Invitation to Murder

by Zenith Brown

  “I’ve got a touch of the sun. And it’s so crowded there on Saturday.” She took a bite of her sandwich. It was clear she still had not had time enough really to compose herself. “You’re going to the dance tonight, I suppose, aren’t you?”

  Fish shook his head.

  “It seems so odd, doesn’t it . . . a flag half-mast on the roof and the balloons and smilax all up downstairs. But the flag comes down at sunset, doesn’t it, and the band doesn’t start up till ten.” She shrugged lightly. “That’s life, I suppose, isn’t it. How long had you known Polly Randolph, Fish.”

  “Not long enough. Why?”

  “I really want to know.”

  “No reason you shouldn’t. Last night was the second time I’d met her. An old classmate of mine from Ithaca brought her to dinner once, a long time ago.” It seemed like a long time to him then. “She was a nice person.”

  Mrs. Emlyn shrugged again. “Unless she had her hooks in you. I’m afraid Dodo’s going to regret her last night’s girlish confidences. Or alcoholic confidences. Whichever they were.”

  “Am I supposed to know what you mean?”

  “You’ll know soon enough, I expect.”

  She regarded the remains of her sandwich with distaste and pushed it aside. He lighted the cigarette she took out of her bag, watching her, remembering the way she’d watched him the day before, seeing she was too involved now with something inside herself to be concerned with him. She leaned forward then as if she’d suddenly made up her mind.

  “I want to talk to you, Fish.”

  “What about?” he asked pleasantly.

  “About a lot of things. About Dodo and Nikki. About Jennifer.”

  Then as if aware she was being too intense, she relaxed, letting the smoke feather lightly from her lips, smiling at him, delicately ironical. “And about myself. And Peter.”

  He shook his head, smiling. “Too many . . . and none of them any business of mine.”

  “Not Dodo? Not Jennifer?” Her brows arched. “I thought they were intensely your business?”

  “Their financial behavior only . . . within defined limits, and very narrow limits at that,” Fish said. “And not a matter for me to talk about . . . as I’m sure you know.”

  “Very discreet, Mr. Finlay.” A lazy smile curved her lips, but for a moment the pupils of her dark eyes had contracted. “Let’s talk about something else. Jennifer’s orchids, for instance. The ones she had in her hair last night. They were lovely, weren’t they? Who sent them to her, I wonder?”

  “Peter, I’d assumed.”

  “Peter? My God.” She laughed, eyebrows up. “Are you being comic, Mr. Finlay, or aren’t you an orchid buyer? Have you any idea how much a spray of fourteen white butterfly orchids costs?”

  “Afraid not.”

  “Well, an awful lot more than Peter has, I assure you. Even if he’d thought of it, which he wouldn’t, not before he’d seen her at least—if after.” She shrugged again. “But that would be someone else’s financial behavior, wouldn’t it. I must say I didn’t see her with anyone who looked that filthy rich last night.”

  “I guess we can all relax, then,” Fish said. “It’s not our problem, is it?” He rolled up his magazine and stuck it in his pocket. “And you’re in a frantic hurry. Remember?”

  “That was a lie, darling. I’m not in any hurry except to do exactly what I’m doing. Please sit down. I must talk to you, it’s terribly important.”

  “To whom?”

  Her eyes narrowed. “I’m not joking, Fish,” she said quietly. “You listen to me. I have no interest in either Dodo or Nikki. None whatsoever. But I have a great deal of interest in myself and Peter. In myself for Peter, to put it precisely. Peter belongs to me. Everything I’ve ever done—and I’ve done some pretty shocking things by your standards—I’ve done for Peter, and there’s nothing I won’t do for him. So you must listen to me. Time’s getting short. Peter has got to have a rich wife.”

  He controlled the sudden anger flashing up in him. What was the use? The woman simply meant it. He smiled at her.

  “If you’re determined to make a first-class bum out of him, it’s obvious we must act at once. What do you propose?”

  Her cheeks flushed a little. “I propose that you answer one question I want to ask you,” she said evenly.

  “Fire away, lady. I’ll certainly answer it if I can.”

  “How much money has Jennifer Linton got?”

  She put her hand up quickly. “I know that’s horribly bald, Fish.” She smiled, her old mask slipping lazily back into place. “But you might just as well be realistic about it. If Peter wants her, he’ll get her. He has a really astonishing gift, and Jennifer hasn’t had enough attention in her life to resist his kind of excitement.” She smiled again. “And if you try to warn her, she won’t believe you, darling, you’ll only make her more determined. She’ll be like her mother. I was worried, last night, but as long as the donor of the orchids is in absentia I have complete confidence in Peter. The only question is whether he wants to go all out. If she’s dependent on Dodo for an allowance when she marries, it would be stupid for him to bother. Dodo’s not too generous unless she wants to be.”

  He looked at her across the table for a long instant.

  “If she was as rich as all the seven seas, you don’t think I’d tell you, do you?” he asked quietly.

  The smile on her lips hardened. She nodded slowly. “But you have, haven’t you,” she said softly. “She isn’t, is she. I was rather afraid of that when I saw her dress last night. It didn’t cost $39.50, if that.”

  He felt the blood crawl up the back of his neck, leaving his spine clammy cold. The viper, he thought. The female viper.

  “In fact, Peter gathered as much,” she added calmly. “But there’s still her grandfather, isn’t there. Is he alive . . . or dead?”

  “I expect you know as much about that as I do. More, if Nikki’s told you about what he found in the newspaper morgue the three days he spent in New York looking up the Maloney files . . . or if you’ve read the photostats Western Union sent you.”

  He moved out of the booth and got to his feet.

  “I thought you two pooled your findings. If not, maybe you’d better find out what really happened to Polly Randolph, Alla. And to a little waiter whose name was Ferenc Blum. Or was that what gave you the touch of sun you had when you came in here? You’ll excuse me . . . I’ve got a touch of something not the sun, myself, and I’d like to get to the curb before it’s too late.”

  He went over to the counter and paid the girl. He put down an extra dollar bill. “Sorry I was sore. It was at myself, not you. Okay?”

  “Oh, sure. I know how you feel.” She blinked. “Gee . . . thanks!”

  He grinned at her and went out, acutely conscious of Alla Emlyn still rigid in the frozen pool of silence behind him. He was halfway out Bellevue Avenue to Enniskerry before his mind cleared away enough for him to think. When it did, the two dimes and five pennies in the fountain girl’s open palm slipped quietly onto the retina of his mind’s eye.

  She’s broke. She’s flat broke, he thought. She’s broke and she’s scared.

  He slowed down. Maybe he’d better go back and let her talk to him. . . . But no. Let her sit there and think awhile. He looked at his watch. He still had time to meet Caxson Reeves for lunch at one, and time to stop by the stable and wash up.

  As he turned in between the mortuary urns of Enniskerry, something else struck him about Mrs. Alla Emlyn. She wasn’t thinking about Dodo being dead. That wasn’t part of her scheme. She was thinking about Jenny’s share of the estate and with Dodo still alive.

  He came through the rim of purple beeches. Two men and two cars were in the drive. One car, with the Newport police tag on it, was in front of the stable. The other was over at the porte-cochere. The heavy-set man standing by it was talking to the lieutenant of detectives, Bestoso, whom Fish had talked to on the Randolphs’ fishing platform as dawn was breaking. W
hen they saw Fish the lieutenant headed his way, the large man got into his black sedan and drove on around toward the beeches. Fish saw the government tag on the back of his car.

  “Who’s that, Lieutenant?”

  “Federal,” Bestoso said. “Nothing to do with us.” Fish’s attention sharpened. “F. B. I.? Who did he want to see?”

  Bestoso shook his dark stubby head. Second or maybe third generation Portuguese, short, stocky, weather-beaten, with bright black eyes, he looked more like a fisherman than a policeman.

  “He didn’t talk much. Says he’ll be back at four. Mind if we talk a little? I hear you were down at the Azores this morning.”

  “Come on in.” Fish opened the clock tower door and led the way up to the living-room.

  “Nice place you’ve got,” Bestoso remarked. “My grandfather was head groom when the hay burners lived downstairs. Used to tell us kids about it. Before the Maloneys’ day. The old lady lived here was crazy about horses. Broke her back jumping one. The grass out there was a sand track, two boys did nothing but keep it raked. Built the house so they could wheel her out to watch the horses do their stuff. Haute école, the works. Big show, grampa said. It’s the waiter named Beyle I came to talk to you about. You heard about finding him? Before you went to his place or after?”

  “After,” Fish said. He sat down and waited for Bestoso to make a tour of the room.

  He came back grinning. “Sure gone to hell since grampa’s day. Somebody went through Beyle’s stuff, the landlady said.”

  “I wasn’t the first. I looked around, when I saw somebody had.”

  “Why?”

  “Curiosity, I guess. One of the drawers was in crooked, and the rest of the place was so neat.”

  “Why did you go there, is what I meant,” Bestoso said. “If you’d gone after you heard about finding him, I’d have understood your curiosity, maybe. I guess you’ve connected him with what Mrs. Winton said about the little black man, same as I have?”

  “Not till a few minutes ago. I thought she was seeing things.”

  “So did I, last night. Why did you go there?”

  Fish Finlay lighted a cigarette to give himself a chance to think with the sharp black eyes resting steadily on him.

  “Look, Lieutenant,” he said. “If you’ll give me a little time, there’s a hell of a lot I think I can tell you. But I need time.”

  “Any particular place you want me to send your remains when we fish you out of the Atlantic?” Bestoso inquired coolly. He put his hand in his pocket and brought out a small book. “This mean anything to you?” He handed it to Fish.

  It was a French passport. Fish opened it, and looked at the face of a man without a Gallic mustache. Clipped to the cover was a typed note from the Sûreté Générale, stating that the bearer was a private detective in good standing and that his efforts had the blessing of the Sûreté. His name was Ferenc Jean Baptiste Marie Blum.

  “Blum brought that to me when he got to Newport,” Bestoso said. “He wanted time to play it cagey too. Cocky little frog. I thought he was a laugh. But he had plenty on the ball if it was worth somebody’s while to bump him off. If he’d played it straight, I could have helped him. Afraid I’d horn in on his fee, or his glory, I guess.”

  “You knew who he was this morning?”

  “Sure. I was hoping for some kind of lead to somebody else. Like you, for instance.”

  He went on as Fish started to speak.

  “The rest of the day I’ve been looking into a note he had in his pocket. Written with one of those ballpoint underwater pen deals. There’s one of ’em on the stand by the Randolphs’ telephone. It looks like Miss Randolph—”

  He went on coolly as Fish made an abrupt movement. “I said ‘looks like.’ But it’s funny she’d sign it ‘Polly Randolph, Paris Edition, New York Courier Graphic’—if she wrote it and it was her he was after.”

  Fish Finlay took a deep breath. Miss Lanson had left that out.

  “The handwriting doesn’t look much like hers either,” Bestoso said. “It’s sort of a disguised backhand. You wouldn’t think she’d do that and sign her name and life history. And she’d write ‘make a deal,’ not ‘do a deal.’ We found her body.”

  “Did she have a note too?” Fish asked quietly.

  Bestoso looked at him for an instant. “Stuffed down in her bra. The paper was different. The salt water mushed it up, we can’t read it. But you can see the picture. Her family didn’t want an autopsy on account of Mrs. Winton. We did one. She was dead before she hit the water. Have you seen this before?”

  He reached in his back trousers pocket and brought out the jeweled leather flask Fish had seen when the men picked up Mrs. Winton’s unconscious form.

  “It’s full. Not liquor—lead shot. Colonel Randolph gave it to me. They keep it hanging on the porch, it’s a souvenir, washed up from some place in the big blow of ‘38. Randolph used to show it to everybody. Blum was drowned. His skull was thicker than Miss Randolph’s, I guess. Now I can’t see Helen Winton doing that. Course, she was drunk as a skunk.”

  “You haven’t got a carbon of Blum’s typed report to his client in your other pants pocket, have you, Lieutenant?” Fish inquired. “Brother, you don’t need any help from me.”

  “You need some from me,” Bestoso said tersely. “We got a sensitive deal here in Newport. The Navy at one end, you millionaires’ colony at the other, the town in the middle. We like to treat you people the way you like to be treated. But we don’t go for murder. And we don’t need a New York newspaper man editor to tell us when to do an autopsy.”

  He went to the door. “The Randolphs had five hundred guests from all over, drunk or sober or semi-each. I could waste months and get no place. You play square and I’ll give you a little time. I won’t trail you. I don’t have the men. So watch yourself, brother.” He went to the door. “I want somebody now who knows the fellow Blum to identify him. That could be a lead. Miss Lanson says you know somebody. Who is it?”

  Not Caxson Reeves. Fish had already seen the error of that. Reeves would have been far too cagey ever to let Blum see him in the flesh.

  “There’s a man named Durban,” he said. “A hunchback. At the Colony Hotel. He was talking to the bartender this morning. I got the impression he’d retained Blum once . . . a long time ago and in another country. I was just an anonymous guy buying him and myself a milk punch.”

  “Thanks,” Bestoso said. “I’ll drop in there and buy myself a shot of straight rye.”

  CHAPTER : 15

  Fish followed him out to the stairs. They stopped, looking down at the taxi just pulled in, a man working his way out of the door, wrong end to.

  “Who’s that?” Bestoso asked.

  “Looks like the hind end of a tall, lean, sandy-haired character totally unfamiliar to me,” Finlay answered. “Name him and you can have him.”

  Bestoso grinned. “Okay. You’ll find me in the phone book. Arturo Bestoso. And watch it, Finlay. They don’t have banks where Blum’s gone.” He went on down, meeting the sandy-haired character coming in the clock tower door.

  “Finlay?”

  Bestoso hiked his thumb back toward Fish at the top of the stairs.

  “Hi, Finlay. B. Meggs. Joe Henry sent me.”

  “Come on up,” Fish said. He heard Bestoso speaking to the taxi driver. B. Meggs came shambling up the stairs. He was not only tall, lean and sandy-haired, he looked as if he’d heard the alarm but hadn’t waked up enough to turn over and shut it off.

  “Cops?”

  Fish nodded. “Come in.” He led the way into the living-room.

  “Nice place you’ve got.”

  “All right. Don’t tell me your grandfather—”

  “He owned a grocery store in Pendleton, Oregon.”

  B. Meggs gave him a sleepy grin and put his hand inside his coat. “Joe said to give you this.”

  It was a folded piece of news copy paper, jagged where it had been ripped off the typewriter. It was a l
etter from Polly, the lines crooked, the punctuation mostly dashes, the sentences elliptic and the meaning plain.

  “Joe,” it said. “Important!!! Get picture, color if possible, Exhibit No. 43, Zirolli show Berdan Galleries Connecticut Avenue—La Dame aux Oeillets. I went to cover society angle—big deal for Zirolli—customers loaned portraits—all loaners named except the Dame with the Carnations best in show by long odds. Should be called La Dame aux Rubis and the rubies are what rang a bell. Talked with Zirolli—story off record but la dame is first Countess de G. Rubies terrific—I THINK I know where they came from—Blood all over them. Get your friend Fish Finlay for Lunch Friday—and picture—before I go to Newport. Will be in N Y Thurs, but Ive got a man to see—he wont talk over phone but 9 PM Thurs is a date. Get Picture before anything happens to No. 43.”

  “Polly R.” was scrawled in pencil under it, and there was a postscript.

  “Thanks for your efforts in re. Newport but I won’t mind going up if I have the picture. I’ll steer clear of dusty passages. Also grateful for Paris assignment I know you filched for me. Youre an angel. Love, P.R.”

  Fish read it a second time and looked at B. Meggs, propped against the paneled fireplace, squinting sleepily through his cigarette smoke.

  “She was okay,” B. Meggs said without moving. “Polly Regina, we called her, when her uncle dumped her on us. That ‘R’ after her name. I owe her twenty bucks she loaned me. I was going to buy flowers but I guess Scotch for the boys in the back room. She’d like it that way.”

  He rubbed his cigarette out on the brick lining of the fireplace.

  “I’ve got the story, I guess, from the taxi driver and the AP man downtown. Any ideas? Joe’d like to help if he can. He loved her too.”

  “You’d better see Bestoso. He’s probably waiting for you downstairs, anyway,” Fish said. “The only thing I can think of would be to see this Mrs. Winton. But it can’t be done. She’s six deep at a place called Shepherd’s Vale.”

  “Always try,” said B. Meggs. “A week’s rest, Joe’s expense, sounds fine.”