Big boo boo.

“Shut up!” she screamed, jerking her arm up and aiming the gun at my face.

I raised both my hands and didn’t say a word. The time had come to take Elsie Londergan seriously. Very, very seriously.

“You’re a real smart aleck, you know that?” she said, eyes blazing. “I wanted to kill you that first day you showed up at my place and started sticking your nosy beak in my business! But I had to wait because of the diamonds. I figured Judy’s brother had found the jewelry when he was staying in her apartment and packing up all her stuff. And then-since he’d asked you to help him find his sister’s killer-I figured you were hiding the fucking diamonds for him, or at least knew where he had hidden them.”

“You’re a very smart lady,” I said, trying to pacify her with praise. “Three giant steps ahead of me! But there’s still one thing that puzzles me. Whatever made you think that I had stashed the jewelry in the lunchbox?”

Elsie laughed. It was a wild, mean, hyena laugh. “I saw you through the window of the hardware store when I was on my way to meet you at the Green Monkey. You were buying the goddamn lunch pail and you had such a gloating, self-satisfied smirk on your face, all I could think was that you were buying it to use as a secret jewelry box. It was the perfect size, and a perfect hiding place, and what the hell else could you need the stupid thing for? Silly me,” she said, giggling. “Sure jumped to the wrong conclusion that time! Guess I’m a woman with a one-track mind.”

Hating to think where her one-track mind might lead her next, I took a deep breath and ventured on. Elsie was in a talkative mood, thank God, and I had to make the most of it. “You took a big risk pushing me in front of that train, you know. If I had been killed, you would have lost your chance to find the diamonds forever.”

“That wasn’t me!” Elsie screeched. “I would never have done a half-witted thing like that! Roscoe was the biggest blockhead on earth!”

“You mean Roscoe was the one who pushed me?” I was surprised, but not completely shocked.

“Yes indeedy!” she crowed, beginning to take pleasure in the telling of the tale. “I told Roscoe about the lunchbox, see? And then I gave him your address and told him to go downtown and watch you leave for work the next morning. After you’d gone, he was supposed to break into your apartment and look for the lunchbox and the diamonds. But when you came prancing out of your building with a goddamn shopping bag in your hand, he freaked out and abandoned the original plan. He felt he had to follow you into the subway to see what was in the bag. And when he snuck up behind you in the crowd and looked down into the bag and saw the lunchbox-shaped package… well, he just lost his moronic little mind

“He was certain the diamonds were in the package, see?” Elsie jabbered on. “And he didn’t know where you were taking them. So he thought he better grab them while he could. But he knew the minute he snatched your shopping bag you would start screaming and calling for help, maybe even chase him through the station yourself. So he had to do what he had to do. He had to wait till he heard the train coming, and then he had to grab the bag and push you down on the tracks at the same instant. That way nobody-not even you-would know what was happening, and he’d be able to make a clean getaway.”

So that’s the way it was, I groaned to myself. Just a case of being in the wrong place at the wrong time with the wrong bag… er, box. “Did Roscoe hang around to watch me get creamed?” I asked. I could imagine the little beast hovering there in the rush hour crowd, craning his skinny neck to watch me crawling on the tracks, baring his little brown teeth in eager anticipation of the bloody, bone-shattering spectacle to come.

“Sure did,” Elsie said, with a sickening grin. “And I don’t mind telling you he was really disappointed when that big Negro pulled you up to safety. If you’d been killed, Roscoe said he would have snuck off to a dark corner of the station, opened the lunchbox, and seen that the diamonds weren’t inside. Then he would have run back to your apartment, busted in through the back door, and turned the place upside down till he found them. But with you still alive, he couldn’t do that. He had to get out of there fast-before you saw him. So he just stepped on the train-the same one that almost turned you into hamburger-and came straight to my place. We opened the package together.”

What a heartwarming scene, I muttered to myself. Right up Norman Rockwell’s alley. A perfect Christmas cover for The Saturday Evening Post.

“So, that was the same wrapping paper I saw in your wastebasket!” I said, excited, so caught up in the lurid details of Elsie’s narration I was forgetting the lurid climax that loomed ahead.

“Yeah,” Elsie admitted, also engrossed. Her arm was now hanging at her side, gun pointed toward the floor. “When you ran out of my place this morning like a crazy bat out of hell, I knew you’d seen something, or thought of something, that had suddenly made you suspect me. I didn’t know what it was, though, until later, when I went into the bedroom to throw away a snotty Kleenex. And there they were, four or five wrinkled-up, red-cheeked Santa Claus faces, grinning up at me in glee, making me feel like a goddamn idiot for not emptying the trash more often.”

Elsie was starting to get agitated, so I changed the subject again. I made a sharp U-turn and bounded back to the beginning of the story, panting and wagging my tail for answers. (Curiosity killed the cat, they say, so I was doing my best to act like a dog.) “Were you and Roscoe in cahoots from the start?” I asked, begging for another bone. “Did you plan Judy’s death together?”

“Don’t make me laugh!” Elsie snapped. “I would never have willingly joined forces with that greedy little weasel. How stupid do you think I am? I killed Judy all by myself! I didn’t want to share the diamonds with anybody!”

“So what happened? How did Roscoe get involved?”

“That was the worst damn luck of all,” she said, suddenly looking very tired. She must have been feeling tired, too, because she sat down on a kitchen chair and rested her outstretched right arm-the one that was holding the gun-on the table. “About ten minutes after I shot Judy, Roscoe came up to her apartment and started knocking on the door, calling out to her to open up for the landlord. I was still there, down on my knees in her bedroom, looking for the diamonds in her bottom dresser drawer. I didn’t answer the door, of course. I just knelt there next to the dresser, not making a sound, hoping he’d give up and go away.

“My first thought was that somebody in the building had heard the gun go off, and called Roscoe to report the noise. But then I figured if somebody had heard the shots, they would have called the cops instead of Roscoe. And then I realized that even if they did call Roscoe, he wouldn’t be fool enough to dash upstairs all by himself and start knocking on the door of an apartment where he thought a gun had just been fired.”

“So why was he there?” I asked. “What did he come for?”

“Oh, he probably just stopped by to make a pass at Judy,” she said with a sneer. “He was always doing that-showing up at her place when he knew Smythe wouldn’t be there, making suggestive remarks, trying to sneak a feel. What a creep he was! Judy said he made her skin crawl.”

“So what happened next?” I urged, so eager for information I forgot I was supposed to be taking it slow. (Hey, am I a born mystery writer, or what?) “Did he go away, or did you let him in?”

“He let himself in!” she wailed. “He opened the door with his own goddamn key! I couldn’t believe my eyes. He just waltzed inside like he owned the place.”

“Well, he did, didn’t he?”