The Westing Game (6 page)

 

 

Once again Edgar Jennings Plum cleared his throat.

“Nasal drip,” Denton Deere whispered, confiding the latest diagnosis to his partner. Chris giggled. What’s the crippled kid so happy about, the intern wondered.

A piercing shriek suddenly reminded the Westing heirs of murder. While passing out the checks, the lawyer had stepped on Crow’s sore foot.

“Is this legal, Judge?” Sandy asked.

“It is not only legal, Mr. McSouthers,” Judge Ford replied, signing her name to the check and handing it to the doorman, “it is a shrewd way to keep everyone playing the game.”

Placing the last of the envelopes on table eight, the young lawyer smiled at Angela. Sydelle Pulaski smiled back.

“This makes no sense,” Denton Deere complained. Four clues typed on cut squares of Westing Superstrength Paper Towels lay on the table before him.

Arms and elbows at odds, with fingers fanned, Chris tried to rearrange the words in some grammatical, if not logical, order.

“Hey, watch it!” the intern shouted, as one clue wafted to the floor.

Flora Baumbach leaped from her chair at the next table, picked up the square of paper, and set it face down before the trembling youngster. “I didn’t see it,” she announced loudly. “I really didn’t see it,” she repeated under the questioning gaze of her partner, Turtle Wexler,
witch.

The word she had seen was
plain.

The players protected their clues more carefully now. Hunched over the tables, they moved the paper squares this way and that way, mumbling and grumbling. The murderer’s name must be there, somewhere.

Only one pair had not yet seen their clues. At table eight Sydelle Pulaski placed one hand on the envelope, raised a finger to her lips, and tilted her head toward the other heirs. Just watch and listen, she meant.

She may be odd, but she’s smart, Angela thought. Since each pair had a different set of clues, they would watch and listen for clues to their clues.

 

 

“He-he-he.” The delivery boy slapped his partner on the back. “That’s us, old pal: Queen Crow and King Amber.”

“What’s this:
on
or
no
?” Doug Hoo turned a clue upside down, then right side up again.

Theo jabbed an elbow in his ribs and turned to see if anyone had heard. Angela lowered her eyes in time.

J. J. Ford crumpled the clues in her fist and rose in anger. “I’m sorry, Mr. McSouthers. Playing a pawn in this foolish game is one thing, but to be insulted with minstrel show dialect . . .”

“Please, Judge, please don’t quit on me,” Sandy pleaded. “I’d have to give back all that money; it would break my wife’s heart. And my poor kids. . . .”

Judge Ford regarded the desperate doorman without pity. So many had begged before her bench.

“Please, Judge. I lost my job, my pension. I can’t fight no more. Don’t quit just because of some nonsensical words.”

Sticks and stones can break my bones, but words will never hurt me, she had chanted as a child. Words did hurt, but she was no longer a child. Nor a hanging judge. And there was always the chance . . . “All right, Mr. McSouthers, I’ll stay.” J. J. Ford sat down, her eyes sparking with wickedness. “And we’ll play the game just as Sam Westing would have played it. Mean!”

Flora Baumbach squeezed her eyes together and screwed up her face. She was concentrating.

“Haven’t you memorized them yet?” Turtle didn’t like the way Otis Amber’s scrawny neck was swiveling high out of his collar. And what was Angela staring at?

“Yes, I think so,” the dressmaker replied, “but I can’t make heads or tails of them.”

“They make perfect sense to me,” Turtle said. One by one she put the clues in her mouth, chewed, and swallowed them.

 

 

“Gibberish,” Mr. Hoo muttered.

Grace Windsor Wexler agreed. “Excuse me, Mr. Plum, but what are these clues clues to? I mean, exactly what are we supposed to find?”

“Purple waves,” Sandy joked with a wink at Turtle.

Mrs. Wexler uttered a cry of recognition and changed the order of two of her clues.

“It’s still gibberish,” Mr. Hoo complained.

Other players pressed the lawyer for more information. Ed Plum only shrugged.

“Then could you please give us copies of the will?”

“A copy will be on file . . .” Judge Ford began.

“I’m afraid not, Your Honor,” the lawyer said. “The will not, I mean the will will will . . .” He paused and tried again. “The will will not be filed until the first of the year. My instructions specifically state that no heir is allowed to see any of the documents until the game is over.”

No copy? That’s not fair. But wait, they did have a copy. A shorthand copy!

Sydelle Pulaski had plenty of attention now. She smiled back at the friendly faces, revealing a lipstick stain on her front teeth.

“Isn’t there some sort of a last statement?” Sandy asked Plum. “I mean, like the intern says, nothing makes any sense.”

DURING THE NIGHT Flora Baumbach’s itsy-bitsy snowflings raged into a blizzard. The tenants of Sunset Towers awoke from clue-chasing, blood-dripping dreams, bound in twisted sheets and imprisoned by fifteen-foot snow-drifts.

No telephones. No electricity.

Snowbound with a murderer!

The slow procession looked like some ancient, mysterious rite as partner sought out partner on the windowless stairs, and silent pairs threaded through the corridors in the flickering light of crooked, color-striped candles (the product of Turtle’s stint at summer camp).

“These handmade candles are both practical and romantic,” she said, peddling her wares from apartment door to apartment door to frightened tenants at seven in the morning. (Oh, it’s only Turtle.) “And the colored stripes tell time, which is very handy if your electric clock stopped. Each stripe burns exactly one-half hour, more or less. Twelve stripes, six hours.”

“How much?”

“Not wishing to take advantage of this emergency, I’ve reduced the price to only five dollars each.”

Outrageous. Even more so when the electricity came on two hours after her last sale. “Sorry, no refunds,” Turtle said.

No matter. What was five dollars to heirs of an estate worth two hundred million? Clues, they had to work on those clues. Behind closed doors. Whisper, someone may be listening.

Not all the heirs were huddled in plotting, puzzle-solving pairs. Jake Wexler had retreated to his office after a long and loud argument with his wife. He sure could have used half of that ten thousand dollars, but he wouldn’t admit it, not to her. The forfeited money upset her more than the murder of her uncle, if he was her uncle.

Five floors above, Jake’s partner stood before the restaurant’s front window staring at the froth on the angry lake, and beyond. No one had bothered to tell Madame Hoo about the Westing game.

Other players were snowbound elsewhere: Denton Deere in the hospital, Sandy at home. No one gave a thought to where Otis Amber or Crow might be.

But Sydelle Pulaski was there, thumping her crutch against the baseboards as she limped through the carpeted halls on the arm of her pretty partner. Not one, but seven tenants had invited her to morning coffee or afternoon tea (murderer or not, they had to see Pulaski’s copy of that will).

“Three lumps, please. Angela drinks it black.” Your health? “Thank the lord I’m still able to hobble about.” Your job? “I was private secretary to the president of Schultz Sausages. Poor Mr. Schultz, I don’t know how he’ll manage without me.” Your shorthand notes? “Thank you for the refreshments. I must hurry back for my medication. Come, Angela.”

 

 

One heir had not invited them in, but that didn’t stop Sydelle Pulaski from barging into apartment 2D. “Hi, Chris. Just thought we’d pop in to see how you’re doing. Don’t be scared. I’m not the murderer, Angela is not the murderer, and we don’t think you are the murderer. Mind if I sit down?” The secretary toppled into a chair next to the invalid before he could reply. “Here, I stole a macaroon for you. It’s so sticky you’ll be tasting it all day; I must have six strands of coconut between my upper molars.” Chris took the cookie. “Just look at that smile, it could break your heart.”

Angela wished her partner had not said that; it seemed so insensitive, so crude. But at least Sydelle was talking to him, which was more than she was able to do. Angela, the fortunate one, standing like a dummy. “Um, I know Denton wants to work on the clues with you. He’s snowbound, too.”

“You ver-r pred-dy.” How did “pretty” come out? He meant to say “nice.” Chris bent his curly head over the geography book in his lap. She wasn’t laughing at him. It was all right to ask her because she was going to marry his partner. “Wha ar-r g-gra annz?”

Angela did not understand.

Chris fanned the pages of the book to a picture of a wheat field. “G-gra-annz.”

“Oh, grains. You want to know the names of some grains. Let’s see, there’s wheat, rye, corn, barley, oats.”

“O-ohss!” Angela thought the boy was going into a fit, but he was only repeating her last word: oats.

Sydelle was puffing her warm breath on the window and wiping a frosted area clean with her sleeve. “There, now you’ll be able to watch the birds again. Anything else we can do for you, young man?”

Chris nodded. “Read m-me short-han n-noos.”

The pretty lady and the funny lady moved quickly out the door. One limped, but it was a pretended limp (he could tell), not like the limper on the Westing house lawn.

Oats. Chris closed his eyes to picture the clues:

Grain
= oats = Otis Amber.
For
+
d
(from
shed
) = Ford. But neither the delivery boy nor the judge limped, and he still hadn’t figured out
she
or
plain.
He’d have to wait for Denton Deere; Denton Deere was smart; he was a doctor.

Chris raised his binoculars to the cliff. Windblown drifts buttressed the house—something moved on the second floor—a hand holding back the edge of a drape. Slowly the heavy drape fell back against the window. The Westing house was snowbound, too, and somebody was snowbound in it.

 

 

Only one of the players thought the clues told how the ten-thousand-dollar check was to be spent.
Take stock in America,
the will said.
Go for broke,
the will said.

“In the stock market,” Turtle said. “And whoever makes the most money wins it all, the whole two hundred million dollars.” Their clues:

stood for symbols of three corporations listed on the stock exchange: SEA, MT (the abbreviation for mountain), AMO.

“But
am
and
o
are separate clues,” Flora Baumbach said.

“To confuse us.”

“But what about the murderer? I thought we were supposed to find the name of the murderer?”

“To put us off the track.” If the police suspected murder, she’d be in jail by now. Her fingerprints were over everything in the Westing house, including the corpse. “You don’t really think one of us could have killed a living, breathing human being in cold blood, do you, Mrs. Baumbach? Do you?” Turtle did, but the dressmaker was a cream puff.

“Don’t you look at me like that, Turtle Wexler! You know very well I could never think such a thing. I must have misunderstood. Oh my, I just wish Miss Pulaski had shown us her copy of the will.”

Turtle returned to her calculations, multiplying numbers of shares times price, adding a broker’s commission, trying to total the sums to the ten thousand dollars they had to spend.

Flora Baumbach may have been wrong about the murder, but she was not convinced of Turtle’s plan. “What about
Buy Westing Paper Products?
I’m sure that was in the will.”

“Great!” Turtle exclaimed. “We’ll do just that, we’ll add WPP to the list of stocks we’re going to buy.”

Flora Baumbach had watched enough television commercials to know that
Buy Westing Paper Products
meant that as soon as she could get to market, she’d buy all the Westing products on the shelf. Still, it felt good having a child around again. She’d play along, gladly. “You know, Turtle, you may be right about putting our money in the stock market. I remember the will said
May God thy gold refine.
That must be from the Bible.”

“Shakespeare,” Turtle replied. All quotations were either from the Bible or Shakespeare.

 

 

Mr. Hoo moved aside a full ashtray with a show of distaste and rearranged the clues. “
Purple fruited
makes more sense.”

Grace Wexler looked across the restaurant to the lone figure at the window. “Are you sure your wife doesn’t understand English, I mean, after living here so long?”