Oliver, too, had an explanation. One that was also less than flattering. This interrogation was turning into an exercise in embarrassment.
“I went to her room. I brought her a bagel. More original than flowers, I thought. I asked her if she’d care to see me after this game was over. She... wasn’t interested. I told her to keep the bagel. No hard feelings. A guy like me can get girls whenever he wants. It wasn’t a big deal.” He faltered in the middle, but by the end of his statement, the Powers attitude was back in full force. Humiliation was a state seldom visited by a Powers, and one they were quick to recover from. Jericho felt some smug satisfaction at the fact that Ollie had been turned down by the woman in red.
It was the other girl’s turn, little Sally from Texas, who looked more like death than the corpse upstairs. He walked right up to her and leaned into the chair in which she was trying to disappear. Her pale face glowed in the thick shadow. “And where did you get that cut?” he said. Sally’s hand went up to her head, almost as if she’d forgotten about it, a guilty reminder of a terrible sin, like an adulterer who forgets his mistress’s lipstick smeared across his neck. Jericho enjoyed watching the rich little girl squirm. Her life of convenience was over. This quiet little thief-turned-murderer was going to jail.
She looked confused, almost as if she’d just woken up. Jericho wondered if she’d only just realized that this wasn’t a part of the game. There was a real dead person upstairs. There was an honest-to-goodness punishment for such a transgression. There was a great detective present who was going to solve this terrible crime, and the guilty party was going to jail. This wasn’t some little rich girl’s world where money buys freedom. “The scratch... I didn’t. It wasn’t her. It was her.” Sally pointed across the room at Kelly Greene.
From her seat on the davenport the actress gaped wide-eyed at her pale accuser. “I... It was an accident. I brushed her temple with a serving tray while we were preparing for dinner.” The actress. Of course! She had been the one who told Jericho that the girl had admired the dead woman’s jewelry. She had put the scrape on Sally’s head to cause suspicion, to cause Jericho to envision some sort of struggle with the deceased, a superficial injury that might have been incurred during the tussle before the murder was complete.
Jericho crossed the room toward the guilty thespian at a brisk pace. If he’d had his handcuffs with him, he’d have been slapping them on her right then and there.
“Wait, wait,” she said, sinking back into the sofa, clearly fearful of the charging cop. No doubt she would try to come up with something, anything, that might clear her name. How clever that she had “volunteered” to find the body. Certainly it made her seem less suspicious. But she had not anticipated the presence of a world-class detective in the house. None of these pompous elitists had realized what Adam Jericho was capable of before the murder. He’d hoped his name might make someone slip up and reveal themselves. A story that fooled the locals would not be able to trick the great Adam Jericho.
But then Kelly Greene did something that made it all click. She reached up and tugged her ear, fiddling with the gold heart that was stabbed through her left lobe. It was a nervous gesture, completely unconscious, but it caused one of those revelations in Jericho: like at the end of a great Scooby-Doo mystery when the caretaker at the cemetery sneezes and reveals himself as the monster who’s been chasing the Scooby gang around the haunted graveyard for the last half-hour. Everything fell into place. There was suddenly a piece of incontrovertible evidence that wasn’t going to be easily explained. Someone in this room had slipped up.
“Tell us, Sally,” he said. “Why did you kill her?”
4
The Way It Happened
Sally looked even more pale than she had before, if pure white can get any whiter. She sat there, stunned. Jericho didn’t rush at her as he had Kelly. He didn’t want to frighten her. She was the killer. He had no doubt. “Where are the jewels, Sally?” If she gave them up, he’d have hard evidence. Sure, he’d put it all together. But she was rich. He needed to catch her red-handed if he was going to avoid public embarrassment. He needed the diamonds. Jericho knew she had them. Sally did not reply.
He walked around the room. Outside, the thunder rumbled, enhancing the dramatic mood in the mystery mansion. It was time to reveal what exactly had happened upstairs this evening. “This is the way it happened...” he said.
“The woman in the red dress went upstairs about the same time Kelly did. Not long after she retired to her room, after a short debate with Oliver and me, Mrs. Painsbum went to the victim’s room for help with her wig. Not long after Mrs. Painsbum left, Oliver made a brief visit with his request for a date, and was shot down. Sometime after that you came along, Miss Freddins.”
The pale girl was shaking her head, but did not speak. The others were listening with only a modicum of interest, for Jericho had accused almost everyone and had not yet provided them with a shred of evidence. He alone knew that he had Sally Freddins in the bag. And the terrified look on Sally’s face suggested that she knew that she was busted. But there was nowhere to run.
“What exactly happened when Sally knocked on the door to the woman’s room? I suppose we won’t know for sure unless Sally cares to enlighten us. Nevertheless, I can guess. The woman let you in without suspicion, Sally. Maybe because you’re the only one here who was around her own age. Whatever her motivation, she did not suspect you when she let you in. She certainly didn’t know what was coming when you grabbed her from behind.
“She knew you liked her jewels, though. And maybe she caught on a bit when you were using the bathroom in her room. Maybe it wasn’t you she was writing about, but you saw her journal. She wrote ‘I think I’m in trouble.’ Did that make you scared? Was that what made you decide you had to kill her to get the jewels? You couldn’t steal them if she’d already noticed you eyeing them, could you, Sally?”
At that point, Oliver Powers spoke up, a liberal mastermind who always came rushing to the defense of the guilty, willing to let murderers back on the streets, ready to fill the world with compassion and weakness. “What kind of evidence do you have, Jericho?”
The masterstroke. Jericho savored it. He made his dramatic pause. He wanted this climax to last as long as possible.
“It was the woman in the red dress’s hair,” he said. “It hung down on each side of her face in a perfect frame of her head. When everyone else talked about her jewels, it was the ones that we could see. You could see her bracelet and you could see her necklace, but no one had been able to see her earrings. Her hair completely covered the woman’s ears. But Sally said that she hadn’t even paid any attention to the girl’s earrings. How could she know that the woman had earrings unless she herself took them out of her ears?!”
The whole group gasped. Jericho grinned triumphantly. Of course, they were all thinking. It made perfect sense. She was as guilty as sin.
Sally leapt from the chair, tears trailing a river down her alabaster cheeks. She looked like an albino tiger loosed from its cage. Her teeth were bared. “Those were my jewels!”
She further damned herself with her outburst. Were all rich people so demented as to believe that all pretty things were their own? Jericho was thankful he wasn’t wearing a Gucci belt or she might have slain him, too, just to hitch up her jeans.
Jericho advanced on her, and Sally slowly retreated, crying hysterically. The detective drew his gun.