Pick Up Sticks

by Deaver Brown

  “Well, three cheers! Now we get Amanda, the protector of the young. You’ll have to give us a minute to adjust. Up till now, all we’ve gotten has been Amanda the swinger, Amanda the girl who’s too with it to give up smoking pot. And who’s being the lily maid now? Tell us about how you and Steve courted. Holding hands on the porch while you drank lemonade, was that how it was?”

  Amanda for some reason had gone a brilliant crimson. “That’s none of your filthy business!” she bellowed with surprising depth for so slight a girl. “Do you think that you had some kind of lifetime license on Steve? Or have you forgotten how normal people act?”

  As Amanda grew less controlled, Eunice became more so. “You’re mixing your lines,” she almost purred. “Nothing less than absolute chastity can come near our young. I’ve got to hand it to you. You were willing to turn over more than a leaf. You were willing to throw the whole book away.”

  Amanda was being backed into a corner. Perhaps Eddie Quinlan was inspired to raise his voice by some remembered ideal of gallantry. Thatcher was more inclined to suspect sheer nervousness.

  “Oh, come on, Eunice!” he pleaded ill-advisedly. “And Amanda, too. You’re both saying more than you intend. Why don’t we all just—”

  Amanda sighted a new target. “You!” she said in tones of loathing. “What the hell do you think you’re doing? You talk about poor Mr. Valenti. And about poor Mrs. Valenti! You know as well as I do where you have to look for your killer. But you didn’t want to go with me to the police. Oh, no, not you! You were too worried about your two-bit little business.”

  Quinlan defended himself. “What you wanted was a little perjury in the night,” he replied shortly. “I can’t help it if your husband forgot to talk to you about the lot he was buying.”

  “He didn’t forget!” Amanda declared roundly.

  She was almost beaten to the gun by Eunice. “Still pushing me as a murder suspect, Amanda? And not too fussy what means you use? My God, I probably made the mistake of my life thinking the dirty work on that custody suit was Steve’s idea. He was willing, but he wasn’t very imaginative. I suppose he had to rely on you for that.”

  “You hated Steve! And you murdered him!”

  Eunice smiled pityingly. “Get this through your head, once and for all, Amanda. Steve wasn’t interesting enough to inspire much emotion in anyone on a long-term basis. Hell, the only reason you were still waltzing around him was because he was your meal ticket.”

  “I don’t sell myself! Take a good look at me. I’m probably a foreign animal to the likes of you,” Amanda invited.

  “I’ll say one thing,” Eunice conceded. “You don’t sell yourself cheap. You want a lot more than the going price.”

  “Why, you . . . how dare you . . . you can’t say that to me!”

  Surprisingly enough, Amanda seemed to believe what she was saying, although she had just received proof that Eunice would talk any way she pleased.

  “You’re playing with grown-ups now,” Eunice warned. “Either be a good girl or get ready to hear a lot of unpleasant things.”

  Tears began coursing down Amanda’s face, but she was still young enough to make a last desperate stab at dignity.

  “I don’t have to stay here and be insulted. You’re just flailing around, trying to make everybody forget. Well, I won’t forget. And don’t think you’re getting away with any of this. With the car, with the estate or with murder.”

  Amanda had been retreating as she spoke. Her final comment was a thunderous slamming of the door.

  Silence should have reigned longer than it did.

  “Now, Eunice honey,” Peter Vernon began. “I think you were a little hard on her. After all, somebody did murder Steve Lester.”

  Eunice might have been warming up for this moment.

  “Oh, you think I was a little hard, do you?” she asked with savage mimicry. “Your standards shift around so fast, it’s not easy for me to follow, Peter.”

  “Eh?” Vernon was genuinely startled at drawing fire. “What in God’s name do you mean?”

  “It was your idea to attach the car.”

  “Sure it was,” he protested. “For Christ’s sake, she’s trying to get herself declared administratrix. You’ll never see a cent if she can start unloading assets.”

  Eunice smiled alarmingly. “And it’s perfectly gentlemanly to worry about disappearing assets. Amanda doesn’t have to be protected against attachments or anything like that. But let her start calling me a streetwalker, let her start accusing me of murder, and then we all have to be very careful of Amanda’s feelings.”

  Vernon was belatedly scenting danger. “Oh, now, I didn’t say that, Eunice.”

  “You didn’t have to! You’ve been acting it out for the last two weeks. Well, let me tell you, it’s time you started worrying about my feelings. I can get pretty upset at little things like being accused of murder, being questioned by the police, and being left, always, without fail, to go through everything by myself.”

  “If you wanted me,” Vernon blinked unhappily, “you only had to ask.”

  “Well, I’m asking now! Either you’re on my side, or you’re no damned use to me. I’m not going through the rest of my life like this. I’m not something you bought C.O.D., on approval.”

  Peter Vernon at this point proved that age and experience do after all leave their mark on a man. He abandoned the contest of words as one in which he was a sure loser. Instead he marched up to Eunice, held out his arms and said, “I’m here. Right beside you. In case you haven’t noticed, that’s the important thing.”

  Eunice looked up at him, seeing him for the first time. The words she neither heard nor understood, although they would come back to her later. But everything else was clear as crystal.

  Suddenly she crumpled, and her sobs burst forth like a torrent.

  At that point, Peter Vernon earned John Thatcher’s everlasting approval. Looking over Eunice’s head at the remaining company, he spoke with unabated dignity. “I think the rest of you people had better go on without us. I’m going to look after Eunice.”

  Chapter 21

  FOUR BY SIX

  SUKEY DAVIDSON was first to speak after the combatants left the field.

  “Well,” she breathed on a long drawn-out sigh. “That’s some marriage those two are planning. Do you think he knows what he’s letting himself in for?”

  “That woman must be plain hell on wheels,” agreed Alan, still round-eyed. “I can understand her going after Amanda. But why make a dead set for that Vernon? I tell you, I’m glad she didn’t get me in her sights.”

  Henry bristled. “Vernon has been asking for it for a long time,” he said shortly, giving every evidence of being willing to pick up where Eunice had left off. “It’s made me sick, watching him and his hands-off policy. Where was he when Eunice was being grilled by the police? Where was he when Eunice was at the Prudential Center? Either she’s been alone or she’s been with someone else. I’ve been with her. Hell,” he said, swinging around to Eddie Quinlan, “I’ve seen you with her. Probably John has seen more of her than this so-called fiancé.”

  Eddie Quinlan had learned a lesson. He muttered that he didn’t know anything about all that. John Thatcher was equally prudent. The cudgels were picked up in an unexpected quarter.

  “You know,” Ruth Morland said thoughtfully, “I think you’re being a little unfair to Peter Vernon. I don’t think it’s entirely his fault.”

  “Ruth!” Henry had been betrayed. “You can’t approve of the way he’s been behaving?”

  “Not approve, no,” Ruth conceded slowly.

  “I’d like to hear what you’d say if I behaved that way. I can tell you what the trouble is, Ruth. Just because you’ve fed the man in your own house, you automatically spread your wing over him.”

  “And whose fault is it that I’ve been feeding him?” Ruth asked cogently. “But I’m not simply being protective. I do think a lot of this is Eunice’s fault.”

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nbsp; Henry was thunderstruck.

  “Eunice’s fault? How can it be her fault?”

  Undaunted by Henry’s incredulity, Ruth composed her thoughts. “First of all, do you think Eunice has asked him for any support? I know if you hadn’t gone with her to that dinner where Mr. Valenti was murdered, she was planning to go alone. Do you think that Peter even knew that there was a dinner, let alone that Eunice was going?”

  “He knew she was being questioned by the police,” Henry said doggedly. “It was in the papers.”

  “Yes, but did he know where or when? Or did he just read about it when it was all over?”

  Henry squinted at his wife suspiciously. “I don’t see what you’re driving at.”

  “I’m willing to bet that Eunice never asks him for support because she’s afraid he’ll refuse. Then, when she has to go through things by herself, she blames him for not being there.”

  “Now, look, Ruth,” Henry said in the tones of a man who was not paying out any more rope. “Regardless of what Eunice has been asking, he could guess that she needs help, couldn’t he? Hell, even I could!”

  Ruth was exasperated. “I’m not claiming that Peter Vernon is a perceptive man. Probably when his first wife wanted something, she said so, loud and clear. After twenty years of that, he doesn’t react unless he hears the signal.”

  “Poor Eunice,” Henry lamented. “She has a real gift for picking lemons.”

  “That’s where the trouble is. She positively expects her second husband to act as badly as her first,” Ruth had become sibylline. “She lost confidence when Steve Lester walked out on her. All she knows is that she desperately wants to marry Peter Vernon. I expect it’s never occurred to her that he feels the same way.”

  “He hasn’t given her much proof,” Henry ground out resentfully.

  “Well, he has his chance now. It’s probably the best thing she could have done, blowing up at him that way. She’s given him his loud, clear signal. If he doesn’t respond, then she’s better off without him. But he will. A man of his age doesn’t propose to a woman of her age unless he wants the kind of home she can give him. He wasn’t just swept off his feet for a solid year.”

  “So you think they’re making it up now.” Henry’s ever-alert imagination was limning the scene all too vividly. “I suppose they’ve checked into a hotel by now. I suppose—”

  But Ruth was a conservative product of her generation. “And whatever they’re doing,” she interrupted firmly, “is none of your business.” She rose and shook herself. “I think it’s time we all went and had that lunch Peter Vernon has forgotten about. We could go to Thelma’s Restaurant. She has very nice home-cooked food.”

  At last they had reached a point where John Thatcher dared venture an opinion.

  “This lunch is on me,” he said. “And we are going someplace with a bar. I don’t know about the rest of you, but I could use a drink.”

  Quite a lot of people felt the same way. The cocktail lounge and dining room of the Gridleigh Inn were crowded.

  “These people are all locals now,” Henry explained on entry, nodding to the right and left. “We all stay away once the ski season starts.”

  Eddie Quinlan looked startled and asked why.

  “Everybody wants tourists to have a good time and spend a lot of money,” Henry said ruminatively, “and somehow it spoils the atmosphere to have a bunch of men in business suits at the bar.”

  Thatcher nodded comprehendingly. He had seen the same phenomenon from Cape Cod to Aspen, Colorado. These resort communities all specialized in creating elaborate auras—everything from Tyrolean Gemütlichkeit to old salts putting to sea in whaling ships—and the permanent residents did their bit to sustain the illusion by appearing in ski boots and sou’westers, or not appearing at all. Henry probably had a wolfskin parka stowed away somewhere.

  By the time the intercom summoned them to a center table in the thronged, noisy dining room, most of the gathering had successfully put the problems of Peter Vernon and Eunice Lester from their minds. True, Sukey was still wrapped in silent abstraction. But the older members of the party realized that she was formulating silent resolves about the loud clear signals she would transmit to her husband in future life.

  Alan Davidson, happily, was following his own line of thought. “What I’ll never understand,” he said, “is why Finley got Sukey to call Amanda and Eunice and get them to go to the Prudential dinner. Why did he want to involve Sukey?”

  “I don’t think he cared about Sukey,” Eddie Quinlan said in an unguarded moment.

  “Then, what was he up to?” Alan demanded.

  Quinlan shifted uneasily as the implications of his speech came home to him. He reverted to his support of Fiord Haven’s architect. “Look, you know as well as I do that Finley claims he didn’t call Sukey. All I’m saying is that, if he did call her, he was trying to involve Lester’s wives.” His lips clamped firmly shut.

  But tactful hints were lost on Alan. He was genuinely puzzled. “Why would he want to do that?”

  Quinlan glared at him.

  Thatcher came to the rescue. “I think Mr. Quinlan means that the police would be so occupied trying to work out the marital tangle that they would underestimate other motives. After all, Amanda Lester tends to thrust that motive forward whenever she’s on the scene.”

  Slowly but surely, Alan was coming up the homestretch. “You mean that everybody always thinks marriage is the best motive for murder?”

  It was a genuine search for enlightenment, the kind of activity that is supposed to be encouraged in the young. Nobody at the table was very encouraging and they were happy to be diverted.

  “Ruth! Ruth Morland!”

  An elderly woman, tidy in a suit and hat and accompanied by a large festive party, had paused by their table.

  “Elvira Tilley!” Ruth beamed. “How nice to see you. When did you get back from Florida?”

  “Last night. And Mr. Morland too!” Punctiliously Mrs. Tilley shook hands with Henry. “Sally has been telling me about all the excitement I’ve missed. Imagine, I live here for sixty-five years and nothing happens. Then I go away for ten months and you have a murder.”

  Ruth agreed that it was unfair.

  “And I hear that they’ve locked up this poor architect. Trust Donald Frewen to mismanage things!”

  A gleam of mischief appeared in Ruth’s eyes. “You think he’s locked up the wrong person, Elvira? Do you know something we don’t?”

  Mrs. Tilley permitted herself a ladylike snort. “When a man is murdered with two wives on the scene, I don’t have to know anything else! But there’s Guy Villars and Edith, too. I must run over to their table. I’m trying to say hello to everybody.”

  After Mrs. Tilley had left, Ruth looked across the table at Alan. “There’s your answer. That’s how most people feel about motives for murder.”

  Alan was unhappy and Henry looked none too pleased.

  “But, look at Mr. Quinlan,” Alan insisted. “I don’t want to embarrass him or anything, but he doesn’t seem to think that Mr. Finley is automatically innocent because he wasn’t married to Steve Lester.”

  “Some people,” said Quinlan, goaded, “might be murdered by almost anyone they meet.”

  Alan had his own defenses against sarcasm. “You mean you think Lester was like that?” he asked earnestly.

  “I don’t know anything about Lester! I don’t know all that much about Finley! He just came into Fiord Haven last year.” Quinlan took a deep breath and looked hesitantly at Henry. “But if a wife of Lester’s finally lost her head and went for him, say Amanda just for argument’s sake, then I’d expect her to go temporarily insane and batter him to pieces. This was a . . . almost a restrained murder.”

  “Now that is really interesting,” observed Henry, who had not blanched at the picture painted. “And you’re right, you know. If Eunice caved in after ten years of hating Lester, it would take more than one whack to let off her steam.”

 
Alan was proving surprisingly squeamish for a rebel accustomed to jousting with police mercenaries. Thatcher decided that it was the domestic context of the discussion that was putting the boy off.

  “Sukey,” her husband said accusingly, “if you could only be definite about that phone call, it would answer a lot of questions.”

  Sukey emerged from her private reverie. “What’s that?”

  “Everybody here has doubts about Finley being the murderer because they think only marriage drives people to extremes. They don’t see Finley swatting Lester just because of a business disagreement.”

  Sukey’s expressive face became reflective. “It wasn’t just a business disagreement. Not the way I heard it. Mr. Finley was willing to back down and change his roof. But Mr. Lester said that wasn’t enough. People had to be warned about his dangerous building practices.” She leaned forward intently.

  Thatcher was kind. “You mean that Lester was imperiling Finley’s career? That makes him more of a menace, but the motive would still be a business motive.”

  Sukey shook her head decisively. “No, I’m not talking about motive alone. After all, everybody here knew the story of the Lester triangle within two hours of the meeting between Eunice and Amanda. No matter how you felt about it, Steve Lester didn’t look good. Then he pulls this holier-than-thou act. I think that could drive someone into a frenzy. I mean, having someone who you know has got plenty of faults of his own”—was it an accident that her glance rested momentarily on her husband?—“taking a high-and-mighty line about some sin of yours. I think that, for five minutes, it might almost be the same as being married to him.”

  Whether he had noted that glance or not, Alan was prompt to lead the conversation back to proper channels.