Free Help the Poor Struggler by Martha Grimes Page A

down.”
    â€œWouldn’t you rather finish your breakfast?” Before anyone could stop her, she tipped her side of the table, sending plates, food, cutlery crashing and rolling, and most of it into Macalvie’s lap. Then she walked out.
    â€œGod! What a temper.” Macalvie seemed perversely pleased, looking at his stained suit and the wreckage all around them: cups, kippers, broken glass.
    It even broke the porcelain pose of the waitress in black and white.
III
    Lyme Regis was one of many coastal villages whose beauty was reckoned in proximity to the sea. It had been two centuries ago so much the object of Jane Austen’s affections that it now had, where the Marine Parade ended in a narrowstreet, a pretty boutique called Persuasion. Thought Jury, If Stratford-upon-Avon wants to put Shakespeare on sugar cubes  . . . why not?
    Macalvie came out of the newsagent’s at the top of the street, at the triangle where Broad Street and Silver Street ran together down to the sea, taking tearooms, greengrocers, Boots, and banks with them. Wiggins had been left to see to the wreckage at the White Lion.
    Just as Macalvie appeared, a Mini went speedboating down the narrow street. He wrote the registration number in his notebook. Macalvie would do dog’s duty just so long as it gave him the pleasure of collaring some miscreant.
    He slapped the notebook shut and said, “Nothing there. She knew Angela because Angela would stand around reading Chips and Whizzer without paying. The old broad in there hated her. She chased her off yesterday evening somewhere around six. She was closing up late.”
    Macalvie was turning a stile of postcards and removed one that showed the confluence of the streets they were on. He stuffed a stick of gum in his mouth, and said, “You’re a minder, you know?”
    Jury looked at Macalvie, who was frowning down at the postcard. “Meaning what?”
    Macalvie shrugged. “A minder: kind of cop who watches over frails. Defenseless women.”
    Jury laughed. “You see too many American films, Macalvie.”
    Unoffended, Macalvie said, “No, I’m serious.”
    Indeed he did look it, staring from the picture-view of the street to the real thing. One would have thought he might be an artist, studying light and angles. “I’d like to know what she’s doing in Lyme,” he said, almost inconsequentially.
    â€œMolly Singer?”
    He shook his head. “Her name’s not Molly Singer. It’s Mary Mulvanney.”
    Macalvie slotted the card back in the rack and started up the street.

IV
The St. Valentine’s Day Massacre

TEN
    T HE Lady Jessica Mary Allan-Ashcroft looked from blank square to blank square on the calendar hanging in the kitchen and with her black crayon, stood on tiptoe so she could reach FRIDAY : 14 FEBRUARY . She drew a giant X across that square, knowing she was cheating, since it was only teatime and the awful day was not yet over. Another day as blank as the square. There were now five X ’s in a row. The picture above them showed some Dartmoor ponies doing what they always did — chewing grass. She looked at the picture for March. It showed the giant rock-formation of Vixen Tor and a few hardy pilgrims on their way up the rocks. Another stupid pile of rocks they walked for miles to see.
    Just last August she had been driving out with Uncle Robert and had seen a lot of people with boots and back packs at one of those tourist centers, all kitted out to walk to one of those tors in the middle of Dartmoor. Jessie and her uncle were driving with the top down in his Zimmer, and she thought those people out there must be crazy, walking when they could be driving. She told him this and he burst out laughing.
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    â€œEat your tea, my love,” said Mrs. Mulchop. Her husband, Mulchop, served as groundskeeper and sometimes as butler and looked no more like one than he