Grime and Punishment

VanDyne only inches behind her, raised her arm in its cast and swung it at Jane’s head.
    Jane ducked, and Mary Ellen, her fierce swing unstopped, spun around and into VanDyne’s arms. She struggled with insane strength for a moment, then suddenly seemed to crumple with exhaustion. Within seconds three men, including Uncle Jim, had hold of her, and VanDyne was barking into a walkie-talkie he’d taken out of his jacket pocket.
    Behind them, a man in a Happy Helper uniform was coming down the stairs. His wig had gone askew and the stuffing in his shirt had shifted and he had one “breast“ down at his waist. He was rubbing his throat. The “Tit for Tat“ man was gallantly helping Suzie up from her position behind the sofa. Jane could hear sirens in the distance.
    Mary Ellen’s face, as she raised her head and looked at Jane, was flushed. There were stark, white marks around her lips and nose. “You bitch! You knew all along, didn’t you? I should have realized you couldn’t be as dumb as you always act.”
    Jane felt seared by the venom in her voice. She turned away, shaking.
    Edith was being led down the steps by a uniformed officer. She shook off his arm and shambled over to Mary Ellen. There was both hate and arrogance in her voice. “You think she’s stupid! I never had it so easy as with you. If you ever get out of the clink again, you better not keep a scrapbook about your escape.“
    “Scrapbook?“ Jane said. “Scrapbook! Of course. I thought she was cutting coupons, but she was adding newspaper articles about the murder to it.”
    A siren whooped to a stop in front of the house.
    “ Did you know all along?“ Suzie asked her twenty minutes later when Mary Ellen and Edith had been taken away. Uncle Jim had gone along to get her booked. Mel VanDyne had stayed back with two officers who were filling out forms and putting things into little plastic bags. VanDyne had spent most of the intervening time on the phone, talking in an incomprehensible verbal shorthand. The man in the Happy Helper uniform was waiting for someone to bring his own clothes to him. Shelley had made him an ice pack for his throat.
    “No, of course I didn’t know all along,“ Jane replied. “But I see why Mary Ellen thought so. That morning, before it all happened, I went over there and said something about how I’d never had any bones broken, but I once pretended I did and made myself a plaster cast.“
    “Which is exactly what she’d done,“ Shelley added.
    “So that’s what tipped you off?“ Suzie asked.
    “Oh, no, that didn’t occur to me until I was driving back here. What made me realize it had to be her was dropping a bowl. Two bowls, actually. When Shelley and I cleaned out the refrigerator, I lost my grip on that big ceramic bowl of hers and dumped potato salad all over the kitchen. We should have both realized that if it was that hard to keep hold of the thing with two good hands, it would be absolutely impossible to keep a grip on it with one. It was heavy and slippery.“
    “And then there was the way it was in the refrigerator,“ Shelley said. “She put it in at the bottom of the stack of dishes because it was the biggest and heaviest—and probably to make it seem like it had gotten there first, even though she said she’d come right after you, Suzie. That meant she had to take the other things that had come first out, slide hers clear in, and put the others back. She couldn’t have done it with her arm the way she claimed it was.“
    “I still don’t really get it,“ Suzie said. “I had a broken arm once and I got used to doing all sorts of things with it. I used the cast almost like a tool. Pushing things around with it. Balancing things on it—”
    Jane took the last crumpled cigarette out of the pack in her purse, and was irritated to notice that she was still shaking so badly she could hardly light it. “But that’s when you got used to it. She was claiming to have only broken it the day before. And when I was over there that morning, she was doing a convincing job of acting like it was so excruciatingly painful that she couldn’t so much as lift a recipe card with that hand. Besides, she went too far in making the story convincing, and told me how a man at the grocery store had been so nice and drove her to the Oakview Community Hospital to have her arm set. There isn’t a hospital in Oakview.“
    “Also, the bowl had a plate for a lid,“ Shelley said. “It didn’t even fit