The Viola Brothers Shore Mystery

by Viola Brothers Shore

  Gwynn laughed. “Without the final chapter?”

  “I think I have a tag—”

  “Then you saw that bit in yesterday’s paper?”

  “What bit—?”

  “From Hollywood?”

  “What has Hollywood to do—”

  “Pardon me, I spoke out of turn. What’s your tag?”

  “Well, far from being a rich man, the only estate Mackenzie left was his expectations from that patent which, unfortunately, isn’t worth a damn. One of the G.E. men told me everything in it is covered by better patents of their own. You questioned his being a rich man. In fact, you called all the turns. Having read some of your fiction detectives, I should say Lady Novelist takes Great Detective for a ride all along the line—and that makes our last chapter.”

  “Next to the last,” corrected Gwynn. “You haven’t by any chance seen Wild Eagle at the Paramount this week?”

  “Don’t change the subject,” said I. “Stick to the Mackenzie tale.”

  “That’s it.”

  “The picture you saw this afternoon? Don’t be so damned cryptic.”

  “Can’t a girl have her simple pleasures? Knowing we were going to see Mr. Schroeder, I couldn’t resist a sort of coup. My dramatic instinct, you know. I’ll sit through the picture again for the pleasure of watching your faces. And then I’ll tell you my final chapter.”

  For two reels nothing happened. And then Schroeder straightened up in his seat and I exclaimed aloud. There on the screen in riding breeches was Wm. R. Mackenzie!

  * * * *

  “The son-of-a-gun!” said Schroeder, when we were back in his apartment. “I’ll bet you got a shock when he walked on this afternoon.”

  “Not exactly. I went there expressly to see him. But maybe I’d better go back and ‘tell all’?” inquired my wife brightly.

  “Maybe you’d better.”

  “Remember the night you went to Philadelphia, Colin?” I did, of course. “Well, it’s a good thing you didn’t call me because I wasn’t home. I was out all night.”

  I refrained from comment.

  “I was at the Wendham. Took a room on the same floor on which the Mackenzies had stayed and got clubby with Helen, the chambermaid. She remembered Mrs. Mackenzie—a tall, pretty blonde. It seems she had got clubby with Helen, too, and complained about Mackenzie…he had plenty of money but was terribly tight…kept her cooped up on a farm like a prisoner. ‘Of course,’ said Helen, ‘if she left him she wouldn’t get a cent, and he left her everything in his will. He made it before they were married. But she said to me, she said, “What the hell! Money isn’t everything.”

  “I’d been wondering how Temple managed to communicate with her lover.”

  “How did you know she had a lover?” demanded Schroeder. “Schmidt may have made up that whole business.”

  “Oh—she had to have a lover, for my hunch. Anyway, the bathroom of the Mackenzie suite has a door into the next suite. Temple goes in, turns on a tub, and has ready communion with the gentleman in the next suite, whom, by the way, you saw tonight—the tall, curly-headed young man in breeches.”

  “Hold everything! That one was Mackenzie—”

  “The billing says Pat Salisbury,” Gwynn pointed out.

  “Yes, but I thought Mackenzie had taken the name of Salisbury—”

  “No—the other way round. Salisbury took the name of Mackenzie. After he murdered him and dropped him overboard.”

  “By God!” Schroeder brought his fist down.

  “Wait a minute!” I cried. “I don’t get you—”

  “Take your time,” replied Gwynn. “Or—I’ll tell it to you by easy stages. I’d better begin three years ago—in Hollywood with a couple of young people named Temple Drury and Pat Salisbury—both working in pictures—and the going pretty rough for the girl. Along comes Mackenzie—poses as a millionaire—even making out a will leaving her his fortune. Poor man thought he would have one, someday! She marries him, and he takes her to Canada and keeps her cooped up while he monkeys with his invention. Having had a taste of starvation, maybe for a while she is grateful for the security of a roof and three squares. But eventually she gets restless and manages to communicate with the old boyfriend, Salisbury.

  “At last she decides to run away. But Mackenzie watches her like a hawk. So Salisbury, in New York on a little spree, writes the husband exactly the kind of letter that would interest him, signing it Paul Stone, and lures him to New York. But something about Temple’s manner at the last minute worries Mackenzie and he decides to take her with him.

  “Salisbury, who has been staying at the Wendham, and only picking up mail addressed to ‘Stone’ at the Alamac, gets him a suite next to his. Temple and he perfect their plans through the bathroom door and he phones Mackenzie, as Paul Stone, of course, and sends him on a wild-goose chase up to the Alamac.

  “He puts Temple in another hotel and, knocking later at Mackenzie’s door, introduces himself as Philip Schmidt, a detective. And he gets expense money from Mackenzie, which he turned over to Temple…I trust.

  “Maybe his first idea was only to get a few thousand dollars from Mackenzie—string him along—and blow. But Mackenzie wasn’t easy to pluck. And it probably seemed a pity that he and Temple should be broke—when that will left her all that money! If only Mackenzie were out of the way.…

  “Salisbury worked out a pretty neat scheme. On a boat nobody knows who anybody is for the first day. The steward only knows that the two gentlemen in 361 are Mr. Mackenzie and Mr. Schmidt. And if one jumped overboard and the other claimed that Schmidt was missing—who would think it was Mackenzie who was gone? Whereas, if a wealthy man were to disappear under mysterious circumstances, investigation might involve his secretary. And certainly the wife would be questioned and her connection with Mr. Salisbury uncovered. But when Schmidt was missing even Mr. Schroeder asked: “What motive would a man have for murdering his secretary?”

  “Probably the ipecac which made the young man too sick for questioning also made Mackenzie too sick for talking. As soon as the boat starts, Salisbury-Stone-Schmidt puts Mackenzie to bed and does all the talking for the team—making out the poor man is a Scientist, so even the doctor won’t be brought in.

  “Then while the steward is freshening up the room, Salisbury gets the real Mackenzie on deck and finishes him. And from then on he has a fourth identity. He is now known as Wm. R. Mackenzie. And nobody questions that identity. Still, everything doesn’t go as smoothly as Mr. Salisbury-Mackenzie would have liked. There is a snoopy detective on board and a very snoopy woman. They keep wanting a reason for Schmidt’s suicide. So the young man supplies a reason—in a letter from a non-existent lady in Havana—without any address.

  “When he went out to post that letter, by the way, was the only time he left the Nacional. You see, he didn’t have any money. Unfortunately, all the real Mackenzie’s money was in travelers’ checks which he couldn’t cash!

  “Of course that letter from ‘C’ also provided a motive for a fit of despondency in which he could make it seem that Mackenzie had killed himself. Because for Temple to inherit Mackenzie’s money, Mackenzie had to be legally dead. So Mackenzie apparently jumps into shark- infested waters—after a fine piece of acting by Mr. Salisbury-Mackenzie. Which suicide, incidentally, took care of the bill at the Nacional. On the waves floats the Panama hat which he never could wear because it was too small! On the rocks lie the travelers’ checks, which will revert to Temple and be of some use—and a note to remove any possible doubt of his suicide.

  “But there doesn’t seem to have been any doubt. Only the package worried me. What could there have been in a package that a man would want to have with him when he set out to kill himself—with a suicide note all typed in his pocket? …And what had become of it? Had he taken it with him?

  “You know how those flashes come to you. O
f course he had taken it with him…out of the fortress…a coat and a cap! Suppose Colin and the Captain had asked the guard—which they didn’t, once they saw the note—about a blond hatless man in a Palm Beach suit? Would they have connected him with a young man in, say, a blue serge coat, a cap pulled down over his hair, and perhaps dark glasses?”

  Schroeder smoked in thoughtful silence. But I insisted on knowing, step by step, how she had hit on it.

  “Oh, darling, you are such a perfect straight man! Sometimes you just smell a phony and begin to reason from the smell.”

  “Or maybe you note little things,” smiled Schroeder, “and then begin to sniff.”

  “Maybe… I knew I wouldn’t get anything out of Schroeder by asking, so I brought the talk around to it at Cobb’s, and then we began to make a little headway. But a couple of times Salisbury threw me off—like when he told that long circumstantial story of Mrs. Mackenzie’s elopement which Mr. Schroeder could check…and did.”

  “Why do you suppose he told all that?” I demanded foggily.

  “I think he was secretly proud of his scenario and was having fun with Schroeder and me. And I’m sure he was vain of his acting.”

  “Not bad acting,” admitted Schroeder grudgingly. He smiled again, however.

  “Excellent…only somebody else should have written his lines and left out the American slang. That was the first whiff I got…pure American idiom from a man who had only been in the States twice—on short visits!

  “Anybody could have found out what I did at the Wendham…that Mackenzie was a middle-aged, darkish man…that when the Mackenzies had Suite 805, 806 was occupied by a Pat Salisbury, registered from Hollywood…and anybody would have been impressed by the similarity of the initials…Pat Salisbury—Paul Stone—Philip Schmidt.

  “And anybody would have written to Hollywood and found out that Wm. R. Mackenzie had married Temple Drury in June 1930…that Temple Drury was listed at Central Casting among the extras…that she had one bit in a Fox picture and that Pat Salisbury had a part in the same opus…that his last role was a small one in Wild Eagle, after which he left for New York. It was all there to put together—except where he got the money to get out of Havana and back to Temple.”

  “A man as resourceful as Mr. Salisbury probably found a way,” suggested Schroeder.

  “Not probably—actually. They even got out to Hollywood—although it must have been a blow to find that Mackenzie hadn’t left any fortune.”

  “How do you know he got to Hollywood?” asked Schroeder. “That picture was made before he left for New York.”

  “That,” said Gwynn, “is the pay-off. I asked you whether you’d seen an item in the papers. I brought the clipping with me.”

  ACTOR AND WIFE KILLED

  Mr. and Mrs. Pat Salisbury were instantly killed when their car crashed through a railing on a sharp turn of Topanga Pass. The car had been rented by the young couple for the day. Pat Salisbury was last seen in Wild Eagle—a Paramount Picture. Mrs. Salisbury was formerly Temple Drury. The couple had not found work since their recent return to Hollywood. Police are investigating the theory of a suicide pact.

  OPALS ARE BAD LUCK

  Originally appeared in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, January 1943.

  I don’t know what made me dig up that old yarn about the opal pendant the night my wife invited Zoe Cameron and her dentist friend to dinner and the opera. Skeletons belong in six feet of ground with a marble slab over them. But from the moment that dentist fellow stepped into our foyer, he got my goat. Not because he didn’t wear soup-and-fish. Hell, the night I married Alice was the first time I ever had one on my back. But when I was a young punk, working my way up in Hodgett’s Bank, I used to look at people who had money and made up my mind that Joel Quinn would have it too. But this fellow seemed to be having some private joke on me and my penthouse and the special glass dome on my foyer which gives it the look of perpetual sunlight.

  For instance, while Abraham Lincoln, our butler, was taking their wraps, Zoe introduced him to the dentist and I mentioned that Abraham had been with my wife’s family over thirty years, and so we didn’t treat him like a servant. “I happen to be very democratic,” I explained.

  “I can see that,” this Dr. Marcus said, and held out his hand to Abraham. “How do you do, Mr. Lincoln,” he said.

  Abraham took the hand. “Nobody nevuh call me Mr. Lincoln, ’cept my own people,” he grinned. “You-all go ’head and call me Abraham, suh.”

  “Thank you sir,” replied Marcus, “I’d like to. Everybody calls me Doc.”

  I decided he’d never get a dollar of mine for his clinic, no matter how many rickety kids he took care of. My wife had been to the clinic with Zoe and she came home saying the guy had the greatest heart she had ever met and the clearest thinking mind. Well, I wanted to get a look at this Master Brain. And when I did, I wondered what a smart, two-fisted newspaper woman like Zoe Cameron could see in a thin, frayed young dentist with cigarette fingers.

  I waited until we had finished dinner and then, although there were only six of us, we had to have our coffee in the drawing room, which had just been done over in real Gobelin at a price that would have furnished dental clinics for all the rickety kids in New York. Alice’s mother enthroned herself beside the fireplace in the only armchair I liked; because it squeaked every time the old lady leaned her weight on it, which was more than any of the family had nerve enough to do. Without speaking ill of the dead, every marcel wave on my departed mother-in-law’s head looked as if she had just said to it, You lie down there and don’t you dare to move! And she certainly rode herd on the lot of them.

  “If you must have jewelry,” she said and the cords of her neck strained against the black velvet band she wore to hold them together, “the Barroway pearls can still be redeemed!” I had refused to get them out of pawn because I knew that whenever Alice’s brother put his feet in some more flypaper, the pearls would go right back to their uncle.

  Alice’s younger sister held the pendant up against the firelight and sighed, “It’s awfully pretty, isn’t it—in a sort of haunted way—?” But nobody paid any attention to Willette. Nobody ever did. She had a sort of haunted, white-rabbity prettiness herself, only she was so thin that her gold bracelets kept slipping over her wrist and the little jangle they made was your only way of knowing she was around. She sighed again and passed the pendant across Alice to Uncle Digby, sitting in the other corner of the davenport, although sitting is an overstatement.

  He was a fat, overstuffed old man, so lazy that he hated to move, except from his room at the club, down to the roulette table, where he was too lazy to care whether he won or lost. He usually lost, and for the rest of the month he waddled around the family circle trying to raise a ten or a twenty if it wasn’t too much trouble. Good food always put him to sleep and his bare upper lids were already flirting with the pouches under his eyes. He didn’t even seem to see the pendant Willette held out to him.

  So Alice took it and passed it to her brother, who suggested sweetly, “Why not give her all three?” He had all the charm of a spoiled chow dog, even to a sunburst of coppery hair over mean eyes and a stubborn mouth. “Wouldn’t you find it more gratifying if people knew that Joel Quinn could afford three pieces of jewelry at one time?” I never pay any attention to chow dogs, but both his sisters used to shrivel whenever he fastened his restless attention on them. He’d have taken the bread out of their mouths if they were starving. Or rather, he’d have stood by while the old lady took it and gave it to him. Because, of course, he was the only boy—the one and only Teddy Barroway.

  [“Teddy Barroway!” Zoe broke in explosively. “Not the one that Bingham Bailey—” she stopped and looked at Alice uncomfortably. “It’s no secret,” I reassured her, “the one who was shot by his best friend because he finally got himself in a trap he couldn’t crawl out of.”]

  A
nyway, there we were when Abraham brought in the brandy—the old lady in the Gobelin armchair that squeaked, and across the coffee table, Willette and Alice on the davenport that seemed to rise and fall with the increasing weight of Uncle Digby’s breathing. Teddy was flinging himself around the room and I was leaning against the mantel watching them, and figuring that the gentleman from Mars would have picked us for one big, happy family. Whereas actually Alice and I should have been off in a place of our own. Willette was eating herself up over some out-at-elbows school teacher and Teddy was already in his jam with the Baileys and he was determined to get money out of the family, or he wouldn’t have been there at all. I often wondered how they would have managed to keep saving the Good Old Family Name if I hadn’t come along…

  As I recall, Willette was the only one who spoke up for the pendant, although I was beginning to get a kick out of picturing $60,000 worth of Marie Antoinette’s jewelry around the neck of Joel Quinn’s wife. Besides, I was sure I could have gotten it for Forty… Teddy insisted on all-three-or-nothing. Digby was wheezing rhythmically and the old lady stuck to the Barroway pearls. On the whole I was satisfied when Alice chose the ruby, because I was sure it was the one she wanted. And it looked beautiful on her finger when she held it up against the firelight.

  I put the diamond bracelet back in the velvet case and opened the hand-tooled box that had a special well for the chain and pendant. But when I looked around for the pendant it was gone.

  Everybody had handled it, except Uncle Digby, but nobody remembered who had handled it last. In fact, Alice insisted she had passed it to me, but that was probably because of the expression that had begun to show on my face. I stood at the mantel not saying anything, just looking from one to the other.

  Of course when it wasn’t anywhere in plain sight, everybody thought it must have dropped behind the cushions of the couch. So Alice and Willette jumped up and Mrs. Barroway rang for Abraham—and they finally pried Uncle Digby out of the corner although he hated to get up. But the pendant wasn’t there. We all looked. And then Abraham looked. And he looked under the old lady too, and under the rugs and in the coffee cups.