Uncle Herbert?”
“Again—remember the day I talked to you in the hospital. You said you were rich, but later you called that a lie and said you merely came from a rich family. Even your second statement wasn’t quite true, as wealth is measured in Barton Hills. Your father was the president of a medium-sized corporation. He was paid an excellent salary, but that salary was all he had. The real wealth belonged to your uncle; it was merely administered by your father.”
“Sure, I knew that.”
“If your father had died, your mother would have been left with his insurance and his house—ten times more money than most human beings ever see, but not enough to permit her to live as she wished to live.”
“She could’ve killed Uncle Herbert, then killed my father.”
“Possibly she could have, though murdering your uncle would have been difficult as long as he remained in Garden Meadow; but she was intelligent enough, I think, to see that if she were to kill them both she lacked the brilliance to escape conviction. Those murders would have directed a much less astute policeman than Lieutenant Sandoz to her. What actually happened was that your father received a letter which seemed to indicate that your uncle had not long to live. That event, I would guess, suggested a much more subtle plan.
“She had already purchased Pandora’s Box and loaded it with two iron buggy weights—they were used to hitch the horse when there was no post or rail—so that Bill wouldn’t think it empty. Servants talk, you know, and at that time she was very probably planning to put some interesting antique in the box, just as I suggested later.”
“Those were the weights that Sandoz found under the sofa in the study?”
“Yes. She should have disposed of them before then, but at the time neither Sandoz nor I had any idea why they were there. Perhaps I should mention that it was Bill, whom they were meant to deceive, who directed me to the shop where she had bought the box. I telephoned him from the kitchen while you were sitting in my office.”
“But when the letter came, she figured out how to use the box.”
Blue nodded again. “She would kill in such a way that your father would be blamed. While he was in prison, your uncle would, she thought, die of natural causes. Your father would inherit—nothing in the law bars a prisoner from claiming an inheritance, provided it does not come to him by his crime. She, his wife, would control that money for so long as he remained imprisoned, probably for the remainder of his life.”
“Only when he figured out that he was going to die, Uncle Herbert went over the fence.”
Muddy said, “So would I, if I knew I was about to croak—I mean if I was locked up someplace. Al, how about a couple more of these thin-sliced tomatoes?”
I held out my plate. “I’d like some more, Muddy.”
“Swell. Everything’s organically grown and good as hell for you.”
“You think she just decided to hurry things up?”
“I doubt it,” Blue said. “Perhaps she anticipated the sort of situation Lieutenant Sandoz envisioned—your uncle’s starting a legal fight to remain free. Or perhaps she let something slip there in your hospital room that indicated she had planted the bomb, and shot your uncle to silence him. My best guess is that he knew how the Pandora boxes worked—he had been raised to take over the family business, remember—and he said enough in your hospital room to frighten her. Certainly he had been to the site of the explosion, since he must have picked up your rose there. No doubt he had talked to people who described the drawing, but we’ll never know unless she tells us.”
Muddy said, “Tomorrow I’m gonna stew some with bread crumbs and green peppers.”
That about winds it up; you don’t have to read this last part if you don’t want to. Bullets from the gun in my father’s desk matched the bullet they took out of Uncle Herbert, and the police found a nurse’s aide who’d seen him and Elaine leaving together, so that was the one they tried her on. About once a month I hitch downstate to visit her, but I haven’t used any of the stuff she’s told me in the visiting room when I put together this book, because it’s different almost every time. My father still has his place on the Gold Coast, only now there’s a woman named Marcie living with him; she’s maybe five years older than I am. I haven’t seen him for a couple of months, but yesterday I got him a birthday card at Ozco’s, and when I send this off to the first publisher on my list I’m going to mail his card to him. Maybe it’ll remind him my own birthday’s coming up pretty quick now. You never know.
