“But even if it is, that's only circumstantial evidence. She might have bought those cards herself.”
“But Wesley buys his at a mail-order house, and I suspect the odds of anybody else doing that here at Silver Acres are slim.”
“Something like the odds against getting dealt 13 diamonds?” April asked. She was now on her feet and bouncing around as if nothing had happened.
“Not quite that bad,” I said. “Let's get out of here.” Then I took a look at the chair, which had fallen over along with the gymnasts. It had a cracked leg. We weren't going to get away with this, after all.
“We'll take it with us,” Mark said. “We can get it fixed and return it to Ellen anonymously.”
“I don't mind taking the cards,” I said, “because she'd never dare complain about those, but the chair…”
“We can't leave it because she might not see the crack and she might try to sit in it. I know a furniture repair place. I'll take it there.”
“But she'll miss it for sure…”
“One of the chairs to this set is being stored in the back of the closet to save room,” Mark said. “If we bring it out it will take her a while to figure out that one is missing-maybe long enough to allow us time to get it fixed.” He went into the closet and brought out the extra chair.
Mark had too much sense for someone his age. And too much integrity. When he mentioned the chair in the closet, my first thought was just to switch chairs and not take the broken one with us, but I found I couldn't suggest that in front of him. He picked up the broken chair and we left, hoping that if Ellen found her chair missing she wouldn't suspect me. We took a circuitous route to my apartment, but it probably wasn't necessary. Doesn't everybody carry a chair around with them?
“Lillian, I need to explain something to you.” Mark shifted his gaze from April's car to me as it rounded the curve and disappeared from sight. She was on her way to the Raleigh/Durham Airport to fly back to San Diego.
“I'm the one who should do the explaining,” I said. “Why I jeopardized you two kids for the sake of a deck of cards. Now I wish I hadn't.”
“No; you had to do it. I know the feeling because I'm like that. And you're tightening the noose on Ellen, however circumstantial your evidence.”
“I may never have enough to go to the police. I may just have to satisfy myself that I know she killed Gerald.”
“Perhaps. But what I want to explain to you is about April. April is pretty and smart and…sexy, and I enjoy her company, but…”
“I don't blame you. She's a lovely girl.”
“Yes, but what I'm trying to say is, although I enjoy the company of women, looking at them, flirting with them, and hope I still will when I'm 60…”
“I hope you still will when you're 80.”
“…my heart…my heart belongs to Sandra.”
“You don't have to tell me this.”
“I know, but…I want to. Because you're her grandmother and I want your respect.”
“Mark, you're going to have me in tears in a moment. Give me a hug and get back to your dissertation.”
“Okay, but just promise me you'll wear a green dress at our wedding. You look good in green.”
CHAPTER 20
I'm not the sort of person who gets pleasure from confronting people with their faults, especially when one of those faults is murder, but in a way I felt I owed it to Ellen to talk to her before going to the police.
For one thing I felt compassion for Ellen; after all, Gerald did pull a dirty trick on her husband, possibly even defrauding him out of a share of a Nobel Prize, and Ellen out of reflected glory, not to mention the money that goes with it.
I guess I hoped there could be a resolution other than throwing Ellen in jail for life. Perhaps she could plea bargain and get off with probation.
Tess wouldn't go with me; she had even less stomach for this confrontation than I did and she fervently hoped that Ellen hadn't murdered Gerald. She still hoped that he hadn't been murdered.
I called Ellen and told her I needed to talk to her and that I would be right over. I didn't give her a chance to say no. She didn't say much of anything.
When I knocked on the door to her apartment she opened it, still not speaking, ushered me in and pointed to the couch, under which April had found the deck of cards. I checked the chairs in her dining area as I walked by. There was no sign that prowlers had been there.
Ellen didn't offer me anything to eat or drink, but I wasn't expecting hospitality. She sat straight as a ruler in a chair, opposite me, and said, “Well?”
Well, here goes. I said, “Ellen, I want to tell you what I know about you and Gerald.” I paused, trying to find the right words. “I know about your husband's relationship with Gerald, of course, because you told me yourself. I believe that constitutes a motive for murder. Even more so now because of the recent revival of interest in his book.”
I used the word murder on purpose, hoping to get a rise out of her, because she was too contained, too cool. And her very coolness threatened to upset my plan, destroy my confidence. I would prefer that she be raving mad, perhaps even threaten to attack me, to her being this composed.
Her eyes blinked when I mentioned murder, but she made no other sign that I had upset her. I had to go on. “I know that you switched card decks before Gerald dealt, taking the shuffled deck and replacing it with one that you had fixed.” I had confirmed with Wesley that the deck April found under the couch was one of the “official” club decks of cards. I hadn't told him where I had gotten it.
“I know the reason you did it; when you and Gerald lived in San Diego he was once dealt 13 diamonds in a bridge hand. But he regarded it as bad luck because his partner was killed soon afterward. So you were telling Gerald that he was about to have bad luck. You hoped that this psychological ploy would hasten his death. And because you were the only one who knew about this episode in his history, you were telling him that you were his murderer.”
“That's an interesting theory,” Ellen said, with her irritating coolness. “What else do you have?”
“Of course you knew about Gerald's allergy to shellfish. It was common knowledge among the people in the Economics Department at UCSD because you all socialized together, played bridge together.
“I know that you ordered lobster from the Sea Chantey Restaurant on the day Gerald died. I know who delivered it to you and he is prepared to testify in court that he did so.” Didn't all interrogators stretch the truth a bit?
“If you know so much about me you know that I have a fondness for Maine lobster,” Ellen said, “because I grew up in New England. It just so happens it was my birthday and I wanted to treat myself. I had eaten at the Sea Chantey and so I knew they served it. End of story.”
Ellen's arrogance grew as my confidence waned. I felt as if we were on opposite sides of a tug-of-war and I was on the side that was slowly being pulled into the mud puddle. Wasn't the suspect supposed to confess at this point? That's what always happened on the television series, Murder She Wrote.
But I wasn't through yet. I said, trying to keep my voice as calm as Ellen's, “I know when you put the lobster into the casserole. You took the meat out of the shell, of course, and pureed it so it would easily blend in. Then, during the fire alarm scare, when everybody else was outside, you went back into the recreation room. You had time to mix the lobster into the bowl so that nobody would know the difference.”
Ellen looked at me with an expression that said I still hadn't broken her. She reached for a cordless phone, which sat on the table beside her, and punched in a number. Her eyes burned into mine while the phone rang, making me wish I were in Lapland, watching the reindeer.
