The Grub-And-Stakers House a Haunt (25 page)

“Hiram Jellyby?” Darling Arethusa’s voice conveyed only gentle amusement. “Stap my garters, what an exercise in futility. Or was it? You’re not leaking ectoplasm anywhere, are you, Mr. Jellyby?”

“Nope. Sound as a bell, far’s I can make out.”

The voice came from just below the bright yellow eyes, which were now the only visible evidence that Hiram was still among those present. Mrs. Pollicot James seemed nonplussed, as well she might.

“This-er-gazookus you mention, Mrs. Monk. I’m afraid I don’t quite see-“

“He’s the body on the ground,” Dittany explained.

“Zilla-that is to say, Mrs. Trott-you met her that day at the garden club wingding-beaned him with her hatchet.

Then my husband tied his shoelaces together, showing commendable presence of mind if I do say so. The gazookus is really a crooked banker. He’s also the rotter who made the security guard’s cow drink horse liniment, which was a perfectly awful thing to do and whatever punishment he gets, it serves him right. I expect all that face fungus he’s wearing peels off easily enough. Osbert darling, would you mind giving it a tug?”

“Not at all, darling. I’ve been thinking myself that there’s something a trifle spurious-ah, yes. Sorry about the tugging. I’m afraid you overdid the spirit gum a bit, Mr. Cottle.”

“Cottle!” shrieked Mrs. James. “Pollicot, give me that lantern.”

“M’ff.” The man on the ground sounded indignant, but as he was trying to articulate through a mouthful of crepe hair, his wrath did not come out strong and clear, which was probably just as well.

“Shine your lantern a little closer, Mrs. James,” Osbert suggested.

The strong light brought out golden glints from the watch chain, the penknife, the pencil, the gold piece, the cigar cutter, the nugget carved into a beetle, and the goldfilled wolf’s tooth. Osbert had got the beard all off now, revealing a large, smooth, pink face with a reasonably adequate pair of eyebrows but little else to distinguish it from many other bland, pink faces of either sex.

“James!” cried the mother.

“Father!” cried the son.

“Stap my garters!” cried Arethusa, not to be left out of the conversation. “It was my impression, Mrs. James, that you were a widow.”

“It was my impression also,” the elder woman assured her with considerable heat. “James, explain yourself.”

“Go fry your ears, Penelope,” snarled the renegade.

“What the hell was the idea, refusing to pay my ransom?

Fine wife you turned out to be! A man goes to all the pain and bother of chopping off his own pinkie finger at great personal inconvenience, not to mention the nuisance of wrapping it up and sending it off and having to wear gloves all the time forever after with tissue paper stuffed in the left-hand baby finger, and where does it get him? I know all about that phoney memorial service you put on, Penelope. Swanking around in a black designer-model outfit and a widow’s veil, forsooth!”

“Did you say forsooth, Mr. Cottle?” Arethusa inquired with professional interest.

“I sure as heck did, Tootsie, and I’ll say it again, all I want to. Forsooth! Forsooth! Forsooth! Put that in your pipe and smoke it, Penelope. As for that mollycoddle son of yours, he can go out and find himself a job peddling shoelaces, for all of me. I’m cutting him out of my will as soon as I can find myself a sufficiently unscrupulous lawyer.

And furthermore, Penelope, I’m filing for divorce on the grounds of mental cruelty. Refusing to ransom your mutilated husband! Calling yourself Mrs. Pollicot James!

What was wrong with Mrs. James Cottle, pray tell? For the information of all present, I want it made publicly known that this woman was no more born a Pollicot than the man in the moon. Her old man’s name was plain Bill Bugglesby.

At the time of her birth, Bill was working on the railroad as a spikeman.”

“A spikeman?” inquired Osbert, always ready to broaden his horizons.

“That’s just what he was, bub. Old Bill’s duty was to walk the tracks with a bottle of spike polish at the ready, shining up the tips of the spikes as soon as they got the least bit dull and grungy-looking. His division foreman had been butler to one of those stately home dukes or earls or whatever in England. When he came to Canada to seek his fortune, he brought with him a lot of high standards and lofty ideals which, as I’m sure we all agree, helped our fair Commonwealth to become what she is today.”

“He’s talking nonsense,” insisted Mrs. Cottle, as she must now be known, though perhaps only temporarily.

“My father was a steel magnate.”

“I’m not saying he wasn’t, Penelope. What happened was,” Cottle had his audience in the palm of his hand now and was making the most of the situation, “Bill Bugglesby got into a poker game with a gink who owned a small railroad-spike foundry. I’m not saying Bill played with marked cards, mind you; I’m only saying that by the end of that game, Bill owned the deed to the foundry. The business wasn’t much when he took it over, the plain fact of the matter was that the gink hadn’t been any too adept at forging railroad spikes. But Bill knew spikes from the ground up, needless to say, so he just forged ahead until he’d cornered the spike market for most of the western provinces, which just goes to show what diligence, perseverance, and a few extra aces up your sleeve can accomplish.”

“Very interesting,” snapped Dittany. “Now tell us why you fed poor Mossy that bottle of horse liniment, causing her to become distracted with pain and trample an innocent security guard to death?”

“Wilberforce Woodiwiss innocent?” snarled the renegade banker. “Back up and come again, girlie. Woodiwiss lied to the cops about me carrying myself on my back, didn’t he? Furthermore, he helped me get that trunkful of money wrapped up and packed. Added to which, he took one end when I took the other and we lugged it together out to my car. As per our agreement, which I carried out faithfully, I paid him the stipulated sum before I tied him up. In stolen money, I grant you. I had to bring the loot out here and bury it by myself, of course, but that was no great problem. I’m a rugged outdoorsman type, as anybody could tell you who wasn’t planning to defame my character the second she opens her mouth again, which Penelope has always been far too prone to do.”

“Rugged, indeed!” Mrs. Cottle sniffed one of her more contemptuous sniffs. “What’s this nonsense about feeding liniment to a cow? I had no idea you were so versatile, James. Wasn’t it rather careless of you to kill your henchperson by so messy a method?”

“Look, you do what you can with what you’ve got.

Woodiwiss was an idiot for trying to keep a cow anyway.

What does a bank security guard know about cows? Took him six months to figure out how to get the milk, he thought he was supposed to use the beast’s tail as a pump handle. That’s the kind of incompetence a person has to work with nowadays, not worth the powder to blow ‘em to Detroit. Come on, you good-for-nothing young squirt, untie my shoelaces and let me get out of here with my gold.”

“That’s not your gold,” Osbert replied, quite unperturbed.

“What do you mean, it’s not my gold? I held you up according to accepted protocol, didn’t I? Was there any flaw in my technique from start to finish?”

“Well, you’d laid the groundwork thoroughly enough by creeping around and listening under people’s windows for what information you could pick up that might be useful in your attempt to resteal the bank money. You did slip a bit there, however, in failing to muffle your watch chain adequately. Tinkles were reported by various residents who naturally assumed you were just a dirty-minded old voyeur.”

“That was what I wanted them to think, it was part of my disguise. I’ll be more careful about the watch chain next time.” Cottle was trying to wheedle himself into his captors’ good graces. “And I’m really sorry about the purple gaiters. I’d stolen them from-perhaps I shouldn’t mention where.”

“You stole them from Minerva Oakes’s attic in your guise as Tryphosa Melloe the root lady,” said Dittany. “It was a caddish and contemptible thing to do, and furthermore those gaiters are of great historical significance to the town of Lobelia Falls, having been worn by no less a figure than Winona Pitcher, about whom you must surely have gleaned a vast amount of information during your Peeping torn and Melloe phases. You’d better be able to produce the gaiter that’s still missing if you don’t want another fifty years or so tacked on to your sentence.”

“What sentence? You can’t pin anything on me.”

“Oh, yes, we can. You stole Hedrick Snarf’s purple silk socks, too. You must have broken into his room at the inn. Why didn’t you steal a horse while you were about it, instead of an unpicturesque bicycle?”

“Because I didn’t want a horse, damn it! Oh, sorry, Mrs. Monk I didn’t mean to use language unbecoming a gentleman, but you can be pretty exasperating, you know. Anyway, the truth is that I’m scared of horses.

They blow in your ear when you’re trying to get the saddle on. I can’t stand having my ear blown into by a great big slobbering creature with iron toenails. Bicycles, now, you know where you are with a bicycle. They don’t have offensive habits, they don’t keep wanting bagfuls of oats all the time, and they don’t bite your leg when you try to climb onto them. Furthermore, they’re easy to steal.

Where was I going to rustle a horse in a hurry? Give me a good old two-wheeler any day and to blazes with authenticity.

I figured you small-town hicks wouldn’t notice the difference in the dark anyway. Little did I reck that I was going to be up against a pair of neon eyeballs and a bulletproof vest.”

“That wasn’t a bulletproof vest,” Osbert explained.

“Your bullets went through Hiram without making any impression because he happens to be a ghost.”

“What? Are you crazy? How could he be a ghost? I saw him plain as day. Plainer. You don’t think I believed all that garbage people were dishing out about that old mule skinner who got shot to death out here leaving a trunkful of gold he was expecting you to dig up. I wasn’t born yesterday, you know.”

“But Mr. Cottle, if you were so sure the dead mule skinner’s tale was a lot of horse feathers, why were you so eager to rob us of the gold?”

“As things turned out, that became the only option open to me, so I thought I might as well give it a go. You see, what I did when I robbed my own bank was, I retained a sackful of cash for my immediate expenses and got Woodiwiss to help me pack up the leftovers in waterproof bundles which neatly fitted into a small trunk with a lot of brass trimming on it that I thought would be easy to locate in the fullness of time by divining, at which I’m supremely adept.”

“Why did you bury the trunk out here?” barked Zilla, who thus far had been standing guard in stern silence with her hatchet at the ready.

“Oh, this just looked to me like a nice, godforsaken place in the middle of nowhere. I was getting a little worried about trundling the money around in my car, which of course was a new one that I’d bought under an assumed name with falsified identification papers as any practical man of business engaged in major embezzlement would naturally remember to do. Once I got the trunk stashed away, I was footloose and fancy-free to go whither I listed and do as I pleased without Penelope yammering at me to take her someplace cultural when I lusted to wallow in the fleshpots. Which, I may say with a good deal of satisfaction, is precisely what I’ve been doing ever since my unfortunate demise.”

“I always knew you were essentially a lout, James,”

the ex-widow said with a good deal of bitterness.

“And how right you were, Penelope,” replied the errant spouse. “Not for me the two-string dulcimer, kiddo. You can keep your waly-waly, I’ll stick to my hot-cha-cha.”

“Philistine!” snarled Pollicot, casting an anxious glance at Arethusa.

His father nodded as best he could since Ethel was still refusing him permission to sit up and none of the other seemed interested in calling her off.

“You hit the nail on the head, my boy, if indeed you are the fruit of my loins, which I’ve sometimes wondered about because I’ve never been able to figure out how any son of a red-hot papa like me could have turned out to be such a cold fish. Anyway, I’d been flinging the moolah high, wide, and handsome until I happened to notice a month or so ago that I was just about at the bottom of the sack. It then occurred to me that I might be wise to replenish my supply before I found myself flat broke with my stash of cash buried under the winter snows out here where the wind comes whistling up the pant legs and the grizzly bears come prowling o’er the plains.”

“They don’t, actually,” said Dittany.

“Oh yeah? Then what’s this thing sitting here growling at me?”

“We’re not quite sure, but her name is Ethel and she’s pretty darned sore at you just now so I’d suggest you quit thrashing around like that. You were saying that you’d decided to come back here and dig up the leftover money you’d stolen from the bank.”

“Embezzled, if you please, Mrs. Monk. Okay, I stole it, but embezzled is a more courteous term to use when chatting with a larcenous bank president, as Penelope here would be the first to tell you if she weren’t so preoccupied just now in trying to figure out some way of putting a good face on the social dilemma that she’s going to find herself in when I get carted off to the steel chateau.”

Mr. Cottle was smiling a mean and sinister smile.

“Hard lines, Penelope, old girl. But you did take me for better or worse, you know. You simply didn’t realize how much worse I could be. I’ve enjoyed many a quiet chuckle thinking about what you’d say if you ever found out what really happened to me. That memorial service which you organized and I attended in my guise as Tryphosa Melloe was one of the high points. The lies people tell in the interests of propriety!”

“What guise?” scoffed the by now totally exasperated Mrs. Cottle. “Surely, James, you don’t think you could have fooled your own wife?”

“Of course I do, and can, and have. And will again if I can manage to break away from this pack of yahoos.

You wouldn’t care to pick up that hatchet of Mrs. Trott’s and brain this snarling behemoth before it takes a hunk out of me?”