A Pint of Murder (6 page)

“Now that her old man’s gone, I suppose Gilly figured she had to find somebody else she could sponge on fast,” said their uninvited guest, holding out her quickly-emptied glass for a refill. “Henry can’t have had much to leave her, between the way his practice has been going downhill and his delusions that he knew how to play poker, and you can bet she won’t get a cent out of Elizabeth unless she toes the mark. It’s high time that little doll-baby learned the facts of life. She’s been spoiled rotten since the day she was born.”

“I wouldn’t say she looked spoiled this evening,” said Bert, ignoring the stretched-out tumbler.

“Oh Gilly puts on that ‘poor little me’ act and everybody falls for it. If she’d had to scratch for a living like I have, she’d know enough to grab what she can get and be damned glad of it. I don’t know what she’s got to bellyache about. Elizabeth would give her the moon with a pink ribbon tied around it if she’d only ask for it decent.”

“If she’d only turn herself into a human doormat, you mean,” snapped Janet. “Quit swilling that rotgut and eat your supper, Bert. You’d better get a move on pretty soon, hadn’t you?”

Her brother gobbled with an eye on the clock. Marion slowly and deliberately stuffed her long, lean frame as full as possible.

“Jason Bain was up again this afternoon,” she remarked between mouthfuls. “He keeps yowling that he’ll take me to court unless I give him that patent by Thursday. Can he do that, Bert?”

“How do I know? I’m no lawyer. Save the pie till I get home, eh, Jen.”

“Aren’t you even going to drink your tea?”

Bert’s notable good nature must have cracked at last. He was slamming the kitchen door behind him before Janet got the words out of her mouth. She set the pie back in the fridge, not offering to cut a slice for Marion. At this point, Janet was disliking that woman very much.

Thick-skinned as she was, Miss Emery couldn’t help noticing the frost in the air. “That was great, Janet. Thanks a lot. Now I’d better get back and hunt some more before Bain calls out the militia. I don’t suppose you’d—”

“No, you needn’t suppose anything.” The tag end of Janet’s endurance was worn clean through. “I’ve had a rough day and I’m not lifting a hand again tonight.”

Janet worked off her spleen on the dishes, then went into the front room and turned on the television. There was nothing worth looking at, but she found relaxation of a sort in lolling back on the chesterfield and gazing through half-shut eyes at the jumping patterns on the screen. Never before, not even that night at the hospital, had she felt so totally drained. Without meaning to, she fell asleep.

When she woke up, everything was pitch black around her except for the television screen. How could she have slept with the volume turned so high? No, the racket was coming from outside. Over at the Mansion a horn was honking, dogs were yapping, people were shouting.

Janet ran to the window. Surely that was her brother’s station wagon pulled into the driveway and Bert getting out of it, carrying an armload of something. Clothes, perhaps. Somebody had just switched on an outside light and she could see what looked like a coat sleeve dangling. Whatever could he be doing, and who was that woman with him? Then she saw it was Gilly Bascom with a wiggling bundle in her arms that must be one of the dachshunds. Behind her came young Bobby, also carrying a dog.

Before she’d consciously made up her mind to do so, Janet was out the door and across the yard. “Gilly, what’s happened?”

It was the usually taciturn Bobby who answered. “We had a fire! Our house burned up and the goldfish got boiled to death. And Schnitzi had puppies in Mr. Wadman’s car!”

“The Owls were breaking up when we spotted the blaze,” Bert explained. “Some of us ran and got the engine, but the house was too far gone. We did manage to put up a water screen and save the fire from spreading. Then I brought Gilly and the kid up here. Fred and the rest were still wetting down the ashes when I left.”

“I rescued Fritzi,” yelled the boy. “Didn’t I, Ma?”

“Sure you did, honey,” said his mother exhaustedly. “You’re a good kid. Look, Marion,” her coheiress had appeared with a headful of pink plastic rollers, an old kimono of Mrs. Treadway’s clutched about her, “I hate to bust in on you like this, but I couldn’t think where else to go.”

“The boys’ room is all ready,” Janet was beginning, but in the face of disaster Marion Emery showed an unexpected streak of benevolence. “Sure, Gilly, why not? This is your house as much as mine. Here, Bert, give me that bundle.”

They all trooped in carrying the dachshunds and what few bits and pieces Gilly had managed to snatch from the burning house. Marion eyed the squirming litter of newborn pups with pardonable misgiving. “What do we do with those things?”

“I’m keeping them with me,” said Gilly desperately.

“Then you’d better take Auntie’s bedroom. It’s the biggest. Bobby can have the little room next to it if he wants. I guess we’ll have to do something about the beds.” Marion obviously wasn’t sure what.

Janet stepped in and took charge. “Gilly and I will tend to those. Why don’t you nip down to the kitchen and make us all a cup of tea? Bert, you’ll find some cartons in the cellar. Go get one and fix a bed for the pups. There’s a bagful of clean dust rags hanging just inside the cellarway.”

For a while they were milling around getting in each other’s way, finding clean linens, rushing back and forth to the Wadmans’ for tea, for milk, for another pair of pajamas to fit Bobby because his were alarmingly scorched around the edges, for a dozen other things. At last they got settled at the kitchen table to eat the pie Janet had saved from suppertime and drink Marion’s rather peculiar tea. There was nothing like a catastrophe to bring people together, Janet thought, watching Marion fill Gilly’s cup in the friendliest way possible.

“Any idea how the fire got started, Gilly?” Bert was asking.

“All I can think of is that somebody must have thrown a lighted cigarette into that big smoke bush against the front of the house. It’s been so dry lately those fuzzy blossoms would have gone up in a flash. I’ve always known I ought to cut it down, but I never had the heart. It was the only really beautiful thing we had.”

She picked at her pie. “Well, that little old cracker box was bound to go sometime. I’m only thankful the fire started at the front instead of the back. Otherwise we might never have gotten out alive.”

“I’ll bet your mother won’t shed any tears when she finds it’s gone and you got out all right,” said Marion. “She was giving me digs earlier about getting out of here so you and Bobby could move in.”

“I’m not surprised. She’s been working that line with me ever since Aunt Aggie died. I told her I couldn’t possibly manage a place this size even if I were getting money enough out of the estate to keep it up, which I’m sure as heck not. I don’t have any intention of driving you out, Marion. I’ll find something, somehow.”

Her thin shoulders sagged in hopelessness. Her mother’s cousin reached over and laid a hand on her arm.

“Forget it, will you? God knows this ark is big enough for both of us. I’ll be glad of company, if you want the truth. Being alone here at night is getting on my nerves. Besides, you can help with the inventory and stuff. Your mother was bending my ear again today about getting the estate settled.”

“After Papa died?” gasped Gilly.

“Oh no, before she went to the meeting. I bummed a ride down with Sam Neddick to see if your mother could tell me anything about that patent Bain’s been raising the roof over. That was after you ran out on me, Janet,” Marion added parenthetically.

“Elizabeth didn’t know anything about the patent, but she did manage to get in quite a little speech about the dignity of the family and you having to live in that hovel, as she called it. Then she gave me the bum’s rush because she had to get dressed up to put on the dog for that bunch of old hens she hangs out with. I was sort of hoping she’d give me a ride back, but instead I had to hoof it two miles uphill. I was sore as hell at the time, but I sure thanked my lucky stars when I heard about Henry. If I’d hung around a while longer, I might have been the one to find him.”

Janet’s scalp prickled. So Marion had been down at the Druffitts’ before the so-called accident. Maybe she had been the one to find him, and maybe he hadn’t been dead until after she’d found him. She could have pretended to leave when Elizabeth went upstairs, then sneaked around through the hedges to the back door, or simply banged the front door and then walked through the waiting room into the office. If she’d been seen around Queen Street afterward, she could always say she’d stopped to shop or something, and if she was a long time getting back to the Mansion, she could have told Dot she’d simply taken her time walking back because it was so hot out.

Marion must have come down from the attic not long after Janet had dropped her bomb in front of Dot and left the Mansion. Dot would surely have been bursting to tell the news, and Marion would have had to be deaf or crazy not to listen. Why hadn’t she come over to ask Janet about the find then and there? Why hadn’t she brought up the subject at suppertime? She’d been ready enough to talk about other things. Maybe that jar was the one thing she didn’t dare mention.

Who but Marion would have every opportunity to fiddle with the jars in the cellar, and who else would be in more urgent need of knowing which were the good beans and which were the bad? She was the likeliest person to be sharing a meal with Mrs. Treadway when they were served. And who else was scatterbrained enough to have forgotten to take away the second jar once the first had done its deadly job? Except Dot Fewter, of course, and Dot was too feckless and too good-natured to plan a murder in the first place.

But Sam Neddick was Dot’s very particular friend, so if he was at the Mansion long enough to give Marion a ride, he must also have heard the story of the jar. And Sam had brought Marion down to the Druffitts’, where he did chores and knew the layout as well as anybody. And Sam could be the original Invisible Man when he chose. And Sam was a person of dark and devious ways. But why would Sam want to kill Mrs. Treadway, who’d always been so good to him, or Henry Druffitt, with whom he’d remained on friendly enough terms even while he was feuding with Elizabeth?

Suppose, for the sake of argument, Marion Emery’s obsession about a cache of money in the Mansion was no mere fantasy. Suppose the reason she hadn’t been able to find the cache was that it had already been found? Who was better at finding things than Sam, and who but the man who lived on the premises and did odd jobs in the house would be likelier to come across the cache?

What would Mrs. Treadway do if she learned she’d been robbed? She certainly wouldn’t go to Fred Olson; she thought he was about as fit to be marshal as she was to be Prime Minister. She couldn’t talk to Bert or Annabelle because there was always the off chance they might either be guilty or think she was accusing them, and she couldn’t run the risk of antagonizing her only good neighbors. She’d know better than to breathe a word to Sam or Dot, she’d surely suspect Marion, she thought Gilly was a flibbertigibbet, she wasn’t on speaking terms with Elizabeth.

Henry Druffitt was still her doctor, though, and a doctor was a respectable man. Mrs. Treadway might very well have told her story to Henry. If she had, Sam would have known, because Sam had that mysterious way of finding things out.

And Sam might have thought up that stunt with the jars because he’d know that if she hadn’t got around to accusing him yet she would sooner or later, and he might deliberately have left the second one on the shelf after the first had worked so nicely, in the hope that Marion would eat it because Marion was fairly shrewd, too, in her own way, and she was awfully determined about that cache that ought to have been there and wasn’t.

Bert brought her out of her disagreeable musings. “Come on, Jen, you’re asleep on your feet. Let’s get out of here and let these folks go to bed. I daresay we can all use a good night’s rest by now.”

Nobody needed rest more than Janet, but long after the lights had gone out at the Mansion and Bert’s gentle, familiar snore was heard from his and Annabelle’s bedroom down the hall, Janet lay awake, wondering which of them did it.

A
S SOON AS JANET
had fed Bert his breakfast and got him out of the house, she filled a basket with milk, butter, eggs, bacon, and a loaf of the bread she’d baked two days ago. If she knew Marion Emery, there wasn’t a bite to eat at the Mansion and if she knew Gilly Bascom, there wasn’t a cent to buy anything with. Murderers or not, they had a boy to feed.

Of course, there was always the off chance it was the boy himself who was the murderer. Then again, maybe none of them was. If cold-bloodedness was the prime requisite, Janet would put her own money on Elizabeth Druffitt. Imagine getting at Gilly about where she lived and what she’d live on while her own husband lay stretched out in his coffin! Well, the way things had been going with Henry Druffitt of late, from all reports, maybe his wife didn’t count him all that much of a loss. In any case it wasn’t for her to judge.

“At least I can stop complaining it’s too quiet around here,” Janet remarked to the cat as she picked up her basket. None of them would be up yet over there. She’d just slip in and leave the food on the kitchen table, and save Marion the bother of coming over to bum it later.

In fact, Marion was up, still wearing her aunt’s kimono and curlers, though by now wisps of that dull-black hair were escaping and straggling down her hollow cheeks. She greeted the donation with open arms.

“Say, this is great of you, Janet! I was just wondering what in hell I could feed those kids.”

“I suppose they’re still abed.”

“No, Gilly’s up. She’s worried about one of the pups. We’ve called the vet and I sure hope he comes soon. Poor little thing, you can’t help feeling sorry for it. Bobby’s still buzzing away. I peeked in on him before I came down. He looked so cute with that skinny little face, and the other dog tucked in beside him as if it were a teddy bear.” Marion smiled, a real, warm, bonafide smile. “Last night he put his arms around my neck and kissed me good night. ‘Aunt Marion,’ he calls me.”