A Pint of Murder (22 page)

“Afternoon, Inspector. These the people you’ve been looking for?”

“Yes, indeed. Thank you, Sergeant. Stick around, will you? I may have a passenger for you to take back.”

Marion, Janet, and even Mrs. Druffitt pressed close behind him, craning over his shoulder for a closer look as the group entered the kitchen. Elmer towered in the middle, one arm around Gilly’s narrow shoulders and the other great paw engulfing Bobby’s hand. All three looked confused, exhausted, bedraggled, and blissful. Gilly had the remains of a purple orchid pinned to her black dress and was holding her left hand out in front of her like a talisman. On the last finger but one was a shiny new yellow-gold wedding band.

“Gillian!” screamed her mother. “What have you done?”

Elmer gaped at Elizabeth Druffitt. “You? I thought—”

“You thought you’d killed me, you murdering devil!”

“Killed you, nothin’,” he yelled back. “You was already dead. I seen you in the headlights last night when I drove up to the house. You was layin’ on the grass, right over there.” He pointed out the window to the spot where Dot Fewter’s body had been found. “I got out an’ felt your hand. It was ice cold and I couldn’t find no pulse. Then I touched your head an’ got blood on my hand so I knew you must be dead. I washed off the blood at the outside faucet so’s Gilly wouldn’t see it an’ I backed the car up so’s Gilly wouldn’t see you, neither.”

“How could she help seeing?”

“She was asleep! She fell asleep at the drive-in an’ slept all the way back. So then I woke ’er up an’ says, ‘Gilly, we’re leavin’.’ An’ she says, ‘I got to take Bobby,’ an’ I says, ‘Sure.’ So we got ’im an’ we went.” The young giant took a tighter grip on his new wife, folded the other arm around his stepson, and glared defiance at them all.

“You’re lying!” Mrs. Druffitt shrieked. “Gillian would never have gone off and left her own mother—or what she thought was her mother—dead in the dooryard. You tricked her! You drugged her!”

“I told you she never seen nothin’,” Elmer insisted. “We went in the front door an’ she waited downstairs while I snuck up an’ got Bobby.”

“Is that true, Gilly?” said Rhys.

“Yes,” she shouted back.

“What did you do while Elmer was upstairs?”

“Came out here to the kitchen and put what was left of the cookies and milk in a paper bag and made a couple of peanut-butter sandwiches because I knew he’d be hungry when he woke up. I didn’t know where we were going or if there’d be anything to eat there.”

“Did you happen to look out the window?”

“No, I was in too big a hurry. Anyway, I’d put the light on so I could see to fix the sandwiches. If I had looked up, I wouldn’t have been able to see out.”

“Didn’t you ask Elmer what this—er—sudden excursion was all about?”

“No. Why should I? I knew we were going to do it sooner or later anyway.”

“I see. How long would you say you were in the house?”

“Not more than a minute or two, I shouldn’t think. Elmer just rolled Bobby in a blanket and brought him downstairs still asleep. He didn’t even bring anything for him to wear, the big dope.” She gave the big dope a glance of unutterable adoration. “We had to stop at a store somewhere and buy Bobby those clothes he’s got on.”

“So then you went back out the front door and got into the car and drove off?”

“That’s right,” said Elmer. “An’ Gilly never seen a thing.”

“Do you have any idea what time it was when you left?”

“Half-past one,” said Gilly. “I remember glancing at the clock as I was reaching for the peanut butter. I was surprised it was so late. But of course we’d stayed at the drive-in for a while after the show was over. Just—talking. You see, we’d already bought the license.”

Mrs. Druffitt made a queer, strangling noise.

“But what did happen to you, Mama?” said Gilly. “Did you fall, or what? Are you all right now?”

“I’m surprised you even bother to ask,” sniffed her mother.

“She was dead,” Elmer insisted. “I wouldn’t o’ gone off if there was anything we could o’ done to help. But I could see right away it was no accident, an’ what with Gilly’s Aunt Aggie an’ her father dyin’ like that one right on top o’ the other I had a pretty shrewd idea what the Mounties was doin’ up here. I wasn’t havin’ Gilly mixed up in no more murders. But how—”

“It was Dorothy Fewter you saw,” Rhys explained. “She happened to be wearing,” his mustache twitched, “one of your mother-in-law’s dresses.”

“Then how could he know?” said the new Mrs. Bain. “Black dresses all look alike in the dark, don’t they?”

“It wasn’t black,” said Elmer doggedly. “It was that same dress she had on the night she told me I couldn’t take you to the high-school dance an’ slammed the door in my face. Would I be likely ever to forget what that one looked like, eh?”

“But Mama wouldn’t have been wearing a light-colored dress last night, honey. She’s in mourning for Daddy.”

“Grandma says she ain’t going to wear anything but solid black for a whole year,” Bobby piped up.

“Don’t say ‘ain’t,’” his grandmother reproved automatically.

“Pop says it.”

“Pop!” Mrs. Druffitt went totally out of control. “Pop! My God in Heaven, Gillian, have you no sense of shame at all? First that Bascom creature and now this—this Bain! How could you be so heartless, after all I’ve done for you?”

Rhys gazed at the raging, trembling woman, light dawning at last in his sad, bloodhound eyes. “You have a very strong sense of duty, have you not, Mrs. Druffitt?”

“I hope I know what’s right!”

“Did you really think it was right to kill three people because you didn’t care for the house your daughter was living in?”

The July sun beamed down on the dry grass where old Aggie Treadway’s hired girl had lain dead the night before. A flock of sparrows twittered down, trim in their patterned uniforms of brown and beige, then whirled away. Inside the kitchen, nobody noticed. Nobody spoke. Nobody moved, until at last Marion Emery broke the silence.

“So it was you, Elizabeth.” She didn’t even sound particularly surprised. “I always did wonder if you might be a little bit nuts.”

“M
ARION, HOW DARE YOU?
You’re the one who’s crazy! You’re all crazy, all of you. I’m telling you that man tried to kill me!”

“And we are not believing you, Mrs. Druffitt,” said Rhys. “You see, you have not been very clever. You have only been lucky, because you took risks somebody who was thinking straight would not have taken. I hope you will start trying to think straight now.”

“I haven’t the faintest idea what you’re talking about,” she replied with her usual hauteur.

“Then I must explain carefully, must I not? Sergeant Twofeathers, would you mind standing here next to Mrs. Druffitt? Marshal, would you be good enough to get Ben Potts on the telephone for me?”

“Sure thing.” Olson, looking stunned, went to put the call through. The others clustered together, waiting. Mrs. Druffitt looked from one to the other, then averted her eyes from them all. “Ben’s on the line, Inspector,” he called out a moment later. “What shall I tell him?”

“I’ll talk to him myself. You come back here and be prepared to assist Sergeant Twofeathers if necessary.”

Rhys left the door into the hallway open behind him. Those who were waiting could hear him giving curious but explicit instructions to the undertaker. Then there was silence, a seemingly endless silence. At last Rhys spoke again.

“And you can’t get it off with anything, not even steel wool? Thank you. No, that’s all I wanted to know. Leave things exactly as they are. I’ll be down soon.”

He hung up and came back to the puzzled group. “You see, Mrs. Druffitt, that was one of the ways in which you were not very clever. When you gave that outfit of yours to Dorothy Fewter yesterday, you should not have included the shoes.”

She looked coldly down her nose at the Mountie. “Don’t be ridiculous. What harm was there in giving away a pair of shoes?”

“Well, you see, that was the pair you were wearing when you came up here and left those two jars of botulinous string beans in your aunt’s cellar.”

“You’re out of your mind! I’ll have you put off the Force for this. Anybody in town can tell you that I hadn’t set foot in this house for more than fifteen years, not until this very morning.”

“Then anybody in town would have to be mistaken, Mrs. Druffitt, because those shoes of yours have your Uncle Charles’s patent-floor cement all over the soles of them.”

“That’s a lie! It’s white shoe polish. I spilled it while I was cleaning the shoes to give to Dot.”

“You did put a great deal of polish on the shoes, but you see the polish came off when Mr. Potts wet it and the spots on the soles did not.”

“Then Dot must have worn the shoes down cellar last night herself.”

“Dot was not in this cellar last night. She was with Janet Wadman all evening, and later with Sam Neddick until just before she was killed. Anyway, she could not have worn them to walk so far because the shoes were too small for her. She did not have them on when she came over here from the Wadmans’. She carried them in her hand, and she did not put them on after she left Sam Neddick, either. You know what a hard time you had cramming them on her feet after you killed her, don’t you? You couldn’t even get the left one all the way on, because her left foot was a little bit bigger than the right, as many people’s are. Yet Dot had to be wearing shoes when she was found, because it was not reasonable that anybody would mistake a barefoot woman for you, even in the dark. You would never go barefoot outdoors, would you, Mrs. Druffitt?”

“Damn right she wouldn’t,” Marion snorted. “Elizabeth’s too respectable. She’s got to uphold the family name, which is no easy job when you consider how her noble ancestors made their money, and how her uncle liked the girls and her father liked the boys and her dear old Aunt Aggie got hitched to a screwy inventor and she herself married an incompetent doctor who’d lost all his patients and was gambling away the money she needed to put on the dog with in front of a few old hens who know more about your private affairs than you do and laugh at you behind your back, like as not. Right, Elizabeth?”

Mrs. Druffitt ignored her. “I’m afraid I have to confess, Inspector, that those shoes I gave Dot were an old pair I’d had in the house for years and years. I must have got that stuff on the soles back when I still used to come here and visit Aunt Agatha.”

“No you didn’t, Mama,” said Gilly stonily. “You bought them new a year ago last Easter. You’d never in a million years buy another pair of shoes until the old ones were past fixing.”

“Gillian, how can you?”

Gilly plunged on, her voice shaking. “You had two of Aunt Aggie’s jars, right down there in your own pantry. That’s what you and she fought about, the time you quit speaking. I’ve heard the story often enough, God knows, and so had Daddy. Aunt Aggie had given you two jars of mustard pickles she’d made, and told you to be sure to give her back the jars when the pickles were gone. But you’re such a miser you couldn’t bring yourself to part with them, and that’s how the battle started and you wound up saying you’d never set foot in the place again so you’d have an excuse not to bring them back.”

“That’s ridiculous!”

“I know it’s ridiculous, but it’s the truth all the same. I remember once when we were doing science in school I took the jars for me and Elmer to catch pollywogs in, and you raised holy hell about taking family heirlooms out of the house. You called Elmer a common thief. You remember, too, don’t you, Elmer?”

Her husband nodded. “I remember.”

“That’s why you had to kill Daddy, isn’t it, Mama? As soon as he saw that jar of green beans Janet was bringing to show him, he’d have had to admit what he’d known ever since Aunt Aggie died, wouldn’t he? He must have known where those poisoned beans she ate came from, mustn’t he? All he had to do was look in the pantry and notice those two jars you’d made such a rumpus about weren’t on the shelf any more. He couldn’t have kept on covering up for you any longer, could he? Daddy might have been sort of a jellyfish and no great shakes as a doctor, but he wasn’t a complete fool.”

“Was that why he said you ought to go away that day you and him had the big fight?” said Bobby. “Huh, Grandma, was it? That day you were yelling so loud?”

“Be quiet, Bobby,” shrieked Mrs. Druffitt. “You don’t know what you’re talking about. A lady does not raise her voice!”

“Bobby, did your grandpa say ‘go away’ or ‘be put away’?” Marion asked. “In case you don’t know it, Elizabeth, you’re screeching your head off right now. Sure, that’s what happened, isn’t it? When Janet phoned down and said she’d found something funny in the cellar that she wanted to show the doctor, you knew it must be that extra jar of beans you’d left, probably hoping I’d get hold of it and go the same way Auntie did. You didn’t dare let him see the jar, so you whammed him over the head the way you did Dot, then staged your little scene and went waltzing off to your goddamn club. Boy, when it comes to nerve, you take the cake!”

Rhys interrupted. “Bobby, would you happen to recall what day it was that you heard this argument between your grandmother and grandfather?”

“Can’t we keep Bobby out of this?” Gilly started to say, but her son was not a baby any more and his grandfather had sometimes been kind to him. He answered readily enough.

“Sure, it was the day of Aunt Aggie’s funeral. Grandma made me dress up in that dumb navy-blue suit she bought me when I was about eight years old, that’s a mile too small.”

“Where were you when you heard them talking?”

“I told you, they weren’t talking. They were yelling their heads off. That’s how I could hear. See, they were in the front room and I was in the pantry where she’d put the stuff left over from the party.”

“Are you saying your grandmother gave a party on the day her aunt was buried?”

“Well, I guess it wasn’t exactly a party. She asked people back to the house for cake and stuff after the funeral.”

“Did she know you were in the pantry?”

“No, I guess not,” he admitted. “Mama went home with a headache when the rest of the people left and I was supposed to go with her, but there was all this cake and stuff left so I went back again.”