Going Out in Style (15 page)

She said it with disapproval.

He remained a short while longer, but there was no more information forthcoming from the two women. They both maintained that they had never seen the earring before. They said so in very emphatic terms. And they assured him that Albert Whitaker had not seen it since his mother’s death, either.

“To put it on the floor like that,” said Gretchen with disdain, “is such … such a
sly
thing to do. Don’t you agree, Jessie?”

“Oh, yes, Gretchen. Of course I do. Sly is the very word.”

“We may have our faults, but neither one of us is sly, Detective. You can see that for yourself. To do that—well, it’s just so
underhanded
, if you know what I mean.”

“Yes. I do.”

“Poor George. How is he taking it?”

“Not very well, I’m afraid,” said Janovy, remembering the unhappy pizzicato.

“I must give him a call,” she said, and rose to her feet. She waited until he rose also. “Thank you so much for dropping by,” she said, as if it had been a social call from an old friend. “And the very best of luck, Detective.”

Albert, like everyone else, denied stoutly that he had seen the earring since his mother died.

“Of course I recognize it,” he said in his soft reasonable voice. “Of course I recognize it. My mother used to wear those earrings all the time. Well, not
all
the time, actually, just for special occasions, but you see what I mean.”

“Yes, Dr. Whitaker. But since her death—”

“I certainly didn’t take it and plant it on George. Why would I do that? What do I have against poor old George?
And if you’re going to say that I was just trying to get rid of it, well, that’s ridiculous. I could simply throw it away, assuming, of course, that I was the one who had it, which isn’t the case. You see?”

Janovy, unfortunately, did see. The next day, he accompanied Albert to the bank and waited while Albert conferred with the bank manager. They were led to the safe-deposit box and it was unlocked, with great ceremony. The two earrings matched exactly.

“There,” said Albert. “I told you it was hers. The question is, who planted it on George?”

While good at identifying the vital question, Albert claimed he had no answers. He had not seen Gretchen or Jessie drop anything on the car floor.

“It’s impossible, absolutely impossible. You don’t understand, Detective. None of them would do it. Kill my mother, I mean. You don’t know them—Gretchen or Jessie or my sister. You simply don’t understand.”

“Perhaps not,” said Janovy briefly. He shook hands and took his leave.

“So the earring has turned up,” said Philip West. “The question is, what does it mean?”

“I don’t know, sir,” said Janovy. “The thing is, George Drexler is the only one of that group who has a valid alibi. He was nowhere around here when Mrs. Whitaker was killed. I wonder …”

“What, Paul?”

“Nothing. I just wonder if someone is trying to implicate him anyway. Maybe the murderer feels the need for more concealment.”

“If that’s true, that means you’re getting somewhere. You’ve been digging and digging, and somebody might be
getting nervous. Perhaps they didn’t expect the investigation to go on this long—”

“Or maybe they didn’t expect to have to kill Mrs. MacGregor in order to silence her,” said Janovy. “The killer counted on just one death, and now there’s two. That could be making someone nervous.”

“Yes. Well, it sounds like things are beginning to shake up a bit. You’ve got it down to the group in that car. Think Susan Whitaker would plant the earring on her own fiancé, if she felt he was getting off scot-free—or maybe to protect somebody else?”

Janovy flushed. It was hard to believe. His impression of Susan Whitaker had been so favorable. But still … “Yes. It’s possible. She’s very concerned that I not suspect her brother, and her brother’s the same way about her.”

“Hmmmph. That’s interesting. Well, it’s coming along, Paul. It’s coming along. I told you there was no such thing as a perfect murder.”

“I hope not,” said Janovy earnestly.

Snooky took a sip of the hot drink and said, “Hot cider, rum, cinnamon, nutmeg, a little orange juice, buckwheat honey, some brandy and—” he took another sip—“cloves.”

“Very good, Snookers,” said his sister.

“I don’t understand,” Bernard said. “How did he learn to do that?”

“He didn’t learn, Bernard. It’s an inborn talent. A gift. My mother used to say he could analyze his bottle formula.”

Bernard looked sulky. “That was my secret recipe for a hot toddy. Now it’s out. He could tell people about it if he wanted to.”

“Grow up, Bernard. That’s one thing about my little
talents, none of them are worth much. How about trying something else? Make it hard this time.”

While Bernard turned his back and mixed another drink, Snooky continued, “And I have some news. I just spoke to Susan. It’s about the missing earring. Apparently it’s been found.”

He related this briefly.

“I see.”

“Do you, Bernard?”

“Yes.”

“What is it that you see?”

“More than you can ever imagine,” said Bernard firmly. “That earring was part of a set that Bella was wearing that night, wasn’t it?”

“Yes. I’ve seen her wear it before. Fabulous stuff. Diamonds and sapphires. Susan told me her father gave it to her mother years and years ago. I can’t imagine what it’s worth now. I’ll say one thing about Bella, she could dress up like nobody’s business. If she had gone out that night she would have swept into the restaurant and everybody’s mouth would have been hanging open. The maître d’ would have let her mop the floor with him if she wanted to. She had that kind of style.”

“How fascinating,” said Bernard. He lifted up the bottle of Tabasco sauce and looked at it thoughtfully. “Where’s the matching earring?”

“The other one? In a safety deposit box at the bank. Susan told me she and Albert put it away with the rest of the set.”

“Are you sure of that?”

“Certainly I’m sure.” Snooky gave him an uneasy glance. “Why, you don’t think that—”

“I don’t think anything. Here, Snooky. Try this drink. It’s got a magic ingredient. I’ve got him now, Maya. If he
guesses this right, I’ll—I’ll drink this bottle of Tabasco sauce.”

“Don’t say that, sweetheart. I’ve never known him to make a mistake.”

Snooky took a sip and grimaced. “Good Lord, Bernard, you don’t have to
poison
me, do you? Let’s see now … it’s tomato juice, a dash of Tabasco, garlic, cloves again—ugh, what a combination—whisky, and a touch of some other spice, let’s see, I think it’s cardamom. Am I right?”

Bernard was looking pleased. “Not quite.”

“There’s something else?”

“Yes.”

Snooky took another sip, choked and said, “I give up. What is it?”

“Dog food.”

Maya let out a faint shriek of laughter.

A little while later Bernard went up to his study, closed the door, put a page in the typewriter and, after turning the light out and plunging the room into pitch darkness, began to type.

Mr. Whiskers had finally become more cooperative. He was still obsessed with his own reflection, but he had left the mirror long enough to get involved in a series of swashbuckling adventures, and in a romance with a young pink-eyed mouse from the neighboring village. Bernard wasn’t too sure whether it was possible for rats and mice to interbreed, but he figured, rather sensibly, that this was a question that would probably not occupy the minds of his four- to six-year-old readers.

He worked for a while in the darkened room, typing
along madly as Mr. Whiskers attacked a baker’s boy and made off with the bread he carried. He took the bread to the home of his beloved and they had a feast. She fluttered her long pale eyelashes and sighed, “Now if we only had some cheese,” and Mr. Whiskers was out the door like a shot, heading toward the cheese shop in town. “Now if we only had some lettuce for a salad,” she said when he brought back half a wheel of soft blue triple-crème cheese. Mr. Whiskers headed off, a little more grudgingly this time. The lady mouse was up to, “Now if we only had golden goblets to drink the wine out of,” when Bernard decided she would have to go.

“Avaricious little bitch,” he said, and pulled the page from the typewriter. He sat despondently in the darkness, mourning Mr. Whiskers’s bad taste in women, then switched on his desk lamp and took out his notebook. He uncapped the green Magic Marker, sat thoughtfully for a while and then wrote:

“Earring,” he said, and grunted.

Misty scratched at the door and he let her in. She looked at him, gauging his readiness for a walk outdoors, then yawned and settled down under the desk at his feet.

Bernard wrote:

“George’s car,” he said out loud. Then:

These, when deciphered, meant
shift suspicion; plant elsewhere
, and
why keep it in first place?
Bernard sat and looked at his notes for a long time. The page with Mr. Whiskers’s aborted relationship lay forgotten on the floor. Finally Bernard put away his notebook and sighed. Much as he hated the thought of actually coming into contact with anybody outside his house, there were a few questions he felt he had to ask.…

Etta Pinsky went into the tiny kitchen of her apartment and took the whistling kettle off the heat. She took out an old, chipped blue teacup and saucer, put a tea bag in it, and poured the water in. She carefully added three spoonfuls of sugar and then, with a sigh, sat down at the rickety kitchen table, which was simply a folding card table with two chairs around it.

Etta looked around at the kitchen, with its fading flowered wallpaper and its old stove and fridge. Her things. All her old things. Her husband Vinnie had left her comfortably off, but she didn’t like to buy anything new, preferring instead to be surrounded by her old familiar things. She liked to watch them age along with her. No use buying a lot of new stuff, she thought philosophically. She was eighty years old now. New furniture would just make her feel older. This way she could look at the wallpaper and remember when she bought it, forty years ago, and the terrible fuss that Vinnie had kicked up because it was so expensive.
Expensive!
she thought. It wouldn’t be expensive by today’s standards. Of course everything was worth more in the old days. The dollar was worth something then.
She
was worth something then. Now she was old and worn-out, just like her wallpaper.

She thoughtfully rubbed a burnt spot on the top of the
table and remembered how Vinnie’s old friend Max had dropped a match there one night during a poker game. Max had been lighting his cigar, puffing furiously and in between puffs shouting at Ralph, who had just bluffed him out of twenty-three dollars with nothing but a pair of fours in his hand. “You shlemiel! You goddamned shlemiel!” Max had shouted, and had dropped the match, nearly sending the card table and the players up in flames. Ever since then, whenever Max got upset the other men would silently point to the burnt spot. Poor Max, thought Etta. How he loved to get angry. How he loved it when his oldest friend Ralph would bluff him and win. Max had died twenty years ago. Ralph had died shortly afterwards.

Etta sighed and her eyes roamed around the room. So many memories … her gaze rested thoughtfully on the corner next to the fridge, where a heap of fuzz balls and dust remained, despite MacGregor’s halfhearted attempts at cleaning. Harriet MacGregor, thought Etta. Another old friend who was gone. She felt very old and dusty and gray herself, all of a sudden. Really, perhaps it would be best to have a little cry, all to herself.

She pushed away the teacup, which rattled on its saucer, and put her head slowly down on the table.

She was still sitting there a little while later when the doorbell rang. Goodness, she thought, I
am
getting old. She had completely forgotten that Snooky and that likable brother-in-law of his, what’s his name, Bernard Something, were coming over for tea. Snooky had called earlier and asked if they could drop by.

“Bernard wants to talk to you,” he had said. “This is a banner day. You don’t know it, but Bernard never wants to talk to
anyone
.”

Come at four, she had said, and then with her thoughts of the past, she had forgotten. Luckily there was tea, and plenty of cake left over from yesterday. She got up slowly and went to the door.

She showed them into the living room, and went back into the kitchen to make more tea. Bernard looked around. The furniture was old and hard and had that indefinable musty smell of furniture which has stood in the same place for decades and never been moved. It was good solid furniture, made of walnut, and it gave a sense of importance and weight to the room. The windows were narrow and there was not much light, but Bernard felt comfortable with that. “Nice room.”

“I knew you’d like it,” said Snooky.

“Go help her with whatever she’s doing in there, Snooky. Unless you enjoy letting an eighty-year-old woman wait on you.”

Snooky came back a few minutes later with a tea tray. Etta poured out for the three of them and cut them each a large slice of pound cake. Then she leaned back on the divan and said sharply, “Why are you here?”

“We came by to see you,” said Snooky.

“Come on, Snooky. I’m not that old yet. I haven’t had two young men who weren’t even related to me drop by this place in more than forty years. Why are you here?”

“I came to ask you about your niece’s murder,” said Bernard.

Etta looked at him curiously and nodded.

“I wondered whether you could repeat to me what Mrs. MacGregor said to you before she died.”

“You mean what she told me here, when she was hinting around about something?”

“Yes.”

The old woman sipped her tea, her eyes vacant. “Harriet
MacGregor loved to have secrets. She loved to know something before everyone else did. It got her killed in the end, didn’t it? Let me see. She was starting to sweep up in the kitchen—not that that made much of a difference to the kitchen floor, let me tell you—and she was giggling to herself the way she always did when she had something to tell me. Well, I wasn’t going to put up with it, so I asked her what was so funny. She wouldn’t tell me. Then she started to work, if you can call it that, and even when I pointed out some spots she had missed, she didn’t mind. That wasn’t like her. No, it wasn’t like her at all. Usually she got upset at the least little thing I said. But that day she just giggled some more. I could see that there would be no work done until she had spilled the beans, so I gave her a cup of tea and we sat down to talk. We often did talk while she worked,” Etta added. “I realize now that I hired her more for the company than anything else. Anyway, one or the other of us brought up that black mink coat that Albert had given her. MacGregor was terribly excited about it. I don’t think she had ever owned anything like it in her life. She said it was beautiful, and then it seemed to remind her of something, because she said there was something else—something else that had happened the night that Bella was killed.…”