A Pint of Murder

by Alisa Craig

  Once they saw the relatively impersonal trend his interrogation was taking, they stopped being cagey and showed themselves eager to answer in detail. After two hours in that hermetically sealed office, his head was splitting from the sounds of their voices. It was a relief when he at last got around to Jason Bain’s interest in Uncle Charles’s patent washtub. All of a sudden, the ladies didn’t care to talk any more.

  CHAPTER 14

  Rhys trudged back up the hill, his mind full of questions and his shoes full of gravel. His stomach, on the other hand, was distressingly empty. Mrs. Druffitt hadn’t offered him so much as a cup of tea and he’d decided that eating at the Busy Bee called for valor over and beyond the call of duty. Though it was now long past the noon hour, Janet would give him something, bless her kind heart in advance.

  That long conversation with Marion and her cousin had given him nothing, so far as he could determine, except a shrewd hunch that they had made or were about to make a deal of some sort with Jason Bain about the patent. He would learn nothing more about that from any of them. His best hope was that Dot Fewter really did listen at keyholes. She’d be up later, she’d told him, to help Janet with the supper. He could wait.

  In fact, he waited with deep contentment. Janet, having heard his tale of gastric woe, poured him a slug of Bert’s rum to soothe his nerves while she prepared a snack of ham and eggs, brown bread and strawberry jam, fresh tomatoes from the garden, fresh lettuce from the patch by the back door, and a modest wedge of apple pie with cheese to stay his stomach till suppertime. After that, he adjourned to the glider hammock on the porch to collect his thoughts, and fell asleep. When he woke, Dot Fewter had arrived.

  Dot was, as he had confidently expected, eager to tell all and then some. Her prize nugget of intelligence was that Jason Bain had called on the widow again shortly after Rhys had left, stayed half an hour or so, and gone away looking like the cat that had swallowed the canary. She deeply regretted that despite her most determined effort she had not been able to overhear a word of the interview. Dr. Druffitt’s office was indeed well soundproofed.

  What had happened after that? Marion had gone out to do some shopping. She’d telephoned to the Mansion before leaving, asking Elmer to meet her at the market in half an hour, and Dot had it on reliable authority that Elmer had, in fact, done so. As to what Marion had bought Dot couldn’t say, but no doubt she’d be able to before the day was over.

  Rhys was not interested in Marion’s grocery list. “And how did Mrs. Druffitt seem after the others had left? Was she pleased with the result of Bain’s visit? Upset?”

  “She don’t generally show her feelin’s much unless I happen to break something” Dot answered reflectively, “only today she was—I dunno how you’d call it. Kind o’ sad an’ thoughtful. She was real nice to me, too.”

  “Was that so unusual?”

  “I’ll say it was! I dunno, I guess she’d got to feelin’ low in her mind about the doctor. She went pawin’ through his desk an’ found the picture they took of ‘im the time he got to be Grand Supreme Regent at the Owls, an’ brought it out into the parlor an’ stuck it up on the pianna. ‘I think I’ll buy a silver frame for it,’ she says to me, so I says to her, ‘They’re awful expensive, ain’t they?’ an’ she says to me, ‘Money isn’t everything, Dot,’ an’ I tell you that give me a queer feelin’ right down to the pit of my stomach. An’ then you’d never guess what she did!”

  “Probably not,” said Rhys. “Would you care to tell me?”

  “Well, I’ll be darned if she didn’t take me upstairs an’ open her closet door an’ take out that lilac dress she was wearin’ to the Tuesday Club meetin’ when Dr. Druffitt brained hisself. ‘Here, Dot,’ she says, ‘somebody might as well get the good out of this. I’ll never wear it again.’ She gimme the whole outfit: hat, bag, shoes, white gloves, everythin’. O’ course they ain’t new but they’re beautiful quality. I never thought I’d live to see the day! Ma was flabbergasted when I told ‘er.”

  “Then Mrs. Druffitt was not in the habit of passing such things on to you?”

  “She never passed nothin’ to nobody, never before in ‘er life, far’s I know. You could o’ knocked me over with a feather! O’ course she couldn’t o’ worn ‘em again for a year anyhow, ‘cause she’ll be in mournin’. Most folks don’t bother no more, but Mrs. Druffitt likes to do things proper.”

  Yes, that had been Rhys’s impression. Propriety was, he would have said, the essence of Mrs. Druffitt’s character, so why did she choose to accentuate the likeness which Marion had so ungently pointed out to her not long before, by dressing a woman who was no doubt her illegitimate cousin in her own distinctive castoffs?

  Perhaps she wasn’t thinking about such things any more. Could it be that she’d had a sudden onrush of Christian charity and decided it was time to let bygones be bygones? Was it simply that she couldn’t bear having the clothes in the house any more because of their association with her husband’s murder, and that she gave them to the maid because that was what ladies were supposed to do with their hand-me-downs? He must ask Janet’s opinion when he got her alone.

  However, he didn’t get her alone. Bert came bouncing in to supper, rejoicing at Annabelle’s release from the hospital and the prospect of having his family reunited under their own roof. Dot was much in evidence, wolfing down everything that came her way. Rhys resented her presence, not only because she ate like a whole messhall full of starving loggers but also because she’d be there to help with the dishes instead of him. He would have rejoiced in another such session as last night’s. Wearing the lavender apron would be a small enough price to pay for the chance to stroll down by the pond and watch the sun set behind the soft brown cloud of Janet Wadman’s hair. But it was not to be, and anyway duty lay elsewhere. Humming a mournful snatch of “Gogoniant i Gymru anwylwlad fy nhadau,” he crossed the side yard to the Mansion.

  Marion, to his deep regret, was there alone. “I’m baby-sitting,” she explained. “Elmer took Gilly to the movies to get her mind off Henry and I’m stuck here with the kid. Isn’t it just my lousy luck you turned out to be a cop instead of a rich bachelor from Winnipeg? Oh well, maybe I’m due for a break. It’s about time, God knows.”

  Marion’s attitude was an interesting mixture of apprehension and smugness. She was plainly nervous with Rhys, but he also got the distinct impression she thought she was putting something over on him. In any event, though she was cautious, she was not overtly hostile. “What the heck, as long as we’re stuck with each other, we might as well make the best of it,” was her cordial remark as she fetched the cribbage board and a deck of cards.

  They played a couple of rounds amicably enough, then Marion got up again and came back with two juice glasses and a dusty-looking bottle. “Want to try Uncle Charles’s most successful invention? Elmer found a hidden cache while he and Janet were looking for the patent. The old gink made the best cherry brandy in the world, and never got around to writing down the recipe.”

  She poured them each a glassful of the dark red liquid. A sip warned Rhys that the stuff was as lethal as it was delicious, and he nursed his drink henceforth with due respect. Marion either didn’t realize or didn’t care. She downed the stuff like barley water. By half-past nine her shrewd game had gone to pieces. By a quarter of ten she could barely find her pegs, let alone count the holes on the board. As the mantel clock struck ten, Rhys dragged her inert form to the couch and threw an afghan over her.

  He went back to the cards, played a few hands of Canfield, finished his first and only glass of cherry brandy because it would be flying in the face of Providence to waste any, and went upstairs. Gilly and Elmer were still out. Bobby was safe asleep with one of the dachshunds on the bed beside him, its long nose stretched out on the pillow and a stubby paw resting against the boy’s shoulder. Rhys went to his own room and put on his pajamas.

  The cherry brandy turned out to be a powerful soporific. Rhys might have slept on like the lotus
eaters had he not been violently aroused. The time was 6 a.m. and the rouser was Marion. She was slapping him, shaking him, screaming into his ear. “Madoc, for God’s sake, wake up! She’s dead!”

  “Who?” He sat bolt upright regardless of his canary-yellow pajamas.

  “Elizabeth,” she moaned. “Out there on the lawn.”

  He was out of bed, grabbing for his trousers, barking at her to go wake Elmer. He’d got his coat on over his pajama top and was tying his shoelaces so he wouldn’t break his neck running down the stairs when she screamed, “They’re gone!”

  “Who’s gone?” he yelled back as he bolted for the staircase.

  “Gilly and Elmer. Their beds haven’t even been slept in. And Bobby’s gone, too!” she shrieked over the bannisters.

  She was still yelling something when he rushed out the door. It took less than a second to spot the woman’s body sprawled on the sun-brown grass, a bundle of lavender and white print, and a tumble of black hair.

  “That—” Marion was at his elbow. “Madoc, is that—?”

  “Keep back. Don’t come any nearer.”

  Rhys himself picked his way toward the body, watching where he put his feet, but the hard-baked ground told him nothing. He knelt and carefully pushed aside the blood-matted hair. The face exposed looked like Elizabeth Druffitt’s, but was not.

  “It’s Dot!” Marion screamed. “It’s Dot Fewter wearing Elizabeth’s dress. What’s she got Elizabeth’s dress on for?”

  “Marion, be quiet.” Rhys didn’t need hysterics on top of everything else. “Dot was telling us last night at suppertime that your cousin had given her some clothes. However, she was not wearing this dress then. She had on some sort of loose—er—garb with broad red and green stripes.”

  “That’s right.” Marion was trying to calm herself, although her voice was shaking. “She had that tent shift thing on yesterday morning when she came to clean down there. Elizabeth blasted her out for wearing such a getup to a house of mourning and made her put on an old gray cotton housedress of Elizabeth’s own. But Elizabeth didn’t give it to her, she only lent it. Elizabeth never gives anybody anything.”

  “The outfit in question was the one your cousin had been wearing when her husband was murdered, and she gave it because she said she could never wear it again. Does it seem unreasonable to you that a woman should wish to be rid of clothes that had such unhappy associations?”

  “I don’t know. I guess not.”

  “Would this be the dress your cousin wore that day?”

  “Maybe. I don’t know. She’d changed to black by the time I got down there.”

  “But this is in fact one of her dresses?”

  “Of course it is. God knows I’ve seen it enough times, that and those damned genteel Cuban-heeled pumps with the little bows on the toes, white in summer and black in winter. Elizabeth never wears anything else; that way she can get by with only two pairs. It looked so strange yesterday with the temperature up to eighty and her wearing black shoes. Look, Dot’s even got the shoes on. Madoc, is she really dead?”

  “You seemed sure enough when you were hauling me out of bed,” he answered rather testily. “Why are you asking me now?”

  “I—I don’t know.” Marion licked her lips. “Look, what are you driving at? I didn’t touch her, if that’s what you mean. I never went near her. I just got up to go to the bathroom and looked out the window and—and here she was out here on the ground and—and Elizabeth would never—”

  Rhys nodded. It was true. From what he could judge of her, Elizabeth never would. And the woman before him was indeed dead, no doubt of that. Had been for at least four or five hours if he was any sort of judge, which experience entitled him to be. He explored the mess of hair with his fingers, hating the feel of it, and found a deep cavity on the crown. It was rounded, like the one Janet Wadman and Fred Olson claimed to have felt in Dr. Druffitt’s fractured skull.

  Had the same weapon been used? Then why wasn’t the wound cleaner? Why were crumbs of fresh earth sticking to the blood clots? He looked around and saw whitewashed rocks the size of cabbages outlining the driveway. One of them was a trifle out of line. A few sprigs of yellowed grass showed where it had been replaced, neatly but not quite neatly enough.

  CHAPTER 15

  So it was that simple. The killer had simply grabbed the first heavy object that came to hand, and whanged away. He’d then carefully put the rock back where it belonged, but left the corpse lying where it fell. Why? It would have made more sense to drag Dot over to the border and lay her head against the rock, as though she’d tripped in those unaccustomed shoes and fallen.

  It would have been a bit difficult to place her properly, though, since the injury was in such a curious place, on the top of her head and slightly to the front, as though somebody had stood face-to-face with her, lifted the rock high above her head, and brought it down with all force. But why should she stand there like a fool and let herself be struck down?

  Maybe she hadn’t been standing. Maybe she had in fact tripped and was sitting on the ground when it happened. Maybe the killer had come pretending to help her up, bent over her, and hit her instead. That would be easy enough even for a small person. In any event, the nature of the injury suggested it had been done by somebody she knew and wasn’t afraid of. That didn’t help much. Dot would have known just about anybody from around these parts. She’d been too long on good nature and too short on brains to be easily frightened.

  There was something finical about the way that rock had been replaced. The act suggested a housewife with tidy habits and too little strength to move a tall, big-boned body like Dot’s. Somebody like Gilly Bascom, who liked to leave a place looking halfway decent, as she’d remarked while they were making the beds together. Somebody—and Rhys did not enjoy this idea—like Janet Wadman with her injured hand.

  There was also the boy Bobby. Could he, with the fantastical reasoning of a child, have imagined he could clear himself of suspicion by putting back the weapon?

  But why should any of these three, or anybody at all, want to kill Dot Fewter? Maybe nobody had. Here was a woman the size of Elizabeth Druffitt, wearing a distinctive and familiar outfit of Elizabeth Druffitt’s; a light-colored outfit, moreover, that would be easy enough to recognize in the dark.

  It was not unreasonable that Elizabeth might have decided to break her long boycott of the Mansion and decide to spend a night here with her daughter and her cousin, rather than sleep alone in her own place. It was not unreasonable that she might find herself unable to sleep at all, and try to calm her nerves by a late-night stroll around the yard. Mightn’t somebody else have made the same mistake Marion did when she saw the body on the lawn?

  Marion could even have made that same mistake twice. She’d have needed great powers of recovery, though, if she’d been able to stagger out here and commit a murder so soon after she’d passed out over the cribbage board. On the other hand, she might have been a good deal less drunk than she’d appeared to be. It was possible that his own faculty of discernment had been a trifle impaired by the time he dragged her to the couch.

  Rhys was rather taken with that hypothesis. For one thing, it took Janet Wadman and her brother off the list of suspects. They’d known about the dress. Marion and the rest of them at the Mansion had not, so they could all be left on. So could the rest of the town, for that matter, unless Dot had managed somehow to get the word around in the brief time she’d had between leaving Mrs. Druffitt and coming to Janet. It appeared to be an accepted fact of life around here that Elizabeth Druffitt had never given away any of her possessions and never would.

  Mrs. Druffitt made a far more logical victim than Dot Fewter. Mrs. Druffitt had a husband who’d just been murdered, so she constituted a possible threat to whoever had done that little job. She had property, she had power and influence in the community. Under that ladylike facade she had the gall of an ox. She also, he was willing to bet his Sunday boots, had by now worked out a deal
of some sort with Jason Bain. That combination of circumstances suggested several possible motives.

  Rhys slid a couple of twigs under the rock and lifted it gingerly on to a sheet of paper he’d asked Marion to bring him from the house. It was a letterhead captioned “Treadway Enterprises Ltd,” he noticed. He wasn’t concerned with letterheads; he was thinking about the chance of fingerprints on that whitewashed surface. A vain hope, no doubt. Anybody who’d take the trouble to put back the rock would be tidy enough or clever enough to wipe it off, most likely. Even young boys. Especially young boys. They read comic books, and watched cops-and-robbers programs on television.

  Elmer, Gilly, and Bobby were all three missing and presumably all three together. The two grownups, if such they could be called, must have got back from their movie sometime after Rhys and Marion had been lulled to rest by Uncle Charles’s lotus-blossom brandy, picked up the child, and cleared out. What better reason could they have for doing so than the one that lay here in front of him?

  They couldn’t have known Rhys would be asleep, unless they’d fixed it up with Marion beforehand to dose him with the brandy. That would mean they’d planned the crime in advance. But they wouldn’t have expected Elizabeth Druffitt to be here, so Dot would then have to be the right victim, after all. And what would Dot be doing here when she was supposed to be over with Janet?

  He tried another tack. Suppose for the sake of argument that Bobby had skinned out of the house after Rhys had found him so sweetly asleep with his canine bedmate. Suppose the boy had got up to some mischief or other, not necessarily anything really wicked but something he wouldn’t want to get caught at, and been appalled to run into a woman he thought was his grandmother as he was sneaking back into the Mansion?