Thirteen Diamonds

a sun hat that completely covered her hair. If she had any loose ends sticking out I didn't notice them.”
    I ordered coffee and we dawdled over dessert. Finally, the ladies in question did stand up and leave, one at a time. Mark's final judgment after he watched them was that he could have delivered the lobster to either one of them.

CHAPTER 18
     
    On Wednesday morning I told Tess that I wanted to play with Harriet as a partner for that afternoon's bridge session, instead of her. She could play with Laura, Harriet's usual partner. Tess acquiesced, knowing I was up to something.
    As part of my assistantship to Wesley I numbered the partnerships and set up a schedule so that each partnership played a certain number of hands against every other partnership during the course of the afternoon. Wesley was glad to let me do this because as a retired CPA his forte was rows and columns of numbers, not logic.
    I needed two things to happen for my plan to work. One was out of my control, namely that Ida and Ellen were still partners. I could have asked Ida at dinner the night before but when I talked to her I hadn't put my plan together yet. That came after Mark expounded on deck-switching techniques. And even though I had talked to Ellen after that I wasn't about to ask her. Since Ellen and Ida had been partners for at least two years, the odds were in my favor.
    The other thing, which I had at least partial control over, was that when Harriet and I played against Ida and Ellen, we would play at the same table and in the same positions as the day of Gerald's death. I was substituting for Gerald.
    I arrived at the recreation room early and found Joe Turner, the handsome facilities manager, busily measuring with a retractable tape measure. He had his back to me and I self-consciously patted my hair and wished I didn't look like an old lady.
    I tried to think of a clever way to start a conversation, but what came out was, “Are you going to enlarge the room to hold more bridge tables?”
    Joe chuckled and turned toward me, saying, “No, we're actually going to replace some of the heating ducts below the floor, but since I don't feel like crawling around down there I'm measuring up here. Something like the guy who loses his wallet in an alley but looks for it underneath a streetlight because the light is better there.”
    I fumbled for a riposte, but before I could come up with one the other bridge players began to arrive. Joe took his clipboard and tape measure and left; I hadn't even introduced myself.
    I went to work, assigning numbers to each partnership and giving them their schedules. Fortunately, Ida confirmed that she and Ellen were playing together. I gave her the number and schedule I had prearranged for them.
    My plan was to have the critical match-up occur in the middle of the session. It was easier to do then than at the beginning and I didn't think the timing mattered, especially since we weren't eating lunch first.
    When the time came, Harriet and I were already seated at the key table from the previous round. I occupied Gerald's chair and Harriet sat where she had been on the fatal day.
    I signaled Tess, who sat at another table, during the changeover and she started talking to Ellen to delay her for a minute. I had told her she could apologize to Ellen for my behavior at lunch on Monday, if she wanted to, but I couldn't hear what she actually said.
    As Ida ambled over to our table she headed toward the wrong chair. I said, “Ida, sit over here so you can legally shuffle this deck, since Ellen has been waylaid.” I dealt first, just as Gerald had done, and I wanted Ida to shuffle, just as she had done.
    Ida complied with my request. A minute later Ellen came over and sat down in her assigned seat and placed her purse in her lap. She didn't look at me. Ida finished shuffling the cards and placed the deck on the table to my left. At that point could she have created a diversion and switched the cards? Possibly. Although Ida was a bit clumsy and it was difficult to picture her doing anything that required sleight-of-hand. And if she had accomplished the switch, Gerald would have had to deal the cards without Ellen cutting the deck, which was unlikely.
    I picked up the deck and placed it on the table to my right, inviting Ellen to cut. She cut the cards neatly and efficiently. I had always admired her dexterity, as demonstrated by the smoothness of her shuffling technique. As she cut I heard a voice in my mind