A Murderous Yarn

for the night. Have you had supper yet?”

“No, I was going to ask if you wanted to go halves on a pizza.”

“I’d rather have Chinese.”

“But I was thinking of eating at home-yours or mine. Like I said, I want to talk to you.”

“Is this about Lars thinking of buying another Stanley Steamer?”

Jill stared at Betsy.

“I take it he didn’t tell you.”

“No.” Jill could be very terse when annoyed.

“He said the later models had condensers on them so he wouldn’t have to stop every twenty-five miles to take on water.”

“I see.”

“I told him to consult you before he bought one.”

“Thank you.”

“Chinese take-out, then?”

“Fine.”

“I’ll buy if you’ll fly.”

“Okay.”

Excelsior had its own Chinese restaurant, the Ming Wok, just a few blocks away. By the time Jill came back with the warm, white paper sack emitting delectable smells, Betsy had finished in the shop and was up in her apartment.

And Jill was over her mad.

They sat down to feast on Mongolian beef and chicken with pea pods.

Jill, feeling the cat Sophie’s gentle pressure on her foot, dropped one hand carelessly downward, an ort of chicken even more carelessly hanging from her fingers. Sophie deftly removed it and Jill brought her hand back up to the table to wipe it on a napkin.

“If you leave your hand down there, she’ll lick it clean and I’ll be less likely to notice you wiping your fingers and guess what you’re up to,” said Betsy.

Jill laughed. “I’ll remember that. But since you didn’t jump up and shout at Sophie, or me, I take it you no longer disapprove. So why don’t you just give up and feed her, too?”

“I do feed her. She gets Iams Less Active morning and evening. She gets enough to maintain a cat at sixteen pounds, which is what she’d weigh pretty soon if everyone else would just stop sneaking her little treats.”

“I mean-”

“I know what you mean. Jill, you stayed here last December, and you saw what she’s like when feeding time approaches, whining and pacing and driving me crazy. That’s what she’d be like every time I sat down at this table if she thought I allowed her to have something from my plate. So long as she thinks I forbid it, she’s content to be slipped a treat on the sly by someone else, and she’s very quiet about it. So I do my part, scolding her-and you and everyone else-when it gets too blatant. Look at her.”

Jill looked down then around and saw Sophie all the way across the living room, curled into her cushioned basket. She looked back with mild, innocent surprise at their regard. “See that smirk? She thinks she’s got me fooled. Help me maintain the fiction, all right?”

Jill raised a solemn right hand. “I promise.” She opened her fortune cookie. “Mine says, Tomorrow is your lucky day. Always tomorrow, never today. What does yours say?”

Betsy opened hers. “The solution lies within your grasp,” she read. “To what, I wonder?”

Jill said, with a little smile, “How about the Birmingham murder? How’s that coming?”

“Not very well. I don’t know the people, I don’t know enough about antique cars, I don’t know as much about the actual scene of the crime. And you can’t really help this time because the Excelsior police aren’t investigating.”

“Well,” drawled Jill, “it just so happens I have prints of photos taken at the Highway 5 lay-by.”

Betsy said, “That’s what you came to talk about, isn’t it? You came here meaning to show them to me.”

“Only if the subject came up. Which it was going to. Where’s my purse?” She looked around, saw it in the living room, and stood. “Come on, have a look.”

But a minute later, pulling a brown envelope out, she hesitated. “Um, these aren’t pretty.”

Betsy hesitated, too. She was not fond of the uglier details. “Well, let’s see how bad they are.”

They were awful. Betsy hastily took several close-ups of the head of the victim off the top of the stack, putting them facedown on the coffee table. The next one was of the horribly burned upper body, and she pulled it off, too. “How do the people who deal with this sort of thing stand it?” she asked.

“By making horrible jokes.” Betsy looked up at Jill, who was standing beside the upholstered chair Betsy was sitting on. “I’m serious,” she continued. “They call burn victims crispy critters, for example. They have to; otherwise, they’d be so sick they couldn’t conduct a proper investigation.” She shrugged at Betsy’s appalled expression. “You asked.”

Betsy returned her attention to the photographs. The next few were of the burned-out Maxwell. “The whole inside seems to be gone,” she noted.

“Yes, and it smelled of accelerant.”

“Accelerant?”

“Something combustible, like gasoline or kerosene. Which at first wasn’t suspicious, because after all a car uses gasoline. But some of the ash they collected from the back seat contained gasoline.”

Betsy looked at the photo again. “How could there be any accelerant left in something this thoroughly burned?”

“Because it isn’t liquid gasoline that burns, it’s the vapor. You can actually put a match out by sticking it into a bucket of gasoline-unless it’s been sitting long enough for fumes to gather, in which case the fumes will explode as your lit match enters the cloud. Arsonists who spend too long splashing accelerant around are arrested when they go to the emergency room with burns.”

“You know the doggondest things.”

“I know. Look at the rest of the photos, and see if there’s anything to see.” She had taken out a notebook and pen, prepared to write down anything interesting Betsy might notice.

Betsy obediently looked. Since she knew very little about automobiles and even less about antique ones, the photos of the burnt-out car told her nothing. She noted the hammer in the puddle of dirty water around the car and remembered the joke hollered by a fellow driver last Saturday: Get a bigger hammer!

She asked Jill, “Do you know if they found evidence Bill was struck on the head before being shot?”

“Not that I know of. Why would someone do that?”

“Maybe it was a quarrel he had with someone and he got hit in the head with that hammer. Or maybe he swung it at someone, who pulled a gun and shot him. I understand he was a very aggressive type.”

“Hmmm,” said Jill, writing that down.

Farther down were more photos of the corpse. Again Betsy hurried past them, but she slowed at several taken of just the lower portion of the body, which was barely damaged. The white flannel trousers were barely smudged, and then only above the knees. Except…

“What?” asked Jill.

Betsy looked closer, frowning. “That’s funny, that smudge right there looks more like someone wiped his dirty fingers than smoke or fire damage.”

“Let me see.” Jill took the photo and peered at it closely. “Where’s your Dazor?”

“In the guest bedroom.”

“Bring it here, will you?” She spoke peremptorily, slipping into cop mode without thinking.

Betsy went into the bedroom her sister had used and opened the closet to pull out the wheeled stand with the gooseneck lamp on it. She wheeled it out into the living room and plugged it in.

Jill turned on the full-spectrum fluorescent light that encircled the rectangular magnifying glass and bent the gooseneck to a convenient angle to view the photo. “Huh,” she said after half a minute. “It does look like someone wiped dust off his fingers, it’s so faint…”