The wife, spoiled and fat,
spent all her husband’s MONey.
Bill collectors appeared,
arriving in ones and TUES.
That’s when Mother decided to remove
that burden her son had WED.
Mother contrived a kitchen accident
that would fool the auTHURities:
When wifey plugged in the griddle,
she, not the bacon, did FRI.
But so did Mother; convicted,
in the electric chair she SAT.
Getting Things Done
by Jan Gleiter
© 1998 by Jan Gleiter
With two well-reviewed novels to her credit, 1997’s Lie Down with Dogs and this year’s A House by the Side of the Road (both from St. Martin’s Press), Jan Gleiter is carving out a niche for herself in the mystery world. Although her last two stories for EQMM have both keen true whodunits, each has keen told from an unusual point of view. We think she’ll fool you with this one; it’s full of unexpected twists!
Being a secretary, I may not get a lunch break until noon is no more than a dim memory, but at least I always get one, which is more than I can say for my boss, Walter Prescott. A few weeks ago, I returned from a late lunch in the park (and a lovely lunch it was: chicken salad with grapes, which I’d brought from home and eaten in the sunshine of an April afternoon) and found the office in an uproar. Two police officers had come, interrupted a meeting of the department heads, and told my boss, the company president, that his wife was dead.
Mr. Prescott had turned pale (according to Louise, from Accounting) and nearly fainted. He had left immediately, his face now gray (according to Phil, from the mail room), and that was all anyone knew. That was not all anyone suspected.
“I’ll bet she was murdered,” said Lucy, the receptionist. “She was just about asking to be murdered.”
Nobody at the company had much liked Mrs. Prescott, who was considerably younger than her husband and beautiful. It wasn’t her youth we disliked, or her looks. It was her habit of taking too much for granted. Our resentment hadn’t been tempered by rumors that she was spending an inordinate amount of time with her very handsome tennis instructor. (I’d seen them together once and, had I been in her place, I’d have chosen Mr. P, but that’s neither here nor there.) We all liked Mr. P and felt protective of him as regards Mrs. P but he’d always seemed fond of her, so I’d guessed she was more charming than we knew. As recently as the evening before, he had appeared quite the devoted husband. Several of us had been invited to dinner, and the Prescotts had gotten along just fine.
“That is more than enough of that!” said Helen Trudeau, from behind Lucy’s desk. As VP for Development, she was, in Mr. P’s absence, the boss — a role she always slid into with no apparent effort. Despite her unquestionable skill at running things, I hoped Mr. P would not be gone for a long time. I knew his vagaries, preferences, style. Ms. Trudeau was more of a mystery. Her sternness about gossip was, however, to be expected, and Lucy blushed with embarrassment at being caught.
Ms. T was dressed in her typical, buttoned-down, professional way — a far cry from the low-cut number she’d worn to dinner the night before — but she was still a knockout. One wouldn’t have guessed from looking at those smoky, long-lashed eyes that she was harder than nails in every way that counts in the world of business, but she was. I knew, because every time Mr. P was away, she took me over as well as his office.
I spent the rest of the day doing what Ms. T told me to do instead of straightening the files, which is what I’d planned. I hate straightening files, so I didn’t mind putting it off, but taking dictation from Ms. T was an adventure I could always live happily without. One memo was to Mr. P himself:
“I am cognizant of the imperative nature of my rigorously maintaining company policies and procedures pending your return. I will use all necessary measures to assure the continuation of timely transactions and will swiftly relate, if circumstances so necessitate, any instances of staff failures to execute your expressed and/or understood wishes as communicated by me.”
Had Mr. P actually expressed any wishes? I doubted it, but my pencil had been racing and there it was — on paper.
“Type that up, give it to me for signature, take it to the copy machine, make me one copy, and leave the original in the machine,” she said.
I had never been able to figure out why Ms. T took such roundabout ways of doing things. Still, I have to admit, she got them done. The entire staff would shortly be aware of just what a firm hand she had on the tiller.
The next morning, the police arrived almost as soon as the doors were unlocked and requested an interview with Ms. T. Actually, they only pretended to request it; they made it clear that they expected to talk with her immediately. I buzzed her and showed the officers in, noticing that Ms. T was decked out in a smashing tweed suit of a gray that did marvelous things for her eyes. I shut the door very firmly. But before releasing the knob, I gave it a teensy little push so it sprang back open an inch or two. Then I sat at my desk, put on my reading glasses, and pretended to work on some papers while I listened to the conversation.
I almost gave myself away with a gasp when the police announced that Mr. P had been arrested, but I got my hand up over my mouth in time. Ms. T sounded not only shocked, but outraged. According to her, if Mrs. P was killed at about one-thirty the preceding day, as they said, then Mr. P could not possibly have been involved. She herself, so she said, had been having lunch with him not long before then. Yes, of course they had been seen. No, they hadn’t returned together. She’d had an errand to run; he’d said he was going for a walk; they’d parted. But (and here she lost some of her cold efficiency) anyone who knew anything about Mr. P and what a saint he’d been year after year no matter how his wife provoked him would know that the mere suggestion that he had murdered her was preposterous!
Provoked him how? they wanted to know. Ms. T backtracked immediately, but it was too late. She stammered a bit in efforts to deflect suspicion from Mr. P to the sources of provocation. The cook Mrs. P had hired, at great expense, was a likely suspect. She might have been stealing from the Prescotts and been caught in the act.
No, said the police. The cook was the one who discovered the body when she arrived for work at two o’clock.
That proved nothing, insisted Ms. T. I could practically see her bridle, throwing her head back so that her silky blond hair almost cascaded out of its chignon.
Much as I would have liked to believe in the murderous-cook theory, I didn’t. When she’d brought the torte in for Mrs. P to apportion the night before, she’d seemed a jolly and unobjectionable sort. “You know what they say about a moment on the lips,” she’d remarked, plunking the dessert in front of Mrs. P. Her employer had, it was true, seemed put out by this informality and had drawn back with a huffy, “I do not believe I will serve, Mabel,” but that scarcely seemed an adequate motive for violence.
I was mentally eliminating the cook as a suspect when Ms. T came up with a few better ones. There was the ne’er-do-well brother, whom Mrs. P had thought deserved an executive position at his brother-in-law’s firm. Or how about the tennis instructor, whom Ms. T had seen at an outdoor cafe with Mrs. P, just a week ago? If the police couldn’t figure out who the murderer was, then she, Helen Trudeau, would be happy to do it for them. I imagined her nostrils flaring as she threw down the gauntlet.