Joan Hess - Dear Miss Demeanor

“You’re fond of the anomaly, aren’t you?”

“I suppose I am.” The confession sounded sad.

I told her that there’d been someone in the building the night Sherwood and I had indulged in a mild spot of prowling. She was fairly sure it couldn’t have been a teacher-unless it was the one who’d let me in the building in the first place. I was fairly sure Sherwood hadn’t stolen the letters from under my nose. I asked her if she’d heard anything further about the mysterious reinstatement of the jock, and she told me that she hadn’t.

I bade her farewell, took a deep breath, and called Miss Bernice fort. After eleven unanswered rings, I hung up in disgust.

When Peter wandered by later in the morning, I was still behind the counter, staring at the nonfiction shelves and grumbling under my breath. “Any progress?” I asked morosely.

“Miss Parchester continues to elude us, and she seems to be our only decent suspect thus far. The lab reports are back, but they don’t say much of anything we hadn’t already suspected. Pitts ingested more than three hundred fifty milligrams of cyanide, which was dissolved in the whiskey.”

“Was it also organic?”

“It was. A sample has been sent to the regional lab for a more precise analysis, but it’ll take weeks to get the results. We’re presuming Pitts was murdered with-well, with pits.”

“Pitts poked the peach pits.” I said, gnawing on my lip.

Peter grinned. “That’s what you claimed last night, among other more whimsical things.”

“There are too many damn p’s in this. Pitts the peeper, peaches, Parchester, plagiarism, Paula, principals, pouters, poisonous pits, and parades! It’s worse than the jackhammer.”

“Not to mention policemen and prowling prevaricators.”

“Stop the p’s!” I gestured for him to accompany me to my office, where I offered (not poured) coffee and a dusty chair. “I am going to figure this damn thing out without any Farther alliteration. Let’s begin with another source for the toxic substance.”

“It’s definitely organic,” Peter said, leaning back with a tolerant expression. “Officers of the law do not dismiss coincidences; they leap on them. Toxic compote, made from… a certain fruit with a toxic interior.”

“But Jorgeson told me that cyanide is found in the seeds of a variety of fruits. Apples, cherries, apricots, and so forth-why couldn’t one of those be the source?”

“One of them could, I suppose, but we haven’t come across any of them in the investigation.”

I stared at him. “I may have, though.”

He stared right back. “When? What?”

“It’s just a wild guess-but there was a souvenir from Mexico.

“Lots of tourists go to Mexico, Claire; they all buy things to bring home and discard a few weeks later. Hundreds of thousands of tourists, I would estimate.”

“And they go for a variety of reasons, both conventional and unconventional.” I toyed with the theory for a few minutes, trying to find slots for all the disparate bits of information (not pieces of the puzzle, mind you). “Apricots and Mexico. The joint in the desk. Charles Dickens. It almost makes sense, Lieutenant Rosen, although it means we’ve been looking at this thing from the wrong side of the hole.”

“Apricots, Mexico, Dickens, and dope? How many joints did you find in Miss Zuckerman’s desk?”

“Just the one,” I said distractedly. “It was evidence of a sort, although I don’t think we’ll need it for court. The murderer is going to get away with the crime. We couldn’t see the apricots for the peaches.”

“I’m not sure you’ve frilly recovered from the effects of the marijuana,” he said, looking at me as if I were atop the file cabinet with a rose clenched between my teeth. “We might run by the hospital and have you checked for lingering euphoria.”

“My idea, exactly.” I grabbed my jacket and hurried out of the office, followed by a bewildered cop (as opposed to a perplexed policeman). I directed him to drive me to the hospital, then clammed up and stared out the window.

As we neared the lot, I told him that I wanted to visit Miss Zuckerman before he arranged for a straitjacket and a handful of Thorazine. When he sputtered, I suggested we question her about the joint that was ingested in the name of scientific discovery. He agreed, albeit with minimal grace.

I stopped at the nurses’ station to inquire about Miss Zuckerman’s status. We were informed that she was critical, but allowed short visits by close friends and family members. She did look critical, more frail than she’d been a few days ago and even grayer. Her skin was translucent, her bruised arms sprouting needles and tubes that led to bags above her head.

She managed a smile. “Mrs. Malloy, how kind of’ you.”

“I believe you know Lieutenant Rosen,” I murmured. “We stopped by for only a minute, so please let us know when you’re too tired for visitors.”

“I intend to enjoy my visitors as long as I’m here,” she said. “This morning Alexandria and Mae came by to tell me about the Homecoming game. So hard for the students to lose their big game, but they’ll get over it. The resilience of youth in the face of disaster is remarkable, you know, as long as they can rely on the wisdom of their elders to protect them from true evil.”

“Drug dealers, for instance?” I said softly.

“Wicked, wicked people.”

“It must have been difficult to see Pius every day when you knew what dreadful things he was doing to the students.”

“He was very wicked.”

“The marijuana cigarette was the last straw, wasn’t it?” I prompted, ignoring Peter’s sudden intake of breath behind me.

“I’d been observing him for several months, but this was the first time I actually saw him sell drugs. The student, when confronted, was properly contrite and vowed to never again purchase illegal substances, but I knew Pitts had to be removed from Farberville High School. Since Mr. Weiss seemed unwilling to take action, I felt obliged to act on my convictions.”

“You happened to have cyanide with you-in your purse, I would guess-and you knew Pitts would eat anything that caught his fancy in the refrigerator in the teachers’ lounge.”

She gave me a beatific smile. “Very good, dear. I’m not sure that I intended to kill him; I hoped he would become very ill, and perhaps quit his job and go elsewhere. I crushed a dozen or so pills and mixed them in Emily’s little jar of compote. I never dreamed Mr. Weiss would eat it first… but he wasn’t a very nice man, either. He was supposed to set an example for the students, yet he was having an affair with Bernice fort. I was listening at my post when Pitts sold the information to Cheryl Anne, who seemed to be pleased to learn her father was a philanderer. I was appalled, I must say.

I felt an elbow in my back. I ground my heel on a convenient foot, then bent over the hospital bed and said, “No one saw you enter or leave the lounge, Miss Zuckerman.”

“No one ever noticed me. After all those years, I’m afraid I simply became part of the backdrop, a pathetic gray ghost who haunted the basement of the school. Once I made up my mind to teach Pitts a lesson, I assigned a lengthy paragraph to my Ad Sten class, slipped off to the lounge, and returned without my absence being noticed.”

“Was there anyone in the lounge?”

“Mrs. West’s student teacher was present, but she didn’t notice me, either. Young people tend to find the elderly invisible; it helps them avoid facing their own mortality.” She glanced away for a moment. “It hasn’t been a very exciting life, but it has been rewarding. I did take a trip to a foreign country once; it was dirty, yet the cultural differences intrigued me. I would have liked to travel more.”