Going Out in Style

by Gloria Dank

  For a long time there was complete silence in the study, except for the sound of Misty’s gentle snores. Suddenly Bernard gave a loud grunt. Misty moved and grumbled at his feet.

  Bernard grunted again; he sounded happy. He turned on the lamp, took out his notebook and carefully printed:

  F SH HD GN T THT NT

  Then he put down the Magic Marker and began to think even harder than before.

  * * *

  Detective Janovy was feeling very frazzled. Jessie Lowell was dead. He thought he knew why someone had killed her, but he still did not know who that killer was. Half the citizens of Ridgewood were on his back, protesting that they could have been killed, and that an insane murderer was on the loose in their quiet town. One thing Janovy was sure of, in this case where he was not sure of anything, was that the killer was not insane. Jessie Lowell had been killed because she knew something, and she had chosen to announce that fact at the top of her voice in a crowded room.

  Still, having a murder take place during the rummage sale was bad for the sale (most of the citizenry had sworn off ever going there again), bad for Ridgewood, and bad for everyone involved. Whoever was doing this was quickwitted, thought Janovy for the hundredth time. He or she had seen their chance and taken it, while the room was still crowded and everyone’s attention was focused on the sale items. The murderer had chosen an opportune moment, when the room was full enough, but not so full that Jessie’s apparent fatigue would be noticed and remarked upon.

  Mrs. Furness, little Johnny’s mother, was having heart palpitations. She sat in Janovy’s closetlike office and gestured with wide sweeping motions of her hands, nearly knocking Fish out the door.

  “I was standing right there next to her,” she was saying. “Right there, I’m telling you. How awful! The murderer could have been anywhere … right behind us … I’m telling you, it gives me the trembles to think of it. A murderer standing behind me. My heart isn’t very strong, you know.”

  Detective Janovy was of the private opinion that Mrs. Furness’s heart was as strong as a mule’s, but he did not contradict her.

  “Not strong at all,” Mrs. Furness went on with evident pride. “Why, just the other day the doctor was telling me that I should avoid any shocks to my system—I’m telling you, this could have killed me.”

  “Yes. Yes. Terrible. Tell me, Mrs. Furness, what exactly did Jessie Lowell say to you?”

  Mrs. Furness hemmed and hawed, obviously preferring to discuss the state of her cardiovascular system, but finally got down to brass tacks.

  “… and then she said it didn’t make any sense and she thought everyone was thinking about it completely backwards,” she finished in triumph. “At least, I think that was what she said. I wasn’t giving her my total attention, you see—it was so loud there, and as a matter of fact there was this darling little evening bag I had my eye on—”

  Janovy and Fish exchanged glances. “Thank you very much for coming by with this information,” Janovy said. “We appreciate it, Mrs. Furness.”

  She fairly bristled with self-satisfaction.

  “Of course, Officer. I felt it was my civic duty.”

  She shook hands with both of them and left.

  Janovy leaned back in his chair and said, “ ‘Everyone was thinking about it completely backwards.’ Any idea what she meant by that, Fish?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Could she mean there’s another suspect—one we haven’t thought of?”

  “I don’t know, sir.”

  Janovy did not know either. It made him very uneasy.

  “Any fingerprints on that letter opener, Fish?”

  “No, sir. It had been wiped clean.”

  Janovy nodded wearily. “What are we down to, Fish? We can’t wait until they’re all killed off before we have a suspect.” He ticked off the names on his fingers. “Albert and Susan Whitaker, Gretchen Schneider, George Drexler. Etta Pinsky wasn’t at the sale yesterday, and anyway she has no apparent motive for any of these murders. George Drexler couldn’t have killed Bella Whitaker, but he might be in on it with Susan. Albert and Gretchen might be working together, as well. What do you think, Fish? Are we looking for one person working alone, or for a team?”

  Fish looked more mournful than ever and said he didn’t know. It was a strange case. It didn’t quite meet the eye.

  Janovy agreed wholeheartedly. It didn’t meet the eye. The more he found out, the more complicated it seemed.

  The whole business worried him.

  He rose to his feet and said, “I want to talk to Gretchen Schneider.”

  He looked with compassion at the tall sticklike figure in front of him. In the course of a few hours, Gretchen seemed to have aged several years. Her face was ravaged, swollen red with tears. Albert, sitting by her side in the Whitaker living room, looked absolutely deflated, collapsed in upon himself. His fair hair stuck out wildly in all directions, and his big square face looked drained and empty. He had taken off his glasses, and his eyes looked strangely unfocused.

  “I’ll do anything,” Gretchen was saying in a low tone, “anything it takes to catch the person who killed her. Do you hear me, Detective—anything.”

  “Yes, thank you, Dr. Schneider.” In his mind’s eye, Janovy had a sudden uneasy vision of citizen vigilantes riding wildly through the night. He did not like the haunted look on Gretchen’s pale face and the weird fire that burned in her eyes. “Thank you. You understand we’re doing our best to find out who it was. Now, can you tell me anything—anything at all that you think might have a bearing on why Miss Lowell was killed?”

  Gretchen told him, in a few terse words, about the conversation she had had with Jessie the night before the bazaar.

  “She was looking at this doll, and she seemed very odd. I stopped and asked her how she was, and she looked right through me. She seemed to be thinking hard about something.”

  That was all that Gretchen knew. No, Jessie had been fine later that evening, when they came home together. And she had been her usual bossy self, the day of the bazaar. Tears sprang to Gretchen’s eyes.

  “I didn’t see her during the bazaar at all. She was at table number three, and I was at table number six.”

  “Can you tell me who had the tables on either side of her?”

  “Oh, yes, let me think. George was on one side of her, at table number two, and that tall young man with the funny name, what is it now, Snooky Randolph, was on the other side. Susan was beyond George at table one, and now let me see, who was at table five?…”

  “I was,” said Albert.

  “Oh, yes, that’s right, dear. You were. And on the other side of me were the two teenagers, Henrietta and Lisa, at tables seven and eight. But I’m afraid that’s not very helpful, Detective Janovy. The tables were arranged in a circle, after all, so table eight was right next to table one. And the noise level was incredible. You had to be there to believe it. Even someone at the next table couldn’t have heard Jessie talking. It would have had to be someone who was right near her.”

  “Even if she was shouting?”

  “Yes. Even if she was shouting. Isn’t that so, Albert?”

  Albert woke up from a kind of stupor he had fallen into. “Oh. Yes. Yes, you couldn’t hear anything. The room was filled with screaming women.”

  “All the volunteers got some free time away from their tables?”

  “Yes,” said Gretchen. “Ten minutes. It was staggered so that two people wouldn’t be off at the same time.”

  “I see.”

  Albert’s story was the same as Gretchen’s. He had been busy during the sale—overwhelmed, he said—and hadn’t seen Jessie at all.

  “Thank you, Dr. Whitaker.”

  Albert escorted the detectives to the front door and took their coats out of the closet. “Gretchen will be staying here with me, Detective Janovy. I’m not having her go back to that house alone. She’s going to live here with me until we’re married.”

  “I understand.”r />
  So the two of them were getting married, thought Janovy as he and Fish went down the icy steps toward their car. That was interesting. It didn’t seem right, did it? Marriage in the midst of all this death.

  No, it didn’t seem quite right.

  He got in and sat in the passenger seat as Fish started the car. Janovy sat for a long time, not moving, sunk in thought. So Jessie Lowell had seen who had gone into the Whitaker house that night. It was perhaps just a glimpse, but it was sufficient. The porch light was on and she had seen someone. And, perhaps more importantly, the person she had seen was almost definitely a woman. She had been looking at a female doll and it had jogged her memory.

  A woman, thought Janovy. Well, there were only three women involved in this case: Aunt Etta, Susan, and Gretchen herself. Aunt Etta he discounted. She had neither motive nor opportunity for these crimes. Both Susan’s and Gretchen’s motives, on the other hand, were obvious.

  So he had it down to two, Janovy thought. Two people. But that wasn’t good enough. He still didn’t know.…

  Bernard was looking doubtfully at a page of his notes. In green ink, he had written several lines that he was sure were important if he could only remember what it was he had meant. The lines read:

  RNG MT B MPRTNT—MT N MN WT SMS T MN H BT KY?

  And at the bottom:

  GNGS BRM

  “Gngs brm,” Bernard said experimentally, rolling the sounds over and over his tongue. “Gnnngs brmmmm. Gnngggsss … goings? Goings brm? Goings brimmm. Broommm. Brummm. No. Hmmmm …”

  This was the problem with his system of shorthand, one which he had never yet solved. Usually saying the words out loud made a difference, but today he could not figure out what he had meant at all.

  But it didn’t really matter. He knew, anyway. He knew who was behind all the murders.

  Bernard sat back and looked thoughtfully out his window. There was nothing to be seen except smooth, empty blackness. He felt upset. There was only one way all the facts made sense … but that was not proof. Unless someone did something, the killer would get away with it. And that Bernard did not approve of at all. No. He did not like the thought of somebody literally getting away with murder.

  With three murders … and sixty-four million dollars …

  He shook himself all over, like a dog, then got up and went upstairs to the third floor. Misty trailed behind, hoping against hope that it was time for dinner. Bernard knocked on the door of the guest bedroom and Snooky’s voice called out, “Come in, whoever you may be.”

  Snooky was sitting swathed in blankets and propped up by pillows on the bed. He had his chin in his hand and was staring out the window, something he spent a lot of time doing. (“I can’t explain it, Maya,” he had told her once when she asked him what in the world he was thinking about. “I need time every day just to stare. I can’t explain it.”) Now he said, “Bernard, what a pleasure. Please come or in. Pull up a chair. Notice how cold it is, and notice also that I have not complained in a long time. What brings you here? Just wanted a trip up to the arctic circle?”

  Bernard pulled up a rickety wooden chair and sat down.

  “Can I offer you a blanket against the cold?”

  “No, thank you.”

  “You never feel the cold, do you, Bernard?”

  “No.”

  Snooky looked at him enviously. “It must be the physique. You’re like a bear, did you know that? I wouldn’t be surprised if you hibernated.”

  “Snooky.”

  “Yes?”

  “Please try to concentrate. I need you to call that pet detective of yours, what’s his name, Anchovy—”

  “Janovy.”

  “—and suggest a few things to him. Would you be willing to do that?”

  “Well, why not? But why would he listen to me? What do I know about anything?”

  “He’ll listen,” said Bernard, “when you tell him who killed Bella Whitaker.”

  Detective Janovy, with his faithful shadow Fish, knocked on the door of the ancient white-and-blue Victorian. Snooky let them in, and ushered them upstairs to Bernard’s study.

  The two detectives were closeted with Bernard for nearly an hour. Downstairs, Snooky fidgeted and fretted.

  “I don’t see why I’m being left out of it,” he said to his sister, who was sitting placidly proofreading one of her own articles. “I mean, Bella was my friend, wasn’t she? If it weren’t for me, Bernard wouldn’t even be involved in this. What does he know about it, anyway? He barely knows these people.”

  “Bernard is very prescient,” said Maya, calmly correcting a spelling error.

  “Prescient? Prescient? You mean he has ESP?”

  “No, Snooky. I mean he’s very good at analyzing things and predicting how they’ll come out. He doesn’t need to know people well in order to analyze patterns. He’s very good at getting the bigger view of things. Take Aunt Martha, for example. You remember Aunt Martha?”

  Snooky strained his eyes upward. “Aunt Martha? Elderly blue-haired lady? Strongly resembles a toad?”

  “That’s her. Well, you remember when we had a big housewarming party when we moved in? You were here. You drank an entire bowl of champagne punch.”

  “I remember. Pink bubbly stuff, with fruit floating in it. It was delicious.”

  “Anyway, the next day we found out that some of our best crystal was missing. Wedding presents, some things I inherited, all kinds of stuff. Bernard said that Aunt Martha had taken them. I asked her for them, and she was very nice about it. She said she couldn’t imagine how it had happened, and she gave everything back. To this day I don’t know how Bernard guessed. The only time he ever met her was at that party, and there were at least fifteen other people here.”

  “So you’re telling me that my Aunt Martha is a kleptomaniac?”

  “That’s right. We talked about it for a long time. She’s very sweet. She said she would have given everything back the next day, except that there was one crystal nightingale on a branch that she had set her heart on, and she couldn’t bear to part with it.”

  “Touching story. I hope you turned her over to the police?”

  “I gave her the nightingale.”

  Snooky looked disgusted. “Sucker,” he said.

  “She’s a relative, Snooky. Not unlike yourself.”

  “I don’t steal from you.”

  “Just room and board,” said Maya, but with vast affection. She leaned forward and patted his hand. “Don’t worry about Aunt Martha. We had her over a few times after that, and she never took a thing. Not a single thing.”

  “That’s hardly an achievement, Maya. Most guests don’t steal things when you invite them over.”

  “It’s an achievement for Aunt Martha,” said Maya tartly.

  “So how did Bernard know?”

  Maya shrugged. A puzzled look came over her face. “I tried to get him to talk about it, but all he said was that it was the look in her eyes. I don’t know what that means. He’s not terribly verbal, you know.”

  “You’re kidding. Bernard? Not verbal?”

  “Perhaps you’ve noticed this.”

  “I’ve noticed that he never talks to me if he can help it.”

  “You always take everything so personally, Snooks. You know Bernard never talks to anyone if he can help it. It’s part of his charm.”

  “A large part,” said Snooky gloomily.

  Upstairs, in the study, Detective Janovy was shaking his head.

  “I don’t know,” he said slowly. “I don’t know. It seems fantastic.”

  “It’s the only way all the facts fit,” said Bernard.

  Janovy nodded. “It would take a great deal of planning.”

  “Certainly. This was a well-planned crime. Nothing rash or impulsive about it, except for Jessie Lowell’s murder. There the murderer saw that she knew something, had seen something, and had to be gotten out of the way quickly.”

  Janovy nodded thoughtfully. It did fit. And it reverberated w
ith his deepest instincts, which had told him all along that these crimes were the result of long and careful planning.

  “The point is, what are you going to do about it?” said Bernard.

  Janovy sat back and stared out the window. “This plan of yours. It’s tricky. We could be setting ourselves up. How positive are you that the person we want isn’t Gretchen Schneider?”

  “I’m not sure,” replied Bernard, “but I think the probabilities are against it. I don’t believe that she would have killed Jessie Lowell under any circumstances. It would be too easy for her to convince Jessie that she was wrong in what she saw. She has a motive for all these crimes, of course, but I don’t believe it’s her.”

  Janovy nodded again.

  “One more thing,” said Bernard. He got up, opened the study door, and went to the head of the stairs. “Snooky?”

  His brother-in-law came bounding upstairs like a gazelle. “Yes? Yes, Bernard? What is it?”

  “Come inside.”

  Snooky was ushered inside and the door closed again. The sound of voices could be heard rising and falling from within. Downstairs, Maya red-penciled another mistake in her article and smiled to herself. Ever since he was little, Snooky could not bear being left out of anything. If there was a tree-house club anywhere in the neighborhood that he did not belong to, it would drive him crazy. When he was older, it was parties—he had an uncanny gift for knowing where and when a party was going on, and he had been known to crash diplomatic functions and vice-presidential receptions, once he had honed this ability into a fine art. But to Maya it would always be the tree-house mentality. She remembered how he had cried one summer—cried in complete and utter desolation—when some of the neighborhood boys had organized an insect-collecting club and he had not been allowed to join. The fact that he actually loathed insects had not made any difference. When the boys finally got around to asking him, he had accepted happily and spent the rest of the summer refusing to go on any of their collecting trips. Anything bigger than a spider gave him the willies, he told Maya. He was eventually kicked out of the club, but that did not bother him at all. The important thing was that he had once, however briefly, belonged.