Invitation to Murder

by Zenith Brown

  She looked almost sick. “Are you . . . from the government?”

  “No. I work in a bank. I have nothing to do with the law or the police. I just think maybe the little guy got a pretty raw deal.”

  “Oh, I’m so glad you’ve come, then!”

  She went quickly to the front door and pressed the latch to lock it. “We’re just out of our minds. Sit down, will you? Let me run up and tell my father. His ulcers flared up. If he was Mrs. Winton, he’d be in a hospital where nobody could worry him.” She added it bitterly as she hurried through the curtains. When she came back in a moment, she pulled a chair up to the desk and pushed her hair back from her anxious face.

  “Father always trust the wrong people. I told him we’d be ruined if it ever got out. But he would do it. Mr. Beyle was discreet. Father’s friend would never have sent him if he hadn’t been absolutely trustworthy. And look what happened. It’s simply ruin, Mr. Finlay. Nobody will ever come to us again when they find out father let a detective in with his waiters to spy on them. And we’ve worked so hard.” The tears were running down her sallow cheeks. “We’ve just bought a brand new trailer kitchen with all the latest equipment.”

  “Maybe there’s something we can do,” Fish said soberly. He took out his pack of cigarettes, offered her one and lighted it for her.

  “I’ve racked my brain ever since I heard them describe him over the radio this morning,” she said. “It’s not only the customers. We couldn’t sell the business—good will is our biggest asset, and there wouldn’t be any left—but we could scrape along on what we’ve saved. But the government . . . I don’t know what the penalty will be. Maybe prison even. My father—both of us—knew his union and social security cards belonged to somebody else.”

  “Have you told the police?”

  She shook her head. “We lied to them too. That’s part of father’s upset. Lieutenant Bestoso’s a good friend of ours. Father wanted to tell him everything. But he’s a policeman first. You see, father doesn’t believe it was an accident.”

  “I don’t either,” Fish said. “And you can’t go on lying, can you. The social security and union cards are a matter of record.”

  “I know. And the real François Beyle will have to have them back before he can work again. He’s an old waiter of father’s. It’ll make terrible trouble for him too. I told father that from the beginning.”

  The tears were springing up again.

  “Beyle’s real name was Blum?” Fish asked.

  “Oh, you’ve heard of him, then? We never had, till father got the cable, from an old friend of his in France—one of the really great chefs, father was apprenticed to him. He said the renowned Ferenc Blum was coming to Newport. It would be a distinguished honor for my father to assist him. It didn’t sound like a customer to me.” She smiled a little. “Father cabled back, and got a letter. M. Blum was a world-famous detective, on the track of a ‘black-hearted devil incarnate.’ I burned the letter this morning or I could show it to you. The family who retained him first had given up, but M. Blum was convinced there would be another ‘victim.’ He told father’s friend the whole story over a bottle of wine one night, and the old chef recognized the victim’s name. He’d known the family in his old days in New York, at the Ritz. He’d lost touch during the war, but they were Newport people, so he wrote here. He got a letter back from a connection of theirs who said he’d retain M. Blum to go on with it, if it could be done absolutely sub rosa . . . with this person’s name and connection never under any circumstances appearing.”

  Fish Finlay nodded. He knew the name and connection. The reputation of the bank. The sole duty of the Maloney trustees. “When did all that happen, do you know?”

  “We didn’t hear about it until M. Blum found out that his . . . quarry,” she hesitated before she spoke the word, as if it had some disturbing meaning for her, “or the victim, or both, were going to be in Newport for the season. But the arrangement had been in effect for some time . . . since October, anyway.”

  Or practically from Dodo and de Gradoff’s meeting under the lamppost in the rain. The marriage had been in October. Finlay, the hired left hand, hadn’t appointed himself till the April following. “You didn’t know the names of the people—”

  “Oh no.” Her face had the same expression of perturbation he’d noticed when she hesitated before. “They purposely didn’t tell us, except to assure my father they were old customers of his. That’s really what made him take M. Blum on his staff. Because a waiter can be right in people’s pockets and they never see him. I did my best, but father’s very simple in some ways, and sentimental about old friends—”

  She broke off abruptly, her uneasiness suddenly acute. “That’s why he read the note, Mr. Finlay.”

  “The note?”

  She nodded. “. . . That took M. Blum to the fishing platform. That’s really why father’s so terribly upset. And I won’t let him tell the lieutenant. It’ll just make everything that much worse. And Polly Randolph’s dead anyway. . . .”

  Fish waited, silently intent.

  “One of the other waiters found it on his tray that he’d set down for a moment while he got more champagne. It was just a sheet of paper folded over and marked on the outside for M. Ferenc Blum. Of course the waiter didn’t know who Ferenc Blum was, so he brought it to father in the pantry. Father thinks it was premonition made him open it. I think it was Old Devil Curiosity, myself. Because father’d noticed how excited M. Blum had got all of a sudden there, when he’d been terribly down in the dumps for the last two or three days. He was even more excited when father gave him the note . . . very cocky, very pleased with himself. He asked where the fishing platform was and what the word ‘deal’ meant. Father was amused . . . he told him both and forgot all about it, he was so busy—until this morning.”

  “What did the note say, Miss Lanson?” Fish asked quietly. “Your father probably remembers it, doesn’t he?”

  She nodded. “It was very short. It said: ‘I’ve been expecting you for a long time, M. Ferenc Blum. I still believe we can do a deal, you and I. Say nothing, but meet me at the fishing platform as near one o’clock as you can.’ ” She closed her eyes a moment. “It was signed ‘Polly Randolph.’ It . . . it’s just so awful, Mr. Finlay. That’s why father didn’t think anything about it, then. He did her parents’ wedding . . . he just can’t believe—”

  “But he’s right, Miss Lanson,” Fish said gently. “Miss Randolph wouldn’t—”

  She broke in with a kind of renewed despair. “But you look at it, Mr. Finlay. We’d assumed it was a man M. Blum was after, but he never said so. Polly Randolph lived in Paris. She wouldn’t be the first black sheep in the Randolph family. She’d never expect my father to read a note addressed to someone else. And God knows she’d never expect Helen Win-ton, drunk, to follow her down there. I haven’t a doubt that seeing her there is what put the idea in Mrs. Winton’s befuddled mind. Because M. Blum was already dead . . . his watch was broken at six minutes past one.”

  Fish Finlay felt a slow dry crust forming on his tongue. Maybe the little black man caught her. He was waiting down there. He could hear the childlike, blood-chilling voice of the woman weaving back and forth against the pipe rail. He’d taken that as an alcoholic hallucination, never for an instant dreaming it was the literal truth. There was in fact a little black-clad man down there, or had been until the cresting waves swallowed him.

  “She knew there wouldn’t be anybody else down on the platform,” Miss Lanson was going on. “She was the one who showed her uncle all the poison ivy under the roses. A girl sitting there would be sure to touch it, and the girls’ arms bare in their evening dresses. So her uncle had a thick white rope put across to bar the steps. And who else would know about the blackjack?”

  She caught herself quickly, her face paling. “Oh, I shouldn’t have said that. We were told in confidence. Don’t say anything, please . . . unless Lieutenant Bestoso tells you, too.”

  “All
right.” Fish hesitated, and pushed back his chair. There was no use arguing with her. He got up. “I think you’d better tell Bestoso about the note.”

  “And have everybody think father reads their letters and runs to the police? No, Mr. Finlay. And if Polly Randolph didn’t do it, it’s better not to tell them. They’ll see it just the way father does, now that M. Blum’s dead. They’ll think Helen Winton’s killing Miss Randolph just cancels the whole thing.”

  It was precisely what they were supposed to think, Fish Finlay thought grimly. There was cunning behind all of it. Miss Lanson was right. It was the way the police were bound to read the note.

  “Will you do one thing for me?” he asked. “Check with your waiters, and find out which one of them brought a message in a blue envelope to Polly Randolph. He might know who gave it to him to deliver.”

  “I will.” She followed him over to the door. “This seems to be what always happens when you try to help somebody.”

  “Isn’t it the truth,” Finlay said. “But there ought to be some way for you to let the police know what Blum was doing without ruining yourselves. What about his records? Somebody thinks he kept some. They’ve already gone through his stuff at his rooming house. But I have the idea he wouldn’t just have left them around, with all his passion for discretion. You’ve got a safe, haven’t you?”

  Miss Lanson shook her head. “There’s nothing in it. I looked this morning. All I know is that he typed a long time night before last. On my typewriter, with some old blue onion-skin paper I had. I know he made a copy, because he brought one sheet of carbon paper out and burned it in the garbage pail. He hated to do it. It was still good, and he was full of little economies. He had a long envelope in his pocket when he went out. But you’d better give me your phone number. I’ll call you about the other waiter and anything else I can find out.”

  Fish gave her the number.

  “That’s Enniskerry stable, isn’t it?”

  He waited, and relaxed. She was too involved with her own difficulties to make the connection between Enniskerry and his special interest in Ferenc Blum.

  “We’ve got a worse problem,” she said. “Worse because it’s immediate. The police expect us to make the formal identification for the inquest.”

  “I can help you out there,” Fish said, and she brightened for the first time. “I know a man who can identify him as Ferenc Blum. And I’ll damn well see that he does it,” he added doggedly. The Lanson reputation was as important to them as the bank’s was to Caxson Reeves.

  “Oh, thank you!” she said. “And thanks for everything. I feel so much better I can’t tell you. If you ever give a party, and we’re still in business. . . .”

  “I’ll remember that.”

  He walked back to Bellevue Avenue and stood on the corner looking in at a window of artificial flowers. Artificial flowers, in a town that was a gardener’s paradise of the most great. He realized then that it was a large bowl of carnations that had caught his eye. De Gradoff’s voice the night before, and Polly Randolph’s, echoed in his ear.

  “Carnations?”

  Carnations, darling. You know. Flowers. Very fragrant.”

  They had some significance in terms of the first wife whose death the Argentine family had retained Ferenc Blum to investigate. They’d then called him off, leaving a black-hearted devil incarnate free as a bird to hunt another prey. And the Lansons were facing ruin because they’d innocently tried to help out. He glanced back at the shop, saw a police car pulling up to the curb in front of it, and started down the street to pick up his own car over behind the hotel. On the corner he stopped, looking both ways carefully before he crossed, grinning to himself without amusement. The surprising thing really was that he hadn’t been included in the scheme that had liquidated Polly Randolph and Blum. De Gradoff, seeing all three of them there at the table, must have realized the possibility that Polly and Blum had told him more than they in fact had. And taking precautions at street crossings wasn’t going to help. When his turn came, it would be something as neat and unpredictably opportunist as the fishing platform, with somebody else to take the blame, as Polly was supposed to take it for Blum and Mrs. Winton was already taking it for Polly . . . with eyewitnesses as unimpeachable as James Fisher Finlay present, no doubt, to make it foolproof.

  But it wasn’t foolproof. He quickened his uneven pace to his car, two things Miss Lanson had told him fusing themselves in a sudden and simple solution of the whole thing. Blum’s excitement at the Randolphs’, and his message to Fish—“All is now prepared”—meant that he had found the salient fact he needed to complete his case. The message was clearly spur of the moment. That bracketed the salient fact in time and place. The report he’d typed on the thin blue paper the night before the party, when he was still down in the dumps, would bracket all the rest of it: the identification of de Gradoff, of Ferenc Blum himself, the reason he was in Newport, what was behind his being there, what he’d found out, what the keystone fact was that he was looking for and found the next night at the Randolphs’. If it wasn’t stated in so many words, it would have to be so bracketed that it ought to be easy for the police to work out. It was that simple. All Fish Finlay had to do was get Caxson Reeves to turn over the report to them. The reputation, honor and prestige of the bank would be pristine and unimpaired, the personal welfare of the Maloney heirs fully assured, and Finlay could go back to New York and forget he’d fallen in love with a girl young enough to be his granddaughter, the way he’d forgotten it in April when he came back from Virginia—until June when he saw her a second time in Newport. Out of sight, out of mind.

  A dull pain in the pit of his stomach made him look at his watch before he set out to find Caxson Reeves for the showdown. It was twenty minutes past twelve. The pain was nothing, he hoped, that a large fresh-broiled lobster wouldn’t cure. He got out of the car, started into the hotel and decided to call Jenny Linton first, just to see if everything was all right. He crossed the street to the drugstore there.

  “I’m sorry, sir. Miss Linton is out.” It was Moulton answering, adding, as he recognized Fish’s voice, “She and Mr. Peter have gone to play tennis at the Casino, sir. They’re going on to the Chalet for a swim and lunch at half-past one, sir.”

  Fish put the phone down. He tripped clumsily coming out of the booth, and flushed as the girl at the soda fountain looked startled and then distressed.

  “Ham and cheese on rye,” he said curtly.

  “Plain or toasted?”

  “Plain.”

  He wanted then to tell her he was sorry, but couldn’t think just how, and a moment later he forgot it as a lime-green parasol open above a graceful figure in black caught his eye across the street. He watched the woman turn up the front steps of the hotel, close the parasol and go inside. Mrs. Emlyn was probably lunching with Durban before his conference with Caxson Reeves at three o’clock. He went back to the telephone booth, got the book and looked up Reeves’s number at his sister’s.

  “Who’s calling, please? Oh, Mr. Finlay, Mr. Reeves left a message if you called. He’s lunching at the Chalet, he’d like you to join him at one o’clock.”

  And watch Peter and Jenny swimming and having lunch together? No, thank you, Finlay thought. He stood there staring at his hand on the book, picked it up and found another number. The Lansons’ line was busy. He went back to the counter and started on his sandwich, looking across the street again. Mrs. Alla Emlyn was coming out of the hotel, Fish put his sandwich down and picked up his plate and coffee cup. “I guess I’ll take this to a booth. I’ll take this, too.” He picked up a magazine, went across the room and sat down, his back to the door. In a moment he heard it open and the click of the high-heeled lime-green sandals. He put his hand up to his head and bent over the magazine.

  “May I have a glass of water, please.”

  He looked over. Mrs. Emlyn was taking a couple of aspirin out of a box in her bag.

  “Headache?” the girl asked sympathetically,
and Fish cringed at the second nasty brushoff she got for giving a damn what happened to the human race.

  “No,” Alla Emlyn said sharply. “It’s just the sun. I’ll have a cheese sandwich toasted and another glass of water. At the booth.”

  At his booth, no doubt, Fish thought. But not by design. She wouldn’t have snapped at the counter girl if she’d known anyone she knew was there. He saw her face then. She looked as if she had worse than a headache. Her whole lovely ivory-white façade was caved in, in some odd undefinable way, and she was too concentrated on the evils, or the anxieties, of her own universe to notice any other around her. She looks raddled. If it was anybody else, I’d think she was scared as well as sick. Or just scared sick period.

  She came to the booth next to his and sat down, facing him, not seeing him, and sat looking down at the table, not seeing it at first and then aware of it and wincing with distaste as she pulled a paper napkin out of the container and brushed the table off. She moved to let the girl put her sandwich and water down.

  “How much is that?”

  “Twenty-five cents. The water’s free.”

  She fished in her bag. The girl went back to the counter holding two dimes and five pennies in her open palm, the curl of her bright red lips expressive.

  It was then that Alla Emlyn saw him across the scarred edge of the wood partition between them.

  “Why, Fish! How divine!”

  CHAPTER : 14

  It took her a full moment to make it appear divine, a much longer, much less adroit moment than Fish would have expected her to take, before she rose gracefully, her sandwich, glass of water and lime-green impediments all, the way women manage, in her hands.

  “May I join you? I hate these places but I’m in a frantic hurry. Don’t get up, darling, it’s too close quarters to be polite.”

  She slipped into the seat across from him.

  “Why aren’t you at the Chalet? I’m sure Dodo expects you.”

  He closed his magazine and smiled at her. “Why aren’t you?”