The Grub-and-Stakers Spin a Yarn (11 page)

Shaking off temptation, Osbert took Wardle’s address and the probably spurious letter from the Worcestershire sauce manufacturer, told Mother Matilda again that he’d be in touch, and left the mincemeat factory.

Since Osbert was not yet and indeed might never become a bona fide member of Mother Matilda’s staff, he hadn’t ventured to approach the company lot but had simply left his car parked on the street in front of the main entrance. As he came out the door, he observed an elderly policeman in a uniform that had seen better days standing beside the big station wagon, stroking his grizzled chin in a thoughtful and deliberate manner. Nothing daunted, since there really wasn’t anything here to be daunted about, Osbert walked straight over to him.

“Morning, Officer.”

“Urf.” The man thus addressed took his hand away from his chin and then didn’t appear to know what else to do with it. “This your wagon?”

“Yes, it is. Or rather, no, it isn’t.” Osbert had forgotten for the moment that he was not himself today. “Actually it’s my brother’s. I’m staying with him and his wife until I find a job. That’s what I’ve been doing at the factory, in case you’re wondering. Applying, that is.”

“Seen Mother Matilda, have you?”

“Yes, we had a constructive chat. At least I think we did. She’s a lovely lady, isn’t she? I thought it was awfully good of her to see me, my brother says she lost her husband only yesterday in tragic circumstances.”

“Shot, so quick and clean an ending.”

Osbert was not surprised to hear a Lammergen policeman quoting A. E. Housman. All policemen, at least all the policemen he knew, were poetically inclined. Sergeant MacVicar would recite “The Cotter’s Saturday Night” at the drop of a helmet, officers Bob and Ray knew a lot of limericks, and Osbert himself was thoroughly conversant with the works of Robert W. Service. He did not, however, consider this particular snatch of Housman an apt one in view of the time it had taken the late VP Nutmeg to expire.

“I’m afraid the ending wasn’t all that quick,” he replied. “My—er—brother’s wife’s aunt-in-law happened to be talking with the proprietor of the yarn shop when Mr. McCorquindale drove up and went inside the shop and came out again. She says he left a trail of bloodstains all the way before dropping dead at her very feet. Hers and Miss Jane Fuzzywuzzy’s, I should say. That’s what the woman who keeps the yarn shop calls herself, for some unfathomable reason. Her real name, I believe is Derbyshire.”

The policeman perked right up and looked official as anything. “Operating under an alias, eh? Has MacVicar arrested her yet?”

“Why, no. Now that you mention it, I don’t believe he has.”

“Huh! That’s typical of MacVicar. Sitting on his hands looking pontifical while the citizens of Lammergen get gunned down in the streets of Lobelia Falls. Somebody ought to write a strong letter to the newspaper.”

“Which paper would that be, Officer?” Osbert asked him politely.

The policeman slid his cap forward until the peak almost touched his nose, so that he could scratch the back of his head. Presumably the maneuver was calculated to stimulate thought, but it proved not to be efficacious.

“Darned if I know, now that you ask. I haven’t read a newspaper since the time they ran that piece about my brother-in-law getting to be Head Hooter or whatever it was in the Loyal Order of Owls. Seems to me that was the Lobelia Falls paper, come to think of it. No use writing to them, they wouldn’t print anything against MacVicar for fear he’d slap ’em in the jug. He can act fast enough when it’s his own neck that’s in the frying pan, you’d better believe. Well, nice talking to you, Mister. Drive careful and don’t shoot anybody.”

O
SBERT PROMISED TO OBEY
the local ordinances and started his engine. The address Mother Matilda had given him for Quimper Wardle was over in West Lammergen. He didn’t anticipate any trouble finding his way since West Lammergen was mostly just the opposite end of the road that led from Lammergen proper, which happened by a cozy coincidence to be the road he was on at the moment. As for the house he’d been told to look for, that would have been hard to miss. Its entire front yard was filled with life-sized plastic flamingos, aligned in geometrically precise rows, spaced exactly one foot apart from beak to tail and from wing to wing.

Somebody had taken a great deal of trouble over those flamingos. Osbert wondered why. He didn’t dare enter the driveway, which was guarded by a phalanx of mean-looking peach-colored plaster ducks with ferocious orange beaks, but left the car out by the curb and walked up to the door, half-expecting to be met by an emu. Instead, the woman who answered his knock reminded him of a tawny pipit. He couldn’t think why this should be so, he didn’t recall ever having been reminded of a tawny pipit before. Anyway, she greeted him pleasantly enough.

“Good morning. Did you bring my pinwheels?”

“Er—no, I didn’t,” Osbert replied, somewhat nonplussed. “I didn’t know you wanted any.”

“But I ordered them three weeks ago!” she wailed. “I’m desperate for those pinwheels. How do you expect me to finish my magnum opus without them?”

Happily, Osbert was in a position to offer assistance. “When I was in kindergarten, we used to make pinwheels out of colored paper. What you do is, you start with a square and make diagonal cuts at the corners, only you don’t cut all the way to the middle. Then you bend every other corner in toward the middle and stick a pin through to twirl it by and Bob’s your uncle. It’s quite simple, really. If you’d supply a piece of paper, a pair of scissors, and a suitable pin, I could show you in about half a minute. Unless my hand has lost its ancient cunning, that is. I used to be a real whiz at pinwheels when I was five. In fact I was graduated from kindergarten magna cum laude, but my academic career was mostly downhill after that.”

“Oh, I’m sure it wasn’t! Come in, come in. Just thread your way between the frogs and don’t trip over the toadstools. I have some lovely metallic foil with varicolored stripes that will be just the ticket for pinwheels. Better than bought ones, I’ll bet, now that genuine celluloid is not to be had except at fantastic prices and in short supply. Oh, sorry, I should have warned you about the stegosaurus. Don’t you adore his scales? I made them from the lids of cat-food cans.”

The stegosaurus was roughly the size of a cabinet grand piano. Wardle’s landlady must have a great many cats, Osbert thought. It occurred to him that he’d somehow got beguiled from his original purpose in coming to West Lammergen.

“Perhaps I should explain,” he began as he seated himself at a professional-sized drafting table and measured a precise eight-inch square from a sheet of iridescent peacock-blue foil with squiggly trails of gold, silver, scarlet, and emerald running through it, “that I didn’t come here about pinwheels. Though I have to say this one appears to be coming out quite nicely considering how long it’s been since—the pin, please. Ah, thank you. See, that’s how it’s done. You can make them however big-or small you want to. I just happen to believe eight inches is the optimum diameter for a paper pinwheel.”

He blew on his creation. It spun like anything. The landlady was jubilant.

“You’ve opened my eyes to a whole new avenue of self-expression. I can see myriads of pinwheels, galaxies of pinwheels, infinities of pinwheels! How can I ever thank you?”

“You might show me Quimper Wardle’s room,” Osbert replied at once.

“But Mr. Wardle’s not in it.”

“So I’ve been informed. What I’m trying to find out is, where did he go? Perhaps I ought to explain that I’m here on behalf of Mr. Wardle’s employer. Mother Matilda’s getting quite worried about him.”

The landlady giggled. “What’s a mother for? Come to think of it, though, I expect I ought to be worrying, too. Mr. Wardle’s rent is due tomorrow and I need the money to pay for the bow ties.”

“Bow ties?” said Osbert. “I thought it was pinwheels.”

“Pinwheels too, but the bow ties are another of my top priorities. They’re to put on the flamingos,” she explained. “You know, the kind that come pre-tied and hook on with an elastic band. I’m making a statement about conformity.”

“For or against?”

“That’s for the viewer to decide. I’m an artist, not a preacher.”

“And your medium is flamingos?” Osbert was still gamely trying to keep the facts in order.

“My medium,” the landlady stated rather grandly, “is kitsch.”

“Kitsch? You mean like—well, big green frogs with holes in their backs?”

“Precisely. If it’s tacky, if it’s garish, if it’s so cloyingly cute and whimsical it makes you long for a shot of insulin, then it sets my creative juices pumping ta-pocketa-pocketa-pocketa like the mad scientist’s chemistry tubes in the old horror movies. I can’t help it, that’s just the way I am. Actually, those flamingos by themselves are somewhat too tasteful and conservative for me, but using them in a massed arrangement does tend to lift them out of the prosaic and mundane, don’t you think? And the bow ties will make all the difference. But you say you’re anxious to get hold of Quimper Wardle. Whatever for?”

“He’s needed back at the mincemeat factory,” Osbert improvised. “They’re running out of orange peel. And since you’ve intimated that you’re about to run out of rent money …”

“A point well taken. Come along then. I’m Mrs. Phiffer, by the way. Perhaps you’ve heard of me?”

“Oh yes.” Osbert was too busy picking his way through a minefield of pots filled with plants made principally of scrubbing brushes and mousetraps to add that he’d first heard of her only a short while ago from Mother Matilda, which was probably just as well. “My name is Monk. Reginald Monk, not to be confused with my brother Osbert. I’m sort of a temporary personnel assistant just now. These plants are quite—er—evocative.”

“Oh, do you think so?” Mrs. Phiffer made a moue of disappointment. “They’re intended to induce a mood of utter boredom.”

“That’s just what they evoke,” Osbert hastened to reassure her. “What I meant to say was they bore me stiff. Honestly, I’ve never been more bored by anything in my whole life. Even my—er—brother’s mother-in-law would be bored by them, and she’s not a person who bores easily, I’m here to tell you. Is this Mr. Wardle’s room?”

“This is it. I had a lovely flibbertigibbet made out of old bathmats and toothpaste tubes hanging on the door, but Mr. Wardle didn’t seem to think it was in keeping with the dignity of his position, so I had to take it down. I suppose what you want is to look around for clues and all that sort of thing. Letters from sinister foreigners saying ‘Fly at once, all is discovered.’ Or from his girlfriend saying ‘Come at once or I’ll elope with the undertaker’s assistant.’ ”

“Precisely,” said Osbert. “It’s not as if I were just trying to snoop, you know, it’s for Wardle’s own good. Mother Matilda’s threatening to tie a can to him if he doesn’t get back to work pretty darned soon.”

“I’m none too keen on Mr. Wardle’s missing his payday, myself,” Mrs. Phiffer confessed, “nor do I care whether you snoop or not. We free spirits are above petty conventions. In fact, I used to do quite a lot of snooping myself, back when I was making the stegosaurus. What else was there to do? I kept running out of cat-food lids and had to hang around waiting for the neighbors’ cats to get hungry again. That was a heartbreaker, I can tell you, walking down the street and having to watch all those inconsiderate felidae lolling around on their porch steps burping and washing their whiskers or else slinking around the fields after poor, innocent little cutesy-pootsy mice when they might have been scoffing up another round of pussy goo. I’ll leave you to your snooping, then. I’m simply bursting to go make a pinwheel and see how it feels!”

Off she ran, merry as a pipit. Osbert supposed it was something to have been able to bring a ray of sunshine into this woman’s kitsch-crammed life, though he didn’t like to think what might come of the pinwheels. He put on the gloves he’d brought to avoid leaving fingerprints, although he felt awfully overdressed in them and they did make it awkward trying to rifle drawers and handle such correspondence as there was, which was not a great deal and most of that addressed only to Occupant.

In fact the scope for searching was far less than he could have wished. The room was not large and either Wardle had taken some of his possessions away with him or else he hadn’t brought many in the first place.

The missing peel buyer’s wardrobe was of good quality but hardly lavish: two suits—one gray worsted, one brown tweed—three sets of underwear, three shirts fresh from the laundry, two that needed to go, and a smallish pile of socks Osbert didn’t bother to inventory. Wardle might of course have taken a packed suitcase with him, though an empty suitcase and a small carry-on bag were sitting in the closet.

If he’d gone away of his own volition, though, Osbert thought it rather odd that Quimper Wardle hadn’t taken his razor, his toothbrush, or, most inscrutably, his bridgework. A contraption of wire and steel with a bicuspid, a canine, and an incisor attached was lying on the nightstand beside the narrow bed, where a drowsy peel buyer might naturally park it before drifting off to dreamland. That Wardle had not resumed his portable dentition on rising suggested to Osbert that either Mrs. Phiffer’s boarder was in a hurry, that he was awfully absentminded, or that he hadn’t been planning to chew anything.

Perhaps he hadn’t been able to take the time. Here were Wardle’s pajamas, thrown down in a heap although he appeared to be neat in his habits by and large. Here was a small hole in the pajama coat where a button should have been, and here under the dresser was the button. The fragment of cloth still caught in the threads suggested that the button had not fallen but had been wrenched off, either by a frantically hurrying Wardle or by a ruder hand.

Here also was a section of broken-off brown shoelace approximately five inches long, but where was the brown shoe it came from? A pair of well-polished black shoes sat in the closet, a pair of calfskin slippers lay under the bed along with a great many dust kittens. Perhaps Mrs. Phiffer was saving them to do something creative with. But nowhere could Osbert find a single brown oxford, much less a pair. Was it possible that a sober, respectable Englishman who wouldn’t say boo to a goose had of his own volition put on a shoe that was incapable of being properly tied and walked out into the night? Where to, for Pete’s sake?