Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 112, No. 3 & 4. Whole No. 684 & 685, September/October 1998

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:

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.

There was silence for a moment, and then I had to smother another gasp, because Ms. T actually said, “I would be bright enough to consider his secretary, who has had an eye on Walter Prescott for decades and who took quite a late lunch yesterday.”

Much as I appreciated her spirited defense of Mr. P, and hopeful as I was that she might actually discover the real perpetrator, suspecting me was not, I thought, very nice. The idea that the eye I kept on Mr. P had a salacious glint in it was both untrue and, to my mind, indelicate. Besides, decades was a low blow. I may have passed my prime, but her implication that I had entered an advanced stage of life was inaccurate.

I was simultaneously offended and unnerved, and my brain started whirling frantically. Was anyone else at the firm suffering from the same misapprehension as Ms. T? And, from a practical point of view, had anyone seen me in the park?

Indicative of my emotional conflict was the fact that the next statement from the police actually made me feel relieved, but just for the moment it took affection to triumph over self-interest.

“Ms. Trudeau,” said a deep voice. “We have the murder weapon. It’s a knife from the Prescotts’ kitchen, and it has Mr. Prescott’s fingerprints on it. It also has blood of Mrs. Prescott’s type on it, and it matches the depth and nature of the wound exactly. It was discovered last night, in a dumpster half a block down the alley from their home.”

The phone rang, making me jump and, unfortunately, sounding loudly enough in Ms. T’s office for her to realize the door was ajar. The next thing I knew, it had been closed all the way, and that would be the end of what I’d be able to hear.

The voice on the line was familiar, but I didn’t recognize it, even when the man gave his name. “Charlie here,” he said. “I need to talk to you. Can you get away?”

I was a little stiff. “Charlie? Perhaps I should know who you are, but I do not.”

He laughed, embarrassed. “Oh, gosh! Sorry! Charlie Potter. Patricia Prescott’s brother. In Marketing.”

I agreed to meet him at a coffee shop around the corner. I left a note on my desk. “Back in twenty minutes,” it said. No further explanation. Decades indeed!

Charlie Potter was a wreck. Elegantly dressed, as always, but a wreck. He had circles under his eyes, his tie was crooked, and he’d cut his chin while shaving.

“The police came by at midnight,” he said. “They arrested Walter!”

“My goodness,” I said noncommittally. “Was he at your house?”

Charlie waved a hand. “No, no, of course not. I was at Patricia’s house. I mean, his house.”

“It’s dreadful,” I said. “And ridiculous.”

Charlie nodded vigorously. “I know! But you must be able to give him an alibi. You always know where he is, what he’s doing. Have the police talked to you yet?”

I shook my head. I wasn’t sure what, if anything, to tell him. I sipped carefully at my coffee while I thought. He took too large a swallow and grimaced. “Look,” he said, “you know he didn’t do it. Not Walter.”

“Of course he didn’t,” I said, with more confidence than I felt just then. My understanding of fingerprints is that they are, well, incontrovertible. “But what do you want from me?”

He laughed nervously. “Why, nothing,” he said, “except the truth. Just tell the police what you’re sure is the truth.”

“And why wouldn’t I?” I asked, frostily.

“But you would!” he said. “It’s just that, if you didn’t happen to be able to provide a definite alibi for Walter by stating what you know to be facts, well, perhaps you might provide one by stating what you are convinced are facts.”

It took me a moment to take this in. “You mean, make up an alibi?” I asked. “Say he was in his office when he wasn’t?”

“Look,” said Charlie, “you know he didn’t murder Patsy.”

Actually, though I didn’t say so, that was something I was feeling less sure of all the time. Charlie Potter, it appeared, didn’t realize that the murder weapon had been found, or he wouldn’t have thought my lying would do any good.

I stood up, stretching to the limits of my less than considerable height so I would have as far to look down as possible. “Goodbye, Mr. Potter,” I said.

Five seconds after I arrived back at my desk, Ms. T buzzed me. I went into her office with my steno pad at the ready, but she had a new method of torture in mind.

“You are, I believe,” she said, “a secretary. I could look up your job description, but I am reasonably sure I know what it says, and I do not think it mentions your taking twenty-minute breaks whenever the fancy strikes you.”

I didn’t reply. Silence fit my purposes as well as anything. I gazed at her, thinking about something I’d read recently — that Cro Magnons were skeletally identical to modern humans. “Dress one up in a suit,” it said, “and you couldn’t tell the difference.” That, I thought, would explain a lot.

She looked angrily at me. I looked placidly at her. Then she sighed.

“Look, Richard,” she said. “I need help! Running this place is hard. This awful situation is so unnerving, so horrid, so...” And then, to my amazement and extreme discomfiture, she began to cry. I really can’t stand to see people cry. I was, however, still annoyed.

“There, there, Helen,” I said. “There, there. No one expects you to do as good a job as Mr. Prescott.”

In the days that followed, everyone tended to gather in clumps. Groups of us took coffee breaks together, ate lunch together, waited for the bus together. Even the management-level people seemed cozier than usual. We all felt confused and insecure, and there seemed to be safety in numbers. Everyone had heard about the knife in the dumpster and, though there was no further news of any importance, the situation was a topic of constant conjecture. Ms. T went back to calling me Mr. Andrews and I went back to calling her Ms. Trudeau. I would find stacks of work with detailed instructions on my desk. My dictaphone always had letters on it for me to type up (while cringing). I often ran through the capacity of my personal note recorder with reminders to myself about what to get done when. But we had little personal contact except when she called me in to her office to tell me which restaurants to make reservations at that week, where to pick up her dry cleaning, and what photographer to schedule for the shots of her that would appear in Allied’s annual report.

I did my work as best I could under the circumstances, though it wasn’t easy. Mr. P was out on bail, but he didn’t come near the firm. Ms. T moved her potted plants and silver-framed photos into his office, and it gradually lost its identification with Mr. P entirely. I, however, was not willing to see him disappear permanently from Allied Enterprises. One afternoon, I decided to pay him a visit.

I had to go out anyway, to pick up the photos of Ms. T so she could choose the one that did the best job of making her look both competent and ravishing. It was close to five o’clock by the time I could get away, so I didn’t come back to the office, but headed over to Mr. P’s.

He answered the door himself, looking a good ten years older than he had just a few short weeks before. He brightened a bit when he saw me.

“Richard!” he said. Mr. P can call me Richard anytime he chooses, having spent years earning the right. “This is a pretty kettle of fish, wouldn’t you say?”

I sat myself down on an antique something or other and dove in. “Mr. Prescott,” I said, “something has to be done. Did you kill Mrs. Prescott?”

He looked at me and laughed. “Ah, Richard. I should have known you’d be direct. No, I did not kill Mrs. Prescott.”

“Then we absolutely must figure out who did.” I was speaking no more than the God’s truth. I wouldn’t survive many more of Helen Trudeau’s dictated memos, and I doubted that Mr. P would survive a trial.

“You don’t go along with the official theory?” he asked. “After all, my fingerprints are on the murder weapon.”

“Oh, pish!” I said. “You didn’t do it, so somebody else did. Now, who? How about Charlie Potter?”

“I wondered about that,” he replied. “But why? He doesn’t inherit from Patsy; I do. That’s only fair, I guess, since it was all mine to start with.”

I told him about Charlie’s efforts to get me to lie to the police — which, I should mention, I hadn’t done. “Now that,” I said, “is suspicious.”

Mr. P smiled again. “Not really. Poor Charlie. His new advertising campaign is based on shots of the company president demonstrating interest and competence, on site, in Allied’s branch offices and plants from Paris to Pago Pago. Charlie was all set up for three weeks with a camera crew and me. Now he’s facing three weeks with a camera crew and Helen Trudeau.”

“Ah,” I said. So that was it. I was surprised it hadn’t been his throat he’d cut while shaving. “Well, then, how about Helen Trudeau? She might have had it in for Patricia.”

He shook his head. “Motive, Richard, motive. What was her motive?”

“She’s in love with you,” I said. “She certainly tried her best to get the police interested in some other suspect.” I told him what I’d overheard.

“Well, I’m flattered,” he said. “But, believe me, Helen Trudeau has never been in love. She’s certainly not in love with me.”

I wasn’t so sure. She had been sitting, as the most important guest would, on his right during dinner and I’d noticed her leaning in his direction. This, however, was hardly proof of anything, and Mr. P’s tone had been adamant.

“Fine,” I said. “Charlie had no motive; Ms. T had no motive. Who did? Who had a reason to want to get rid of Mrs. P? How about the cook?” I liked the cook, but somebody did it. “How about her? I notice she’s not here.”

“Of course she’s not here,” he said. “What use could one person possibly have for a cook? I haven’t exactly been entertaining large groups of people. What’s her motive, Richard? She disliked her job but didn’t have the nerve to quit?”

I sighed. I could think of only one more person. I didn’t want to bring up the tennis coach, but I steeled myself.

“Uh,” I said. “I’ve heard some rumors about Mrs. P and her tennis coach...”

Mr. P threw me a horrified look. “You think Patsy and her tennis coach were having an affair? And maybe it went sour?”

I looked prim. “I didn’t say that.” (Of course, it was what I’d been thinking.)

“But her tennis coach is gay!” he said. “Couldn’t you tell?”

This flustered me. Usually I can tell. “I only saw the man once,” I said. “And I wasn’t the only one who couldn’t tell. Besides, that doesn’t mean he isn’t a murderer.”

“Maybe not. But it does mean he wasn’t having an affair with Patsy. So, why would he kill her?”

That’s what we kept coming back to. Why? And, even if we could answer that, then how?

I don’t know if I would ever have figured it out if it weren’t for my wife. When I turned down the covers that night, I noticed the pillowcases. They were beautiful. Hand embroidered and made of cotton so fine and smooth, it felt like satin.

“Wherever did these come from?” I asked. “You haven’t taken up needlework, have you? Where are you hiding your embroidery hoop?”

Sandra laughed. “No, silly!” she said. “Some old lady with a lot of time made them, probably about thirty years ago. They’re from the AmVets Thrift Store.”

I dropped the pillow I had been rubbing against my cheek. “You mean other people have put their heads on these?”

She laughed again. “Uh huh. Just like in hotels and motels and inns and on overnight trains. Why, if it weren’t for detergent and washing machines, there might be something to be concerned about. But, you know, Richard, people can wash things.”

She grinned wickedly. “Now, get in bed.”

I abandoned my resistance to the pillowcases. She was right. People can wash things and she had. Besides, when Sandra tells me to get in bed in that tone of voice...

Then, of course, I was distracted for a while, but before drifting off an idea started to form in my mind, and sometime during the night all the little bits and pieces came together. They must have, because when I woke up, I knew precisely what had happened. Therefore, I also knew precisely what to do.

I got to the office a bit late. I marched directly to Ms. T’s door, knocked sharply, and opened it.

She took a dramatic look at her watch and lifted one eyebrow. “Yes?”

“I was at Mr. Prescott’s yesterday,” I said. “We talked about a lot of things, including the dinner party. This morning, I couldn’t decide whether to go to the police station or come to work, but I decided — at least for today — to come to work. I’d like an extremely large raise.”

I set my briefcase on her desk. “Look,” I said, demonstrating with exasperation. “The clasps don’t work smoothly, and it isn’t even made out of real leather. And I’ve got my eye on a truly fetching little Mercedes. Yes, the raise will have to be sizeable.”

She frowned. “Excuse me?”

“Sizeable,” I said firmly. “Or I will feel it necessary to tell the police about your stealing a lovely damask napkin from the Prescotts’ home.”

“Stealing a...” She gaped at me.

“Lovely damask napkin,” I said. “It was peeking out of your purse — your sweet little beaded purse. The one that was carrying more than an evening bag is meant to carry.”

I had noticed the purse because it looked almost exactly like the one Sandra had been carrying. Sandra had gotten hers at AmVets. Ms. T, I was sure, hadn’t. I had not noticed a damask napkin peeking out of it, but Ms. T couldn’t know that.

I regarded her and smiled conspiratorially. She decided to brazen it out.

“I had not cared for the candied fruit in the torte,” she said crisply. “I got rid of it the way one is supposed to — in my napkin. I didn’t want to offend the cook, so I took the napkin away with me to wash and iron and return at a later date. I intended to confess to accidentally carrying it off. Now, if you would like to tell the police about this, you go right ahead. I very much doubt that they’ll be interested.”

She turned away and took a stack of folders off the credenza behind her. “There is a lot of work to be done today,” she said coldly, rising to her feet and putting a hand on one lovely hip. “I suggest you start on it.”

“Oh, I would, I would,” I said. “Except that I’m just so confused! See, I keep wondering why Mr. Prescott would take the knife he had just used to stab his wife to death all the way out to a dumpster half a block away.”

She was no longer pretending shock at the suggestion that Mr. P had, indeed, done the foul deed. “To get rid of it, of course,” she said, frowning at me again. If she kept this up, her perfect brow was going to develop unfortunate little lines. “He didn’t have time to hide it better.”

“Why hide it at all?” I asked. “Why not wash it?”

She stared at me.

“Why not wash it?” I asked her. “And then dry it? And then put it back in the drawer with all the other knives? The blood would be gone. His fingerprints would be gone.” I shrugged. “Not that they’d matter on a knife in his own kitchen.”

Ms. T sank back into her chair.

“You see, the only evidence the police have is those fingerprints. But what they really prove is that Mr. P did not murder his wife. Unless he’s incredibly stupid. And Mr. P,” I said, “is not stupid.”

She blinked slowly. Her voice was like ice. “Whatever is your point?”

“I’m getting to that,” I said. “Mr. P cut the torte that night, after his wife was snotty about it. You were sitting right next to him. You dropped your napkin over the knife he used, picked it up, and put it in your purse. If anyone had noticed the knife missing from the table, so what? You wouldn’t use it. But no one did. So the next day, you returned to the house — realizing that Mr. P’s plan to take a walk provided the perfect opportunity for your ‘errand’ — and killed Mrs. Prescott with the same knife, carefully keeping the napkin around the handle that still bore Walter Prescott’s prints. No, you didn’t have a motive to kill Patricia, but your real victim wasn’t Patricia. It was Walter.”

She tried to laugh, but the noise she made didn’t qualify. “That’s absurd! You could never prove that!”

“Oh, really?” I asked. “There’s a lady who lives in the house closest to the dumpster. She does a lot of gardening in her backyard. Especially in the early spring. Especially in the early afternoon in the early spring. Her Yorkshire terrier barks at everyone who walks down that alley. Don’t you remember being barked at by a Yorkshire terrier?”

Ms. T was staring at me and a muscle under her left eye began to twitch.

I continued. “I’m so sorry I was late today, but this lady — her name is Pearl Carruthers, Mrs. Pearl Carruthers — was telling me the most fascinating things about Campanula persicifolia.” I sighed. “It made me just long for a yard. Oh, and can you guess what she said when I asked if she recognized a photo of you?”

I didn’t wait for a reply. What Mrs. C had said, over the hysterical barking of one of the most obnoxious examples of canine life I’ve ever met, was, “My goodness! My eyes are so bad, I really can’t see farther than that flowering crab — certainly not all the way to the dumpster, dear!”

I went blithely on. “Of course, Mrs. Pearl Carruthers doesn’t know — yet — why I was showing the photograph to her at all. Now, if that’s not good enough, I believe the police will find your fingerprints on the edge of the dumpster, where you grabbed it to steady yourself while you put the knife just far enough under the edge of something to make it look as if it had been hastily hidden.”

Her mouth opened and shut. “No,” she said. “I never touched the dumpster. Never touched it! I was much too careful to touch it!”

“Walter Prescott said you’ve never been in love,” I said. “But you are. You’re in love with Allied Enterprises. You just had to have it, didn’t you?”

For the second time, she started to cry. On this occasion, however, it did not surprise me. “I would never have gotten control,” she said. “Never! Walter Prescott is only fifty-eight. I had to get rid of him. He’d have run this place forever! It didn’t matter that I was better at it, didn’t matter that I’m the only one around here who knows how to get things done!”

“But in such a roundabout way,” I said, shaking my head sadly. “In such a roundabout way!”

She pulled herself together and asked me what would qualify as a big enough raise.

“I’ve changed my mind,” I said. “I think I’d rather just have my old boss back.”

That started her off again, but she calmed down before the police arrived. If I hadn’t known better, I’d have thought her indignation was completely sincere. They took her in for “questioning.” They won’t be able to hold her long without something more concrete than my suspicions. But then, it won’t take long to finish typing up the conversation that’s on my personal note recorder. I’m especially going to like transcribing Ms. T’s statement about being “the only one around here who knows how to get things done.”