Richard Stevenson - Chain of Fools

At the Edensburg Country Club, Tidy Puderbaugh wasn't any happier to see me than his father had been at the fuel-oil office or Parson Bates had been in his tree. A pear-shaped, prematurely jowly, immaculately groomed man of thirty or so in a rep tie and blue blazer, Tidy was in the middle of a bridge game with three young men similarly gotten up. Unlike his father and Parson Bates, however, Tidy appeared unflustered by my unplanned appearance. He said cordially, "My mother's attorney has advised me not to talk to anyone in regards to the Herald. As an attorney, I would have given me the same advice." Tidy seemed to think of that as a witticism; he grinned slyly at his bridge partner, who grinned slyly back.

I said, "The conflict over the Herald is an incidental part of what I'm looking into. I'm investigating a murder and two or three instances of attempted murder. All the victims and intended victims were members of your family. Could we get together for a few minutes after your game, Attorney Puderbaugh?"

The four bridge players frowned over this, but none lunged at me. They watched their cards serenely. Tidy appeared to be the most placid of all. Whatever the mental idiosyncrasies of his branch of the Osborne clan, attention deficit disorder did not appear to be one of them.

"After this game," Tidy said, "I've got another game scheduled. If you'll call my office and talk to Lillian, she'll set you up for something next week or the week after, over at the office." He fished in a side pocket, came up with a business card, and held it out to me. I accepted the card, considered chewing it up and swallowing it, but stuffed it in my pocket instead.

I said, "If there's an ongoing violent plot to eliminate an anti-InfoCom Osborne from the Herald board of directors, next week or the week after might be too late. I was hoping to pick your brain sooner than that on any background or insights you might have that could aid my investigation, however indirectly."

Tidy shrugged lightly and said, "I wouldn't worry about murder plots if I were you, Mr. Strachey. I've heard that's the story you and my Aunt Janet and some other people are spreading around Edensburg. But the only thing you're achieving by spreading this crap around is, you are embarrassing my family."

"I'm trying hard to achieve more than that. But few members of your family are giving me much help."

Tidy peered purposefully at his cards, not at me, and said, "And I'd be surprised if that situation changed anytime soon."

I waited, and when he continued to ignore me, I said to him over his shoulder, "Too bad you're playing bridge, not hearts." Then I left.

Having spent what felt like a useless afternoon getting stonewalled by anti-Griscomb, pro-InfoCom Osbornes and their allies, I was about to head back to Maple Street and report my futile wheel spinning to Timmy, Dale and-if they were back at the house-Janet, Dan, and Arlene.

But when I came to the turnoff for Summit Road, I hung a left, on impulse, and drove up the long hill to Chester and Pauline Osborne's house. As I had hoped, only one shiny Lexus, the teal one, was parked in the cul-de-sac. I left my dusty Mitsubishi next to it, walked over, and rapped on the main door of the big house. The bronze knocker made an impressive racket, but half a minute went by and no one responded. I knocked again and was about to give up, when the door suddenly opened and I was face-to-face with a woman I assumed to be the blonde I'd caught a quick, back-of-the-head glimpse of when I'd called on Chester the night before.

"Yes?"

Like everybody else that afternoon, she wasn't happy to see me. The tension in her narrow tanned face was partly from obvious subcutaneous cantilevering for cosmetic purposes, but the wiring couldn't have been responsible for the fear in her hazel eyes.

"How do you do. I'm Don Strachey. Are you Mrs. Osborne?"

She was dressed in tennis whites, though the object in her hand aimed at me was not a racket but a. 38 caliber revolver. In a flat, tight voice, she said, "I'm Pauline Osborne. Are you the detective?"

"I might be, or I might not be. Which is the answer you'd like to hear?"

She didn't chuckle. Not moving, she stared at me for a long moment, apparently trying to decide something about me-Shoot me? Trust me? Ask me in for a drink? — or about something or someone else. Her eyes were full of indecision and pain and-even though my manner was unthreatening-fear.

Finally, she said, "You are the detective. I saw your car last night when you came here to see my husband."

I said, "It sounds like you've been doing some detective work yourself, Mrs. Osborne." She flinched when I said this, and I quickly added,

"But I am the private investigator from Albany you might have heard about. I've been retained by Janet to investigate Eric's death and attempts on the lives of two other Osbornes, Janet and Dan."

"Dan too?" she said, and her eyes widened.

"This morning someone tried to run his car off the road. Arlene Thurber was riding with him, and they barely avoided being shoved over a cliff. The State Police are investigating too. I'm surprised the police haven't been up to see you already."

This startled her, and I said, "Would you mind pointing that gun somewhere else? I'm harmless, and if you inadvertently blew bits and pieces of me all over that fine automobile of yours, it could badly interfere with your tennis schedule."

She looked down at the. 38 for the first time, shuddered, lowered it, then looked back at me. Suddenly, Pauline Osborne shrieked at the top of her lungs. Her face twisted with rage, and I hoped nothing inside it snapped. Then she slammed the door in my face. She shrieked again, then, some seconds later, a third time. I listened for a gunshot and thought about smashing my way into the house. But I waited, and after five or ten minutes went by, I got into my car and drove away. In those five or ten minutes, there had been no gunshot, just the occasional shriek from somewhere deep inside Chester and Pauline Osborne's house. A half mile down the hill, I thought I heard still another shriek, but that one I probably imagined.

Friday morning I hit the road early for the three-hour drive out to Attica. I had the radio on for a while, but the news on Morning Edition was unrelievedly bad-tornadoes, Bosnia, Newt-so I shoved a Betty Carter tape into the player. Some of her news was bad too, but with a musical ingenuity that seemed to rival the engineering feats of Leonardo, Carter transformed both good and bad news into the aural equivalent of human flight. The miles flew by, and I would have enjoyed the solitary couple of hours of sublime music while cruising under a deep, cloudless August sky, except for the fact that as I drove I was nagged by two events of the day before.

One was Pauline Osborne's greeting me at the entrance to her home with a pistol, followed by her sudden, unprompted screams of what I took to be rage and frustration. A few hours afterward, I had described this scene to Janet, Dale, Timmy, Dan, and Arlene. None of them knew what to make of it. Janet said Pauline had long been prone to both anxiety and depression and probably relied a little too heavily on alcohol to get from one shopping day to the next. But Pauline had never shown signs of a crack-up coming on, nor had she brandished a firearm, as far as anyone present knew So what did this incident mean?

The other disconcerting revelation of that evening concerned Craig Osborne. I had asked Janet for tear sheets or printouts from the Herald library on the jewel heist that had landed Craig in prison. She had brought them back to the house, and I read them and discussed the clippings with members of our odd, jittery household while an Edens-burg policeman watched over us from his cruiser parked across Maple Street.