Invitation to Murder

by Zenith Brown

  Jenny stiffened at the soft caress in his voice again.

  “Mother,” she said quickly. “Could I stay here and just . . . just talk to you a little while? I . . . I hate to be alone.”

  “Surely, darling.” Dodo’s voice was firm again. She nodded a little at Nikki. “You go and get some rest . . . please, dearest.”

  “Jennifer had better go. You’ll be all upset again, my darling.”

  This is sort of a battle. She thought it suddenly. Her back was to him, but she could feel that he was winning. In a moment her mother would make her go and let him stay.

  “Or why don’t you come down to my room, Mother?” she said quickly. “I’ve got some coffee—”

  “Oh, wonderful.” Dodo pushed back the sheet and silk blanket cover. “Give me my slippers, darling. I feel so horrible about poor Helen Winton. And poor Polly. I just can’t bear it.”

  She was putting on her velvet robe.

  “Polly was so excited about my rubies.”

  She looked through her dressing-room doors. They were lying in a pool of deep wine-bright light on the dressing table, four pools of wine-colored light, their own and the three images of them in the triple wings of the mirror. Jenny steadied herself, her hand on the bedpost, aware of another smaller silence mushrooming when de Gradoff stopped suddenly, moving toward his own door.

  “I wouldn’t have thought she’d be interested in them,” he said easily. “Most women only like jewels they’d look well in themselves.”

  “That’s what she said, you know.” Dodo paused, tying the ribbon at the neck of her robe. “She said she was terribly surprised anyone with reddish-gold hair could wear them.”

  “Come along. Mother. Our coffee’s getting cold.”

  Jenny opened the door and waited, not daring to look at the silence again where her stepfather stood. She could feel it spreading out, cold, terribly cold, and terribly dark. Then with a self-possession that surprised her she said, “Polly just wanted something interesting to put in her column. She was phoning her story in to her paper when Peter and I got there.”

  “Oh, but she promised not to use it,” Dodo said confidently. “I told her it was off the record. See you, darling.”

  She said it to Nikki without turning back as she went into the hall. Jenny followed and closed the door, her heart still tight in her breast. She could feel him standing there, motionless, behind it. The palms of her hands were clammy moist and very cold.

  CHAPTER : 12

  It was half-past nine before Fish found the Azores on Thames Street. He’d passed it several times, but the Portuguese funeral parlor on the corner, its window full of flyspecked tinsel trappings of gaudy death, threw him off, and he didn’t look up ta see the neon sign with the flowing purple arrow pointing to “Rooms, Day or Week,” around in the weed-grown dead end, littered with shells, that extended to the jetty between two piers, where the fishermen were swabbing out their empty boats. He turned his car in. The building was a long starkly barren clapboard-sided former warehouse, built on barnacled piles over the water. The rickety porch had another neon sign over it, and three women on it, like bundles of old laundry dumped in rocking chairs, waiting to be picked up.

  “Does Mr. Beyle live here?”

  One of them looked up at him and nodded her black head back at the door. Inside was another woman, vigorously scrubbing the linoleum on the stairs, her face flushed, her black eyes bright in contrast to the lilies of the field outside. He asked for Mr. Beyle again, and through the torrent of words he thought were angry until she laughed he gathered that Mr. Beyle occupied Number 7 on the floor above. She moved her scrub bucket aside for him, still voluble about something, presumably about the tracks on her clean steps. There was a set besides the ones he was making, the faint trace of them continuing in front of him along the shining strip of linoleum on the second floor. They ended at the door of the room with a polished brass “7” on it. Mr. Beyle must have just come in himself.

  He raised his hand and knocked. There was no answer. He could hear someone moving inside the flimsy door, and knocked again. Then he knocked louder and tried the door. It was locked.

  “Mr. Beyle!” he called.

  He heard steps then. A key turned in the lock and the door opened. It was not the little waiter. It was a workman in blue dungarees and blue denim hat, with a thin weather-beaten face and sad faded blue eyes. He looked at Fish, shook his head and walked past him down the hall back to the steps, leaving Fish alone in the open door of Number 7.

  “This whole blasted town is wacky,” Fish thought, hearing the woman below sound off volubly and violently and then laugh, ebulliently good-natured, as her pail grated out of the way again. He went into the room. It was as spotless as the halls, cheap and garish pink and purple, but scrubbed to the bone. Any evidence that it was the room of the little French waiter was not externally visible as he glanced from the neatly made brass bed with the violent pink spread and pink-shaded drop light over the head of it to the washbowl and wavy mirror. Until he looked at the pot-bellied chiffonier against the wall beside the door. Propped on the starched pink runner was a framed motto, elaborately inked in many colors. It was in French, no authorship ascribed, and none needed. He translated it.

  “Discretion is the shell of the oyster guarding the priceless pearl within.”

  The good two inches of decorative flourish at the end of it were so precisely like the flourish of the silver tray in the Randolphs’ garden that he grinned and pulled up a chair to wait. He noticed then that the bottom drawer of the chiffonier was not closed straight, in a room in which everything else was cameo-clean and neatly ordered. The oyster-shell of his own discretion opened perceptibly. He leaned down and pulled the drawer out. He frowned and pulled out the one above it. The drawers were a mess. It was clear from the way the underwear and shirts in them were folded that that was not their normal state, furthermore that they had not been that way long . . . not long enough to wrinkle the fancy striped shirts, size fourteen, and flowered shorts that were side by side with a pile of waiter’s starched white dickeys with built-in white ties . . . on and off with one flourish.

  He went over to the cupboard built out in the far corner of the room, its flimsy door papered lazarus blue and purple, the same as the walls. Somebody had been in a hurry there, too. Two black suits with the cleaner’s wrappings partly torn from them were pushed at a cockeyed angle on the broom-handle rod. A coat, a gaudy French version of an English tweed, was on the floor, the pockets turned out. Even the small highly polished shoes were jumbled together as if they’d been kicked impatiently aside.

  Fish stood there looking around. If the workman in the dungarees had found what he’d been hunting, it must have been fairly small. His hands had been empty as he came out. Fish looked at his watch. Actually, except for the fancy motto on the potbellied chiffonier and the fancy message no longer in his possession, he hadn’t much to support his conviction that the waiter was, in fact, the French detective Blum. Except that Dodo and Polly both had described him as absurd. But Polly hadn’t recognized him. Or had she? He suddenly remembered the impression of excitement she’d given him when he pointed her out to the waiter who had the message for her. She’d been looking over at Mrs. Emlyn’s table, with the little man hovering near it. And if he was the detective, he certainly hadn’t recognized Polly either. She was in evening dress, of course, and he mightn’t expect to find a newspaper reporter he’d seen in Paris there in Newport. “It might all be another bust like the long-distance call you so avidly traced an hour or so ago, my friend,” Fish Finlay told himself.

  He’d look like a damned fool if M. Beyle came back and found him there pawing through his dresser drawers. It would be worse if the voluble wench on the stairs demanded an explanation for his being there. He crossed the shining clean floor and closed the door of Number 7 quietly behind him. As he did, he noticed that the door of Number 6, just across from it, was slightly ajar. Halfway down the hall he heard it squ
eak, and looked back. A blonde in a striped house coat had stepped out, but she skirted modestly back. He went on, relieved to find the stairs empty of the scrub bucket, and the three depleted babes on the stoop the only other hazard outward bound.

  It seemed strange that François Beyle, if he was only a waiter, would be out that early when he’d worked so late the night before. It wasn’t until he drove away from the Azores and out of the milling chaos of Thames Street that it occurred to him that a waiter would have to have a regular daytime job too. That was probably what the scrub lady was trying to convey, in her flood of Portuguese volubility. He grinned and drove down Bellevue past the library, with its magnificent fernleaf beech in front, looking for a place to park.

  The thing to do would be to go to the caterer’s and find out more about M. Beyle’s daily routine. But the only parking place he saw was behind him. He went on to make a right turn and come back along the cross-street, stopped to wait for the traffic light to change, and straightened up, blinking sharply at the man in the old yellowed panama hat and old-fashioned cream-colored poplin suit, narrow-legged trousers two inches above his ankles, a walking stick in his hand, crossing the street on the green light a couple of cars ahead of him.

  It couldn’t be. But it was. The clothes were strange, but there was no mistaking the saurian profile and the patient droop to the shoulders of the Vice-President and Trust Officer of the Merchants and Mechanics Bank and Deposit Company. The impulse to sound his horn or lean out the window and shout surrendered to discretion’s pearl. Hired hands didn’t sound horns or shout at Caxson Reeves. He was headed Fish’s way, and Fish leaned over and ran down his window. But Reeves turned then, and went up the steps of the white clapboard hotel on the corner. By the time the light changed he was inside. Fish drove on and turned the corner, grinning at the sudden warm lift to his spirit.

  Whoever’d think I’d be that glad to see the old lizard! He parked his car in the first place available and got out. Ten to one, the little waiter had a job here at the hotel, and Reeves. . . . There was a side door. Fish hurried up the steps, and slowed down then as he pushed the door open, his exuberance diminished abruptly. If Caxson Reeves wanted him there, he’d have said so. He hadn’t even told Fish he was in Newport. It wasn’t a question of time either, not if he’d had time to go to his sister’s and haul out the rig he was wearing.

  Fish let the door bang shut behind him. The hell with that stuff. This business of being a hired left hand not knowing what the executive right hand was doing wasn’t funny any longer. It was like his going on pretending he didn’t know what Jennifer Linton was talking about. Even she saw it was stupid . . . and dangerous. And if Reeves had cast him in the role of blind assistant to his French detective—and no wonder the little man knew his name and recognized him when he saw him—then Reeves could hardly object if Fish tracked him down too in the process. He grinned and went through another door into another hall. He’d tell Mr. Reeves it was line of duty. That’d fix the crafty old alligator.

  The place was a dark maze of narrow passages and closed doors. He’d obviously come in the wrong way. Another tack brought him out to the serving end of a dining-room, very empty, no waiters, French or otherwise, in sight. Next to the dining-room was a small dark bar where a man in shirt sleeves was polishing glasses, listening to the radio turned on quietly behind him. Beyond it was a constricted passage leading into the main hall. Fish started through it and stopped abruptly. There was a window in the wall opening into a small cubbyhole where the reception desk was. What stopped him was Caxson Reeves’s voice.

  “Will you ring Mr. Durban’s apartment, please? Tell him Mr. Reeves is here.”

  “Mr. Durban’s waiting in the lounge.”

  Fish stepped discreetly back into the bar, the interior dimness concealing the flush creeping uncomfortably up the back of his neck. The fact that Reeves might have other interests than the Maloney Trust was acutely vivid to him. He would have preferred to fade quietly back into the street and avoid the sardonic scrutiny from under the drooping lids, but it was better to stick it out in case Reeves had seen him in the car, as he probably had. There wasn’t much he missed.

  “Want something, Mac?” The bartender asked.

  “A milk punch, if you’ve got one handy.”

  “Have to get the milk. Only take a second.”

  “Okay.”

  Fish sat on a bar stool. “Line of duty” . . . very funny. He was wondering what he could say if Reeves walked in, when he heard a deep voice, and heavy footsteps with lighter ones coming through the hall toward the central staircase. He shifted uncomfortably on the leather stool as he heard Reeves’s voice then.

  “I’m not unwilling to discuss it, except in public, Mr. Durban,” he was saying, in the familiar dust-dry tones. “You have my address if you wish to come at three o’clock. It isn’t possible for me to discuss it in your apartment, however private it may appear to be. I’m sure you’ll appreciate my position.”

  “Certainly.” Mr. Durban’s accent was precise if obviously foreign. “I’ll see you at three. I know nothing of the acoustics here and nothing of my neighbors. I checked in from the Randolphs’ very late. The situation there is most unhappy.”

  “I’m sure it is.”

  “Most unhappy. And I think I rather need a pick-me-up. Will you join me?”

  It was cool in the bar, but Fish’s hand went up and wiped off his forehead. He waited.

  “No, thank you. I’ll see you at three, sir.”

  Fish got out a cigarette and lighted it, breathing normally again as he listened to one pair of footsteps diminishing, the other, heavier, coming closer, until it was in back of his stool. He heard the deep voice again.

  “Anybody in attendance here?”

  “He’ll be back in a second,” Fish said. He looked around, and gave an involuntary start as he saw the man beside him.

  “I’m sorry,” Mr. Durban said. His smile was ironic but not unpleasant. “I’m rather horrible at first sight.”

  Mr. Durban was the man from Mars, the hunchback with the grotesquely enormous head, the fairy godfather of the improvident rich, that Polly had pointed out sitting with Alla Emlyn at the Randolphs’ party. He smiled at Fish again.

  “Don’t let it disturb you. I’m used to all sorts of reactions.”

  “Sorry,” Fish said. “It was very rude. The bartender’s gone to get some milk to make a milk punch. Would you have one with me?”

  “I’ll be happy to,” Durban said. “I’ve never had one.”

  “They ease your conscience, if you have one, about drinking early in the morning. Also your stomach.”

  “I doubly need one, then.”

  He got up on a stool and bent his huge head, listening to the radio as the bartender came back with a bottle of milk. He nodded to Durban familiarly.

  “That fellow you were talking about, sir,” he said. “The one they found his body this morning?”

  “Have they identified him?” Durban asked calmly.

  “Yes, sir.”

  He shook up the bottle of milk and took off the cap.

  “It came over the radio a few minutes ago. He was a waiter, they said. His name’s François Bailey, or something like that. He lived at a Portuguese hangout down off Thames Street. The Azores, they call it. He was working on the Randolphs’ party last night, but nobody knows when he left, or if it was the tide carried him out over to the Island. I was talking to a Coast Guard fellow in the service yard just now, helped haul him out. He said he was drowned, all right, a lot of water in his lungs. Figured he was sampling the Randolphs’ chamagne on the q.t., I guess. What are you going to have, sir?”

  “This gentleman has offered me a milk punch,” Durban said pleasantly. “From the man’s description I thought at first it was someone I knew. But I was mistaken.”

  “Who did you think it was, sir?” Fish asked quietly.

  “Just a man who did some work for me once,” Durban said. “But it was a lo
ng time ago, and in another country.” He smiled. “And besides, the wench is dead. That’s a line from one of your English poets, is it not?”

  CHAPTER : 13

  Fish Finlay found a telephone book in the office next to the bar and turned the yellow pages again for the address of the Randolphs’ caterer.

  “The Coast Guard plane spotted him.” The bartender had explained to him. Durban had lost interest when he heard the little waiter’s name. “They thought it was Miss Randolph, the sea gulls were making such a row out on the end of the island. The plane’s still up looking for her. This fellow I was talking to out back said there was one of her slippers got caught up on the rock. It’s funny how little things like that get you, isn’t it?”

  Fish nodded and went to find the telephone book then.

  The shop he was looking for was just off Bellevue Avenue on John Street, a small gold stencil on the window discreetly announcing the premises of Jean Paul Lanson, Caterer, Open 9 to 3, Or By Appointment. He stepped into a clean bare room with a fine tiered wedding cake in a glass case. A desk with two chairs stood by a curtained door. The curtains moved and the sallow anxious face of a woman of about forty appeared.

  “Not the police again,” she said. She looked at him with weary desperation. “My father’s very ill.”

  “I’m not the police, Miss Lanson,” Fish said. “I talked to you early this morning. My name’s Finlay.”

  “Oh yes.” She came on into the room. “I had to tell the police somebody called. I hope I didn’t make a lot of trouble for you, too.”

  “Not so far.”

  Her drawn face relaxed a little as he smiled at her. “It’s been awful, Mr. Finlay. We just don’t know what to do.” She gave the impression of wringing her hands without moving them at all, searching his face with a pathetic need of some kind of understanding. “Are you a friend of Mr. Beyle’s?”

  “In a way. I came to see your father. I have an idea that Beyle was something besides a waiter.”