Through fragrant smoke, the Detective-Sergeant said, “You wouldn’t get much chance to use disguises or do imitations as a private detective. Probably not a damn bit more chance than you get in the business you’re in. That what you did in vaudeville—mutations?”
“I had a vent act. Ventriloquism.”
The Detective-Sergeant sighed and stood up. He said, “And I used to play trombone once and be pretty good at it. And look at me now. Well, thanks for the cigar. And so long.”
“So long,” Greene said.
A Little White Lye
DIRK CAME INTO THEIR hotel room with excitement shining in his eyes. He grabbed Ginny and kissed her.
After the kiss, she pulled back a little to look at him. “Dirk, have you—”
“Yes, Angel. Found just exactly the place we’ve been hoping for. In fact, better than we had hoped to find, really. The house is smallish but not too small. Five rooms. But a big yard and no near neighbors, all the privacy and quiet in the world. On the edge of town, almost out in the country.”
“It sounds—but can we afford it, Dirk? How much?” “Believe it or not, only seven thousand. And one thousand down. Come on and give your okay so we can grab it before the agent finds out he’s being gypped!”
It sounded to Ginny as though all their troubles were over, if only she liked the house.
Dirk’s car was being repaired at the garage and they took the bus. The agent, Dirk told her, was to meet them there.
Ginny held her thumbs all the way out, hoping that she’d like it. A hotel is fine for a honeymoon, she thought, but it gets awful once you’re back and want a place of your own. They’d been back a week now from their brief but ecstatic trip. Brief because Dirk had wanted to save his money for a down payment on a place of their own. The honeymoon had been as short but wonderful as the courtship that had preceded it. It seemed almost impossible to believe that she’d known Dirk only a month. It seemed impossible to believe that so much had happened in only four weeks.
Then they were off the bus, and walking, and after a few blocks Dirk said, “That’s it, Angel!”
It was a nice house, or seemed to be from the outside. A bit lonely with the nearest other residence a full block away and screened by trees. But that didn’t matter much. There was a little picket fence around the front yard, and the lawn was in excellent condition. The house had green shutters and plenty of windows.
A friendly agent met them on the porch and showed them through. Ginny’s eyes brightened as she planned just what furniture she would need to put in each room.
The agent seemed to be ignoring Dirk; he concentrated on Ginny as though Dirk was already in the bag, and he did a shrewd job of selling her. They came, finally, to the kitchen. This was the agent’s hole card, this was the clincher.
It had windows over the sink, low windows, the kind that swing open. It had a nook for a refrigerator, and cabinets. Cabinets enough for anybody.
Ginny looked around once more, and took a deep breath. It did seem impossible that a place like this would go for such a price. She looked fearfully at the agent, wondering if Dirk could have misunderstood. She asked, “And—how much?”
“Seven thousand, Madam. And excellent terms, of course—”
They’d seen places for ten thousand, even twelve, that were worse.
The agent was hemming and hawing now. He said, “It’s only fair, of course, to tell you—” He cleared his throat again. “Uh—you’ll remember that it has an unfortunate history. That is the reason it’s being sold so reasonably. The former tenant rented it, and—uh—you’ve heard about it, undoubtedly.”
Ginny didn’t seem to have anything to say at the moment, and Dirk said, “I don’t believe we understand. What happened here?”
“The—uh—the newspapers called it the Love Nest Murder, Mr. Rogers. Undoubtedly, you read about it, just a few months ago.”
“I think I remember the headlines,” said Dirk. “I never read that kind of story unless—You say it happened right here?”
The agent nodded, his eyes troubled. He said, “I never met Mr. Cartwright, the—murderer. I was working for another agency then. But I’ve read about the case. And I can assure you that the bathtub you just saw is a brand-new one.”
“The bathtub?” echoed Ginny a bit blankly. And then suddenly, “I remember now, reading about it. After he strangled her he tried to—he put her in the bathtub and filled it with lye—”
Dirk shuddered a little.
He said, “The Love Nest Murder. It sounds—ugh!”
There was a curiously stubborn look on Ginny’s oval face. She said, “Dirk, let’s take it.”
There was a strange twist to Dirk’s lips. He said again, “The Love Nest Murder. Angel, I wish they’d named it something else. But I suppose we can forget about it. If you say so, we’ll take it.”
And they did. They moved in just five days later, and in the chaos of buying as much furniture as they could—on the installment plan—they almost succeeded in forgetting about “it.”
But there were neighbors, even though they were a block away. They were neighborly neighbors, and Ginny got to know them. She told Dirk at dinner one evening: “That Mrs. Platt in the next house—the widow—told me all about this house today.”
Dirk merely grunted, and Ginny looked at him suspiciously. “Aren’t you interested?”
He shook his head. “Look,” he said, “we’re here, but the less we think about whatever happened—”
“Sissy,” Ginny interrupted. Then her face became serious. “I think it’s wrong to—to ignore it. To think about ‘whatever’ happened instead of knowing the whole thing. It’s the unknown that gets people down. Just thinking of it as the Love Nest Murder instead of—”
“Don’t,” said Dirk, putting down his knife and fork, “use that awful phrase. All right, go ahead and tell me about it and get it off your mind.”
“Well,” Ginny began, “this woman had some money. At least, that’s what everybody thought. Well-to-do and a bit eccentric because she didn’t believe in keeping whatever money she had in banks and people said she hid it. She was thirty-six.”
Dirk grunted. “Trust the neighbors to know that.”
“Why shouldn’t they know it? The marriage license applications in the papers show people’s ages, don’t they? And this Cartwright man was younger, and handsome in a way, and—”
“And he married her for her money,” Dirk supplied wearily.
Ginny nodded. “And then he tired of her, I suppose, or maybe he couldn’t get her money, so he strangled her in—”
“You told me about that part,” Dirk said quickly. “But her bones wouldn’t dissolve,” Ginny went on. “And he hadn’t even finished getting rid of—uh—the rest of her, when some of her friends got suspicious and—called the police.”
“What made them suspicious?”
Ginny said, “I don’t know exactly. But he got scared, and got away in time. When the police came they found—they found the mess in the bathtub.”
“Well,” Dirk said. “Now I know. Now let’s not talk about it any more.” He picked up his knife and fork, and then put them down again.
“This Cartwright,” Ginny said ominously, “hasn’t been caught—yet.”
“He will be,” Dirk said. He looked at Ginny thoughtfully. “Do you really feel better now that you’ve talked about all the sorry details?”
Ginny’s lower lip was trembling. “I thought, maybe, I would; maybe if I said it all out loud I could forget it.” There was moisture, suddenly, in her eyes. “Oh, Dirk—”
Swiftly he rose and came around the table. Tenderly he tilted her chin and kissed her. “Now quit thinking about it,” he said. “Or bargain or no bargain, we move out of here quick.”
Ginny wiped her eyes with an absurdly little handkerchief. She said, “All right, Dirk. But honestly, I’m not sorry we bought it. But—I’ll feel better when that man is caught.”
“And don’t let that
Mrs. Pratt next door talk to you about it. You—you just tell anybody that wants to talk to you about it that you don’t.”
Ginny nodded dutifully. Of course Dirk was right. He’d been right all along and she’d been a dumb-bunny to think the way to forget something was to talk about it. She felt so humble she didn’t even correct him on his mispronunciation of Mrs. Platt’s name. And that was quite something for Ginny, because she loved to correct people who made mistakes.
That had been Tuesday, at dinner, and it had spoiled the dinner.
There’d been a bad moment Tuesday night, around midnight. Ginny, who was usually a very heavy sleeper, chanced to wake up then. She rolled over—and found she was alone in the bed. Dirk was gone.
For an instant she was startled, then she remembered that Dirk often got up around that time to raid the icebox. He was a restless sleeper, and seldom slept soundly for more than an hour or two at a stretch.
She listened for sounds that would indicate that he was out there—the scrape of a chair or the opening or closing of the icebox door. Or—
But the sound she heard was a muffled tapping. It kept on a moment and then changed tone, as though Dirk—if it was Dirk—had quit tapping on something and started tapping on something else.
Tap—tap—tap. Tap—tap—tap. Not a familiar sound. It wasn’t the noise Dirk’s pipe made being knocked out, because that was a succession of more rapid taps. Faster and sharper.
Wide awake now, and a bit afraid without knowing what she was afraid of, Ginny slid her feet out of bed and into the slippers on the floor beside it. She slipped a bathrobe over her shoulders and went through the bedroom door, which led into the dining room.
Yes, the kitchen light was on. The kitchen door squeaked when she opened it, and Dirk, standing in front of the built-in cabinet over the sink, looked over his shoulder and then turned.
His voice was casual. “Did I wake you, Angel?”
“N-no. I just woke up. But what was that funny tapping noise?”
Dirk grinned a bit shamefacedly. “I imagined something. It looked to me as though this cupboard wasn’t as deep on one side as on the other, and I just got curious. But I was wrong.”
Ginny said, “Oh,” a bit blankly. What if the cupboard were deeper on one side than the other?
“Something to eat, now that you’re up?” Dirk asked. “I was just getting the crackers out of the cupboard, and there’s some swell cheese. Just the thing for a little mouse like you.”
She was hungry, a little. Neither of them had eaten much dinner, she remembered now, because—But no, don’t think of what they’d been talking about, she told herself, or it would spoil her appetite now, too.
And Dirk, with a sharp knife in his hand, but smiling, was already slicing the cheese….
She didn’t see the widow until late afternoon of the next day, when she walked by on the way to the grocery. The widow was working at the flowerbed just inside the fence, and Ginny said, “Hello, Mrs. Platt.”
“Pratt,” corrected the widow, smiling. “How are you, my dear?”
“I’m fine,” Ginny told her. “Sorry I got your name wrong. And my husband had it right, then. I didn’t know he’d met you.”
“He hasn’t,” said Mrs. Pratt. “These zinnias are going to be beautiful here, I think. No, I’ve seen your husband only at a distance, when he’s driven by. You must bring him over sometime.”
“I will,” Ginny told her. “But I wonder how he knew your name, when I told it to him wrong. I—” And then realizing that, by implication she sounded as though she were doubting Dirk and Mrs. Pratt both, she said quickly, “Yes, zinnias will go nicely there. What have you planted in that other bed, back by the porch?”
“Gladioli. But about your husband—I’ll bet the agent he bought the house from talked about me to him. I rent from him, too. And he probably said, ‘Mr. Rogers, you want to be careful of that awful widow, Mrs. Pratt, who lives in the next house.’“
Ginny laughed heartily at the very thought of anyone saying that. But undoubtedly it was—in a way—the explanation. The agent had brought Dirk here first and had talked to Dirk alone. He might easily have mentioned the name of the nearest neighbor, since he knew her.
Mrs. Pratt was taking off the cotton gloves she’d been wearing. She said, “Well, that’s enough gardening for today. Will you have a cup of tea with me?”
“I really haven’t time—” said Ginny hesitantly. But she did.
She wasn’t, of course, going to talk about “it.” That is, she thought she wasn’t, until all of a sudden there was the subject, big as life, being talked about. And Ginny listening with both ears.
“My dear,” Mrs. Pratt asked her, “have you searched the place since you lived there? The police did, of course, and they didn’t find anything, but I’ve often wondered—”
“Searched it?” Ginny wanted to know. “For what?”
“Why, for the money, of course. Everybody says it was hidden there, somewhere, and nobody knows whether he got it or not. He left in an awful hurry you know, after—after he found the police were coming.”
Ginny said hesitantly, “But he—he wouldn’t have killed her, would he, unless he knew that he could get the money?”
Mrs. Pratt shrugged complacently. “Don’t forget, my dear, he tried to dispose of the body. If he’d succeeded, he could have had time to take the house apart, practically, afterwards. I’d say he knew it was in the house all right, but he may not have found it.”
“You say the police searched, though?” Ginny asked. (Why, Dirk had known about this and hadn’t told her. That was why he had been searching in the kitchen last night. That was why she’d seen him wandering about the house so much, and with that curious, inquisitive expression on his face. Why hadn’t Dirk told her?)
“Oh, they went through the place,” said Mrs. Pratt, her manner clearly indicating that she didn’t think much of either the police or their methods. “But I think they sort of assumed he had it already.”
“Oh,” said Ginny, feeling vaguely uneasy at the mere possibility of money, big money, being hidden in the house over there. It seemed almost worse, more dangerous, than—than the other. That was past. Maybe the money was still there.
She said, “But if he didn’t get it wouldn’t he have come back while the house was empty?”
Mrs. Pratt shrugged again. “He might have, of course, but if he did it was taking an awful chance. He’s wanted now for murder. And all the while it was empty the policemen on the beat kept an eye on it, and the squad cars went by. And I told the police if I ever saw a light there at night I’d phone them.”
“And there was no sign that he ever came back?”
“Narry a sign,” said Mrs. Pratt. “What I think is that he ran far when he ran. That he’s miles away from here and will stay away until it’s all blown over, and then some day when he thinks it’s safe he’ll—Oh, I shouldn’t say this, my dear.”
Ginny found that her lips were tightly pressed together. She relaxed them with an effort and forced herself to smile. She said, “I’m afraid you’ve already said it. And I won’t lie to you, I am a bit frightened. But I won’t let it scare me out. It’s our house now, and I’m going to live there no matter what.”
“Does your husband have a revolver?”
“Yes,” said Ginny. Dirk didn’t have one, but she made up her mind then and there that he would buy one the next day, so she might as well answer in the affirmative now, hadn’t she? (Oh, Dirk, you should have thought of that yourself. You knew about the possibility of the money being there, or you wouldn’t have been hunting for it. Why didn’t you tell me?)
Mrs. Pratt said, “And if I were you I’d be very, very careful about agents, and vacuum-cleaner salesmen and people like that. You know he was an actor, I suppose?”
“No, I didn’t,” said Ginny, faintly.
“Well, he was. He could probably disguise himself so you wouldn’t know him at all. I wouldn’t let anybody in the house
, unless he was short and fat, maybe. Even an actor couldn’t do that with make-up.”
“He was tall and thin, then?” Ginny asked.
“Not really tall,” said Mrs. Pratt. “But an inch or two above average. Five foot eleven, about. Slender, but not thin. You have a telephone, of course, haven’t you?”
“Of course,” said Ginny, and then resolutely changed the subject and, ten minutes later, got away.
It was too late now to go to the grocery after all, and Dirk would have to be satisfied with eating something that was already in the house. But Dirk was good about such things, he seldom complained.
(Dirk, dearest, were you trying to spare my feelings by not telling me what you were searching for? I’d rather know. I’d rather know the worst, any day.)
Dirk was sitting in the Morris chair, reading, when she came in. Had he been sitting there all along, or had he been searching again, while she was out, and run for the chair and the book when he heard her coming? He said, “Hi, Angel. What’s for grub?”
“Dirk, I’m so sorry. I didn’t get to the store at all. Mrs. Pratt asked me in for a cup of tea and we talked so much I looked up at the clock and—”
“Ummm-hmmm,” Dirk drawled. “Baked beans, I suppose.”
“No, I can make a salad except that it won’t have any celery in it, and we’ve got some boiled ham left, enough for a sandwich apiece.”
“Swell,” said Dirk. “A loaf of bread, a slice of ham, and thou, beside me sitting in the wilderness—”
“Dirk, do you—don’t you think it would be a good idea for you to get a revolver? Tomorrow?”
“Why—I’ve been arranging to get one, Angel.” He looked at her, and the laughter was out of his eyes. “Matter of fact, I’m going to get it this evening, from a friend of mine who has a spare one.”
He put the book down on the arm of the chair, shutting it without marking his place. “Have you been talking to this widow-woman about—you know what?”
“N-no,” said Ginny.
Dirk smiled, surprisingly, and said, “Tsk, tsk. Never stutter when you tell a lie. But I’m glad to know you’re not a good liar, Angel. First time you ever tried it, and it sticks out like a sore thumb. Now I can trust you.”
Mostly Murder Page 16
