Grime and Punishment

“I beg your pardon, ladies. But is this really pertinent?' VanDyne asked.

“It is to me,' Shelley replied sharply.

After a long pause, he bent and picked up a briefcase and removed a stack of papers. 'Now, I'd like to go over these statements with you—'

“Statements?' Jane asked.

“From the women who came here that day. You were a witness to some of them arriving.'

“I've already told you everything I know.'

“Yes, but I thought going over it might help you remember more. Something insignificant you didn't think to tell us maybe? Now, I spoke to Mrs. Williams last night—”

Something about the awestruck tone in his voice when he mentioned Suzie's name made Jane and Shelley both smile. 'Did you learn any new words?' Shelley asked.

“A few,' he admitted. 'She's quite a woman, isn't she?' There was both admiration and something like fear in the statement. 'She says she's a buyer for the local branch of Marshall Fields.'

“Lingerie and foundations, as I suppose she told you,' Shelley said.

“Yes — ah, well, uh. Now, Mrs. Williams says she forgot to bring her dish over before she went to work, so she took an early lunch hour and ran home and then over here. She thinks that was about eleven.'

“I wouldn't know,' Jane said. 'I was out shopping from around ten to about twelve.'

“She told me Edith had cleaned her house once, but that she didn't like her. Do you know anything about that?'

“Nothing, except that's what she told me too.'

“Oh, you've discussed this with her?'

“At a ball game Saturday. In fact, she's the one who first gave me the idea that it might be the wrong cleaning lady who was killed.'

“She suggested that?' he asked, his eyes narrowing.

“No, she was talking about the boys in their uniforms and said all the cute little bastards looked alike in them.'

“Yes, I imagine that is how she'd put it. Now, Mary Ellen Revere, your neighbor across the street. She said she came over just after that. She saw Mrs. Williams leaving and that reminded her to bring over her food.”

Jane shrugged. 'I don't know.'

“She says she works at home except on Wednesdays, when she goes into the city for a weekly meeting with her other investors.'

“I've never known what it is she does, but I see her leaving in city clothes from time to time,' Jane said. 'What is it she does, exactly?'

“It's odd that you wouldn't know. All of you seem to know so much about each other.'

“She doesn't have children,' Shelley said. At his perplexed look, she elaborated. 'Most of us know each other through our children. School things, sports, swimming pool, car pools to various activities. We only know Mary Ellen because she lives so close. When we have adult neighborhood parties we invite the Reveres, of course. They don't usually stick it out to the end, though.'

“Antisocial?'

“No, but conversation eventually gets around to the kids' teachers and teams and baby-sitters and such and, naturally, that bores them.'

“I see,' he said, as if being instructed in some esoteric habits of a foreign country and finding them excessively tedious. 'Mrs. Revere said she wasn't out of the house anytime except to bring—' he consulted his notes ' — potato salad over here. Would you know anything to the contrary or anything that would confirm that?' He looked from Shelley to Jane.

“No, except that I know she wasn't feeling well. She's just broken her arm and it's very painful. I didn't ask, but I assume she can't drive, so she's probably stranded,' Jane said. 'I hadn't thought about that. I guess I ought to offer to take her to the store or something, but I imagine her husband's taking care of all that.”

VanDyne was looking away, waiting for her to get over this little outburst of suburban trivia. 'Now, Mrs. Wallenberg says she brought a cake over and you brought it in. You confirmed that the first time we talked. Did you see her again the rest of the day?'

“Not until after — after Mrs. Thurgood was killed. I phoned her as soon as we discovered the body and came back here. She picked my son up from school and dropped him off home after dinner. Come to think of it, I didn't see her then.'

“She said she was playing tennis — all day.' It was clear that he found this hard to believe.

“I'm certain she was. Dorothy lives for it. She was a pro or almost a pro when she was young, and she married a man who's a sporting goods distributor. She's also a nurse, and does part-time volunteer work in a birth control clinic.'

“Yes, she told me that. She said she'd had Edith clean for her once and didn't like her. Is she one of — well, you called them 'slobs'?'

“I'll say,' Shelley put in. She'd been quiet for quite a while, but now she became talkative about Easter eggs in sofa cushions and elicited the dimpled smile again.

“Mrs. Jones said she brought her dish a little after noon. But you didn't see her?”

There was a note of skepticism in this that Jane found irritating. 'Believe it or not, I really don't spend my days spying on Shelley's driveway. I was probably down looking at the furnace then.'

“I see. Looking at the furnace. Mrs. Jones said she saw you earlier in the day.'

“At the dry cleaners,' Jane said curtly. Why couldn't it have been at a travel agency where she was picking up tickets for an exotic trip, or at a jeweler having a diamond necklace clasp fixed — at the very least a health club? The man would think she never went anywhere interesting. Unfortunately, it was true.

He waited to see if she'd go on. When she didn't, he said, 'Let's see who else — Laura Stapler, the woman next door to Mrs. Nowack's on the other side. She says she brought her salad over around one-thirty and spoke to you?'

“I think it was a little bit before that. Ten or fifteen minutes, probably. I started the carrots at one and—' She was about to do it again, gab about telling time by carrot cookedness.

“You didn't start the carrots until that afternoon?' Shelley interrupted.

“I didn't see her leave, though,' Jane went on hurriedly. 'I was leaving when she came. She must have been the last one in the house. Let's see—' Jane got up and opened the refrigerator door. 'Shelley, you haven't moved any of this since then, have you?'

“Well, I — the kids aren't home and we ate out—'

“I'm not accusing you of keeping a piggy kitchen. I just wonder if you got these potluck dishes out of order. Isn't this Laura's bowl on the top of the stack?”

She shut the door and thought a minute. 'That doesn't matter. I mean, it doesn't tell us anything that's necessary to know.'

“Why not? I thought it sounded good,' Van-Dyne said, looking like he hated to admit it.

“The dishwasher was still on prewash when I came over after Shelley called. So Mrs. Thur-good must have started it just before she was killed, and everybody had come and gone before then.”

VanDyne got up and looked at the controls of the dishwasher. 'Mrs. Nowack, had you set this to start in the afternoon?'

“What do you mean? Oh, yes, it is one of those, isn't it?'

“One of what?' Jane asked, joining him and bending over to see what he was looking at. 'What in the world are all these buttons, Shelley?'

“It's got a thing where you can load it up and program it to start in the middle of the night.'

“Why in the world would anybody want to do that?' Jane asked.

“I have no idea. It would scare the stuffing out of me if it started gushing and thrashing at four A.M., so I never bothered to learn anything but 'wash' and 'cancel.' '

“It's so you can use it at nonpeak water consumption hours,' VanDyne explained. 'In some parts of the country that matters.'

“So—' Jane began.

“So we've been looking at this dishwasher business as proof she was alive and it isn't necessarily. You're