by Joan Hess
“All of you heard his response. He assured me that he would try to divorce me first, and transfer his assets to his secretary’s name, in order to keep me from getting my fair share.” Bella found Suzetta and gave her an inscrutable look. “However, even in his drunken stupor, Harmon knew that a lawyer would be able to thwart the petty scheme. I had no reason to kill my husband, Sergeant; I had already washed my hands of him.”
“Yet yesterday morning you followed him to the Mimosa Inn and attempted to register under a false name!”
“A crime, Sergeant? I think not. Yes, I followed Harmon here to confirm my suspicions. Earlier in the morning I found a notation on his desk about his reservation for the weekend, although he had told me earlier that he would be on a hunting trip with some colleagues from a distant city. He was hardly hunting squirrels.”
“Mrs. Crundall, you must be frank with us.”
Bella adjusted her hat, seemingly unconcerned by Nickie’s increasingly dark expression. “If you’re finished, I would prefer to return to my bungalow, Sergeant Merrick.”
Without waiting for a reply, she left the room. Nickie gave his mustache a vicious tweak, then hurried across the room to confer with his nervous henchman. The rest of us took the opportunity to commence breathing once again. I noted the parameters of the time of death in my notebook, did a bit of subtraction on my fingers and arrived at the estimated hours: ten o’clock to midnight, when we had all been watching the movie in the drawning room.
Or had we? There had been noises in the back of the room, as if people had washed in and out on a random tide. I could vouch for my own presence the entire time, but I couldn’t be sure about anyone else’s, including Peter’s. I looked around the room for him, and spotted him at a far table, grinning at me with an inquisitive tilt to his head. It was not worthy of response.
Nickie returned to the front of the room. “Mrs. Vanderhan, it seems that Crundall and his”—discreet cough—“secretary, Miss Price, were unaware of the special nature of the weekend. According to several witnesses, they were surprised by the whimsical plans and a bit disgruntled. If they had no reservations, why did you permit them to register?”
Mimi fluttered her hands helplessly. “Eric and I had a meeting scheduled for Monday with Mr. Crundall. He arrived Friday after lunch and announced that he had driven down early to spend a restful weekend with his secretary. Due to the nature of the meeting Monday, I could hardly refuse his demand for adjoining rooms.”
“This meeting was about … ?”
“He had an option on some of the land surrounding the Mimosa Inn. He was a sort of—silent partner, and he wanted to discuss refinancing schemes on Monday. I had no choice.”
Eric joined her in the doorway, placing one hand on her shoulder to steady her. His pipe was clenched tightly between his teeth. “That is correct, Sergeant. Harmon Crundall was a business associate, nothing more.”
“Ah, Mr. Vanderhan, I have a question or two for you. If Crundall was indeed murdered during the movie last night, someone must have left the room. You were in the back of the room with the projector; can you offer any enlightenment about the group’s movements?”
“It was dark,” Eric said uneasily. His pipe wobbled for a second, and he quickly stuffed it in his pocket.
“Necessarily so, in order for the movie to be visible,” Nickie said. “Then let us return to the moment before the lights went out. Was anyone missing from the room at that time?”
“Mrs. Crundall did not appear, but she was in her bungalow. I later sent Bruce down there to see if she might want a tray from the dining room or a pot of tea.”
“Bruce?”
“Bruce Wheeler, our temporary bartender. He came back and said that Mrs. Crundall refused to answer his repeated knocks.”
Nickie scanned the room until he found the blond beach boy, who was sitting at the table with Suzetta. “How did you know that Mrs. Crundall was really inside the bungalow?” he barked.
Bruce carefully placed his fork on one fingertip and balanced it with negligent confidence. “I heard her inside. Crying. I decided not to disturb her and left.”
“Did you then return to the house to watch the movie?” The fork clattered onto the table. “I’d already seen it, so I continued past the bungalows to walk around the lake.”
Nickie digested that with a wry frown, then waved a hand at the man poised in the doorway to the drawing room. The man came forward with a collection of plastic bags and arranged them on a table.
“These,” Nickie said, “are the pieces of evidence found at the scene of the crime or in Crundall’s room. I will allow you to examine them, if you wish, but they must not be tampered with before the investigation is finished. Those of significance will be needed at the trial.”
He spun on his heel and marched out of the room. Suzetta and Bruce followed more slowly, whispering to each other. Pale but composed, Mimi invited us to resume our meal and went into the kitchen with her husband. We sat for a decorous minute, then all shoved back our chairs and scrambled for the table with the clues. Mrs. Robison-Dewitt arrived first. Elbows primed for violence, she began sifting through the plastic bags as the rest of us advanced with caution.
Once I had worked my way through the crowd, I snatched a Baggie from under her substantial nose and studied the contents. Three long yellow threads, similiar to human hairs but with an unmistakable synthetic sheen. I dutifully recorded the information in my notebook and picked up another Baggie, labeled “victim’s bedroom.” Inside was a ragged corner of paper, the edges charred. I could make out a few letters: “Whereas th—” Mrs. Robison-Dewitt plucked it out of my hands, but I doubted there was anything else to be deduced from it.
A second Baggie from the bedroom contained a highball glass with a crescent of lipstick on one side of the rim, and a third a clump of mud. The last clue was from the boathouse, and was as helpful as the previous ones. I noted the matchbook (minus two matches) in my notebook and wiggled out of the crowd.
It was time to determine a game plan. Resisting the urge to dash to the boathouse to examine the scene of the crime, I forced myself to go upstairs to my room in order to contemplate the clues in peace. If Poirot could do it from his parlor, then so could Malloy.
Caron was still asleep. Dandy, I told myself as I perched on one corner of the bed and read my squiggles. The penciled message on the boathouse door still avowed that the building held the answer. It had held the body, but we all knew that. It also held dust, grime, and cobwebs, and it had held the clues Nickie left for us to examine.
I listed the suspects: Bella Crundall (for obvious reasons), Suzetta Price (for unknown reasons), Mimi and Eric Vanderhan (again, obvious reasons), Bruce Wheeler (because of his peculiar story), and Mrs. Robison-Dewitt (on principle). Five valid suspects, and one out of sheer malice. The schedule gave us until dinnertime to unravel the clues, question the suspects, and arrive at a solution.
For lack of anything else, I arranged the clues under their respective sites of discovery. Boathouse: plastic threads, matchbook. Bedroom: lipstick-smudged glass, burnt paper, piece of mud. From Nickie’s comment about them, I decided that some of them might be irrelevant, not that I could find relevance in any of them. I flipped to a clean page and licked the tip of the pencil.
Harmon Crundall had come to wrest the Mimosa Inn from its devoted owners, whose protective instincts might drive them to murder. He had brought his witless secretary—except that she was by no means as witless as she acted. She had some unknown relationship with the agile bartender, who seemed to be hiding something. Bella Crundall, the estranged wife, could well be disguising her justifiable rage. Now what?
I tried a time scenario: Harmon was carried to bed at nine o’clock, after which we finished dinner and went onto the porch for brandy. Shortly after that, Mimi and Suzetta engaged in a terse conversation on the stairs, then Mimi returned to the second floor with a strained expression (and lied about it when questioned). But she couldn’t have
bashed Harmon and carried him to the boathouse. Harmon weighed a solid two hundred pounds, Mimi perhaps half that.
At ten o’clock we had gone inside for the movie. Bruce had been sent to check on Bella Crundall and purportedly heard her inside the bungalow. Then, according to his statement, he went for a walk. In the dark? Almost anyone could have slipped away from the drawing room, since the lights were conveniently off. Eric had seemed distressed by his inability to provide an alibi for any of us, which might indicate that he was protecting someone.
And, most interestingly of all, Suzetta had crept through the house at one-thirty and vanished in the stable area (and lied about it when questioned). To meet Bruce? To find a wheelbarrow to transport a tenth of a ton? And go thump, thump, thump down the stairs to the boathouse?
I was on a merry-go-round, making precise little circles that led precisely nowhere. I swatted Caron’s exposed posterior. “Wake up, there’s been a murder. I want you to help me.”
An eye opened to a slit. “Why?”
So much for the hopes of a successful mother-daughter team. I changed into jeans, a knit shirt, and my Marple cardigan. Notebook in hand, I went downstairs to commence some serious sleuthing.
Peter was in front of the desk, flipping through the registration book. When he saw me, he closed the book and turned around. “Good heavens, it’s the sinister spinster from St. Mary Mead. Making any progress?”
“I certainly am,” I lied blithely. “There are a few loose ends to be tidied up, but I have a fairly good idea who our murderer is. How about you, Wimsey? Found any good recipes?”
“I’m sure I can find some if the need arises,” he said, flashing his teeth at me. I flashed mine in response; we nodded and he strolled across the drawing room and went outside to the porch.
Once he was gone, I hurried over to the guest book and located the entries of the present guests. I had checked in about midway in the list; Harmon and Suzetta had come a few names later, after a Dr. Chong Li. Peter’s name was the ultimate except for the mysterious arrival whom we now knew as Bella Crundall.
I went out the back door to explore the stable on the chance I might find a clue to Suzetta’s mysterious behavior the previous night. It was a long, sturdy building, which originally had housed over a dozen horses in roomy stalls. Side walls were removed to allow cars to park under the roof. At one end there was a tack room filled with lawn mowers, bags of fertilizer, gardening tools, and odd bits of furniture in need of minor repairs. It did not seem a romantic setting for a midnight tryst, in that the dominant redolence was that of ripened organic material. I recalled Mimi’s comment about the staff quarters on the second floor, and wasted a few minutes creeping up the steps to gaze at an empty, narrow hallway with closed doors.
As I started down, I saw a slip of paper tacked on a post. Giddy with optimism, I took out my pencil and prepared myself for a shattering revelation. The message read, “The blonde has an abbreviated problem of personal identity.”
I stood there and reread the words approximately twenty times before I copied them into my notebook. I knew who the blonde was, and I already knew she had played a role for Harmon’s and our benefit. Okay, a problem of personal identity. But abbreviated?
I heard a footstep in the tack room and ducked into a stall that housed a black Cadillac. Breathing heavily, I peeked around the bumper. Although the whole thing was a game, my heard thudded unplayfully on my stomach and my hands turned to sponges. Competition does that to me.
Mrs. Robison-Dewitt crept into view, a priggish frown on her face as she took in the wisps of straw on the floor and the cobwebs stretched across the rafters. She was heading toward the post with the clue, but I doubted it was visible from her vantage point.
I leaped to my feet and shouted, “Hello!”
It was well worth the effort. The lady turned the color of algae, shrieked, and almost lost her balance on the loose straw. Her hands were curled to battle a rapist or mugger; her expression might have sent the same into terror-stricken flight. Our eyes met across the expensive expanse of Cadillac.
“You!” she said, outraged and shrill. And brownish-green.
I opted for an innocent ploy. “Well, yes. I came out here to tighten the carburetor regulator valve on my pistons. I never thought I’d get the stubborn thing adjusted. Afterwards, I searched for clues but didn’t find anything.” I abruptly shifted to a solicitous expression. “Mrs. Robison-Dewitt, you’re quite pale. Let me help you back to the porch to sit down. Perhaps a glass of sherry … ?”
She was too shocked to protest, and allowed me to lead her out of the stable and around the house to the lawn. Once we reached the porch, however, she jerked her arm free.
“Thank you, Mrs. Malloy,” she said stiffly, “but I am fine. If you would be so kind as to leave me in peace, I shall soon recover.”
It sounded like a promise for revenge. I gave her my sweetest smile and murmured, “But of course. Please be careful if you intend to prowl around deserted buildings; the floors can be rough.”
I thought I heard her say that she could, too, but she was already through the door. Trying not to chortle, I glanced around to see what my fellow detectives were up to. The lazier (or more confident) were sunbathing near the water; the more industrious were wandering about with notebooks and guarded expressions. The boathouse had a line in front of it, as though it were a movie theater. Caron could have made a fortune selling tickets.
I strolled past the end of the line, striving to look uninterested, and continued through the garden. As I passed the statue in the center, I heard a scraping noise. I followed the noise to a far part of the garden, where I found Bella Crundall on her knees in the middle of a row of roses. I managed a timid greeting and introduced myself.
The “widow” seemed to have survived the ordeal without any visible distress. Waving a trowel at me, she said, “I’m a born gardener, and the sight of these neglected roses was too much to bear. All they need is a good pruning and a little lime worked into the soil around their roots.”
“I can see that,” I murmured. Limes belong in margaritas. I wasn’t sure what they would do for roses, but I wasn’t about to ask. Given any encouragement, avid hobbyists can expand like hot-air balloons. “I’m sorry about your husband, Mrs. Crundall,” I added, determined to avoid any further botanical insights.
“Call me Bella, dear.” She sat back on her heels and wiped her forehead with her sleeve. The blue suit had been replaced with sturdy denim jeans and a flannel shirt, the cuffs of which did little to hide the angry scratches on her wrists. She saw me looking at them and said, “I really shouldn’t have taken it upon myself to undo years of neglect. The bag of lime was in the tack room, but gloves were not. My hands are already beginning to blister.”
I found a grassy spot and sat down (the companionable ploy). “The garden is rather sad, isn’t it? I suppose you noticed its condition last night when you returned to the bungalow?”
The corners of Bella’s mouth curled, but she caught herself before she actually smiled. “Exactly, Claire. I came back to the bungalow just as the sun was setting, and stayed there the rest of the night. I was so distressed by Harmon’s—ah, unfortunate condition. I felt truly sorry for the girl he was with. Thirty-one years of marriage hadn’t changed him; I doubted that she could, no matter how hard she batted her eyelashes and flattered him.”
“Did you hear Bruce knock on the door around ten o’clock?”
“I was too upset to notice much of anything, Claire. Although I fully expected to find Harmon in his disgraceful state, I was still rather shaken. So childish, pretending it was an innocent business trip.” Sighing, she began to dig a small hole.
“Did you know about the option?”
“Yes,” she admitted with a sigh, “and I told Harmon that he wasn’t giving that nice young couple a fair chance to make a go of the Mimosa Inn. He didn’t care; his heart shriveled up along with his liver. Once, when we were young and poor, I thought there mig
ht be a noble spirit under his ambition. How wrong I was …”
“He was a developer?” I asked encouragingly.
“He began as a real-estate salesman in a small office. By the end of five years, he owned the office and it had grown to a major operation. But Harmon was never satisfied. He not only had to make money, but also to spend it so that everyone could see how successful he was. The women were paraded so that everyone could know how virile he was. The drinking was to hide his one fear that no one would believe his ostentatious display and see through the pitiful charade.”
I was impressed with the work that had gone into the weekend. It seemed that an elaborate background had been arranged for each character, and detailed stories were available for the asking. Bella’s presentation had been convincing. I asked her if she had done much acting with the Farberville Community Theater.
“I’m a chemistry teacher at the high school,” she answered. “I do my acting in front of a captive audience every day, and I would imagine that’s more demanding than any theater presentation. The latter audience wants to be there, and they want to be amused.”
That brought me back to Caron, who needed as much stimulation as a sophomore chemistry student simply to be roused from bed. I thanked Bella for talking with me and left her to dig rings aound the roses. Once at the statue, however, I followed the path that ended at the row of bungalows. Bella had moved into the first, for the shutters were pulled back and the door was slightly ajar. As tempting as it was, I could not bring myself to snoop through her room, even though I knew she was safely occupied in the rose garden.
The other two bungalows were shuttered. I pretended for a moment that I was a juggling bartender on a mission of mercy. After tapping in the direction of the door, I told myself that I heard muffled sobs and lowered my head. Now, to take a walk. I noted that the only path out of the clearing led back to the garden; the brush on the other three sides was formidable, if not impenetrable. Bruce Wheeler had not strolled onward. He had returned the way he had come … to meet Suzetta? No, she had been in the drawing room.