He shrugged. Albert made a gesture that said I was amusing myself sexually.
“My guess is, you bought a box of baggies brand-new. Figured they would be better, anyway. And then you pulled out the ones you needed. Now, what do you think a judge will say when I can tell him that your baggies match the brand that were in the pigs? And here’s the other thing. I’ll bet you didn’t put the baggies away, so they’re sitting right out on the kitchen table. Something like that. So what is a judge going to do when you have nine baggies out of a roll of say twenty-four missing and we find nine baggies in the pigs? You think that amounts to circumstantial evidence? You lump that with people watching you from the Coast Guard cutter, and what do you think?”
My cell rang. Constable Smith said he was standing in the kitchen of Danny’s house.
I looked at Danny. He looked at Albert.
“GLAD Bags,” Constable Smith said when I asked. “On the counter here, next to the sink.”
Greta sat with the door open on her car, changing film.
“Film is made with petroleum products which in turn cause the devastation of pristine environments which in turn kills off habitat which in turn kills off animals,” I said. “Something like that?”
“Funny,” she said.
“The pigs had pot in them,” I said. “Thought you’d want to know.”
“Oh, you’re a hero.”
“Only to pigs. They don’t like swallowing plastic bags.”
“I understand your situation, Detective,” she said. “I’m not as green as you think.”
I shrugged. She stood. She let the camera hang around her neck.
“Do they?” I asked.
“Do they what?”
“Lobsters. Do they scream when you cook them?”
“Wouldn’t you?”
“So I guess buying you a lobster dinner is out of the question,” I said.
She looked at me. Then she lifted the camera. She snapped three pictures.
“Today it is,” she said. “You can’t tell about tomorrow.”
The Fourth Way
by Neil Schofield
A former finalist in the EQMM Readers Award competition, Neil Schofield has a distinctive, offbeat sense of humor and style, and an eye for quirks of character. Once a writer for corporate videos and events, Mr. Schofield now devotes his time to fiction. He lives in Le Havre, France, far enough from his native England that he’s found a clear perspective from which to view and write about it.
Grace Westmacott had received a letter and Madge Best was reading it. Madge was large, anxious, in her fifties, and unused to reading letters, but she had plucked up the courage to open it at last, sitting in the window of the large sitting room.
The letter was impressive, written on heavy bond paper. The letterhead was even more impressive. Madge began to read it carefully, as she always did: Start at the top and carry on down the page until you reach the bottom, then stop.
The letterhead read: “Sniving, Preacle & Biles, Solicitors and Commissioners for Oaths.”
There was an address, and a very respectable one, too, in London Wall, where, she knew, lots of large firms of City lawyers lived and had their being.
But there was more. Because Sniving, Preacle, and presumably even Biles could also boast that they were in the happy position of “incorporating Upshot, Wassail, Pervious, Crust & Co.”
Not only that; at some point they had become “successors to Draggett, Nawkish, Merriment, Wigg & Partners.”
Madge had the feeling that her eyeballs were steaming up on the insides, if that were possible.
And if anyone succeeded in getting through these serried ranks, they could call on the real heavy-hitters: their “New York Agents: Rugspell, Faintly, Mouseman & Biddlebaum Associates, Inc.”
She let the letter drop to the Persian carpet.
“Inc.,” she said loudly, “oh, yes, Inc.! And well might they be. No, really, I may not know much, but I know what is what, and you can’t tell a sausage by its overcoat.”
She went to the drinks table and poured herself two large glasses of Tio Pepe, in quick succession. She eyed the letter lying white and threatening on the floor. What did they want, all these people? She had the feeling of being surrounded by a host of chattering dwarfs all nipping her legs and biting her feet with their tiny, sharp, pointy teeth.
The thing was, this letter was not welcome. Not at all. It was the first letter one had received for ever such a long time. She thought briefly about going upstairs and asking Grace about this and then decided no. She would handle this on her own, as she had handled all the other tasks and duties that were incumbent on her as head of this household. Current head.
She poured a third glass of sherry and walked over to the letter. She picked it up and deliberately kept her eyes away from the letterhead. She didn’t want to go through all that again. She read, instead, the bit that started “Dear Mrs. Westmacott.”
Dear Mrs. Westmacott, it said,
It is my solemn duty to inform you that as agents of the executors of the will of a certain party, now deceased, and after exhaustive enquiries undertaken with the authority of the said executors, we have positively identified you as legatee under the testament of the said defunct, whose identity, however, we must for the moment withhold.
In order to apprise you of the circumstances surrounding the inheritance, I should like to call upon you at 7 P.M., Thursday the 12th. You do not, according to our enquiries, seem to have a telephone, listed or otherwise. (Quite right. That was one of the first things she had done away with.) If the above appointment is not convenient, please feel free to telephone me at the following number. There followed a number which differed, she noticed, from the number on the letterhead.
I would impress upon you, Mrs. Westmacott, that this matter is, at this date, extremely delicate, and would ask that you speak of it to no one, including the members of your immediate entourage, if any.
I cannot overemphasize the capital necessity for confidentiality.
I look forward to meeting you on the 12th, should I not hear from you in the interim.
Yours sincerely,
And it was signed: Benjamin Twohig.
Try as she might, she could find no mention of a Twohig in the dread letterhead. So presumably, Benjamin was entombed in the “Partners” of the ill-fated Merriments and Wiggs, or enmeshed in the “Co.” of Upshots and Perviouses. She hoped he wasn’t an “Associate” of Mouseman. She had never trusted Americans.
But there we were. A letter. And what was to be done about it, that was the question. The thing was, you see, that she didn’t quite know how to handle this. This was totally unexpected. She’d handled all the rest of it, plugged all the holes she could think of, made the arrangements necessary to keep at bay all the multitudes of people who want to see one, talk to one, get one to sign things, buy things, borrow things. All that was taken care of.
So, what were the options? She could ring the number in the letter and tell this Twohig that she wasn’t interested, to stay away and never contact her again. But was that really likely? Would anyone really do that, when large inheritances were being talked of? And Twohig might not be put off so easily as that. He might be a sticker.
All right, then, she could ignore the letter completely. But he’d turn up, wouldn’t he? Unless he heard from her, he’d turn up. She could turn all the lights out and pretend not to be there, and then he’d go away. But, horrors, he might not. He might go nosing around. The nearest village was a long way away, but even so, he might stir things up. Ask questions. And that she couldn’t have. She might lose all this, and she’d worked so hard for it.