“Crump’s unscathed. Apparently he doesn’t care for oatmeal cookies.”
“Very sensible of him, I must say. Did you talk with him?”
“No. Old Quinn has him in isolation.”
“Whatever for? Cyanide peanuts may be fatal, but they are hardly contagious.”
“That’s not the point, Hester. Old Quinn doesn’t know anything about the cyanide peanuts. He suspects Mrs. Crump’s liver, and he wants to look at it.”
“You mean he wants to open her up and go snooping around inside?”
“Exactly. He’s been trying to bully Crump into giving his permission.”
“What’s Crump’s position?”
“He’s against it.”
“Quite rightly. Uncle Homer, you should have encouraged him.”
“I couldn’t get to him. Old Quinn doesn’t want him subjected to influence. He’s a tyrannical old scoundrel, Quinn is. We can only hope that Crump stands fast.”
“Uncle Homer, you might have tried a little harder. This could develop into a very serious business, if you ask me. Things could become unpleasant at least, even though everything is Mrs. Crump’s own fault.”
“Somehow, if things come to the worst, I doubt that that will be the official viewpoint.”
“Well, she had absolutely no business making cookies out of Senorita Fogarty’s oatmeal. I don’t suppose you made the slightest effort to steal the cookies and bring them away.”
“How could I? They were in the library with Crump, and I wasn’t permitted to enter.”
“In my opinion, you are far too easily intimidated. At least you could have slipped into the kitchen and appropriated the rest of the oatmeal.”
“To tell the truth,” said Uncle Homer, “I didn’t think of it.”
Hester curled up on the end of the sofa with her feet under her and her knees out. She was clearly thinking fiercely about developments, and Uncle Homer, uneasily aware that he had acquitted himself with less than distinction in a crisis, waited in silence and longed for gin.
“Well,” said Hester at last, “I have had to think and act for everybody from the beginning, and it’s now apparent that I must think and act for myself. In the meanwhile, let’s hope that neither Quinn nor Crump gets hungry enough to eat oatmeal cookies.”
15
Apparently neither Quinn nor Crump did. Indeed, the only threat to the life of either developed naturally from their dispute over the autopsy. The former was threatened by apoplexy, and the latter was threatened by the former. Crump, however, was superb. Under the most intense pressure, his adamantine resistance to the butchery of Mrs. Crump remained unshaken, and Quinn was eventually forced to capitulate. Unprepared to commit himself to the dark suspicions that would have hauled in the cops and a court order, he put the blame on Mrs. Crump’s heart after all, and was thus deprived of a look at her liver and the chance to make a substantial contribution to the sum of medical knowledge.
On the whole, Crump took the passing of his mate with remarkable fortitude. It may be said, in fact, that he blossomed. An observant cynic would have said that he seemed to be relieved of a burden. It’s true that he behaved decorously so long as Mrs. Crump was laid out in the house, preserved for visitors in embalming fluid, but she had no sooner been transferred permanently to the cemetery than Crump emerged from his autumnal bud. There was a touch of spryness in his walk, an added sparkle to his eye. The very next morning after the last rites, he showed up in the park wearing a new sports coat with a giant check and a pair of pants with an ivy league cut. On the bench, while Senorita Fogarty frolicked on the grass at the end of her leash, he even exchanged with Hester sly nudges of the knee.
This was the same day that Junior came a cropper in the garden house. His duty there had been sporadic at best. It was onerous and unproductive, and he skipped it as often as he thought he could get away with it, which was more and more frequently as the days passed. Inasmuch as nothing was ever observed that seemed to him the least significant, all his reports were substantially the same, and it was a simple matter, he discovered, to falsify them. The passing of Mrs. Crump had made him hopeful that his espionage could be discontinued with official sanction, but he was given to understand by Hester, to whom he reported, that Mrs. Crump, alive or dead, was hardly a factor in the private sex life of Senorita and Crump’s stud.
“It must be private,” said Junior, “because I’ve never seen any sign of it. If you want to know what I think, I think Crump’s stud is an imposter.”
“Don’t be absurd. How could be a stud be an imposter? It’s against nature.”
“Well, a stud is supposed to do only one thing that I know of, and I’ve never seen him do it. I’ve never even seen him try. A stud that doesn’t act like a stud must be an imposter, that’s all I can say.”
He offered this as an irrefutable conclusion, having thought it through by the rules of logic in the form of a syllogism, but Hester was neither convinced nor impressed.
“How do you know he doesn’t try?” she said.
“I didn’t say he doesn’t. I said I’ve never seen him.”
“Maybe he’s just waiting until Senorita Fogarty is ready.”
“Damn it, you used to claim that Senorita is always ready. You know you did. It’s in her blood or something.”
“I’ve remembered since that dogs have certain times, regardless of blood. They’re different from humans that way.”
“However they are, I don’t intend to spend the rest of my life trying to find out. Anyhow, I’ll bet that Lester got all excited and made a mistake about the whole thing. I don’t believe there’s any stud there, or ever was one.”
“You’re trying to evade your plain duty, that’s all. Of course there’s a stud. Lester saw Crump bringing him home in a cage. Why on earth would you claim that there isn’t one?”
“I’ve told you and told you. Because I’ve never seen one.”
“You said you’ve never seen him trying. Are you saying now that you’ve never seen him at all?”
“That’s what.”
“Junior, you make no sense whatever. First you say baldly that Crumps stud is an imposter, and then you say that he doesn’t even exist How can he be an imposter if he doesn’t exist?”
“Well, I don’t want to get into any debate about it, because I wouldn’t have a chance, and I know it. All I can say is that it’s damn odd, to say the least, that old Crump never ties the stud out in the backyard with Senorita Fogarty.”
“Do you know what I think? I think you don’t even know who is tied in the backyard and who isn’t. Uncle Homer has said several times that you’re doing nothing in that garden house but taking after-lunch naps, and now I’m compelled to agree, although I have held out all along for giving you the benefit of the doubt.”
This was so near the truth, even though slightly exaggerated, that Junior was prompted immediately to swear to its falsity.
“Father’s nothing but a damn liar,” he said, “and that’s a fact. He’s always saying things like that about me for no good reason, and I’m tired of it.”
“All right. You needn’t get so belligerent about it. It has just occurred to me that Mrs. Crump may have been responsible for the stud’s absence from the backyard.”
“What makes you think so?”
“Mrs. Crump, you will recall, was delicate about sex and things like that. In fact, she was literally a mass of inhibitions. She would certainly have felt that the proper place for intimacy was in the house, and probably in a certain room with the blinds pulled and the door and all the windows locked.”