The Weekend Was Murder (13 page)

“Since … since Fran and I found the body.”

“So you could have had it
before
Devane was murdered.”

“No!” I said. “Mrs. Duffy gave it to me and asked me to get her notebook from the scene of the crime. I didn’t want to go into that haunted place all by myself, so Fran went with me.”

He thought a moment and relaxed, so I guessed he was satisfied, but he mumbled, “Are you sure you aren’t the one who’s haunting it?”

With all our conversation about that key, I should have immediately given it to him, but I was so nervous about going into that suite that I absentmindedly took the key from the door and dropped it back into my pocket.

The room was so cold that Detective Jarvis fumbled with the air conditioner controls. “Sit down, Liz,” he said. “I’m going to call Mrs. Duffy.”

I perched on the edge of one of the big sofas, listening for whispers, but the room was silent.

Detective Jarvis picked up the phone and asked the operator to connect him with Mrs. Duffy’s room. It took less than a minute to reach her, and she must have agreed to come to room nineteen twenty-seven, because he thanked her and hung up the phone.

Jarvis came over to sit beside me. “The operator asked me to tell you, if I saw you, that your mother telephoned and is trying to reach you. Better call home.”

I ran for the phone and dialed. Was someone sick? What had happened?

Mom answered on the first ring. “Sweetheart,” she said, “how are you?”

“I’m fine, Mom,” I told her. “What’s the matter? What happened?”

“Nothing happened here,” she said, “but we read in the morning newspaper about that savings-and-loan owner getting killed at the Ridley Hotel. Mary Elizabeth, that doesn’t have anything to do with your group, does it?”

“Mom, ours is a make-believe murder to solve.”

“But they said the murder took place in your mystery weekend’s scene of the crime.”

“Kind of a coincidence,” I answered.

“You’re sure you’re not involved?”

“Mom,” I said, “I’m not a little kid. You don’t need to check up on me all the time.”

Indignation crept into her voice. “I don’t check up on you all the time!”

“What are you doing now, Mom?”

“This is different,” she said.

“Okay,” I said. “Just don’t ask me lots of questions.”

“Fine,” she said. “We’ll just have a friendly chat.” There was only a brief pause before she asked, “Tell me, do you have a nice room? Did you sleep well?”

“Mom—” I began.

Her pace quickened. “Are you eating properly? Balanced meals? You did have salad or vegetables for dinner, didn’t you?”

There was a knock on the door, and Jarvis answered it, ushering in Mrs. Duffy.

“Living on junk food will only cause problems—”

“Mom,” I mumbled into the phone. “Stop worrying about me. I’m a big girl. Anyhow, I can’t talk any longer. I’m working.”

“I thought you didn’t have to work at the club today,” she said.

“I’m working to help people solve a murder,” I said.

“Oh,” she said, and chuckled. “Of course. That’s right. The murder-mystery weekend. Well, have fun, dear.”

“I will,” I said.

“And be sure not to stay up too late and—”

“Good-bye, Mom,” I said, and quickly hung up the receiver.

Mrs. Duffy raised one eyebrow as she greeted me. “Detective Jarvis has told me what happened,” she said. “I’ll have to think of something to cover it.”

“It should be easy,” I suggested. “I came up here with Tina Martinez—she’s with security—to check out
this room because there was a complaint about loud noise and music. That’s because of the ghost, you know. Anyway, I picked up the paperweight to see if it really was bronze, and I touched a couple of the other things. That’s the truth. That’s what happened.”

“But we’re dealing with fiction, not truth,” Mrs. Duffy said. “You wouldn’t have been able to check out the scene of the crime
before
the murder took place.”

“Ooops!” I said.

“Ooops is right,” she told me.

Detective Jarvis and I sat quietly for a moment while Mrs. Duffy wrinkled her forehead and made little mumbling noises as though she were talking to herself. Finally she opened her eyes, smiled, and said, “This is how it happened, Mary Elizabeth. As we informed the mystery sleuths, you came to Edgar Albert Pitts’s room, at his request, to bring him the script he had left in the health club. You found his door ajar, and when no one answered your call, you walked into his room and discovered the body. So this is what we’ll add: The paperweight was lying beside Pitts’s body, and you picked it up and looked at it, noticing the blood. Naturally, you immediately dropped it and ran from the room.”

I couldn’t help groaning. “That’s the way it always happens in detective shows on television. I
hate
it when someone finds a body and picks up the weapon. It makes them look so dumb! Nobody with any sense at all would pick up the murder weapon!”

Mrs. Duffy sighed. “I’m sorry, Liz, but I can’t think of any other explanation. Can you?”

I thought hard for a couple of minutes. I really did.
Then I had to give up and admit, “I guess there isn’t any other reason for my picking up the paperweight.”

“Will you go along with the change of script?” she asked.

“I don’t have any other choice,” I said.

I must have sounded awfully gloomy, because Mrs. Duffy said, “Mary Elizabeth, I have another idea. After the arrest scene, which takes place after the brunch tomorrow morning, Eileen will introduce the actors. I’ll ask her to include you, and we can make a point of telling the audience that we had you play your part under your own name in an attempt to mislead and confuse them.”

I had to smile. “Won’t all those sleuths get angry if you say you were trying to mislead and confuse them?”

“Of course not,” Mrs. Duffy said. “That’s why people read mystery novels, to get misled and confused.” She turned to Detective Jarvis, and her smile broadened. “Do you ever bring your wife to these things?” she asked.

His jaw dropped open for a second. “These things?” he repeated. “Mrs. Duffy, I’m investigating a murder.”

“Oh yes,” she said. “I’m getting my make-believe murder and the real murder all mixed up.”

He paused a moment and said pointedly, “I’m not married.”

It didn’t take much of a detective to figure out what Mrs. Duffy was getting at. So … Eileen Duffy was interested in Detective Jarvis and must have talked him over with her mother. And Jarvis must be somewhat interested in Eileen to have answered the question.

As Mrs. Duffy smiled sweetly at him, Detective Jarvis’s face began to turn red. To cover his embarrassment he abruptly reached into his jacket pocket for his pen, but his hand came out with both the pen and a strip of bent, dark cardboard. He turned the cardboard over, studying it as though wondering where it came from.

“Detective Jarvis!” I nearly shouted as the idea bounced into my brain. “Isn’t that the piece of cardboard that Mr. Walters—uh—Burns said was wedged under the door to this suite, holding it open?”

“Yes,” he said. “It is.”

“Don’t you know what that is?” I asked him. “It’s the kind of cardboard under a candy bar, inside the wrapper.”

He sniffed it and nodded. “That’s why I’ve been smelling chocolate all morning.”

I clapped my hands together. “It’s a clue!” I yelled. “Remember Mr. Yamoto? He constantly eats candy bars!”

“You think Mr. Yamoto used this?” Detective Jarvis asked.

“Yes!” I said.

But Mrs. Duffy took it from Detective Jarvis’s fingers, sniffed it, and shook her head. “It’s a clue, all right, but it doesn’t lead to Mr. whoever you said. It’s one of the clues for our mystery-weekend scene of the crime. It was inside a candy-bar wrapper I had placed in the wastepaper basket by the desk. I retrieved the wrapper from those people from the crime lab, but it just occurs to me that when I laid out the clues again in room nineteen twenty-five and put the candy wrapper in the
wastebasket, that the little piece of cardboard was missing. It wasn’t that important, so I didn’t think anything of it.”

I slumped into a chair. So much for that good clue. We weren’t any closer to the answer of who killed Frank Devane.

“Tell me about these clues you set up at the crime scene,” Jarvis asked Mrs. Duffy as he took the small piece of cardboard from her hand and put it back into his pocket. “It looks as if part of this clue has become one of the clues in the Devane murder.”

“How?” I asked.

“The murderer used this to prop open the door—I suspect in order to have the body discovered as soon as possible,” he answered. “Maybe there are more of Mrs. Duffy’s clues that might tie in.”

“There’s something else we have to know,” I said. “What was Mr. Devane doing in the room after the scene had been shut off to visitors?”

“For that matter, why did the murderer choose this room?” Jarvis asked in turn.

“Maybe he was going to meet someone, and he wanted a
very
private place—a place where no one would interrupt him, and he knew no one would come to this room.”

“The perp,” Mrs. Duffy said.

“Perp what?” I asked.

“The police call people who commit crimes
perps
,” she said. “That stands for
perpetrator
.”

“Unless we’re talking to civilians, who wouldn’t know what we meant,” Detective Jarvis explained.

“But
I
know,” Mrs. Duffy said. “I have to know these things in order to make my mysteries authentic.” She smiled charmingly. “You asked about the clues I work out for the scene of the crime. As you well know, a murderer always takes something away from the scene and leaves something behind.”

“You mean he leaves the murder weapon and then steals something?” I asked.

“No, it’s usually something he’s not even aware of. He may leave a personal item that relates directly to him, or it may be a blade of grass or some dirt from his shoes. The things I leave at the scene aren’t that hard to spot. Some of them give extra information about the suspects. For example, the business card for Arthur Butler. The sleuths discover, through that card, that he writes plays. Some clues simply place a suspect on the scene. Others tell us where he’s been. Occasionally, I use a match cover from another city to give that clue. And once in a while I have a cigarette stubbed out so hard in an ashtray that it’s torn to shreds.” She looked very pleased with herself as she added, “Did you know that points to a
very
disturbed person—someone who could be so upset he might kill?”

“No,” I said, but Detective Jarvis pursed his lips and nodded, looking at Mrs. Duffy with surprise.

“What about the murder weapon for Edgar Albert Pitts?” I asked. “Was that in the room too?”

“I’m afraid so,” she answered. “When I came to scout out the hotel a few weeks ago, I took note of those heavy bronze paperweights that are in each of the suites and decided to use one of them as the weapon.”

The telephone on the desk rang, and it startled me so much that I jumped. Since I was closest, I answered and handed it to Mrs. Duffy, then moved to one of the sofas so that I’d be out of her way.

Mrs. Duffy put down the receiver and said, “They’re going to begin another meeting with the detective in ten minutes. Eileen wants me down there right away with the new information about Mary Elizabeth.”

As she went through the door I caught a glimpse of some of the sleuths, who were probably leaving Edgar Albert Pitts’s scene of the crime.

One of them saw me. “It’s that girl from the health club!” she shouted.

“What’s she doing in there?”

“I don’t know. Let’s find out.”

As Mrs. Duffy firmly pulled the door shut behind her, Detective Jarvis looked at his wristwatch and said, “Time for me to go too. I’ve got an appointment to talk with Mr. Yamoto.”

I got to my feet as he did, but he waved me back. “This is private, Liz.”

“I wasn’t going with you. I just want to find Fran.”

“Find him in ten minutes, after that detective meeting gets underway and those people in the hall are out of here,” he said.

“Can’t you take me through them?”

“I don’t have time.”

“You mean I have to stay here?”

“That’s exactly what I mean. Ten minutes at least. We don’t want any more misinformation. Let Eileen—uh—Detective Sharp—have the chance to give her mystery
fans the information her mother worked out, so she can resolve the problem about your fingerprints on the paperweight.”

I sat down again. I had to. My legs wouldn’t hold me up. “How can I stay in this suite with a ghost for a whole, long, ten minutes?” I asked, but Jarvis wasn’t sympathetic.

“Surely, you don’t believe in ghosts,” he said.

Detective Jarvis was a big man, so he couldn’t open the door just a crack to get through. As he walked into the hallway, the sleuths who had crowded around the door pushed forward, one of them trying to squeeze past him.

“Move back,” Jarvis ordered, but I heard their squeals and squeezed my eyes shut tightly.

“That girl from the health club—is she under arrest?”

“Is it true they found her fingerprints on the murder victim’s neck?”

“Does she have a record?”

“Is she a member of the Mafia?”

“Has she ever lived in Brazil?”

“Does she like chocolate?”

Detective Jarvis’s voice boomed out as the door shut. “Detective Sharp has called a meeting downstairs in the ballroom, and you’re all going to miss it! Get out of here!”

The noises ceased, and I leaned back in the sofa, resting my head against its comfortable cushions. I opened my eyes to look at my watch, but from the corner of my eye I caught a slight movement. I jerked
to attention, ready to run, but the man who sat on the chair at the desk looked so mournful that instead of being afraid of him, I felt sorry for him. I did wonder, though, how he’d managed to sneak past Detective Jarvis.

The man was neatly dressed in a sport shirt and slacks, and I guessed he was probably somewhere in his late twenties or early thirties. He wasn’t looking at me. He just sat with his elbows on his knees, his clasped hands propping up his chin, and his gaze was fixed on the spot where the real murder had taken place.