by Leo Bonanno
“What the hell are we doing here?” Ida Scribbs harped. “Some of us have jobs, you know. We can’t all be retirees living off the rest of society.”
“Quiet ma’am,” Myron said sternly. She huffed and walked over to the fountain, sitting on the edge of the basin and frowning. Carol followed her but chose to stand. The thought of sitting down so close to Ida Scribbs clearly bothered her.
“I think we deserve an explanation,” Dennis piped up.
“Everything will be explained,” I said calmly. Dennis walked over to the fountain and sat down next to his former boss, or is Ida his former former boss? Either way it didn’t surprise me. Emily came up to me and, with her back to the others, whispered in my ear.
“What’s going on?”
“I’m ending this,” I said softly. Then I added “Please forgive me.” She looked into my eyes, then backed away. Leon followed her, not even looking in my direction. Emily sat down on the other side of Carol, who put a hand on her shoulder. Leon veered off to the right and leaned against the wall beside the doors to the Human Sciences room. He stood and stared at the dormant fountain, and it made me feel like garbage.
Dolores Tilson said nothing. She sat next to Dennis, complete with cracked glasses, looking thoroughly exhausted. I wiggled a finger at Myron who hustled to my side. As I whispered in his ear, he flagged one of his deputies to come near. After we were finished, Myron stood next to me, and the deputy headed for Arnold’s office. The others watched him as he disappeared inside it. “Arnold Medley’s murder has been caught, ladies and gentlemen,” I proclaimed. “This terrible ordeal is about to end.”
“Yes, we all know that,” Dolores said. “We know all about Tommy Hall and Simon Dunlowe, but why are we here?”
“You’re all here because Mr. Hunt doesn’t think either of the boys killed Mr. Medley.” The others looked at each other and then back at us. “He thinks it was one of you.” Instantly the others jumped up from their seats and protested. This is absurd, this is ridiculous, blah blah blah. I elbowed Myron in the ribs and he nodded to the two deputies behind us, who quickly rushed forward to quash the uprising. “He thinks it was one of you folks, and I think he’s right.”
“I knew it,” Ida Scribbs said. “Fifteen minutes just isn’t enough when you’re a walking fossil, is it? So what’s the arrangement, the cop figured it out and the sarcastic windbag here is going to solve this crime, write the book and split the royalties with you? Is that it, Jumbo?” Myron stepped forward slowly and overshadowed the scrawny old crow. She diverted her eyes, and didn’t say anything more. Her attempts to divert me didn’t work, though I wondered why she had so much hostility towards me. Perhaps she caught on as to how much I liked Arthur that night at the party, just as I had seen how close Arthur was with Carol. Regardless, my train of thought on the subject was abruptly halted.
“I knew it! I knew it wasn’t the kid!” Carol shouted. “Dennis has wanted that job forever. I knew you did it you rotten bastard! Couldn’t even do it to his face, fatso? You had to hit him from behind like a wuss!”
“Oh, please!” Dennis retorted. “You knew he was giving me that job and you couldn’t take it, so you killed him before he got the chance to make it official! You jealous murdering bitch!” Emily stood up and started shouting.
“Stop this, stop! You just can’t-”
“Cram it, Doc!” Dolores blurted out, and that honestly surprised me. “You fly in here as nothing but a pee-on volunteer and take him. I’ve been with him for seven years and you just waltz in, flash some leg, and start banging my boss!”
“Tone it down, Dolores,” Leon said from the wall. “Everyone tone it down.”
“So you killed him because you weren’t getting any, huh sweetheart? How pathetic!” Ida snapped at Dolores. The arguing voices eventually merged into steady, angry hum, the echoes of which were close to deafening. After the sounds separated again, I spoke calmly and slowly, and I walked towards the group.
“There are enough motives to go around, people. Ms. Scribbs said it best I think when she described the love triangle between you two and Arnold.” Emily and Carol looked at each other and then looked away. “Those situations are always hostile, and speaking of hostility, who knows what Mr. Trago would do if his precious promotion didn’t pan out. And Ms. Tilson, who seemed utterly harmless has proven the contrary. Jealousy is a powerful emotion, Dolores. Who knows what you might be capable of underneath that demure exterior?”
“Yet again, Mr. Hunt,” Ida butted in. “Why am I here?” I looked over her head at the deputy coming out of Arnold Medley’s office. He walked towards us carrying an object that, up until about an hour before, I had considered irrelevant. Myron reached into his pocket and pulled out a pair of white gloves. I put them on, and took the object from the deputy. I nodded and he retreated behind me. Holding the object, I looked at Ida whose eyes were very wide. She stood up slowly and started walked towards me. Myron raised a hand without saying a word, and she stopped, frozen to the marble floor.
“You’re here Ms. Scribbs because you killed Arnold Medley. And you killed Arnold Medley because of this. Ladies and gentlemen, The End of Eden.” I held up the hideous painting for all to see, and Ida glared at it. She took a step back, as if scared by it. She had every right to be.
“I did no such thing. I don’t know what you’re talking about!”
“I think you do,” I said, handing the painting back to the deputy. “At first, I agreed with everything you said, right down to the fact that you didn’t have any reason to kill Arnold. Like you said, you run a successful museum and you’re probably better off now than you were ten years ago, but that got me thinking about something. Arnold told me that they hired him, a museum department head, over you, already a Curator at that time. That seems odd now that I think about it, turning down someone with more experience, so I pulled your original application from the town’s public records.” I pulled a wad of rolled papers out of my back pocket. I plucked one from the stack and handed it to Myron.
“You withdrew your application?” He asked, reading the stamp across the sheet.
“That she did,” I said with a smile.
“But why?”
“Because she was forced to, isn’t that right Ida?” Ida said nothing, but backed up and sat down on the fountain again. The others began to slowly shuffle away from her, like she was carrying a contagious disease. They migrated towards Myron and me, leaving Ida alone on the cold fountain’s frame.
“Who forced her? How?” Carol asked.
“Arnold, of course,” I answered. “To know how you would have had to look back almost a year before Arnold was hired.” I pulled out another sheet of paper, the copy of the news article I had found at the library. I held it up for the others to see.
“Stolen art? So?” Emily asked.
“According to this article, almost eleven years ago, the Beaumont Museum of Art was ransacked and several valuable pieces were either stolen or damaged. One of the stolen pieces was this,” I said, pointing to the painting.
“Arnold stole that painting?” Leon asked, shocked.
“Well, it makes more sense than paying for the ugly thing,” Dolores muttered.
“No, no. Arnold didn’t steal the painting from the museum. He got it from the thief.” The group looked at me, dumbfounded. “Ida Scribbs stole artwork from her own museum, and Arnold found out.”
“How did he find out?” Emily asked. I didn’t answer, but I turned and faced Dennis. He took a step away from me, ironically bringing him closer to the woman he had every intention of abandoning a few seconds ago.
“Ha,” Carol shouted, pointing an accusing finger. “You’re dead to rights now, fat man. I knew you had something to do with this.”
“So what happened, Mr. Trago?” Myron asked. “You get scared of the old lady’s crime spree and bail out?”
“Hey!” Ida screeched.
“Or maybe the plan was for you to get another job at a new museum and
steal some more art work?”
“No,” Dennis said softly. “It isn’t true.”
“So how, then?” Myron pressed. “You got a job here and called your old boss to have a chat about some missing exhibits and Medley heard you on the phone? Is that it? Or maybe you told Arnold and you worked out a blackmail scheme together to ring her dry?”
“It doesn’t matter how it happened,” I interjected. “The point is that at some point Arnold found out about the robbery and blackmailed Ida.”
“That’s ridiculous! This is all ridiculous!” Ida protested.
“Afraid not, ma’am,” Myron said. “On a hunch,” he said, turning and winking at me, “I investigated Arnold’s bank statements a little more thoroughly. Turns out that what I thought was insurance or an inheritance from his dead wife was actually blackmail money from you. You’ve got withdrawals coming out of your bank accounts that match deposits to Arnold’s account.”
“Not just deposits,” I added, “nice deposits.”
“You’d think someone who bragged so much about her Forensic Science Department would have been better at fixing financial records,” Dolores commented.
“She isn’t good at anything,” Dennis mumbled, and we all turned to him. “She never was.”
“Shut up, Dennis!”
“Couldn’t run a department, couldn’t run a museum, couldn’t run around the block without screwing it up. That’s why she stole the art, and that’s why she left shortly after. No one knew she was the one who stole the exhibits, but it was more proof that she didn’t have what it took to run a museum.”
“Dennis, shut up you worthless piece of-”
“Let it go, Ida. It’s over.”
“Over?” She stood up again, her voice turning shriller than ever. “You all seem to be forgetting that we’re talking about a murder here, not a robbery! You’ve got the murderers in jail, Sheriff. Those kids! Why are you letting this farce continue?”
“What makes you think one of them did it?” I asked.
“The murder weapon, and the fingerprints. That boy Simon’s fingerprints were all over Arnold’s office, I heard you say so on the ride here!” She screamed, pointing to Myron. Beads of sweat started to trickle down the side of her face. “And that rhino statue…he killed Arnold with that statue.”
“I’m afraid not,” I said with immense glee. “Simon didn’t kill anyone, nor did Tommy Hall. Simon’s prints are all over Arnold’s office because he used to work here as a volunteer.”
“Oh my God, you’re right!” Leon shrieked. “Remember, he wasn’t here long, and he had to leave when his father made him go to work at the catering business.”
Dolores’s body sprung to life. “That was little Simon? He had quite a growth spurt, didn’t he? I didn’t recognize him under all that hair and acne.”
“She’s right,” Dennis chimed in. “He was half that size the last time we saw him.”
“That’s the hazard of working with old farts like us,” Carol said. “If we don’t see you every day, we’re bound to forget who the hell you are!”
“For all we know, Simon got his fingerprints all over Arnold’s office helping him move furniture, or maybe even hanging this picture.”
“Fine,” Ida said. “So he worked here, but you just try and pin that rhino to me, you just try! You hook me up to a polygraph right now Sheriff. I’ve never seen that thing before and I certainly didn’t kill anyone with it.”
“Of course you didn’t!” I screamed back. “You never saw this rhino because Tommy had stolen it before they left that night.”
“So how did she use it to kill Arnold?” Leon asked.
“She didn’t!” I started to laugh out loud. The whole thing was so obvious now, so simple. I was so pleased with myself for figuring it out I practically slipped into a state of delirium. “Follow me,” I declared, heading for Arnold’s office. The others looked at each other briefly, and then followed. Myron waited for Ida to move before he did, staying between her and the exit.
I opened the door to Arnold’s office and stepped back. “Well, take a look! See anything wrong with this picture?” Everyone but Ida stepped forward, cramming themselves into the doorframe to peek inside. From behind, I could see their heads shifting and turning and twisting, looking over the room with those highly-developed nerd eyes. I had lost all hope of anyone seeing what I had seen when Leon finally spoke up.
“Hey, look at the giraffe,” he said. All of the other heads shifted to it. There, on Arnold’s desk, sat the lonely golden giraffe in its usual place. The space to its left was vacant, evacuated by a golden rhino that was now taking up residence in an evidence locker somewhere deep inside the Pendleton P.D.
“What about it?” Emily asked. “It’s always been there.”
“Yes,” Leon answered, “but now it’s facing the wrong way.” More silence, then light bulbs started turning on.
“Hey, you’re right,” Dennis said.
“Yeah you are,” added Carol. “He used to face the right, not the left.”
“That’s right,” I said. “In fact, the night of the party, I picked it up and mistakenly put it back down on Arnold’s desk facing left, towards that lamp. He corrected it immediately. When I came in with Arnold to get his coat after the party, the rhino was gone, but the giraffe was still facing to the right, towards ‘the homeland’ as Arnold put it. Facing that picture to the right. When I came in with Myron the next day, the giraffe was as you see it now, facing the left towards the lamp and the empty space where the rhino used to be. That only leaves one possibility…”
“She used the giraffe,” Myron said. He turned to me and smiled with wide eyes. The real murder weapon was actually the one part of the story I kept to myself. I couldn’t risk Ida finding out I knew what the real murder weapon was until now. As long as Ida figured the police had the wrong murder weapon, she thought she’d be safe because she had honestly never laid her hands on it. “Amazing,” Myron said.
“Oh please!” Ida yelled, continuing the charade of innocence. “You go ahead and dust that damn thing for my fingerprints. We’ll see what you find.”
“I’m sure the Sheriff won’t find any fingerprints on it at all. Like Dolores said, someone who runs their own Forensics Department surely knows to wipe off her murder weapon before putting it away. You couldn’t take it with you though, because one of us would have surely noticed it was gone. By leaving it here, you hoped to fool the Sheriff into thinking the murderer brought his or her own weapon, like the butt of a robber’s gun, and took it with him when he left.
“But that giraffe is awfully detailed, Ida,” I continued. “You may have gotten all of the fingerprints off, but what about Arnold’s hair, or skin, or the tiniest drop of blood? And the indents you left on the man’s skull are sure to match the shape of that statue. After that, they’ll be able to tell the Sheriff the angle of the attacker’s blow, and that gives away your height. It’ll only take a pinhead’s amount of evidence to tie this all together. Are you sure you got it all off, Ida. Are you sure?”
“This is…” She began. “This is…I didn’t…” Then she stopped talking altogether. She looked around at all of us, then started walking towards the wall adjacent to Arnold’s door. She leaned against it, then slid down into a fetal position on the floor and began to cry. “I didn’t…I didn’t plan it. It just happened…”
Arnold Medley said goodbye to his last guest of the evening, who had just pointed out that his office door was still ajar. He shut the large museum entrance door, turned on his heels and headed back to his office.
As usual, some piece of unprocessed paperwork still lay on Arnold’s desk, diverting his attention from his goal of going home and going to bed. About twenty minutes later, Dolores Tilson arrived to find him still sitting at his desk, still in his black overcoat, deep in thought over some unpaid invoice or piece of citizen correspondence. The two talked briefly about the party that had just ended and their most interesting new friend, R
eevan Hunt. Dolores mentioned taking the dessert cart home with her to return the following Monday. Indifferent to the subject, Arnold obliged the request and arose, once again planning to head for home, but something stopped him; a ringing phone.
Arnold spoke softly and calmly to Emily Sellars, making it a point not to mention her name aloud as Dolores Tilson would undoubtedly reappear to say goodnight. When she did, he smiled and wiggled his fingers in her direction. Then she was gone.
Emily was upset about the events of the evening, about the way Arnold had confronted her in front of Reevan in the Animal Science Department. Too tired to be sympathetic, Arnold appeased Dr. Sellars with various forms of the same apology, hung up the phone and headed for the door, attempting to leave his office for the third time that hour.
Ida Scribbs appeared in the doorway, having sneaked back into the museum through the now unlocked entrance. Arnold was surprised by her entry, but not by her confrontational attitude. While the first half of this scenario was unfolding, Ida Scribbs was parked in her car not two blocks from the museum. Her car was running, and the radio was on, but she found it very difficult to call it a night. Apparently, Ida Scribbs had been paying for a certain indiscretion for the last decade of her life, and tonight she got to see where all her money was going first hand. A beautiful chandelier, a grand fountain and marble tile was only the beginning. There was the new security system as well, not to mention the fact that the man had used her money to fund his own retirement party. No, Ida Scribbs was not a happy camper. She could not turn a blind eye. She could not call it a night. She had some things to get off her chest. She eventually turned off her radio, put her car in drive and returned to the Pendleton Museum of Science to have a chat with her professional rival. So at 11:43 pm precisely, Ida Scribbs stood in the doorway to Arnold Medley’s office and tried to put the past behind her once and for all.
Sensing a long and awkward discussion on the horizon, Arnold sighed and walked behind the door to his coat rack. He removed his overcoat and put on his sweater. He thought his office was as cold as an icebox.
