Ada Silberwetter had obviously dressed in a hurry. Her hair was caught up behind in a ponytail and the soft pink knit pantsuit she wore was nearly decent. It was perhaps a touch too tight; the top was straining against the row of little plastic chains that held it together in front, but for Ada Silberwetter it was positively Puritanical. A black scarf belt covered any gaps between top and trouser while a dangling leather belt scarf around her neck completed the array. Her shoes were apparently somewhere under the table again.
“I’ve been working on this young lady’s murder,” Mrs. Benz explained.
Matt could see Ada was thinking the same thing he was, and her eyes dared him to say ir. After a brief struggle, he decided against it and just said “Oh?”
His mother nodded. “I think we’d just agreed to break into the caterer’s for clues.”
“Um,” Matt replied. “They, er, frown on that.”
She waved him away with the hand that had the pencil in it. “Oh, who cares if it’s legal as long as it’s all right?”
Matt directed a glare at Ada, who rolled innocent eyes up at him. “Fine,” he said. “I’ll just run check my almanac for a list of countries that don’t have extradition treaties with the United States.”
“I knew he’d be that way about it,” Ada whispered to her co-conspirator.
“We need clues.” Her glare was very similar to Matt’s; she turned it to her notes. “The whole story so far is very unsatisfactory. All sorts of things are missing.”
Matt felt slightly vindicated, since the story his mother had so far was mostly Ada’s invention. Mrs. Benz fluttered her fingers at the yellow pages scattered at her end of the table. “Why couldn’t your victim have had more of a love life?”
Matt blinked. Jerry Silberwetter. No love life. Things WERE missing from her notes.
She slid pages across each other. “What we need is for this Walter Prince character to have a torrid love affair with the victim’s sister.”
Matt shrugged. “Change the name,” he said, unbuttoning his coat. “I know someone named Walter Prince, and he’s not the romantic type. He hovers between rage and sullen resentment.”
“You just don’t him very well,” Ada said, “It’s in his will that he’s to be buried with a box of Milkbones so he’ll be ready when he meets his dog in Heaven.”
Matt raised an eyebrow at her but decided not to fight about it. “Well, one of them should be there.”
Catching his tone, his mother rolled her eyes. “It doesn’t matter. We’ll change all the names when we write the book.” She looked up in the general direction of her guest. “It wouldn’t do to call all the Silberwetters by their right names.”
“Of course not,” Ada agreed. “Who’d buy one more book full of obscene phrases?”
Matt said, “You would.” She stuck her tongue out at him.
The author, meanwhile, was shuffling through her notes. “You know what we need,” she announced, pulling them into a neat pile. “We need another murder.”
“Here, here!” cried Ada.
“Somewhere else, please.” Matt folded his arms. “One murder is plenty. Death makes me nervous.”
“Pooh.” Ada took a sip from the cup of coffee at her elbow. “Death is just nature’s way of saying, ‘Remember me?’”
Matt put his nose down at her and looked over his glasses. She choked a little on the coffee and then went on. “You know, if you want to stay on as Watson around here, you’re going to have to work on your stunned admiration. I’ve got a good mind to make this a Women Only detective agency.”
“You couldn’t,” Matt fired back. “You’d….” He remembered that his mother was within earshot. “You just couldn’t that’s all.”
“You never know.” Ada shifted her chair to show more shoulder to her opponent. “The killer might be cute.”
“Oh, I hope not,” said Mrs. Benz, rising from her notes to catch the last of that. “Nice murderers are so hard to handle. That’s what the second murder is for: it defines the killer. Now, you might assume, from the anonymous letters and the poison in the soup, that Miss Skull is an unpleasant person.”
“I might have jumped to that conclusion,” said Matt, pulling back an empty chair and planting himself in it.
Long dry hands swirled over the yellow pages. “But we don’t have definite evidence. She might have been planning this for months and have ingenious reasons for picking just those methods. A second murder clears the air: a murder Miss Skull didn’t plan and had to make up as she went along. Say, if she shot someone in the back, we’d reason that she was desperate, and a coward.”
Ada glanced across the table at Matt. “One of my stepsons was shot in the back. His name was Jerry, and they never caught the killer.”
Matt held his breath. But Mrs. Benz was intent on the murder in her notes. “That’s nice, dear. If we decide to go that way, we can roll your story in. On the other hand, if Miss Skull were to go face-to-face with someone, or hand-to-hand, we’d have another killer altogether, someone bolder. With these letters, you could go either way.”
“Let me see.” Ada set the tip of one index finger in the center of her chin. “Who’s expendable? Who could Miss Skull bump off?”
Matt returned her smile and shrugged off his coat. “Wouldn’t the person who received the letters be the obvious choice?”
“Oh, you can’t ever let it be the obvious person,” said his mother, as Ada stuck out her tongue. “Anyway, I’ve pretty much decided the letters are a red herring, so we can’t hurt her.”
Ada applauded silently. “Let’s compromise,” she said. “Make it an attempted murder. Miss Skull could put on a disguise and try to shoot your detective.”
“That might be nice.” Mrs. Benz groped for her coffee cup.
This was cutting too close to the bone. Matt pushed the coffee cup within his mother’s reach, and held it so it wouldn’t get knocked over. “I don’t like it. Why not brainstorm on the side of law and order for a while? Have you had any ideas about actually catching Miss Skull? Preferably BEFORE the second murder?”
His mother grimaced. “Only silly ones.” She captured the cup and took a drink. “I do hope I don’t have to resort to a tongueslip.”
“Sounds like fun to me,” said Ada.
“Sloppy, though,” said Mrs. Benz, not noticing the glance Ada threw at Natt. “You know the kind of ending: suspects saying things they couldn’t possibly know if they’d been where their alibi claims. It’s harder and harder these days to get away with that. You really have to bury it so the reader misses it. Oh! Burying! Those tombstone pictures….”
She pushed her chair back. “I have them in….” Matt began, but she had already left the room by way of the kitchen.
He started to rise. “You’d better let her get it out of her system, whatever it is,” Ada told him. “She’s as stubborn as I am.”
Matt remembered that this was not a theoretical exercise in solving murders, and also that he was annoyed with everyone. “Don’t you have anything else you could be doing?” He shrugged his coat off his shoulders onto the back of the chair. “I’m sure the weather’s perfect for a bath in Buckingham Fountain.”
Ada leaned back, hands under her ponytail, adding dangerous stress to the black chains holding up her top. “You know very well there won’t be any lifeguards, this season. I was just in the mood for shocking clergymen and automatically thought of you. I don’t know why. I can’t seem to help it somehow.”
Matt snorted, and jerked a little so the coat would fall the rest of the way free. Ada bent forward, reaching under the table. Having Ada Silberwetter go under the table could only be a threat, as far as Matt was concerned, and he pushed his chair back.
She was only fetching a thick folded newspaper. “Miss Skull—the real one—made a date for today. She must’ve thought I’d pick up the Reader on Thursday, or Friday at the latest. It’s the mad holiday social whirl; can’t keep track of my murderers.”
Matt took the folded mass of paper and read through the communications from Bottibooes to Many Tales and from Islamic Secretary to Coatimundi, and found the one she’d circled.
“ROUND-UP PONY. Will swap teeth with you Saturday afternoon at Picturesque Spot known to both of us. Bring plenty of Saliva. MISS SKULL.”
Matt read through it twice. “I suppose you’re going to go. What if it’s a trap?”
She frowned without wrinkling her forehead. “I don’t think it would be. He wants the money too much. Anyway, I’m not going alone.”
“Good,” said Matt. “I wouldn’t….” He lowered the paper. Ada’s smile was brilliant.
“No,” he said. “If you think…well, just think another think.”
“Don’t be so dull,” ordered Ada, flipping her ponytail. “You can’t just shrug your way through life.”
Matt was quite content to live a life devoid of adverb, and repeated “No.”
Ada drew in her lips. “But it’s your job. The Watson has to be there to point at the wrong person, yell ‘There he goes!’ and then trip over his own feet.”
“Get someone else.” Matt refolded the Reader. “There are lots of guys with feet.”
Ada stood up, planting her fists on the table. “You can NOT be so totally useless1”
“Why not? I work for the City.”
“And I have to have a bodyguard.” She eased around the table to give him a better look at the body he’d be protecting. Matt rose from his chair and backed away. “I’ll have all that money for Miss Skull and it’s a lonely neighborhood.”
Matt backed into the wall. Ada followed, trapping him by placing a head just below his right shoulder and setting one pointed fingernail on the little bump made by the lowest button under his sweater. Rolling her face up so she could gaze at her bodyguard-to-be, she let her fingers climb the fuzzy bumps, one by one, on each syllable as she breathed, “You’re so big and I’m so fragile.”
She pronounced it to rhyme with “wile”. Her hand was up to his throat when she finished, and Matt felt a strong temptation to test her fragility. But he had resolved to resolve to control his temper in the coming year, and, anyhow, it was Christmas time: peace on Earth and goodwill even to women named Silberwetter.
“I was going to bring in some pictures,” said his mother. “But I forgot which ones.”
Ada slid away, but Matt could tell by the way his mother’s eyes were strictly on the sheets of paper that it hadn’t been quick enough or far enough. He started to clear his throat.
At any rate, Ada was unabashed. “Maybe you were going to show me the family albums. Surely you had all your sons photographed on bearskin rugs.”
Mrs. Benz’s head came up sharply and for one moment Matt felt deeper dread than he’d experienced all day. But she did not, after all, rush back out to fetch the albums and shoeboxes of pictures and slides and home movies.
“Pictures!” she announced. “What an excellent idea, dear! We can make pictures the theme of the whole book. You remember the tombstone pictures? We add a clue in a baby picture from a family album. And other pictures can be scattered through the text, some clues and some side roads.”
Ada looked straight at Matt but spoke to his mother. “I have plenty of pictures. I can lend you some of mine.”
Matt refused to be intimidated. “Your family albums must have an R rating.”
Before Ada could respond, Mrs. Benz looked her up and down. “You must have been a cute baby.”
Ada whirled to face her. “Cute? I was adorable!”
Both women laughed. Matt didn’t get the joke.
“You must tell me all about your family,” his mother went on. “I’ve used mine in so many stories I’ve nearly worn it out.”
Fourteen of his mother’s novels involved a somewhat hardboiled detective named Barbara Chang. Like their author, the heroine had three children, though Matt was acutely aware that the youngest was a girl. So many family stories and in jokes had been wedged among the pages that Joe had suggested an omnibus volume called simply “Autobiography”.
Matt wondered how those books would have sold if they’d been based on Ada’s family instead. “My Aunt Casey was a contortionist,” she was saying. “You used to be able to see her show on Clark Street.”
“Show what?” his mother demanded immediately. Both women laughed again.
Matt cleared his throat for real this time. “Didn’t you have places to go and people to do?”
Ada opened his mouth, but it was Mrs. Benz who answered, “That’s right. You were to break into—wherever it was—the caterer’s. Better take your coat. It looks dark outside.”
“The sun’s shining,” said Matt, automatically. Ada reached down and picked his coat off the chair.
His mother squinted at the window. “Is it nice today?”
Matt scowled at Ada, who was holding his coat open for him. She smiled. “Maybe your mother would like to come with me.”
“No!” Ada Silberwetter was completely capable of taking her to whatever godforsaken spot Miss Skull had chosen.
“I’d better not, dear.” Mrs. Bez released a tiny sigh of regret. “I’d just slow you down, or trip the alarm. I’ll work on these clues; you young people have a nice time and tell me what you find.”
“We’ll make a full report,” Ada promised. “In triplicate.”
Mrs. Benz nodded. Her son started to sputter explanations, excuses, and expostulations all at the same time. He released only two syllables before he gave up. He knew that face. Felicia Lowe was intent on crime. At least until she hit the first snag in the plot, nothing would make an impression on his mother: not rain, snow, sleet, hail, or dark of day, regular meals, Christmas, or the detonation of small nuclear devices.
So he snatched the coat from Ada’s hands. “Goodbye, Mother,” he snarled.
“Ta-ta,” she said, her eyes on her notes. “Don’t take any nickel woodwinds.”
