“Well, how did you get your victims to eat cyanide?”
“You are prolonging this.” Josiah sighed. “I simply poured cyanide on a handkerchief, pretending it was cologne, and quickly put it over their mouths! Presto! An instant dead person. Now get with the program, girls.”
Harry intoned.“You didn’t have to mutilate them.”
“An artist’s touch.” He sniggered.
“One more teeny-weeny question.” Harry gulped for air. Her voice was steely calm in the suffocating atmosphere. “I know you brought the goods up here in a lorry, but where did you get them in the first place?”
Josiah hooted.“That’s the best part, Harry. Mim Sanburne! I’ve been her ‘walker’ for years. The finest homes. New York, Newport, Palm Beach, Richmond, Charleston, Savannah, wherever there is an elegant party, a must gathering. I’d appraise the merchandise and then one or two years later,voil?—I’d return for an engagement of a different sort. No engraved invitations. That was the easy part. You bribe a servant—the rich are notoriously cheap, you know. Pay someone enough to live on for a year and a one-way ticket to Rio. How simple to get in when the master and mistress were gone. The hard part was lifting the lorry off the track and rolling it inside the tunnel each time we were finished—that and trying to stay awake the next day. We never had to work that hard, though. Perhaps three houses a year. Distribution is easy once the fuss dies down. A small load to Wilmington orCharlotte. A side trip to Memphis. Wouldn’t snooty Mim just die? She looks down her long nose at thee and me, yet she’s consorting with a criminal—an elegant criminal.”
“Big profits, huh?”
“Ah, yes, sweet are the workings of capitalism—a lesson you’ve never learned, my girl. Now, time’s up.” His voice, hypnotic, promised all would be well. This was just a glorious lark.
Harry edged closer to the mouth and in pantomime to Coop said that she would throw out her gun. Cooper nodded. Mrs. Murphy fluffed her tail, ready to strike.
“You won’t toss in that Molotov cocktail. The fire would ruin your inventory. The smoke and commotion would bring all of Crozet up here to the tunnel. Now that would spoil everything. If we’re going into business, we’d better trust one another right now. You throw down your gun first and Officer Cooper will throw out hers.”
“Don’t take me for a fool, Harry. I’m not throwing down my gun first,” he snapped.
“You’re the creative one, Josiah. Think of something,” Harry taunted him. “You can starve us out but Rick Shaw will notice you’re missing. That won’t do. We’d better reach an agreement now.”
“You drive a hard bargain.”
“Never underestimate the power of a woman,” Harry mocked. “I’d hate for one of us to kill the other, because you couldn’t remove the body until the middle of the night, and in this flaming heat the corpse will start to stink in two to three hours. That’s disagreeable.”
“Quite so,” came Josiah’s clipped response. “What would you do if you killed me?”
“What you did to Maude. Then I’d wait a year, and Coop and I would sell off your stash. Oh, we don’t have your contacts, Josiah, but I’m sure we’d make some kind of profit.” She lied through her teeth.
“Don’t be an ass! With me you can make a fortune. By yourself, you’ll get caught.”
“I got this far, didn’t I?”
A long silence followed. The unlit Molotov cocktail was placed at the opening. Josiah’s hand quickly withdrew.
“Proof positive of what a saint I am. There’s the Molotov cocktail.”
“Josiah”—Harry hoped to keep him talking—“how did you fake the postmarks?”
“My latent artistic impulses surged to the fore.” He smiled. “I’ve got waxes, inks, stains, bits of ormolu, you name it, to repair the furniture. I mixed up a color and then tapped the postmark letters with old typeface. The inscription came compliments of my computer. I thought the postcards a flourish. I rather relished the picture of poor Rick Shaw’s face as he tried to make sense of it—once he realized the postcards were a signature. You realized quite quickly. I was terribly impressed.”
“But not scared?”
“Me? Never.”
“Your gun.” Harry’s voice made the demand sound like a social request.
“What about Coop? Is she really in there? I want to hear her voice. How do I know you haven’t killed her?” Josiah made a demand of his own. What he wanted was to hear where she was.
“Here.” Cooper nodded to Harry. She then swiftly moved to stand right beneath Mrs. Murphy. Tucker put her front paws on the lorry.
Harry, on Coop’s signal, said, “On the count of three, you throw down your gun. She’ll throw down hers. One … two … three.” She tossed out her gun as Josiah threw his in the opening.
He had a second gun. He didn’t waste time. He bolted into the tunnel, firing randomly. Mrs. Murphy jumped, claws at the ready, onto his head. Then slid to his back. Tucker, on her hind legs, pushed the lorry, which, despite its slow pace, knocked him off balance when it bumped into him. Tucker then bit his gun hand as he stumbled to the tunnel floor, his knee hitting a steel rail. Josiah lifted his gun hand, the dog still hanging on his wrist, and aimed straight for Harry, who dropped and rolled. Mrs. Murphy hung on his back, digging into him full force. Cooper, with deliberate precision and trained self-control, fired once. Josiah grunted as the bullet sank into his torso with a thud. He fired wildly. Cooper fired one more shot. Between the eyes. He twitched and was dead.
“Tucker!” Harry rushed to the dog, bruised but wagging her tail.
Cooper scooped up Mrs. Murphy as she walked over to Harry. She kissed the kitty, whose fur still stood straight up.“Bless you, Mrs. Murphy.” She reached down and felt for Josiah’s pulse. She dropped his arm as if it were rotten meat. “Harry, if these two hadn’t thrown him off balance he would have hit one of us. His gun was on rapid fire. The tunnel isn’t that wide. He was no dummy, except for his little slip in the post office.”
Harry sat on the moist earth, Tucker licking the tears from her face. Mrs. Murphy stood on her hind legs, her front paws wrapped around Harry’s neck. Harry rubbed her cheek against Mrs. Murphy’s soft fur.
“It’s a funny thing, Cooper. I didn’t think about myself. I thought about these two. If he had hurt Mrs. Murphy or Tucker, I would have killed him with my bare hands if I could have. My mind was perfectly composed and crystal-clear.”
“You’ve got guts, Harry. I was armed. You threw out your gun to sucker him in.”
“He wouldn’t have come in otherwise. I don’t know—maybe he would have. God, it seems like a dream. What a cunning son of a bitch. He had two guns.”
Cooper frisked the body.“And a stiletto.”
46
Mrs. Hogendobber rapturously returned on the day following Harry’s shoot-out with Josiah. The media had a field day with the heroic postmistress, her valiant cat and gallant dog, as well as stalwart Officer Cooper, so cool under fire. Harry found the hoopla almost as bad as being trapped in the tunnel.
Rick Shaw, fully briefed on the engagement with Josiah DeWitt, never mentioned in his prepared statement that Josiah’s entry into wealthy homes was on Mim Sanburne’s arm. Naturally, all of Crozet knew it, as well as Mim’s rich friends, but at least that detail wasn’t splashed across America. Jim secretly relished that his wife’s snobbery had been her undoing, and he was thrilled to be rid of Josiah.
Pewter envied her friends terribly and ate twice as much to make up for being denied stardom.
Fair and BoomBoom dated. No promises were made yet. They struggled to find some equilibrium amid the torrid gossip concerning them. Harry went from being the tough wife who threw out her husband to the innocent victim—in public, but not Harry’s, opinion.
Susan got Harry to take up golf for relaxation. Harry wasn’t certain that it relaxed her, but it began to obsess her.