Death for Dear Clara

by Q. Patrick

“Do you know that crazy fool Tolfrey’s giving a party for the suspects?” he asked sharply.

  “Sure.” Barnes’ voice was gloomy as ever. “He came round from his drunk about eight tonight and sent telegrams to everyone involved. I saw the messages after he’d written them. I called Jervis. He said he’d show up if you didn’t come back in time for it, but that I was to give Tolfrey his head.”

  Timothy cursed under his breath. “It’s my fault. I didn’t make Jervis realize … No one’s gone up to Tolfrey’s room yet, have they?”

  Barnes sounded rather injured. “I wasn’t told to stop anyone. Those four women were here asking for his room number about ten minutes ago.”

  “The Princess Walonska and her friends! Damn. Anyone else?”

  “Maybe someone slipped up the stairs without my noticing. I…”

  “Listen,” cut in Timothy, “this should never have been allowed to happen. It’s my fault but—Tolfrey’s in just about as dangerous a spot as they come. For God’s sake get up to that party, stay there, and don’t let anyone out of your sight until I come. Got it?”

  “Sure.”

  “Okay.”

  Timothy slammed down the receiver and made a dash for the door.

  XVI

  As the taxi sped precariously through the traffic toward the Regina Hotel, Timothy barely had time to puzzle out Oscar’s cryptic record of the day’s telephone calls. With no spacing and a minimum of punctuation, it gave the general impression of Gertrude Stein.

  Mrs. Trant saying please to remember your father’s birthday next week. Mrs. (didn’t catch name) saying something about juvenile crime. The cleaner says shall he go ahead as usual and he has anyway. A lady saying her name’s Phyllis, and you’ll remember her that’s all. A lady long distance with bad connection seemed referring to turtles. Barnes at Regina five times to say call at once or go around to see.

  Timothy slipped these laborious notations into his pocket as he hurried through the swing doors into the large foyer of the Regina Hotel. He was dashing toward the elevators when a familiar figure bending over the information desk made him pause.

  “Hello, Bobby.”

  “Trant!” Robert Bristol smiled rather excitedly and indicated a telegram in his hand. “Did you get one of these mad things, too? Or is this just a police idea?”

  “Very far from a police idea,” said Timothy grimly. “Come on—we’re getting up there quick.”

  Bobby seemed sprucer and a shade less harassed than when Timothy had last seen him. As the elevator shot them upward, he was full of praises for Oscar who had, apparently, made the wilderness of his apartment blossom like the rose.

  “Put paper on the kitchen shelves, washed every dish in the place, pressed my three ties and is getting my suits fixed.” He laughed with a faint trace of bitterness. “Maybe you’d lend him to me to finish my novel and take care of the divorce proceedings.”

  But Timothy wasn’t listening. He hurried down the corridor to Tolfrey’s door. It was half open. As he reached it, Sergeant Barnes emerged.

  “Well, Trant, I’ve been sitting in on the party like you said.”

  “Everything okay?”

  “Well, those four dames are there. And that Muir guy. But Tolfrey’s gone.”

  “Gone?” exclaimed Timothy sharply.

  “Yeah, you don’t suppose …?” Barnes’ voice was agitated.

  Timothy stood perfectly still for a second. “Go downstairs and hang onto the phone in case I need you.”

  Without waiting for a reply, he pushed his way into the apartment on the heels of Robert Bristol.

  Derek Muir moved forward to greet him, an immaculate vision in smoke blue.

  “Enter a policeman and another murderer!” he drawled. “Come in and join the congregation of assassins.”

  Timothy glanced quickly around him. At the window stood the Princess Walonska, slim and carefully regal as ever in an Olympian cloud of mink. Beatrice Kennet displayed the latest thing in Scotch tweeds. The fragile, auburn-haired Susan Hobart sat at her side on a corner settee. The Lotus Lady, her silver fox wrap loose around her shoulders, lounged in a chair with studied studio nonchalance.

  “I expect you’ve been duly informed of the situation,” murmured Muir, languidly handing Timothy a folded telegram. “Mr. Tolfrey has gathered us all together so that he can pick the goat from the sheep.”

  “The only drawback,” snapped Beatrice Kennet, “is that the goatherd himself has not materialized.”

  Timothy was looking at the telegram which Muir had received. It stated very concisely that Dane Tolfrey had discovered the murderer of Mrs. Van Heuten and would appreciate the company of Mr. Muir at a party to be given at ten o’clock that evening to unmask the criminal in public.

  Timothy crushed the telegram into his pocket, took a step toward the empty bedroom and then seemed to change his mind.

  His gaze rested on Patricia Walonska.

  “I’m surprised to find you ladies here. I shouldn’t have thought you’d have hurried to a strange man’s apartment at ten o’clock in the evening just because he sent you a rather sensational telegram.”

  “We came,” said the Princess brusquely, “simply because we had promised to cooperate with you, Mr. Trant. When we received that wire, we naturally thought that you were connected with it.”

  “And when we found Mr. Tolfrey not here and the door open,” added Gilda Dawn sourly, “we were convinced someone crazy like you was back of this.”

  “So the door was open, was it?” asked Timothy slowly.

  “Why—yes!” It was Susan Hobart speaking from the couch, quick and earnest. “We found the door open and came right in. We—we waited here until Mr. Muir came. And then you …”

  She stopped abruptly at the sound of urgent knocking at the door. Everyone started and then tried to pretend they had not. The knock sounded again. Timothy hurried forward and threw open the door.

  On the threshold stood Madeleine Price.

  “You here, Mr. Trant?”

  The little red hat still perched gaily on her dark hair, but a hurried application of her newly acquired cosmetics could not conceal the unnatural pallor of her cheeks. In her gloved hand she gripped a telegram.

  As if to explain her presence, she thrust it into Timothy’s fingers. He opened it. It read:

  STUPID OF ME TO FORGET YOU STOP OF COURSE MUST COME REGINA TEN TONIGHT STOP SQUIRMING WOULDN’T BE COMPLETE WITHOUT YOU AS I’M ANNOUNCING TO WORLD IDENTITY OF CLARA’S ASSASSIN. Signed: TOLFREY.

  “It was waiting when I got home.” Madeleine was glancing anxiously around the room. “Who—who has he accused? Where is he—Mr. Tolfrey?”

  “That’s what we were wondering.”

  Timothy shut the door and stood with his back to it. Very slowly, his eyes moved to Madeleine’s and then to a table where were glasses and a plentiful supply of brandy and scotch and rye whisky.

  “Perhaps, Miss Price, you’ll act hostess for a few moments, while I get the Terrabinny soil out of my nails in the bathroom. I think a little of Mr. Tolfrey’s liquor might be needed around here.”

  Swiftly he moved into the bedroom, shutting the door behind him. He took a step forward and then paused, suddenly tense. From the darkened bathroom came a faint but unmistakable sound—the steady gurgle of running water.

  He hurried forward.

  The tiles of the bathroom floor were wet beneath his feet. He stretched out a hand, searching for the light switch, and flicked it down. As the room sprang into illumination, he found himself immediately in front of the wash-basin. Both faucets had been left full on and the waste pipe was closed. Water was dripping over the porcelain rim, pouring down onto the floor.

  The long mirror above the basin was on an exact level with his eyes. That was why his first glimpse of that incredible thing in the bathroom came to him in so oblique, so particularly horrible a fashion.

  He stood staring for one dazed instant at what was reflected there. Then, as though against the
ir own volition, his eyes moved unsteadily to his own image in the glass.

  Timothy had seen many faces taken by surprise, startled, thrown out of focus by sudden shock. But never before had he seen his own face that way.

  It was ghastly—all the more bizarre for the foreshortened view, like a shot from some horror film. His own face, unfamiliar in close-up, and behind it, the shining whiteness of the wet tiles stretching to the bath where that impossible thing lay.

  Slowly he turned from the macabre image in the mirror to the reality. He moved through the quarter inch of water on the tiles to the bath.

  There, stiffly, almost deliberately posed, lay Dane Tolfrey, his arms straight at his sides, his head propped grotesquely against the glazed edge. He was meticulously dressed in a blue suit with a large single pearl pin in his tie which gleamed in the light from above the mirror. His lips were half open in a travesty of their usual sardonic smile; there was bluish tinge in the floridity of his cheeks—and the eyes stared blindly forward in an idiot stare.

  Unquestionably, he was dead.

  Slung over the edge of the bath were two bloodstained towels.

  After a second’s hesitation, Timothy gripped the heavy shoulders and pushed them forward, revealing the back. He saw what he had half expected to see. The blue serge of the coat was ripped and stained. Blood trickled down, vivid crimson against the vivid whiteness of the bath. And, lying on the cold porcelain, its blade wet and dulled, was a cheap wooden handled knife such as is used for garden or rough kitchen work.

  Timothy let the body fall back into place. As he stood there, his fingers pressed against his thighs, he was trembling.

  But he was not trembling with fear; he was trembling with anger. Timothy was coldly, implacably angry. Tolfrey had done the one thing to ensure his own murder. He had been a fool. The police had bungled. But worst of all, Timothy himself had bungled.

  That was one thing he would never forgive either himself—or the murderer.

  XVII

  There was absolutely nothing of the casual young man about Timothy as he started a swift search of the bathroom. The panther was on the warpath now.

  He turned off the faucets in the wash-basin and opened up the waste-pipe. He gazed down at the wet tiles of the floor.

  It was clear why the murderer had left the faucets running; He had made ruthless use of the advantages of a bathroom as a locale for murder. The water, overflowing the rim, had poured down on the floor and would have obliterated whatever traces of footsteps or dirt might have been left by his shoes. And, reflected Timothy grimly, there had probably been another motive. Running water attracts attention. The murderer had seen to it that the body of Dane Tolfrey would be discovered while the suspects arrived for the party—while they were all on the scene of the crime.

  With a final swift glance around the bathroom, Timothy closed the door and hurried to the telephone in the empty bedroom. Connected with Barnes downstairs, he outlined rapidly what had happened, told him to get in touch with Jervis immediately.

  He pitched his voice low to make certain the guests in the next room would hear nothing. Apart from John Hobart and Helen Bristol, all of Mrs. Van Heuten’s visitors were congregated there. It was a six to two chance that the murderer of Mrs. Van Heuten and Dane Tolfrey was among them. Something, perhaps, could be gained from the disaster of this party. If the murderer, whether singular or plural, masculine or feminine, were in that room, he alone would know what Timothy had found. There was just a chance.

  When he re-entered the living-room, hardly one of Tolfrey’s guests glanced up. They were all talking with an excessive animation which was only half successful in concealing their growing uneasiness. Patricia Walonska was chattering with surprising absence of condescension to Madeleine Price, of all people. Gilda Dawn and Derek Muir were deeply entangled in the complexities of Hollywood gossip; while Beatrice Kennet had so far forgotten herself as to promise a good word to her own publishers about Bobby’s latest novel.

  Susan Hobart alone made no attempt to conceal her nervousness. She sat by herself in a corner, her tiny hands fingering the clasp of her pocketbook.

  He had not found the shadow of a motive against any of these people, thought Timothy as he crossed and poured himself a drink. There was absolutely no evidence to connect them with crime of any sort. And yet he could tell as certainly as he could tell anything that they were all guilty of something—guilty as hell.

  He turned very slowly so that he faced them all. He lifted his glass. When he spoke, there was an edge of steel behind the casualness of his tone.

  “Well, ladies and gentlemen, let’s drink to our lamented host.”

  The various threads of conversation were cut short. They all glanced at him sharply, but no one spoke.

  “And since,” continued Timothy, “Mr. Tolfrey is not here to entertain us with his amateur solution of the crime, perhaps you’ll help me in my blundering attempt toward the official one.”

  His gaze moved to the patrician mask of Patricia Walonska.

  “You claim, Princess, that you and your friends were the first to arrive here tonight. You found the door ajar and you walked in. Is that correct?”

  “Yes.”

  “Weren’t you rather surprised at a hotel door being open?”

  Patricia Walonska’s mink shoulders shrugged indifference. “I really didn’t think about it. We knew he was giving a party. We supposed there were other guests.”

  “And when we didn’t find any,” broke in Beatrice Kennet, “we sat here waiting like four sour débutantes until the diverting Mr. Muir came to quicken our lonely female pulses.”

  “Apparently,” murmured Timothy, “you didn’t consider the fact of a hotel door being open—surprising. Thanks. After Mr. Muir, Mr. Bristol and myself arrived. And then, Miss Price.”

  He broke off sharply. Everyone had turned to the door. Once again someone was knocking. This time it was not a brisk rapping as Madeleine’s had been; it was soft, tentative.

  In the brief ensuing silence, Timothy caught Bobby’s questioning glance and nodded. The boy hurried to the door and swung it open.

  Timothy’s eyes narrowed as a tall, suntanned man sauntered into the room. It was the man whom Timothy had seen only that morning, over three hundred miles away in Winton, Ohio.

  John Hobart paused, glanced indolently around the startled circle.

  “It seems to be a party,” he said.

  All eyes were on him, but in particular, Timothy was watching Susan Hobart. The little millionairess had half risen, her face flushed and strangely embarrassed.

  “Johnny,” she breathed, “what—what are you doing here?”

  John Hobart bent and kissed her on the mouth. Then his velvet brown eyes turned with lazy insolence on Timothy.

  “This morning, Susie, I had an interview with two representatives from Actual Life Romances. They convinced me that a husband’s place is very definitely at his wife’s side.”

  Timothy returned his gaze steadily. “And what exactly made you think you’d find your wife’s side in Mr. Tolfrey’s apartment?”

  “Another Princetonian question.” Hobart’s brown hand caressed his wife’s shoulder. “It happens that I arrived and registered at this hotel about fifteen minutes ago. I called my wife at the Princess’, but the butler didn’t know where she’d gone.” He glanced down at the abrasions on his knuckles. “Having time on my hands, I thought I’d look up—my old friend.”

  He strolled across and helped himself generously to whisky.

  “By the way, where is Tolfrey? Apparently the police don’t object to our purloining his liquor.”

  The silence was broken only by the sibilance of seltzer as he filled his glass.

  Then, abruptly, the Princess Walonska rose.

  “There’s no conceivable point in our staying any longer,” she said, drawing her fur coat more closely around her. “Come, Beatrice, Gilda.” She shot an imperious glance at Mrs. Hobart. “And you, too, Susan.�
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  As she moved toward the door, her right arm pressed rather awkwardly against her side, Timothy caught a glimpse of something silver, gleaming beneath the fur of her coat.

  “One moment, Princess,” he said curtly. “No one’s leaving this room until I tell him to. And—if you do have to steal a photograph belonging to Mr. Tolfrey, is it necessary to appropriate the frame too?”

  The Princess stopped dead. Her cheeks lost their customary pallor. For the first time since he had made her acquaintance, Timothy saw Patricia Walonska thoroughly embarrassed.

  “Oh, I—it’s just a picture of my husband,” she faltered. “It’s rather good. I haven’t a copy of this particular one and …”

  With a nervous little laugh, she produced the photograph from the folds of her coat.

  “I intended, of course, to ask Mr. Tolfrey for it. But—but as he didn’t come …”

  Timothy took the picture and looked for a moment at the lean face of the Prince Walonski, as distinguished and aristocratic as that of his wife.

  “You disarm me, Princess.” His voice was dangerously smooth. “A mere policeman can hardly bring up the subject of petty larceny in the face of such wifely devotion.”

  The three other women had moved instinctively toward the Princess, but she seemed unaware of their presence as she stood there, flushed and defiant.

  “I can understand,” continued Timothy quietly, “why you should be reluctant to have police know your husband was acquainted with Mr. Tolfrey. I can also understand why you wouldn’t want even the photograph of so illustrious a man to be contaminated by proximity to murder.”

  “Murder …!”

  Timothy’s gaze moved like lightning, taking in each individual reaction to the word. Hobart’s raised glass half concealed the sardonic curve of his smile. Derek Muir flicked a particle of cigarette ash from a smoke blue sleeve, while Bobby Bristol ran a hand through his already untidy hair.

  But Timothy was most conscious of Madeleine Price—her eyes almost fiercely bright, the patches of rouge on her cheeks standing out like two wounds.