“Poffering, where did you get this thing?” He indicated a great, green cucumber on his desk. I told Furberry how quickly it had all happened and that the lady was so muffled up against the weather that I couldn’t have seen her face even if I’d had the time or wits enough to try.
He pushed the now crumpled-looking letter, sans envelope, toward me.
“I understand,” it said, “that you advertised in the Craterville Times for the return of an object of certain dimensions which, belonging to you, was recently stolen; and I was moved to ameliorate your distress, if I can indeed do so. Is this the purloined object? If it is, I rejoice. Do not try to find me. I desire no reward.” It was unsigned.
My evident astonishment must have cleared me of any suspected complicity. Furberry sank dejectedly into his squeakless executive chair (it was, by orders to Hagachoff, kept well oiled). He opened a desk drawer and, with shaking hands, pulled out another paper which he silently gave me.
The message on this one was made of letters evidently cut from the comic strips of a newspaper. “Your BaNANA,” it read, “Is IN my CUStoDy You Will bE INformeD IN FUTURE coMMuNicAtionS AS TO the PRice of ITS saFe ReTUrn.”
“Who, Poffering, is committing this outrage upon my sanity?” moaned Furberry.
I had, of course, no answer, and no answer to that same question when the tape recording came: on which someone, in the dim recesses of the Listening Lab where Furberry led me one evening, sang, “Yes, we have no hmm-hmm-hmms” and “Banana ripe, banana ripe, ripe I cry-y! Full and fair ones, co-o-ome a-a-and buy-y!” The voice, said Furberry, was unfamiliar to him — as it was to me. He cast the offending cartridge into the wastebasket, then retrieved it. His eyes gleamed menacingly and he said, “Deduction — clues. I’ll get this robber yet.”
“Well,” I asked, feeling like Dr. Watson, “who has the motive? Who most dislikes your liking your banana?”
“Sophie! Sophie, of course. And she’d know that wretched eighteenth-century ditty too. But Sophie made it clear that she had no further interest in me whatsoever.”
“Nevertheless a bona fide suspect. But, Furberry, how about Miss Lakey? How does she feel about—”
Furberry’s expression changed from detective glee to bloodhound gloom. “She hated it. Of course, I didn’t know at first. Poffering, things had been going so well for us. Well, it was all over the night I took her to the Aztec Room of the Shelton. Over her third champagne cocktail — I was telling her about my college fraternity initiation and old Harry Buller and I riding buses all night without any funds — he had to point to his head and say, ‘I’m a cuckoo, I’m a cuckoo!’ Hilarious! — anyway, over her third champagne cocktail, she suddenly suggested we go somewhere else. It was called Tonio’s. I could hardly enter for the din of that rock-and-roll stuff. I spent the evening trying to drink some poisonous green thing called a Tonio’s Tempest, and she... she actually left me sitting alone while she gyrated with a series of young clowns. Oh, it was a terrible evening, but at least I discovered that Miss Lakey and I could never be close. Common values, Poffering, are essential if two people are to have a meaningful relationship. When I think that I even toyed with the idea of telling her how I came to have the banana — the poignant and meaningful circumstances—” Furberry stopped, grimacing angrily. “No matter. Then and there I cut Miss Lakey out of my life!”
I decided that Miss Lakey was a poor suspect for our thief, unless the teaching assignment she’d been given by Furberry was a source of resentment.
“Professor,” I said, “could Miss Hagachoff have a possible motive?”
“Miss Hagachoff?” He looked amazed.
“I’m just trying to cover all areas which might bring enlightenment. Miss Hagachoff has worked for you for many years. And she’s always been solicitous of your needs and intensely loyal.”
Having so recently rethought the sad affair Lakey, Furberry now settled, smilingly relieved, into the flattering possibility of being the object of Miss Hagachoff’s unrequited love. “Well!” he said, still smiling. Then, shaking his head, “No,” he said. “What you say may be true, Poffering, but this is just not Miss Hagachoff’s style.”
“A student prank, perhaps?”
“Not Bonnie or Betty!”
This time it was I who said no. Betty and Bonnie were serious-minded scholarship students, and I happened to know that they needed their jobs too much to risk playing jokes.
After an hour or so of these conjectures, we left the Listening Lab, Sherlocked-out for the day, more or less agreed that Furberry could only watch and wait for further developments. The comic-strip letter had, after all, promised further developments.
But days and weeks went by and there were none. It began to seem the affair had never been, and we of the English office were rather glad, although I confess a certain sense of anti-climax disturbed me when I thought about the matter.
Furberry was not relieved, however. At first he seemed to be, but then he began asking Miss Hagachoff rather too anxiously about the daily mail. Then one day he stopped me in front of Staunton Hall to ask me if I had seen anyone who might perhaps resemble the lady of the cucumber occurrence. Of course Furberry knew full well the details of that happening and how I was not able to make any identification. But he made me go over the incident once again: the muffled figure, the umbrella, the color of her clothing, her walk, her jingle—
“Jingle? You say she jingled as she walked away?”
I had amazed myself. The jingle must have been stored somewhere in my subconscious until this moment of recall. Yes, I was sure, there had been a jingle.
“Then it’s Sophie, Poffering! It had to be Sophie and that damned charm bracelet she always wears. Poffering, I am going after my banana. Sophie Hennington has no right to play these demeaning games!” And Furberry walked briskly away in the direction of East Campus.
The next thing I knew, the Furberry-Hennington alliance was on again. Furberry himself volunteered nothing to me, but his mood was cheerful and assured, even as soon as the day after his resolution to confront the wicked Sophie. I finally decided to press the matter. I was, after all, willing or no, involved, if only as consulting detective. I walked into his office — and saw a large picture of Sophie on the wall behind his desk. I asked him flat out what had happened.
Furberry looked uncomfortable. I had the impression he would wish me into the nearest supply cabinet or worse, had he the power. But then he got up and closed the door, waving me into the chair across from him.
“You were all wrong, Poffering. I should have been able to counter your suspicions of Sophie, but distraught as I was—”
My suspicions! But I was too intrigued at that moment to point out to Furberry his gross calumny.
He went on, “Sophie was absolutely broken-hearted that anyone should think that she would steal — that even in her very natural jealousy—” he smiled “—she would take from me an object I so obviously valued.”
“And she cried,” I said.
“Oh, of course she cried. Dear Sophie has such a sensitive soul. We’re to be married next week, Poffering, and you must come to the wedding. Dr. Heinrich — you know, the eighteenth-century scholar who is retiring as head of the English Department at Coppershaw University? — has consented to be my best man. You may as well know now, Poffering, that he has named me as his successor at Coppershaw, and Sophie and I will be leaving for the new campus very soon after the wedding. A great man, Heinrich. Have you read his ‘On the Nature of the Comma in Keats’?”