The Grub-and-Stakers Pinch a Poke

by Charlotte MacLeod

  “Good morning,” said Dittany. “You must be Norah. Are you the maid or the cook?”

  “I’m both, along with everything else that’s getting done around here now that poor Wilhedra’s laid up.” Norah measured a meager two teaspoonfuls of tea into the pot. “The mahster send you down?” She made a drawn-out mockery of the vowel. “What’s the old blowhard want now?”

  “Just his tea, as far as I know,” Dittany told her. “I’ve got to do some errands and I wondered if there’s anything you need in the way of groceries.”

  Norah snorted. “You might bring me back a couple of everything they’ve got in the store, long as you don’t mind never getting paid back for ’em. I’m darned sick and tired of living on cheese parings and peanut butter sandwiches as I’ve told him to his face and I don’t care who knows it. If it wasn’t for Wilhedra needing me so bad, I’d be out of here like a bullet from a gun. Say, you’re dressed pretty fancy for a district nurse. How come you’re not in uniform, eh?”

  “Because I’m not the district nurse, just a friend of Wilhedra’s who stopped in to see how she’s getting along. My name’s Dittany Monk.”

  “Monk, eh? Say, you’re not that rich woman he’s got on the string? Kind of young to be chasing around with an old goat like him, aren’t you?”

  “Perish the thought. You’ve got me mixed up with my husband’s aunt. And if Jenson Thorbisher-Freep thinks he’s got her on the string, he’s got another think coming, but I’d as soon you didn’t let him know just yet. Tell me, Norah, is it true Jenson’s piddled away all his money in the stock market? I’m not asking just to be nosy. I’m worried about my husband’s aunt and even more about Wilhedra. She’s in a mighty tough spot, if you ask me.”

  “You don’t need to tell me that. If any woman alive ever needed a helping hand, Wilhedra’s the one. Here she is, eating her heart out for the man she loves, who’s a decent soul for all his la-di-da ways, and there’s old Jense trying to force her into marrying that Charlie Bledsoe who’s not fit to clean her boots, in my humble opinion. The old fool’s on his uppers all right, no doubt about that. He think Bledsoe’s going to win the lawsuit and he’ll use Wilhedra to get hold of her husband’s money, now that he’s thrown away his own trying to play the big millionaire. And Jense will win out, you wait and see. Wilhedra’s scared stiff of her father and always has been. She’d never dare cross him. Oh, I could give you an earful.”

  An earful was just what Dittany wanted. “You couldn’t for instance, tell me whether Jenson’s bought any new cartridges for that old Smith & Wesson of his lately?”

  “The one he carried when he played Jack Rance?” Norah snorted again. “I can’t imagine what you want to know for, but as a matter of fact he did. He was mad as a hatter because he had to buy a whole box when he only needed one or two for the play. I heard him fuming to himself about it back there in the furnace room one day. He talks to himself a lot when he can’t get anybody else to listen. And then it turned out he’d bought the wrong color and he had to paint the tops red. He spoiled a few, getting them too bright at first, then having to tone down the color with some old stain that was kicking around from the Lord knows when. They had to be just like the old ones or the play wouldn’t go right, though how anybody could see from the audience was beyond me. But that’s him all over, which I wish he was.”

  “Did you see him painting the cartridges?”

  “I sure did. I went to put the garbage out, eh, and I was walking quiet so’s he wouldn’t hear me and start bending my ear. He’s worse than the ten years’ itch once he backs you into a corner and starts jawing at you. Anyway, I saw him fiddling around with those things and couldn’t figure out what he was up to, so I snuck behind the furnace and watched him unbeknownst. I know that sounds foolish, but there’s darned little else in the way of entertainment around here.”

  “How long ago did this happen?”

  “Seems to me it was a week ago Wednesday.”

  “What did he do with the cartridges after he finished painting the tops?”

  “Put the one that suited him into a little box and carried it upstairs. The rest he put back in the box they came in and hid behind a beam back there where he’d been working. Ashamed for Wilhedra to find out he wasted good money on that kind of foolishness when she has to keep wearing those old suede boots of hers every time she goes out any place because she hasn’t got a whole pair of stockings to her name and he won’t buy her any.”

  “You didn’t tell Wilhedra about the cartridges?”

  “Not me. No sense in making her feel any worse than she did already, was the way I looked at it.”

  “And how right you were. Did you tell anybody else?”

  “When would I have got the chance? I don’t set foot out of this house from one week’s end to the next, and old Jense throws a fit if I use the phone.”

  “I thought you had yesterday off to go to your great-nephew’s christening.”

  “I was supposed to, but then Wilhedra fell on those pesky stairs and hurt her ankle. He made me stay here to take care of her so’s he could go out and run the roads with his rich lady friend, no offense to your husband’s aunt. How could she know? But I might as well be a slave with a chain around my leg for all the consideration I get from him.”

  “You’re not the only one,” snapped Dittany. “He told us he couldn’t have Carolus Bledsoe here after coming out of the hospital because it would have made too much work for you and he was afraid you’d quit, so we got stuck with the job.”

  “Huh! One excuse was as good as another, I suppose. All Jenson was afraid of was that he might not be able to hit Bledsoe up for the grocery money, or else he was scared Bledsoe would catch on to how broke he is and back out of the wedding. Though why Jense thinks Bledsoe’s going to save his bacon is beyond me. That ex-wife’s going to skin the pants off him before she’s through. Of course there’ll be the insurance eventually, but the way Wilhedra’s been sliding downhill lately, poor soul, I shouldn’t be surprised if Bledsoe turns out to be the one who collects instead of her.”

  “Insurance?” Dittany pounced on the word like a hawk on a mouse. “Norah, are you saying Wilhedra and Carolus have insured their lives in each other’s favor?”

  “I’m saying old Jense did it for them. It’s customary practice in a union of such unusual significance as this one. Those were his very words. You’d have thought they was royalty, the way he carried on about it. Made a big ceremony of them signing the policies with him and Bledsoe wearing their black dress suits, drinking champagne and eating them little fish eggs, and Wilhedra all decked out in her mother’s diamonds. And the next morning Jense took and hocked the diamonds so’s he could pay the premiums. Wilhedra bawled her eyes out, but a fat lot he cared. He’d got his own way and that’s all he gives a hoot about.”

  Dittany shook her head to settle her scrambled thoughts. “Norah, would you happen to have a telephone down here? I’ve got to call my husband.”

  “You go right ahead. It’s around the corner in the scullery. I’m s’posed to take the calls when his majesty’s out gallivanting in case it’s the prime minister wanting him to take over running the government or something.”

  “Thanks. Look, I’d better not keep you talking any more. Why don’t you take tea up for Wilhedra while you’re about it, and a cup for yourself? She’s got some cookies we brought her. Nice to talk with you, Norah.”

  Dittany waited till the maid had clumped up the stairs with the tray then made her call. “Osbert, get Sergeant MacVicar and the Scottsbeck police with a search warrant and come straight to the Thorbisher-Freeps’. Quick, before Arethusa’s perfume wears off. I’ve got to go.”

  Jenson would smell a rat if she didn’t get into her car and drive off. Osbert and the troops couldn’t be here in much less than half an hour anyway. She made a quick trip to the nearest grocery store, then parked down the street from the mansion and waited.

  She was eating an apple out of the grocery b
ag when the official Lobelia Falls police car drew up beside her. Osbert was at the wheel wearing his deputy badge on his parka, Sergeant MacVicar in uniform beside him wearing a grim and Scottish expression. Right on their tail was a delegation from the Scottsbeck police, the officer in charge waving a search warrant.

  “Noo then, lass,” said Sergeant MacVicar, “what’s up?”

  “Jenson Thorbisher-Freep’s broke to the wide. He’s pawned the family jewels to pay for a big insurance policy on Carolus Bledsoe’s life, bought a new box of .38 cartridges the wrong color and repainted the wads to match the old ones. He set a tripline on the back stairs to take Wilhedra out of commission and lied to us about the maid so that we’d get stuck with Carolus instead of him. Good enough to go on?”

  “Aye, good enough, Hoots awa’, lads!”

  “You’d better let me go in first,” said Dittany. “I’ve got the groceries.”

  “What’s she talking about?” demanded the Scottsbeck officer in charge.

  “I dinna ken,” Sergeant MacVicar replied. “But dinna fash yoursel’. Lead on, Dittany.”

  She was just in time. Jenson had Arethusa bent backward over a easeful of old theater programs and was panting words of passion straight out of Elinor Glyn at her.

  Arethusa was panting back, “Unhand me, sirrah!” but Jenson was obviously in no unhanding mood. Dittany had spied a handsome black umbrella with a heavy silver handle in the stand by the front door. She whizzed back and got it.

  “Unhand her, sirrah!”

  By way of emphasis, she brought the silver handle down as hard as she could on his flowing white mane. The mane came off.

  “A wig, by my halidom! So, blackguard, even your hair is false.” Even in the midst of trying to rearrange her woefully disheveled garments, Arethusa was right there with the mot juste.

  “Madam, you wrong me.”

  Jenson began sidling toward a different case wherein lay a dagger that Sarah Siddons probably hadn’t seen before her when she played Lady Macbeth. Dittany sprang between him and the dagger. She was using the umbrella tip like a rapier to fend him away when Osbert bounded into the room, followed by Sergeant MacVicar and about half the Scottsbeck police force.

  “Aha!” cried Osbert. “We’ve got him on assault already.”

  “Attempted ravishment, ninny,” his aunt corrected. “The caitiff cur was trying to work his scurvy will on me.”

  “She lured me on,” Jenson shrieked.

  Without that gorgeous white hair, he was no alluring figure. Arethusa on the other hand, flushed and disheveled in the accepted regency romance tradition, her jetty locks astream, her noble bosom aheave, and her lustrous orbs even more unfathomable than usual, was a knockout. The officer in charge, who’d up to now seemed more than a bit disconcerted at the prospect of having to pinch the neighborhood aristocrat, leaped gallantly to her side and faced the now wigless bigwig without so much as a nervous twitch.

  “Jenson Thorbisher-Freep, I arrest you on a charge of attempted ravishment and I guess a lot of other stuff but we’ll get to that later. We have a search warrant here and we’re going to search, so why don’t you just put your hair back on and go quietly out to the wagon with Officer Knudsen here as soon as he gets the handcuffs untangled from his belt?”

  The old actor recognized a cue when one was fed him. “You’ll never take me alive!” he bellowed.

  But they did, of course.

  Chapter 22

  “MY STARS AND GARTERS,” Dittany remarked, “this has been quite a day.”

  They’d left Norah fixing a hearty late lunch out of groceries Dittany had bought. Wilhedra didn’t need their company any longer. Leander Hellespont was with her, spouting Shakespeare by the ream and laying his modest but perfectly genuine fortune at her feet. They were going to get married as soon as Wilhedra’s ankle was well enough so she could walk down the aisle without her crutch. Wilhedra didn’t appear much bothered by the circumstance that her father wouldn’t be free to give her away.

  Carolus Bledsoe had been told the whole story. He was naturally relieved to learn he was no longer in danger of being shot, poisoned, or snakebitten; but it was finding out he’d been jilted by Wilhedra that had set off the fireworks. Antibiotics to the contrary notwithstanding, he’d raised such a ruckus about toasting the bride-to-be that Osbert had finally broken down and mixed him a stiff hot whiskey and lemon. After a brief but raucous period of celebration, Carolus had settled down to sleep it off.

  Sergeant MacVicar was still in Scottsbeck, helping the police there wrap up the evidence. They’d found the insurance policies in Jenson’s heavy old cast-iron safe, which they’d opened with a bent hairpin. With Norah’s all too willing assistance, they’d located the box of wad-cutter bullets, several with their tops painted in various shades of red, behind the beam where she’d watched her employer stash them.

  Behind another beam they’d found a couple of stink bombs like the ones that had rendered the old opera house unusable. Wilhedra had been able to cast some light on her father’s motive for that outrage, though naturally she hadn’t realized then what his random remarks had portended. He’d been concerned whether the Scottsbeck police might be clever enough to discover who’d rigged the so-called accident with the Smith & Wesson by which he’d expected to collect Carolus Bledsoe’s life insurance. That comic-opera Scot (Jenson’s very words) in Lobelia Falls, with his puny force of two young sprouts and one old coot, would surely present no threat to the success of his plan.

  The comic-opera Scot had been the one to discover the venomous stuff Jenson had smeared on the rat trap, as well as the black wig and the mustache with curly ends he’d worn impersonating Andy McNaster when he stole the cobra. The Scottsbeck police got the credit for tracking down the messenger whom an elderly man wearing an obviously bogus black wig and curly mustache had hired to deliver a box of flowers to the Monk residence late Sunday morning. They’d made Jenson put on the wig and mustache, and the messenger had unhesitatingly picked him out from among several other similarly wigged and mustached elderly men in a police lineup.

  Wilhedra had even identified the florist’s box. It was one Leander Hellespont had sent her on Valentine’s Day, filled with calla lilies and stephanotis. Her father had snatched it away in a well-feigned rage, leaving fingerprints on the shiny cardboard that had somehow survived the subsequent mishandling. He’d claimed he was going to throw the flowers in the garbage. Instead, he’d wrapped them in red tissue paper left over from some earlier Christmas and carried them to Arethusa as an unsubtle hint of his matrimonial intentions.

  More than the peanut butter sandwiches he’d made her eat while he was gorging with Arethusa on filet mignon, more than the fishline he’d tripped her with, more than the tarantula she now suspected him of having hidden in her mink muff until he saw his chance to put it on Carolus’s back, more than all his other rogueries put together, it was this misappropriation of her beloved Leander’s floral tribute that had impelled Jenson’s daughter to testify so damningly against him. He was working up a King Lear act in the hope of copping an insanity plea, but he wasn’t fooling Sergeant MacVicar any.

  He hadn’t fooled Deputy Monk to any significant degree, either. “I’d been thinking it must be either Jenson or Hellespont,” Osbert confessed, “because the shootout, the cobra, and the poisoned rat trap, not to mention that tarantula at the airport, reminded me so much of plots from old melodramas.”

  “Not very good melodramas, i’ faith,” Arethusa scoffed. “None of them worked.”

  “Yes, that’s the factor the would-be murderer overlooked.” Osbert could have added that none of Arethusa’s plots would have worked, either, but he was feeling strangely mellow and protective toward his aunt at the moment.

  “Theoretically any of his tricks except the tarantula might have done the job,” he conceded, “but they required an element of luck he hadn’t counted on and didn’t get. What confused me was that Hellespont’s too skinny to have impersonated
Andy and I couldn’t figure out what Jenson’s motive might be when he seemed so dad-blanged set on Wilhedra’s marrying Carolus.”

  “He probably would have waited till they were married,” said Dittany, “if Carolus hadn’t happened to sit next to Arethusa on that airplane. Jenson could see Carolus succumbing to her siren wiles and getting ready to ditch Wilhedra, so he had to act while his story was still plausible. Besides, he was determined to get Arethusa for himself. And to think it all started over a packet of smoked peanuts! I suppose until Carolus met you, Arethusa, Wilhedra Thorbisher-Freep looked to him like a fairly juicy proposition. Jenson must have had Carolus thoroughly convinced that he’d be getting his hands on the old man’s money just when Andy McNaster had practically reformed him out of business and his ex-wife was in the process of taking him to the cleaners.”

  “I expect it was Jenson’s taking out that policy on Wilhedra with Carolus as beneficiary that clinched the deal,” Osbert agreed. “Jenson must have planned on murder right from the beginning, knowing he could bully Wilhedra into turning the insurance over to him, the old brute! Still, I must say I’m a bit surprised a downy duck like Carolus would be sucker enough to fall for his scheme.”

  “Carolus may have had his own ideas about Wilhedra’s insurance,” Dittany pointed out. “I wonder how long the bride would have survived the honeymoon.”

  “Alas, poor Wilhedra,” sighed Arethusa. “She was only a bird in a gilded cage. However all’s well that ends well, as Mr. Hellespont has no doubt reminded her by now. Od’s fish, whatever do you suppose has happened to Archie and Daniel?”

  “They went off some place with Andy,” Osbert told her. “Archie was pretty sore about going, though naturally he couldn’t say so. He’d planned to corner Daniel in my office and wrestle a contract for Dangerous Dan out of him, then drag you off to lunch at some secluded rendezvous and blow his commission on gourmet pizza and imported beer.”