Scratch the Surface

interrupted.”
    “Actually, the murder itself was very odd. Listen to this: Coates was hit on the head with a blunt instrument, and then his nose and mouth were sealed with duct tape, and then his head was encased in a plastic bag. The police asked me if all that sounded familiar from a mystery. I couldn’t think of one. Can you?”
    The appetizers arrived. Ronald chewed a raw clam and apparently mulled over the murder at the same time. After swallowing, he said, “No. You know what it sounds like to me? You know what it suggests?”
    “No,” said Felicity, who was averting her gaze from the raw clams and concentrating on her chowder.
    “It suggests a murderer who doesn’t know how to kill someone and can’t tell if the victim is dead. A self-confident, capable murderer does what he’s going to do. Let’s say he smothers the victim. And when the victim’s dead, he quits. But three methods? He tries one. He can’t tell whether it worked. He uses another. And he’s still not sure. And then he uses the third. So what we’ve got is a murderer who didn’t know what he was doing.”
    Felicity felt chagrined. “I’ll mention that to the police. I hadn’t thought of it, and I don’t think they have.”
    Ronald dipped a clam in a red sauce that was nauseatingly reminiscent of blood. “Have you been able to get any writing done with all this going on?”
    “Less than usual. But speaking of my writing, Irene called me this afternoon. She had lunch with some other agents, and they discussed the whole business of Russians pirating American books.”
    “It happens all the time.”
    “Yes, it does. I just didn’t know about it until it happened to me.”
    “You and a lot of other people. Isabelle Hotchkiss’s were pirated. Her agent made a big stink. I read about it somewhere.”
    Felicity contained her competitive curiosity about whether her own books had been stolen before or after those of her rival. “And?”
    “And nothing. Her agent got nowhere.”
    “None of them have. That’s what Irene says, and she’s a terrific agent. She’s as furious as I am. We have the signed contracts. But what are we going to do? Get a Russian lawyer and take the whole thing to court in Russia? But there is one... let’s call it a remote possibility.”
    The waiter appeared, cleared the table, and served the curried shrimp to Felicity and the lobster casserole to Ronald, who immediately spoke up. When the waiter had corrected the error and left, Felicity told Ronald about her suspicions of Mr. Trotsky. “How many Russian publishers can there be? How many who pirate American books?”
    “Hundreds?” Ronald replied. “Living next door to you? I don’t believe in coincidence.”
    “Maybe it isn’t a coincidence.”
    With a sweet smile, Ronald said, “I don’t believe in your paranoia, either. But what just happened with the food made me wonder about a mistake. The houses in your neighborhood are all alike.”
    “No, they’re not!”
    “They are. Same size, same color, same basic design.”
    “Ronald, that is not true.”
    It was, in fact, more true than not.
    “They all look the same to me. And the house numbers are hard to find.”
    “You’re right about that.” She peered at his shrimp, which were completely peeled. He probably hadn’t contracted hepatitis from the clams, either.
    “So, maybe the body got left for you by mistake. Switched. Like our dinners. It could’ve been meant for the Trotskys. Or someone else.”
    “Well, if Quinlan Coates had been a professor of Russian, that would be a connection. But I don’t think Trotsky has any connection with Romance languages or Boston College. And he hates cats. He tried to get the condo association to enforce our no-pet clause. No one supported him. But it’s easy to see how someone could have something against Trotsky. He really is unpleasant. Needlessly unpleasant. There’s friction between our neighborhood and Norwood Hill, and he makes everything worse, but he’s also nasty to the other people in Newton Park, and for no good reason. He was horrible to some woman from Norwood Hill who was just walking her dog by his house, and when I tried to pour oil on troubled waters, as it were, he went stalking off, and the woman said that he must be a gangster.” Stalking. Had she said “stocking”?
    “Maybe he is.”
    “He’s a publisher. Maybe he pirates books, but there’s no reason to think he’s a gangster, and I don’t like it that the