Felix turned to look at her, astonished.
Myrtle turned the light back off and swung her cane at Felix, hard. She connected to him somewhere and he let out a stream of profanity and lurched toward her. Myrtle swung again at him, making contact but not nearly as hard. She stumbled away to run toward the living room and front door.
Her knowledge of her home’s layout was a plus and she carefully skirted any objects in her way, hurrying toward the door. The profanity behind her grew louder as Felix ran into Myrtle’s armchair. Then he started screaming and Myrtle glanced behind her to see that Pasha had leaped from Myrtle’s desk onto Felix’s back and was screeching about as loudly as Felix was.
To her great relief, Miles appeared from the hallway, glasses askew and eyes wide.
“Call Red!” said Myrtle as Felix tore Pasha off of his back, stumbling almost drunkenly in the process and crashing into Elaine’s hideous gnome. He hit the floor with a resounding thud, knocking his head against Myrtle’s coffee table as he went down.
“People is clumsy,” said Myrtle thoughtfully, remembering what Wanda said. And then, “No hurry, Miles. He’s seeing stars. And I want to talk to him for a few minutes before Red comes over.”
Felix groaned from the floor.
“Don’t try anything, Felix. Miles and I make a formidable team. I would give you a glass of water, but since you’re an uninvited guest, I think we’ll just skip the formalities. Plus the fact that you tried to kill Miles, of course.”
Miles, considering he was so close to death, seemed only mildly miffed.
“I wasn’t trying to kill Miles,” said Felix coldly.
Myrtle said, “Oh, I know. You were trying to kill me. Quite unsuccessfully, I might add. And you must have gotten a lot of bumps and bruises from climbing in the kitchen window. That was only meant to be a portal for Pasha.”
Felix didn’t answer.
“The nice thing is, that you so solidly incriminated yourself. Attempted murder of Miles with me as witness? What a mess. You see, all I really had was circumstantial evidence,” said Myrtle.
Felix remained sulkily silent.
Miles said, “I’d like to hear the circumstantial evidence. A lot must have happened while I was asleep.”
“Not much, actually. Short conversations with Bonnie and Tippy. What did happen is that I had a series of epiphanies,” said Myrtle.
“Which were?” asked Miles.
Felix’s normally friendly face scowled at Myrtle.
“That Felix wasn’t good at telling the truth. He lied about playing football with Chester in high school, for one.”
Felix’s eyes glinted. “That was a slight exaggeration. Hardly a criminal offense.”
“You’re not really the most coordinated person, so I should have guessed earlier that you weren’t telling the truth. You also lied about Louvenia. You said that you wanted to speak to her about a volunteer project at the church. But Tippy Chalmers, who knows everything about what goes on at the church, said you weren’t very involved over there. Another example of your not telling the truth,” said Myrtle.
“White lies,” shrugged Felix, sitting up cautiously. “The kind of thing most politicians do. I merely was avoiding a lengthy explanation.”
“Of course, there was the fact that you hustled Louvenia out of my dinner party very quickly to make sure no one got help for her,” added Myrtle.
Felix didn’t even try to argue this point. His face was drawn and exhausted and he gave another shrug.
Myrtle adopted her former schoolteacher voice again and Felix straightened up a bit on the floor. “You mentioned that Chester was resentful of your success, but wasn’t it the other way around? You took the time and effort to get a college degree and, if I remember correctly, even graduate work. But he made a fortune without those things. Did that make you feel as if you’d put in the time and effort and deserved to do better than Chester?”
Felix said in a tired voice, “Of course it did. I put in an investment in education and deserved the outcome I had.”
Miles said, “But he put in an investment, too. His investment was just physically hard work instead of education.”
“So you already felt resentful of him, and then it was really the icing on the cake when he didn’t even support his old school friend in the local election. You expected his support. After all, if one of your friends didn’t support you, what did that say about your qualifications? You probably started off being low-key about it, didn’t you? But then Chester escalated it by laughing at you. Plus, Chester pushed back. We heard that he threatened you with blackmail,” said Myrtle.
Felix’s lips tightened. “He happened to see me with someone. He simply misinterpreted what he’d seen.”
Miles said, “But a misinterpretation could really cost you, couldn’t it? All the campaign signs and literature that I’ve seen portray you as a big family man.”
“You were desperate to keep Chester quiet about your affair. Especially this late in the campaign. So instead, you took the opportunity to kill him after class.” Myrtle paused, looking thoughtfully at Felix. Dressed in carefully-pressed dark slacks and a pastel button-down showing under a dark jacket, it was hard to picture him with a pillow over Miles’s face. She went on in a harsher voice, “He was probably expecting an argument, not being murdered by you. You don’t look like a killer. The element of surprise would have worked in your favor, since Chester was a much larger man than you are.”
“Size wasn’t a factor in Louvenia’s death, though,” noted Miles.
“No, it wasn’t. And poisoning ... I’m surprised you went in that direction. I’d have thought you’d have been much more likely to do what you just tried with Miles. Smothering doesn’t really leave much of a trace, does it? It would look as though he’d just passed away in his sleep.”
Miles gave a small shiver.
“But after a friendly conversation with Bonnie before class one day, you realized that antifreeze could be an effective poison. What’s more, it’s easily accessible to everyone. I bet if Red widens the search to out of town stores, he’ll discover that you made a purchase of antifreeze in anticipation of my dinner party. Probably purchased in one of those big box stores far away where no one would have known who you were,” said Myrtle. She shook her head. You should have followed the advice in your horoscope: avoid leaving town.
Miles said, “And you chose the dinner party when all the other suspects would be there.”
“A stroke of genius on my part,” said Felix in that same, tired voice.
Myrtle couldn’t tell if he was being sarcastic or not. She continued, “How did Louvenia know it was you who killed Chester? Did you think that she’d gone for the day and then, when she returned, she caught you trying to wipe down the meat thermometer for prints?”
Felix gave a short laugh. “I don’t know. That’s what must have happened, I suppose. She never told me how she knew. But she wasn’t bluffing—she definitely knew.”
“And then she tried blackmailing you with the information. The same method that got Chester killed. You must have felt that you had only one choice,” said Miles thoughtfully.
Myrtle said, “You were probably trying to figure out how to get rid of Louvenia when two things happened almost simultaneously. You received an invitation from me for a class dinner party and Bonnie Pendergrass told you about the antifreeze poisoning incident in her book club selection.”
“And that took care of Louvenia’s blabbing,” said Miles. “What I’m still not clear on is why you tried to murder Myrtle a few minutes ago.”
Pasha growled at Felix from the doorway, her eyes gleaming with fury.
Felix sighed. “A moment of madness? I had dinner downtown and decided to leave my car down there and take a walk to clear my head. I passed your house and all the lights were off. None of the neighbors were out and about and it was totally quiet on the street. I walked around the back of the house and saw you had a window open.”
“But why?” asked Miles.
“Because, Miss Myrtle was the toughest teacher I ever had, and that counts grad school. She was determined, stubborn, dogged. There was a paper that I didn’t hand in once.” He laughed. “Miss Myrtle had a zero-tolerance policy on late work. The paper was already late and I knew I was going to get a zero on it, so why turn it in? But she made me turn it in. Said it was important that I knew how to write a paper and not stall on writing one simply because I wasn’t sure how to start. She kept on me and kept on me and I turned it in,” said Felix.
“And she gave you a good grade?” asked Miles, always one to look for the happy ending.
“No, I gave him a zero,” said Myrtle sharply. “It was my policy. But that didn’t mean he didn’t have to do the same amount of work as everyone else in the class.”
Miles said, “I’m confused. The research paper made you decide to smother Myrtle in her sleep?”
“The research paper incident made me realize that Miss Myrtle was like a dog with a bone. She doesn’t give up. She’s the perfect investigative reporter for the newspaper because she’s completely bullheaded. Plus, I thought she was starting to see the truth. The last thing I needed was for her to uncover two murders,” said Felix.
“My son is pretty bullheaded, too. I think you’d have found that Red would have been on your trail, even if you had succeeded. But let’s find out how close he was to figuring it out,” said Myrtle.
And Miles made the phone call.
Red was over there immediately in a hastily-pulled-on and wrinkled uniform. He secured Felix and called Lieutenant Perkins.
“Really, Felix? You were trying to kill my mother?” he asked in disgust after he got off the phone with the state police.
Miles said, “And doing a remarkably poor job of it, if it’s any consolation.”
Myrtle said, “We left the crime scene as-is, so you could see how everything transpired.”
Red’s gaze went from the bruises and cuts on Felix to the hideous gnome with the now-broken hands to the askew armchair. “It looks like a bar fight happened in here.”
“Just wait until you see the mess in the guest room. And be sure to tell Elaine that her gnome was a huge help in catching the perpetrator,” said Myrtle. “Pity it got injured.”
Red studied the gnome again and winced. “Yes, isn’t it?”
He hauled Felix to his feet and walked him out the door, past a still-growling Pasha.
“Mama, I’ll come back for a chat after I’ve booked Felix,” Red said. “You won’t be asleep, will you?”
“Hardly.” She had an important story to write for Sloan. “Shouldn’t you be asleep?” She glanced at Miles. “Red is sick with a fever.”
Miles turned pale and slowly backed away from Red. A moment later, he was patting his pockets for his bottle of hand sanitizer.
“I’ll be better soon,” said Red. “I think that antibiotic is already kicking in.”
Red left with a limping Felix.
Miles looked after them thoughtfully, rubbing the sanitizer over his hands. “You seem to have quite disabled Felix. That’s pretty impressive. He’s a good thirty years younger than you are.”
“Adrenaline,” said Myrtle with a shrug. “And sheer vexation. He was trying to kill my sidekick. What total impudence! He couldn’t be allowed to get away with it.”
“Although you were the intended victim,” reminded Miles again.
“How anyone could confuse the two of us is baffling,” said Myrtle with a snort.
“It was very dark. And there was no moon outside. A lump under the covers was probably just like any other lump under the covers,” said Miles.
“I must say it was about time. I was always the one in danger. A sidekick should pick up the slack,” said Myrtle.
“I suppose. I’ll happily let you take on the danger again next time, though. What’s next?”
Myrtle said, “I write the big scoop for the paper and call Sloan to make him fit it in as the top headline. You go to sleep and call the air conditioning guy in the morning.”
“That’s it?” asked Miles.
“Don’t tell me this case has made you an adrenalin junkie, Miles.”
Miles said, “Even though I didn’t want to sign up for the cooking class, I have to admit it did turn out to be very exciting.”
“I told you it would,” said Myrtle smugly.
“Maybe we can look at the rest of the course catalog,” said Miles. “But next time we’ll sign up for something less thrilling. And far less dangerous. Like skydiving.”