The Westing Game (11 page)

“Would you prefer to sit alone or with that young lady over there?”

“I thought I was going to sit with you.”

“Please be seated,” Grace replied. “Jimmy, I mean Mr. Hoo, will take your order shortly.”

Jake snatched the menu from his wife and watched her glide (gracefully, he had to admit) to the reservations desk and whisper in Hoo’s ear. (Jimmy, she calls him.) “That’s a fine kettle of fish,” he exclaimed, then turned to his dinner companion. “Fine kettle of fish. I’m so hungry even that sounds good, and from the looks of this menu that’s probably what I’ll get.”

“I’m okay,” Turtle replied, the final prices of actively traded stocks rumbling in her ear.

Mr. Hoo waddled over. “I recommend the striped bass.”

“See, what did I tell you, a kettle of fish.”

Turtle switched off the radio. She had heard enough bad news for one day.

“How about spareribs done to a crisp,” Hoo suggested; then he lowered his voice. “What’s the point spread on the Packers game?”

“See me later,” Jake muttered.

“Go ahead and tell him, Daddy,” Turtle said. “I know you’re a bookie.”

 

 

“Can you stand on your legs?” Sydelle Pulaski asked. “Can you walk at all?”

People never asked Chris those questions; they whispered them to his parents behind his back. “N-n-no. Why?”

“What better disguise for a thief or a murderer than a wheelchair, the perfect alibi.”

Chris enjoyed being taken for the criminal type. Now they really were friends. “When you ree m-m-me nos?”

“What? Oh, read you my notes. Soon, very soon.” Sydelle daintily touched the corners of her mouth with the napkin, pushed back her chair, and grabbed her polka-dot crutch. “That was a superb meal, I must give my compliments to the chef.” She rose, knocking the chair to the floor, and clumped toward the kitchen door.

“Where is she going?” Angela, starting up to help her partner, was distracted by shouting in the corridor.

“Hello in there, anybody home?” Through the restaurant door came a bundled and booted figure. He danced an elephantine jig, stomping snow on the carpet, flung a long woolen scarf from his neck, and yelled, “Otis Amber is here, the roads are clear!”

That’s when the bomb went off.

 

 

“Nobody move! Everybody stay where you are,” Mr. Hoo shouted as he rushed into the sizzling, crackling kitchen.

“Just a little mishap,” Grace Wexler explained, taking her command post in the middle of the restaurant. “Nothing to worry about. Eat up before your food gets cold.”

A cluster of red sparks hissed through the swinging kitchen door, kissed the ceiling, and rained a shimmering shower down and around the petrified hostess. Fireflies of color faded into her honey-blonde hair and scattered into ash at her feet. “Nothing to worry about,” she repeated hoarsely.

“Just celebrating the Chinese New Year,” Otis Amber shouted, adding one of his he-he-he cackles.

Mr. Hoo leaned through the kitchen doorway, his shiny straight black hair (even shinier and straighter) plastered to his forehead, water dribbling down his moon-shaped face. “Call an ambulance, there’s been a slight accident.”

Angela dashed past Mr. Hoo into the kitchen. Jake Wexler made the emergency telephone call and sent Theo to the lobby to direct the ambulance attendants.

“Why are you standing there like a statue,” Hoo shouted at his son.

“You told everybody to stay where they were,” Doug said.

“You’re not everybody!”

Madame Hoo tried to make the injured woman as comfortable as possible on the debris-strewn floor. Angela found the sequined spectacles, wiped off the wet, crystalline mess, and placed them on her partner’s nose.

“Don’t look so worried, Angela. I’m all right.” Sydelle was in pain, but she wanted attention on her own terms, not as a hapless, foolish victim of fate.

“Looks like a fracture,” an ambulance attendant said, feeling her right ankle. “Careful how you lift her.”

The secretary suppressed a grunt. It was bad enough being drenched by the overhead sprinkler and draped with noodles; now they were carrying her right past them all.

Grace pulled Angela away from the stretcher. “You can visit your friend in a few days.”

“Angela, Angela,” Sydelle moaned. Pride or not, she wanted her partner at her side.

Angela stood between her determined mother and her distraught partner, paralyzed by the burden of choice.

“Go with your friend, Angie-pie,” Jake Wexler said. Other voices chimed in. “Go with Pulaski.”

Grace realized she had lost. “Perhaps you should go to the hospital, Angela; it’s been so long since you’ve seen your Doctor D.” She winked mischievously, but only Flora Baumbach smiled back.

 

 

The policeman and the fire inspector visiting the scene agreed that it was nothing more than a gas explosion. Good thing the sprinkler system worked or Mr. Hoo might have had a good fire.

“What kind of a fire is a good fire,” Hoo wanted to know.

“And what about the burglaries?” Grace Wexler asked.

“I’m with the bomb squad,” the policeman explained. “You’ll have to call the robbery detail for that.”

“And what about the coffee shop accident?” Theo asked.

“Also a gas explosion.”

Jake Wexler asked about the odds of having two explosions in two days in the same building.

“Nothing unusual,” the fireman replied, “especially in weather like this, no ventilation, snow packed over the ducts.” He instructed the tenants to air out their kitchens before lighting ovens.

Mrs. Wexler turned up the heat in her apartment and kept the windows open for the next three days. She did not want anything blowing up during Angela’s party.

But the Wexler apartment was exactly where the bomber planned to set the next bomb.

THE SNOWPLOWS PLOWED and a warm sun finished the job of freeing the tenants of Sunset Towers (and the figure in the Westing house) from their wintry prisons.

Angela, disguised in her mother’s old beaver coat and hat and in Turtle’s red boots, was the first one out. Following Sydelle’s instructions she hastily searched under the hood of every car in the parking lot. Nothing was there (nothing, that is, that didn’t seem to belong to an automobile engine). So much for
Good gracious from hood space.

Next came Flora Baumbach. Behind her a bootless Turtle tiptoed through puddles. Miracle of miracles: the rusty and battered Chevy started, but the dressmaker’s luck went downhill from there. First, the hood of her car flew up in the middle of traffic. Then, after two hours of watching mysterious symbols move across the lighted panel high on the wall of the broker’s office, her eyes began to cross. After three hours the grin faded from her face. “I’m getting dizzy,” she said, shifting her position on the hard wooden folding chair, “and worse yet, I think I’ve got a splinter in my fanny.”

“Look, there goes one of our stocks,” Turtle replied.

Flora Baumbach caught a glimpse of SEA 5$8½ as it was about to magically disappear off the left edge of the moving screen. “Oh my, I’ve forgotten what that means.”

Turtle sighed. “It means five hundred shares of SEA was traded at $8.50 a share.”

“What did we pay?”

“Never mind, just write down the prices of our stocks as they cross the tape like I’m doing. Once school opens it’s all up to you.” Turtle did not tell her partner that they had bought two hundred shares of SEA at $15.25 a share. On that stock alone they had a loss of $1,350, not counting commissions. It took nerves of steel to play the stock market.

 

 

“The Mercedes is wiped clean and shiny like new,” the doorman boasted. His face reddened around old scars as he rejected a folded five-dollar bill. “No tips, Judge, please, not after all you’ve done for the wife and me.” The judge had given him the entire ten thousand dollars.

J. J. Ford pocketed the bill and, to make amends for her thoughtless gesture, asked the doorman about his family.

Sandy perched on the edge of a straight-backed chair, adjusted his round wire-framed glasses, repaired at the bridge with adhesive tape, across his broken nose, and told about his children. “Two boys still in high school, one daughter married and expecting my third grandchild (her husband just lost his job so they all moved in with us), another daughter who works part-time as a typist (she plays the piano real good), and two sons who work in a brewery.”

“It must have been difficult supporting such a large family,” the judge said.

“Not so bad. I picked up odd jobs here and there after I got fired from the Westing plant for trying to organize the union, but mostly I boxed. I wasn’t no middleweight contender, but I wasn’t bad, either. Got my face smashed up a few times too many, though; still get some pretty bad headaches and my brain gets sort of fuzzy. Some dummy of a partner you got stuck with, huh, Judge?”

“We’ll do just fine, partner.” Judge Ford’s attempt at familiarity fell flat. “I did try to phone you, but your name was not listed.”

“We don’t have a phone no more; couldn’t afford it with the kids making so many calls. But I did make some headway on our clues. Want to see?” Sandy removed a paper from the inside of his cap and placed it on the desk. Judge Ford noticed a flask protruding from the back pocket of his uniform, but his breath smelled of peppermint.

“Remarkable,” the judge commented to Sandy’s delight.

“However, we are looking for one name, not six.”

“Gee, Judge, I forgot,” Sandy said dejectedly.

Judge Ford told him about Theo’s proposal, but Sandy refused to go along. “It seems too easy, the clues adding up to one message, especially for a shrewd guy like Westing. Let’s stick it out together, just the two of us. After all, I got me the smartest partner of them all.”

Shallow flattery for the big tipper, the judge thought. McSouthers was not a stupid man; if only he was less obsequious—and less of a gossip.

The doorman scratched his head. “What I can’t figure out, Judge, is why I’m one of the heirs. Unless Sam Westing just up and died, and there is no murderer. Unless Sam Westing is out to get somebody from his grave.”

“I agree with you entirely, Mr. McSouthers. What we have to find out is who these sixteen heirs are, and which one, as you say, was Westing ‘out to get.’”

Sandy beamed. They were going to play it his way.

 

 

“What you need is an advertising campaign.”

“What I need is my half of the ten thousand dollars.”

“Five thousand dollars is what I estimate the redecorating and the newspaper ads will cost.”

“Get out of here, get out!”

Grace stared at Hoo’s smooth, broad face, at the devilish tufts of eyebrow so high above those flashing eyes, then she turned her back and walked out. Sometimes she wondered about that man—no, he couldn’t be the murderer, he couldn’t even kill the waterbug in the sink this morning. Grace spun around to see if she was being followed on the footstep-hushing carpet in the third-floor hall. No one was there, but she heard voices. They were coming from her kitchen. It was nothing, just Otis Amber shouting at Crow, something about losing their clues.

“I remember them, Otis,” Crow replied in a soft voice. She felt strangely at peace. Just this morning she had been given the chance to hide her love in Angela’s bag, the big tapestry shoulder bag she carries next to her heart. Now she must pray that the boy comes back.

“I remember them, too, that’s not the point,” Otis Amber argued. “What if somebody else finds them? Crow? Are you listening to me, Crow?”

No, but Grace Wexler was listening. “Really, Mr. Amber, can’t you find another time to discuss your affairs with my cleaning woman. And where are you going, Crow?”

Crow was buttoned up in a black moth-eaten winter coat; a black shawl covered her head.

“It’s freezing in here.” Otis Amber shut the window.

Grace opened the window. “The last thing I need is a gas explosion,” she said peevishly.

“Boom!” he replied. The two women were so startled that the delivery boy sneaked up on the unsuspecting for the rest of the week, shouting “Boom!”

Besides shouting “Boom!” Otis Amber delivered groceries from the shopping center to Sunset Towers, back and forth, to and fro. Not only did the tenants have to restock their bare shelves, they had to add Westing Paper Products by the gross to their orders. “Idiots, just because the will said
Buy Westing Paper Products,
” he muttered, hefting a bulky bag from the compartment attached to his bike. Even Crow was using Westing Disposable Diapers to polish the silver and Westing Paper Towels to scrub the floors. (Is that what happened to their clues?) Poor Crow, she’s taking this game harder than he had expected. She’s been acting strange again.