Majoring In Murder

by Jessica Fletcher

She pushed back her chair. “Let me get the letter for you.”

  “I’ll take good care of it. I promise.”

  “I know you will,” she said. “I trust you.”

  She went upstairs to the bedroom. A minute later she returned and handed me the letter, her hand trembling.

  “I’ll photocopy it as soon as I can and return it.”

  We sat in silence as I reread the letter.

  “We found Wes’s safe,” she said. “It’s behind a painting, hanging in the study.”

  I looked up. Finally some good news. I folded the letter and put it in the zipper pocket of my handbag.

  “What was in it?” I asked.

  “We haven’t been able to open it yet. It’s locked, of course, and we couldn’t find the combination. We went through every drawer in his desk, and checked every folder in his file cabinet.”

  “You and Mrs. Tingwell?”

  “Yes. Letitia came to introduce herself yesterday. She was very helpful.”

  “She’s a nice lady. Did you show her the letter?”

  “No. I figured that until the police made it public, I wouldn’t say anything. I didn’t want to upset her. She said she and Wes were close friends.”

  “That was considerate of you.”

  “She’s helping with the memorial service, too.”

  “I’m happy to hear it.”

  “The two of us searched for Wes’s will yesterday, but we couldn’t find it. I think it’s probably in the safe. But the combination ...”

  “It wasn’t with the letter he sent you?”

  “No, just the locket. And before you ask, yes, I looked on the back of the photo, just in case he had written it there.”

  I smiled. “I see you’re a mystery fan, too.” “It was the kind of thing he’d do when we were kids. But there’s nothing on or under the photo, or on the other side of the locket. I even examined it under a magnifying glass to see if he’d scratched it on the case.”

  “Is there a duplicate of the photo somewhere in the house?” I asked.

  “I didn’t think of that. There’s another picture in the study.”

  We carried our mugs to the study and set them atop a magazine on the desk. The room was small but charming, in a masculine way, with walls painted a deep rust color, a maple desk in front of the window, and a navy plaid love seat against the wall. A laptop computer sat open on the desk. Above the love seat were three oil paintings the college had obviously supplied, and a small shelf on which Wes had placed a glass figure of a cat, a plaster bust of Mark Twain, and a framed photograph of Lorraine posing next to a stuffed polar bear.

  “I sent him that one the first year I moved to Juneau,” she said, taking down the photo and smiling at the memory. “Alaska was so exotic to me. It was like going to a foreign country. I loved it from the start.”

  “Do you still feel that way?”

  “It’s all familiar to me now—the polar bears, the dogsled races, the long winter—but I still love it. Should I check behind this?”

  “Can’t hurt,” I said, and watched her slide off the back of the frame.

  “Nothing here,” Lorraine said. “I hope the combination wasn’t on the back of the photo President Needler took.”

  “Me, too. Is this the only photo in the house?”

  “I haven’t seen any others. Wes wasn’t a sentimental guy. He’d be more likely to shove pictures in a box than display them. I sent this one of me to him already framed. He probably got the other one that way, too.”

  “Well, that ends that theory.”

  “So what do we do next?”

  Opposite the love seat were two ladder-back chairs and a wall of bookshelves from floor to ceiling, chockablock with books—upright, stacked, and sideways on top of the standing ones, shoved in wherever space would permit. There were five gaps where Lowell Needler had pulled out books. What Wes hadn’t been able to wedge in the shelves, he’d piled on the end of the desk, on a table next to the love seat, and on a little wicker trunk that served as a coffee table.

  I picked up a copy of Kidnapped, flipped through the pages, and put it back on the stack of books on the desk. “If he tucked the combination into one of his books,” I said, “it’ll take us a year to find it.”

  “Letitia and I already checked all the books on the tables,” Lorraine said. “No dice.”

  “Did you check the ones in the living room?”

  “I did, but there’s nothing there, except Wes had the wrong dustcover on one of the books.”

  I perused some of the titles on the shelves, A Child’s Garden of Verse, A Tale of Two Cities, The Ordeal of Richard Feverel, The Stories of O. Henry, books I hadn’t read since I was in school. On two shelves were books by Wesley S. Newmark, Swinburne and the Rosettis, Poetry of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, Jane Austen and the Comedy of Manners, Onstage: Voltaire and Congreve, Mark Twain Abroad.

  In a section of twentieth-century mysteries, I saw one of my own, Murder in Spades, among the eminent names of the genre. I pulled it down and felt a secret pleasure when I discovered the spine was broken, indicating he’d read it.

  “It makes sense to me that if he were to hide the combination, it would be somewhere in this room.”

  “I agree,” she said, “but short of shaking out every book on the shelf, I don’t know where else to look.”

  It may come to that, I thought. I asked, “Could I see your locket?”

  She undid the clasp. “Here you go,” she said, dropping the locket and chain in my palm. She threw herself onto the love seat and lifted her legs onto the little trunk. “If you can find something there, I take my hat off to you.”

  “You’re not wearing a hat,” I said, laughing as I sank down next to her.

  She laughed, too. “You’d enjoy Alaska, Jessica. Alaskans love to laugh. In the long dark of winter, it helps to have a sense of humor.”

  “Tell me about this picture,” I said. “When was it shot?”

  “Golly, I’m not sure.” She leaned over to squint at the tiny photo in the locket. “I think we were about eight and ten. That looks like we were at our grand-father’s farm. He had cats in the barn. We would adopt one as a pet whenever we went to visit.”

  “You didn’t have a pet at home?”

  “No. My father was allergic. Cats made him sneeze. Wes used to say he did it on purpose.”

  “Wes wanted a cat?”

  “Very much so, but it turned out he was allergic, too.”

  “I noticed that little glass cat on the shelf. He must still have been fond of them.”

  “Probably. But the only time he had one was when we went to Papa’s farm. I remember that little guy now. He was a real cute one, always nuzzling Wes and me.”

  “What was his name?”

  “Aces.”

  “Aces?”

  “Yeah. Wes named him. I told you he loved cards.”

  “Maybe that’s it,” I said, jumping up. I pulled my book from the shelf and riffled through the pages, looking for writing or a slip of paper. I shook it upside down, took off the dustcover. Nothing. I put the book back and scanned the shelves for another possibility.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Looking for another book having to do with cards. The cat’s name was Aces. Wes was a big poker player. You said he loved puzzles, all kinds of puzzles. This book I wrote has ‘spades’ in the title. I thought it was unlikely, but it was worth a shot.”

  Lorraine got up and joined me perusing titles. There were several books with “hearts” in the title, two with “diamonds,” and none with “clubs.” We also looked for books with “king,” “queen,” “jack,” “knave,” and “joker” in the title.

  Half an hour later, Lorraine collapsed on the love seat again. “It was a good idea,” she said.

  “It’s still a good idea,” I replied. “Where did he keep packs of cards?”

  “I don’t know, but there’s got to be a deck somewhere.” She went around to the back of the d
esk and pulled open the top drawer on the right. I joined her and opened the drawer on the left. We checked every drawer and every file folder, but found no playing cards.

  “I know I’ve seen them,” I said. “I just can’t remember where.”

  “In a closet?”

  “No. If he were a passionate player, he’d keep a deck handy, somewhere convenient.”

  “Like where?”

  “The kitchen!” I said. “There was a deck of cards in the kitchen drawer.”

  We went to the kitchen. Tucked on the side of the silverware drawer were three packages of playing cards, two of them unopened. I took the open pack, sat at the kitchen table, and slid out the cards. “You look at the box. I’ll check the cards.”

  While Lorraine examined the box, checking both flaps and inside in search of writing, I turned over the cards, looking for aces. The first one I found was the ace of spades. There was no writing on the card. I held it up to the light. Turned it over. Nothing.

  Lorraine tossed aside the box and took the card from me. “Oh, what a shame,” she said, her shoulders slumped. “I was sure you were right.”

  “So was I,” I said, spreading the deck on the table and sifting through it for the other aces. “Don’t give up yet. There are three more to go.”

  Lorraine leaned over the cards, watching intently as I went through the deck, one card at a time. “Look! The ace of hearts. Jessica. Jessica. You did it. There’s a number in the center of the heart.” She burst into tears.

  The number on the ace of hearts was written in a red pen on the red heart, something easily missed by a casual observer. There were also numbers on the ace of clubs and the ace of diamonds, written in ink the color of the suit.

  Lorraine whooped, pumped both fists in the air, then pulled out a tissue and blew her nose. She grinned, the tears still streaking down her cheeks. I picked up the three cards and we returned to the study, where Lorraine removed her shoes and climbed on the love seat to reach the center painting. She grabbed one side and swung it open to reveal a silver wall safe. As I read aloud the three numbers, she twirled the dial on the combination lock, turning the knob all the way to the right, back around to the left, and again to the right. It took us four tries, rearranging the order of the numbers, until we came up with the correct combination. The safe door popped open.

  “I’m as jumpy as a moose on thin ice,” she said, laughing as she lifted a large, heavy green metal box from the safe. A narrow manila envelope was attached to the box with a rubber band. “I can’t believe he’s got another locked box here. He’ll drive me crazy.”

  We sat on the love seat again. Lorraine placed the box on the wicker trunk and opened the envelope, dumping its contents on her lap. Out fell a tiny silver key and another envelope on which was written, Last will and testament of Wesley Stanton Newmark. The key easily fit in the lock of the green box, and Lorraine turned it gently.

  “I’m almost afraid of what I’ll find,” she said, her hand resting on the top of the box.

  “Come on,” I said. “Let’s see what it is.”

  “What if it’s empty?”

  “You’ll never know till you open it.”

  Lorraine lifted the lid, let it drop back, and gasped. Inside was a narrow notebook, and beneath it, packed tightly across the bottom of the box, were stacks of one-hundred-dollar bills.

  Chapter Fifteen

  “What does it come to?”

  “Forty-seven thousand, eight hundred dollars.” Lorraine wrapped a rubber band around the last bundle. “I guess my brother didn’t believe in banks.”

  “He did sometimes,” I said, lifting my head from the file I’d been examining while Lorraine counted the cash. “The bank statements you gave me paint a pretty normal picture. His salary check was deposited directly into his account. Checks were written for all his expenses. He has about twenty-five hundred dollars in checking, four thousand in savings, and an annuity the college contributes to.”

  “You don’t think he robbed a bank, do you?”

  “Does that sound like your brother?”

  “No. It must be from cards, although I can’t believe he won this much playing poker.”

  “He might have been good enough to win,” I said, “but it’s doubtful the men he was playing with would be willing to lose that much money. It wasn’t a high-stakes game. One of his colleagues in the English department said they played for fifty cents and a dollar. The most anyone was allowed to lose in a night was thirty. After that, they made him leave the table. Plus, they played only once a month.”

  “At that rate, it would take him a century to amass this much.”

  “At least.”

  “What about the notebook that was in the box? Were you able to figure it out?”

  “It has notations in it about amounts,” I said, “but it’s all in code, abbreviations and initials.”

  “Maybe he had another business on the side.”

  “It looks that way. And he must not have wanted the government to know about the money, because he didn’t put it in the bank.”

  “He wasn’t declaring it on his taxes?”

  “Probably not.”

  “Then I won’t get to keep all of this.” She looked wistfully at the piles of cash she’d laid out on the desk.

  “If he didn’t declare it as income, you’ll have to pay the tax on it,” I said. “You should talk with an accountant and a lawyer. Estate taxes are tricky.”

  “Jessica?”

  “Hmmm?”

  “Do you think he was doing something illegal, I mean apart from not declaring the income?”

  “I don’t know, Lorraine.”

  “But you’re thinking it might be a possibility.”

  “I have to admit that using a code the way he did would seem to suggest that. He didn’t want anyone who came across this book to know what his notations meant. For instance, on this date, it says, ‘F dash MS dash one dash twenty M.’ And later, it says, ‘F dash MS dash two dash ten M.’ ”

  “What do you think it means?”

  “Possibly that he collected from someone two times. The Ms have a little line through them, which could be an abbreviation for thousand, twenty thousand, and ten thousand. Here’s another. It says, ’N dash fifteen M dash FE.’ ”

  “Who do you think MS or FE are?”

  “No one I can think of has those initials. If you don’t mind, I’d like to take this with me, too. I’ll photocopy it at the same time I copy the letter, and return them both to you tomorrow. Okay?”

  “If you can make any sense of that book, you’re welcome to it,” Lorraine said. “I’d better put this cash away before I get tempted to spend it.” She repacked the money in the green box, locked it with the silver key, put the box back in the safe, and twirled the dial. “I’m going to put this key on the locket chain where I can’t lose it,” she said, climbing down from the love seat and reaching around her neck to undo the clasp. “And I’m going to put those aces back in the deck.”

  “Good idea,” I said. “You’ll always remember where they are.”

  I added the slim notebook to the zipper pocket in my bag, where I’d placed Wes’s letter, and looked at my watch. “I’ll go to the library right now and use the copy machine.”

  “You don’t have to be in such a hurry.”

  “I’ll feel better once they’re back in your possession. Besides, I can study a copy just as easily as the ariginal.”

  The route from La Salle House, where Wes Newmark had lived, to Sutherland Library took me past the three buildings destroyed by the tornado. The bursar’s office had been completely razed, and the demolition of Milton Hall was under way. The yellow tape surrounding both those properties, as well as around Kammerer House, had been replaced in areas where it had started to stretch. It no longer fluttered along the ground, but had been pulled taut, and additional Keep Out signs had been added. I felt as if the new signs were pointed at me, and Lieutenant Parish probably intended them that
way. In addition, he had assigned a patrol car to check on the buildings every so often. As I walked by, I glimpsed a black-and-white cruiser parked on the street behind the former English department office. My heart sped up. That poker inside under the desk was the key to this case. It had to be tested. Maybe I could convince the coroner to call the lieutenant again. Failing that, I could try to talk to the construction foreman and have him retrieve it for me before they began taking down the building. There had to be a way to get it out without my crossing the police barrier.

  I hurried past Kammerer House and trotted up the steps to the library door, which opened at my approach.

  “Hi, Professor Fletcher. Here to check out a murder mystery? I just did.” Eli Hemminger displayed a copy of one of my books as he held the library door open for me.

  “That’s very nice that you want to read one of my books,” I said, stepping inside. “It must mean you’ve already read the one assigned for class.”

  Eli followed me inside. “Aw, Professor, I can read more than one book at a time. Can’t you? I’ll bet you always have three or four going.”

  I laughed. “And you’d be right,” I said. I took the staircase on the left, thinking I’d stop by the English office to see if I had any messages. Eli climbed along with me. “Weren’t you just on your way out, Eli?”

  “I was, but I have time. I’ll walk you to your office. I’ve never seen the Langston Apartments.”

  “They’re beautiful,” I said.

  Mrs. Tingwell was locking up when we came to the door. “Oh, did you want to go in, Mrs. Fletcher? I thought I’d close up early and see if Lorraine Newmark wanted to join me for dinner tonight.”

  “I’m sure she’ll be grateful for your company, Mrs. Tingwell. I can come back tomorrow. Any messages can wait till morning.”

  “No, no. I won’t hear of it.” She leaned her tote bag against the wall, unlocked the door, swung it open, placed the iron doorstop in front of it, and switched on the overhead lights. “Here’s the key,” she said. “Just leave it with the librarian. I’ll pick it up tomorrow. Eli, you’ll show Mrs. Fletcher where the librarian’s office is, please?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”