It wasn’t fair to make such a judgment, however, without checking out the office first and finding out whether it was possible simply to steal a key. There were a lot of things that had to be found out. He’d start tomorrow. Right now, he was feeling too abominably tired. Was it that lethal drink of Dysart’s, or the fact that he was fifty-six years old?
Why did he have to keep brooding on his age all of a sudden? He and Jemima were born in the same year. Jemmy had organized a joint birthday party for him and her mother while she was still living at home. He’d been pleased at being included, even though he had to wear a paper crown and blow out a lot of candles that kept relighting themselves. Jemmy had a regrettable taste for practical jokes. That baby of hers would probably be born wearing a false nose and celluloid buck teeth. Shandy was glad Tim would be with her when it happened. The poor old coot needed a laugh to cheer him up.
Getting Tim to the airport, that was another chore for his list. Either of the Dysarts would no doubt be glad to take Ames in the Porsche, but they both drove like maniacs and smoked like fiends. Tim would be a wheezing hulk by the time they arrived. He was in no great shape now. Shandy would rent a car from the garage downtown and make the trip as comfortable as possible for his old friend. It was the least he could do, after what’s he’d done.
But what the flaming perdition had he, in fact, done? That was the crux and quite likely the nexus of the entire situation. Did his misbegotten whimsy precipitate this outrage, or only provide a handy cover for something that was going to happen anyway?
Shandy got little time to ponder. He was barely inside the brick house, contemplating a spot of badly needed relaxation with Robert W. Service, when the front door buckled slightly. Only one person could knock like that. Now he knew how Rome felt when the Visigoths arrived. “Come in, President,” he said.
The invitation was superfluous. President Svenson was already in, filling the tiny hall from side to side and from floor to ceiling. If the hall had been large, the effect would have been the same. No space ever seemed big enough to contain Thorkjeld Svenson. Wearing a sweater and cap of untreated gray sheep’s wool knitted for him by his wife, Sieglinde, probably with an assist from the Norns, he looked like a mountain gone astray from its bedrock.
“Shandy, what are you up to?”
“I’ve been wondering that myself.” There was no use trying to beat around the bush with Svenson. “Sit down, won’t you?”
“No. Grimble tells me you’ve killed Mrs. Ames.”
“Does he, now? I wonder why.”
“Because he’s a jackass, I suppose,” the president replied thoughtfully. “What happened?”
“She’s presumed to have broken in here to remove my—er—decorations on the way home from the Dysarts’ Christmas party, and had a fatal fall.”
“Why presumed?”
“I think somebody murdered her.”
“Why?”
“If you mean why was she killed, I don’t know. If you mean why do I think so, I have sound reason.”
Shandy told of the spilled marbles, the superfluous ladder, and the key that should have been with her body but was not. Svenson ruminated awhile.
“Police didn’t notice?”
“They didn’t want to notice. Grimble and Ottermole are both scared to death of offending you.”
“Damn well better be. You told Ames?”
“Yes. He agrees with me, particularly about that step stool. He says his wife would have stood on the sofa.”
“Urgh.”
The president pondered some more.
“My wife would never stand on a sofa,” he pronounced finally.
Shandy wondered what sofa could hold her, but thought it wiser not to ask. “Mrs. Svenson is a lady of great dignity,” he said.
“Yes, and she’s going to bean me with a skillet if I’m not back in time for supper. Mrs. Svenson is not going to like this, Shandy. I don’t like it either.”
His voice rose to a full gale. “Damn you, Shandy, you’ve already tried to sabotage the Grand Illumination. If you involve the college in a public scandal over Jemima Ames, I’ll personally shove a Balaclava Buster straight down your throat and out your other end.”
Professor Shandy had to stand on tiptoe and lean over backward to look his superior square in the eyes, but he managed.
“As far as I’m concerned,” he roared back, “you can take the Balaclava Buster and squat on it till you both rot. There’s been murder done in my house and I’m not going to stand for it. If you didn’t carry your brains in your backside, you’d realize you can’t afford to either. Didn’t your grandmother ever tell you about the rotten apple in the barrel? Don’t you know the meaning of the expression ‘moral decay’? You let one member of your faculty get away with a thing like this, and you know what’s going to happen to the whole college?”
Svenson’s jaw dropped. “How do you know it’s a member of the faculty?”
“I don’t. It could be a student or someone from Buildings and Grounds or your own secretary, but I don’t think so. It has to be somebody who knows the Crescent and the people well enough to have heard Jemima planning to enter my house. I assume it’s somebody who could find a way to steal a key from Grimble, unless he’s in on the deal, too, which wouldn’t surprise me because I think he’s a sneak and a liar as well as a jackass, as you so rightly pointed out.”
“Urgh. I’ll have to think this over. And you can damn well watch your step. All right, Shandy, since you started this mess, you can just go ahead and clean it up. You get it done fast, with no embarrassment to the college, or you’ll wish to God you’d never come back. I may carry my brains in my backside, but I also pack one hell of a clout in my fist. Happy New Year.”
The president went away. After a while, the walls stopped reverberating. Shandy fixed himself a nightcap and sat down with Robert W. Service, but “The Shooting of Dan McGrew” was pallid stuff compared to what he’d been through this day. To cap it off, he had defied Thorkjeld Svenson and was still alive.
For how long? That aspersion on the president’s intellect was not only uncouth and unworthy of a man of letters, but also damnably ill judged. The insult had been adroitly turned against himself. Svenson knew perfectly well that the team of Ames and Shandy could never misread the available evidence so egregiously as to think Jemima had been murdered if she hadn’t, and that it would be morally indefensible as well as administratively irresponsible to let such a crime go unpunished. But Svenson would have handled the dirty work himself if Shandy hadn’t given him a glorious excuse to dump the responsibility.
Sitting here hoping Mrs. Svenson had in fact crowned her husband with a griddle would avail nothing. Shandy put down his book and tried to organize his thoughts. His brain had turned to mush. He went to bed.
Chapter 8
JEMIMA AMES’S FUNERAL MADE a gloomy anticlimax to a festive weekend. People were huffed at the short notice. They acted flustered and hustled and impatient to get on with their planned activities. Since they couldn’t very well take out their resentment on the corpse, they pinned it to Peter Shandy. Only the fact that Tim stuck to him like a leech averted a mass cold-shouldering. The widower was fully aware of what was happening and displayed a Machiavellian streak in getting around it.
“Don’t know how I’d have managed without old Pete here,” he was telling Sieglinde Svenson. “Rotten thing for him, coming home and finding her like that.”
“It is a terrible loss for us all.” The president’s wife knew better than to commit herself. “Your wife was a truly dedicated woman.”
She did not try to expand on what Jemima was dedicated to, but gave the widower a sad, ineffable smile, barely touched Shandy’s hand with two fingers of her woolly gray glove, and sailed on like a majestic ship of the line. She was wearing a plain blue tweed coat, a blue Angora beret, and enormous black leather boots. Glittering armor would not have been appropriate to the occasion, though it was generally supposed she had a suit
at home.
Hannah Cadwall, as mistress of ceremonies, had prepared a collation to which a chosen group were invited directly after the obsequies. Shandy went perforce, hoping for a drinkable cup of coffee to take away the chill that had gripped him ever since he happened to catch the president’s eye.
To his surprise, he found not only coffee but a pitcher of bloody marys and a cold buffet that stopped not far short of being lavish. Ben Cadwall was dispensing refreshment with an unwontedly free hand, in the happy knowledge that Timothy Ames would have to foot the bill. Bob and Adele Dysart were munching and sipping along with the rest.
That they’d accepted an invitation was not remarkable. The Dysarts would say yes to anything that in any way resembled a social event. What was astonishing was that Ben had let Hannah invite them. Shandy thought it over and came to the conclusion that the Cadwalls must feel some sense of obligation for all those invitations they’d declined. This was a way to pay back the Dysarts at no cost to themselves.
Unfortunately, the idea struck him as funny. Shandy made the appalling blunder of laughing aloud, then had to pretend he was choking on a crumb. There seemed a general decision to let him choke, but Mirelle Feldster’s motherly impulses got the better of her.
“Here, Peter, drink this. We don’t want any more accidents around here.”
The professor couldn’t think of anything to say to that, so he drank the coffee she’d brought without speaking. Mirelle was not one to tolerate a silence for long.
“I must say, Peter, I’m surprised you popped into the house long enough to find poor Jemima, you’re such a gadabout lately. I’m also just a bit puzzled as to why you haven’t thought fit to tell your old friends about getting engaged to that woman in Baltimore.”
Shandy set down his cup. “You haven’t heard who she is, by any chance?”
“I’m waiting for you to tell me.”
“They say the—er—husband is always the last to know. Would you mind passing on any further information that comes your way?”
“Are you trying to tell me it isn’t true?”
“Mirelle, I cannot imagine how that yarn got started,” said Shandy with a glance at Adele Dysart, who was carefully avoiding his eyes, “but I assure you that I am not going to marry any lady from Baltimore.”
“Maybe it isn’t Baltimore,” said Mrs. Feldster archly.
“And maybe she ain’t no lady,” yelled Bob Dysart, who could generally be counted on to make an awkward situation worse. “Eh, Pete, you old rip?”
“Tim,” said Shandy, “don’t you think it’s time we got started? You mustn’t miss that plane.”
That set off a chorus of “Who’s going to drive him to the airport?”
“I am,” said Shandy.
“But you don’t have a car,” Adele Dysart protested.
“I’m renting one from Charlie Ross. It’s all arranged.”
“I didn’t even know you could drive. I’m beginning to think there’s quite a lot I don’t know about you.”
“Aren’t we all?” murmured Mirelle Feldster. “Tim, who’s going to look after your house while you’re gone? I’d be glad to run over once or twice a day.”
“No need,” said Ames. “Some relative of my daughter’s husband is—oh, my God! Pete, I forgot to tell you, Jemmy phoned again last night. That woman’s coming in at twelve forty-two and we’re supposed to meet her.”
“It’s way after eleven now,” said Hannah Cadwall. “You’ll never make it.”
“That,” Shandy replied, “remains to be seen. Come on, Tim.”
“I’ll get your coat,” said Ben. “It’s in the guest room.”
“Don’t bother, I can find it.”
Shandy raced upstairs. His coat was somewhere in a heap on the bed, along with everybody else’s including Hannah’s own unmistakable red-and-green plaid and the ratty brown ulster Ben had worn for as long as anyone could remember. As the professor fished among the garments, something rolled to the floor and bounced under the bed. Muttering, he stooped to pick it up. The object was a yellow glass marble with brown streaks, oddly crackled inside. He’d have known it anywhere.
There was no telling whose cuff or pocket the marble had fallen out of, nor was there any sense in stopping to ask. He grabbed his overcoat, tucked the marble carefully into the inside pocket, and thrust his arms through the sleeves. When he got downstairs, Tim was already on the doorstep and Ben was ready to usher him out. They shouted words of thanks, wrung a few hands, and sped down to the garage.
Neither of the men spoke until they were safely in the rented car, headed for the turnpike. Then Timothy Ames heaved a long sigh and fumbled for his pipe.
“Thank God that’s over. I’m just as well pleased the kids couldn’t come. Lot of damn foolishness, but she’d no doubt have come back to haunt me if she didn’t get a proper send-off.”
He made loathsome noises with his pipestem and commenced stuffing tobacco into the burned-out bowl. “What the hell were they saying about you and some woman? I couldn’t catch it.”
“You didn’t miss much. Another of my asinine jokes backfired.”
Shandy explained his evil impulse and its embarrassing consequences. Ames was unsympathetic.
“Christ Almighty, Pete, when you set out to cook your own goose, you sure do it up brown. You know what’s going to happen to you?”
“No, but I daresay I’ll find out fast enough.”
“Too right you will! They’re probably back there tossing coins to see who gets first whack at warming your bed.”
“What?” Shandy narrowly missed climbing up a Volvo. “You’re out of your mind.”
“Wait and see, old buddy. You’re going to get propositioned at least six times between now and New Year’s. As to what’s going to happen when the holidays are over and the women have time to concentrate on tracking you down, all I can say is—” Ames gave way to unseemly mirth.
“I’m glad you’re able to enjoy your own joke,” said his friend austerely. “In all my eighteen years at Balaclava, I can assure you that none of those women has so much as—er—dropped her handkerchief in my direction.”
“That’s because they figured you for a sweet, innocent guy. From now on, they’ll be dropping a damn sight more than handkerchiefs. Pete, you don’t know what’s in store for you. If you don’t want to take warning, that’s your funeral.”
“Well, Tim, we won’t argue. Time will settle the matter, one way or another.”
“I just don’t want to come back and find you a shattered hulk.”
“On that, at any rate, we’re in perfect agreement. Now if you can get your mind off—er—whatever it’s on, I have something more important to tell you. I’ve found the marble.”
“You’ve what? Where?”
“When I went upstairs to get my coat at the Cadwalls’ just now. It rolled off the bed.” He explained about the jumble of wraps.
“You couldn’t tell whose it came out of?”
“Not possibly.”
“At least I’m out of it,” said Ames. “Now you see why it pays not to bother with an overcoat.”
“Good Lord, Tim, I never thought of you.”
“Why not? You can damn well bet Ottermole would have, if he could think. Anyway, it looks as though we’ve narrowed the field.”
“That was my first thought. I only hope I can remember who was at the Cadwalls’ till I get a chance to write down the names.”
“What about the Cadwalls themselves? Are they out of it?”
“They’re in. Ben and Hannah didn’t hang up their coats, just tossed them with the rest. We all arrived in a bunch, you know, and I expect they were in a hurry to get the party rolling. Anyway, I’ve been rather wondering about that pair.”
He told Ames why. The widower nodded.
“You may have something there, Pete. Ben must be hell on wheels to live with, and Hannah has plenty of chances to get at the cash. For one thing, she goes around and collects from the kids w
ith the sleds. They’re not supposed to keep more than a couple of bucks in change on them, and you’d be surprised how much they pull in.”
He grinned at his unintended pun and made more noises on the pipe. “Hannah also takes the money from the parking lot and those misbegotten gingerbread houses, which comes to a hell of a lot more than you might think. There’s an elaborate system of cross-checking that’s supposed to keep everybody honest, but Ben was the guy who drew it up. You know, old buddy, this is turning into quite an interesting problem. I sort of wish I weren’t going away.”
“Nonsense! Jemmy would be heartbroken.”
Shandy stepped on the gas and concentrated on reaching the airport before Ames had a chance to talk himself out of the trip. They were going to be late for the incoming flight from California, as it was.
In fact, they were not. That plane was overdue. However, it turned out Tim hadn’t heard Jemmy properly about his own time of departure. He had to be hustled madly past the reservation desk and down to the boarding gate, with loudspeakers blaring his name. Only when Ames was safely airborne did Shandy realize he’d forgotten to ask the name of the woman he was supposed to meet.
He was having wild thoughts about phoning Jemmy when more bleatings from the public address system sent impatient friends and relatives surging toward a gate far distant from the one they’d been told to wait at. Shandy surged with the rest, deciding he’d just have to hang around until only one person was left, then introduce himself and hope for the best.
It didn’t work that smoothly. Outgoing passengers mingled with incomers. He had no way of knowing which was which. At last he drew a bow at a venture, choosing a middle-aged woman in a red wig and six-inch Wedgies as the likeliest prospect.
“Er—I’m Professor Shandy from Balaclava College.”
“Whoopee for you. Beat it, Tyrone, I’m not open for business.”
Rest You Merry Page 7
