Going Out in Style (20 page)

When he was finished, she sat silently, her hands
playing restlessly in her lap. “I understand. I understand. Yes, Mr. Woodruff. I’ll do as you say.”

“You see why we’re coming to you,” interposed Detective Janovy. “Your friendship with Jessie Lowell makes it plausible that—”

He broke off. Gretchen was nodding, and her face had gone very white. She said in a low whisper, “Yes. I know. I’ll do it for Jessie. I’ll be glad to do it for Jessie.”

“When?” asked Bernard.

Gretchen glanced at her watch. “I’ll go there tonight,” she said calmly. “No use beating about the bush, is there? No use at all.”

Janovy studied her face anxiously. “You’re sure you can handle this, Dr. Schneider? It’s not without an element of danger, you know. If you’d rather not get involved …”

“I
am
involved,” she replied sharply. “Aren’t I? Don’t worry, Detective. I can play my part.”

Bernard got to his feet. “Just don’t strangle anyone or attack anyone,” he said mildly. “There have been enough murders as it is.”

Gretchen looked at him, and a spark of gallows humor lit up her face. “Yes,” she said. “There have been enough murders.”

Albert, who had been excluded from their meeting, was fretting the same way Snooky had been fretting. After the two men had left, he went into the living room and said, “Gretchen? Are you all right? What did they want?”

“I’m fine, Albert. I’m fine.” She was sitting gazing thoughtfully out into the garden, which was covered with frost. The oval flower bed looked like a grave today, she thought.

“What did they want?”

“They asked me to do something, Albert. Something for Jessie. I’m going to do it, and I don’t want you to stop me.”

“Is it dangerous?”

“Not if I play it right.” Her hands twisted and untwisted nervously on her lap. “Not if I play it right.”

He sat down next to her and took her hands into his own, stilling their movement. “How can I help?” he asked humbly.

“Oh, Albert.” Her lined, worried, haunted face grew softer as she gazed at him. “You’re too good for me, Albert. You really are.”

He was frowning to himself. “I don’t like this,” he said sharply. “Why can’t you tell me what’s going on? What is this?”

“Don’t badger me, Albert. I need to think.” She took her hands away from his, and turned away to gaze out at the frost-covered garden again. Strange how that flower bed resembled a grave … she would have to do something about that in the spring.…

“I need to
think
,” she said curtly.

That evening, when Susan came home from a movie that she and George had taken Harold to see—
Nine Thousand Ways to Die
, a cult science fiction classic that Harold had already seen practically nine thousand times—she found Snooky shivering on her doorstep.

“Snooky, what are you doing here? I told you we wouldn’t be home until eight-thirty, didn’t I? Have you been waiting long?”

“No, no.”

“Come inside and get warm. You look half frozen. Harold, where are your mittens? Harold, look at me, young man. What have you done with your mittens?”

“I ate them,” Harold said sullenly.

“All right, go inside, young man. They must be around somewhere. George, would you look in the car? Do you see Harold’s mittens?”

George was locking up the car. “No, I don’t,” he said absently. “Listen, Susie, you know the part where the aliens communicate through those toothbrush things they
had on the top of their heads? You remember that? What were those things, anyway?”

“They were toothbrushes, George. This was the lowest-budget science ficton film I’ve ever seen,” she told Snooky. “The alien space ship looked exactly like a bottle cap. Didn’t it, George? It looked like a soda bottle cap, shot from up close.”

“But those toothbrush things—”

“That reminds me. HAROLD, BRUSH YOUR TEETH BEFORE YOU GET INTO BED. I’M SERIOUS, YOUNG MAN. I CAN TELL THE DIFFERENCE, YOU KNOW. THOSE CHOCOLATE GOOBERS ARE BAD FOR YOUR TEETH. Do you think he heard me, George?”

“I think they heard you in Wisconsin, Susie. Now listen, do you remember the part where the aliens pointed those things at people and they fell down? What were those things?”

“I don’t know. They looked like garden rakes to me. Deadly garden rakes. You know, the long kind with the hooked part on the end. The alien leader looked like he was wearing a roll of toilet paper on his head. It worries me that Harold likes this film so much, Georgie. What does it mean?”

“It’s okay, Susan. I think it gets his aggression out. He always seems calmer after we see it.”

“Really? Do you think so?”

“Excuse me,” said Snooky. “Susan, can I talk to you for a minute?”

Susan looked contrite. “I’m sorry, Snooky. What is it? Would you like something hot to drink?”

“No. It’s something … well, sort of personal. A relationship problem. You know how I always turned to your mother for advice, and now that she’s gone—well, I wondered if I could talk to you about it.”

“Oh. Of course. I’ll just put Harold to bed, and then you and I can talk in the kitchen. You don’t mind, do you, George?”

“No, Susie, no, no, no, you go right ahead. I’ve got some stuff I have to do here anyway.”

Susan put Harold to bed, surprisingly without too many protests on his part (“Maybe George is right,” she thought, “he does seem, well,
calmer
than usual”). It worried her that Harold liked that low-budget alien movie so much—why couldn’t he enjoy
Pinocchio
and
101 Dalmatians
like other children his age?—but there was no denying that he seemed happy and content. He took his old, worn, much-loved teddy bear into bed with him and fell asleep practically immediately, his blond head tucked underneath the pillow, the way he always slept. She had given up years ago worrying that he would somehow smother himself.

When she came back into the kitchen, Snooky was sitting idly thumbing through a tabloid magazine. “Look at this,” he said. “
PREACHER EXPLODES IN PULPIT AFTER FIRE-AND-BRIMSTONE SERMON
. What is this, Susan? Do you read this stuff?”

“I can’t help it. Dora brings it over and leaves it here. She buys three different kinds every week. I know it’s terrible, but I’ve started reading them. Look at this—
EIGHTY-SIX-YEAR-OLD WOMAN GIVES BIRTH TO TWINS
. What do you think? Where do they get this stuff?”

“I don’t know. I can’t imagine. My horoscope says I shouldn’t have gotten out of bed today. Yours says you shouldn’t make any new business deals.”

Susan handed him a cup of steaming hot chocolate. “Now, what’s this terrible problem of yours?”

“Oh. Right. Well, it’s like this. My girlfriend left me a while ago for one of her professors, which is depressing enough, but she recently wrote to tell me she’s getting
married, to this guy who’s at least twice her age. Consciously I wish them all the best, but I keep on having this disturbing dream where I firebomb their wedding and everybody goes up in flames, except for Deirdre, who lives long enough to beg my forgiveness and tell me I’m the only man she’s ever really loved.”

“And then she dies?”

“Oh, yes, they all die, especially the professor, who goes up like a torch. And then there’s this other dream I’ve been having where Deirdre turns into this enormous frog and keeps trying to tell me something, but I can’t understand what she’s saying because it’s just this weird kind of hoarse croak, you know.…”

Outside Susan’s little blue-and-yellow house, a car pulled up and Gretchen got out. She walked up the front steps and rang the doorbell. Nothing happened, so she rang again. After a minute or two, George opened the door. He looked flustered, and a viola string hung from his hand.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I was listening to the opera, and of course you can’t hear anything at all through that. Come on in.”

“Thank you.”

He led her into the tiny, cluttered living room, where he picked up his viola and began to thread the string into the peg. “Restringing the instrument,” he said by way of explanation. “Have to do it every so often. Good for the morale, too, the viola sounds so much better. Is the opera too loud?”

Gretchen thought the banshee sounds emanating from the speakers were far too loud, but she sat down with her hands folded and said politely, “Oh, no, of course not.”

George grinned at her. “Yes, it is,” he said, and lowered the volume. “You’re here to see Susan? I’m afraid
she’s busy right now. She’s talking with Snooky in the kitchen.”

“That’s all right,” said Gretchen. “I can wait.”

“Oh, good.”

Gretchen sat there quietly for a few minutes, watching George as he bent over his task. He looked so gentle, so essentially harmless, sitting there, she thought. His long stringy dark hair fell over his forehead, his thin fingers wrestled with the string, and his eyes were half-closed with concentration. A soprano aria came booming out of the speakers, and George sang along in a high tinny voice totally unlike his own. His whole being was focused on the viola string. She watched him for a little while, then grasped her hands together and said abruptly,

“George,
I know you did it
.”

“Did what?” He looked up and smiled at her in a sleepy, startlingly sensual way. She began to see what Susan had seen in him, something that had always eluded her before. The string had held, and now he picked up the next one and began to thread it carefully through the peg.

“George, please. I know that you killed all those people. I know it was you.”

He looked up again. She thought he looked faintly wary. “Gretchen, if this is your idea of a joke, then it isn’t in very good taste.”

“It’s not a joke. Believe me, it’s not a joke. There’s nothing funny about it.”

“No, there isn’t.” He put aside the viola and sat up, hugging his knees. There was a strained silence between them. The voice of a basso profundo boomed out of the speakers. George reached out with a lazy gesture and switched off the tape.

“What is it, Gretchen?” he said. “What’s the matter? What have you really come to talk about?”

“I’ve come to talk to you about Jessie,” she said quietly.

“Jessie?”

“Jessie had guessed it was you, the night before you killed her, George. She found a Barbie doll in a box some people had donated, and it jogged her memory. You didn’t know that she drove by Bella Whitaker’s house that night, did you? Nobody did, except for me and the police. Jessie said all along that she hadn’t seen anything, that the porch light was on but the rest of the place was dark and she couldn’t see anything. She just drove by for a moment and didn’t think about it much afterwards. But as it turned out, she had seen something—hadn’t she, George? She saw the one thing you were afraid people would find out, and that’s why you killed her, isn’t it?” She paused, her hands working nervously in her lap. “The doll reminded her.
She had seen Bella Whitaker leaving the house that night
. Oh, maybe just a quick glimpse of her walking down the steps as Jessie drove by, just a flash out of the side of her eyes, but she saw it, all right. She saw Bella Whitaker leaving—or rather, being
forced
to leave, isn’t that right, George? She saw her being forced down the front steps with stiff, jerky movements,
just like that doll
.”

Gretchen leaned forward. Her face was very white now. George stared at her as if fascinated. His mouth hung slightly open and his eyes were wide.

“Nobody guessed it was you, George, because of your alibi. At the time that Bella died, you were miles away, in Springfield, at a concert. But the truth is,
so was Bella
. Everyone assumed that because she was found at home, she was murdered at home. But that’s not the way it was, was it? You drove her to that concert, and you killed her there and hid her body in your car.”

George stared at her, his eyes faintly bulging. He said nothing.

Gretchen gave a faint, half-hysterical laugh. “That’s why that stupid earring was under your car seat, wasn’t it, George? Nobody hid it there. Nobody planted it on you. It fell off of Bella’s ear when she was struggling with you, while you were strangling her. It fell off and rolled under the seat.

“You were so clever all along, George. Really, if Jessie hadn’t told me enough of what she had seen, the night before she died, I would never have been able to piece it together. Old Mrs. MacGregor … she didn’t know who had done it, but she knew one thing that you couldn’t afford to have her tell anyone. It was the coat, wasn’t it, George? The mink coat? Mrs. MacGregor had gone out to the front hall closet at six-thirty that evening, and she had opened the closet for her coat, and she had seen something. Or rather, she had
not
seen something.
She had seen that Bella’s black mink coat wasn’t there
. Which was peculiar, really, because Bella was supposed to have never left the house. Yet where could the coat be? It was a freezing cold night—Bella would never have left without it. Mrs. MacGregor didn’t know what it meant, but she knew it was important. She had a knack for that kind of thing. But she was stupid. She didn’t realize how important it really was. And so you killed her.”

Gretchen leaned back. She felt suddenly drained and exhausted.

“Of course the coat wasn’t there,” she said, “because Bella had already left with you in your car. The sound of the door opening and closing that Mrs. MacGregor heard wasn’t the sound of someone coming in—it was the sound of both of you
leaving
, wasn’t it? By the time Mrs. MacGregor came out to get her coat, the house was empty. When did you actually come into the house, George—earlier in the afternoon?”

There was a silence. From the kitchen they could hear the faint sound of Snooky’s voice droning on.

“Yes,” said George. His eyes were half-closed now, and his thin face wore a sleepy, pleased look. “Around five-thirty.”

“And you waited … under the stairs?”

“Yes.” George picked up his viola again and absent-mindedly played with the string. “It didn’t take very long. She came downstairs about forty-five minutes later.”

“And then you came up behind her?…”