by James Yaffe
“But why, I’m asking myself, should she run for herself such an unnecessary risk? Only one possible reason comes into my mind. Late that night, sitting in front of her television watching Jimmy Stewart, it suddenly came to her that there was something in the old man’s room which could maybe prove she killed him. Something she didn’t want the police to find. And if the body wasn’t discovered yet, maybe there was still a chance she could get into the old man’s room and pick up this something before the police got there. Anyway, even if she failed, it was important enough so she had to give it a try.
“What is this something? This is the question I’m asking myself over and over. And also, did she get what she was looking for? It seems like she did, because the police didn’t find anything in that room, any clue that could lead them to her, and you didn’t find such a clue either. If she got it, the next question is obvious? What’s missing from that room?”
“You can’t possibly answer that one. If it’s something whose existence nobody even knows about—”
“Davie, Davie, there was something missing from that room, and we do know about its existence. The wine bottle that had the poison in it—how did the old man carry it through the streets and up to his room? He carried it in a white paper bag. The hotel clerk told you that’s what the bottle was in when Abernathy walked through the lobby at four o’clock. So what happened to that white paper bag? You looked at every inch of the floor, you looked under the bed, you looked in the closet, you looked all over the place—and isn’t it true you didn’t run across that paper bag?”
I gulped a little at this. It was obvious now that Mom pointed it out to me, but to tell the truth it hadn’t occurred to me earlier. “All right, the bag was missing. But why would she want to take such a big risk for that?”
“Because when she got that bottle from her restaurant in the first place, she thought this was a completely safe thing to do. The police could go around to liquor stores for the next ten years, she thought, and no clerk was going to identify her. But late that night she suddenly remembered something. How did she carry that bottle from the restaurant to her meeting place with old Abernathy? She carried it in that white paper bag, one of the doggie bags she kept around her restaurant. She gave it to Abernathy in this bag, and this was the bag Abernathy brought back with him to his hotel room. And don’t you remember, Davie? All of these doggie bags, like the napkins and the tablecloths and the windows and the doors, had that little monogram on them, FF, with the Fs tangled up with each other so they looked like a couple making love.
“You see what this suddenly meant to her? When the police found the paper bag that the bottle came in, they’d be able to tell by the FF that it was from Francesca Fleming’s restaurant. They’d know there was a connection between her and the dead man, and how long would it take them after that to figure out what it was? So she had to go back to that room and get hold of that paper bag.”
I was getting excited now, I have to admit it. There’s something about the way Mom piles the details up to make a case. Before I could say anything, though, she said, “And now we’ll go back to Candy’s murder, so we can see where the fanatic comes in.”
“The fanatic?”
“When Francesca Fleming ran out of Candy’s house, she didn’t realize he wasn’t dead yet. He had in him enough life still to tear open a box of crayons that was under the Christmas tree and write a message on his carpet. What he wrote, in capital letters, was ‘GOLD, FRANKINCENSE, AND MYRRH.’ Now why should he use his last ounces of life to write on the carpet?
“This had to be because he was trying to tell the police who killed him. It had to be—but what I couldn’t see was how this message he wrote told the police anything. What was the connection between Francesca Fleming and the Three Wise Men? I gave myself pains in the neck trying to figure this out. Until I noticed another peculiar thing about this message.
“What I noticed was, Candy couldn’t have written it. First of all, it would be too hard for a dying man to put down so many words, and especially in such a short period of time. Remember, he had to do it after Francesca ran out of the house but before Roger got there and found him dead—which wasn’t more than a few minutes later.
“And the second reason why he couldn’t have written this message—Candy was a terrible speller. You saw it for yourself in the posters he put up at the church and in the sermon he wrote. So does it make sense to you that he could spell ‘frankincense’ and ‘myrrh’ absolutely without any mistakes? With no chance to look them up in the dictionary?”
“You’re confusing me again. One minute you say he wrote the message to name his killer. The next minute you say he didn’t write the message.”
“Part of it he wrote, most of it he didn’t. What he wrote was only four letters, that’s all he could manage before he died. But those four letters were enough so the police would understand who killed him. F-R-A-N. The beginning of the name Francesca.”
“But what I saw on that carpet was a lot longer than—”
“At five-thirty, his wife came home from her shopping. She found her husband’s body, she called the police, they got there in fifteen minutes. She told you she spent those fifteen minutes sitting in the room across the hall. But the mystery of this message clears up once you catch on she spent that time in a more creative way.
“She saw what Candy wrote on the carpet, and she understood what those four letters meant. She wanted to erase them, only she couldn’t, because the crayons were indelible, it would take turpentine and cold water and a lot of time to make them invisible. All she could do was try to disguise their meaning, by adding on to them, by turning her husband’s short message into a longer one, by hiding the capital letters that really meant something in a larger collection of capital letters that seemed to mean something but actually didn’t. So she turned FRAN into FRANKINCENSE, and she tacked GOLD on to the front of the word and AND MYRRH on to the end of the word. Right away we’ve got the Three Wise Men, only their main purpose in life is to make the rest of us stupid.”
“But why did Mrs. Candy do it? You’d think she’d want her husband’s murderer to get caught.”
“There’s something she wanted a lot more. She knew her husband was having an affair, maybe she even knew it was with Francesca Fleming. Either way, she realized when she saw those letters on the carpet what would happen if Francesca got charged with her husband’s murder. All the dirty details of their affair would come out into the open. The whole world would find out her husband was a lecherer, an adulterer, a breaker of two or three commandments, and a dirty old man. And for Mrs. Candy, like you noticed yourself when you talked to her, the most important thing in her life is to keep up the appearance what a holy virtuous man her husband was. He was a saint, and she wants the world to go on thinking so. Maybe she still thinks so, maybe she’s managed to convince herself that the evidence of her own eyes was false. This is what religious faith is, isn’t it? Ignoring the evidence of your own eyes?”
“Then Mrs. Candy is the fanatic you’ve been looking for all this time?”
“Who can doubt it? She’ll never admit it though. Under torture, in my opinion, you couldn’t get her to confess that she changed that message on the carpet or to say what the original message was. Luckily, your case against Francesca Fleming is strong enough so you won’t have to bring in Candy’s dying accusation. Once you have her arrested, you’ll maybe find powder burns on her fingers—didn’t you tell me once they last for a week or more, after somebody fires a gun? And I’ll make a bet, if the police go over Candy’s living room carefully, they’ll find some of Francesca Fleming’s fingerprints there. And somewhere there must be signed agreements between her and Candy so she could take over ownership of those houses he bought. All this is just routine details, it don’t interest me.”
And Mom poured out another cup of coffee for herself and disguised her self-satisfaction for the next few seconds by gulping it down noisily.…
* * *
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… Though Francesca had no coffee cup to use as a prop, she remained as cool and unruffled as she had been from the start. No way around it, I just had to admire her.
She said nothing for awhile, and then she said, “It wouldn’t do any good, I suppose, if I denied the whole thing?”
“Do you?” Ann said.
Francesca laughed. “As a matter of fact, I don’t. You’ve hit a lot of nails on the head. I must admit it never occurred to me that either of you was capable of this much sheer brainpower. Yes, I did have a little private real estate deal with Chuck Candy. And the idea of getting the Meyer couple out of their house by dressing up Chuck’s house for Christmas was entirely mine. Pretty imaginative, wasn’t it? And appropriate for the season too.
“One little bit you’ve got completely wrong, though. I’m not a murderer. As it happens, I didn’t kill Chuck Candy or anybody else.”
This was what I’d been waiting for. Nice work, Mom, I said silently.
Out loud I said to Francesca, “But you know who did, don’t you?”
For just a second her gaze flickered away. It was enough to tell me that Mom was right.
“I can’t imagine,” she said, meeting my eyes steadily again. “As far as I know, none of my friends are murderers. Some of them, I grant you, are asking to be murdered—”
“It’s all right,” I said, “you don’t have to tell me who it is. I’ll tell you, okay? And then you can say if I’m right.…”
* * *
… Mom gulped down some more of her coffee, and I got up and gave her a kiss. On my face was that look of awe that’s been there countless times since my boyhood. “I believe you’ve done it again, Mom.”
“I’m glad you believe it. Because you shouldn’t sit here on your backside one minute more. You should call up Ann Swenson and tell her about this, and tonight the two of you should go to Francesca Fleming and tell her—and it’s very important she should believe that you believe it.”
“Why shouldn’t she believe we believe it? She knows better than anybody that it’s true.”
“Excuse me,” Mom said, “but what she knows better than anybody is that it isn’t true.”
I stared at her.
She laughed and said, “Close your mouth, and I’ll tell you what I left out the first time around.
“Like I told you already, Francesca found out from Victor Kincaid about the company from the East that’s building the mall. It’s natural he should know about it because he’s the lawyer for this company. But there’s something else Kincaid knew which isn’t so natural.
“In the meeting you had with him yesterday, he made a remark about the type sermons that preachers like Candy give. He said such sermons are all about ‘people killing calves, and being dead and coming to life again, and feeling guilty because they slept with harlots.’ You know what all these items come from? They’re all mentioned in the story of the prodigal son, which Candy quoted in his sermon.”
“Well, he did quote those things, didn’t he?” I said. “So how was Kincaid wrong?”
“He wasn’t. He was right. This is the point. How should Kincaid, when he wanted to give an example how ridiculous sermons are, come up with exactly the sermon that Candy just got finished writing? It’s another coincidence, and this one is so big even Jonah and the whale would choke on it.
“Now you see what’s not natural, don’t you, Davie? Candy wrote that sermon on Thursday afternoon, just before he got killed. Nobody saw it afterwards, except his son and you. His son didn’t deliver it in public ’til this morning. So how did Kincaid know what was in it? He could know this in only one way—if he was in Candy’s house on Thursday afternoon.
“And here’s another thing you should notice. Luke Abernathy, the old prophet, saw the murderer coming out of Candy’s house, recognized this person, and eventually got killed because he went in for blackmail. But how did Abernathy recognize the murderer? Abernathy wasn’t what you’d call a social butterfly. He wasn’t welcome in any circle of Mesa Grande society. If Francesca was the murderer, and Abernathy saw her leaving Candy’s house, he wouldn’t know who she was so he’d be able to contact her later on and blackmail her. It isn’t likely Abernathy ever saw her or knew her by name before or since.
“But with Kincaid it’s different. Kincaid is a celebrity, a well-known face. In Wednesday morning’s paper was a big picture of him, how he just came to town on business. And the paper not only gave his name and his face, it also mentioned he was staying at the Richelieu. Abernathy read the paper regularly—he picked it up out of trashcans—so it’s a sure thing he saw Kincaid’s picture on Wednesday. And recognized that face when he saw it coming out of Candy’s house on Thursday afternoon.
“And finally, there’s the wine bottle with the poison in it. This bottle came from Francesca Fleming’s restaurant, this we can be sure of. And Kincaid had lunch with her in that restaurant on Saturday, she mentioned it to you yourself. Did she give him a bottle of wine for a Christmas present? This is what I think. And did she put it in one of the restaurant’s white paper bags so he could take it away with him? So he took it all right, put the poison in it, and gave it to Abernathy a little later in the afternoon when the old man came to him for money. And naturally it was still in the same white paper bag—why should Kincaid bother to switch it to a different one?
“But an hour or so after that, when he was with you at the Unitarian Church, Francesca Fleming said something which to Kincaid was like getting a kick in the stomach. She made her little speech how Easterners always underestimate Westerners. They think Westerners prefer Coca Cola to fancy wines with French names and dirty pictures to paintings by French painters. It was the combination of these two items that suddenly made Kincaid realize what he did. He gave Abernathy a bottle of French wine from Francesca Fleming’s restaurant, and he put that bottle inside a paper-bag with one of her monograms on it—that FF monogram which, let’s face it, is practically a dirty picture. You noticed it yourself, didn’t you, how awful Kincaid looked after Francesca Fleming made this remark?
“And the worst part of it was, he couldn’t do anything about it right then. He had a business dinner that he couldn’t get out of. In my opinion, he didn’t enjoy the food very much at that dinner. But as soon as he could break free from it, around eleven-thirty, he went to Abernathy’s hotel to get his hands on that paper-bag.
“The point is, Francesca Fleming could never make such a mistake. She could never put the murder weapon in one of her own paper bags and leave it at the scene of the crime. She’d realize right away, maybe even without thinking about it, that the bag could be traced back to her from the monogram. Kincaid, though, could make such a mistake easy. He knew about her special FF monograms, because she tells everybody about them, but they weren’t on his mind.”
“But what was his motive for killing Candy?” I asked.
“The same motive that I accused Francesca of having, only with Kincaid it goes double. He found out about the Eastern company’s plans for a mall, he got in touch with her because she’s right here in Mesa Grande, on the spot, and she agreed to handle the arrangements. She reported to him regularly. On Thursday, when she got to his house for her weekly date, Candy told her to go away. He told her he was ending the affair and blowing the whistle on the real estate deal.
“After she left his house, the first thing she did was to call her partner at the Richelieu. Kincaid was even more upset about this development than she was. He stood to lose a lot of money, and his reputation is all over the country, he’s built his career on being this unselfish fighter for human rights. If it ever gets out he’s mixed up in a sleazy real estate business, his whole career flushes down the toilet. So he told Francesca Fleming to sit tight and keep her mouth shut, and he’d take care of the situation.”
“What about Candy’s dying message? He wrote the letters FRAN on the carpet, and his wife changed them to—”
“He didn’t write FRAN on the carpet. What he wro
te was KINC. He was accusing Kincaid, only he died before he could finish writing his name. It’s KINC that Mrs. Candy changed to FRANKINCENSE. She knew her husband was in this shady real estate deal with Kincaid. She did it to protect her husband’s reputation, like I said before—only not from a sex scandal, from a money scandal.”
Mom finished her cup of coffee with a loud satisfied slurp.…
* * *
… I finished my chain of reasoning and waited for Francesca to make a comment.
After a moment she shrugged. “You don’t really think that case is strong enough for you to get a conviction. Victor’s an awfully good lawyer, you know.”
“You’re right,” Ann said. “We probably couldn’t make it stick in court. Unless we could find a witness to strengthen it. Somebody who could testify to Kincaid’s part in the real estate deal. And somebody who knows he intended to visit Candy that afternoon.”
Francesca’s eyebrows lifted slightly. “You surely aren’t referring to me. What on earth makes you think I’d testify against my dear old friend?”
“I didn’t think so actually. I was just hoping. I always prefer it if the guilty party gets punished rather than an innocent party.”
“Your client?” Francesca gave a splendidly contemptuous shrug. “I can’t imagine how that concerns me.”
“I didn’t mean our client. He’s out of it. The evidence clears him completely, the DA will have to let him go. No, I was referring to you, Francesca. Our case against you is more than strong enough.”
Francesca gave one of her loud laughs. “But you know I didn’t do it! You’d charge me with murder even though you know I’m innocent?”