Skulldoggery (13 page)
Authors: Fletcher Flora
“S
ENORITA
F
OGARTY,”
said Hester, “did not die from eating cyanide peanuts. She died of a broken heart. She merely went off, in a manner of speaking, to join Grandfather.”
Back in Flo’s apartment, she had maintained heretofore an aloof and rather arrogant silence that Uncle Homer privately considered insufferable. After the completion of the midnight mission in the garden house, the return trip had taken a considerable while, due to the insistance of Lester that the party detour by way of Pearl’s for the purpose of having her join it. It was her right, he said, to participate in the family triumph. The delay in their return had not been so much the result of the additional distance covered as the difficulty experienced in convincing Pearl that it was not some kind of trick. But she was finally convinced and persuaded to come along, and she had brought, moreover, a bottle of gin that did much to allay the valid fears of Uncle Homer that the gathering would soon go dry.
“How do you know?” Uncle Homer now said.
“I know,” said Hester, “because the evidence, though circumstantial, is conclusive.”
“Well, no one will deny that you have been clever and effective in this matter from first to last,” Uncle Homer said, “but I don’t see how you can simply say that Senorita Fogarty died of a broken heart. If you ask me, circumstantial evidence or not, it’s an unwarranted assumption.”
“I am not surprised to hear you say so, for you have demonstrated time and again that you can’t recognize a piece of evidence when you see it. Your contributions have consisted entirely of threatening to do old Brewster in, and even that, in the end, was left to someone else.”
“Oh, some on, Hester,” Lester said. “Tell us the evidence.”
“Yes, darling,” said Flo. “Do tell us. You’ve been so smug about everything that I was determined not to ask you, but I’m simply dying to know.”
“The evidence was perfectly clear to anyone with the brains to understand it,” Hester said. “It is not only highly probable that Senorita grieved herself to death, as Mrs. Crump feared she would, but it is possible to fix the approximate time of her death.”
“That’s just too much,” said Uncle Homer. “Hester, you’re just showing off.”
“Not at all. We know that Senorita was alive the morning Mrs. Crump went to market, because Mrs. Crump bought the oatmeal for her diet. It is indicated, then, that she died while Mrs. Crump was out, or soon after her return, because that very afternoon Crump went out to buy the stud.”
“Well, that makes no sense whatever,” Junior said. “Why the hell should old Crump buy a stud if Senorita was dead?”
“Because,” said Hester, “Crump did
not
buy a stud. Lester, with his usual talent at being wrong about practically everything, merely assumed from seeing a cage that a stud was in it.
Crump bought a replacement for Senorita Fogarty.
“
“Oh! Oh, by God!” Uncle Homer, rising from his chair, sputtered as if he were fused and lighted and about to explode. “I see it now. I see the whole monstrous plot. The damned old scoundrel was out to deprive us interminably of our inheritance.”
“I see it, too,” said Junior. “That must be why I never saw the stud in the back yard.”
“Yes,” said Hester. “It is also why I never saw him in the park. It is impossible to see what doesn’t exist.”
“Do Chihuahuas all look alike?” Flo said. “I mean, couldn’t you have told the difference?”
“Please don’t be ridiculous, Mother. Can you describe Senorita Fogarty this minute?”
“Certainly not. I never really looked at the revolting little beast.”
“Well, there you are.”
Just then there was a loud rapping at the door that had, somehow, an official sound.
“Who can that be at this hour?” said Flo.
“If I am not mistaken,” Hester said, “it is Bones reporting according to instructions.”
“Bones here?” said Lester. “Why?”
“You will know shortly, Lester, let him in.”
Lester opened the door, and Bones entered. He did not, however, enter very far. He stopped after a step, watching the happy family group warily, and seemed prepared to make his report and his departure promptly.
“Well, Bones?” said Hester.
“It’s all over,” said Bones. “Crump is in custody.”
“I should certainly think so,” Uncle Homer said. “The old devil is guilty of the most flagrant fraud.”
“What he is guilty of,” said Bones, “is murder.”
“Murder! Is there no limit to the man’s depravity? Whose murder?”
“The murder of old Brewster, that’s whose,” Hester said. “Anyone with half a brain would have know that he was the culprit. It was only necessary, first, to be aware of the fraud. Old Brewster kept a sharp eye on things, you’ll have to say that for him, and he was soon onto Crump’s deception. Once he was convinced, he called Crump to account and Crump, determined to retain the advantages of Grandfather’s house and money, knocked him in the head with something.”
“What I don’t see,” said Flo, “is why he had to do it in Brewster’s apartment the same day that I went there to dinner in the evening.”
“So you did go,” said Bones. “I thought you did.”
“Never mind that,” Hester said. “It is now unimportant. Mother, it is my guess that old Brewster had gone home to make proper preparations for the dinner, and called Crump to come there in order to settle the issue and have the good news for you when you arrived. It would have put you in an amiable mood and susceptible to what Brewster apparently had in mind.”
“You’re probably right,” Flo said. “He was surprisingly lively and full of tricks.”
Hester, duly honored at every turn, was in quite an expansive frame of mind. It even expanded sufficiently to include Bones.
“Lieutenant Bones,” she said, “I must say that you have done a good job, once you were shown how. Will you join us in a gin sling or something?”
“No. No, thank you. Having done my duty, I’ll just run along. Crump’s confession is being taken down, and I still have a report to write.”
He back up to the door, reaching behind him for the knob, and disappeared in reverse. There was something definitive in the door’s closing.
“I was tempted,” said Hester, “to tell him about Mrs. Crump, but it would have done no particular good. One murder is sufficient to be guilty of, and another would simply be surplus.”
“What about Mrs. Crump?” said Uncle Homer. “What are you implying?”
“I was as explicit as possible, Uncle Homer. Can’t anyone understand anything? Why do you think Crump was against an autopsy? Mrs. Crump did not die of cyanide in her oatmeal cookie, as we originally thought, but it is certain, if she were dug up and examined, that she would be found full of rat posion or weed-killer or something else handy to Crump’s hand.”
“Oh, cut it out, Hester,” Lester said. “You shouldn’t go finding murder victims all over the place. It’s simply your imagination.”
“Is it? Perhaps I am in a better position to judge that than you are. Just because you were a failure with Mrs. Crump, Lester, you shouldn’t make the mistake of thinking that everyone else has been a failure, too.”
“Are you trying to say,” said Uncle Homer, “that Cump deliberately eliminated Mrs. Crump to make room for you?”
“I will only say that I may have gone a bit too far. Crump was ambitious, and it gave him delusions of grandeur.”
“Well,” said Flo, “if Hester says it, I believe it. Thanks to her, everything has come out well, even though I sometimes thought it wouldn’t.”
“As for me, I was never in doubt,” Hester said. “It all come from remaining hopeful in a just cause.”
THE END
If you liked Skulldoggery check out:
The Brass Bed
“Maybe,” she said, “we should call it quits.”
“Sure,” I answered over the telephone. “It would just make things a hell of a lot worse.” But I knew she didn’t mean it. “What do you want anyway?” I asked her.
So she told me. “YOU.”
I hadn’t seen her in six weeks, and the six weeks had been hell, especially when I knew she was right around the corner, as close to me as the telephone beside the bed where I was lying. I wanted her with me, wanted her badly, but there was a problem. It may seem to some people that a man and a woman’s seeing each other should not be such a hell of a problem, but it was — because she was married.
And right now — right now she was probably in some other guy’s arms.
I waited for the telephone to ring.
“It’s really very simple. I want you to come over and have a drink with me.”
“Having a drink with you is not a simple matter. It leads to excesses.”
Then she said it: “Are you afraid to see me?”
I took a deep breath. “That’s right,” I said. “I’m afraid.”
And that summer there was plenty to be afraid of. More, even, than I knew when I talked to her then. And a more terrifying summer than I could have imagined….
• • •
The summer that all this happened, I taught a course in medieval history that had something in it about goliards. I didn’t know much about goliards to start with, but I got interested in them. After a while I got the idea that you might be able to write a novel about a goliard that would sell to a lot of people and a book club and maybe to the movies, and so I started on the novel, but it didn’t go very well. It was hot in June and hotter in July, and the students in the class were either very bright kids who wanted to earn a degree in two or three years instead of four, or school teachers who had come in from various places to get revived intellectually and possibly to get also a small raise on next year’s salary for having gone to school in the summer, and all in all, if you want the truth, it was pretty terrible.
The goliards helped a little. They were very interesting, as a matter of fact. I imagine that most people don’t know anything about goliards, which is no great loss either to the goliards or to the people, but anyhow they were mostly twelfth century students and clerics who wrote some nice poetry that you can still read if you’re interested. They also did other things. Some of the things they did best were drinking and shooting craps and making love and raising hell in general, and it was for these reasons that I got the idea that one of them might go well in a novel. There is a prevalent feeling that clerics do not have the same rights in hell-raising as folk who are not clerics, and this would certainly cause a feeling of prejudice against the goliards in certain quarters, but as for me, I found them helpful in a hot summer and quite a relief from bright kids and school teachers.
But even the goliards were no relief from Jolly. I do not intend this as criticism, for you can expect only so much from anyone, even goliards, and I kept thinking about Jolly and wanting to see her, but I didn’t. That was the trouble, of course. Wanting to see her, I mean, and not doing it. Something like that can be very troublesome. I tried to build up a feeling of pride in me about being strong and doing the right thing and all that kind of stuff, but it was pretty sour business and was not successful. I felt more miserable than proud, to tell the truth, especially in the long evenings and at night when I lay on my bed and thought about her in more detail than the days allowed. I went fishing twice with Harvey Griffin and got drunk three times, once with Harvey and twice alone, but I kept right on thinking about Jolly even when I was drunk or fishing, and so I gave up temporarily on both of them. I didn’t try fishing and drinking at the same time, but I doubt if it would have worked any better.
I don’t know why she was called Jolly. I ought to know, but I don’t. I knew her well and had made love to her once, which was in the spring before this summer, but I never learned why she was called Jolly, and I consider this, thinking about it, a very odd thing. Jolly is not a name you would encounter commonly, and it seems like one of the first things you’d find out about a woman would be why she was called that, but I never did, and I can’t explain it. Of the things I did learn about her, some are easy to say, and some are hard, and some are impossible. It is easy to say that she had brown hair and brown eyes and a warm and slender and responsive body, but it would be hard to say why she was so much lovelier than she was, and it would be impossible to say why it broke your heart to look at her. Perhaps it would have been better for me if I had learned to understand the hard things and the impossible things about her. A man is very vulnerable to things he doesn’t understand.
I had not seen her since the first week in June, and here it was the third week in July, and it is reasonable to assume that not seeing someone will get easier as time goes along, but in this case it didn’t. I wondered if she wanted to see me as much as I wanted to see her, and I hoped that she did and knew very well that I ought to be hoping that she didn’t, because if one of us hadn’t given a damn, everything would have been simpler and different.
Ordinarily the marriage thing would be a problem that could be solved in one way or another, though there may be certain unpleasantries in the solution, but when it is complicated by peculiar attitudes like those Jolly was addicted to, it becomes both unsolvable and confusing. She was married to a man named Kirby Craig, and he was a big guy with blond hair that waved, and he played golf and tennis and handball and would have been quite difficult for anyone to whip, and impossible for me. I didn’t want to fight him, anyhow. Whipping him wouldn’t have solved anything, and getting whipped by him would have solved even less from my point of view. I don’t know exactly how he felt about it, but I suspect that he felt otherwise. He sold real estate and was very good at it and had made a lot of money, which was something I had never been able to do because goliards do not pay as well as real estate unless you can put them in a novel with a sexy duchess or something, and even then I doubt seriously that they would pay as much. I might as well admit also that Kirby was pretty handsome, and I could understand how Jolly might have once loved him enough to marry him, so there it is, and I admit it, but I won’t dwell on it.