Free Flynn's In by Gregory McDonald Page B

Jensen I didn’t get the impression his staff is so grand as to include an inspector and a detective lieutenant.”
    “You’ll be going back today?” Flynn asked.
    There was no luggage visible in the room.
    “Yes. The children…We’re just waiting for the undertakers…”
    “I understand.”
    “The manager put us in this room to get us away from the press.”
    “Did you talk to the press at all?”
    “I did.” Max said, as if it were a joke. “As a friend of the family.”
    “What’s there to say?” Carol Huttenbach’s voice was low and shivering. “A terrible hunting accident…”
    Standing halfway across the small, dark room, Flynn kept his hands in his overcoat pockets. “Why don’t you tell me anything you can.”
    “Why don’t you tell me anything
you
can, Inspector,” Carol said sharply.
    “Carol…”Max said.
    Flynn waited for a moment, waited for questions which would reveal her contempt for what she had been told, what she had been shown.
    Instead, her eyes sought neutrality in the farther wall.
    “Just general things,” Flynn urged, “about your husband.”
    “He’s dead,” she said angrily.
    “Did he come here often?” Flynn asked.
    “Yes. Often. To this dump. This freezing dump. Packed up his damned guns and fishing rods and woolens and waders and came up here. To this…place! Timberbreak Lodge: The Rod and Gun Club. Look at it! Not even a place for us to get a sandwich!”
    “This is your first time here?”
    “Of course. And last.”
    “Your husband always came alone?”
    She looked at Max a moment, sighed, and shook her head.
    “It’s all right, Carol.”
    “You don’t believe your husband was alone, Mrs. Huttenbach?”
    Carol Huttenbach started to say something, and stopped.
    “It’s all right, Carol,” Max Harvey repeated. “Inspector Flynn is not from the press. He’s a policeman. And he knows if he repeats what you say, to the press, he’s in trouble. That right, Flynn? They have to know things before we go. Better to be frank with them, than to be dragged back to this…God-awful place.”
    Flynn waited, unsure of the source of her anger.
    Cocky sat on the bed nearer the door.
    “Where is she?” Carol Huttenbach blurted.
    “Where’s who?” Flynn asked.
    “My God,” she sputtered. “It’s a man’s world, all right, isn’t it? The hotel manager—”
    “Carl Morris,” Max Harvey said.
    “That sheep-dipped town cop—”
    “Chief Jensen,” Max Harvey said.
    “You two. You tell me Dwight went outside in the middle of the night to clean his gun and the gun discharged and blew the top of his head off. That can happen to anybody. Especially Dwight, so cocksure of himself he was as careless as a pampered two-year-old. What did you
men
do with the woman he was with? Just send her packing in the middle of the night? Just because Dwight was a man and you’re all men and ho-ho-ho, men will be men, belly up to the bar, boys, no need to mention he was with a woman, just pack her off before the little wife gets here?”
    Flynn turned slightly, looked at Cocky, then at Max Harvey, then back at Carol Huttenbach. “What makes you think he was with a woman?”
    “My husband was never
not
with a woman, Inspector Whatever-your-name-is.”
    “Ghote.” Flynn smiled. “Ghote-dipped.”
    “My husband was a profoundly spoiled man,” Carol Huttenbach announced. “Sexually spoiled. He was boyishly handsome, healthy, rich, powerful, utterly charming, and as sexy as a magazine cover. He didn’t even have to blow that damned trumpet of his to have a parade of women following him.”
    Max Harvey sat forward and put a hand on her arm. She waved it off.
    He continued to sit forward, holding his own hands.
    “Dwight always had everything his own way. He really believed all the attention he got, all those women throwing themselves at him, were his God-given right.”
    Often Flynn had seen bereavement express itself as anger at the deceased. Watching Carol