The Pinch of Death – a mystery by Alysse Aallyn

Chapter 31. Devil’s Elbow

At the library he gave her a stack of dimes and said, “Better make copies of those letters. Lady Susan might repossess them out of sheer revenge.”

“I’ve got my own dimes thank you,” she said, pushing his hand away.
The newspapers – now confined to microfilm operated by a sticky hand crank rotary machine – were bleached of both sense and sensibility.

Photos of Kleinemann and Lundt might as well have been Kabuki masks; one Obvious Old Woman and a pair of gangly dark-haired teenagers, visibly he and she. Jacquetta had better luck with the magazines, showing two pictures; one of a terrifying earth floored basement where tree trunks complete with bark held up the ramshackle house and the other of the “back yard”; a chipped cement court whose single central pole dangled a depressing wire.

The tale was soon told; the old woman tortured Ricey Kleinemann as long as she was able, beating her with a wire and confining her to the basement until the abused was old enough and big enough to become the abuser. She, as Clay Lundt asserted – or Clay, as Ricey always insisted – followed Granma’s script closely, throwing her down the basement stairs, tethering her in the yard and ultimately garroting her with a wire. Whether it was the same wire that had been used on Ricey the story did not say.

Even a town named “Devil’s Elbow” could produce enough jury members with a sneaking suspicion Granny had it coming.

The “perps” – no one bothered to ascribe superior or inferior culpability – were confined till their twenty-sixth birthdays – then Sayonara. There were no stories in any press format about their release three years ago.

“Yuck,” said Jacquetta. “What kind of a name is Ricey? I don’t know if we should even bother to have any of this copied.”

“It was Rise,” said Nelson. “German. All we need to now is whether this is any kind of a secret worth killing for.”

“They did their time,” Jacquetta said.

“But could either of them ever get a position of trust again?”

“Nobody’s the right age.” Jacquetta tried to think how old Penny Dettler was. Hard to tell – she looked thirty in some light and forty in another. “The au pair said both Avalon and her husband are having affairs with younger partners. One of them could be one of our ex-killers.”

“If we knew who they were.”

“Benson might have known. And Chester is rumored to have affairs with people he hires. Benson would have investigated all that.”

“And now he’s dead.”

In fact there were nothing but dead ends in this case, thought Jacquetta. That was obviously the way the murderer liked it.