Murder in Pastiche

by Marion Mainwaring

  Dolores Despana’s aggressive ignorance was unshaken. “I can’t imagine who it would be,” she returned, looking calmly at the little heap of stained cigarette ends.

  “I see. Thank you.… Now, Miss Despana,” Tourneur went on cheerfully, “about this ‘plug’ which Mr. Price promised to write for you: do you think he meant to keep his promise?”

  “I— It was more than a promise.” Her eyes narrowed a little. “What are you getting at? You know perfectly well that he wrote it!”

  Tourneur asked quietly: “How should I know, Miss Despana?”

  “Because—” Miss Despana’s eyes jerked wide open. A look at once of fury and of terror crossed her face; it was as if she had just sighted a peculiarly diabolical trap. She jumped to her feet. “You won’t get me mixed up in this!” she cried harshly, and flung herself out of the room.

  And it was typical of the drunken perversity of the whole case, Tourneur thought, that she should have shot out into the passageway at the precise moment when Mrs. Chip-Ebberly was passing the door, with a resulting collision which would, he thought, no doubt have been a wild hit at the Palladium.

  Mrs. Chip-Ebberly clutched at the doorpost to keep from falling as Miss Despana flounced away. She refused the seat Tourneur offered her.

  “Perhaps since you are here,” he said, “you will have the great kindness to give us one moment of your time.… You have stated, I believe, that you did not know Mr. Price. Had you any reason to suppose that he was seeking your acquaintance? For there is some evidence that he was interested in you.”

  “Fantastic!” The tone conveyed only affront as at an impropriety, and her face was guarded; but Tourneur saw her hands close convulsively on the wooden handles of her knitting-bag. She looked at the clipping Tourneur produced. A curious expression flickered across her rigid features, and when she spoke her relief was unmistakable. “I cannot imagine,” she said, “why he should have had this in his possession.”

  “Thank you very much. And you have, I suppose, no suggestions as to who might have killed Mr. Price?”

  “None,” Mrs. Chip-Ebberly replied pointedly, “other than those I have already transmitted to the Authorities.” She explained with a glance of majestic rebuke in the direction of Mr. Waggish, who ran his finger under his collar in agitation: “As I have informed the First Officer and Sir Jon. Nappleby, Mr. Price consorted with two individuals of the type who invariably figure in crimes: Mr. Anderson and a—a woman passenger.” On these last words, she glanced about the cabin with a grimness which made the two investigators suddenly conscious of a heavy scent clinging to the very bulkheads, of thick cigarette smoke, and a general aura as of some orgy just ended.

  “Lumme!” Mr. Waggish ejaculated when she had left.

  “Lumme, indeed.”

  After a moment the First Officer said rather unhappily: “You think Miss Despana did it, don’t you, Mr. Tourneur?”

  “Oh, my dear chap, I don’t especially think she killed Price! But she came here to meet him, unquestionably. And I think she will be back, and anxious to convince us that she was here. But I fancy she’ll wait till she can handle one of us alone.”

  “Oh.” Mr. Waggish digested this prophecy solemnly. “I hadn’t known,” he said presently, “that a detective had so many—so many …” He waved his hand inarticulately.

  “Emotional crises?” Tourneur sighed. “I’ve known cases where those two ladies, and the rather theatrical little Miss Price, would appear as nothing. One does need to be able to cope with them.”

  “Is that the most important qualification for being a detective, would you say, Mr. Tourneur?”

  Tourneur reflected. “That, and breeding. One always has to ask oneself, ‘How does the gentleman behave in this particular situation?’ Or—better still—‘How would a lady consider that a gentleman ought to behave in this particular situation?’” And no handbooks, no rules, no Police Colleges can teach such things, he thought. He accepted thankfully Mr. Waggish’s subsequent invitation to have a quick one before dinner in the Doctor’s cabin.

    

  They found the Doctor and the Purser comfortably ensconced among the former’s cluttered possessions. The Doctor jumped up to fetch more glasses from a cabinet under his bunk. “Well, have you solved the crime yet, Mr. Tourneur?” he asked in his homely Newcastle voice. “Cheers!”

  Mr. Waggish intervened. “Let Mr. Tourneur have a drink in peace. This voyage is a busman’s holiday for him.… Cheers!”

  Tourneur smiled. “I like to think out loud when I can comer an audience. Perhaps you’ll let me run through things.” He settled back in his chair. “Apparently only a few persons had the opportunity to obtain the weapon which killed Price: I hear you’ve definitely decided it was the cosh that did it, Doctor? Well, did these persons all have opportunity to kill him at twelve-fifteen? And did they all have motive? First off, we’ll leave Mr. Mallory King, who noticed the theft, out of consideration.”

  “Well,” Mr. Waggish said, “practically anyone on the ship had the opportunity to commit murder, at twelve-fifteen or any time whatever. No one seems to have an alibi, and it’s not to be expected they should, at night, with no regular habits, among strangers, and all.”

  “Too true.” Tourneur sighed. “Oh, for a village, where everyone knows where his neighbours belong at a given time! Well, as to motives, then. Miss Price gains financially by her uncle’s death, and she had various complicated reasons for resenting him. Anderson was being blackmailed by him but how did he get his cosh back? And Miss Despana and Mrs. Chip-Ebberly had some connection with him also. We don’t know yet if they had reason to wish him dead.”

  The Purser asked quickly: “You say Mrs. Chip-Ebberly— What could she have to do with a bloke like him?”

  “I don’t know. But I rather think,” Tourneur said, “that Mr. Price sailed on this ship because he learned she would be aboard.”

  “Not his type, I should have thought,” the Doctor muttered irreverently.

  Tourneur explained sedately: “Price cut the good lady’s picture out of a magazine on the very day he told his niece they had passage on the Florabunda. Now, Miss Price told M. Poireau that her uncle made that announcement directly after telling her that he had come upon ‘two nice pieces of business’; he was pleased about some ‘tittle-tattle.’ ‘Someone had tattled.’ I think those were the words she quoted; I have a filthy memory,” Tourneur interposed apologetically. Mr. Waggish looked at him, opened his mouth to speak, but closed it again. Tourneur continued: “Now just look at this picture of Mrs. Chip-Ebberly and her rather forbidding friends at the Bazaar. Miss Price is American and doesn’t know our society papers; but we can tell that this picture is from the Tatler! From which one deduces that it was this picture in the Tatler which had something to do with Price’s taking passage on this ship.”

  “So that he could meet Mrs. Chip-Ebberly, do you mean? I can’t believe he could have anything on her!” the Purser insisted.

  “Too much the perfect comic dowager, you think? Maybe. On the other hand, there’s that grotesque business of her stalking Anderson like a self-appointed and miscast Mata Hari. It’s so damn’ ridiculous it just might be a giant smoke screen.”

  The Doctor reached over to refill Tourneur’s glass. He asked: “And that’s the whole list, and no one has an alibi?”

  Tourneur studied him and the other two officers for a moment. He asked himself if they could really be so naïve as they appeared. “That exhausts the passengers who are suspect.” He underlined the noun. “If you’ll forgive me for being tiresome,” he went on diffidently, “I might make a note of your alibis. Just for the record—since you were all on the scene when that bothersome cosh was taken.”

  The Doctor looked blank; the Purser, uncomfortable; and the First Officer, at first surprised and then decidedly chagrined.

  “But if I’d seen who took it,” he pointed out reasonably, “I’d have said. So would these chaps. You didn’t see who took i
t, did you?” he asked them.

  The Doctor shook his head, but the Purser said drily, “Inspector Tourneur wants a bit more than that.” He eyed Tourneur curiously, almost resentfully, and Tourneur was faintly puzzled. The Purser, even if he was younger, struck him as more a man of the world than the other officers—though they all appeared, each with a certain amount of charm, to be fundamentally and almost fecklessly impractical. He said lightly:

  “Well, if this were a book, you know, I should be obliged to give a portentous frown, take out my notebook, and ask you each: ‘Where were you at quarter after midnight on the night of the murder?’”

  “We were up on the boat-deck then, Waggish,” said the Doctor. Turning to Tourneur he explained complacently: “The First was listening to ‘Tipptoppus and Gazella.’”

  Mr. Waggish hesitated. “Was it so early?’

  “Don’t you remember,” the Doctor said, “you came up at seven bells, and when the steward brought us that cocoa he said it was still just on five minutes of the hour?”

  “Aye, you’re right.”

  “And you were together every minute,” Tourneur asked, “from eleven-thirty (wouldn’t that be?) until—”

  “Every minute till nearly six bells,” said the Doctor. “I got through three cantos.”

  Mr. Waggish answered Tourneur’s interrogatory glance with a nod. He was a little grim at the recollection of three solid hours of “Tipptoppus and Gazella,” and Tourneur, who had heard about the Doctor’s epic, felt sympathetic; the more so as the Doctor now began to declaim:

  “At midnight dim and dire Sarazin called all his hosts—

  Chimaeras, elves, and demons, goblins, incubi, and ghosts,

  Werewolves and vampires, witches foul that sail upon the wind,

  Dread wizards, sorcerers, necromancers, scourges of mankind …”

  Tourneur was reminded of the Dormouse at the Mad Tea Party who fell asleep singing “Twinkle twinkle twinkle twinkle …” The Doctor’s friends did not silence him with pinches, or by thrusting his head into a teapot, but they seemed able by dint of long practice to ignore him.

  “And you, Tom?” Mr. Waggish demanded over the incantation. “After you’d left your girl and gone below, that is?”

  The Purser said “I wasn’t alone for a minute! We played cards in the Engineers’ Mess—the Chief, Sparks, the Fourth, and myself. You’ll find they confirm my alibi! We were there for hours.”

  “Nor was the noble Tippitop from their dread power secure,

  Nor by his shield of adamant, nor by his bosom pure—”

  “Anyway,” the Purser went on in a loud, tense voice, “even if I couldn’t account for every minute—which I canl—why should I have killed Price?”

  “We know you didn’t do it, you clot,” the First Officer said. He added heartlessly: “But I’ll lay Mr. Tourneur could make a case against you if he wished.”

  “Well,” Tourneur said apologetically, “in a book the detective would say: First, this chap’s alibi is too perfect. What innocent man would have every second covered by a shoal of witnesses? And then he’d say: This chap didn’t like Price. Price insulted him in a rather public place. If the insult was unjustified, there’s a motive. Or, supposing it was a true accusation, and this chap did hope to marry the wealthy niece, her fiancé being at a considerable remove—”

  The Purser’s ruddy face darkened as Tourneur elaborated this hypothesis. Now he cried: “That’s an insult to Miss Price!” Without another word he rose and hurled himself incontinently at Tourneur.

  “Belay there!” Mr. Waggish grabbed his arm, shocked.

  The Doctor looked on with lively but seemingly Olympian interest; his only concession to the emergency was to move a glass out of the way of harm from the Purser’s flailing arms. Tourneur had not risen from his chair. One eyebrow lifted high, he studied the Purser’s indignant face. I have evidently overestimated his sophistication, he thought. It’s a choleric young fellow as ever was … And he wondered just what he ought to read into that.

  The spasm of fury ended as abruptly as it had begun. The Purser sat down, picked up his glass, and said: “Sorry, Mr. Tourneur. I know you didn’t really mean … I’m afraid I lost my temper.” He sounded genuinely matter-of-fact and even a little pleased. Rather obstinately he added: “But my alibi will hold, you know. Price was a blasted rat; he mistreated—her. But I was playing cards when he got killed; and I have no idea who did it!”

    

  Tourneur found a visitor waiting in his cabin. Dolores Despana had changed her style from the chic to the delicate. She wore a coral lipstick, a pale green chiffon gown, and the air of a woman frail, defenseless, but brave. Very possibly she could not act, he thought; but she could at least look the part of a heroine from Pinero or Henry Arthur Jones. She carried a tiny, glittering evening bag and a lacy handkerchief which she occasionally remembered to touch to her eyes. She began in a faltering voice, one hand laid confidingly on Tourneur’s, “I should have known better than to fib to a famous detective like you!”

  “Thank you very much,” he said formally.

  “But the way it must look! Being in that cabin so late at night!”

  Tourneur could think of no really civil answer to this; he made an encouraging noise.

  “Not that there was anything wrong! Like I told you, Paul promised to write a plug for me, only he said I’d have to come to his stateroom for a conference about it. So, of course I thought twelve-thirty was pretty late; but it couldn’t hurt to go. So I knocked and went in and waited for a while, and when he didn’t show up after five minutes I went away.”

  “After smoking,” Tourneur murmured vaguely, “nine cigarettes.”

  “I—yes,” she said rather flatly. She put the handkerchief to one eye and then, after consideration, to the other.

  “So that it was, perhaps, rather more than five minutes?”

  “I— Oh, hell,” said Miss Despana in a welcome burst of candor. “He was a rat. But a plug from him means— It was a case of my career! And besides, if I’d refused to go—” She stopped.

  “Yes, Miss Despana?’

  “Nothing.”

  “Perhaps I know already,” he said, not unkindly. “Price was not a generous man. He may have threatened to print excerpts from the London reviews—”

  She cried: “They had a grudge against the director! It was all dirty politics. Why, the—”

  “Yes. Well,” Tourneur said cheerfully, “since we’ve got over all that, suppose you tell me what happened in Price’s cabin as you waited?”

  “Happened? Why, nothing happened,” said Dolores Despana with devastating gaucherie. “He got killed, didn’t he? He never came.”

  “Quite so,” Tourneur said hastily. “I meant to inquire as to anything—er—else that may have taken place. Did you notice anything remarkable about the cabin?” At her blank stare, he experienced a spasm of irritation; her slowness of mind appeared to be genuine. He suggested: “Was there anything on the floor?”

  “Oh, that’s right. There was an envelope.”

  Tourneur nodded: that would be Anderson’s check. He asked slowly: “Did anyone knock, or try to enter?”

  “No. Nothing happened, only I got sleepy waiting. I was mad, too, naturally,” she added in another disconcerting flare of frankness, “but next morning when I heard he’d been killed I knew why he hadn’t showed up, so that was O.K.”

  Tourneur looked at her speculatively as she produced this sufficiently inhumane sentiment. He asked: “Do you mind telling me just what Mr. Price said in his ‘plug’?”

  “Why, it says how I set London on fire, how I was seen with a Lord, and— But you know! It was right there in his typewriter. That’s how you got me to admit I was in the cabin, isn’t it? Why ask me to tell you what it said?” She gasped in sudden alarm. “There isn’t going to be any holdup about getting it printed, is there? I mean, they’ll put his column in the papers even if he’s dead, won’t they? Sure they will! I k
now they do; they publish things post—post—”

  Tourneur suddenly felt like a brute. “Miss Despana,” he said slowly, “I don’t know about posthumous publication in this case. I did use that typed paper with the ‘plug’ as a subterfuge, I’m afraid; you must forgive me. I guessed it was in the typewriter. I have never seen it.”

  Dolores Despana stood up abruptly. She cried with an appalling effect of shrewishness: “What are you getting at? What do you mean, you didn’t see it? It was right there! Have you burned it up or something?”

  Tourneur sighed. “Miss Despana, I give you my word I’d like to see it almost as much as you would. But when I got to Price’s cabin there was nothing left in the machine but a scrap of paper. Someone went into the cabin after you had left, and tore that paper out.”

    

  “She told the truth about seeing the paper in the typewriter,” Tourneur said to the First Officer. “Of course, she might have killed him and then pretended to wait for him, leaving ostentatious clues, so we’d think she didn’t know he was dead. But some one else took her precious plug—and the envelope with the check. And who would do that but the murderer? … Which takes us around in a circle.”

  “Do you have any theory who it is, Mr. Tourneur?”

  Tourneur grimaced. “Have you ever played Horribles?” As the First Officer shook his head uncomprehendingly he explained: “They do it at parties. You draw a head and fold the paper over. The next person draws the shoulders and the arms and the body to the waist; and the next one goes on down to the knees; and so on. Then you unfold the paper, and there is a figure with a girl’s head and a gorilla’s chest and a ballet skirt and the legs of a duck. Everyone roars with laughter.”

  Mr. Waggish looked at him in solemn question.

  “I feel,” Tourneur explained, “as if we were all hard at play at Horribles. M. Poireau draws a head, and Nappleby a chest, and so on. What sort of monster will this murderer turn out to be? We’re working almost blindfolded.”