by J. J. Murphy
“If we find out the who, we shall quickly determine the why. Let us consider. . . .” A wicked look stole over Woollcott’s face. “Oh, that devious pair! What cunning! What boldness! What effrontery!”
“What—are you talking about?” Benchley asked.
“You mean, who am I talking about? None other than Hollywood’s sweethearts, Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks!”
Dorothy sighed and drained her cup. “Aleck, just when I start to take you seriously, you jump right off the deep end. Are you still at a loss for your marbles?”
Woollcott raised a finger in the air. “Ah, but that’s the beauty of their plan. On the surface it does seem crazy. But take a closer look, and it’s devilishly clever. Think about it. Who was probably the last to see Bibi alive? Mary Pickford, correct?”
“Well, that may be true—”
“Of course it’s true,” he snapped. “Mary somehow killed Bibi in the bathtub, but then you and I appeared before she could get rid of the body. So what does Mary do? She enlists the help of her husband, who follows you down to the cellar, locks you in the cold storage closet and absconds with the body of his wife’s rival. You see? Mary and Douglas worked together. She did the killing, and he did the disposing. And then they can cover each other’s tracks. Devilishly clever!”
“It’s nuts, is what it is,” Dorothy said. “Why on earth would Fairbanks steal Bibi’s body? What would he need it for? He and his wife are the most successful couple on Broadway and in Hollywood. Why in heaven’s name would they waste their time—as well as jeopardize their reputations—on murdering Bibi in the first place?”
“Mrs. Parker has a point,” Benchley said.
Woollcott opened his mouth to speak, but Dorothy continued, “And why murder her in their own bathtub in the midst of their own party? No woman in her right mind would agree to sully her own home in such a way.”
“Ah, there’s the rub,” Woollcott said archly. “Perhaps she’s not in her right mind.”
Benchley nodded. “Aleck has a point. Mary was rather upset with Bibi. You told me so yourself.”
Woollcott stepped closer. “And didn’t she accuse Fairbanks of some kind of extramarital shenanigans, even bestowing that necklace on the young tartlet? Ahem, I mean starlet.”
Dorothy shook her head. “Aleck, you came looking for me because you thought Lydia was the guilty party. Now you have your sights set on Mary and Douglas? Whom will you accuse next?”
“Don’t get too comfy, Mrs. Parker,” he said, graciously taking her empty coffee cup from her. “I have only your word that you saw a man wheel Bibi away. And I have only your word that you had found Bibi already dead. You could be lying on both counts, for all I know.”
“All that you know could fill up this coffee spoon,” she said, handing him the utensil. “And there’d be room to spare.”
“Room to spare?” His smile hardened. “Speaking of rooms, what do you say we go up to Fairbanks’ penthouse and question its occupants? Then you’ll see how much I know.”
Chapter 15
They rode in the service elevator. It was darker and noisier than the passenger elevator, but it was also right next to the kitchen. So it was too handy to pass up.
“Aleck, this is preposterous,” Dorothy said. “Why would Doug Fairbanks and Mary Pickford allow Bibi to sit naked in their bathtub all night, then kill her by some mysterious means but allow her body to be placed in their bed, then demand that it be removed, and then steal the body back? It makes no sense.”
Woollcott gazed at her over the rims of his eyeglasses. “Do you have a better theory? I’m all ears.”
“You’re all wet,” she mumbled.
She didn’t have a better theory—although she had a different one. What if Lydia Trumbull murdered Bibi? Lydia’s whereabouts were unknown at the time of the murder. She was apparently one of the last to see Bibi alive. And she most certainly had an axe to grind against Bibi. Also, Dorothy thought, that fainting spell did not seem like the reaction an innocent woman might have to an accusation—even for an actress.
“Benchley, you’re painfully silent,” Woollcott said. “Something on your mind?”
Benchley shot a guilty glance at Dorothy.
Woollcott became impatient. “Come on. Out with it. What—or who—is on your mind?”
Dorothy held her breath. Was it she who was on his mind?
“Go on,” Woollcott urged. “Tell us who it is.”
“Dr. Hurst,” Benchley finally said.
Dorothy silently exhaled.
Woollcott raised his eyebrows. “You have my attention. Please speak, Robert. Expatiate. Proclamate. Divulge. Tattle. Spill the beans!”
Benchley took a deep breath. “Well, Dr. Hurst certainly seemed rather displeased with Bibi. Remember how he entered the bathroom during the party, shut the door and then emerged soon afterward? What if he did something to her at that time, something that later killed her?”
Woollcott frowned, although he was clearly intrigued. “Go on.”
“Immediately after, Dr. Hurst became drunk and argumentative. Fairbanks asked him to leave, and Doyle escorted him down to his room, where he fell asleep under the watchful eye of his valet. A perfect alibi. But if I’m right, he had already meted out Bibi’s death sentence well before she actually died. Perhaps he employed a poison that only a doctor might have.”
Dorothy looked up at him with admiration. What a clever fellow my dear Fred is!
“Mr. Benchley,” she said, “no one would ever guess it from your angelic appearance, but you have quite a devilish mind to come to such a devious conclusion.”
The elevator arrived at the top floor. Woollcott didn’t make a move to open the door. He seemed displeased—displeased with a reasonable alternative to his theory against Fairbanks and Pickford. “But if it was Dr. Hurst, why would he seem so alarmed when he was brought up to examine the body?”
Benchley shrugged. “Lousy bedside manner?”
Dorothy spoke up. “You were the one who cried murder, Aleck. And that was right after you noticed that Bibi’s locket was missing. That was Dr. Hurst’s locket. So, it’s no wonder that he was alarmed. Don’t you find that significant?”
Woollcott held up a hand. “Ah, but Dr. Hurst then said the necklace was worthless. And he evidently had entrusted its care to Fairbanks. Don’t you find it significant that said locket then wound up around Bibi’s neck, and then subsequently disappeared while Dr. Hurst was no longer in the penthouse but down in his room? It directs the blame toward Fairbanks, not Dr. Hurst. And, last but not least, the door was locked—from the inside! And there’s no reason to believe that Dr. Hurst or Lydia Trumbull had a key.”
“Well . . .” Dorothy felt as though Woollcott had somehow turned her words against her. And she was about to argue that although Dr. Hurst said the locket was worthless, perhaps it really wasn’t. Perhaps it had sentimental value, or some other value. Perhaps Dr. Hurst said it was worthless just to keep himself from looking guilty. But Woollcott didn’t give her the chance to speak.
“Enough of this gibberish!” he said, flinging open the elevator door. “Let’s talk to Douglas and Mary, and get to the bottom of this.”
But when they entered the penthouse, the place was empty. They looked in every room, but there was no sign of Fairbanks or his wife.
“Now what?” Dorothy asked.
Woollcott hesitated, then thoughtfully moved toward the bathroom. “As they say in the detective novels, let us reconstruct the scene of the crime. Mrs. Parker, show us exactly how you entered this room in the first place, and then every step afterward. Leave out nothing.”
“But, Aleck, you were here when I found her—”
“No, I most certainly wasn’t. When I arrived, you were standing over the bath. What did you do just before th
at? Show us step-by-step. Leave nothing out.”
“Oh, well, if I must.” She closed the bathroom door. “When I arrived, the penthouse was empty. The bathroom door was closed. If you’ll recall, Aleck, I had told you that Mary had wanted your help to pry Bibi out of the bathtub. So I thought it’d be a hoot if you opened the bathroom door and instead of finding Bibi, you found me.”
“And then you’d ‘murder’ me, per the rules of the game.”
“That was my idea, yes. So when I found the bathroom door locked, I recalled that Fairbanks had said that there was a key in a kitchen drawer.”
She proceeded to show them the drawer where she had found the key, although the key was no longer there. They went back to the bathroom door, and she pointed to the key in the lock, right where she had left it. She opened the door. “There was a towel on the floor against the inside of the door—”
“On the inside?” Woollcott asked. “That’s very strange, don’t you think?”
“More than strange,” she said. “How did the murderer place a towel on the inside of the door—and why?”
“It’s impossible,” Benchley said. “If there was a towel against the door inside the bathroom, that means the murderer either left the room by other means—or didn’t leave at all.”
They all looked at the tub where Bibi had been, and thought the same thing. Had Bibi left the tub at some point, put a towel down against the door and then gotten back into the tub?
“It makes no sense!” Woollcott said.
“Then Bibi’s murderer must have done it somehow,” Benchley said.
“But if so,” Woollcott asked, “how did he get out the door, yet leave the towel against it?”
“He or she,” Dorothy said.
“Whoever!” Woollcott said. “Someone murdered Bibi, then disappeared like a ghost. I don’t like it.”
They looked all around the room. The only doorway in or out was the one in which they were standing. There was no skylight or air shaft in the ceiling. The only window was four feet off the floor and barely large enough for Dorothy to fit through—and there was a twelve-story drop on the outside.
Woollcott pursed his lips. “For the time being, let’s not concern ourselves with how the murderer left the room. Let’s get back to reconstructing the scene of the crime. Mrs. Parker, that’s your cue.”
Dorothy said, “As I told you before, I opened the door, which pushed aside the towel, and then I saw Bibi in the tub—”
“Show, don’t tell,” Woollcott said. “What kind of writer are you?”
She approached the tub with much less urgency than when she had originally found Bibi’s body. “I went over, knelt down and, let’s see, I felt her cheek. She was ice-cold. Her skin was white.”
“And the room?”
“The room?”
“Was it cold? It was roasting during the party.”
Dorothy stood up. “You know, it was cold. Well, it was cold after I opened the window, at least.”
“So you opened the window?” Woollcott asked. “I remember closing it.”
“Yes, I—” She was ashamed to admit she had panicked. “I needed some fresh air. So I opened the window.” She reached toward it.
“Stop,” Woollcott commanded. “That ice bucket on the floor and that broken glass. Were they there when you found Bibi?”
Dorothy hesitated.
Woollcott yanked his silk handkerchief from his breast pocket and used it to pick up a shard of glass. “Perhaps Bibi was poisoned!”
“Poisoned?”
“She took a drink, felt the poison at work in her body, then dropped the glass on the floor in her agony. As her life shattered, so did this glass,” he said dramatically.
“No, that wasn’t it,” Dorothy said. “Both the glass and the ice bucket were on the radiator. I knocked them over in my hurry to open the window. That’s all.”
“Was the glass empty?”
“I don’t know. I think so.”
“Well, Bibi may still have been poisoned. But now that the glass is broken, it’s doubtful we shall ever know,” he said disdainfully. “And the ice bucket, was it empty, too?”
“No, there was some ice in it. That I remember. It had spilled out when the bucket tumbled over.”
“That’s strange, because the floor is dry now. Must not have been much ice.” Woollcott nodded thoughtfully, though she knew he made nothing of this information. “So you carelessly knocked over the champagne glass and ice bucket—”
“Aleck, really,” Benchley said. “She had just discovered a dead body. Give her some latitude.”
“Not attitude,” Dorothy said.
Woollcott continued, “Then you stood up and threw open the sash.”
She nodded and opened the window as she had earlier. Looking outside, she saw that the city was snowbound and quiet. It had been loud before, as crowds throughout New York were counting down to midnight.
Behind her, Woollcott asked, “And then what did you do?”
“I took in some fresh air.”
“Mrs. Parker, you don’t have to tell us every breath you took.”
“You said to tell you step-by-step, leaving nothing out.”
“Very well,” he sighed. “And then?”
“Then I turned around, and you were standing there.” She pointed.
Woollcott moved backward to the bathroom doorway. “And I said, ‘Happy—’”
“Footprints!” Benchley shouted, almost in her ear.
“What?” Woollcott asked.
“Look, footprints.” Benchley pointed out the window. “Footprints in the snow, on the roof! What do you make of that?”
“Someone took the road less traveled by?” she said.
Chapter 16
Dorothy, Benchley and Woollcott crowded together at the tiny window.
Benchley was right. Dorothy hadn’t noticed it before: On the outside windowsill, the snow had been pushed aside. She leaned forward. Now with her head slightly out the window, she could see that there was a portion of flat roof—like a very wide ledge or balcony—a few feet below the window. A trail of footprints, now obscured slightly with fresh snow, led away from beneath the window, went off to the right along the roof and turned the corner at the edge of the building.
“Someone came in or went out this window!” Woollcott cried.
“Went out, undoubtedly,” Dorothy said. “There’d be snow or at least water on the floor if he had come in.”
“Aha! So our killer somehow murdered Bibi, locked the door from the inside, put a towel at the bottom of the door for some reason, climbed out the window and made his escape across the roof.”
“Or her escape,” she said. “But to where?”
“Is there another way back into the hotel? A roof hatch or some such thing?”
They both looked at Dorothy.
“How should I know?” She narrowed her eyes at Woollcott. “You’re the one who makes it his business to know all about the hotel.”
He ignored this. “Someone needs to go through this window and follow those tracks.”
“You do it, Sherlock,” Benchley said to him. “Maybe you’ll find Professor Moriarty out there.”
“Heh heh,” he chuckled, and patted his prodigious paunch. “I’m afraid that window is not my size. Perhaps you’d like to give it a go, Mr. Benchley?”
“I’m allergic to footprints. And snow. Sorry.”
“Mrs. Parker?”
“I’m like the cleaning staff here. I don’t do windows.”
“Tut tut, you want to clear Fairbanks’ name, do you not?”
She didn’t answer.
Woollcott continued. “Who else could have performed such an acrobatic feat? Not only did he climb out t
he window, he also must have reached back in and replaced the champagne glass and ice bucket on the radiator, and then closed the sash from the outside. Then he scampered pitter-pat across the rooftop like a cat. Doesn’t this answer to the acrobatic derring-do of Douglas Fairbanks, the man who does a backflip or walks on his hands at the drop of a hat?”
“Then let’s get Fairbanks in here, and he can give it a try. Not me. I backflip for no man.”
“Then how about a woman, as you keep insisting?”
“A woman?”
“Mary Pickford. The lady of the house.”
“Mary wouldn’t climb out her own bathroom window. Not when she had a key. For that matter, why would Fairbanks do it if the key was in his own kitchen drawer?”
“To throw off suspicion? To be mysterious?” Woollcott said. “Of course Fairbanks would not have expected you to open the window in the first place. By the time daylight arrived, the additional snow would have obscured his footprints altogether, and they wouldn’t even be noticeable from the window. But you just helped us out with that clue, did you not? So, thank you for helping to incriminate him.”
“How do you figure?” she asked.
“If you hadn’t opened the window just now, we could never have seen Fairbanks’ footprints,” he said.
“But they’re not—” She gritted her teeth. “How do you know they’re Fairbanks’ footprints?”
“Why don’t you just go out the window and follow them, to find out for sure?”
Woollcott—and her own misplaced sense of guilt—eventually wore her down. Soon she again had Benchley’s tuxedo jacket on, and he and Woollcott helped her climb up the hot radiator and scrabble out onto the window ledge.
She paused with her knees on the snowy stone sill. She felt awkward with her rear end to them, but her dress was long enough to cover her small rear end and most of her legs. But her dress and Benchley’s jacket weren’t thick enough to shield her from the winter chill.
She looked down at the small strip of flat roof, which was only about four feet wide. Even though the cornice of the building was high enough to keep her from slipping off the roof’s edge, it was low enough that she could easily look over it. This was the back of the hotel, so she looked down into darkness—whether it was a dark alley or courtyard or what, she didn’t know.
