Jessie pursed her lips. “You’re the only one who’s ever put it like that. But most people are sheepish, after all. You know, baaaaaaa.”
A titter ran through the crowd, and Teischer’s face turned stop-light red. But Jessie didn’t stop. “You’re the sheepdog. You ought to know.” She winked at the deputy.
Martha clarified. “Jessie gives out the cheat sheets at the start. And she keeps an eye on the guests as the play develops and they’re all looking for clues, so no one goes too far off track. Tom’s the M.C., though.”
“I want to know where everybody was when this happened.” Teischer had persistence, at least. “If you had people going into each other’s rooms…”
“Never!” Jessie interrupted. “Clues must be left only in the common rooms. I wouldn’t dream of expecting people to take that much initiative. Such liberties, I mean.”
Unfettered by such limitations, Jessie zoomed across the room, and with a flourish, opened the closet door. A man’s khaki trousers hung inside, along with two plaid shirts and a winter coat. Hiking shoes stuffed with thick socks sat below. She poked her head in and came right back out.
“Just like I thought. Cherchez la femme!” Jessie’s tone left no doubt of her authority.
“Ahhhh!” the crowd exclaimed.
By now Teischer was reduced to following in Jessie’s footsteps, so as not to tread on what was left of an unsullied floor that might still hold a scrap of evidence. He stuck his head in the closet and looked at an empty rack.
Meanwhile, spotting a pile of personal items a-top the dresser—a bunch of keys, scrunched up $20 bills and loose change, a vial with a dusting of white powder inside, two unopened condoms, and a leather wallet—Jessie stuck her cell phone in a pocket and scooped the wallet up.
She flipped it open and fanned through a thick stack of bills with her thumb, then studied the driver’s license. “Tsk. Only 47.” She pulled out the cash and counted it. “And money to burn.”
“Put that down!” Teischer cried, anguish in his voice. “Lady, you need to get out of this room. You’re going to ruin the scene.”
“You’ll note there’s more than three hundred dollars still there.” Jessie returned the bills to their original compartment. “No pictures of his loving family, though.”
“Out.” Teischer pushed Jessie by the elbows toward the hall.
“Fine. Get your own expert, then.”
Jessie threw the wallet back onto the dresser, hard. It tumbled against the base of a flower arrangement. The vase teetered, the flowers swayed, and the whole arrangement dropped to the floor with a crash. Water, flowers and plant waste spilled on the floor.
“Aaaagh!” Teischer’s face went crimson. He reached out with both hands as if to choke the blasted woman, but Jessie trotted past him, her long nose in the air.
“I’ll be in the kitchen when you need me,” she sniffed. “And you will.”
Jessie stepped on the first tread toward the ground floor, then stopped and cocked her head. An ambulance siren ended mid-wail and chirped into silence in front of the inn.
“I’ll get the door.”
Jessie hummed the tune to “Jingle Bells” as she descended. The guests whispered behind her, but Jessie didn’t care. She was a woman with a mission, a woman who knew what she was about, and who had made that abundantly clear.
Christmas greens and gold ribbons trailed down the banister, and the fragrance of Martha’s hot cinnamon buns overcame a certain burnt coffee smell, their spicy sweetness filling the air.
Jessie threw open the door to the inn just as she moved from a hum to a song.
“God rest ye, merry gentlemen, let nothing you dismay! Come in, come in! We left everything exactly the way it was.”
* * * *
A half-hour later, an unhappy two-man team from the medical examiner’s office wheeled David Whipple’s body out that same door and forever away from the Victorian-style B&B at 22 Laurel Street, Oakville, Texas.
Deputy Teischer watched them load the zipped rubber bag and gurney from the front porch, pacing in front of a tall Christmas tree decked with vintage ornaments. The winter sun had come out, but it shone with a thin, watery light that gave no warmth.
“You guys want to come back inside to do the paperwork?” Teischer’s voice held a hint of desperation. “Maybe take one more look around?”
The two men trudged back up the front steps and around the tree, making its bell ornaments jingle when one of them passed too close.
“Won’t do no good,” he muttered to his colleague, “but I wouldn’t mind a cup of hot coffee for the road.”
The guests, who had been asked to wait in the front yard while Teischer searched the house, followed them in. Once inside, they scattered like startled birds.
“So it was that ditzy woman who’s gone on the lam?” Arpeccio shuffled in behind the deputy sheriff, his voice hopeful. His doughy face oozed concern like an olive in a press. An unsolved murder wouldn’t be good for the bed & breakfast business, and as it was, Oakville wasn’t exactly the crossroads of the world.
“Nobody says ‘on the lam’ any more, sir. But it sure looks like she was involved. Funny thing is, she’s got the best alibi,” Teischer mused. “It’s troubling.”
“I wondered if she was high on something besides alcohol.” A stocky man in a blue plaid bathrobe offered this wisdom, after stopping to eavesdrop halfway up the stairs. “Though they kept drinking all afternoon while we searched for clues. He actually took a flask into the cemetery.”
“Emily told me she saw half a dozen pill bottles in their bathroom, too,” Martha added, from the kitchen door. “Diazepam, Tylenol 3, Prozac and something that started with an O.”
“Plus the coke.” Jessie’s disembodied voice came from out of the blue. “That’s a whole lot of tickets to ride.”
Teischer looked around as if he expected to see a ghost.
“Where… ” He gave up. “Mrs. Arpeccio, I’ll need to get statements from everybody—I mean, the guests—before they pay up and take off.” Teischer locked the front door and handed Tom the key.
“She won’t get far,” Martha opined. She dried her bony hands on a dishtowel. “We all just spent two days with her, all of us, up close. Once they put our descriptions together, they’ll find her fast. Come on, Jacob, I’ve got some fresh coffee made. I expect this is kinda a big surprise for your first day on the job.”
“No shit, Sherlock,” the deputy said with fervor. He started to follow Martha, then hesitated. He crouched and turned in a circle, looking high and low around the hallway, suspicion furrowing his brow.
He glanced into the parlor. Jessie’s grinning face popped up over the top of a grand piano. A flash went off, and she took a picture of him, a head-to-toe shot framed with cedar trimmings and twinkling lights.
“Give me a trophy shot. Show me your gun.”
The deputy threw up a hand, but it was too late. His eyes cut left and right until he saw the front door—an exit route! He reached for the doorknob, but stopped midway—of course, it was locked. By then Jessie had scrambled across the parlor toward him, a fistful of papers in her hand.
She pulled at his sleeve and thrust the pages at his face.
“Wait, wait… Look, I took statements from all the staff.”
“What?”
Martha pulled on the deputy’s other arm. “Oh, come have some coffee, son. It won’t hurt to sit down a minute and think.
She’s probably saved you a ton of time, and my buns just came out of the oven.”
Teischer accepted Jessie’s notes while avoiding both her eyes and her hands as she tried to stroke his bicep. Instead, he let himself be led toward Martha’s kitchen without protest, where the EMS men had already found Martha’s Styrofoam cups.
“You coming?” Martha said to the writer.
“In a minute. I need to pack up.” Jessie threw them a salute and headed up the stairs to her room.
* * * *
His long
, lean legs splayed out to preserve the creases in his pants, Deputy Teischer tried to fit on one of Martha’s kitchen stools by putting only an inch of his butt on the seat. He sipped at his coffee and studied the ruled pages that represented Jessie’s most recent efforts.
The last page listed what Jessie had titled “Curious Facts.”
Lawyer-Client relationship?
No money stolen
No drugs left behind
Scratch marks
Teischer was pondering these words when the stocky man in the blue bathrobe wandered in. Dr. Marsberg sauntered in next, going straight for the sweet, sticky buns. Martha watched the orthodontist prepare to take a huge bite.
Marsberg stopped when she saw her audience. “No fear. Mine are all false.” She tapped her front teeth.
“Scratch marks?” Teischer was puzzled.
“Sometimes a public facility like a hotel is host to—difficult— guests. At dinner there was a—problem. Experienced innkeepers see this kind of thing all the time.”
Her husband looked up from sorting dirty sheets in the laundry room. “Actually, that’s the first time I’ve ever seen a guest…”
Martha cut him off. “It is the policy of the Canyon River Inn not to inquire into the personal arrangements of our guests,” she declared, implying that they all deserved a rebuke for their curiosity about a murder suspect with whom they had lived for two days.
“Someone needed to inquire into hers, poor kid.” Dr. Mars-berg shook her head with rue and licked sugar off her thumb.
As Martha poured the deputy a warm-up, Frank Arredondo— the accountant from Texarkana who sported the blue robe—and Dr. Marsberg recounted the events of the evening before. Martha pretended to object, but soon she gossiped with the rest.
* * * *
The idea was that each character attacked the others and revealed their nasty sides, Martha explained, according to a sheet of facts and questions each guest had received as a resource before arrival. Every time they all met for a meal, another act of the play would ensue and more motives would be exposed. All the guests were supposed to give and take during these discussions, in character, and everyone was a suspect.
But during the Act Three discussion over dinner, everyone soon realized that Myrna had tumbled not only out of character, but also out of consciousness.
David Whipple, apparently a close personal friend as well as Myrna’s fellow “detective” for purposes of the mystery, had turned his head away just before it happened. He was reviewing the evidence revealed in the first two acts with Sophia Greco, a Texas girl-become-New York socialite who came home to Oakville once a year. They huddled, giggling over some detail the others had overlooked.
Jessie, however, was watching, and she later told Martha how it began. She had just passed a bowl of apple cobbler to the elderly real-estate lady on her right, so she saw it all—the acceleration of Myrna’s black forelock and pointed nose, diving like a cartoon crow toward a full cup of coffee, and just short of its destination, the jerk that caused that nose to miss its target and her head to go into a rolling collapse that took out the communal butter dish.
This was followed by a miss—a near-miss—of the steaming Mocca Almondine that Martha had served with dessert, thus saving Myrna’s red lace frock and probably her genitals.
By the time someone else noticed these events and cried out, Myrna’s cheek rested on her dessert plate, her ear and its several silver cuffs in a dollop of whipped cream. She opened her mouth into a tiny black-lined O and began to snore.
Jessie got to Myrna’s side first.
“Myrna, honey?” Jessie grabbed the girl’s arm in its flimsy sleeve and gave it a shake.
No response.
Jessie stepped closer to David and gave him a nudge in the ribs with her knee. He finally awoke to the situation just as Myrna slipped south of the horizon.
“Hey, baby, wake up,” David yelped. He grabbed for the girl, but her limbs were as floppy and useless as a dead squid’s.
Pulling her up from the nether realm, David slipped an arm around Myrna’s waist and looked around for help. The others were, for once, speechless.
Myrna’s head lolled against David’s neck. He tried to lift it off with his other hand, but he succeeded only in pushing puffs of whipped cream farther into Myrna’s ear and hair—and then onto Jessie, who tried to stabilize Myrna from the opposite side.
Arredondo had to admit that none of the guests moved to help—some were a little drunk by then, on Tom’s excellent martinis. He refrained from pointing out that their host had also sat big-eyed and useless in his chair throughout Myrna’s debacle.
Dr. Marsberg recalled someone saying, “This’s a hell of a note. S’posed to be a party,” and she thought it could have been David himself. In her opinion, his show of frantic concern was meant to hide his exasperation, if not contempt.
Jessie pushed Myrna’s head over to David’s shoulder and told him not to move. She ran to fetch Martha from the kitchen, where the innkeeper’s wife stood licking an eggbeater. By the time the two women got back to the dining room, Samantha Marsberg and David had decided to pull Myrna away from the table by her armpits, and had done so without knocking over more than a chair.
However, all hopes of normal—or even murder-centric— conversation had died.
Martha walked into that void only to see Myrna’s ribs, her small dark breasts, and her lacey red blouse coming off over her head.
“Mmmmm…” Tom Arpeccio broke the silence with an appreciative growl and seemed just short of smacking his lips.
Martha’s expression went from dumb-founded, to shocked, to horrified, to angry at Tom, to embarrassed and finally stopped on confused.
By then Myrna rested like a fallen nymph half on the floor and half in David’s arms, with her tongue lolling out. David looked scared to death.
Jessie, as usual, came to the rescue.
“Doctor, if you wouldn’t mind?” Jessie tossed a large dinner napkin to the orthodontist, who had the presence of mind to drop it on Myrna’s chest. “Now Martha, would you two please take Myrna to her room.” Jessie’s authority was presumed. “David, I mean Sheik Abdullah, I think someone had an important question for you just a moment ago. The ladies will take care of your friend, and I’ll stand in for her. After all, I guess I know the role.”
For another second, no one spoke. Then one of the guests— Dwight, the car dealer, Jessie thought—laughed out loud.
“Yeah, Jessie can do it,” he said. “She wrote all the parts.”
Jessie laughed, too. At least someone understood. The show must go on, she thought.
The guests’ faces brightened. The innkeeper found his feet and passed out paper hats and noise-makers to cover the delay, and the players resumed their debate.
Martha grabbed Myrna’s hands, Dr. Marsberg her feet, and David tilted Myrna’s chair upright. He sat down next to her empty place. As the conversation came back to life around him, he picked up his fork and turned to his beef tips again, ignoring the dragging and scraping sounds behind him as his girlfriend disappeared.
With Arpeccio mixing and pouring, and with Jessie steering the discussion back to clues and characters, Myrna’s indiscretion was forgotten. Act Three of Out with the Old finished on a happy note, the old year ended, and the guests retired to their rooms for the night some time after 2 a.m. The most inebriated (other than Myrna) tossed out bawdy hints and accusations against the other characters as they roared off to bed.
The sound of gunfire in one of the rooms of the Canyon River Inn erupted at 4:32 in the morning, by Martha’s alarm clock—an ungodly early hour on New Year’s Day.
As their account of the previous evening ended, Arpeccio started the dryer. He returned to the kitchen looking embarrassed. At last, he blurted out a confession. “My first thought was, Man, did I screw up!”
Teischer, Martha, Arredondo and Dr. Marsberg turned to look at their host.
Tom explained that the innkeeper w
as the one who was supposed to get up and fire the starter pistol, which Jessie had left downstairs for him in the linen drawer. But when it went off—or rather, when the murder took place, one assumed—he thought Martha or Jessie had been kind enough to do it for him. He went back to sleep.
It was Emily’s scream, and then the screaming duo, that had awakened everyone around 7:30 a.m. And some guests thought this, too, was staged at first.
Martha’s made the final contribution to their combined account. The fact that she and Marsberg had found bloody scratches on Myrna’s back when they put her to bed. “So Mr. Big City Lawyer, the toast of the town, was into rough sex when he was on the road.” For her, it was almost too much to believe.
Tom Arpeccio plucked a dirty sheet from a pile of waiting laundry and held it up. It was streaked with dark stains.
“It’s true. This is blood,” he said. “But these sheets are from the night before.”
* * * *
“So the question is, was it murder, or was it self-defense?” Dr. Marsberg summed up the essential point.
At that moment, Jessie swept into the kitchen in a long black trench coat and black leather gloves. “Hello. Here’s a surprise,” she chirped. “Myrna was no girlfriend.”
Teischer’s face brightened with hope. Jessie had expunged his first impression of her from the crime scene. The woman was good.
“David’s wife knew all about this trip,” Jessie said. “She even suggested it.”
“What?” Marsberg reached for another bun, to have something to bite.
“It seems Myrna was under indictment and falling apart from the stress. Eva Whipple said he ought to get her away from her usual environment for a few days before trial. She thought David should bring her up here to work on the case.”
Teischer pursed his lips and stared at a spot on the floor, assessing this news. His unlined brow grew gnarly with a puzzled scowl. “Inn’s got no law library,” he objected.
Martha gave the deputy a pitying look. “He needed to know how she would hold up under questioning.”
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