Turtle switched off the radio. She had heard enough bad news for one day.
“How about spareribs done to a crisp,” Hoo suggested; then he lowered his voice. “What’s the point spread on the Packers game?”
“See me later,” Jake muttered.
“Go ahead and tell him, Daddy,” Turtle said. “I know you’re a bookie.”
“CAN YOU STAND on your legs?” Sydelle Pulaski asked. “Can you walk at all?”
People never asked Chris those questions; they whispered them to his parents behind his back. “N-n-no. Why?”
“What better disguise for a thief or a murderer than a wheelchair, the perfect alibi.”
Chris enjoyed being taken for the criminal type. Now they really were friends. “When you ree m-m-me nos?”
“What? Oh, read you my notes. Soon, very soon.” Sydelle daintily touched the corners of her mouth with the napkin, pushed back her chair, and grabbed her polka-dot crutch. “That was a superb meal, I must give my compliments to the chef.” She rose, knocking the chair to the floor, and clumped toward the kitchen door.
“Where is she going?” Angela, starting up to help her partner, was distracted by shouting in the corridor.
“Hello in there, anybody home?” Through the restaurant door came a bundled and booted figure. He danced an elephantine jig, stomping snow on the carpet, flung a long woolen scarf from his neck, and yelled, “Otis Amber is here, the roads are clear!”
That’s when the bomb went off.
“NOBODY MOVE! EVERYBODY stay where you are,” Mr. Hoo shouted as he rushed into the sizzling, crackling kitchen.
“Just a little mishap,” Grace Wexler explained, taking her command post in the middle of the restaurant. “Nothing to worry about. Eat up before your food gets cold.”
A cluster of red sparks hissed through the swinging kitchen door, kissed the ceiling, and rained a shimmering shower down and around the petrified hostess. Fireflies of color faded into her honey-blonde hair and scattered into ash at her feet. “Nothing to worry about,” she repeated hoarsely.
“Just celebrating the Chinese New Year,” Otis Amber shouted, adding one of his he-he-he cackles.
Mr. Hoo leaned through the kitchen doorway, his shiny straight black hair (even shinier and straighter) plastered to his forehead, water dribbling down his moon-shaped face. “Call an ambulance, there’s been a slight accident.”
Angela dashed past Mr. Hoo into the kitchen. Jake Wexler made the emergency telephone call and sent Theo to the lobby to direct the ambulance attendants.
“Why are you standing there like a statue,” Hoo shouted at his son.
“You told everybody to stay where they were,” Doug said.
“You’re not everybody!”
Madame Hoo tried to make the injured woman as comfortable as possible on the debris-strewn floor. Angela found the sequined spectacles, wiped off the wet, crystalline mess, and placed them on her partner’s nose.
“Don’t look so worried, Angela. I’m all right.” Sydelle was in pain, but she wanted attention on her own terms, not as a hapless, foolish victim of fate.
“Looks like a fracture,” an ambulance attendant said, feeling her right ankle. “Careful how you lift her.”
The secretary suppressed a grunt. It was bad enough being drenched by the overhead sprinkler and draped with noodles; now they were carrying her right past them all.
Grace pulled Angela away from the stretcher. “You can visit your friend in a few days.”
“Angela, Angela,” Sydelle moaned. Pride or not, she wanted her partner at her side.
Angela stood between her determined mother and her distraught partner, paralyzed by the burden of choice.
“Go with your friend, Angie-pie,” Jake Wexler said. Other voices chimed in. “Go with Pulaski.”
Grace realized she had lost. “Perhaps you should go to the hospital, Angela; it’s been so long since you’ve seen your Doctor D.” She winked mischievously, but only Flora Baumbach smiled back.
THE POLICEMAN AND the fire inspector visiting the scene agreed that it was nothing more than a gas explosion. Good thing the sprinkler system worked or Mr. Hoo might have had a good fire.
“What kind of a fire is a good fire,” Hoo wanted to know.
“And what about the burglaries?” Grace Wexler asked.
“I’m with the bomb squad,” the policeman explained. “You’ll have to call the robbery detail for that.”
“And what about the coffee shop accident?” Theo asked.
“Also a gas explosion.”
Jake Wexler asked about the odds of having two explosions in two days in the same building.
“Nothing unusual,” the fireman replied, “especially in weather like this, no ventilation, snow packed over the ducts.” He instructed the tenants to air out their kitchens before lighting ovens.
Mrs. Wexler turned up the heat in her apartment and kept the windows open for the next three days. She did not want anything blowing up during Angela’s party.
But the Wexler apartment was exactly where the bomber planned to set the next bomb.
14 Pairs Repaired
THE SNOWPLOWS PLOWED and a warm sun finished the job of freeing the tenants of Sunset Towers (and the figure in the Westing house) from their wintry prisons.
Angela, disguised in her mother’s old beaver coat and hat and in Turtle’s red boots, was the first one out. Following Sydelle’s instructions she hastily searched under the hood of every car in the parking lot. Nothing was there (nothing, that is, that didn’t seem to belong to an automobile engine). So much for Good gracious from hood space.
Next came Flora Baumbach. Behind her a bootless Turtle tiptoed through puddles. Miracle of miracles: the rusty and battered Chevy started, but the dressmaker’s luck went downhill from there. First, the hood of her car flew up in the middle of traffic. Then, after two hours of watching mysterious symbols move across the lighted panel high on the wall of the broker’s office, her eyes began to cross. After three hours the grin faded from her face. “I’m getting dizzy,” she said, shifting her position on the hard wooden folding chair, “and worse yet, I think I’ve got a splinter in my fanny.”
“Look, there goes one of our stocks,” Turtle replied.
SEA 5$8½ GM 5000$67 LVI 32¼ MGC 2$14 T 1000$65¼ AMI 3$19¼ I 8$22½
Flora Baumbach caught a glimpse of SEA 5$8½ as
