come here in the first place?” I asked.
“He wanted to talk about our development plans for the Musket Creek area. Try to work out a compromise of some kind, he said. He showed up out of the blue-no appointment or anything. I should’ve known better than to see him.”
“What sort of compromise did he have in mind?”
“Something he and his crazy friends drew up. A list of restrictions as to what we could and couldn’t develop, things they want to preserve in their goddamn natural state. If we agreed to it, they’d quit fighting us.”
“What did you say to that?”
“I told him to go to hell,” O’Daniel said. “That list of his was as long as your arm. It’d cost thousands to revamp our plans, and for what? Just to satisfy the whims of a bunch of backwoods cretins.”
Miss Irwin brought him his water and his brandy. He drank the water first, gargling it a little and rubbing his throat while it went down. Then he tossed off the brandy. “Better,” he said. “My head still hurts, though. You got any aspirin, Shirley?”
“I’ll see.”
He watched her walk out of the office. In a smarmy undertone he said to me, “Some ass, huh?”
So are you, I thought.
The telephone rang. Miss Irwin picked up out front, held a brief conversation, and then poked her head back into the office. “Your wife,” she called to O’Daniel.
“Ah, Christ.” He looked and sounded annoyed. “Tell her I’m busy, I’ll call her back later.”
“I told her that. She said it’s important and it won’t wait.”
O’Daniel muttered something profane and plucked up the handset on his phone. “Helen? What’s so damned important it can’t… What? Yeah, I know, I know. But I can’t talk about that right now… Because I can’t, that’s why…”
One of the things that had been knocked off the desk in the fight was a photograph in a silver frame. Miss Irwin had set it facing outward when she’d cleaned up the carpet, and from where I was sitting I could see that it was a color portrait of a woman that was probably Helen O‘Daniel. I gave it my attention while I pretended not to listen to O’Daniel’s end of the phone conversation. She was somewhere between thirty-five and forty, dark-haired, attractive in a snooty, pinch-faced way. Her mouth was smiling but her eyes weren’t: that kind of woman.
“No, not tonight,” O’Daniel was saying to her. “I told you before, I’m going to spend the weekend on the houseboat… No, I’m not coming home, I’m leaving for the lake straight from here… What? All right, all right. I’ll call you.”
He rang off without saying good-bye. “Shirley!” he yelled. “Where the hell’s that aspirin?” Then he looked at me and said,
“Women. They’re a pain in the ass sometimes.”
I wasn’t ready or willing to discuss women with Frank O’Danie! — particularly not his wife and her possible affair with Munroe Randall. There were less direct, less inoffensive ways to find out whether or not there was any truth to Penny Belson’s intimations.
I said, “Let’s get back to that threatening letter you received. Do you still have it?”
“Somewhere in this mess. You want to see it?”
“If you don’t mind.”
He shuffled among the papers Miss Irwin had picked up, found an envelope, and handed it over. Plain white dime-store envelope, with O‘Daniel’s name and the company address printed in an exaggerated child’s hand- somebody’s method of disguising his handwriting. No return address, of course. The envelope had been slit at one end; I shook out the single sheet of paper it contained. It had been torn off a ruled yellow pad, and its message had been printed in the same scrawly hand:
Frank O’Daniel,
If you don’t leave Musket Creek alone you’ll wish your mother never had you. Look what happened to your partner Randall. Don’t let anything like that happen to you. Get out NOW! OR ELSE!
When I looked up from the paper Miss Irwin was back with some aspirin and another glass of water. I waited until O’Daniel was done swallowing before I asked him, “Have there been other letters like this?”
“No. This is the first one.”
“Other threats of any kind?”
“Well… not exactly.”
“How do you mean, ‘not exactly’?”
“There were a bunch of hang-up calls,” he said. “Back when we first started buying up land in Musket Creek. Every time you’d pick up the phone, the bastard on the other end would hang up.”
“Just here? Or at your home too?”
“Both. You remember, Shirley? A fucking nuisance.”
“I remember,” she said.
“It went on for a couple of weeks,” O’Daniel said. “I had my home number changed finally, unlisted, but we couldn’t do that here.”
“No other calls since then?”
“No. They just stopped and that was it.”
I tucked the anonymous letter back into its envelope, but I didn’t give it back to O’Daniel. “Were either of your partners ever threatened? Letters, calls, in person?”
“Ray Treacle was. An artist named Robideaux who lives over there threatened him to his face.”
“Yes, he told me about that. What about Munroe Randall? Was he ever threatened?”
“Not that he mentioned to me.”
I said bluntly, “Do you think he was murdered, Mr. O’Daniel?”
“Munroe? Hell, I don’t know what to think.”
“This letter you just got hints that maybe he was.”
O’Daniel didn’t say anything for a time. You could see the wheels turning inside his head: thinking about that hundred-thousand dollar double indemnity payoff, probably. “The police say it was an accident,” he said at length. “They ought to know, shouldn’t they?”
“The police overlook things sometimes. Everybody does.”
“Yeah, I guess so. But that note-it could just be a crank thing. I mean, whoever wrote it might want me to think Munroe was murdered. You know, trying to take advantage of the accident. That could be it.”
“It could be,” I admitted. “But I’d like to keep the note anyway, if that’s all right with you.”
“Sure, go ahead.”
I put the envelope into my coat pocket. “Let’s assume that Jack Coleclaw didn’t write it,” I said. “Any other candidates?”
“Anybody in Musket Creek, just about.”
“The letter’s fairly literate. Whoever wrote it has a pretty fair grasp of English fundamentals.”
“Well… Penrose, maybe.”
“Who’s Penrose?”
“A writer. Writes stuff on natural history. All writers are nuts, but that one is a real fruitcake. You’ll see what I mean when you talk to him.”
“That should be pretty soon,” I said. “I’m going out there tomorrow.”
“If I were you,” O’Daniel said, “I’d take along a couple of cops. They don’t like strangers, particularly strangers asking questions that have anything to do with Northern Development.”
“It can’t be that bad, Mr. O’Daniel.”
“No?” He put a hand up to his throat. “Well, it’s your neck this time, not mine.”
Kerry was out by the pool, soaking up the last of the dying sun, when I got back to the Sportsman’s Rest. She was in better spirits too, which was a relief. She wanted to know all about my day, and she kept asking questions and chattering at me the whole time we were getting ready to go out for dinner.
But by the time we picked out a restaurant, her mood had shifted. Periods of silence again, interspersed with grouchy comments on the food, the decor, my table manners, and the feeble quality of my jokes. She didn’t say much on the ride back to the motel, and nothing at all for the first half hour we were in the room.
I figured it was going to be a long evening, so I got out the three typed, single-spaced sheets Shirley Irwin
