Free The Old Wine Shades by Martha Grimes Page A

This is a pleasant surprise!’ But why a surprise? These two old gents lived in the place, or seemed to.
    Major Champs made a few gruff how-d’ya-do noises and they both shook Melrose’s hand. They looked pleased as punch to see him. Yes, they had fought off sleep many’s the time sitting in Boring’s in their favorite chairs.
    ‘Saw you at dinner last night with that attractive lady. You didn’t see us; that dining room is so ill lit Young Higgins is always barking his shins on the furniture and spilling the soup.’ Young Higgins would be doing that standing in the noonday sun of the Greek isles, thought Melrose, but didn’t say so since Higgins was probably the same age as these two.
    They had both taken chairs now and were looking about for one of the porters to bring them their whiskey. Major Champs was waving out a match he’d used to light tobacco in the bowl of his pipe. He said, ‘Now your friend, I thought she looked familiar, was sure I’d seen her and, lo and behold!’ He held up the book he was carrying.
    Polly’s face looked out at the reader in a fearful way or an alarmed one, rather like Ruth Rendell expecting the worst.
    ‘Marvelous yarn!’ said Major Champs. ‘Neame’s read it, keeps threatening to tell me who did it.’ He snickered. ‘Read all her books, every blessed one. I don’t suppose’–he leaned closer to Melrose and into the firelight whose shadows carved even deeper hollows in his cheeks–’you’d introduce us?’
    ‘Certainly, I would. I’ll be seeing her in a week or two.’ Would two weeks allow time enough to read her book? Melrose looked at the bookmark in the major’s copy. At least three fourths of the way through. Aha! thought Melrose, who said, ‘What d’you think about this poodle?’ He tapped his copy. The poodle had wandered in around page twenty.
    ‘Ah, that! The poodle. Never cared for them much myself, a prissy, mean-spirited, self-indulgent animal. She puts a lot of dogs and so forth in her stories. Last one was.., a Labrador? Anyway, the dog finds the body. Damned clever. That’s later, of course. Wouldn’t want to give the plot away.’
    Oh, do. Please.
    Colonel Neame put in, ‘And Hubert–’
    Who the hell was Hubert?
    ‘–the young lad, he’s one of the few children in fiction I’ve found convincing.’
    Major Champs said, ‘We agree on that certainly.’ They disagreed about other things and that was just splendid! Melrose fancied an argument that would offer up all sorts of morsels for him to file away before he saw her again. ‘In what way, precisely, do you find Hubert convincing?’
    ‘Because... well, look at the way he responds to his mother’s death and his father’s suicide. Then the sister’s falling from that cliff side–’
    Melrose smiled slowly. He had no idea what they were talking about. ‘Yes, but did she really fall?’ Of course she didn’t. Had any victim ever ‘accidentally’ fallen off a cliff or for that matter, a chair–in any mystery? ‘
    Colonel Neame slapped the chair arm and said, gleefully, ‘Exactly, exactly! And did the mother really have a heart condition?’ Wink, wink, nod, nod.
    Melrose was picking up stuff. But it left him wondering about the chef and that dinner party at the beginning. What did all of these deaths in one family and the poodle have to do with that? Were all three of them reading the same book? Yes, the title of the one Major Champs held was quite definitely The Gourmandise Way.
    ‘Thing is,’ he said, brow knitted in puzzlement, ‘I’ve only gotten around, oh...’ He was going to trap himself if he wasn’t careful.
    (After all, he’d acted as if he’d read about Hubert.) ‘Well, I’ve not gotten terribly far, and I just wonder about the ‘gourmand’ idea.’
    ‘He’s the father, isn’t he? He’s the chef.’ Major Champs gave Melrose a lowering look from under his thick eyebrows.
    ‘Oh, the chef! Yes, of course, he’s the chef.’ Melrose took a long