The Westing Game (14 page)

“These are clues?” Jake looked down on
purple waves for fruited sea.
He switched two squares of Westing Superstrength Towels. “
Purple fruited
makes more sense. How about grapes or plums?”

Grace was about to insist on
purple waves,
but plums reminded her of something. “Plum,” she said aloud. “Plum. Wasn’t the lawyer’s name Plum?”

“You’re right, Grace,” Mr. Hoo said excitedly. “You’re absolutely right.” He tore one of the clues in two:
fruit/ed.
“Ed Purple-fruit. Ed Plum!”

“We got it, we got it,” Grace cried, leaping up to embrace her partner.

“I never did trust lawyers,” Mr. Hoo shouted gleefully.

“What about the other clues:
for sea waves
?” Jake asked, but the happy, hugging and dancing, celebrating pair did not hear him.

“Boom!” said Madame Hoo, placing a plate of spareribs on the table. That word she had learned from Otis Amber.

 

 

Sandy was proud of the notebook he bought, with its glossy cover photograph of a bald eagle in flight (sort of appropriate, he explained to the judge; fits in with Uncle Sam and all that). In it he painstakingly entered the information culled from reports the private detective delivered each day to Judge Ford’s office: photostats of birth certificates, death notices, marriage licenses, drivers’ licenses, vehicular accident reports, criminal records, hospital records, school records. To these the doorman added the results of his own snooping.

“My investigator is having a difficult time getting into the not-so-public records of Westingtown,” the judge said. “We’ll have to put the Westings aside and begin with the heirs.”

“Since we’re feasting on chicken with water chestnuts,” Sandy said, “I’ll start off with the Hoos.” (Doug had delivered down.) He read aloud from his entry:

“I can take some credit for those paper innersoles,” Sandy bragged. “My feet were killing me, standing at the door all day, so I said to Jimmy: ‘Jimmy, if only somebody would invent a good innersole that didn’t take up so much room like those foam-rubber things.’ And sure enough, he did it. They’re great, I got a pair in my shoes now, wanna see?”

“No, thank you.” The judge was eating.

 

 

It was past midnight when Theo finished his homework in the dim light of the study lamp. The wind was still howling, and something (a word? a phrase?) was still eluding him. He had been studying solutions in chemistry. Solutions—that was it! The solution is simple, the will said. He was sure of it.

By changing
for
and
thee
to the numbers
four
and
three,
Theo was able to arrange the clues into a formula (whether or not it was a chemical solution, let alone the Westing solution, was another matter).

But four clue letters were left out:
isto, osit, itso, otis.
OTIS! He had it: a formula for an explosive, and the name of the murderer! He had to tell Doug.

“Where g-g-gogin?”

“Shhh!” Theo smoothed the blanket over his sleepy brother in the next bed, struggled into his bathrobe, and stumbled over the wheelchair as he tiptoed out of the room.

The elevator made too much noise, use the stairs. The cement was cold, he had forgotten his slippers. Two unmarked doors, which one? Tap, tap. Tap. A grunting voice, dragging footsteps. Please, let it be Doug, not Mr. Hoo or Judge Ford.

It was Crow. Clutching a robe about her gaunt frame, her unknotted hair hanging long and limp, she tried to focus her dulled eyes on the shocked face of her visitor. “Theo! Theo! The wind, I heard the wind. I knew you would come.”

“Me?”

Grasping his hand, she pulled him into the maid’s apartment between 4C and 4D and shut the door. “We are sinners, yet shall we be saved. Let us pray for deliverance, then you must go to your angel, take her away.”

Theo found himself kneeling on the bare floor next to the praying Crow. He must be dreaming.

“Amen.”

IT WAS FLORA Baumbach who braided Turtle’s hair now, sometimes in three strands, sometimes four, sometimes twined with ribbons, while Turtle read
The Wall Street Journal.

“Listen to this: ‘The newly elected chairman of the board of Westing Paper Products Corporation, Julian R. Eastman, announced from London where he is conferring with European management that earnings from all divisions are expected to double in the next quarter.’”

“That’s nice,” Flora Baumbach said, not understanding a word of it.

Turtle gave the order for the day. “Listen carefully. As soon as you get to the broker’s office I want you to sell AMO, sell SEA, sell MT, and put all the money into WPP. Okay?”

Oh my! That meant selling every stock mentioned in their clues and buying more shares of Westing Paper Products—at a loss of some thousands of dollars. “Whatever you say, Alice, you’re the smart one.”

Flora Baumbach’s hands were gentle, they never hurried or pulled a stray hair. Flora Baumbach loved her, she could tell. “I like when you call me Alice,” Turtle said, “but I better not call you Mrs. Baumbach anymore, because of the bomb scare, you know.” Calling her Flora would spoil everything. “Maybe I could call you Mrs. Baba?”

“Why not just Baba?”

That’s exactly what Turtle (Alice) wanted to hear. “Was your daughter, Rosalie, very smart, Baba?”

“My, no. You’re the smartest child I ever met, a real businesswoman.”

Turtle glowed behind
The Wall Street Journal.
“I bet Rosalie baked bread and patched quilts and dumb stuff like that.”

The dressmaker’s sure fingers fumbled over the red ribbons she was weaving into a four-strand braid. “Rosalie was an exceptional child. The friendliest, lovingest . . .”

Turtle crumpled the newspaper. “Let’s go. I’m late for school and you’ve got that big trade to make.”

“But I haven’t finished tying the ribbons.”

“Never mind, I like them hanging.” Turtle felt like kicking somebody, anybody, good and hard.

 

 

Sandy was not at the door when they left. He was in apartment 4D neatly writing in his patriotic notebook information gathered on the next heir.

Sandy turned to a fresh page, propped his feet on the judge’s desk, and began to read the data supplied by the private investigator on Otis Amber. He laughed so hard he nearly fell off the tilting chair.

 

 

Haunted by last night’s dream, Theo jogged behind his partner halfway to the high school before he uttered a breathless “Stop!”

Doug Hoo stopped.

“Who lives in the apartment next to yours?”

“Crow. Why?”

“Nothing.” How come he didn’t know that? Because no one ever wonders where a cleaning woman lives, that’s why. But he wasn’t like that, was he? Still, it must have been a dream. In the dream, the nightmare, Crow had given him a letter, but the only thing he found in his bathrobe pocket this morning was a Westing Paper Hankie. “Hey, wait!” Doug had started off again. “I figured out our clues. Ammonium nitrate. It’s used in fertilizers, explosives, and rocket propellants.”

“I knew those clues were a pile of fertilizer,” Doug replied, jogging easily. Only one thing mattered: Saturday’s big track meet. If he won or came in a fast second he’d have his pick of athletic scholarships. He didn’t need the inheritance.

“Stand still and listen.” Theo grabbed Doug by the shoulders and held him flat-footed to the ground. “Like it or not we’re partners, and you’ve got to do your share.”

“Sure,” Doug replied. His father was angry, his partner was angry, and a bomber was blowing up Sunset Towers floor by floor. Some game! “What do you want me to do?”

“Follow Otis Amber.”

 

 

Head tilted back, Flora Baumbach squirted drops in her eyes, blinked, and stared again at the moving tape.

“Oh my!” Westing Paper Products had jumped four and a quarter, no, four and a half points. Her eyes must be blurry from the medicine. The dressmaker sat on the edge of her chair, biting her fingernails, waiting for WPP to cross the board again. There: WPP $40. Oh my, oh my! This morning she had paid thirty-five dollars a share. There it goes again: WPP $40¼. Oh my, oh my, oh my!

 

 

After classes, instead of running around the indoor track, Doug Hoo jogged out of the gym to the shopping center six blocks away. There was Otis Amber, placing two cake boxes in the compartment of his bike. He picked up a package from the butcher shop, and pedaled off, unaware of the sweat-suited figure trotting half a block behind him, and went into Sunset Towers to make his deliveries.

“Hi, Doug. Gonna run the mile under four minutes on Saturday?” the doorman asked.

“Sure hope so. Do me a favor, Sandy, give a loud whistle when Otis Amber comes out. Okay?”

Chip-toothed Sandy gave such a loud whistle that Otis Amber would have been deafened if the flaps of the aviator’s helmet had not been snug against his ears.

Leaving his bicycle in the parking lot, Otis Amber boarded a bus. Doug ran the five uphill miles to a house with the placard: E. J. Plum, Attorney. He ran another three uphill miles after the bus that took the delivery boy to the hospital entrance.

Doug sank down in a waiting-room chair, wiped his face on his sweatshirt and picked up a magazine. Fascinated by the centerfold picture, he almost missed Otis Amber, who dashed out of the hospital as though fleeing for his life.

Hiding behind parked cars, Doug followed the delivery boy to another bus, ran four steep miles to a stockbroker’s office (how is it that all roads go uphill?), from the broker to the high school, from the high school (downhill, at last) back to Sunset Towers.

The exhausted track star leaned against the side of the building, thankful he was not a long-distance runner.

“I gotcha!” Otis Amber poked a skinny finger into Doug’s ribs. “He-he-he,” he cackled, handing the startled runner a letter. “It’s from that lawyer Plum. Says all the heirs gotta be at the Westing house this Saturday night. Sign here.”

With his last ounce of energy he wrote
Doug Hoo, miler
on the receipt, then slid down the wall to a weary squat. Some miler. His feet were blistered; his muscles, sore; he could barely breathe, he might never run another step in his life.

 

 

On receiving the notice of the Westing house meeting, Judge Ford canceled her remaining appointments and hurried home. Time was running out.

Sandy read to her from his notebook:

“I would’ve guessed Otis had an IQ of minus ten,” Sandy said with a smile.

“Go on to the next heir,” the judge replied.

“That’s awful complicated, I know,” the doorman apologized, “but it’s the best I could do.”

SYDELLE PULASKI.
Age: 50. Education: high school, one year secretarial school. Secretary to the president of Schultz Sausages. Is taking her first vacation in 25 years (six months’ saved-up time). Lived with widowed mother and two aunts until she moved to Sunset Towers. Walked with a crutch even before she broke her ankle in the second bombing. Now needs two crutches (she paints them!).