“But then there was Ada. She was the source of the truth. When did you discover that Ada knew who you were and told the Madame?”
“Oh, we had it out, all right. Madame listened in to my call to Benny. I heard the click when she hooked the phone. I went to her room and she waved Ada’s letter and the Finder’s Detective report in my face. I wasn’t going to kill her. I just wanted to get the cash and then get out of town, so I disconnected the telephone extension in her bedroom and locked her in.”
“Of course you planned on killing her! After Benny left the money. You had Benny’s service revolver for the job, so he’d be framed for her murder,” said Mr. Benchley. “How long had you had the gun, Lee?”
“Shut up!”
“After you killed Madame, Ada had to die, too. And then there was Finder. Later you killed Finder. One thing led to another, snowballed, as they say, isn’t that how it went?”
Mr. Benchley paused for a brief moment to take in the stiff little angry smirk on the woman’s face, and then he said: “Two things you didn’t know, Miss Pigeon: Madame had already changed her will hours before she confronted you with the truth, and with the fact that Madame Annabelle Leopold Olenska was Caroline’s real mother, not Myra Mead. Myra took in the child fathered by her husband, Luther Pendragon.”
“I don’t want to hear any more!”
I said, “I saw you at the Dakota the morning Mr. Benchley and I went to have a tarot card reading. The morning of Miss Ada’s murder. This afternoon, we watched you from the park as you left the house. You were wearing a green cape coat. I’d seen one just like it, rather old-fashioned really, that’s why I remembered it—you were wearing it that morning at the Dakota. You wore a black wig, too. You were on the stairs and entered through a door—a door to the delivery entrance of Miss Ada’s apartment. Funny that I saw you there and you never saw me and Mr. Benchley. The Dakota apartments are so big I thought the woman in the green cape was entering another apartment, not Miss Ada’s place, by the servant’s entrance.”
“The only reason you didn’t steal the key then, right after you strangled Miss Ada, was because you didn’t realize that what she had hanging around her neck was in fact a key, isn’t that right?” said Mr. Benchley. “Not until Pendragon tried to steal the book. How’d he get it, Lee? Did he threaten to give your real identity away? He must have known the first time he laid eyes on you. The man knew you weren’t his daughter, his dead daughter.”
I didn’t like the way the gun was shifting around in her hand. I wanted her wrath to be directed elsewhere, and if it meant throwing a new light on things, redirecting her anger at someone else, I might buy Fred and me a little more time for the police to arrive.
“Now, with what the cops have on you, you’ll be going off to jail, and Bette, who will say you stole Benny’s gun, will get off scot free, ’cause the police don’t have anything on her. And because Benny has been shot to death by the police, she’ll inherit his huge fortune,” I said, and waited to see how she took that little news item. “He was a Boston Booth, dinchaknow?”
“Maybe not scot free, Mrs. Parker,” said Mr. Benchley.
“Oh, no, Mr. Benchley? How is it that Bette won’t get away with murder?”
“Why, she’s an accessory to the crime, Mrs. Parker.”
“And how can anyone prove such a charge, Mr. Benchley?”
“Why, Bette set Benny up—for the police to catch him and charge him with murder, knowing he’d run—so that the police killed him, Mrs. Parker. A far better ending than Bette could have ever hoped for. Murder by proxy.”
“Is that so, Mr. Benchley?”
“Yes, Mrs. Parker, that is so.”
“Won’t you tell me what it is that will send Bette to the poky, Mr. Benchley?”
“Why, certainly, my dear Mrs. Parker! You see, people of good breeding never fail to send a bouquet, or a box of bonbons, or a basket from Bonwit’s to their hosts after a weekend stay at their country house. Now, Benny was in a hurry to return to his wife, after she telephoned him at Alexander Woollcott’s home to say he’d been cleared of suspicion in the murders—and we know she did that for a fact, called him there at Aleck’s house; the telephone company will confirm a call was put through. She knew Benny was staying with Aleck, out of sight of the police—remember, you called to tell her that Benny was with Aleck and safe?”
“So I did . . . .”
“As I was saying, Benny was in a hurry to get back to his wife, but, because he was a man of very fine breeding—”
“A Boston Booth, in fact,” I announced in a high-falutin’ tone.
“—but with no time to lose ordering flowers or bonbons or baskets as thanks for his stay there—albeit he was domiciled in a rather cramped, cluttered, four-room apartment where he was assigned a lumpy couch to sleep on in the house Aleck shares with Ross and Jane—and not in a bucolic country estate—”
“The point, Mr. Benchley?”
“Ah, yes, the point: Benny felt that a note of thanks to his host was the very least he could do on such short notice, with a brief explanation that Bette had called to say he was no longer a suspect and that he was returning to the suite at the Waldorf, etcetera, etcetera, you get the picture.”
“So the note will do Bette in, is that what you’re trying to say, Mr. Benchley?”
“Quite.”
“Because Benny was still, until only a few hours ago when we figured it all out, the primary suspect in the murders. The note left for Aleck, in Benny’s own hand, proves Bette set him up.”
“Ya-voll.”
“Don’t you two ever stop talking?” Obviously our banter was proving annoying, for the girl had no sense of humor.
There were noises from somewhere in the house. At last, I thought, the police had arrived! We’d been there more than fifteen minutes, and Dudley had done as he was asked!
“I’d put that gun down, now, Caroline—or Lee, whatever you call yourself—the police have arrived, and you’ll only make yourself look even more guilty with a gun pointed at us.”
“There aren’t any cops,” declared Caroline. “Nobody’s coming in,” she said, peeking through the drapes. “Good try, though. No, stay right where you are, both of you! Bette! Bette, come on in here. I need your help tying these people up.”
Bette was here, listening? We thought for sure she’d be playing the grieving widow in her room at the Waldorf!
When Bette failed to appear, Caroline moved through to the dining room, keeping us in eyeshot as she called out Bette’s name once again. She pushed the kitchen door open a crack, and then called out her friend’s name again.
All of a sudden, Mr. Benchley pushed me violently into the foyer and out of Caroline’s line of vision; Woodrow leaped clear of my crushing fall, as Caroline glanced furtively in at the kitchen. And then, grabbing a paperweight from off the desk, Mr. Benchley hurled a knockout pitch at Caroline’s head.
The gun went off, and Mr. Benchley fell violently down to the floor. Caroline Mead, suffering from a direct hit on her shoulder, pain seizing her and taking her breath away, rose to her knees and scrambled across a short, but difficult, course to retrieve the gun. As she crawled to where it had landed, a foot came down on her wrist.
Dudley the Chauffeur stood over her, the gun in his possession now, the police sirens whining louder and louder as they barreled up the street.
“What’d I tell you? Some women are just murder,” said Dudley, standing victoriously over her.
I knelt beside my best friend, who lay there sprawled out, and searched for a gunshot wound, but he suddenly sat up, shaking his head, and with a frown of confusion took in the sight of Dudley restraining Caroline just as the police came charging through the front door.
“I don’t think I’ve been shot,” announced Mr. Benchley, patting his chest and arms. “A little light-headed, maybe, but—”
He had fallen, he said, when he pitched the paperweight; his foot snagged the edge of the Oriental rug on which he
was standing, tripping him and sending him flat on his back.
The police cuffed “Caroline” and took her away. Mr. Benchley told the officer in charge the circumstances behind our dawn visit, the discovery of the true identity of the young woman they were taking away in cuffs, her guilt in the murders of the two spiritualists and the private eye, and her complicity with Bette Booth in the blackmail scheme that threw suspicion of the murders onto Benny Booth. Benny, had he been convicted and executed for the murders, would have left Bette a wealthy widow, and Caroline—Lee Pigeon—a woman of means, thanks to her dead benefactress, Madame Olenska. Now Bette was on the run.
We were then instructed to go directly to the police station to make our statements.
“Awww, shit!” I whined, “no more questions! Why do they need to ask questions all the time? Why can’t they just write up their little reports from what we just told them happened? Bet we have to talk with that awful little man, Morgan. I don’t like the way he looks at me—ah, yes, Sergeant, we’ll be over there right away—like hell we will, right Fred? What are they, on a deadline or something?”
As soon as I could pull Woodrow Wilson out from behind a potted palm where he had taken refuge, we were going home. Mr. Benchley sent the reporters and press photographers, who’d tagged along with the police in search of a good story, over to interview Dudley. “This fellow has a rather interesting, if jaded, romantic philosophy for our times,” said Mr. Benchley by way of introduction, before we left for our apartments and much-needed sleep.
We were riding in the cab uptown, too tired for words, each of us just staring out our windows at the new day. Activity on the streets was picking up with the arrival of many early-morning service workers and the departure of those on the nightshift, but the full-blown bustle and flow of life at morning rush-hour was still more than an hour away, when the onslaught of company office staffs and store clerks would rise from out of the subways and step off from packed streetcars and trolleys and onto the sidewalks on their way to their tower-tall destinations. I rolled down my window; Woodrow stuck his head out and took in the breeze, eyes narrowed against the wind.
It will be a warm day, today, I thought, sunny and almost spring-like. The yeasty smell resulting from the street-cleaner washing down the avenue and the rising vapors of mist from the warm sun hitting the cold, wet asphalt were not unpleasant, and lent a rather refreshing quality to the start of the day. The slanting autumn sunshine, still low in the eastern sky, flickered between brightness and shadow as we passed open side streets and obstructing towers as the cab rushed north. I closed my eyes against the flickering, hypnotic flashes of light and darkness, but not for long. The city is too compelling to turn a blind eye. As tired as I was, the concrete and brick and mortar and steel were a testament to human ingenuity. The greatest city in the world was compellingly beautiful, ever changing, and demanded my attention.
Mr. Benchley murmured sleepily, “Someday, I’d like to say good-morning to the milkman instead of good night.”
“I suppose you’ll have to call Aleck, now, and tell him about Benny and all.”
“Why me? Why do I have to tell him the bad news?”
“It would be too upsetting should he read about it in the paper. I believe he was growing rather fond of the young man.”
“No, Mrs. Parker, what I meant was, why do I have to make that call? Why can’t you call with the sad news?”
“Cranky this morning, are we?”
“I’m on my way over there now, anyway, and he probably knows all about Benny by now.”
“How’d’ya figure that?”
“Bette.”
“She’s probably skipped town by now.”
“Not without the note Benny left for Aleck. She heard us talking about it to Caroline—at the house, that is. That noise we heard and thought was the police arriving was Bette leaving by the back door. The note is the only real evidence implicating Bette. I asked one of the arresting officers to call in and get some men up to Aleck’s.”
“Why didn’t you just telephone Aleck?”
“I tried, and I tried calling Ross and Jane to warn them, but couldn’t get through.”
The taxi pulled up to the residence on 47th Street, the house Aleck shared with Jane and Ross. There was no sign of the police having arrived as yet.
Ross came to the door, disgruntled and more unkempt than usual in spite of the few hours’ rest after escorting Percival Peckinpah through Brooklyn with our friends. His rumpled, pillow-creased face and bristly hair pointing in several directions away from his head suited the gravelly voice that demanded, “What the hell do you mean by ringing the doorbell at this hour of the night? First it’s that woman to see Aleck, and just as I was getting back into bed, you’re ringing the doorbell.”
“Why did you disconnect your telephone?”
“Why do you think? I’d’ve disconnected the doorbell, too, if I could have, but you people would have used knuckle power to wake me up! What in the world do you want from me?”
“The world is out to get you, Ross, and they sent me,” said Mr. Benchley, pushing past him and into the house. He looked up the long staircase toward Aleck’s apartment, but thought better of climbing up and entering by the apartment’s front door.
A nasally Jane, wrapping a chenille robe and standing in plush bunny slippers, peeked out from the bedroom.
Mr. Benchley told Ross to look out for the police and have them positioned both front and back of the house, and then he went out through the kitchen and into the garden to climb up the fire escape.
“Come on!” ordered Jane, grabbing my hand and racing back through the kitchen after him. She bolted out the back door, and before I knew it Jane was climbing the ladder up to the second floor and Aleck’s apartment.
Shit! I thought, as I glanced over my shoulder at a tight-lipped Ross who was scratching and shaking his head. “Well,” he said at last, “what are you waiting for? I can’t go. I have to wait for the cops to arrive.”
Why was I always wearing heels at such times?
I climbed the ladder. The window curtains of Aleck’s apartment were closed against the morning sunshine, but the window was opened a few inches up from the frame. Mr. Benchley threw a look of displeasure at the two women beside him, and when he glanced down at Jane’s bunny slippers, he just shook his head in sad resignation, took a deep breath, and then gingerly lifted the window and climbed through. We followed his lead, blind to whatever lay behind the curtains.
“Well, there you all are,” said Aleck from his armchair, snug in his royal-blue-satin dressing gown, not at all surprised by our unorthodox entrance.
Bette Booth sat across from him on the sofa, her eyes red, a handkerchief clutched in her hand, wiping away tears. She tensed visibly and rose from her seat to announce, “My Benny is dead!” And with that she crumbled back down in sobs.
“Poor, poor child,” cooed Aleck, not moving an inch out of his chair. “Such an ordeal you’ve suffered!”
“What the hell is going on?” I yelled out. “That child is a conspirator to murder!”
“So she is,” said Aleck very solemnly. “So she is . . . .”
“The police are on their way, Bette,” said Mr. Benchley, gently. “Where did you put that note Benny left for Aleck? The note that he wrote telling Aleck you had called and that he should return to the hotel? The note that said the real murderer had been caught? Where is the note, Bette? The note that implicates you?”
Aleck said, “I was about to give it to her after she asked for it, but it just seemed a little odd that she’d come here to see me so soon after her husband was killed. When she told me the police had shot him dead, I was shocked. Why would a devastated widow come here at six in the morning? Why not find consolation in her friend, Lord Wildly, who was on hand for her, and quite her champion? Made me think: Why would she ask me repeatedly to see the note? You and Mrs. Parker were the only people who knew Benny had left me a note; I didn’t tell anybody els
e, just unplugged the telephone after talking with you and went to sleep, so I wondered how she knew about it. The whole thing didn’t sit right with me. And then, when I didn’t hand it over, she pulled that gun on me.”
“Awwww, shit!” I whined, “not again. Don’t you know that if you fire that pistol at us, you’re toast?”
“I want that note, and I want to walk out of here—”
“It’s over, Bette,” said Mr. Benchley. “The police are on their way. Caroline—I mean, Lee—gave you up, told the whole nasty story. Before you came here you were at the Washington Square house listening to our conversation. You heard us tell her that Benny left a note. You figured if you could get it and destroy it, there’d be no evidence that you set him up. But, it doesn’t matter anymore if you destroy the note, not with Carol—Lee’s testimony. You don’t think either of you are going to walk away free, do you?”
Bette fell back in her chair, a picture of hopelessness; the gun she’d been holding slipped to the floor. Mr. Benchley retrieved it and slid it into his pocket. Then he walked to the front door of the apartment, opened it, and waited as several officers, led by Detective Morgan, came up the stairway.
Jane & Ross
The Final Chapter
The way things were going, I’d need a wagon to wheel Woodrow out of the stadium.
Woodrow Wilson had already bummed sizable, plump morsels from Jane’s and Ross’s hotdogs, and then stared Harpo down to guilty submission as the latter tore into his frankfurter. When there was nothing left to be had from one Marx Brother, he moved on to the next. Finally, when Groucho ignored him, he moved on to FPA, mistaking his stinking cigar for a dog. When Frank tried to reason with him, he finally relented by pulling the link out from the bun held by an unwary Chico, who was busy yelling with the masses to “kill the umpire!”
Woodrow struck pay-dirt with Mr. Benchley, who had “Sucker” written all over him when he signaled with two fingers to the boy vendor—“One for me and one for my friend over here—hold the mustard”—a sure victory sign that he was getting the goods. At least one whole red link was coming his way on a soft white bun! He did a little dance of excited expectation.
[Dorothy Parker 03] - Mystic Mah Jong Page 26
