The Grub-And-Stakers Pinch a Poke (20 page)

Dittany went downstairs to let the sergeant out and Roger in.

Then she put on the kettle, sat down in the kitchen rocker to wait for it to boil, and fell asleep. She woke with the kettle ready to dance off the stove and Osbert bending over her, smoothing back her light brown hair.

“Are you all right, darling?”

“I guess so.” She yawned and did a little experimental stretching.

“I don’t know what got into me, I never sleep in the daytime. Do something about that kettle, will you, darling? Carolus must be yammering for his tea. Do you think we made a mistake telling him about the cobra?”

“He had to know, dear.” Osbert filled the teapot and started fixing a tray. “Shall I give him some of this stuff Zilla brought?”

“No, don’t, for heaven’s sake. He’s had enough shocks to his system already. Give him that last bit of coffee cake and a few of Therese’s cookies. Those ought to hold him till suppertime, whenever that may be. Is Roger still here?”

“No, he went straight home as soon as he’d got the television set working. Hazel’s brother Euonymus and his wife are visiting and they were in the midst of a Chinese checkers tournament. What are we having for supper, by the way?”

“Could you eat beans on toast?”

“Us old cowhands can always eat beans on toast, pardner. I wonder what Archie and Daniel are doing.”

“As a guess, ogling,” Dittany answered. “I hope Arethusa offers them supper at her house for a change. It’s going to be slim pickings around here if we have to stretch one can of beans among six or seven of us. Unless you want to take them out to eat and I’ll stay here with Carolus?”

“Not on your life, sweetheart. Ethel and I will ride herd on Carolus and you can go with the boys. Let them treat you on Archie’s expense account. He’s had it pretty easy so far.”

“How could I sit eating filet mignon knowing you were back here with a can of beans and a crabby invalid?” Dittany protested. “We’ll manage one way or another, we always do. Do you think we ought to make a conciliatory gesture and have our tea upstairs with Carolus?”

Osbert shrugged. “As long as we’re stuck with him, we might as well make a decent pretense of enjoying his company. Here, you take the cookies and I’ll carry the tray.”

They found Carolus flipping the remote control switch from station to station and not finding anything he liked. “Ah, my bodyguard has arrived,” he remarked sarcastically. “Why three cups? Is the dog coming, too?”

“Two cups for us and one for you,” said Dittany, refusing to be annoyed. “Ethel’s up on the Enchanted Mountain trying to find something to bark at. Do you want to pour or shall I?”

“You, by all means.”

They took their cups and cookies and sat for a while watching a program from British Columbia about how to carve a totem pole.

Gradually they drifted into conversation, trying to stay away from controversial subjects. That meant mostly talking about the play, which led inevitably to talking about the lady who’d been temporarily known as Lou.

“I’d rather hoped Arethusa might drop by and say hello,” Carolus remarked with a sigh of self-pity.

“I’m sure she will as soon as she has a chance,” was Dittany’s consolation. “The thing of it is, we’d expected Osbert’s agent and his friend the producer to leave early this morning, but they’ve decided to stay over. That means somebody has to entertain them and Arethusa’s been the only one free to cope. She did mention something about coming back here at suppertime.”

Carolus brightened up. “Then I ought to start trying to make myself presentable. I didn’t get much of a shave this morning at the hospital. The nurse gave me a stupid little disposable plastic razor which was about as useful as nothing at all. There’s a good one in my shaving kit. It’s in that suitcase Roger picked up at my apartment this morning. I always leave a bag packed because I never know when I’m going to be called out of town in a hurry.”

He probably meant whether he’d have to take it on the lam, Dittany thought, but she didn’t say so since this was meant to be a peacekeeping operation. Osbert went over and started to open the brown pigskin suitcase that was sitting on the floor beside the dresser. Then he hesitated.

“Wait a minute, Carolus. You said your kit was already packed.

Did Roger open it?”

“He opened the suitcase to get my robe and pajamas out, but I don’t believe he opened the shaving kit. Why should he?”

“I don’t know.” Osbert lifted the lid of the suitcase, fished around under a clean shirt, and pulled out a small zippered case that matched the bag. “Is this what you want?”

“Yes. If you’ll be kind enough to help me to the bathroom-“

Osbert hesitated. “This is going to sound pretty silly, Carolus, but I think it mightn’t be a bad idea for me to take this kit outdoors and open it there. Using those lazy tongs Dittany’s grandfather had for when his lumbago was acting up. Do you remember where we keep them, darling?”

“Hanging in the cellarway next to the wire carpet beater,” Dittany told him. “Darling, that case isn’t hissing, by any chance?”

Osbert held the kit to his ear. “No, it doesn’t seem to be doing anything. I’m probably being foolish.”

“Better you a fool than I a corpse,” Carolus replied grimly. “Go ahead, Osbert. Open the damned thing anywhere you want except here. God, I feel like a trapped rat.”

“I’ll get the tongs,” Dittany said. “Osbert, why don’t you throw the kit out the window? If there’s a bomb inside, it will go off when it hits and you won’t be running the risk.”

“Sound thinking, dear. Is there anything breakable inside, Carolus?”

“Just some after-shave lotion. I don’t care, go ahead and chuck it.”

“I’ll aim for a snowbank.” Osbert opened the window, leaned out, and lobbed the kit neatly into a high drift out by the road.

“No bang,” said Dittany. “That’s a hopeful sign, but you’d better put on those extra socks anyway.”

She got him bundled up against almost any contingency except total immersion, which wasn’t likely to happen anyway, and watched in apprehension from the top of the front steps.

Osbert approached the shaving kit much as he had the cobra. It took some fiddling to get the case wedged firmly enough into a cleft branch of the lilac bush so that he could get a grip with the tongs on the zipper tab, but Deputy Monk was not one to back away from difficulty. Satisfied, he backed off, extended the lazy tongs to their full length, grappled with the zipper, and tugged.

Crack! He leaped back as Dittany yelped, then retracted the tongs and stared in semi-disbelief at the object that had attached itself to the bottom gripper.

“Roistering rattlesnakes, it’s a rat trap! And the spring bar that’s supposed to snap down over the rat’s head has been filed to a sharp edge and smeared with something or other.”

“Cobra venom, I’ll bet.” Heedless of the cold and her thin shoes, Dittany was out on the path now, craning her neck for a better look.

“Or else plain old-fashioned rat poison mixed with molasses to make it stick,” Osbert suggested. “I expect the idea was for the sharpened wire to slam down and cut Carolus’s fingers open when he reached into the kit, so that the poison would enter the bloodstream.

If it is poison, of course. It might just be something nasty like lye or itching powder. Come on, darling, let’s get back inside before you catch pneumonia.”

“Don’t forget the shaving kit. Carolus will want his razor.”

“He’d better use mine till we find out what that stuff on the wire is. Some of it might have dropped off.” But Osbert retrieved the kit from the lilac bush anyway. “We’ll keep this for evidence. Gosh, I don’t much look forward to telling Carolus what we found.”

“He ought to be darned glad you found it instead of him,” said Dittany. “I’m betting Sergeant Mac Vicar isn’t going to relish what his wife will say when we call him away from his tea. But we should, don’t you think?”

“Oh, no question. He’ll want Carolus’s permission for a thorough search of his flat. Some ornery coyote is anxious to see Carolus Bledsoe dead, pardner.”

“This coyote’s more than ornery. Crazy as a coot, if you ask me.

Tarantulas and bullets and cobras and rat traps right and left! It must be that goofy ex-wife, wouldn’t you think?”

“Carolus says not.”

“So what? Men never know anything about women. Except you, dear.” Dittany kissed Osbert’s cowlick as it emerged from his parka.

“Go ahead, call the sergeant. I’m going to take a prowl through the freezer and see if I can’t find something for supper besides baked beans.”

Both missions were crowned with success. By the time Dittany emerged from the cellar with a package of frozen leftover turkey, a plastic container of giblet gravy, a bag of broccoli, and some passion fruit ice cream she’d bought in a spirit of scientific research and hadn’t yet found occasion to try, Osbert had Sergeant MacVicar with him in the kitchen, holding Gramp Henbit’s lazy tongs and shaking his head over the rat trap.

“A vicious machination, indeed. Carolus Bledsoe would hae lost a finger or two, belike. An’ perchance his life, gin yon sticky substance smeared on the wire is what you conjecture it to be. Aye, Deputy Monk, a diabolical mind is at work here.”

He fished his eyeglasses out of his breast pocket, perched them halfway down the majestic sweep of his nose, and scrutinized the rat trap more closely. “Supersnapper, eh. Not a brand wf which I am familiar. The trusty auld Ratsbane has aye been the favorite around these parts.”

“Then if we can find a shop that sells Supersnappers instead of Ratsbanes, we may be able to trace the person who bought the trap,” said Dittany.

“It’s a possibility, but a weary and belike fruitless task it may prove to be.”

Sergeant MacVicar returned his spectacles to his pocket and picked up the plastic bag in which Osbert had stowed the shaving kit. “We may be able to get some fingerprints off this wee poke.

Dittany lass, you did me a guid turn when you showed the perspicacity to marry this bright lad.”

“I did myself an even better turn.”

Osbert grinned and blushed and gave his wife, though not the sergeant, an affectionate squeeze. “And here I’d been thinking I was the lucky one. We’ll get married again tomorrow, Chief, if you think it’ll help the case along. Is there any chance of getting that wire analyzed today?”

“We can try. My daughterin-law will nae doot be willing to drop off the trap at the chemistry teacher’s hoose on her way home frae bringing the eggs. Hae you a stamp pad in the house?

“Two of them,” Dittany told him. “One green for getting out the Grub-and-Stakers’ newsletter, one black on general principles.

What do you want stamped? Oh, I know. Carolus Bledsoe’s fingerprints.”

“Aye, lass, they’ll be on the kit along wi’ Deputy Monk’s.”

“Would ordinary typewriter paper do to take the fingerprints on, Chief?” Osbert said. “That’s what we have mostly.”

“I dinna see why not.”

They experimented on Osbert and found typewriter paper worked just fine. Then they had to take the pad and paper upstairs, explain to Carolus about the rat trap in the shaving kit, and get his fingerprints, also. Finally they had to fetch him a tot of brandy, antibiotics or no antibiotics. Even a lawyer could take only just so much in the way of being assassinated without beginning to fray around the edges.

Osbert had made a thorough search of Carolus’s luggage to make sure there were no more booby traps and was playing cribbage with the patient to settle him down. Dittany was in the kitchen, wondering whether she ought to defrost that whole big lump of turkey or just hack off enough for the three of them and put the rest back in the freezer, when Arethusa blew in with Archie in tow.

“What happened to Daniel?” Dittany asked her.

“He’s gone where the woodbine twineth.”

“Could you be more specific? There’s a fair amount of woodbine around, you know.”

Since Arethusa appeared to be more interested in the turkey, Archie took over the explanation. “We stopped at the inn for a drink with Andy, and found out two of the kitchen helpers had got into a fight. They’d been throwing crockery and knives and both of them were rather impressively cut up. So Andy had to drive them over to the hospital to get stitched together, then go back to stir the soup and make the salads, the cook being by now short-handed and the usual biggish Sunday night supper crowd expected. Daniel stayed on to help Andy. He had to do a fair amount of KP in the army, he says, so he’s handy in a big kitchen. Arethusa and I decided to leave them to it and walk over here. It’s a lovely evening for a stroll.”

The day had been bleak and raw at its best. As the light failed, the temperature had dropped and the wind picked up. Archie must have a fairly serious case.

“I’m glad you came,” Dittany replied as a thoughtful hostess must. “I was wondering whether to plan on you for supper.”

“Also for drinks and hors-d’oeuvre,” Arethusa assured her.

“Where’s that useless nephew of mine, forsooth?”

“Upstairs entertaining our invalid. Carolus has been asking for you, by the way. He got shaved on purpose when we said we more or less expected you here, so you’d better go up.”

“For how long, prithee?”

“That’s between you and your conscience.”

“Stomach,” Arethusa corrected. “What time are you planning to serve?”

“Anon.”

“And as to the drinks?”

“Help yourself. You know where we keep the liquor. Archie, what would you like?”

“Let me fix them.”

Archie bounded out of the chair he’d barely got settled in and followed Arethusa into the pantry. That was where Osbert had proposed to Dittany on the strength of a four-day acquaintance. She watched with interest to see whether Archie was going to beat Osbert’s time, but evidently he wasn’t quite that beglamored yet.

He came out after only a minute or so, carrying a whiskey and two sherries. Arethusa followed with a plate of crackers. Both acted content enough, but neither showed that stunned and starry expression which betokens a rapid-fire betrothal.

“Archie’s going to stay here and keep you company,” said Arethusa, taking the two sherries from him and handing one to Dittany.