Holiday Homicide

by Rufus King

  “In any community, no matter how confined by natural barriers, or how small, there is always murder. I’m unfamiliar with the census number of the population that surrounded Cain and Abel but I imagine it must have been quite negligible, or does anybody know?”

  Wallace Emberry was sitting across the table from me. He looked at McRoss coldly, and said in his best courtroom voice:

  “Shall we settle on twelve? Say seven adults, of assorted sex, and five children?”

  The fog thickened.

  “I do think it’s stupid to temporize.” This was Miss Jettwick speaking. “There’s only one thing on our minds, and that’s Myron’s murder. And, apart from the tragedy of his passing, we’re naturally wondering how it’s going to affect all of us here. Let’s talk about it frankly. Shall we, Mr. Seward, or would you prefer to wait?”

  “I believe later, Miss Jettwick. Less collectively, don’t you think? That is, unless one of you has some information that I should know of at once?”

  We could have finished our kidneys in peace after this, if Mrs. Schuyler hadn’t begun to rattle. She gave us her best madam-president voice and said:

  “I know precisely what you mean, Mr. Seward. The odd things, the little things that seem of no importance to a layman’s mind, but which a trained detective instantly clarifies into an essential clue. Wasn’t it an inappropriate necktie that trapped that horrible optometrist last year? I mean, the murdered man’s wife felt that nobody but a blind man would select that color tie to go with the color shirt the optometrist was wearing, and spoke to the police about it?”

  Seward, under his polite smile, was plainly interested, and I could see that Moon was, too, from the way his fingers tightened a little on the handle of his cup.

  “Yes, Mrs. Schuyler, the man was color-blind and the tie incident did help to solve the case. Naturally, with things like that, the wheat is infrequent and there is a good deal of chaff.”

  “Naturally. I would consider as chaff, for example, the fact that when we gathered in the passageway after the sailor shouted his alarm, Bruce’s hair wasn’t tousled from sleep, but carefully brushed. I dismissed the fact at once on the grounds of his being an artist. My deduction being that no artist under any circumstances would ever appear in public with his hair uncombed.”

  The fog was by now pea soup. We all caught the effect, in that dominant voice, of direct attack. There was no time to pin a reason for it because Helen Jettwick was suddenly stung into dropping a depth bomb of her own. She had been sitting perfectly quietly beside Bruce, just looking starched and wrung out and deadly pale.

  “That must have been the second time you looked out into the passageway, Mrs. Schuyler? I believe the hour was about half past six when the sailor’s shout brought us from our cabins, that is, all but you?”

  Harriet Schuyler’s arm jerked sharply against mine, and I had to spear another kidney.

  “Really? I rather remember, Mrs. Jettwick, that I joined the rest of you at once.”

  “No, not at once. I’m certain that I caught a glimpse of you standing in your cabin doorway. Then you closed the door for a moment. When you opened it again, this time to join us, you had removed your hat.”

  Well, I have always said that nothing can be more lethal in a nice way than a nice woman when she turns tiger in defense of her young. I saw Moon’s expression change slightly as he glanced at Mrs. Schuyler and then back again to Helen Jettwick, and knew that he was figuring the same thing, too.

  If I, with my slender experience in such matters and having no blood connection whatever, had been able to see that Bruce and Elizabeth were going down for the third time about each other, it was a sure thing that Harriet Schuyler and Helen Jettwick hadn’t missed it either.

  Still, there they were,, coming right out in meeting, with Mrs. Schuyler hinting at dirty work on the part of Mrs. Jettwick’s hopeful because of a hair comb, and with Mrs. Jettwick practically accusing her son’s hoped-to-be-mother-in-law of grim intentions by being dressed and having her hat on at six-thirty in the morning. Bruce’s hair business didn’t matter, as we were willing to admit that he had stayed up all night anyway, but that hat business was fishy enough to smell like Gloucester.

  To say that Seward was interested was putting it mildly. Moon, of course, was entranced.

  Not so, however, either Bruce or Elizabeth. Bruce just stared at his mother and looked stunned, as if she’d taken off a mask or something. As for Elizabeth, she stopped looking haggard and careworn, and looked a plain seventeen that has just been given a good slap. She looked quickly at Helen Jettwick, then at her mother, and then not so quickly at Bruce. And as glazed writers say, there came into her eyes an expression which boded him ill. Seward said politely:

  “I am sure that Mrs. Schuyler will have a perfectly reasonable explanation for the hat.”

  She had.

  “We were to sail at nine this morning,” she said. “We had planned to be gone from the city for an absence of several weeks. Are you aware, Mr. Seward, of my operations in real estate?”

  “Yes. I think your latest venture was that apartment block near Columbia University?”

  “Precisely. For indigent students. Unhappily it became completely tenanted by modest business couples. I can do nothing about it, as the property yields around twenty-two percent. I shall devise another project for the students. It is important that they be taken out of unimaginative rooming houses and sympathetically housed.”

  Still nothing about hats. Seward brought her graciously back to them by simply saying:

  “And the hat?”

  “I required some data that I had left at home. I suddenly remembered it this morning on waking. I required it to discuss with Myron Jettwick on this trip. It consists of notes in a small notebook which I had left in my desk. I dressed, and was prepared to take a taxi home to get it, when that seaman screamed.”

  It was thin. In fact, it stuck out like bare bones in the silence that followed the stopping of Mrs. Schuyler’s voice.

  Just how thin it was, none of us realized completely until McRoss later told us about the black steel box.

  Chapter Five

  THE BLACK STEEL BOX

  Moon has a flair for selecting the one person in a group who can give him the quickest digest of all angles on a situation. In picking out McRoss he made no mistake.

  Our gay little group had broken up immediately after breakfast. Seward had suggested to Mrs. Schuyler that they go below and keep right on discussing real estate and hats, especially from the angle of her having taken the hat off.

  Wallace Emberry and Miss Jettwick wanted to talk about the arrangements for her brother’s funeral, and Miss Jettwick asked Helen Jettwick to be with them while they did so.

  Bruce and Elizabeth scattered as far away from each other as the boat allowed. Both went out on deck, and he courted another bout with pneumonia in the bows while she went back to the taffrail and consented to pose for a few tragic press photographs for the first arrivals among the reporters, who were kept in herd on the landing stage under the eyes of the hard-faced cop.

  Moon and I followed McRoss into a small library on the main deck. I got out my notebook, and Moon got right down to business.

  “Mr. McRoss, just how closely were you in Mr. Jettwick’s confidence?”

  McRoss said he had often wondered. He tried to explain.

  “You always felt a sense of complete intimacy when you were with him,” he said. “It had a conspiratorial touch, though, rather than one of candor. I mean, he not only told you things, but he seemed to involve you in them just by telling you about them.”

  “His business record establishes him as having been a remarkably astute man.”

  “He was.”

  “Were you with him for long?”

  “No, simply during the past three years.”

  “It’s astonishing how unastute such men can frequently be in their private lives. They can face an economic problem with precision, and still bo
g down helplessly among the human equations. Did you find that true with Mr. Jettwick?”

  “True? Oh, but decidedly so. Just take his divorced wife and her son, for an example.”

  “Let’s,” said Moon.

  “Do you know anything about it? The divorce, I mean?”

  “No.”

  “It wasn’t nice. The papers were full of it fifteen years ago. She married Myron’s younger brother Alfred first. I’m speaking of Helen Jettwick, of course. Bruce was born, and I think he was about nine years old when Alfred Was killed in Vienna by a taxicab. Then she married Myron. Am I clear?”

  “Quite, thank you.”

  “Well, that only lasted for a year. They honeymooned in Africa, and came back to the States on the Leviathan. That’s when things started. It’s hard to believe it when you look at her, but you never can tell when you go by faces, can you?”

  “Tell what, Mr. McRoss?”

  “Tell whether or not a person has criminal tendencies. She looks like such a nice woman, but there it was. She stole some valuable jewelry from the wife of a Senator Blackman during the crossing. The customs found it stuffed in a toe of a slipper when they went through her things on the dock, and Mrs. Blackman insisted on prosecuting. Wallace Emberry handled the case for Helen Jettwick, incidentally. He was Myron Jettwick’s lawyer even back in those days, and he did get her off with a suspended sentence. There was the worst sort of publicity, and then the divorce came along to finish it.”

  “Because of the theft?”

  “Oh, no. It was worse than that. You can imagine how the relationship between Myron and her was, well, strained. It isn’t as if he didn’t stand by her, because he did. It seems that he almost bent backward being noble about it, and I daresay they’d have just agreed to a quiet separation if it hadn’t been for Jeffry Smith.”

  “Mr. Smith became the third leg of a triangle?”

  “Yes, exactly. I understand he was a rotter if there ever was one, and even Mr. Jettwick’s nobility snapped under the strain and he divorced her. If you look up the papers you’ll find it was one of the messiest divorces on record. Social ostracism puts it mildly. I mean that she and Bruce vanished at once into some sort of a limbo that must have been appalling, especially in those days when sin was sin. You remember the era?”

  “Perfectly, Mr. McRoss.”

  “Then came this business of two weeks ago. I suppose it was his blood pressure that had something to do with it.”

  “Myron Jettwick’s blood pressure?”

  “Yes. He’d had a stroke last month and it frightened him tremendously, made him think of death and that sort of thing. Putting his house in order, you know. Of course the Christmas season helped.”

  Moon never stirred through this, but sat patiently dissecting the jumble and waiting, I knew, for a straight line to emerge. He always worked that way with a gossipy witness, just let him ramble on, which Mr. Spider McRoss certainly did.

  “Christmas helped,” McRoss chattered on, “in the sense that it crystallized Myron’s sudden decision to bring his divorced wife and her stepson out of their banishment and shower them with some seasonal goodwill, while restoring them to his good graces. It was funny, of course.”

  “What was, Mr. McRoss?”

  “It was funny when I found out Helen Jettwick’s and Bruce Jettwick’s status. I knew something of their history, both from odds and ends that Myron had told me, and from newspaper items that I looked up over at the public library. She’d been a singer of sorts herself, you know, although not nearly as good a one as her son turned out to be. Anyhow, I’d pictured her as eking out the grubbiest sort of existence and probably giving fifty-cent music lessons to the neighborhood brats. That’s why I say it was funny to find her installed in a very stunning apartment on the upper east side, and with Bruce hauling down two thousand a week in radio.”

  “Didn’t Myron Jettwick know of that?”

  “No, I’m quite certain that he didn’t.”

  “Hadn’t he kept in touch with them at all?”

  “No.”

  “Then how did you find them?”

  “I found them through Wallace Emberry. Myron was peculiar that way. He wanted his lawyer to keep a casual eye on them, which Emberry did during the past fifteen years, but he forbade Emberry ever to mention their names in his presence. Everybody’s a little screwy here or there, don’t you think?”

  “Fortunately. A world of utter sanity would be a madhouse in itself.”

  “Of course with a man of Myron’s wealth, the word was ‘eccentric.’”

  “You were the ambassador, then, between Myron Jettwick and his divorced wife and Bruce?”

  “Yes. It took several visits, and finally even Emberry had to add his persuasions.”

  “Just what was your method?”

  “A simple one, Mr. Moon. I touched on the frightening stroke from blood pressure and Myron’s subsequent desire to effect a reconciliation both with her and with Bruce. Then I painted a general Yuletide softening on the part of Myron’s heart with an encompassing wish for peace on earth and goodwill toward all men. Curiously, I believe that Myron was perfectly sincere in that. He seemed to have developed a determination to spray forgiveness and blessings around the landscape with an almost religious fervor. He even started going to church.”

  “Just what was Helen Jettwick’s reaction to all this?”

  “Well, after I’d worked on her for a while, and then after Emberry had—both of us were trying to convince her of Myron’s genuine sincerity—she broke down. And that was funny, too.”

  “How?”

  “In her way of doing it. When she finally did accept the invitation for this cruise she said that I was to tell Myron that she was ‘afraid to refuse.’”

  “Where is her apartment?”

  “It’s on Fifty-sixth Street, just east of Park, one of those nice reconverted houses with an automatic lift and trees on the sidewalk. Number Ten-B.”

  “What church was it Mr. Jettwick started going to?”

  “It’s rather a high Episcopalian one. I found it completely incense and intoning. It’s in the Chelsea district, over on West Twenty-second Street near the river.”

  “What was the name of his doctor?”

  “Winston, Doctor Arthur B. Winston, on Park.”

  “Who were his business associates?”

  “Myron’s? He had none. That was one of the reasons for his great success, if you ask me.”

  “There seems to have been a double-barreled angle to this proposed Caribbean cruise. On the one hand we have a leisurely opportunity under agreeable circumstances for effecting a reconciliation with his divorced wife and Bruce, and then we have Mrs. Harriet Schuyler. Were Mr. Jettwick and Mrs. Schuyler planning some real-estate merger or deal?”

  “Yes, I’m quite sure of it.”

  “Do you know what it was?”

  “No, beyond the fact that I think it concerned Staten Island.”

  “Even as his confidential secretary, Mr. Jettwick did not confide his business plans to you?”

  “As I’ve said, just to an extent. I’d say that his only complete confidante was his black steel box.”

  “Good. We needed that.”

  Spider McRoss smiled quickly.

  “The ‘missing papers,’ Mr. Moon?”

  “Yes, with any luck.”

  “Perhaps there will be. I didn’t notice the box beside the bed this morning, when we went in after the alarm.”

  “It had been there?”

  “Yes. Myron always carried it about with him on his trips, and it was there last night when he sent for me about six. It was on the night table by his bed.”

  Moon could do some leaping about, too.

  “Why did he send for you?”

  “He wanted me to order flowers for Mrs. Jettwick. He seemed suddenly to have remembered a fondness on her part for Parma violets. I thought it a rather nice touch.”

  “Describe the box, please, Mr. McRoss.”<
br />
  “Well, black enamel, one of those dispatch things. I’d say about eighteen inches long, by six wide and three deep, with a very good combination lock on it.”

  “Do the police know about it as yet?”

  “No, I don’t think so. Should they?”

  “Yes.”

  “Perhaps I’d better go and tell them?”

  “Perhaps you had.”

  I said to Moon, after McRoss had left us to carry his glamorous chitchat to the cops:

  “Just what’s the matter with that guy?”

  Moon thought for quite a while before he answered, and I suspected that he was going psychic on me. He was, in a way, but I didn’t get the full force of it until afterward. Moon said:

  “He knows too much.”

  Chapter Six

  THE TAPPING FINGER

  A small clock on a false mantel in the library struck four bells.

  Moon shut his eyes and had me read back through the notes to date. He says it doesn’t do the slightest good, but that it soothes him. It soothes him because my voice, if I could sing, would combine the better features of a train announcer and a synthetic baritone going home on a Negro spiritual of the sort that finds unhappiness in shirts and looks on shoes like strait jackets.

  All that is nonsense, because I can tell from a habit Moon has of tapping his forefinger when I come to a point that he wants to remember.

  Here’s a list of the taps:

  Miss Jettwick: “A sailor was clearing the snow—”

  Bruce Jettwick: “I’d say maybe three minutes, or five at the most.”

  Bruce Jettwick: “—and we’d only spoken a few words together last night.”

  Bruce Jettwick: “He was under the covers—”

  Bruce Jettwick: “If I had to stop him from ruining Mother’s life again, and mine—”

  Miss Jettwick: “—whereas Mrs. Schuyler has been known to plunge her whole fortune blindly—”

  McRoss: “She married Myron’s younger brother Alfred first.”

  McRoss: “—and Mrs. Blackman insisted on prosecuting.”