A Pint of Murder

by Charlotte MacLeod

  Somebody must have picked up a few dollars doing roadwork since she was last home. They’d put down a lovely new pavement, which was nice but strange, as the road never got used much. Another governmental aberration, no doubt. What a pity they didn’t have Charles Treadway still around to invent one of his super surfaces for them. He could have brought the whole country to a screeching halt in no time flat, thus saving the Conservatives, the Liberals, the N.D.P., and the rest a lot of fuss and bother. Whatever did Jason Bain want of that batty old inventor’s patent?

  The patent was the least of her worries. What really mattered was this jar of mismatched string beans. She parked in front of the one private residence on Queen Street that merited the description “imposing,” and took her jar, discreetly masked in brown paper, off the front seat.

  Mrs. Druffitt met her at the front door, dressed for her meeting in a lilac print dress, spotless white pumps with little bows on the toes, and an impressive Queen Mary toque of purple violets swathed in lavender veiling. Janet knew the outfit well. Mrs. Druffitt had been complaining for years that one had to keep wearing one’s old clothes because one simply couldn’t find anything fit to buy any more. It was generally agreed that Elizabeth Druffitt could find more excuses for not parting with a dollar than any other woman in Canada.

  Preoccupied with pulling on her white nylon gloves and checking her handbag to make sure she had the notes for her little speech of introduction to the distinguished speaker of the day, the doctor’s wife had no time to spare for Janet.

  “Good afternoon, Janet. Please go right on in. I thought I heard Doctor putting the car away in the carriage house just now, but I’m so rushed I didn’t take time to look. They’ve stuck me with the job of pouring out, unfortunately.”

  As if she didn’t know every other member of the Tuesday Club would cheerfully give a back tooth to preside over the teapot. Annabelle had never been invited to join that august group, of course, and Janet never expected to be. Gripping her jar, she nodded farewell to the lilac print as it swished down the well-swept brick walk, and went into the waiting room.

  The house Elizabeth Druffitt had inherited from her parents was as gloomily grand as the Mansion must have been in its heyday, and a great deal better kept. Its furnishings hadn’t changed in this century, except that pictures of Edward VII and Queen Alexandra, George V and Queen Mary, George VI and Queen Elizabeth, and Queen Elizabeth II and Prince Philip had been added in proper succession to the steel engraving of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert. King Edward VIII was conspicuously absent.

  This place looked like a museum and felt like a funeral parlor, Janet thought as she settled herself and her perturbing burden on a slippery black horsehair sofa with crocheted antimacassars pinned to the back. No wonder Gilly had balked at bringing her son back here to live. What must it have been like for that only daughter, growing up inside this well-dusted tomb?

  The hands on the red marble mantel clock pointed to exactly two when she sat down. She watched them swing around to five past, ten past, then a quarter past the hour. It certainly was taking Dr. Druffitt a long time to put that car away. Perhaps he’d stopped in the kitchen for a snack or something, but why didn’t he at least poke his head in to see whether any patients were waiting? Janet began to get annoyed. She coughed once or twice, and when nothing happened she got up and tapped diffidently at the office door.

  Still nothing happened. She knocked louder. At last she turned the knob and said, “Dr. Druffitt, are you—”

  Then she saw the body on the floor. The crumpled mat at its feet told a clear story. The parquet floor was waxed slick as a curling rink. Dr. Druffitt must have skidded on that braided mat and bashed his head against the corner of the desk.

  Janet knelt beside him, wondering if she ought to loosen his collar or something before she called for help. But something about the look of the man told her he was beyond any help she could get. Steeling herself, she slipped a hand inside his vest to feel for a heartbeat but could find none. She remembered something she’d read once, took the mirror out of her purse, and held it to his mouth. There was no clouding of breath. She hadn’t really expected any.

  But why hadn’t she heard the crash when he fell? She’d been sitting right outside the whole time. Unless it happened during those few moments when she and Mrs. Druffitt had stood talking out at the front door. How dreadful, the husband lying dead and the wife tripping off to pour tea in her violet toque!

  “Oh my God,” Janet thought. “I’ll have to go over there and tell her.”

  Janet knew where the Tuesday Club met, in the vestry of the Reformed Baptist Church. How could she face that group of respectable ladies with a horror tale like this? How could she leave the doctor lying here alone while she went? What if some child were to come in and find him like this, or an elderly person with a bad heart?

  At last her head began to function again. Janet knew what she must do. She’d telephone to Fred Olson.

  Olson was Pitcherville’s town marshal, as well as its auto mechanic and sometime blacksmith. His police duties had never amounted to more than locking up the usual Saturday-night allotment of drunk-and-disorderlies or ticketing the odd Yank for admiring the scenery at sixty miles an hour, but he was a decent soul and better than nobody.

  By the time she got him on the line, her voice was shaking so that he had a hard time understanding the first word or two. “Fred, this is Janet Wadman. I’m down here at Dr. Druffitt’s office and you’d better come right on over. He’s—I was waiting and he didn’t come out so I knocked and then I opened the door and—for God’s sake, will you hurry?”

  She couldn’t stay there. She went back to the waiting room. It was terrible, being there alone with all those kings and queens staring down at her. Why didn’t anybody else come? Surely Dr. Druffitt must have had a few patients left.

  It was too nice a day to get sick, that was why. It was too nice a day to be finding things in people’s cellars one didn’t want to find. Now she’d never know if that jar Dr. Druffitt had sent to be analyzed was a mate to the one she had here in a bag from the Dominion Stores. She’d never know for sure that this was how Agatha Treadway was murdered.

  She might as well admit what she was thinking. Somebody had prepared those string beans wrong on purpose, and put them where Mrs. Treadway would find them, and eat them, and die. Two jars had been left in the cellar because there was a chance Mrs. Treadway might use the first before it had time to go bad. But there had been time enough.

  Then why didn’t the murderer come and take the second jar away? Maybe he, or she, had been too scared. Nobody had expected Marion Emery to stay on at the Mansion after her aunt died to hunt for that assuredly mythical hoard. Maybe the person hadn’t realized the vegetables were prepared in a different way from the rest. It wasn’t the sort of thing most people would notice.

  Mrs. Treadway herself wouldn’t have noticed. Her eyes had failed badly, though she’d tried to hide the fact for fear her nieces would clap her into an old-folks’ home and help themselves to what was left of her property. But the Wadmans, who knew her so well, realized that during the past several years she’d been managing more by what she knew than by what she saw. Around the Mansion she could lay her hands on anything she wanted. She could still fix her own food and she’d eat whatever came from one of her own jars because she’d be sure it was safe. Only that last time, she’d been wrong.

  Cutting beans in bunches was the quick, modern way. Only a really fussy cook like Annabelle or an old-fashioned one with time on her hands would bother to snap them one by one, feeling for perfect freshness. A would-be murderer who did home canning by modern methods would most likely chop them without thinking. One who did none at all might do the same because that was how canned or frozen beans came and he’d think that was the only way. Or somebody who knew perfectly well that Mrs. Treadway always snapped her beans might deliberately have cut the prospectively lethal string beans as a warning signal to himself.r />
  After all, there’d been no telling when Mrs. Treadway might open that particular jar. She’d never been inhospitable. Anybody who happened to be around at mealtime would have been invited to share her meager fare. It would be hard to refuse the vegetables because there wouldn’t be much else to eat. Yet to taste that particular serving would be a dangerous thing to do.

  Who was apt to eat at the Mansion? Janet herself had, on any number of occasions. Annabelle used to go over often enough when the kids were at school and Bert off somewhere and she thought the old lady might like company. Gilly Bascom came once in a great while. Marion was there a lot, of course, and had to eat what was set in front of her or go hungry. Sam Neddick must have taken some of his meals with Mrs. Treadway since he did her chores and made his home in her hayloft, although since he was also Bert’s part-time hired man, he usually preferred the more bountiful fare at the Wadmans’.

  Dot Fewter couldn’t be left out, either. Dot always lugged a horrible lunch of baloney sandwiches on store-bought bread when she came to clean, if such her feeble efforts could be called, but no doubt she’d have accepted whatever else was offered on top of that.

  On the face of it, Marion and Gilly were the likeliest suspects. Both knew they stood to inherit. Both were always hard up for cash. Both had every chance to get at Mrs. Treadway’s food supply.

  But so did anybody else. The cellar was never locked. Anyone with a little luck and a lot of nerve could sneak in there some dark night, pinch a couple of empty jars, fill them up, and put them on the shelf with the string beans that were already there. It could be done in one trip by bringing the prepared beans in some other container and filling the jars on the spot. One wouldn’t have to be fussy about how it was done, since the whole object was to let the food spoil. A child with a bike could manage—Bobby Bascom, for instance.

  Gilly’s misbegotten son was almost eleven by this time. Janet had heard that Bobby’d already been in trouble a few times for throwing rocks at Pitcherville’s few street lights, swiping fruit from orchards, letting air out of people’s tires; nothing serious but nothing that augured well for his future behavior. Annabelle thought it was plain awful the way that boy was being dragged up by the boot heels. Gilly didn’t seem to have any control over him, and the grandparents showed less interest than a person might expect them to.

  That was Bobby’s grandfather lying dead in there. Janet wished she knew where the boy was now, and where he’d been twenty minutes ago. Could he have been poking around the office, by any chance? Might he have thought it funny to hide under the desk or somewhere, then reach out and give that treacherous little mat a yank?

  Why should he think it was funny to do a thing like that? He was old enough to realize the possible consequences. Maybe he didn’t do it to be funny. Kids could harbor grudges as well as grownups, and Janet had had a little sample last night herself of how nasty the doctor could be.

  Bobby might even have thought he was doing something great for his mother. He might know something about a jar of string beans and a much-needed inheritance. He might very well have heard through the village grapevine that Janet Wadman was coming to show his grandfather something strange she’d found in the cellar up at the Mansion. Little pitchers had big ears.

  Janet found she was having a hard time trying to swallow the coincidence that Dr. Druffitt had died just when he did. It was, however, frighteningly easy to credit the possibility that somebody hadn’t wanted him to see that jar. If Bobby Bascom could have heard about her errand, so could lots of other people. If he could have done that stunt with the mat, so could others.

  A doctor’s waiting room was a public place. Anybody could walk in through the waiting room. Everybody knew this was Mrs. Druffitt’s club day, and that she’d be upstairs getting herself dolled up for the occasion. Everybody knew Dot Fewter wasn’t working here today. Everybody knew everything about everybody, in Pitcherville. Somebody might still be lurking close by, wishing Janet would leave so that he could make his getaway. Why hadn’t she thought of that sooner? She was almost out the front door when Fred Olson barged in and stopped her.

  “What happened, Janet?”

  “We’re supposed to think he slipped on the mat and banged his head.”

  Fred either didn’t catch the implication or chose to ignore it. He opened the office door and stood gazing down at the thin, elderly body sprawled on the gleaming parquet. “Poor old Hank. Never knew what struck him, I don’t s’pose. That’s a blessin’, anyhow.”

  He knelt and prodded at the back of the skull, his blackened stubs of fingers tender as a mother’s. “Yep, dent there you could get your fist into. Looks as if there’s nothin’ to do now but send for Ben Potts.”

  “Ben Potts?” cried Janet. “You can’t just bundle him over to the undertaker without a doctor’s certificate, can you?”

  “No, I guess not, come to think of it.” Olson scratched his raspy chin. “I might get hold of ol’ Doc Brown. You prob’ly ain’t heard he’s back in town. Livin’ with his married daughter Amy out beyond the Jenkins place.”

  “Dr. Brown? I didn’t even know he was still alive. He must be crawling on for ninety.”

  “So what? He’s still a doctor, ain’t he? Might perk the ol’ geezer up to make one last house call. You told Elizabeth yet?”

  “No. I—it didn’t seem right to leave him alone. I thought I’d better call you first.” Janet realized she was backing away from the body. She supposed she couldn’t blame Olson for backing away from such a ghastly responsibility.

  “Better get ’im up on the examinin’ table an’ haul a sheet over ’im before she comes. Be an awful shock to her, seein’ him like this. Ben won’t be back till suppertime. He’s got a funeral over to West Jenkins.” He bent and picked up the smaller, slighter body and swung it around toward the black leather-covered table.

  “Watch out for his head!” Without quite realizing why, Janet put out her hand to shield the skull from the edge of the desk.

  “Can’t hurt it no more’n it is already,” the marshal said grimly, but Janet wasn’t paying any attention. Almost of their own accord, her fingers were exploring the shattered cranium.

  “Fred, feel this dent again.”

  Reluctantly, he did. “It’s busted all to hell an’ gone, sure enough. What more do you want me to say?”

  “Feel the shape of the break, I mean. Don’t you notice how round and smooth it is? Shouldn’t it be more—more angular? Like a hard edge would make?”

  “How should I know? I’m no doctor.”

  “Neither am I, but I’ve fried enough eggs in my day to know that if I whack them with the round bowl of a spoon it makes a different sort of break than if I crack the shell on the edge of the frying pan, and so do you. Can you honestly believe the sharp corner of that desk wouldn’t at least cut into the flesh and leave some kind of ridge or something?”

  Olson prodded again, a worried expression on his red pudding of a face. “Criminy, Janet, I dunno what to think. What else could it have been? There’s nothin’ else in the way he could o’ fell on. Maybe his hair—”

  “What hair?”

  The marshal’s jaw dropped. He stared down at his old friend as if he’d never seen him before. “Lord A’mighty, I never realized. I can remember when Hank had corkscrew curls down to his waist. Had ’em myself, not that I wanted ’em. Forty years before you was born, I s’pose.”

  He sighed, picked up a clean sheet that had been lying ready beside the examining table for the patient who was never going to come now, and tucked it over his lifelong pal. “You go on over an’ break the news to Elizabeth, Janet. I’ll stay here an’ try to get hold of Doc Brown.”

  Anxious as she was to get out of that place, Janet hesitated. “Fred, there’s something else I have to tell you.” She got her paper bag from the horsehair sofa, and showed him the jar. “Dot Fewter and I found this in Mrs. Treadway’s cellar this morning.”

  He shrugged. “Seems as likely a pla
ce as anywhere else.”

  “Fred, listen to me. You know what Mrs. Treadway died of.”

  “Yep. Poisoned string beans.”

  “And you know how fussy she always was about what she ate.”

  “Yep. Fat lot o’ good it did ’er in the end, eh?”

  “All right, now take a look at this jar. Notice it’s full of string beans. Notice that they’ve all been cut into nice, even pieces with a knife, like the ones you’d get in a frozen-food package.”

  “So?”

  “Is that how your mother would have fixed hers?”

  Olson shoved back the ratty tweed cap he was wearing and scratched his head. “’Pears to me she snapped ’em in ’er fingers.”

  “I expect she did. My mother did, too, and I’ve watched Mrs. Treadway do it ever since I was a little kid. Furthermore, there were thirteen other jars on the shelf beside this one, and every single bean in them had been snapped. Do you see what I’m getting at?”

  The marshal scratched his head again. “Maybe she got tired o’ doin’ ’em all the same way.”

  “And maybe pigs have kittens. Look, Fred, I knew Mrs. Treadway as well as anybody in this world did, and there never was a woman more set in her ways. She had certain ways of doing things, and she wasn’t about to change for anybody. I remember saying to her once, ‘Mrs. Treadway, let me show you a new trick I learned in home arts,’ and she said to me, ‘No, thank you. I learned enough new tricks while my husband was alive. I’ll stick to what I know is going to work.’”

  Olson emitted a snort of laughter, then glanced into the office and looked embarrassed.

  “Furthermore,” Janet went on, “I was there and saw the jar she’d eaten from, after Marion Emery and Dr. Druffitt took it out of her fridge. It was one of her own preserving jars and a mate to this one. I couldn’t be mistaken about that, because she’d had them for sixty years or more, and they haven’t been on the market in ages. There probably aren’t any others like them in the whole province.”