The shop was closed, but Betsy remained, restoring order to the sale bins, restocking spinner racks, washing coffee cups. Saving the best for last, she opened a box containing an order of twelve clear glass Christmas tree ornaments. She was making a small display of them on a shelf in the back area when someone knocked on the front door.
It was Jill, bent over so the night light fell on her face as she peered around the needlepointed Closed sign. She was wearing a very pale yellow blouse and tan capri pants.
Betsy unlocked the door, and Jill said, “I rang the bell to your apartment but there was no answer so I decided to see if you were in here.”
“Is something wrong?” asked Betsy.
“No, I have the night off, Lars is doing something strange to his Stanley, and I just wanted to talk. Mind?”
“Not at all. Come in,” said Betsy. “I’m working in back.” Jill went on through the opening between the high stacks of box shelves, into the counted cross stitch section, while Betsy relocked the door and reset the alarm.
Betsy had turned off the ceiling lights in back, turning the many models hung on the walls into angled shadows.
“Whatcha doin’ with those?” Jill asked when she saw the ornaments. “Isn’t it kind of early for Christmas?”
Betsy said, “RCTN gave me the idea. You take these plain ornaments and fill them with orts.” Ort is a crossword-puzzle word whose dictionary meaning is “morsel, as of food.” But RCTN, the Internet news group of needleworkers, had adapted it to mean the little ends of floss or thread left over from stitching. Most threw orts away, but some collected them, filling old glass jars with the tiny fragments and displaying them. Betsy had seen the ornaments at an after-Christmas sale, and had bought one to fill with her own orts. Long before it was filled, she saw how beautiful it was going to be, and was sorry she hadn’t bought more to sell in the shop. Then a few weeks ago she’d seen the ornaments in a catalog and ordered a dozen.
Now, she picked up her ort-filled ornament and handed it to Jill. “What do you think?”
“Say, this is nice! What a great idea! How much is one?”
“Empty, three dollars. I haven’t set a price for filled yet.”
“Who wants one full of someone else’s leavings? It’ll be fun filling it with my own. In fact, I’ll take two.”
Pleased at this early evidence of a success, Betsy said, “I’ll put them aside for you-my cash register’s closed for the night. Have you had supper yet?”
“No, I was going to ask if you wanted to go halves on a pizza.”
“I’d rather have Chinese.”
“But I was thinking of eating at home-yours or mine. Like I said, I want to talk to you.”
“Is this about Lars thinking of buying another Stanley Steamer?”
Jill stared at Betsy.
“I take it he didn’t tell you.”
“No.” Jill could be very terse when annoyed.
“He said the later models had condensers on them so he wouldn’t have to stop every twenty-five miles to take on water.”
“I see.”
“I told him to consult you before he bought one.”
“Thank you.”
“Chinese take-out, then?”
“Fine.”
“I’ll buy if you’ll fly.”
“Okay.”
Excelsior had its own Chinese restaurant, the Ming Wok, just a few blocks away. By the time Jill came back with the warm, white paper sack emitting delectable smells, Betsy had finished in the shop and was up in her apartment.
And Jill was over her mad.
They sat down to feast on Mongolian beef and chicken with pea pods.
Jill, feeling the cat Sophie’s gentle pressure on her foot, dropped one hand carelessly downward, an ort of chicken even more carelessly hanging from her fingers. Sophie deftly removed it and Jill brought her hand back up to the table to wipe it on a napkin.
“If you leave your hand down there, she’ll lick it clean and I’ll be less likely to notice you wiping your fingers and guess what you’re up to,” said Betsy.
Jill laughed. “I’ll remember that. But since you didn’t jump up and shout at Sophie, or me, I take it you no longer disapprove. So why don’t you just give up and feed her, too?”
“I do feed her. She gets Iams Less Active morning and evening. She gets enough to maintain a cat at sixteen pounds, which is what she’d weigh pretty soon if everyone else would just stop sneaking her little treats.”
“I mean-”
“I know what you mean. Jill, you stayed here last December, and you saw what she’s like when feeding time approaches, whining and pacing and driving me crazy. That’s what she’d be like every time I sat down at this table if she thought I allowed her to have something from my plate. So long as she thinks I forbid it, she’s content to be slipped a treat on the sly by someone else, and she’s very quiet about it. So I do my part, scolding her-and you and everyone else-when it gets too blatant. Look at her.”
Jill looked down then around and saw Sophie all the way across the living room, curled into her cushioned basket. She looked back with mild, innocent surprise at their regard. “See that smirk? She thinks she’s got me fooled. Help me maintain the fiction, all right?”
Jill raised a solemn right hand. “I promise.” She opened her fortune cookie. “Mine says, Tomorrow is your lucky day. Always tomorrow, never today. What does yours say?”
Betsy opened hers. “The solution lies within your grasp,” she read. “To what, I wonder?”
Jill said, with a little smile, “How about the Birmingham murder? How’s that coming?”
“Not very well. I don’t know the people, I don’t know enough about antique cars, I don’t know as much about the actual scene of the crime. And you can’t really help this time because the Excelsior police aren’t investigating.”
“Well,” drawled Jill, “it just so happens I have prints of photos taken at the Highway 5 lay-by.”
Betsy said, “That’s what you came to talk about, isn’t it? You came here meaning to show them to me.”
“Only if the subject came up. Which it was going to. Where’s my purse?” She looked around, saw it in the living room, and stood. “Come on, have a look.”
But a minute later, pulling a brown envelope out, she hesitated. “Um, these aren’t pretty.”
Betsy hesitated, too. She was not fond of the uglier details. “Well, let’s see how bad they are.”
They were awful. Betsy hastily took several close-ups of the head of the victim off the top of the stack, putting them facedown on the coffee table. The next one was of the horribly burned upper body, and she pulled it off, too. “How do the people who deal with this sort of thing stand it?” she asked.
“By making horrible jokes.” Betsy looked up at Jill, who was standing beside the upholstered chair Betsy was sitting on. “I’m serious,” she continued. “They call burn victims crispy critters, for example. They have to; otherwise, they’d be so sick they couldn’t conduct a proper investigation.” She shrugged at Betsy’s appalled expression. “You asked.”
Betsy returned her attention to the photographs. The next few were of the burned-out Maxwell. “The whole inside seems to be gone,” she noted.
“Yes, and it smelled of accelerant.”
“Accelerant?”
“Something combustible, like gasoline or kerosene. Which at first wasn’t suspicious, because after all a car uses gasoline. But some of the ash they collected from the back seat contained gasoline.”
Betsy looked at the photo again. “How could there be any accelerant left in something this thoroughly burned?”
“Because it isn’t liquid gasoline that burns, it’s the vapor. You can actually put a match out by sticking it into a bucket of gasoline-unless it’s been sitting long enough for fumes to gather, in which case the fumes will explode as your lit match enters the cloud. Arsonists who spend too long splashing accelerant around are arrested when they go to the emergency room with burns.”
“You know the doggondest things.”
“I know. Look at the rest of the photos, and see if there’s anything to see.” She had taken out a notebook and pen, prepared to write down anything interesting Betsy might notice.
Betsy obediently looked. Since she knew very little about automobiles and even less about antique ones, the photos of the burnt-out car told her nothing. She noted the hammer in the puddle of dirty water around the car and remembered the joke hollered by a fellow driver last Saturday: Get a bigger hammer!
She asked Jill, “Do you know if they found evidence Bill was struck on the head before being shot?”
“Not that I know of. Why would someone do that?”
“Maybe it was a quarrel he had with someone and he got hit in the head with that hammer. Or maybe he swung it at someone, who pulled a gun and shot him. I understand he was a very aggressive type.”
“Hmmm,” said Jill, writing that down.
Farther down were more photos of the corpse. Again Betsy hurried past them, but she slowed at several taken of just the lower portion of the body, which was barely damaged. The white flannel trousers were barely smudged, and then only above the knees. Except…
“What?” asked Jill.
Betsy looked closer, frowning. “That’s funny, that smudge right there looks more like someone wiped his dirty fingers than smoke or fire damage.”
“Let me see.” Jill took the photo and peered at it closely. “Where’s your Dazor?”
“In the guest bedroom.”
“Bring it here, will you?” She spoke peremptorily, slipping into cop mode without thinking.
Betsy went into the bedroom her sister had used and opened the closet to pull out the wheeled stand with the gooseneck lamp on it. She wheeled it out into the living room and plugged it in.
Jill turned on the full-spectrum fluorescent light that encircled the rectangular magnifying glass and bent the gooseneck to a convenient angle to view the photo. “Huh,” she said after half a minute. “It does look like someone wiped dust off his fingers, it’s so faint…”
Betsy took the photo and held it under the magnifier. “Maybe it’s an old stain that didn’t wash out. Funny I didn’t notice it Saturday.”
“Why funny?”
“Well, I do remember noticing how immaculately white they were. No, wait, he had a towel tucked into his belt to keep the grease off, so it would have covered these old stains up. Oh, and here’s-no.”
“No, what?”
“Not flecks of dirt, orts.”
“Where?”
“On his trousers, near the cuffs. Charlotte really could use one of those glass ornaments, she sprinkles orts wherever she goes. Her daughter Lisa came into the shop on Monday and I said I knew she was a stitcher when I saw the orts on her dress and she said they were her mother’s-though I was right about Lisa being a stitcher. Her mother is a nice, nice woman, but even I came home Saturday with some of her orts on my clothes. She kind of flicks them off the ends of her fingers.” Betsy looked again at the photo. She could not have said why she found the few tiny ends of floss clinging to Bill’s trousers so touching.
She gave the photos back to Jill and said, “I assume the police have the same two suspects I have. Do you know if they have more than two?”
“Our department is only marginally involved, so I’m not sure how many suspects Steffans at Minnetonka PD has. I hear he’d love Charlotte for this, but you gave her a terrific alibi.”
“He’d love her why, because they always look at the spouse?”
“That’s part of it. The other part is, they’re getting reports that the couple weren’t getting along, hadn’t been getting along for the past several years.”
Betsy said, “ Charlotte told me they were in counseling, and things were starting to turn around. Certainly she seemed affectionate toward Bill when I saw them.”
“Seriously affectionate or polite affectionate?”
“She patted him on the rump when she went to tell him she was riding with me to St. Paul.”
“If she was feeling so chummy, why didn’t she ride with him?”
“Because he was having trouble with the car, and she said it was jiggling so unevenly it was making her sick.” Betsy frowned. “Is that likely? I’ve never ridden in an old car other than Lars’s, and that old steamer has a very smooth way of going.”
“Lars told me that was a selling point, that the internal combustion cars of that period did jiggle. He says it was a combination of too few cylinders and no shock absorbers.”
Betsy nodded. “In Charlotte’s case, there may also have been the prospect of having to sit in the hot sun wearing all those clothes while Bill worked on it after it broke down on the road-I mean, he had trouble starting it, and when he did, it was still idling rough, so she probably guessed it was going to break down. Which apparently it did. He spent the whole time they were in Excelsior with his head under the hood.”
“So if not Charlotte, who are your suspects?”
“I hardly dare say they’re actual suspects, but the two I’d like to know more about are Bill’s son Broward and Adam Smith.”
“Who’s Adam Smith?”
“He was in charge of Saturday’s run,” Betsy said. She explained about the ongoing quarrel between him and Bill, concluding, “I don’t know how powerful a motive that is, but I do know Charlotte and I waited quite a long time for Adam to show up in St. Paul.”
“Who could you ask, do you know?”
“Not offhand, not anyone who wouldn’t go right to Adam and tell him I’m asking questions. He’s president of the Antique Car Club, and from the little I’ve seen, he seems to be very popular.” Betsy had gone to exactly one meeting of the Antique Car Club with Lars, just to see if it was something she wanted to get more deeply involved with. It had been interesting-but also obvious that this was one of those organizations that ate up all a member’s spare time, and Betsy didn’t feel she wanted to spend what little spare time she had on this organization. After all, she was not going to buy an antique car of her own. She told Lars on the way home that she would volunteer for this year’s run, because Lars was a part of it and she was Lars’s sponsor, but after that, he was on his own.
“Are you afraid that if he did it and thinks you’re closing in on him, he might come after you?”
“Oh, nothing like that,” Betsy said. “I don’t want to get people all stirred up about my thinking it might be Adam, when I really think he’s only a possibility. Being suspected of murder can ruin someone, even if it turns out he didn’t do it. If I knew more about antique car owners or the Antique Car Club, I might form a real opinion. Why do people collect them and how fanatical do they get about them? Adam would have to be totally invested in getting that Fuller to consider murdering Bill.”
Jill said, “They’re probably like every other set of hobbyists. Some are casual, some are intent, some are fanatical. You talked with Adam, which kind is he?”
Betsy remembered Ceil’s jeer at Adam’s remark that he might be willing to find a buyer for Joe Mickels’s McIntyre. “As if you’d let anyone else get their hands on it!” she’d said, or words to that effect.
But Betsy was unwilling to say anything out loud, even to Jill.
Godwin was in Shelly’s kitchen, doing the dishes, when the phone rang. “I’ll get it!” he caroled, wiping his hands on his apron. He lifted the receiver on the wall near the back door. “Hello?”
“Goddy?” said a man’s voice in a near-whisper.
“Who is this?” said Godwin, though he knew.
“Don’t be stupid, for heaven’s sake!”
“Why, hello, John,” drawled Godwin in as dry a voice as he could manage, though his heart was already singing.
“I’m concerned that I haven’t heard from you.”
“Well, you made it pretty clear-twice-that you didn’t want anything to do with me ever again.”
“I was angry. You made me very angry. Sometimes, Goddy, when you act like you don’t care about me, I just can’t stand it.”
“You suspected I didn’t care about you, so you stopped caring about me.”
“I have never stopped caring about you. Ever. Even when I’m angry-even in a jealous rage. Goddy, sometimes you exasperate me beyond endurance. You know you do. You know you’re doing it when it happens.”
“I wasn’t doing anything you could get mad about.”
“Goddy, I saw you talking to-”
Godwin hung up at that point with a satisfied little smile.