#full disclosure: this is an adapted version of Agatha Christie's After the Funeral

[effectivedetectivc-blog]

Care to tell us about one of your more interesting cases?

     “Well…” The hesitation was a formality, and he knew it. He was completely aware that he’d become the very pinnacle of a stereotypical elderly New Englander - always ready to reminisce and spin out a yarn to anybody who would listen, or nobody at all. “Guess there are a few that come to mind. Missing persons work is my specialty, of course, but I get homicide cases occasionally, and I got called in on a real wild card about ten years ago. Biggest web of false leads, family politics and lies I ever stuck my foot in. Might want to take a seat, it’s a long one:”

     “It all started with just about the oldest family left in Massachusetts. The Van Burens go way back, before the War - made all their money in steel during the arms race with China, and that estate out on the coast held up real well after the fallout. They were rich enough to get the place set up with some pretty nice defenses, and a good three generations of ‘em survived the bombs in a shelter under the mansion, ended up striking it rich a second time when they came out and started setting up trade caravans through Bunker Hill. Guess a head for business ran in the family, but by the time I came along most of ‘em were just living off the work of the previous generations, letting the wheels turn and pulling in the profits - whole family of post-apocalyptic trust fund babies. Last one of ‘em with any real industry was the patriarch, Alphonse Van Buren, and he’d been dead in the ground three weeks when I got there. Turned out to be his will that started all the trouble, but that wasn’t the half of it.”

     “Make of the family fell out this way: Al’s brother George, his younger brother’s widow, Lacey, his late sister’s son, Gordon, and daughters, Jane and Carol, along with their fellas, and “Aunt Mabel”, only member of the family to get ghoulified after the bombs dropped, who’d drop by and check on things every ten years or so, and another ghoul, her gal Helen. All of ‘em showed up after Al kicked the bucket hoping they’d be the beneficiary, and it went down about how you’d expect, nobody getting what they thought they deserved and every one ticked off about it. Nothing for me to get involved in, there, but the night Al’s legal man from Bunker Hill read out the will, Mabel lets it slip that she knows he was murdered - hadn’t been a reason to think it before, just seemed like an old man with failing health finally gave up the ghost, but day after that she turns up hacked to death with a fireman’s axe in her shack.”

     “I’d helped Bernard, the estate manager, out of a bind a few years back, and he recommended me to the family. Naturally, everybody there suspects everybody else of the murders, trying to get at a bigger slice of the old man’s fortune, and they want me to get to the bottom of it, so I start sniffing around. Turns out nobody had an alibi that held together, and every damn one of them had motive to give Al the boot except for Mabel and her lady love: George was peeved the whole sum didn’t go to him, as the remaining eldest, Lacey had cancer and needed the money for treatment, Gordon was a gambler in a bad way with the Triggermen, Jane was a failing singer trying to make a name for herself, her man Don had tried his hand at acting before figuring out you can’t make money at it when the theaters are all ferals and rubble, Carol married into poverty for love and found out the lack of luxury didn’t sit well with her, and her guy Mike had lost his rep as a medic after slipping a customer some bad drugs for being rude to him. Seemed obvious somebody had overdosed the old man on his Med-X slowly hoping to make out in the will, then took after Mabel when she seemed like she knew more than she should and might let the cat out of the bag, but with seven suspects all at each other’s throats, I had my work cut out for me.”

     “First thing I did was head by Aunt Mabel’s shack to case the scene and get a word in with Helen. The thing had obviously been made to look like a raider attack - violence of the method, plenty of her possessions made off with, but thing is, somebody had taken the time to make sure Helen wasn’t around, none of the stolen goods were worth more than a handful of caps, and I found ‘em shoved in a storm drain half a mile off the estate. Only things really worth talking about in the whole place were the old gal’s paintings - Pre-War coastal scenes done from memory, all of ‘em, and pretty good, too. Sloppy frame-job at best, though, and I had Bernard shack up with Helen in the motel on Bunker Hill - seemed to follow that if Mabel had been killed for what she might know, the perp would have good reason to suspect she’d spilled the beans to her lover as well, and she’d be the most likely target if they planned to keep covering their tracks.”

     “Carol came up most likely to benefit from Mabel’s passing - turns out Mabel had married poor herself, back in the day, and left a decent cache of caps stashed away for Carol in her own will to get her out of the red. Even worse, Bernard told me she came by the motel day after he and Helen got there to ask about anything Mabel might’ve said about what she knew about Al’s illness over lunch, tried to sweeten it up by offering her work as a cook at the Van Buren estate once things were settled. Gordon had been around too, badgering Bernard about the caps Carol was due to come into, but things got dicey later that night when Helen went down with a heart attack - somebody’d slipped some Jet into her Fancy Lads, but they must not’ve known too much about ghouls and chems, and she pulled through, came around soon enough to tell me Carol had passed on dessert at lunch. But why would she have killed Al at the start? She didn’t stand to benefit more than anybody else in the family. Something smelled fishy - figuratively speaking, of course.”

     “So there I was, two murders and another attempt on my hands, a few likely suspects coming up, but about as far from the truth as I’d been to start with - and now I was on a timetable, no way to tell when the killer might try again, or who they might go after next. That’s when Lacey came to me - the dying old widow. She told me something had struck her funny during the reading of the will, something about somebody there, but the pain came on hard before she could get hold of it, and I gave her my frequency so she could radio me when she was back on her feet and it came to her. She went to bed, and I headed back over to the main estate to keep an eye on things while the family bickered over the furniture, trying to get a fix on anything out of place. I kept getting the sense something wasn’t quite right, but I couldn’t get the pieces together, couldn’t figure out how all the inconsistencies added up.”

     “Lacey radioed me that night, told me she’d figured out what it was she’d forgotten, who had been behaving out of character during the reading - then the line went dead. I beat feet out to her house on the property as fast I could, and she was alive, thank Christ, but somebody’d bludgeoned her over the head with a blunt instrument. I got her out to Bunker Hill to see one of the docs down that way, and had Bernard hire on some mercs to keep an eye on she and Helen this time. Then I got to thinking about what she’d said, and something clicked - and I decided on a gamble. I had Bernard head back out to Mabel’s shack, and got the rest of the family together at the estate.”

     “I told them I was about fed up with their uncooperative bullshit, that everybody who was above suspicion was safe in Bunker Hill, and that I’d be heading that way myself until somebody decided they were ready to get down to brass tacks and talk straight with me about what they really knew. Put all their backs up, of course, but that was the point. Turns out Helen was the first to come to me - she was feeling better already, and she told me she’d overheard some talk over the HAM radio between Mabel and Alphonse before he died, something about not being able to turn on his own niece. More fingers pointing at Carol. Then Don bursts in, not even half an hour later, and confesses to the whole damned thing, claimed Al had humiliated him, blamed him for pulling Jane into a dead-end career and ruining her prospects, made him feel like dirt, and he decided to bump him off to avenge his pride and get Jane her part of the inheritance.”

     “Of course, then Jane comes running in and puts up his alibi, and it’s rock solid. The guy was putting on a drama, playing for attention, maybe trying to get himself on the news to boost his acting career, knowing the evidence would prove him innocent after the fact. Mike came in after to set out his own real alibi - turned out he was cheating on Carol with a working girl in Goodneighbor, and he’d been out with her at the time. No guarantee she’d give honest testimony if he’d paid her, but the fella was wrecking his marriage to prove his innocence. Turns out Carol knew the whole time, and she’d been out of reach at the time of Mabel’s murder because she was tailing him - and that I got confirmed from Ham at The Third Rail. Trustworthy guy so long as you don’t treat him like a talking doorstop, and Carol had some ideas to put to me about Gordon poking around Mabel’s place for the cache of caps.”

     “So the storm of testimony blows in, and right in the middle of the thing Bernard gets me on the radio and confirms what I’d already suspected, and everything came together. I got on the HAM radio and let the Van Burens know I had the whole thing figured, and got them all out to Bunker Hill so there wouldn’t be shooting when I opened up Pandora’s box. Here’s how it was:”

     “Alphonse Van Buren dies suddenly, and Aunt Mabel claims he was murdered. Next day she’s violently killed, presumably for what she knew, and two days after that her dame, Helen, suffers a failed poisoning. The first question was who could have gotten the poison to her, up in Bunker Hill, and that came down to Bernard, Gordon, and Carol - but Carol had an alibi for Mabel’s death, so she wouldn’t have had reason to come after Helen, Gordon had been at the Van Buren estate at the time, being turned over for breaking into Mabel’s place, and Bernard was never in the running. Funny enough, but here’s where a little something comes in I noticed earlier, but hadn’t mentioned yet: Mabel’s paintings. All done from memory before the War, but there was a problem: one of them showed the Bunker Hill Memorial Bridge - but not the way it’d been before the bombs dropped. It got remodeled when Nick’s dad was still a kid, and Mabel had only been thirty-five when she turned ghoul. There was no way she could have seen it herself that way - she would’ve had to have done it from a photo, maybe a postcard, and that struck me even funnier than the issue with the poisoning.”

     “Set that aside for a minute, and think about this: if Mabel hadn’t said anything about it, there never would’ve been a reason to think old Al had died of anything but natural causes. Even that might’ve been dismissed, if Mabel hadn’t turned up dead the next day, and Helen’s “accident” right after. Then I asked myself: if Mabel only came around every ten or fifteen years to check in on the family line, how well could any of them have really known her? Lacey was the only one who’d been in regular contact, and she’d told me she’d noticed something out of place - but she was still down with a concussion, and it had to be because of what she’d picked up on. And there’s where it all came together.”

     “Aunt Mabel’s only purpose coming to that reading was to plant the suspicion of Al’s murder, but I examined the corpse, and I saw something the docs didn’t pick up on: she’d been dead over a week. Most humans couldn’t tell, with a ghoul - probably wouldn’t think twice about her eyes getting eaten by bloatfly maggots, with all the rot, but the maggots had already hatched and gone when I examined the body. Over a week. So who came to the reading of the will? The answer was simple: the only person who could’ve conceivably looked and sounded like her, with the right wig and clothes, and the only person who would’ve known her well enough to fake her mannerisms almost well enough to pass as her. Helen, the only other person who would have been in a position to poison the cakes she ate, and who would have known anything less than Ultra-Jet wouldn’t kill her.”

     “But why kill Alphonse Van Buren? Easy: she didn’t. Al died of natural causes, just the way it looked, and Helen jumped on the opportunity to throw off suspicion that she might have killed Aunt Mabel, in case Lacey checked in and didn’t buy that raiders had come by in the night and just happened to catch Helen out of the house. Then she poisons herself to throw the scent off further, and sets it up to cast suspicion on Carol - but she didn’t count on Ham being able to vouch for her.”

     “But why bother? Why kill the woman she’d been partners with for almost ten years, and why make it so goddamned complex? I couldn’t figure that until I fixed on the painting. Mabel had made it to look out of place, but only to somebody who’d been around long enough to notice the difference. So I sent Bernard to have a look at it, since Helen hadn’t been able to get at it while under watch in Bunker Hill, and Gordon had been caught after she’d sent him, but before he could get his hands on it either. Sure enough, take it out of the frame and what do you find? Schematics of the Van Buren estate, showing the location of a subterranean vault. Turns out there was a whole mess of valuables down there that only Mabel was still around to know about, including about twenty gold bars by the invoice on the schematic, and after Al passed she’d decided it was finally time to let the family know. And of course, she told Helen. And Helen got greedy.”

     “She decided she’d take the gold for herself, and killing off Mabel, replacing her, then getting herself embroiled in a murder scandal would get her into the estate - even if she’d had to wait, Carol offered her a job as the family cook and housekeeper, which would have kept her close enough to take the gold as soon as it was safe. She had good reason to hate all of them: aside from Lacey and Jane, just about all of them were rotten one way or the other, and they had too much money on their hands already, not to mention they thought they were so charitable, offering to let a ghoul be their servant when they couldn’t even tell the difference between one and another. I’d say there was as much spite in there as greed. So she took an axe to Mabel one night while she was sleeping - she wouldn’t have jumped out of bed when the door was broken down if the attack came from inside, and she was already dead when Helen did it - and took her spare wig and clothes, and off she went to cash in.”

     “Helen cracked and pulled a pistol once she knew she had no way out, and the mercs Bernard had hired on took her out before she could hurt anybody. Not the way I would’ve preferred to end things, but after what she did to Mabel and Lacey, I can’t say it was undeserved, and that closed the case.”

     “As for the gold, there wasn’t anybody left alive who knew the code to the vault, and the security was too advanced to break through. The family would have to demolish the whole damned house if they wanted even a dream of getting it open, and I figured about the same as Helen had - that the Van Burens didn’t need or deserve that gold anyhow. Better to let ‘em live knowing it was right under their noses, but always out of their reach. I had a talk with Ham and got Jane a gig at The Third Rail, and that cache of caps nobody ever found…well, Lacey found herself a nice doctor up in D.C., away from that mess, and nobody needs to know how she got the money to make the trip. I didn’t end up getting paid, of course, but at that point I was glad to put the whole mess behind me, and Bernard managed to get me some rare servos through the caravans to keep my knees together another decade or two.”

     “I couldn’t save Mabel, but at least she got some justice in the end. You always hope for a happy ending, no snags, no complications, but there ain’t much that comes up roses in the Commonwealth these days. I head out and put a few hubflowers on Mabel’s grave every year, just in case. Figure she deserves somebody who cares that she’s gone.”

     “And that’s it. The whole story. ‘Foul deeds will rise, Though all the earth o'erwhelm them, to men’s eyes.’”