justice who's fair and honest? Like Howie Murchison.'
Marge snorted, leaned over her eggs, and rumbled, 'The point of H. O. W. is, see, that it's the wimmin who are going to run this town.'
'Oh,' said Quill.
And Adela's right. If the wimmin find this killer and make the streets safe again, then it's the wimmin the voters are goin' to put in government.'
'By and large, I agree with you,' said Quill. 'Except that Adela Henry's a witch.'
'She's right, Marge,' Betty said without officiousness. 'We'll have to think about this. In the meantime, are you with us, Quill?'
'Well, sure,' said Quill. 'I guess so. Except that I really think Howie'd make a great - '
'Lame, girl, lame.' Marge patted her shoulder with one elephantine hand. 'Now, what's the next step in this investigation?'
'Me?' asked Quill. 'You're asking me?'
'You solved three murders before this,' said Betty.
'Who better?' asked Marge.
Meg went, 'Whoop!' and finished the last of Quill's sausage. Quill, both flattered (at the tribute to her investigative skills) and annoyed (Meg had eaten most of her breakfast - and who was it that had spent a sleepless night with a corpse, anyway?), looked over her shoulder. The Mclntoshes had gone. More important, Alphonse Santini had gone.
'Okay, guys, I'll tell you my theory. I had a lot of time to think about it last night, while John was looking for Davy to get me out of that cell. In the videotape of Nora's murder, a figure dressed in my coat waited for her by the intersection. The figure was tall for a woman, short for a man. That coat was down and really huge. I don't know if you remember seeing me wear it.'
Betty hooted. 'Everybody in town knows that coat. That's the ugliest winter coat I've ever seen in this life. I dunno how many times I seen you walking into the bank in that coat and wonder why the heck - oof!'
Marge, who'd given Betty a substantial poke in the midriff with her elbow, rumbled, 'Go on, Quill.'
'So if you had a little potbelly, it wouldn't show when it was zipped up.'
'A nine-months pregnancy wouldn't have shown with that coat,' Meg remarked. 'I know you loved that coat, Quillie, but, honestly, it was an ugly coat. I'm glad it's at the bottom of the Gorge, or wherever it is that the murderer put it. Same for the hat.' Meg yawned.
'Shut up, Meg. Now this is mere supposition at this point, because that tape has disappeared, but I think the only person it could have been was Alphonse Santini.'
'The senator?' gasped Betty.
'Of course,' said Meg. 'You said the person dressed in your coat gave Nora a fistful of money.'
'And took it back,' Quill reminded them. 'And I'll get to what happened to the money in a minute. Nora Cahill told me the day before she was murdered that she had 'more dirt on that guy,' meaning Santini, and that she'd love to publish it, but she didn't yet have enough proof. And she told me she was close to finding out something that would really nail him. Finally, I know for a fact that Santini hated her anyway. He blamed that whole H. O. W. fund- raiser debacle on her. I saw him reading her the riot act right after H. O. W. stopped throwing forks and spoons at him. I think what happened is this: Nora was blackmailing Santini, and he'd been paying her off right along. She said herself she was the only media person to get invited to his wedding - and she was just a Syracuse anchor. I mean, if he's going to 'invite anyone, why not Sam Donaldson? Or Barbara Walters? He could have cried all over Barbara Walters and it would have given him an enormous advantage in the next election. He's a national figure. One of them would have come.'
'But Nora showed up at the courthouse when you were arrested for running over that little kid,' Marge objected. 'Why should she do that?'
'I didn't run over a little kid,' said Quill.
'But it was the start of his 'national' campaign to rescue small towns.' Meg said. 'Nora wouldn't want to miss that. Although it was so clearly phony.'
Quill smiled gratefully at her. 'Just so.'
'I get it,' said Marge. 'There's no reason why Nora'd pass up a good news story, even if she was blackmailing Santini.'
'We probably,' Quill said a little stiffly, 'will always disagree about whether my little traffic ticket was a good news story. Anyway, I think that Frank Dorset recognized Santini in that tape and wanted that money for himself. He went right along with that trumped-up disguise that Santini meant to look like me, and put me in jail on bogus charges.'
'That makes sense,' said Meg. 'I mean, Howie was raving all the way to Ithaca about the high-handed way Dorset was handling due process. He didn't see why or how Dorset was planning to get away with it. But, of course, he was trying to blackmail Santini, too. He was probably planning on taking that blackmail money and hightailing it out of town.'
'And Santini showed up at the sheriff's office...' said Quill.
'Pretended to give Dorset the cash...' added Meg.
'And whammo! Cut his throat. Shoved him into my cell. Wiped the knife and tossed it in after Dorset's body...'
'And tried to pin the second murder on you.'
'Holy crow,' said Betty.
