Murder in Pastiche

by Marion Mainwaring

  “Oh, Spike!” Her violet eyes were misty. She didn’t say anything else, but she looked at me the way you look at the altar in church. Then she was clinging to me and kissing me, and this time I couldn’t push her away.…

  And that’s why I was still a little dizzy next morning, too dizzy to use my head and go after the Doctor first thing. Instead I went off at a tangent. I told the First Officer there was another possibility besides dough and love, as murder motives. I thought to myself it would explain the Doctor’s motive too but I didn’t say so.

  “Crazy people will kill just because they’re crazy,” I explained.

  “Crazy people?”

  “Yeah. People who are bats. Schizophrenics. Psychos. Sadists. Where normal people like you and me would need a motive, they don’t.” I lit a cigarette. “So that’s why I want to see the Captain.”

  The First Officer opened his eyes big. “The Captain!”

  “Yeah. He’s supposed to be bugs, isn’t he? Well, then, I just want to take a look at him. I want to see for myself. I can recognize crazy people … there’s a certain look in their eyes.”

  “But, I say—” I gave him a frown, and he stopped arguing. “I’ll try to arrange it, Mr. Bludgeon,” he said. His voice was shaky. I gave him a level look. Honest? Maybe, but he was the victim of a system, all right: the slave of a foolish hierarchy … afraid of superiors, of rules and regulations, of obsolete stupid traditions …

  I didn’t wait for him to arrange it. I went up to the bridge. The Captain was standing at the rail looking into the fog. When he heard me he turned around and I got a good look at his face. Yes, he was bugs. His eyes were greenish and glittery and mad, like haunted emeralds. I was starting to ask him something when he said, “The bridge is not open to passengers. You will have to go below at once.”

  I’d come all set to be friendly, but I couldn’t take that, even from a lunatic, “I’ve seen all I came for,” but I knew he wouldn’t get the point, so to make sure he remembered my visit I flipped my half-smoked butt into his face. It caught in his beard and as I wheeled and walked off I could smell singeing hair. I heard a bellow behind me as I went down—it took him that long to cotton on to the fact that someone had guts enough to treat him like an ordinary mortal. I gave a bitter laugh.

  But after that I didn’t feel like laughing. It was time to visit the Doctor again. I should have had a premonition … a tight, hot shrieking in my guts. I should have remembered what happens to the women who love me … the poor, fated chippies who come like lovely naked moths to a brilliant flame too searing for them to endure. I should have known.

  When I opened the door I saw Dolores. She was lying on the settee. One beautiful arm hung down. And her face was covered with blood.

  The Doctor was bending over her.

  I couldn’t even scream. Cold ran down my back and fire ran up into my brain. Before the Doctor had even swung about, hiding her from me, I had my gun out. There were footsteps along the passage outside, voices yelling, “He went in there!” Then I knew I wouldn’t have time to give him the nice, slow, crawling death he deserved. I gave him a slug in the guts, and as he staggered and fell down I was already whirling about. A whole line of uniforms came at me down the passage.

  I was blind with a wild, ravaging fury—but I can aim and shoot by instinct. I knew I got one guy in the head, and one in the chest, and another in the guts. Then someone came up behind me and my head split apart with jagged pain and the deck hit my face with a vicious crash.

  When I came to I ached all over. My head pounded agonizingly, and there was a scratch on the little finger of my left hand a full inch long. Broodingly I wondered if they provided Bandaid for prisoners in the Florabunda’s brig. I stared at the bars. Then as the whole thing welled up into my memory I hit my head against the wall in silent rage.

  When I came to again the First Officer was looking in through the bars. “I’m sorry about all this, Mr. Bludgeon,” he said. “But it was the Captain’s orders.”

  I gave a bitter laugh. “I suppose he doesn’t like having his officers liquidated,” I said with a sneer. “But at least I accounted for that rat who killed Dolores … and a few more guys besides.”

  A queer look crossed his face. “But—” he said. He licked his lips nervously. “But, Mr. Bludgeon, Miss Despana wasn’t killed!"

  I leaped to my feet, ignoring the pain.

  “She wasn’t even hurt. It was only—she had a nosebleed, Mr. Bludgeon, and she went to the Doctor for treatment.”

  The sweat rolled down my body. I couldn’t speak.

  “But don’t worry,” he said. “The Doctor isn’t dead, either, or any of those other chaps.”

  “What?” I knew now he was lying. My .45 has never missed.…

  “No. I—I changed your bullets for blank cartridges whilst you were taking a shower. I was afraid you might do something hasty, and then regret it afterwards.”

  “What?”

  “Aye. So I just came down.… I was afraid you’d have it on your mind and I wanted to tell you not to worry. We’ll see about getting you out, but the Captain.… You are really safer here.” He gave me a stupid, anxious smile. “Cheerio.”

  I let out all the curse words I knew. At first I felt only sheer blind fury. Then a nasty, crawling doubt crept in.

  Why had Waggish really changed my bullets for blanks?

  He knew I was out to get the killer, didn’t he? The only reason he could have for wanting to stop me from shooting was—that he was the killer himself!

  Or that he was sheltering the killer!

  True, he had seemed honest. He had never met Price. He was responsible for the murder’s being investigated.

  But his behavior to me was enough to discount everything that had seemed in his favor.

  I thought it over. I struck the wall with my fists again and again till the flesh was raw and bleeding.

  I couldn’t make up my mind.

  But one thing I knew.

  First, I’d get out of this place. And then, I’d get the murderer of Paul Price, if I had to kill everyone on board the ship to do it!

  Mallory King

  Mallory King paced the deck. He stared out unhappily into the fog. He flipped a cigarette into a sandbox, jabbed a match against its folder, and lit another cigarette. He found himself humming:

  “The farmer takes his wife,

  The farmer takes his wife,

  Heigh-ho, the derry-o,

  The farmer takes his wife.”

  And paused in his harried perambulation to groan aloud. The Farmer in the Dell!

  Very well, so he could operate only on the nursery level on this voyage! Shameful—but the whole case was befuddling. It had a tantalizing simplicity like “The Farmer in the Dell,” and made just about as much sense.

  Heigh-ho, the derry-o, The farmer in the dell. The words began to jingle again. The cat takes the rat, the rat takes the cheese …

  Mallory informed himself sardonically: And Mallory King, the great detective, the mastermind of Manhattan, takes the cake! All this time, and the murderer was still at large!

  Still, the Farmer and his bucolic adventures might lead somewhere. Nursery rhymes, after all, lie close to the heart of the racial experience. They suggest fundamental things—birth—death— They follow archetypal patterns of human life. They are basic.

  To what archetype did the murder of Paul Price belong?

  Mallory shook his head impatiently. He reviewed the case in his mind for the trillionth time. He went over the list of exasperating questions he had formulated:

  Why had the body been left aboard? Because the killer was too weak to heave it over the rail? That would mean a woman. Well: the female of the species … On the other hand, it had taken strength to kill with a single blow.

  Or because the killer wanted Price to be found—in order, say, to obviate legal doubt of his death? That would mean Winifred: little Winifred with her dark eyes and her kittenlike innocence. Mallory mumbled �
��No!” aloud, and a passenger standing near him flinched in alarm. Vaguely, Mallory apologized. It wasn’t mere sentimentality that made him reluctant to view Winifred as the murderer, surely?

  Or there might be another reason for wanting the body found—a reason linked with that curious decoration found underneath it; which led to question number two: What was meant by the scarf and the pipe? Was it Price who had had them, or his murderer? The pipe was brand-new; the scarf belonged to an innocent boy. Why had they—if they had—been left deliberately on the scene?

  Why had the cosh been kept, and then used in a too-crude, too-obvious frame against Homer T. Anderson? Again, Mallory mentally kicked himself. If only he had kept his eyes open— The murder weapon obtained under his very nose! Mallory tugged hard at his unoffending hair, and was mortified in spirit.

  Why had Anderson’s check been used in the same obvious, crude, and leaky frame? Who had tried to compromise him? Was he clever enough to frame himself? And if so, why? The frame had made no real difference one way or the other. And Mallory was sure that Anderson, at least, had not picked up the blackjack that night.

  Why had a sheet of paper been removed from Price’s typewriter and then thrust under the noses of the detectives? And why, oh, why, had the killer perpetrated that idiotic, that cretinous, that infuriating twaddle at the bottom of the paper? Mallory stared at his copy:

  Well I find there is another mastermind on board who is a horse of a different colour. He is a specialist in murder too but from another angle and he is having fun and games whilst the sherlocks sleep. He does not know I have found him out but next time we meet FIREWORKS MAY BE EXPECTED THE REAL NAME OF THIS CROOK IS NOT ON HIS PASSPORT IT IS GIB

  As Trajan Beare had seen at once, it betrayed the work of an Englishman. Yet … Whoever had written it, it was an insult to the intelligence. Who could be expected to believe that Price had written it? Who did the killer think he was dealing with, anyway? Or did he want it to look like nonsense?

  Had Mrs. Chip-Ebberly really tried to kill Dolores Despana by pushing her down the companionway? If the answer was yes, she was presumably the killer. But would she, could she have perpetrated that gibberish? or left a red and yellow scarf and a pipe behind?

  If the answer was no, either Dolores had lied or she was mistaken. Mallory guessed she was not above a lie; but this lie would make her a better actress than the critics thought. So good in fact that she needn’t be pursuing Anderson in the hopes of a subsidy. If, on the other hand, she was honestly mistaken, the whole episode meant exactly nothing.

  Mallory had talked with Mrs. Chip-Ebberly. He knew she lived in a private, moribund world, archaic, obsolete. She disapproved of him as of everyone else on the ship. She froze him with her glances. He would creep trembling from a session with her and, as he slowly thawed, would find himself still uncertain whether she was guilty. Her smuggling, and her delusions of espionage as in a Hitchcock movie, did nothing to clarify the issue.

  Mallory had talked with Anderson, too, and with Win Price, and with the Doctor and the Purser and the First Officer. And with anyone else he could find to talk to. The result was nil.

  He had talked with them all—with the persons who were, by the evidence of his senses and his logic, the suspects. And Winifred Price was young and worried and eager to help, and full of screwy psychological theories that led nowhere, and Anderson was crass and stupid and bursting with awareness of his wealth and importance, and the others were what they were, each in his own natural kind, species, and genus. And the Doctor, the Purser, and the First Officer had alibis which were good enough, and they had had no reason to kill Price. Or so it seemed —for Mallory was a cautious soul and would not let his liking (for he liked them all) interfere with his detection.

  He had given due thought to the Purser’s infatuation with Win. But when he opened a discussion of it with the First Officer, Mr. Waggish had only looked blank, and agreed readily enough that the Purser was “in love with the lass.”

  “Then—” Mallory sought a tactful way of suggesting that this provided one of the more commonplace murder motives. “If he wants to marry her, and knew her uncle would object—”

  Mr. Waggish interrupted him. “Surely to goodness— You detectives keep saying that. You don’t really think he would?”

  “Kill Price?”

  “Marry Miss Price!”

  “But if he’s in love with the wench?” Mallory argued reasonably.

  Mr. Waggish was honestly puzzled, and shook his head. “Tom’s in love on every voyage,” he explained.

  “On every— You mean he goes about wearing that dying-cow expression for some girl on every trip?”

  “That’s it,” the First Officer said simply as Mallory groaned. “You might call it his idiosyncrasy. Sometimes it’s a nice young lady like Miss Price, sometimes it’s—well, a different type. No one thinks anything of it.”

  “I see. And—er—his fiancée back home?”

  “Of course he’s in love with her too,” said the First Officer matter-of-factly. “Between trips.”

  “I see,” said Mallory again. A new thought came to him. “What would happen,” he asked interestedly, “if a time came when there were no girls aboard? If all the female passengers were of the Chip-Ebberly vintage?"

  “I never thought.” The First Officer was equally struck with the idea, and a far-away look came into his eyes. “I wonder,” he murmured, “if it could be arranged?”

  Mallory left him to his speculations, and returned to his own.

  He had scoured the Florabunda. He had even, in the wake of Sir Jon. Nappleby and Spike Bludgeon, braved the Captain in his cabin. Who had visions of deep-sea Edens and thought good sailors turned into mermen when they died.

  Who acted like a cross between Herman Melville’s Captain Ahab and the god Poseidon.

  Who had been nowhere in the offing when the cosh was stolen.

  Who had been happy to hear of Price’s demise, but had—it had been determined—an adamantine alibi for the time when it occurred.

  Who had refused to say a word to Mallory King and had been almost ready to order him thrown overboard for approaching him; only the First Officer had come to the rescue.

  Meanwhile, tension mounted. No one enjoys knowing that a killer is roaming about unchecked, especially when there is no way of removing oneself from his neighborhood short of lowering a lifeboat.

  Mallory lit another cigarette and withdrew into intensive contemplation. He dug into his own recollections of Price; things his father, and other police officials, had told him. But these memories only reinforced his opinion that Price had been a rat. A character in search of a murderer. A nuisance to the forces of law and order and decency all his life; libel, extortion, tax evasion, and finally (in a passive and involuntary way to be sure) homicide.

  Or rather, Mallory thought bitterly, rodenticide.

  He stiffened. Something stirred in the depths of his mind. Rodenticide. The killing of a rodent. The death of a rat … But the thought slid away uselessly.

  When Mr. Waggish approached him, Mallory threw up his hands. “Don’t ask me,” he warned. “No, I have not found your criminal. I begin to think the whole thing is hallucination.”

  Mr. Waggish, who was literal-minded, looked at him uncertainly. “But surely it was a real murder? And we’ve got to get the killer!”

  “Well—there’s a little time left. We may find the answer.”

  “We had better,” said the First Officer. “The Old Man is getting impatient. Sooner than be held up in port, he’ll pick on some victim at random, charge him with the murder, and sail off home.”

  “Probably he’ll pick one of us detectives,” Mallory groaned.

  “It would just as likely be me,” Mr. Waggish pointed out. “Since he thinks I ought to have settled the matter by now. And, while I’d enjoy a bit of time in New York, I’d as lief not spend it in quod. So I wish we’d catch the real killer.”

  Mallory demanded: “A
nd what do you suppose my father will say if we dock without my being able to point to the killer? And the newspapers! We’ll be the laughingstock of two continents. Think of the headlines. We’ll be a modern Narrenschiff, or Ship of Fools. If I could only discover the pattern.”

  “The pattern!” exclaimed the First Officer.

  “My cases,” Mallory explained, “always have some underlying pattern; some theme, some motif which unites and gives meaning to details which, on the surface, seem merely arbitrary and fantastic.”

  The First Officer nodded intelligently.

  “For instance, in one case the killer used the concept of the chain of evolution, working up from the murder of frogs, and dogs, and so on, to Man. Another, with an Old Testament complex, used the scheme of the Ten Commandments. This time—”

  “Yes?” Mr. Waggish asked eagerly.

  “This time— Darn it,” Mallory said plaintively, “I simply don’t know. The details remain fantastic, like that scarf and pipe. ~ Obscurum per obscurius.”

  “It’s odd,” Mr. Waggish agreed. “The way they just lay there, the pipe all tangled up in the scarf.” He said hopefully, “But perhaps they just happened to be there? It might have nothing to do with the murder!”

  “They don’t make sense,” Mallory told him absently, “whatever tune they were meant to pipe.”

  Pipe! Pipe!

  Mallory gasped. He gulped. “Quick,” he cried. “Where can I find a copy of Browning’s Poems?”

  “What?”

  A picture formed itself in Mallory’s mind. Books. Papers. A copy of Browning. Papers … “The Doctor’s office!” he exclaimed.

  “If you want poetry, that is where it would most likely be. But why?” Mr. Waggish asked, looking vaguely unhappy.

  “I’ll tell you after I’ve checked this hunch,” Mallory told him. “This may be what I’ve been waiting for—the clue to the labyrinth—the Figure in the Carpet! I’ve got to see the Doctor. I want to borrow a book.”

    

  At Mallory’s greeting the Doctor grunted without even looking up from the desk where he was writing away furiously with a scratchy pen and trying to keep his papers from sliding about too much. He was pale, and there were bits of sticking-plaster and bandaging on his face and neck, the aftermath of his encounter with the impetuous Spike Bludgeon. He looked up as Mallory leaned over him to pull the Browning from the shelf.