The Weekend Was Murder by Joan Lowery Nixon

of the pack of sleuths, but it wasn’t until we were inside one of the elevators, headed for the nineteenth floor, that I said to Fran, “Mr. Walters may be the man who murdered Mr. Devane. We have to find Detective Jarvis.”
    “I don’t get it,” Fran said. “If Walters is the murderer, why didn’t he just leave the hotel?”
    “Think about it. Being part of the mystery-weekend group is a perfect cover for him. Who’d suspect any of the sleuths of committing a real murder? Especially when the victim has no connection at all with anybody at the mystery weekend?”
    “You may be right,” Fran said. “We definitely have to talk to Detective Jarvis.”
    We caught Jarvis just as he was leaving the scene of the crime. He was carrying Mrs. Duffy’s dressmaker’s dummy, and Mrs. Duffy was with him, her arms filled with odds and ends, which were undoubtedly her clues.
    “Detective Jarvis,” I began.
    Jarvis ignored me, he was so relieved at seeing Fran.“I’m glad you’re here,” he said. “You can be the dead body. Mrs. Duffy was insisting that
I
do it.”
    “I don’t want to be a dead body,” Fran told him.
    “Could I say something?” I asked.
    “All you have to do is lie on the floor,” Mrs. Duffy told Fran. “I’ll draw your outline on the rug with narrow masking tape. You’ll be a stand-in for Edgar Albert Pitts.”
    “As you can see, we’re juggling rooms,” Jarvis said. “The new scene of the crime room is going to be located in the Duffys’ room, and Mr. Parmegan is moving the Duffys to a room on the eighteenth floor.”
    “I am going to miss that lovely suite,” Mrs. Duffy said.
    “I hate to interrupt,” I began, then said, “No. I want to interrupt. It’s important to interrupt. Detective Jarvis, I think I know who murdered Mr. Devane.”
    As I explained my reasoning, Jarvis shoved the dummy into Fran’s hands, grabbed my elbow, and steered me toward the elevators. “You can I.D. him for me,” he said.
    I guess I expected a big commotion as Detective Jarvis confronted Mr. Walters—or whoever he was—but it didn’t work that way. As soon as I had pointed out Mr. Walters, Detective Jarvis slipped through the crowd, spoke to Mr. Walters quietly, and the two of them moved toward me.
    It wasn’t until we were back inside the elevator that Mr. Walters slumped against the back wall for support and said, “You want to talk to me about Frank Devane, don’t you! Well, I didn’t kill him!”
    I gasped, and Jarvis said, “You know him, and you know he’s been murdered.”
    “All right. I admit that much,” Mr. Walters said. He was sweating so much, his shirt was getting damp. “When this girl ran out of the elevator yelling that she found a body, I thought she meant Devane. I couldn’t believe it happened so fast.” He threw me an angry look and said, “I was just going to walk quietly away from the hotel, and no one would have known the difference, but when she ran into me, making all that racket, it caught everyone’s attention. Somebody would have remembered me.”
    “Mrs. Bandini did,” I offered, but got nothing more than another sharp glance for my trouble.
    Mr. Walters wasn’t through. “I nearly panicked,” he said, “but when I found out those people were playing a mystery game, I decided to join them. That would be my reason for being in the hotel, and no one would connect me with Devane.”
    “Would you like to call an attorney and have him present while I question you?” Jarvis asked.
    Mr. Walters groaned and wiped an arm across his forehead. “You have to believe me. Devane was dead when I got there.”
    “What were you doing on the nineteenth floor?”
    The elevator’s door suddenly opened, and we stepped out into the hallway. Mr. Walters shrunk back, cringing as he looked at the door of room nineteen twenty-seven.
    “I came up here to speak to Devane.”
    “Business?”
    “Yes, business. The savings and loan he owned went under, you know, and so