Нэнси Пикард - Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 128, No. 6. Whole No. 784, December 2006

He knew that talking with Oliver Powers was going to be a treat. The massive man was parked in the large easy chair in the study. There was a smug upturn to each of his doughy cheeks, a cocky smirk that mocked Jericho’s authority. Ollie was one of those guys who thought that everyone in leadership was inept at everything they did: cops, teachers, other news folk, politicians (especially the politicians). No one knew anything in the whole wide world except the egotist himself.

“Shouldn’t we be waiting for the police to start this whole process?”

Jericho assured him that he was a cop, after all.

“I’d rather wait for the local authorities.”

Jericho knew that Oliver did not like celebrity cops. But Jericho’s fame had been hard won. He’d caught the notorious murderess Danielle Kohl when he was barely a kid! And that was just for starters. Oliver’s digs at his qualifications were getting to him. Just as Oliver Powers wanted. Why was he pushing Jericho? Was he trying to throw him off, afraid that Jericho’s superior detective skills might smoke out the murderer before the locals arrived? Maybe Ollie had a very good reason to try to stop this investigation.

Jericho let Oliver go, but he did note that the man had a white smudge on his left sleeve. It looked like cream cheese, possibly from a bagel — maybe the bagel that was sitting beside the journal of the woman in scarlet. Jericho did not recall seeing another such bagel anywhere in the mansion tonight. Another strange coincidence? There were a lot of odd parallels here. Too many. Some of those connections were not just chance.

Jericho gathered the guests together in the living room. It was time that he solved this murder.

Oliver Powers sat on the davenport, engulfing nearly half of the large piece of furniture. He glared at Jericho with a look that was half amusement, as if he were a barker at a carnival sideshow, and half disdain, as if he’d have preferred to get right up and sit on Adam Jericho’s brilliant little head. On the other end of the grand sofa sat Kelly Greene, keeping up the appearance of being distraught, although her performance was starting to flag. Sally Freddins was curled into a high-back leather chair with hand-carved birch legs turned in ornate shapes and stained as dark as Sally was pale. The chair huddled in the shadows and Sally seemed to blanket herself in the darkness, almost disappearing into the sliver of night. Margaret Painsbum looked as if being relegated to the audience — the subject of speculation instead of the purveyor of questioning — was pure torture. She stared out of withered eyes as Jericho began to outline the events of the night.

It started as the woman in the red dress ascended the steps to retire to her room before dinner. Jericho had been there when Oliver bade her goodbye. They had all seen Kelly and the woman go their separate ways at the top of the stairs, after a short conversation in which they had briefly discussed the possibility that the killer in the game was the woman in scarlet. The lady in red had answered Kelly with a sly smile. She went to her room alone, though she was not alone for long. Jericho whirled around and glared at Margaret Painsbum, who was still staring at him like a hungry vulture. He was holding the Ziploc bag that contained her hair.

“You were in that room,” he accused the old woman.

She sat still, unblinking. She was not rattled at all. Either she hid her guilt well, or she was not the murderer. Jericho still wasn’t positive, but this was the process that all great detectives went through to solve the case: Poirot, Holmes, Frank and Joe Hardy.

Mrs. Painsbum did not deny it. In fact, she nodded her head once, slowly. She admitted to being there! Jericho found it very suspicious that she had not mentioned this before. A wide smile spread across his face.

But then the old woman asserted that she had been invited to stop by the room of the woman in the red dress. When Jericho pressed her for an explanation another look flickered across her eye: something that wasn’t stubborn superiority. It looked more like shame.

“Fine. You need proof of my innocence...” She reached up and lifted off her hat. Her blue hair came with it. She was bald beneath the camouflage of hat and hair. “She said she had a comb that could loosen some of the snarls in this thing. Wigs get so tangled, you see. I even tore my hat with the comb, pulling the snarls out. Said she’d help me stitch the hat. Tomorrow. Never, I guess. Nice girl. Didn’t ask a thing about the cancer. Didn’t have pity. Just wanted to help me look nice.” Her voice trailed off. Did Jericho hear it crack at the end? Was it in sorrow at the passing of a kind stranger, or was she so humiliated that her concrete countenance had crumbled?

Moving on...

He had all but eliminated Margaret Painsbum. She could be lying, but he didn’t think so. Besides, he had other suspects. He turned to Oliver Powers and looked down his nose at the mountain of opinionated flesh. He hoped with all his heart that Powers was the killer. “You shared a bagel with the deceased!” For dramatic effect, Jericho thrust his finger in Oliver’s face. He pulled it back when it looked as if Powers was considering biting the extremity right off. “Explain that stain on your shirt sleeve!”

Oliver, too, had an explanation. One that was also less than flattering. This interrogation was turning into an exercise in embarrassment.

“I went to her room. I brought her a bagel. More original than flowers, I thought. I asked her if she’d care to see me after this game was over. She... wasn’t interested. I told her to keep the bagel. No hard feelings. A guy like me can get girls whenever he wants. It wasn’t a big deal.” He faltered in the middle, but by the end of his statement, the Powers attitude was back in full force. Humiliation was a state seldom visited by a Powers, and one they were quick to recover from. Jericho felt some smug satisfaction at the fact that Ollie had been turned down by the woman in red.

It was the other girl’s turn, little Sally from Texas, who looked more like death than the corpse upstairs. He walked right up to her and leaned into the chair in which she was trying to disappear. Her pale face glowed in the thick shadow. “And where did you get that cut?” he said. Sally’s hand went up to her head, almost as if she’d forgotten about it, a guilty reminder of a terrible sin, like an adulterer who forgets his mistress’s lipstick smeared across his neck. Jericho enjoyed watching the rich little girl squirm. Her life of convenience was over. This quiet little thief-turned-murderer was going to jail.

She looked confused, almost as if she’d just woken up. Jericho wondered if she’d only just realized that this wasn’t a part of the game. There was a real dead person upstairs. There was an honest-to-goodness punishment for such a transgression. There was a great detective present who was going to solve this terrible crime, and the guilty party was going to jail. This wasn’t some little rich girl’s world where money buys freedom. “The scratch... I didn’t. It wasn’t her. It was her.” Sally pointed across the room at Kelly Greene.

From her seat on the davenport the actress gaped wide-eyed at her pale accuser. “I... It was an accident. I brushed her temple with a serving tray while we were preparing for dinner.” The actress. Of course! She had been the one who told Jericho that the girl had admired the dead woman’s jewelry. She had put the scrape on Sally’s head to cause suspicion, to cause Jericho to envision some sort of struggle with the deceased, a superficial injury that might have been incurred during the tussle before the murder was complete.