Miss Throop looked thoughtful. “How did Leona try to get out of that one?”
“She denied she ever saw the cake before and insisted she had never baked it.”
“And?”
“And it seems to have been prepared precisely according to an original recipe in her present cookbook-in-progress.”
“I suppose the book will never be published now.”
“On the contrary, I believe the publisher has tripled the initial print order.”
Ehrengraf sighed. “As I understand it, the presumption is that Miss Weybright was desperate at the prospect of losing the unfortunate Mr. Bierstadt. She wanted him, and if she couldn’t have him alive she wanted him dead. But she didn’t want to be punished for his murder, nor did she want to lose out on whatever she stood to gain from his will. By framing you for his murder, she thought she could increase the portion due her. Actually, the language of the will probably would not have facilitated this, but she evidently didn’t realize it, any more than she realized that by receiving the paintings she would have the lion’s share of the estate. In any event, she must have been obsessed with the idea of killing her lover and seeing her rival pay for the crime.”
“How did Mrs. Keppner get into the act?”
“We may never know for certain. Was the housekeeper in on the plot all along? Did she actually fire the fatal shots and then turn into a false witness? Or did Miss Weybright commit the murder and leave Mrs. Keppner to testify against you? Or did Mrs. Keppner see what she oughtn’t to have seen and then, after lying about you, try her hand at blackmailing Miss Weybright? Whatever the actual circumstances, Miss Weybright realized that Mrs. Keppner represented either an immediate or a potential hazard.”
“And so Leona killed her.”
“And had no trouble doing so.” One might call it a piece of cake, Ehrengraf forbore to say. “At that point it became worth her while to let Mrs. Keppner play the role of murderess. Perhaps Miss Weybright became acquainted with the nature of the will and the estate itself and realized that she would already be in line to receive the greater portion of the estate, that it was not necessary to frame you. Furthermore, she saw that you were not about to plead guilty to a reduced charge or to attempt a Frankie-and-Johnny defense, as it were. By shunting the blame onto a dead Mrs. Keppner, she forestalled the possibility of a detailed investigation which might have pointed the finger of guilt in her own direction.”
“My goodness,” Evelyn Throop said. “It’s quite extraordinary, isn’t it?”
“It is,” Ehrengraf agreed.
“And Leona will stand trial?”
“For Mrs. Keppner’s murder.”
“Will she be convicted?”
“One never knows what a jury will do,” Ehrengraf said. “That’s one reason I much prefer to spare my own clients the indignity of a trial.”
He thought for a moment. “The district attorney might or might not have enough evidence to secure a conviction. Of course, more evidence might come to light between now and the trial. For that matter, evidence in Miss Weybright’s favor might turn up.”
“If she has the right lawyer.”
“An attorney can often make a difference,” Ehrengraf allowed. “But I’m afraid the man Miss Weybright has engaged won’t do her much good. I suspect she’ll wind up convicted of first-degree manslaughter or something of the sort. A few years in confined quarters and she’ll have been rehabilitated. Perhaps she’ll emerge from the experience with a slew of new recipes.”
“Poor Leona,” Evelyn Throop said, and shuddered delicately.
“Ah, well,” Ehrengraf said. “ ‘Life is bitter,’ as Henley reminds us in a poem. It goes on to say:
“Riches, fame, love — and yet we seek them, do we not? That will be one hundred thousand dollars, Miss Throop, and — Ah, you have the check all drawn, have you?” He accepted it from her, folded it, and tucked it into a pocket.
“It is rare,” he said, “to meet a woman so businesslike and yet so unequivocally feminine. And so attractive.”
There was a small silence. Then: “Mr. Ehrengraf? Would you care to see the rest of the house?”
“I’d like that,” said Ehrengraf, and smiled his little smile.
The Ehrengraf Nostrum
Gardner Bridgewater paced to and fro over Martin Ehrengraf’s office carpet, reminding the little lawyer rather less of a caged jungle cat than — what? He doth bestride the narrow world like a Colossus, Ehrengraf thought, echoing Shakespeare’s Cassius. But what, really, did a Colossus look like? Ehrengraf wasn’t sure, but the alleged uxoricide was unquestionably colossal, and there he was, bestriding all over the place as if determined to wear holes in the rug.
“If I’d wanted to kill the woman,” Bridgewater said, hitting one of his hands with the other, “I’d have damn well done it. By cracking her over the head with something heavy. A lamp base. A hammer. A fireplace poker.”
An anvil, Ehrengraf thought. A stove. A Volkswagen.
“Or I might have wrung her neck,” said Bridgewater, flexing his fingers. “Or I might have beaten her to death with my hands.”
Ehrengraf thought of Longfellow’s village blacksmith. “ ‘The smith, a mighty man is he, with large and sinewy hands,’ ” he murmured.
“I beg your pardon?”
“Nothing important,” said Ehrengraf. “You’re saying, I gather, that if murderous impulses had overwhelmed you, you would have put them into effect in a more spontaneous and direct manner.”
“Well, I certainly wouldn’t have poisoned her. Poison’s sneaky. It’s the weapon of the weak, the devious, the cowardly.”
“And yet your wife was poisoned.”
“That’s what they say. After dinner Wednesday she complained of headache and nausea. She took a couple of pills and lay down for a nap. She got up feeling worse, couldn’t breathe. I rushed her to the hospital. Her heart ceased beating before I’d managed to fill out the questionnaire about medical insurance.”
“And the cause of death,” Ehrengraf said, “was a rather unusual poison.”
Bridgewater nodded. “Cydonex,” he said. “A tasteless, odorless, crystalline substance, a toxic hydrocarbon developed serendipitously as a by-product in the extrusion-molding of plastic dashboard figurines. Alyssa’s system contained enough Cydonex to kill a person twice her size.”
“You had recently purchased an eight-ounce canister of Cydonex.”
“I had,” Bridgewater said. “We had squirrels in the attic and I couldn’t get rid of the wretched little beasts. The branches of several of our trees are within leaping distance of our roof and attic windows, and squirrels have quite infested the premises. They’re noisy and filthy creatures, and clever at avoiding traps and poisoned baits. Isn’t it extraordinary that a civilization with the capacity to devise napalm and Agent Orange can’t come up with something for the control of rodents in a man’s attic?”
“So you decided to exterminate them with Cydonex?”
“I thought it was worth a try. I mixed it into peanut butter and put gobs of it here and there in the attic. Squirrels are mad for peanut butter, especially the crunchy kind. They’ll eat the creamy, but the crunchy really gets them.”
“And yet you discarded the Cydonex. Investigators found the almost full canister near the bottom of your garbage can.”