“Here it is. What kind of heart trouble did Benedict Coon have?”
“How would I know? Is there more than one kind?”
“According to the best authorities, there are several. Could you find out for me?”
“If properly motivated.”
“Bribed, you mean. What’s the tariff?”
“Another dinner?”
“In the immediate future.”
“Agreed. First thing in the morning. I’ve got connections at the hospital.”
“Call me at my office.”
“Just as soon as I know.”
She hung up, and so did I. I smoked three cigarettes and lay down again. I was wide awake, and it was three years till daylight. There was another phone call I wanted to make, but I decided I’d better wait. Brady Baldwin, waked in the night, would be even meaner than Hetty, and he was not, moreover, susceptible to bribes.
The next morning I was in my office with my feet up when the phone rang, and Hetty was back. True to her word, motivated by a steak, she had found my answer, and it was the answer I wanted. Luck, after running bad, was beginning to run good. It looked like the end of a long, dry spell.
I dialed police headquarters. After preliminaries with the switchboard, I got Brady Baldwin in Homicide.
“Hello, Percy,” he said. “No news.”
“I called to give, not to receive. It’s more blessed, supposedly. In brief, I’ve found her.”
The line hummed, and I listened to it hum. Brady was still there at the other end, but he wasn’t talking at the moment. I only hoped that I hadn’t talked too soon and too much.
“Excuse me, Percy. We must have a bad connection. I thought you said you’d found her.”
“I did, and I have.”
“Where?”
“Sitting in my lap.”
“Don’t be a cutie, Percy. Give it to me straight and quick.”
“Not now. Later.”
“Better not play games with your license. You might lose it.”
“No games, Brady. I could be wrong, and I have to be sure. Will you do me a favor?”
“Why should I?”
“You’ll be doing one for yourself, too.”
“That’s different. What favor?”
“Do you still have Benedict Coon’s car in custody?”
“We do, but we’re ready to release it.”
“What have you done to it?”
“The usual. We’ve taken photographs. We’ve lifted prints. We’ve vacuumed it and run tests. Nothing that’s got us much of anywhere.”
“Back seat, too?”
“Sure. We’re not dummies, Percy. Coon was shot in the back of the head. It could have been done by a third party hiding on the floor in the rear. It’s conceivable.”
“How about the trunk?”
“Why waste time? How could he have been shot from the trunk?”
“Run tests on the trunk, Brady. That’s the favor.”
“Maybe you’d better come clean with whatever’s in your mind.”
“I said later, Brady, and that’s when it’ll have to be. Goodbye, now.”
To avoid threats and recriminations and other forms of unpleasantry, I hung up, grabbed my hat, and got out of the office before he could call me back. I got in my clunker and headed east, and in due time I was rattling up the drive to the Cedarvale Country Club, which was not a place I ordinarily went or was welcome.
There were a dozen late vintage automobiles in the parking area. It was a clear day, chilly but still abnormally mild for the time of year, and I could see a few golf bugs scattered over the rolling course. In front of the clubhouse, using a pair of long-handled clippers on a juniper bush, was an angular specimen with an expression of contented idiocy on his face. He looked to me like the kind who might entertain himself by playing poker with license plates, so I wandered over and said that it was certainly a nice day, late in the year as it was, and he agreed. I said it was a good day for golf, and he didn’t deny it. I asked him if a lot of members were still playing, and he said there were quite a few.
“You a member?” he asked.
“No, I’m a cop.”
I didn’t bother to distinguish between cops private, and cops public, and he didn’t require me to make the distinction.
“There was a cop here the other day,” he said. “He was asking about Mrs. Coon and Mr. Farmer.”
“I know. You have to ask about things like that, just to keep the record straight. You know how it is with murder. It’s important to find out where everyone was at certain times.”
“Well, Mrs. Coon and Mr. Farmer were right here, and I said so.”
“Did you see them?”
“Not them. His car. It was parked up here, and I remember it because it had a full house. Highest hand in the lot at the time. I play poker with myself, sort of, with license plates.”
“So I’ve heard. Didn’t you see them when they left?”
“They didn’t leave. Not while I was here, I mean. Other people saw them, though. They came in off the course about four o’clock, something like that, and they hung around in the bar and had dinner before they left. I quit at five.”
“When did they arrive and park the car?”
“I wouldn’t exactly know. About eleven, I had to go down to the caretaker’s shed for a tool I needed, and the car was here when I got back.”
“How long did you stay at the caretaker’s shed?”
“Well, I got to talking with a fellow there, and it was quite awhile. Half an hour, at least. A lot of other cars had come in, and the lot was pretty well filled. There was a luncheon in the clubhouse that day.”
“I see. So the car was here soon after eleven, say. Mrs. Coon and Farmer came off the course about four. I’d call that a long game of golf.”
“They must have practiced before they started to play.”
“That,” I said, “is just what I’m thinking.”
I left him in his juniper patch and went away. I should have gone directly to police headquarters, but I didn’t, and the reason I didn’t had something to do with earning a fee, and something more to do with injured pride or vanity or what you will. I went, instead, to 15 Corning Place, and I was intercepted at the door by the same maid as before, who went, as before, to see if Mrs. Coon would see me.
I waited in the hall for the maid to come back, but she didn’t come. In her place, after awhile, Martin Farmer came, the shirttail cousin. He was superficially polite, but I could tell that I was considered a nuisance. Mrs. Coon, he said, wasn’t seeing anyone. Mrs. Coon wasn’t feeling well and couldn’t be disturbed.
“That’s too bad,” I said. “Give my sympathy to Mrs. Coon, and tell her that Mr. Hand has important information that compels him to insist.”
“Oh? Perhaps, if you were to tell me, I could relay the information to Mrs. Coon later.”
It was a touchy point in our negotiations, and for a moment it seemed questionable whether I would get a concession or a polite bum’s rush. Martin Farmer hesitated, considering the alternatives, then he shrugged and conceded.
“I’ll see,” he said. “Please wait in the library. You know the way.”
I went to the library. I waited. After about five minutes had passed, Dulce Coon came into the library with her shirttail close behind her. Martin Farmer, that is. He stopped near the door. She came on and stopped a step or two away. This time she was wearing a white blouse and tight black pants. Her feet, bare, were thrust into flat sandals that were no more than thin soles with narrow straps attached. She was annoyed, to say the least, and she clearly was determined to make short work of me.
“Mr. Hand,” she said, “I thought I made it clear that our relationship had ended. Why have you come here again?”
“I’m here,” I said, “to tell you that I’ve found Myrna. I thought you’d want to know.”
There was a moment of silence in which no one moved or breathed. Then Martin Farmer stirred suddenly by the door
, but I didn’t look at him. I kept looking at Dulce Coon. Crimson spots had begun to burn in her cheeks, and her eyes glittered behind heavy lashes. Her lips moved soundlessly and were quickly still, as if she had been about to protest an impossible claim, Myrna being a myth. But this would have been a bad mistake, and she caught the mistake in time.
“Where?” she said.
“Where I least expected her.”
“Don’t be evasive, Mr. Hand. Who is she?”
“You. You’re Myrna, Mrs. Coon.”
“And you’re insane.” She laughed harshly, and her voice dripped scorn. “It’s apparent that I made a mistake in coming to you in the first place.”
“You made a mistake, all right, and your mistake was in taking me for more of a fool than I was. Once you had decided just how to kill your husband, you needed a witness to establish the existence of a murderess who didn’t exist. Someone not very clever. Not nearly as clever as you, for example. I don’t know just how you happened to pick on me, but I’m sorry that I couldn’t accommodate you.”
“Are you less of a fool than I thought? Clearly, you are even more of one.”
“Let him talk, Dulce.” The voice was Martin Farmer’s, coming from the door, and it possessed a quality of silken amusement that warned me, suddenly, that I was listening to a dangerous man. “Even a fool can recognize foolishness if he hears enough of it.”
“Thanks,” I said. “I appreciate the opportunity to hang myself. Never mind how I finally tumbled to the fact that you were Myrna, Mrs. Coon. It took me long enough, and I’m not proud of it. Spike heels for added height, being careful at all other times to let me see you only in flats. A blond wig which can, incidentally, be traced, now that we know it was yours. Not only did it have to be bought, it also had to be dressed, and it will be only a matter of time until the police learn who sold it and who dressed it. For the big performance, a calculated emphasis of sex, which for you was easy. More than all this, dark glasses and a dark lounge and every precaution to prevent my getting a good look at you. Your face was always in shadows and turned away. When you left, you left quickly, exposing only your back in the light outside. Unfortunately for you, my ears are better than my eyes.”
“What absurd thing is that supposed to mean?”
“Trade secret. I’ll keep it, if you don’t mind. Anyhow, once I knew it was you in the lounge, I could see that the whole show was phony. For example, you told me that you learned about Myrna by overhearing on an extension a conversation she had with your husband. In this house, there are surely several telephones, most of them without extensions. Why would your husband have received a call from a blackmailer on a phone which offered even the slightest opportunity for eavesdropping to a third person? I don’t think he would have.”
“This is really incredible. If it weren’t so libelous, I might find it amusing.” Her voice was still harsh, however soft, and the blood still burned in her cheeks. She was possessed, I thought, by a kind of unholy excitement. “Now that you have decided that I devised this elaborate hoax, perhaps you will tell me why I wanted to murder my husband.”
“You tell me. Money? That was part of it, I suspect. Money, and the man who helped you murder him.”
“So now there is a man involved. What man, please?”
“The man you met in the Normandy Lounge. Martin Farmer.”
“This is getting more and more absurd. You are insane, aren’t you? I thought all the time that I was presumed to have met my husband there.”
“That’s what I was expected to presume, that the man in the lounge was your husband. But he wasn’t. He was Martin Farmer. Your shirttail cousin. His term, not mine. He had only to exercise the same care that you did to get away with it. Wear the clothes you said your husband would wear. Keep his face obscured in the shadows. He has about the height, the right weight, the right color hair. Everything but the right name and the wife.”
“But my husband was murdered. Remember? Where, exactly does he fit in?”
“He fits in the trunk. The gray sedan’s trunk. He was killed here, in this house, sometime around two o’clock in the afternoon, late enough to satisfy the estimate of time of death, which allowed considerable latitude. After losing me in the traffic, you drove out, put him behind the wheel, and left him where he was later found.”
“You’re ignoring something, aren’t you?” It was Martin Farmer again, and I turned to look at him. There was an air of indolence about him, and he was smiling faintly, but his eyes were cold and wary. “Dulce and I were at the Country Club. We played golf and had drinks and dinner. We were seen by a dozen people who remember.”
“No.” I shook my head and began to wonder, now that I was almost finished, if I could ever get out alive. “Your alibi is the most precarious bit of all. To have a car handy, you drove your car out to the club before noon and left it in the parking area. But you didn’t stay. I imagine that Mrs. Coon followed you and brought you back here, where you had work to do, having arranged in advance for the necessary privacy in which to do it. You know the work I mean. Your golf bags were put into the sedan, along with a change of clothing. After parking Coon’s car on that dead-end road, it was a simple matter to change, and pack into the golf bags that you carried away with you the clothes you removed. It was only a matter of minutes to cross that undeveloped land between the end of the road and the back of the golf course. Risky, of course, but you were ready to take the risk, and you made it. Then you came on into the clubhouse, a pair of innocent golfers with a car to ride home in, and witnesses to testify for you. But I can’t remember anyone’s saying that you were seen before coming off the course. It was simply assumed that you had been playing. Brady Baldwin’s a smart cop, and he’ll be interested in that.”
“This is very interesting speculation,” Dulce Coon said. “Even rather clever. I advise you, however, not to repeat it. It’s actionable, you know, and you would have to account to my lawyer.”
“I predict that you will have to account to a lawyer yourself. The prosecuting attorney, I mean. Don’t forget that the gray sedan is still in custody. The police lab is working over the trunk right now, and you can lay odds that they’ll find something to show that your husband took a ride in it—a thread, a scraping of skin, a hair or two, a smear of blood, something. It’s miraculous, the things that can be done in labs these days. Brady will be along after awhile. You can depend on it. In the meanwhile, since you brought your lawyer into this, I’d recommend calling him early.”
I had started moving toward the door, and I kept on moving, and no one tried to stop me. I slipped past the shirttail cousin and out and away.
At least, I thought, I had finally earned my fee.
* * * *
At dinner, we were three. I was there, and Hetty was there, and Brady Baldwin was there. Brady was included because he had finished the case and earned a dinner, and because I was feeling expansive. Three assorted fiddles and a piano made music, and it was, altogether, very fancy and satisfying. After dinner, Brady’s ulcer began to bother him a little.
“I’ve got to go home and take something,” he said, “and so I’d better humor you immediately and have it over with. I’ll admit you acted practically like a genius in this business, once you got going, but there’s one thing that must have been pure boneheaded luck, a wild guess, at best. How did you tumble to the fact that it was Martin Farmer that Dulce Coon met in that bar? Maybe it wasn’t even a guess, though. Maybe, when you met Farmer later, you simply recognized him.”
“Nothing of the sort. Brady, don’t try to belittle me. There was a strong resemblance between Farmer and Coon, and I never got a good enough look to see any difference. Farmer saw to it that I didn’t. So far as I knew, it was Benedict Coon at the bar, and Benedict Coon who left with his wife. It was only later that I learned something that convinced me that it was really someone else. Under the circumstances, the shirttail cousin, being suspiciously handy, was indicated.”
“All righ
t, I’ll bite. What did you learn?”
“Thanks to Hetty, I learned that Benedict Coon had a serious heart condition. Not that he couldn’t have lived for a long time, too long to suit our Dulce, apparently. Especially since, according to reports, he stuck strictly to his diet and took damn good care of himself.”
“Come off it, Percy. You can’t tell that a man has heart trouble just by looking at him. You trying to tell me that the man at the bar looked like he didn’t have heart trouble?”
“It wasn’t how he looked. It was what he did. Hetty checked it out for me, and she reported that Benedict Coon’s specific heart condition was something called cardiorenal disease. People who have it are put on a very strict salt-free diet. And the man at the bar, all the time he was waiting, kept eating salted peanuts.”
Hetty was drinking coffee and smoking a cigarette, and looking at me through the smoke with a very promising expression.
“Isn’t he remarkable? You said it yourself, Brady. Practically a genius, you said. It makes me all over prickly just to know him.”
“Well, I’ll be damned.” Brady shoved back his chair and stood up and looked down at me sourly. “Good night, Hetty. Good night, Genius. Thanks for the dinner. I’m going home to bed.”
“In good time,” said Hetty, “so are we.”
THE CAPSULE
Originally published in Mike Shayne Mystery Magazine, December 1964.
Nearly three hatred-filled years had passed, postmortem, before Alvin Dudley had an opportunity to kill Carter Malin. The opportunity, when it came, was not the result of any deliberate manifestation of initiative on Alvin’s part. Although his motive was vengeance and his hatred deep, it was not in his character to take positive action. Where other men might have pursued, Alvin merely waited.
He lived alone in a modest house in an unpretentious neighborhood. Six days a week he left for work promptly at seven-thirty in the morning, and returned just as promptly at five-thirty in the evening. He prepared most of his own meals, dining out rarely, and once a week he had a woman in for eight hours to clean and do his laundry. He was admired and respected by folk who knew his history. He was respected for his restraint. He was admired for his quiet courage.
The Second Fletcher Flora Mystery Megapack Page 24
