Scratch the Surface

o’clock. So, sometime in the afternoon, probably the late afternoon, he must’ve been at Angell. Which is not all that far from here.” She put the bagel on a plate, buttered it, and served it to Dave Valentine with blueberry jam that she’d spooned into a little bowl. After supplying him with a knife, she poured herself a cup of coffee and joined him at the table. “It’s maybe twenty minutes.”
    “More at that time of day,” he said. “But that’s interesting. Helpful. Did the woman there have any more to say?”
    “No, I don’t think so.”
    He bit into the bagel and chewed. Felicity wished that she’d given him something quicker to swallow. “We’ll go and talk to them,” he finally said. “Good coffee. Thank you. Good bagel. And thank you for calling right away. We’ll get going on it this morning.”
    “His car was at his apartment building,” Felicity said. “The neighbor who let me in told me that. Maybe he was with someone else, in someone else’s car, when he went to get Edith. Or maybe someone else got her, of course.”
    Dave Valentines eyes, Felicity noticed, were an exceptionally clear blue. In police procedurals, the detectives his age tended to look tired, but Valentine didn’t. On the contrary, he looked as if he’d had ten hours of sleep.
    “We’ll find out,” he said.
    “Quinlan Coates’s obituary is in today’s paper.” She paused. “So the body must have been released.”
    “That’s something I wanted to ask you about.” His eyes met hers. “Besides writing mysteries, you read them. You’d have to, wouldn’t you?”
    “Not necessarily. But I do. It’s not an obligation.”
    “Sorry if... Look, see if this sounds familiar from a book. The victim sustains a blow to the head. Then his nose and mouth are sealed with tape.”
    “Duct tape.”
    “Any tape. Any strong tape. And then his head is covered with a plastic bag. Is there a book where that happens?”
    “Not that I can think of. Not offhand. The three methods separately, I’m sure. But all three? It’s possible, but nothing comes to mind. So that’s how Quinlan Coates died?”
    So, here was Felicity seated at her kitchen table with a handsome, burly police detective who was tapping her knowledge of mystery fiction and confiding the results of a postmortem. He was eating food she’d prepared, and the two were sipping coffee. Beautiful cats added a touch of domesticity. Specifically, Brigitte was now draped across the top of the refrigerator, and Edith was crouching beneath the kitchen chair at the built-in desk near the telephone. Ah, bliss!
    “The actual cause of death wasn’t head trauma,” Valentine said. “The papers got it wrong. It was suffocation.” To Felicity’s disappointment, he added, “It’ll probably all be in tomorrow’s papers.” He drank some coffee and asked, “Have you had a chance to go through your old mail? E-mail?”
    “Yes. But I didn’t find anything, really. I’ve refused to blurb some books, to write things to be quoted on the cover, but I’ve always been tactful about saying no. I usually say I don’t have time, and in most cases, that’s been true. I’ve declined some invitations to be on panels at libraries, do signings at bookstores and events, and so on, but I’ve never said anything to offend anyone, I think. And every published writer gets requests to read people’s manuscripts, and sometimes new writers want me to recommend them to my agent, that kind of thing. I just can’t read everyone’s manuscript. I don’t have time. And I’m a writer, not a book doctor or an unpaid editor. But the letters and e-mail I’ve sent have been apologetic. Gentle. Polite.” She shrugged her shoulders. “If anyone has a grudge against me, it’s an unjustified grudge.”
    “Most grudges are. Do you ever write book reviews?”
    “No.”
    “Anything else?”
    “Well, not about books, but there is something. There’s a lot of conflict between this neighborhood and the adjoining one in Newton. Norwood Hill. The Norwood Hill Neighborhood Association sent a letter to our condo association to complain about traffic. The Norwood Hill people want us to enter and exit through Brighton. There’s resentment on both sides.”
    “Does that have anything to do with you? With you personally?”
    “No. The only personal animosity, I think, is with the guy who lives next door, Mr. Trotsky. He just cannot get along with anyone. I overheard him being very nasty to