But He Was Already Dead When I Got There

by Barbara Paul

  “Jeez,” Lionel breathed heavily. “Our note! Lieutenant, before you say anything—I didn’t take it. I don’t know anything about this.”

  “What were you doing upstairs?” Toomey asked.

  “Talking to Barney! Right next door! Ask him!”

  “I’ll do that. How long have you been here?”

  “Not more than twenty minutes, half an hour. I stopped in to tell Mrs. Polk and Barney not to worry about their jobs.”

  “You’re not discharging the manservant?” Mr. Dann asked in tones of disapproval.

  “Lieutenant, this could have been done last night,” Lionel said, ignoring Mr. Dann. “I didn’t even know Uncle Vincent had a safe until Gretchen told me this morning. And she doesn’t know the combination—I couldn’t have opened it!”

  “Could the safe have been forced open?” Mr. Dann murmured.

  “No signs of it,” Toomey said. “Whoever opened it either had the combination or the right instruments for activating the combination. Mr. Knox, I can’t search you without your permission until I get a warrant, but—”

  “Oh, for crying out loud!” Lionel growled, jerking his suit jacket open. “Go ahead! Search!”

  Toomey quickly assured himself that Lionel was not carrying the purloined promissory note. “I’m going to have to ask you not to leave until we’ve had time to search the house.” He stepped briskly to the adjoining bedroom and told a startled Bjarne Pedersen not to leave his room until further notice. When Toomey got back to the master bedroom, he found Lionel down on his knees peering under the bed, Mr. Dann watching him with bemusement.

  Lionel got back to his feet. “Lieutenant,” he said excitedly, “what if the note wasn’t taken last night? There were police in this house all morning, and—”

  “And so it must have been taken this afternoon?” Toomey smiled. “Recently, in fact?”

  “Yes! Maybe just now—maybe we interrupted the burglar!” Lionel pulled back a heavy window drape and looked behind it. “He could be anywhere!” He strode into a small dressing alcove and pulled open the closet door.

  And found Dorrie Murdoch standing there. Her eyes were enormous, her lips stretched back over clenched teeth, the palms of her hands pressed together in a gesture of supplication.

  Lionel quickly closed the door. “He could be in any room on this floor!” he said to Toomey. “Why don’t we look before—”

  “Mr. Knox,” Toomey sighed, “just leave the searching to us, will you? But until Sergeant Rizzuto gets back, I think we’ll stay right where we are.”

  “Lieutenant Toomey,” Mr. Dann said, “I’m going to want to take those papers as soon as you’ve finished checking for fingerprints.”

  At that moment Godfrey Daniel jumped down from his chair and trotted into the dressing alcove. He sniffed at the door and started pushing at it tentatively with one paw.

  “Find a mouse, did you, Godfrey?” Toomey asked.

  Lionel scooped up the cat and started talking rapidly. “Mr. Dann, who else knew the combination to the safe besides you? Somebody had to know it, or else the safe would have to be blown open and obviously it wasn’t and—”

  “No one else had the combination, so far as I know,” Mr. Dann said.

  “Nobody blows safes that size anyway,” Toomey commented. “Not any more.”

  Godfrey wriggled free from Lionel’s grasp and thumped to the floor. He went straight to the closet and this time tried hooking a paw under the bottom of the door.

  “Must be a pretty big mouse,” Toomey remarked. He shoved past Lionel, gently pushed Godfrey Daniel out of the way with his foot, and pulled the door open. “Well, well, as I live and breathe—Mrs. Murdoch! Aren’t you getting tired of standing in that stuffy closet? Come out here and sit down, why don’t you? And then you can tell us why you were hiding in the closet of a room that’s just been burglarized.”

  9

  A thorough search of Vincent Farwell’s house failed to turn up the missing promissory note. The police had concentrated their efforts on Bjarne Pedersen’s room, because that seemed to Lieutenant Toomey the logical place for Lionel Knox to have hidden the note—if he had in fact taken it. But no, nothing was found there except a confused-looking manservant and his belongings.

  Dorrie Murdoch had come up with one of the flimsiest excuses Lieutenant Toomey had listened to in all his years on the force. She’d lost an earring, she’d said, the night before; and she came back to look for it. While she was there, she said, she thought she’d go up and take a look at Uncle Vincent’s bedroom—which she’d never seen, she said. The first thing she noticed was the wall safe open and then she heard the elevator and she was afraid she’d be accused of trying to steal something from the safe and so she hid in the closet and she didn’t really do anything wrong, Lieutenant. She said.

  Toomey put on a show of reluctance when he told her she was free to go; she’d insisted on being searched and he didn’t have anything to hold her on. Inwardly Toomey was exulting, for now he thought he knew the reason behind all that extraordinary activity in the murder room the night before. Both the Knoxes had been in the library after Vincent Farwell was murdered, Dorrie Murdoch had unexpectedly hidden herself in Vincent Farwell’s closet, and the promissory note Vincent Farwell held from Ellandy Jewels had disappeared. Lieutenant Toomey was not a believer in coincidence.

  Dorrie left with Lionel Knox, the fingerprint man left with several sets of prints, and Mr. Dann left with the papers they’d found in the safe. Toomey and Sergeant Rizzuto settled down in the kitchen with Mrs. Polk, who’d fixed them a big pot of coffee. The housekeeper poured some cream into a bowl for Godfrey Daniel and then sat down in the breakfast nook with the two policemen. She was obviously still worried, but she seemed calmer than she’d been earlier in the day.

  Toomey almost hated to do it to her. “Mrs. Polk, you moved Mr. Farwell’s body, didn’t you?” he charged abruptly. “You and Barney.”

  She turned white, but tried to bluff it out. “What do you mean? I didn’t touch him!”

  “Barney must have done the actual moving, but you knew about it. Maybe it was even your idea. You moved him before you called the police.”

  “That’s not true!”

  “Mrs. Polk, we know the body was moved after Mr. Farwell had already been dead a while. There’s medical evidence that says so—medical evidence. If you and Barney didn’t move him, then it had to be Gretchen Knox who did.”

  The housekeeper looked stricken. “Oh, no! You can’t think Miss Gretchen … you’re wrong, Lieutenant! Miss Gretchen didn’t—wouldn’t …”

  “Nobody else was in the house.”

  “But she—”

  “Either you or Gretchen,” Toomey said mildly.

  She lowered her head, and for a moment Toomey was afraid she was going to cry. She didn’t. After a minute or two she admitted in a voice even higher than usual that she had indeed moved the body, from the middle of the floor back to the desk.

  “You and Barney together,” Rizzuto put in. “You ain’t big enough by yourself, Mrs. Polk.”

  “I’m stronger than I look,” she said defiantly.

  Toomey waved Rizzuto to silence; she obviously felt guilty for involving Barney and was trying to protect him. That could wait. “Why did you move him, Mrs. Polk?”

  “Because he looked terrible, sprawled out like that. It was indecent. He shouldn’t have been left that way. It was a matter of respect, Lieutenant.”

  Toomey asked the housekeeper if she’d cleaned up the study before she called the police. “Like gathering up papers from the floor, for instance?”

  “Papers? There were no papers on the floor. I didn’t touch—oh. I did move the gun. I put it on the desk.”

  “Where was it?”

  “On the floor, underneath Mr. Vincent. I’m sorry if I’ve caused trouble, Lieutenant. I honestly thought it wouldn’t make any difference. I still don’t see that it matters.”

  “So after you moved him,” Toomey
plowed on, “you called the police—and then woke up Gretchen and told her?”

  “Yes.”

  “How did you know she was in the house? You told Sergeant Rizzuto you didn’t speak to her again last night after you’d served the drinks and left the library. Come on, Mrs. Polk, you might as well tell us the whole story.”

  That one took a little longer, but Mrs. Polk finally admitted she’d been listening outside the library door. “It was hard not to hear them. I was just starting up the stairs to my room when they all began shouting.”

  “What were they shouting about?”

  “At first, the loan. Then Mr. Vincent told Miss Gretchen about what that detective found out, about Mr. Lionel and that Nicole, and I knew Miss Gretchen would be staying here. She always does, whenever she and Mr. Lionel quarrel.”

  “Wait a minute—back up a bit. They were shouting about the loan? Why?”

  “Well, they were all angry because Mr. Vincent had told them he wasn’t renewing it. Mr. Lionel was especially upset.”

  Toomey and Rizzuto exchanged a satisfied smile. Motive. “Just one more question for now, Mrs. Polk,” the Lieutenant said. “Did you happen to notice the jewelry Mrs. Murdoch was wearing last night?”

  “Yes, indeed. She was wearing a lovely new gold pendant. It had rubies in it.”

  “Was she wearing earrings?”

  “Oh no—earrings would have distracted from the pendant.”

  Rizzuto snorted. “Searching for a lost earring, huh?”

  Mrs. Polk looked puzzled, but Toomey reassured her they’d just have a word with Barney and then be on their way.

  “Where’s your car?” Lionel Knox asked.

  “In the garage,” Dorrie Murdoch answered. “I took a cab.”

  “I’m parked around the corner.” Lionel waited until they were in the car and then blurted out: “Did you get it?”

  “No!” Dorrie cried in frustration. “The safe really was open when I got there! I looked through the papers, but the note wasn’t there. I was just trying to decide what to do next when I heard the elevator and … well.”

  They looked at each other and pronounced one word: “Nicole.” Lionel started the car.

  “She’s not at Ellandy’s,” Dorrie said. “She might be at home.”

  “Right,” said Lionel, and pulled away from the curb.

  “The computer’s not hooked up yet,” Paul Bernstein said.

  Toomey took his time answering, looking around Bernstein’s new office. More space, higher rent district—the detective was moving up in the world. “But your memory’s still hooked up, isn’t it? I can wait for the details. Just give me a rough outline. This is a homicide investigation, remember. And don’t say anything about client confidentiality—your client’s dead.”

  Bernstein saw no reason to volunteer the information that Gretchen Knox was now his client. “There’s not much to tell,” he shrugged. “Except for that one fling Lionel Knox had with Nicole Lattimer, he’s been hewing to the straight and narrow. Doesn’t even cheat on his income tax more than most.”

  “What about the rest of them?”

  The detective shrugged again. “Dorrie Murdoch spends a lot of time buying clothes and getting her hair done. So does Simon. Nicole seems to have settled in nicely with Malcolm Conner. Conner himself is squeaky clean. They’re all doing well financially—except Simon Murdoch may be in for a rough time.”

  “Oh? How’s that?”

  “He made a killing on a diamond deal several years ago, and he put his profit into real estate—which is unusual for a diamond merchant, I’m told. Most of them just buy more diamonds. Anyway, Murdoch started buying condos and shorefront properties, and he got in over his head. He’s been buying diamonds on extended credit, and he has managed to come up with enough cash to keep both the real estate and the diamond business going. But he’s doing a juggling act.”

  Toomey mulled that over. “What does that have to do with Ellandy Jewels?”

  “Not a damned thing, far as I can see. But the old man wanted reports on all of them, and that’s what I turned up on Simon.”

  “Anything illegal in what Simon’s doing?”

  “I couldn’t find anything. It’s just a high-risk business he’s in and he’s running close to the edge. He’s a pretty shrewd dealer, though. He’ll probably pull out of it.”

  Toomey asked, “If he were a corporation, would you invest money in him?”

  Bernstein grinned. “I’m a conservative investor, Lieutenant. The only one of that gang I’d put money in is the old man himself, and he’s gone now.”

  “How’d he make his money?”

  “Smart investments, most of them in the late thirties right before the war broke out. His U.S. Gypsum shares, for instance—they’d doubled in value by the time the war was over. And his Colgate-Palmolive shares had tripled.” Bernstein shook his head. “Whoever’d think of toothpaste as a wartime investment? Everything he bought didn’t pay off that big, of course, but he never really took a bath on anything. Money makes money.”

  “So I’ve heard,” Toomey said dryly. “Well, thanks, Bernstein. Those reports you gave Farwell—you’ll send me copies when your computer’s clicking again?”

  “Tomorrow,” Bernstein nodded. “This means you owe me one, Lieutenant.”

  “I know,” Toomey sighed.

  Dorrie and Simon Murdoch sat propped up side by side on the big bed, looking at themselves in the mirror that surrounded them on three sides.

  “Tell me I misunderstood,” Simon drawled. “Tell me you didn’t really say you went back to Uncle Vincent’s to rob the safe.”

  “Well, we didn’t know about the safe last night, did we?” Dorrie asked a mite testily. “I thought if the note was there, I ought at least to make a try for it.”

  “Tell me, did you come home first and put on your black housebreaking outfit?”

  “Don’t be silly, darling—black’s no protection in the daytime.”

  “And so Lieutenant Toomey found you hiding in Uncle Vincent’s closet. However did you explain that?”

  “I told him I was looking for an earring I’d lost.”

  “In Uncle Vincent’s closet?”

  “Oh, Simon, you’re not even trying to understand!” Dorrie cried. “You’re so smart—what would you have done?”

  Simon raised an eyebrow. “I wouldn’t have allowed myself to be caught, for one thing. For another, I wouldn’t have been there in the first place. All you’ve done is direct suspicion toward yourself, my love.”

  “Thanks a lot. Whatever would I do without you?”

  “Now, darling, don’t be sarcastic—that won’t help. We have to think what to do next. You and Lionel are sure Nicole took the note?”

  “Who else would want it? She and I had been talking about it, and about where Uncle Vincent was likely to keep the combination. She just beat me to it.”

  “You think she beat you to it.”

  “Where is she?” Dorrie screamed, making Simon wince. “She’s not at Ellandy’s and she’s not at home. Malcolm’s off consulting with a client somewhere and I couldn’t get hold of him either. I’ve left messages everywhere for both of them.”

  “What’s Lionel doing?”

  “Trying to decide how much to tell Gretchen.”

  They sat in silence for a few minutes, staring at their reflections in the mirror. Then Simon got up. “There’s one thing we’ve got to do, and we’ve got to do it now. We have to get rid of our ‘loot’. Where’d you put it?”

  “In the linen closet. In a blue airline bag.”

  Simon found the bag, brought it into the bedroom. “You know, this is just heavy enough to sink nicely if it were tossed into a body of water. A large body of water. Like an ocean.”

  “You want to drive down to the shore?” Dorrie unzipped the airline bag and started looking through the things they’d taken from Uncle Vincent’s library. “Why not just drop the bag into the river? That’s closer.”


  “They drag rivers, darling. I’ve never heard of anyone dragging an ocean, have you?”

  Dorrie held up the jade horse and examined it closely. “You know, Simon, some of these things are really quite nice.”

  “Now, dear, you know we can’t keep them. That’s all we need—Lieutenant Toomey to come charging in here with a search warrant and find incriminating evidence all over the place.”

  “Oh, he wouldn’t do that!” She was half laughing, half scoffing. “Why should he? Just because he found me in Uncle Vincent’s closet? That’s not reason enough to get a search warrant for our home, surely.”

  Simon raised an eyebrow at her. “Oh, you’re certain of that, are you? I suppose we could call Malcolm and find out the law’s position on searching and the issuance of warrants pertaining thereunto, but somehow I don’t believe that would be a wise thing to do.”

  “Now who’s being sarcastic? Look at this jade horse, Simon—it’s a lovely little thing. Do we have to get rid of it?”

  Simon took the horse and examined it. “You’re right, it is lovely.” He sighed. “But we must be strong, darling. Into the water it goes. Along with the rest of Uncle Vincent’s playthings.” He gave the horse back to her.

  “What a pity. Darling, I really don’t want to drive all the way to the shore. Suppose someone did fish the airline bag out of the river. How would they ever know who put it there?”

  “Fingerprints, my love.”

  “Oh, well, if that’s all …” Dorrie jumped up and fetched a linen handkerchief from one of the bureaus. She started polishing the jade horse furiously.

  Simon watched her a moment and then said, “That is a long drive to the shore. Be sure you don’t miss a spot.”

  “I’m being very careful.” She put the jade horse aside and started working on Uncle Vincent’s wristwatch.

  “I’ll get the car out,” Simon said. “You bring the bag.”

  Fifteen minutes later Dorrie slid into the passenger seat of Simon’s Mercedes, the airline bag on her lap. “Where would be a good place?”

  “The middle of the river would be safest,” Simon mused. “We’ll have to drop it off a bridge.”