granddad ran away to join the circus and ended up in Hollywood as a Munchkin.”

  Lyon looked at the little man with interest. “Your granddad was a Munchkin?”

  “A Lollipop Guild Guy. That’s where he met Mom, out there in Hollywood. Then after The Wizard of Oz was over the roles got scarce and no way were they going to work the circus.”

  “I don’t blame them,” Lyon agreed.

  “We keep coming back and back and that’s all she wrote,” the little man said as his head slumped forward on the table.

  Lyon stood. “I think he’s out for the night. Can I help you get him into bed?” He stooped as his head hit the ceiling of the low room.

  Frieda’s hand gently brushed the top of her husband’s head. “No, comfort tonight he does not get. Let him sleep out here and awake with a crick in his little neck.”

  “All right then. It’s been nice to meet you, Frieda.”

  “He’s had too much to drink tonight, but he is a good man. A man possessed by things I don’t understand, even if we are the same size. I suppose we each react differently to our burdens.”

  Lyon had his hand on the low doorknob but turned with the feeling that this upset wife had something to tell him. “What do you mean?”

  “He’s moody at the best of times. As I said, a good man, but a soul with a little darkness. Recently he’s been even more upset. Strange things are going on at the big house. Things are happening that are bothering him, and I don’t know what they are. I worry that he might go back to gas stations.”

  “It’s hard to imagine a man like Rabbit robbing gas stations.”

  “Your friend the policeman told you about it?”

  “Yes, a little.”

  “There was only one robbery and it was quite silly. You know, that’s how we met?”

  “No, I didn’t know that.”

  “Rabbit’s life of crime began and ended at the Amoco Station out on Route Forty-nine. He used one of the old guns from the big house library. It was a Civil War pistol. I was the cashier on duty but was sitting on a high stool so he didn’t know I was his size. He pressed the gun against the window and to me it looked like a big cannon. I thought it was so funny to see this little guy with a huge pistol that I began to laugh and the gun went off accidentally. I fell off the stool and he thought he had killed me. He rushed in and held me and then we began to laugh together and that’s how the police found us. Something was wrong with him the day he tried to rob me and something is wrong now. I don’t know what it is.”

  Lyon nodded. “I may have an answer. I’d like to talk to him tomorrow when he feels better. I have a question about something called the Piper Pie. Markham Swan wrote a note to Paula just before he was killed saying that the Pie was important as a clue.”

  The Welch Rabbit looked up. “What do you mean about the Piper Pie?” He began a deep giggle that died as Frieda reached for the brandy.

  “You know about the Pie?”

  Rabbit laughed again. “Of course I know about the Pie. My relatives are buried all over it.”

  SIX

  “It might have been Igor’s liquor talking,” Bea said half to Lyon and partly into her pillow.

  “I don’t think so, but we’ll find out tomorrow afternoon when Rabbit and I go for a walk to the Pie, wherever and whatever that is. And his name is not Igor. He is Randolph Welch, sometimes known as Rabbit. Or Mister R.” Lyon lay in bed next to his wife and stared at the ceiling. The familiar house sounds of Nutmeg Hill sighed and creaked around them. “The Welch family are old family retainers who have lived near the Pipers for generations.”

  “You mean small family retainers,” she mumbled sleepily.

  “You are not being politically correct, darling.”

  “I am not entirely convinced that I like this Rabbit person whatever his size,” Bea said. “His life seems to consist of gas station holdups and drinking a great deal of liquor with his boss lady, who he knows has a problem in that area.”

  “Actually, I think he’s a very sensitive man born with an unfortunate physical infirmity.”

  “I assume you refer to an excessive love of the grape as his problem?”

  “Come on now, you aren’t listening. He’s a man of small stature. That condition confronts him every day of his life.”

  Bea propped up on her elbows. Her eyes widened, signaling battle joined. “Listen Wentworth, in my Senate Subcommittee on the Disabled and Infirm, I work with people with real problems: like the blind, the lame confined to wheelchairs, and others with physical problems that you can only have nightmares about. I defy you to compare them to a man who is perfectly capable of living a nearly normal life like this Rabbit. From what you tell me, he is married to a woman his size and lives in a house built to their proportions. He is gainfully employed and seems to have access to a great wine cellar.”

  “I had coffee with his wife, Frieda, after Rabbit passed out. She’s very worried about him.”

  “In what way?”

  “She can’t place the reason. I wonder if he might be involved in other things that are happening at Bridgeway.”

  Bea closed her eyes as she sank back on the pillows. “We’ll think about it in the morning over coffee.”

  She was dog tired, but feared that tonight’s emotional overload would keep her awake. She was concerned not only about the murder at Bridgeway—although she hardly knew Markham Swan—but also about the possibility of Peyton Piper’s senate race.

  Compromises such as these demanded by Piper tore her apart. She had faith in her own ability as a state senator, but to keep her seat she had to survive politically. Piper’s demand was a typical hydra-headed example. One face was composed of land mines that were an anathema to her. Another face forced her to consider the reality that his factory employed hundreds of her constituents. The party needed a fresh new candidate, but Peyton?

  These were vexing contradictions and she often wondered if their solutions were worth the emotional rendering. She forced herself to think of the long, slow river that ran below their house. She imagined it flowing over her, enveloping her as it swept her out to the great sea.

  Lyon laced his arms behind his head and listened to their house. Nutmeg Hill was located on a saucer-shaped promontory that rose a hundred feet above a sharp bend in the Connecticut River. The house was reached by a drive that twisted up from a secondary highway and ran between high stands of pine that marched in formal lanes on either side of the lawn. The structural lines of the house were dominated by a widow’s walk that ran the length of the gambrel roof. Leaded glass windows reflected flashing darts of sunlight.

  They had purchased the property a number of years before. The house had been originally constructed in the early nineteenth century by a successful sea captain. After the Civil War the original family’s fortune faltered. The house began a slow process of decay that was exacerbated when a last surviving spinster moved south and boarded the windows and doors. Vandals and weather hastened further deterioration. Lyon and Bea had accidentally discovered the building—nearly hidden by underbrush and tangled growth, but with its foundation and walls still intact—while on a walking trip. They had fallen in love with its secluded location and panoramic perch. After finally arranging to purchase the house throug
h the estate of the last deceased spinster, they had spent several years of painstaking labor refurbishing it.

  It was only five miles from the Piper mansion located across the river, but Lyon considered it a hemisphere away.

  Rocco and Lyon met at noon for their usual Thursday lunch at Sarge’s Bar and Grill in Murphysville.

  Sarge’s place was an anachronism. The owner, a former army master sergeant, had a retirement dream of owning a workingman’s sports bar. He expected a boilermaker clientele who enjoyed betting on an occasional ball game. Initially, its location in an older residential area of two-family homes, not far from a ball-bearing factory, had guaranteed the right mix of customers. When the factory vacated its building and was replaced by an art gallery, gentrification struck like a thunder clap. The customers were soon divided into two distinct groups. During the day retired workers nursed beers and discussed ball games without wagers. At six the bar’s atmosphere radically changed. The night manager arrived with a German chef and a bartender who actually knew how to mix drinks. Cans of Bud mated with cheap bar whiskey abdicated to German food joined with imported wines or tankards of dark German beer. These items were served on checkered tablecloths lit by wicker-covered bottles holding flickering candles.

  On most days Sarge made a valiant and usually successful attempt to drink himself unconscious before the last boiler-maker was chug-a-lugged and the first bottle of Zinfandel was uncorked.

  Rocco Herbert was the rare customer who straddled both groups. He qualified as a daytime drinker, and after dusk he often turned into an exuberant sauerbraten customer. Their former military service together required Sarge to maintain a constant supply of properly chilled vodka and ground sirloin for the chief’s gourmet hamburgers. Lyon was reluctantly accommodated with a dusty bottle of Dry Sack sherry but was forced to satisfy any hunger pangs he might have with displays of pickled pig’s feet and eggs.

  Rocco usually occupied a booth in the far corner, near the window that overlooked a four-way stop sign down the block. Walkie-talkie communication with patrolman Jamie Martin and his hidden cruiser usually made this observation post a productive spot for generating traffic tickets.