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

Jericho crossed the room toward the guilty thespian at a brisk pace. If he’d had his handcuffs with him, he’d have been slapping them on her right then and there.

“Wait, wait,” she said, sinking back into the sofa, clearly fearful of the charging cop. No doubt she would try to come up with something, anything, that might clear her name. How clever that she had “volunteered” to find the body. Certainly it made her seem less suspicious. But she had not anticipated the presence of a world-class detective in the house. None of these pompous elitists had realized what Adam Jericho was capable of before the murder. He’d hoped his name might make someone slip up and reveal themselves. A story that fooled the locals would not be able to trick the great Adam Jericho.

But then Kelly Greene did something that made it all click. She reached up and tugged her ear, fiddling with the gold heart that was stabbed through her left lobe. It was a nervous gesture, completely unconscious, but it caused one of those revelations in Jericho: like at the end of a great Scooby-Doo mystery when the caretaker at the cemetery sneezes and reveals himself as the monster who’s been chasing the Scooby gang around the haunted graveyard for the last half-hour. Everything fell into place. There was suddenly a piece of incontrovertible evidence that wasn’t going to be easily explained. Someone in this room had slipped up.

“Tell us, Sally,” he said. “Why did you kill her?”

Sally looked even more pale than she had before, if pure white can get any whiter. She sat there, stunned. Jericho didn’t rush at her as he had Kelly. He didn’t want to frighten her. She was the killer. He had no doubt. “Where are the jewels, Sally?” If she gave them up, he’d have hard evidence. Sure, he’d put it all together. But she was rich. He needed to catch her red-handed if he was going to avoid public embarrassment. He needed the diamonds. Jericho knew she had them. Sally did not reply.

He walked around the room. Outside, the thunder rumbled, enhancing the dramatic mood in the mystery mansion. It was time to reveal what exactly had happened upstairs this evening. “This is the way it happened...” he said.

“The woman in the red dress went upstairs about the same time Kelly did. Not long after she retired to her room, after a short debate with Oliver and me, Mrs. Painsbum went to the victim’s room for help with her wig. Not long after Mrs. Painsbum left, Oliver made a brief visit with his request for a date, and was shot down. Sometime after that you came along, Miss Freddins.”

The pale girl was shaking her head, but did not speak. The others were listening with only a modicum of interest, for Jericho had accused almost everyone and had not yet provided them with a shred of evidence. He alone knew that he had Sally Freddins in the bag. And the terrified look on Sally’s face suggested that she knew that she was busted. But there was nowhere to run.

“What exactly happened when Sally knocked on the door to the woman’s room? I suppose we won’t know for sure unless Sally cares to enlighten us. Nevertheless, I can guess. The woman let you in without suspicion, Sally. Maybe because you’re the only one here who was around her own age. Whatever her motivation, she did not suspect you when she let you in. She certainly didn’t know what was coming when you grabbed her from behind.

“She knew you liked her jewels, though. And maybe she caught on a bit when you were using the bathroom in her room. Maybe it wasn’t you she was writing about, but you saw her journal. She wrote ‘I think I’m in trouble.’ Did that make you scared? Was that what made you decide you had to kill her to get the jewels? You couldn’t steal them if she’d already noticed you eyeing them, could you, Sally?”

At that point, Oliver Powers spoke up, a liberal mastermind who always came rushing to the defense of the guilty, willing to let murderers back on the streets, ready to fill the world with compassion and weakness. “What kind of evidence do you have, Jericho?”

The masterstroke. Jericho savored it. He made his dramatic pause. He wanted this climax to last as long as possible.

“It was the woman in the red dress’s hair,” he said. “It hung down on each side of her face in a perfect frame of her head. When everyone else talked about her jewels, it was the ones that we could see. You could see her bracelet and you could see her necklace, but no one had been able to see her earrings. Her hair completely covered the woman’s ears. But Sally said that she hadn’t even paid any attention to the girl’s earrings. How could she know that the woman had earrings unless she herself took them out of her ears?!”

The whole group gasped. Jericho grinned triumphantly. Of course, they were all thinking. It made perfect sense. She was as guilty as sin.

Sally leapt from the chair, tears trailing a river down her alabaster cheeks. She looked like an albino tiger loosed from its cage. Her teeth were bared. “Those were my jewels!”

She further damned herself with her outburst. Were all rich people so demented as to believe that all pretty things were their own? Jericho was thankful he wasn’t wearing a Gucci belt or she might have slain him, too, just to hitch up her jeans.

Jericho advanced on her, and Sally slowly retreated, crying hysterically. The detective drew his gun.

“Did you hold her head down while she drowned?” he taunted her. “Did you watch her choke on the water, drinking it, filling her lungs with it? How long did she take to die, Sally? Did you take off her jewelry afterward, pull it off her corpse, or had she already removed it for a shower? Did you have to pluck the earrings off of her cold, lifeless ears? Or were they already out and hidden? Is that why you ransacked the room, looking for them? Or was that just another distraction? How long were you planning this, Miss Freddins?”

The girl tripped over a step, then backed into the large table that was still set for their long-postponed game. The props for the game were all strewn about in disarray. Sally’s hand fell on the pipe. (Not the lead pipe of fame. This is the age of lead-poisoning. This one was made of good old American steel.) She grabbed the primitive weapon. If it was good enough for Colonel Mustard in the conservatory, it was good enough for her.

“Stay back,” Sally warned. Jericho kept advancing on her. She was backing toward the front door, waving the pipe in front of her. “You’re nuts.” Everyone is always crazy, Jericho thought, except for the loonies themselves. He told her to stop.

“Maybe you’re the murderer,” she said. “How do I know you won’t shoot me whether I stop or go?” The others watched the standoff between cop and criminal. The pipe was no threat to anyone but Sally herself. It certainly couldn’t stop a bullet. She opened the door and backed outside. The rain was wild and burst through the doorway. The night was chaos. Sally backed out into the storm, brandishing her pipe. She was still yelling, but no one could hear her over the thunder. Jericho kept his gun trained on her, but still she retreated. He could not bring himself to shoot the girl. She was not threatening him or anyone with that pipe. But he couldn’t very well let her get away. He lowered his aim to her left thigh at the same time a bolt of lightning crashed out of the sky and struck the steel pipe that Sally was holding like a baseball bat.

Both of her shoes exploded like firecrackers. She might have been screaming, but it couldn’t be heard over the crackling of the superheated electrical fire that scorched her skin and clothing to a charred crust in mere seconds. When her corpse cooled enough for Jericho to get a good look, he saw that her left foot was completely gone and her hands were melted around the steel pipe as if it had always been a part of her body. There was a hole in her skull the size of a lemon where the lightning blew her boiling brains out like buckshot. Justice is served hot, Jericho thought. A murderer sent to God’s version of the electric chair before the lawyers had a chance to muck it up.