The Cases of Lieutenant Timothy Trant (Lost Classics)

by Q. Patrick

  “Alors, is it blood?” asked the manager.

  “I don’t think so.” Trant moved to the window, pushed it up and peered intently at the sill. He gave a little grunt. “Look.”

  At his side, the manager looked. Caught on a wood splinter was a scrap of red velvet.

  * * *

  Trant gazed soberly down the steep sloping bank to a large snowdrift among the pines. A few minutes later, he, the manager, and the assistant manager, with shovels, discovered Lady Mavis in the snowdrift—dead.

  Crouched by the body, Trant felt a cosmic pity for Lady Mavis and all other foolish young women who reap what they sow.

  “I’m afraid that she’s been murdered. Probably smothered by a pillow from the sofa in her room,” he added sadly. But only part of him was sad. The other part was musing on Mavis’ murderer as a hungry owl might muse on a mouse.

  They moved around the side of the chalet, to its little front porch which faced away from the hotel’s facade toward the glistening Alps. Mavis’ skis were balanced precariously against the wall. Since the “scandale” was now inevitable, the assistant manager was commissioned to telephone the préfecture at Lausanne.

  Trant remarked almost plaintively: “Now the police are coming, you won’t need me.”

  “But yes, Monsieur.” The manager was wringing his hands. “All the way from Lausanne they must come. And such questions, such crudities…. Ah, please.”

  Trant beamed and called after the assistant manager: “Send Jimmie, and his roommate.”

  Soon Jimmie arrived with one of the Swiss ski instructors. From their distraught faces, it was plain they had been told the news.

  Trant said: “Did you wax Lady Mavis’ skis last night, Jimmie?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “When did you bring them back?”

  “At one, sir.”

  “What did you do?”

  “I knocked. Lady Mavis answered she was going to bed—to leave them on the porch.”

  “Then what?”

  “I went to my room, sir.”

  Trant turned to the Swiss ski instructor. “You check on that?”

  “Yes, sir. I wake up when Jimmie comes in. We sit a while to talk.”

  “What time was it?”

  “Just after one, sir.” He glanced at the large silver watch on his wrist. “I look at my watch when I wake up.”

  At that moment the assistant manager returned with a little old man whom Trant recognized as the night bus boy. The assistant manager said: “Monsieur, André has something to say.”

  “Ah, Monsieur” began André. “C’est terrible. C’est …”

  “Speak English,” said the manager severely, “in front of

  the distinguished detective.”

  André announced: “Last night at one thirty, sounds the buzz-buzz from the chalet of Lady Mavis. I hurry here. I knock. Answers a man’s voice in English: Is all right. Only Lady Mavis has trouble with the window. Now is fixed. I say: Okay, I leave.”

  “One thirty.” Trant watched him. “What was this man’s voice like?”

  “From a foreign land. Not from England. Not from France. Heavy with foreign accent.”

  The manager flung up his hands. “Ah, she is engaged to the Mexican gentleman.”

  Trant made no comment. He stood a moment reflectively. Then he said: “I’m going to need an assistant. Since Lady Mavis’ murderer was certainly here at one thirty, Jimmie is alibied. Can I have him?”

  “But of course, Monsieur.”

  Trant patted Jimmie’s arm. “Find Mr. and Mrs. Howard and Mr. Villanueva. Tell them the manager wants to see them in his office. And use that well-known tact.”

  In the manager’s chic office Trant and the manager questioned the three suspects.

  Mrs. Claire Howard, a vivid redheaded ex-actress with a knife for a tongue, said: “I’m prostrated by grief. I couldn’t be sorrier if the python at the Bronx Zoo kicked the bucket.”

  Although she made no effort to conceal her resentment of Mavis’ behavior with her husband, she was firmly alibied by the testimony of an elderly Italian prima donna who swore she had been telling Mrs. Howard’s fortune between one and one thirty.

  Larry Howard was more conventionally distressed than his wife. He fussed with his hand-painted tie, looked more like a movie idol than any of the stars on his payroll, and kept repeating: “So tragic … such a lovely girl … so gifted …”

  He too had what seemed like a perfect alibi. After leaving the palm lounge the night before, he had run into a big-game hunting friend and had spent the significant time period in the hunter’s suite, discussing the most sportsmanlike way of killing a zebra. The hunter corroborated this.

  After these two had apparently cleared themselves, Carlos Villanueva was pitifully without defense. The elegant, mournful-eyed Mexican denied having been in his fiancée’s chalet but had absolutely no alibi. All he could say for himself was that, humiliated by Mavis’ shameless flirtation with Larry Howard, he had paced the moonlit mountainside for hours in an attempt to console himself.

  “But Mavis was my heart,” he announced with Latin fervor. “You cannot accuse me of murdering my corazón.”

  After he had gone, Trant no longer looked bored. In fact there was a gleam of pleasurable anticipation in his eyes. The manager said: “So we are left with this Villanueva, yes? No alibi—the foreign accent, not of England, not of France.”

  “Foreign accents can be assumed,” suggested Trant

  mildly. “And it’s too early to talk of alibis.”

  The manager looked alarmed. “You mean others of my guests could have killed her?”

  “They could have killed her,” Trant agreed, “but they didn’t.”

  “Monsieur, you do not tell that you know who is this murderer!”

  “Oh, yes,” murmured Trant with an exasperatingly casual shrug, “I’ve suspected it for half an hour. Now I’m sure.”

  The manager stared. “Zut!” he said.

  * * *

  The manager, now in a state of blind adoration, fell in with Trant’s requests. They were simple. He merely wanted to interview the three suspects individually in Lady Mavis’ chalet. While the assistant manager went off to arrange this, Trant stationed the night bus boy in Mavis’ bathroom with instructions to emerge if he heard the foreign voice he had heard the night before. Once he was at his post, Trant and his assistant moved into Lady Mavis’ bedroom. Trant sat down, lit a cigarette, and offered one to Jimmie.

  “Mr. Howard’s coming first, Jimmie. When he arrives, I want you to wait in the living room in case I need help.”

  “Very well, sir.”

  Trant’s gray eyes were pensive. “Jimmie, you’ve had plenty of experience with rich women on Swiss vacations. You can help me on a point of psychology. A lot of them throw their bonnets over the Alps, don’t they?”

  Jimmie grinned. “They’re apt to be in a holiday mood, sir.”

  “Exactly. But Lady Mavis was different. That’s the point about her. She vamped like Salome but when the time came to crash through, it’s my hunch she went colder than a Pilgrim mother.”

  “That’s how I’d sum her up, sir.”

  “All right, Jimmie, before Mr. Howard arrives, let’s assume for a moment that I’m the murderer.” Trant smiled contentedly at this hypothesis. “Lady Mavis certainly hurled her all at me last night. Suppose I’d taken her up on it and come here to the chalet expecting a Big Romantic Moment. What would I have got? The don’t-touch-me-you nasty-man routine.

  “Suppose I was vain, used to easy conquests. Suppose I got rough. Suppose she rang for the bus boy. Suppose I was married, for example, and realized what an awkward spot I’d be in if the bus boy reported an attempted assault to the manager. Say I put the pillow from the sofa over Mavis’ face to keep her from calling out when the bus boy knocked, planning to reason with her later and to calm her down. Okay. The bus boy came.

  “I invented some trouble with the window to explain t
he ring and to get rid of him. Later—after Andre had gone—I realized to my horror that I had been rougher than I thought. I had smothered Lady Mavis.”

  Trant looked at his own hands as if they were the hands of a smotherer.

  “There was Lady Mavis lying in the chair—dead. I hadn’t intended to kill her, but it was done. I got into a panic. Wouldn’t death from smothering look very like death from exposure? If I dropped the body out of the window and closed the window, she might not be found in the snowdrift for some time and, when she was found, they might think she’d died accidentally from exposure. At least it was safer than leaving her there in the armchair. How’s that fit, Jimmie?”

  “It fits, sir. But what about the foreign accent?”

  “Oh, I left out a couple of details. The accent, for example. And the spilled perfume.” Trant nodded to the stained area on the carpet. “The perfume’s simple. There was that stain on the rug and on the pillow from the sofa. Although the murderer was rattled, he knew he had to remove them. He used the perfume, but I’m afraid he didn’t completely succeed. The police analysis will show what the stain is.”

  “What is it, sir?”

  Lieutenant Trant rose. Suddenly he seemed depressed. “He was rather a vain murderer. As the glamor boy of the Hotel St. Laurent, he was used to conquests. He thought that Lady Mavis, with her ‘darlings’ and ‘angels,’ should be as much of a pushover as the others. It must have been humiliating when he came into this chalet last night as a Don Juan to find that Lady Mavis just thought of him as a presumptuous underling. It was frightening, too, to know that she was going to report him to the manager. That would have meant an end to an excellent job.”

  Jimmie sprang to his feet.

  “But the stain rather gave him away,” continued Trant quietly. “The small one on the pillow probably smeared off your strained arm. But the one on the rug—I suppose a tube of the stuff dropped out of your pocket and got stepped on in the struggle. You had to use that perfume, didn’t you, not only to remove the stain but to kill the smell of liniment.”

  “But …”

  “The skis give you away too, Jimmie. You say you put them on the porch at one o’clock. The porch faces in the same direction as my room—toward the front. Last night at one fifteen there was a wind squall which scattered my things. Certainly it would have toppled those precariously balanced skis. No, you brought the skis in here first and took them out onto the porch after you’d killed Lady Mavis—after the wind squall at one fifteen.

  “And I’m afraid your neat alibi can be broken too. Your roommate said he woke up when you came in. He woke up because you deliberately awakened him, didn’t he? But before you awakened him, you switched the hands of his watch. It was easy to stay awake yourself until he fell asleep again and then to turn the hands forward to the correct time.”

  The ski instructor’s ducal composure had fled and with it his elegant accent. He was a frightened little mill boy again and lapsed into a broad Yorkshire dialect: “Yer caan’t say thaat a’me, zur. She war craazed fur me. She assked me ter coom oop. Ah didn’t knaw. Ah didn’t meean her.”

  The bus boy burst out of the bathroom. “That is it! Is the foreign voice I hear last night.”

  Jimmie swung to him. “Eh, maan, yer caan’t—”

  “That’s all we needed,” interrupted Trant quietly. “People almost always revert to their natural dialect when they’re rattled, Jimmie. No wonder André thought that Yorkshire brogue of yours was a foreign accent.”

  He nodded the bus boy out of the chalet. Alone with Jimmie, he felt a twinge of sadness.

  He said: “You didn’t mean to kill her. I’m sure of that and I’ll do everything I can when the police come. I’m sorry, Jimmie. I set a trap for you. I feel like a heel.”

  Jimmie had managed to turn himself into the model hotel employee again. He smiled a ghost of his engaging smile. “That’s all right, sir. After all, it’s your job.”

  There were times when Lieutenant Trant took a low view of his profession.

  This was one of them.

  On the Day of the Rose Show

  Lieutenant Timothy Trant of the New York Homicide Bureau lounged in holiday idleness on the terrace of his sister Freda’s Connecticut home, watching a small scarlet plane buzz through the cloudless morning sky toward Poughkeepsie. Behind him, in the living room, he heard Freda’s voice as she picked up the ringing phone.

  “Oh, hello, Mrs. Weiderbacker.… A burlesque queen? … how perfectly terrible for you … no, I don’t blame you at all. And on the day of the rose show, too! …”

  Trant knew that the local garden club rose show was taking place at Mrs. Weiderbacker’s that afternoon. He knew, too, that Mrs. Weiderbacker was going to read Freda’s Inaugural Address as a proxy since his sister, who had just been re-elected president, had been urged by her doctor to stay home and nurse a summer cold. But how the rich and formidable Mrs. Weiderbacker could have become tangled with a burlesque queen was a new and fascinating development.

  “What, Mrs. Weiderbacker?” Freda’s telephone voice had shot up an octave. “The speech hasn’t arrived? But I mailed it yesterday. How scandalous…. Oh, Daisy will? How sweet of her.”

  Daisy Groves, Trant knew, was Freda’s dearest friend, the wife of Gordon Groves, Mrs. Weiderbacker’s long-suffering nephew who lived with her and managed her estate.

  Freda appeared on the terrace and snatched up the carbon of her speech from the flagstones where Trant had dropped it. “Imagine! My speech never got to Mrs. Weiderbacker. Thank heavens, Daisy knows shorthand. She can take it down over the phone and type it up in time.”

  She was back on the phone. “Hello, Daisy dear. Ready?” Trant listened idly with pleasant fantasies of Mrs. Weiderbacker pitted against a burlesque queen, while his sister launched into her address. “Ladies of the garden club, your greatest friend is the rose … ”

  She gushed on toward an embarrassing middle section, linking contact spraying with democracy—a section he had begged her to cut out. To his relief, she did and soared into her peroration. “Ladies never forget what Oliver Wendell Holmes…. ”

  Suddenly she gave a shrill scream. “No! Daisy, it isn’t possible! Murdered!” Trant jumped up as Freda rushed out onto the terrace.

  “Timothy! Mrs. Weiderbacker’s just been shot. They found her in the music room!”

  Within a few seconds they were both in Trant’s automobile, Freda’s cold forgotten in the excitement.

  “That nephew!” panted Freda. “I always knew he was dangerous.”

  “Gordon Groves? Daisy’s husband?”

  Freda sniffed. “Of course not. Poor Gordon’s in bed with a broken leg. It’s Miles Groves, the other nephew. He’s been a parasite for years. This morning he showed up with some terrible burlesque woman. He’d just married her and calmly expected Mrs. Weiderbacker to welcome her with open arms. There was a dreadful scene. Mrs. Weiderbacker told me all about it on the phone. She was going to cut off his allowance and change her will. And now … oh, poor Mrs. Weiderbacker!”

  So that was how the burlesque queen fitted into the pattern. And a very sinister pattern it seemed.

  * * *

  Soon they arrived at Mrs. Weiderbacker’s impressive treescreened mansion. In the hallway, Daisy Groves, her pretty face red and swollen and her eyes wet, rushed toward Freda. The two women clutched each other. At that moment the local police drove up, and Trant identified himself to the tough, round-faced inspector.

  An anxious, hovering butler took them both through the living room toward the music room. He had discovered the body. After Mrs. Weiderbacker had spoken to Freda and left Daisy in the hall on the phone, she had sent the butler to the tool shed for some garden twine. When he brought it to the music room a few minutes later, he had found her dead.

  “You heard no shot?” barked the inspector.

  “I heard a muffled report,” the butler said, “but I simply thought it was the backfire of an automobile.”

&nb
sp; As the butler opened the music room door, Trant and the Inspector were almost suffocated by the surging scent of roses. On three long tables the rose show entries of all the local ladies blazed in resplendent glory and on the carpet in front of them, large, stately, and formidable even in death, lay Mrs. Weiderbacker with a crimson stain on her chintzed bosom.

  The Inspector picked up a gun. “Whose is this?”

  “Mrs. Weiderbacker’s, sir. She kept it in the desk drawer.”

  “Get everyone together.”

  “But Mr. Gordon is in bed with a cast on his leg, sir. And Mr. Miles and the—er—young lady are still out for a walk.”

  “Get them.”

  There was a great deal of lumbering around and order-shouting. Trant stood looking at the open French windows through which anyone could have slipped in from the garden unobserved.

  He glanced down again at Mrs. Weiderbacker. Then, with an odd expression, half dubious, half satisfied, he drew a particularly lush yellow rose from its arrangement and put it in his buttonhole.

  * * *

  Everyone was assembled in the living room—the butler near the door, Gordon Groves, dark and disturbed, on a sofa, a blanket over the plaster of his leg cast. Daisy calmer and pale-faced now, was close to Freda with a shorthand pad on her lap. By far the most conspicuous people present were the “parasite” nephew and the “burlesque queen.”

  Miles Groves, a tall, blond, amiably handsome young man, stood by a table on which a small heap of ripe and unripe strawberries nestled in a handkerchief. At his side, more spectacular and perfumed than the rose show entries, was the redheaded Chloe Carmichael, the late Mrs. Weiderbacker’s new and controversial niece-in-law.

  The Inspector had cumbersomely gathered the facts and was interpreting them. Already he had eliminated the butler, who had been in Mrs. Weiderbacker’s employ thirty years, Daisy, who had been taking down Freda’s speech over the phone, and Gordon, who had been immobilized upstairs. He was glaring now at Miles.