Quote 1
"They say his corpse is still up there in that big old house. They say his body is sprawled out on a fancy Oriental rug, and his flesh is rotting off those mean bones, and maggots are creeping in his eye sockets and crawling out his nose holes." (2.10)
As stories within stories go, this one's pretty gnarly – and effective. Before long, just about every character is retelling a garbled version of it, perpetuating the myth that Westing is long dead, or that his death is believable, and also pushing Turtle into going into what seems like a haunted house. The story gets even creepier when we find out Sandy made it up and encouraged Otis to start telling it—it's an urban myth in action.
Quote 2
(Now, there's a likely suspect, Otis Amber thought. Hoo, the inventor; Hoo, the angry man, the madman.) […]
(Can't trust that dressmaker, Mr. Hoo thought. How come she's grinning at a time like this?) (16.24, 16.22)
While these lines do a great job of showing off the book's narrative structure (head over to our section "Narrator Point of View" to find out more about that, and then come back here), they also show how little each of the characters know each other. Everyone looks down on Otis as the kind of slow, elderly delivery boy, but of course he's in disguise. Isn't everyone? In the few asides we get from him we see glimpses of a much smarter person who here is coming up with a pretty good idea of a suspect with a strong motive. Then, the narrator undercuts that by telling us who that suspect suspects. Of course, Mr. Hoo is basing his assumption of Flora's possible guilt based on her inappropriate (smiling) behavior. Of the two, Otis probably has a stronger case. (Even though they're both wrong.)