The Complete Cases of Stuart Bailey

by Roy Huggins

  The maid with the frosty eyes had been sent to bring in some tea. Quint told her to be sure the water was boiling, and to hurry in with it. The floor wag mine and I was standing with my back to the fireplace, wondering if the thing was really going to work. The police chemist had been skeptical too. He was an expert in these things. It was something about temperatures. I could feel my hands getting wet.

  The maid came in with the huge teapot steaming gaily over the blue flame of the samovar. She seemed to have got the idea, because there were no cups on the tray. She started out, and Quint told her it would be quite all right if she stayed. So now we were all there except Crukston, who could probably have saved us all the bother.

  The faces were staring at me now as if the arrival of the tea, sending a tiny spiral of steam up from the coffee table, were a curtain rising. They were intent faces, but, if I was looking for guilt, I’d have found it only in the face of the maid, whose pale eyes seemed to yammer at me silently.

  I said, “It was a rather simple thing that happened. The tea had been brought in, and a moment later the lights went off, and in a matter of seconds Mr. Trist had been stabbed through the heart and the weapon disposed of in a way that I think is answered now.”

  I reached into the side pocket of my coat and brought out the ash tray that I had found earlier that afternoon in Sara Franzen’s apartment. But it didn’t look like an ash tray now. It had been rolled and extended and molded into the shape of a crude but sufficiently lethal dagger.

  I said, “He was stabbed with this.”

  Quint was tense now; a nerve was jumping in his throat. His eyes were darting from one face to another, and I thought there was almost anything now in those faces that you might want to find there—guilt, apprehension or simple fear.

  I went on, “The killer stepped to Trist and touched him in the darkness. That was when we heard him say, ‘Who is it?’ The knife was plunged into his heart, the blade was withdrawn and wiped across the dead man’s sleeve. Then”—I stepped over to the coffee table and lifted the lid on the teapot—“the knife was dropped into the water.”

  I dropped the knife into the water and stepped back to the fireplace and waited.

  This was an important moment, a part of Quint’s inspiration. At this point, Sara Franzen was supposed to break down, to stand up and scream, to pull a pearl-handled revolver out of her bosom and start shooting her way out of the joint. She sat and looked at the teapot and looked at me and waited. Quint licked his lips.

  I said, “I think it was about twenty minutes before the law arrived. Sometime during that twenty minutes someone took the knife out of the pot . . .”

  Freddie snorted. He leered at me, his mouth all on one side of his face, and said, “That knife looked like plastic. Don’t try to tell us that the murderer took it out after it got hot and molded it into a piece of bric-a-brac. My eyes didn’t leave anyone in this room for more than a second at a time after dad died!”

  Sara Franzen stirred uneasily, and Mrs. Trist said, “What are you trying to prove, Mr. Bailey?”

  Quint stood up and said, “Let’s call a break for a few minutes, Bailey. I’ve got to make a call. I’ll be right back, and I’d rather no one left the room.” He walked to the French doors and turned and added, “Of course, any of you have the right to leave if you want.” He went on out and closed the doors behind him.

  Time passed, and again a kind of bitter tension grew in the room. I hadn’t noticed when, but at Borne point, in the five minutes just past, they had all realized that we were after something. They waited and looked at the silver teapot and said nothing.

  Quint came back in and sat down, “It’s been twelve minutes, Bailey. How about pouring yourself a cup of tea?”

  I nodded. My hands were wet again. I suddenly felt that the whole theory was a delusion, a quite adequate explanation of what happened, like Aristotle’s explanation of why the rock fell to the earth, but false in fact. My hand shook as I lifted the lid and peered in, knowing that I would see a dagger there, a little limp perhaps, but a dagger.

  But what I brought out and laid on the table was not a dagger. It was a crude round ash tray, soft now, and glistening. But in a few minutes here on the table it would become hard and someone would come along and drop an ash in it.

  I looked at Mrs. Trist. She was pressed back hard against the chesterfield, as if she were trying to get as far away from the thing on the table as she possibly could.

  I said, “Yes, it worked, Mrs. Trist. You see, it’s the original one. I found it where you hid it last night. You shouldn’t have got panicky. You should have kept it in your purse.”

  Her mouth opened and she tried to talk, but her lower jaw wouldn’t behave. Then it came: “You know . . . that I couldn’t have done it! I was nowhere near a light switch!”

  Quint interrupted. “I just called headquarters, Mrs. Trist. Crukston has just signed a statement that he turned off the lights for you.”

  Her shoulders rose convulsively and it came out fast, “That’s a lie! He could——” She didn’t finish the last word. It broke off abruptly, and for a hung moment of silence we waited while panicked thought skittered visibly about on her face. And then she knew that she had thought too long, and that we had all seen that thought as clearly as if she had shouted it at us. And then she seemed suddenly to have decided that she had fought too long, and that she didn’t want to fight any longer.

  She sat down slowly in the corner of the chesterfield and retched suddenly and sickeningly. Quint lifted his thumb and pointed to the door. We all went out of there.

  There were three men from Homicide in the hall. They went into the room and closed the door, but I could still hear the retching. It had become a sob now, dry and rhythmic. I walked on down the hall to where Freddie and Sara Franzen were standing.

  Sara Franzen didn’t want to talk about it. She had no curiosity about it. She wanted to go home.

  Freddie said, “I’ll take you, Sally. But first I’ve got to know why.” He looked at me. “Why did she kill him, and why did she go to pieced there?”

  “Crukston in dead. She was about to tell us that, when she caught herself.”

  Freddie’s mouth hung open for a moment and he shook his head slowly. “She killed him?”

  “Uh-huh. It would seem that Crukston had promised her a love nest after your father was out of the way. But Crukston had another reason for wanting your father dead. The love nest didn’t ready appeal to him. Mildred didn’t like that.”

  Freddie stared at nothing over my shoulder. His cheeks were flushed. He took Sara Franzen’s arm. “All right, Sally,” he said. “Home now.”

  I said, “Hey, aren’t you going to ask me about the dagger?”

  “Oh, I know about that. I read all about it in a magazine article. The ‘plastic with a memory’ they dubbed it.”

  “Yeah. They tell me this was a different plastic, but it works the same.”

  “Coming?”

  “No, I think I’ll just stand here for a while.”

  They went on out and closed the door.

  Someone tapped me on the shoulder.

  I turned and looked into the chill gray eyes of the maid.

  She said, “I’m asking about that dagger. Where’d it go to?”

  I smiled. I said, “Well, it’s this way——”

  But Quint was coming down the hall with one of the homicide men. He was saying, “It’s the molecules in this stuff.”

  He had the ash tray in his hand and he tossed it up and caught it. “The damned things have a memory; there’s no other way to put it. Once this stuff is molded into some shape, like an ash tray, it’s set. You can heat it after that and mold it by hand into anything you like, but it’ll always go back to the ashtray shape if you heat it again.” He looked up and saw me, “Coming, Bailey? I owe you a coupla drinks.”

  “Pretty quick,” I said.

  The maid mumbled something under her breath and went away. I walked on down towar
d the door. The library door was open, and I noticed an oil painting of Trist over the mantel. I stopped and looked the portrait straight in the eye. And Trist looked back at me and said, “Well done, Bailey.”

  After that I felt fine.

  THE END.

  DEATH AND THE “SKYLARK”

  She was tickled pink—all over—at finding a bachelor like Bailey aboard her father’s yacht . . .

  IF it hadn’t been for the yachts tied up at its long row of slips, the Los Angeles Yacht Anchorage would have looked like an abandoned fish hatchery. But the yachts were there, and as I went on down the floating boardwalk looking for the Skylark I began to wonder if it wasn’t about time for me to raise my rates.

  “The Skylark’s a fore-and-aft schooner,” the man at the lunch-room had told me. Which didn’t really help me very much. I couldn’t have recognized a fore-and-aft schooner if one had sailed right through my living room.

  But about halfway down the walk, I slowed to look at a boat that somehow seemed different from the rest, set low and long in the water, with slender lines and two high masts, and wood-work that appeared to have taken the polish of loving hands for a century or so I looked for a nameplate and couldn’t find one, but there seemed to be someone aboard, back at the stern.

  I stepped down on to the narrower walk that ran alongside the ship and went on to the boarding ladder. Someone was here all right—a paunchy man in faded denims and a cork hat.

  He was sitting in a deep-sea fishing seat attached to the deck and reading a paper that looked suspiciously like the “Wall Street Journal”.

  I waited to see if he’d look up, and when he didn’t I called out, “Could you tell me where I’ll find the Skylark?”

  “This is it.” he said, peering down at me over his shoulder. He had the uneven, rumbling voice of a man who has grown fat in his fifties.

  “I’m looking for Glen Callister.” I said.

  “I’m Callister.”

  “I’m Bailey. Thought you’d be expecting me.”

  “Oh” He stood up quickly and came over to the rail. “I was expecting a man more my age. Don’t know why exactly Come on aboard.”

  I came aboard.

  Glen Callister turned out to be a smaller man than he looked from the walk, only five feet six more or less, with a barrel chest and legs that wanted to bow just a little. He shook my hand, gave me a pleasant smile that said he’d forgive me for being the wrong age, and suggested we talk down in the “main salon.”

  The open companionway was about at the center of the ship, the cockpit just a few feet back of it. I went down the steps first and Callister gestured toward a door at the end of the passage. He squeezed past me at the door and opened it, and I followed him into a room that was as unexpected as a Crêpe Suzette at a picnic.

  IT was a large room filled with sun from a center skylight, and the odor of fine scotch from a built-in bar. There were of the room, a built-in refrigerator paneled in Philippine mahogany, a fire-place with a polished copper chimney, and a square grand piano attached firmly to one of the bulkheads.

  Callister indicated one of the couches and carefully closed the door. He crossed the room and closed another door to what appeared to be the galley, came back to the center of the room, and glanced anxiously up at the half-open skylight. He took off the cork hat and sat down, running a hand through his silver white hair.

  He coughed shortly and said: “Well, what’s the good word? Making the trip with us?”

  “I’d like to, yes,” I said, making it sound more like “Maybe.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “I’ve got a few questions to ask.”

  “Shoot. No, wait.” Once again he peered up at the sky-light, stood up, and walked out of the room. While I waited, I took his letter out of my pocket, and re-read it for the fifth time.

  The letter had dropped through my office mail slot the afternoon before. It said simply and dispassionately that he was making a trip to Honolulu on his schooner, the Skylark, with himself as captain, and that he expected to be killed on the voyage. The murder would be attempted either by his wife or his first mate, he wasn’t sure which. He had recently discovered that they were carrying on illicitly behind my back.” He wanted to know if I would come along and keep an eye on Madden—that was the first mate. If so, I was to come down and see him the next day. That was all.

  It had taken the rest of the day for me to consider the letter seriously. By the time I got to bed I was beginning to think it could just be, and the next morning the notice for the office rent arrived. I decided it couldn’t do any harm to go down to the harbor and see what it was all about.

  I was putting the letter away when Callister came back. He had closed the skylight. He shut the door carefully again, and said, still standing: “All right, you had some questions.”

  “The first one’s pretty obvious. If you know one of them’s going to try to kill you on this trip, why make it?”

  “I never ran away from a fight in my life,” he said matter-of-factly.

  “You say one of them intends to kill you. Don’t you know which it is?”

  He sat down. “I don’t think I’ll answer that one yet.”

  I let that pass. “If Madden intends to kill you, do you think having me aboard, will stop him?”

  “Do you?”

  “No.”

  “Do you want the job?”

  “I’m not sure I made myself clear.”

  “You made yourself clear exactly the way I hoped you would. No one could guarantee anything on a job like this. Do you want it? You’ll be passed off as a business associate. We don’t talk business on the Skylark, so you won’t have to worry about that.”

  “Sure,” I said. “I’d love to make the trip. Will your first mate be able to sail the boat after he rubs you out?”

  Callister just looked at me blankly for about ten seconds. Then he suddenly exploded in a laugh that came from the belt up. He laughed painfully for a full two minutes.

  He stood up, and, still fighting a little for breath, pulled a folded check from his pocket and handed it to me. It was a cashier’s check for five hundred dollars, made out to cash—a very handsome and discreet retainer.

  He was getting ready to laugh again. “Be here Tuesday morning at nine,” he managed, slapping me on the shoulder, “We’re going to have a fine trip.”

  I could still hear him laughing when I stepped down on to the boardwalk to go back to my car.

  TUESDAY seemed a long time coming around, but it did, and at nine sharp I climbed on to the deck of the Skylark with my suitcase and shave kit. A man’s head poked up from the companionway and a pair of moody eyes gave me a quick sizing up.

  “Mr. Bailey?” he asked, politely enough, and I was grateful to him for asking it—for all I knew Callister had supplied me with, a new name to go with my status as a business associate.

  I told him I was Stuart Bailey and he said he was Owen Madden, and came on up to shake my hand. He was wearing jeans and a T-shirt and no hat. The wind had been doing just the right thing with his dark, curly hair, giving it that careless, ungroomed look that is a sheer deadfall for a certain kind of woman. He was an inch taller than I, as lean as an antelope, and wearing a tan that you can get only by mixing plenty of salt and wind with your ultra-violet. He looked about twenty eight.

  He took me below and opened a door at the right of the steps, showing me a room with two bunks, a wide chest of drawers, and not much else. “We bunk in here. The head’s just across the passage. Shower, too.”

  I put my stuff on the floor and he offered to show me the rest of the boat.

  The master’s cabin was at the stern, a larger room with its own shower. The Callisters had already moved in—there were some shuts and denims on top of a cabinet, not yet put away; beside them several pipes, a ball of white string, and a book on fishing.

  Next we went to the lounge, which Madden called the “gingerbread hatch,” and then to the galley, which
had a big old fashioned wood stove in it, a large refrigerator, and space for one person—if he didn’t breathe deeply.

  I looked skeptically at the stove and asked: “Who chops the wood for it? And where?”

  He grinned pleasantly and said: “Burns Diesel oil.” and opened one of the doors off the galley to a small room with a bed covered by a lacy spread.

  “This is where I usually hang my sack,” he said, “but I guess Callister thought I’d better bunk with you instead of with his daughter.”

  “The tyrant,” I said. “I didn’t know she was coming this trip.”

  “She always comes,” he said noncommittally, and opened another door in the galley bulk-head to show me a gloomy, disordered space filled with canned goods. “Crew’s quarters,” he said. “When we carry a crew, that is. There’s another hatch up there in case of emergencies.”

  We walked back through the lounge and up the companion way.

  “Are we carrying a crew this trip?” I asked.

  “Nope. We seldom “do. She’s a sweet boat, the Skylark. Bold and sea-kindly. Built fifty years ago, when they really built ‘em.”

  On deck, he stepped into the cockpit and, without wasting words, got down to the business of explaining what would be expected of me. He showed me how to operate what he called the “Iron Mike.” an electric pilot that did the actual work for the man on watch, and explained that each of us would do a trick at the wheel four hours, then be off for twelve or sixteen, depending on how it worked out. Callister, he said, insisted on having the 4 a.m. to 8 a.m. trick, so he could sit in his fishing seat and try to reel in an albacore or barracuda for the table.

  “Ever taken a trip this long on a schooner?”

  “The closest I’ve ever been to a schooner was at Joe’s Bar & Grill.”

  “You’ll enjoy the trip,” he said. “I been hanging around boats for ten years—since I was fifteen—and I never saw a boat as sweet as this.”

  “You’re pretty young to have first mate’s papers.”