by Rufus King
McRoss: “—if it hadn’t been for Jeffry Smith.”
McRoss: “No, I’m quite certain that he didn’t.”
McRoss: “He even started going to church.”
McRoss: “—to tell Myron that she was ‘afraid to refuse.’”
McRoss: “—I think it concerned Staten Island.”
McRoss: “—by six wide and three deep, with a very good combination lock on it.”
The clock struck five bells by the time I was through. Moon asked me to root out the sailor who had discovered the crime, and to bring him back.
I went out on deck and caught a few lungfuls of cold fresh air while watching McRoss lean across the starboard rail and push his face into white stars of photoflash bulbs operated by cameramen on the landing stage below. I saw the results later in the evening editions, where McRoss stared out of front pages, with that zany look, under headings the most typical of which was:
JETTWICK SECRETARY GASPS AFTER GRILLING.
Near him was one of Trade Wind’s officers. He was a nice-looking young chap with the beefy skin that comes from constant weather. He turned out to be Talbot, and he told me that the snow-shoveling sailor’s name was Johnson and that I’d find him in the crew’s quarters forward, either dying or dead.
Johnson was practically both when I got to him. He was stretched flat on his bunk with the sort of a hangover that even Hollywood would be at a loss for a superlative to describe. I asked him if he minded coming back to the library with me and talking with Moon, and he said that if Moon was an undertaker he’d be delighted to, and would give him carte-blanche.
Moon stared, fascinated, at Johnson’s glaceed eyes and asked him to sit down.
“I will make this as painless as possible, Mr. Johnson.”
“Pain?” Johnson snorted, and wished he hadn’t.
“Have you done much snow shoveling?”
“Plenty. I was born in Vermont.”
“Did you notice anything about the condition of the snow when you were clearing the aft-deck this morning?
“I didn’t notice anything about anything until I saw that stiff. Why worry about snow?”
“You will realize its importance. Try to remember whether the edge of your shovel slid over the decking smoothly, or whether it struck any hard spots.”
“Oh, God.”
Johnson figuratively took his head in his hands and tried to think.
“Yes, there were some hard spots.”
“What condition do you find in snow after a man has walked or stood on it for some time?”
“It packs down. Sometimes, if he stands long enough in one place it gets solid like ice. That’s what I need, ice!”
“Shortly, Mr. Johnson. Tell me about the hard spots your shovel struck this morning.”
“Say, you’re right, brother. They were spaced just about how a man would walk, and there was a hard, icy patch just under the open porthole.”
“Thank you, Mr. Johnson.” Moon smiled faintly and added, “Happy New Year.”
“That’s all right.”
Johnson got to the library door before he decided to be insulted.
“A happy New Year, hell!”
District Attorney Seward came in just as Johnson was going out. He glanced at Johnson and then said to Moon:
“Another corpse?”
“Yes.”
“If the rest of the crew were in the same condition that he was in last night, anybody could have come aboard and slit throats with impunity. Why the interview?”
Moon told him.
“Do you agree with me, Mr. Seward, that the man or woman who stood in the snow before that open porthole was either the perpetrator or an eyewitness to the crime?”
“Yes, and I’m glad you thought of that angle. I came to tell you that the body is on its way to the city mortuary and that a few reports on the post mortem ought to trickle in this afternoon by around four.”
“Care to bet on the bullet?” Moon said.
“Oh, that.”
Seward’s smile brushed the bullet aside. The smile stayed, and this time it meant something.
I didn’t like it. Neither did Moon.
Six bells from the false mantelpiece said it was eleven o’clock.
Chapter Seven
AN INTEREST IN FLOWERS
Moon finished looking at Seward’s smile, and then asked him whether or not McRoss had told him about the black steel box. McRoss had, and some of the ferrets from Center Street were already taking Myron Jettwick’s quarters apart in search of it.
The three of us went below and had a look.
The place had cleared out considerably. Chief Medical Examiner Dutton had gone, the photographers and fingerprint boys had finished, and Assistant Police Commissioner McGilvray and his secretary were up in Captain Plummet’s quarters wading through the crew.
Only a sergeant of detectives and a plain-clothes man were left, and they were methodically hunting for the black steel box with that official sort of patience which always amazes me. They were testing the wood paneling in the living room when we got there, and so far they had had no luck.
Seward doubted whether the box would be found aboard the yacht. Moon doubted whether it would be found aboard the yacht. I saw no reason for not doubting it also, all of which got us some sour looks from the busy seekers, especially the plain-clothes man who was digging out a splinter from his thumb.
Seward told us that he had to have New Year’s dinner with his wife and kids, murder or no murder, and that he’d come back to the yacht around four in the afternoon and question Miss Jettwick, Helen Jettwick, McRoss, and Bruce on board rather than dragging them downtown to his office, which, incidentally, saved him from dragging himself down there, too.
Then he smiled again, which took the place of reminding us that the autopsy reports should start coming in by that time, gave us a bright good-by and left.
I followed Moon into the bedroom. He went over and looked down at the empty bed. One pillowcase had been removed for evidence. It would be the bloodstained one against which Jettwick’s head had rested. Built into the wall within reach of the side of the bed were two shelves for books. Moon made no effort to remove them. The detective sergeant and plain-clothes man would already have done that and have returned them carefully to their proper places.
Moon said:
“Look up Miss Jettwick, will you please, Bert? Ask her whether her brother made a hobby of botany. If she doesn’t know, ask Helen Jettwick and McRoss.”
I left him staring thoughtfully at about two feet of books with botanical titles that formed a small block in the center of the second shelf, and went up above to the main deck. Seward’s smile stayed with me, and I tried to figure what else he expected the autopsy to produce beyond the murder bullet, which was a fine time for young love to come rearing its pretty head. The female section of it was standing at the top of the companionway, still vivid in arsenical green, but otherwise pretty limp.
I wanted to breeze on lightly about my botanical research, but Elizabeth stopped me and said:
“I’m worried, Mr. Stanley. I’m worried very much.” It struck me that she had been crying, and being a push-over for tears, in common with the rest of the world’s male population, I started a there-there, and she told me please not to there-there her as she was no longer a child, and that people had stopped patting her on the head over ten years ago after she had patted the last well-meaning idiot who had done so right back.
Well, if she wanted to be treated as a contemporary that was all right with me, so I took one foot back out of the grave of my thirty-four years and said:
“I don’t blame you, Miss Schuyler. I’m worried, too. What’s yours?”
“I think that Mr. Moon ought to be up in the captain’s quarters with Bruce. That police commissioner has been questioning him now for twenty minutes, and nobody’s with him but Wallace Emberry, and you know him.”
“Mr. Emberry is an excellent lawyer.”
&
nbsp; She quit being limp for a minute.
“Very excellent. Mr. Emberry couldn’t be finer for running up a last will and testament over crumpets and tea, but turn him loose against a practical cop on a murder case and he’d even forget when to yell yoicks.”
Well, I agreed with her in this completely, but I felt sorry for her very white face. It had one of the most hectic make-up jobs on it I’d seen in years.
“Don’t forget one thing, Miss Schuyler, about Emberry. If I remember his record, he started his practice in the criminal courts, and anybody who’s once ridden a bicycle doesn’t forget how.”
It was not one of my happiest comparisons because she cut it up into neat pieces, and then said:
“I know just how desperate the spot is that Bruce is in. Unless Mr. Moon can prove that Mr. Jettwick was dead when Bruce went in there at three o’clock this morning, Bruce is sunk. Can he?”
“Why not take the other point of view? Can the police prove that Mr. Jettwick was alive?”
She gave me one look that was like any tall, iced, acid-base drink, and walked away.
I continued my own route into the main saloon. Miss Jettwick, Helen Jettwick, Harriet Schuyler, and McRoss were all there.
There was a nervous hush about the place, for no one was talking, but they sat huddled in chairs and looking like zombies in the mixed light of a murky saffron from the portholes, and the shallow indirect effect from some ceiling fixtures which were turned on. It was like a funeral, but without any flowers and without any grief, just worry and doubts and fear instead.
They all looked up at me as if they were faced by some perfect stranger who had just crashed interstellar space.
I said:
“Miss Jettwick, was your brother interested in botany? Did he make a hobby of it? Mr. Moon wants to know.”
“Myron? I don’t think so, Mr. Stanley. I only saw him infrequently for a great many years, just when I’d come East from the coast, but I’m certain he never showed any interest in flowers.”
“How about it, Mrs. Jettwick? Back in the days when you were married to him, did he show any interest them?”’
“None, none whatever, Mr. Stanley.” She added bitterly. “He was a dilettante in little beyond roast beef.”
For a moment this stopped me, there was so much honed steel in it, while it seemed almost reasonable to picture Helen Jettwick pulling a gun and pumping a bullet into a head she’d just been chatting with.
Then I turned to McRoss who was running white fingers over the crests of his slick dark locks.
“You’ve been closer to him than anybody recently, Mr. McRoss. How about it?”
“Flowers? Myron and flowers? Dear, no. I mean, I’d say the subject not only would have bored him, but he’d have utterly ignored it.”
Harriet Schuyler, who wasn’t on the list for questioning, made the most sense of any of them.
“Might I suggest,” she said, taking the chair, “that botany, landscape gardening and kindred subjects might prove an almost essential study for any man involved in real estate and the development of large tracts? Forgive my natural curiosity, Mr. Stanley, but just why does Mr. Moon want to know?”
I said I didn’t know, because I really didn’t know, and went down again and joined Moon in the bedroom. He was not exactly in a trance, but he answered me absently when I gave him a digest of my botanical findings and asked him what he had wanted them for.
“Those books, Bert.” This, in his absent voice. I always expect, when he uses it, to see Protoplasm Mary swim down through the ceiling and slap me with a wet rubber glove. “That block is entirely on botany. It is long enough to cover an eighteen-inch steel box and there is enough space behind them for its depth. I believe Jettwick kept the box there, feeling it would not be disturbed as botanical books are not the type a person would pick out if looking for something to read.”
“Well, well,” I said, trying to snap him out of it. “So whoever stole the box must have wondered why Jettwick kept books on botany and become suspicious like you.”
Moon was still far, far away.
“Yes.”
“What’s bothering you? Why do this to me?”
“This is bothering me, Bert.”
Moon opened his right hand. Lying on the palm of it was a fragment of nutshell. It was smooth, and its color was a heavy amber brown.
“Sapucaia?”
“Yes.”
“Well, what? Bruce and you have both admitted that he was in here last night.”
“Doing certain things, Bert, yes. But not eating nuts. It disturbs me. It shows leisure, conversation, a calculating pause. You do not start eating nuts when shocked into sudden contemplation of a corpse.
“I’m beginning to wonder whether that was why Seward smiled.”
As we were soon to know, it was and it wasn’t. The reason why it really wasn’t is because it was worse.
“Where did you find it?”
“On the floor, just behind that leg at the foot of the bed.”
“Standing there, eating nuts and dropping shells.”
“That’s right.”
Moon vanished deeper still.
Chapter Eight
THE EVIDENCE OF A NUT
Seward came back to Trade Wind shortly before four. He looked formal, very polite, and his eyes were perfectly cold. In fact he couldn’t have looked more sinister if he’d had a warrant for arrest clasped in his hand.
His secretary was with him. The secretary’s name was Mort Wilbur. He was a neat little trick, complete with pince-nez, and as unobtrusive as something barely visible in a fog.
The interim had been peaceful, because Moon had decided to go back to Coquilla for lunch. We’d finished this by two, and Moon had then taken his regular hour’s sleep after the midday meal. He never misses this except from some disaster of the nature that insurance companies label an act of God.
We had just finished greeting Miss Jettwick in Trade Wind’s main saloon when Seward, plus Wilbur, came in.
Seward said, after his own greetings and introducing Wilbur and all that:
“I wonder whether I might turn the library into an office for this afternoon, Miss Jettwick?”
“Certainly, Mr. Seward.”
“Could I also bother you to send word to your nephew, and ask him to join me there?”
“Of course, but I thought Commissioner McGilvray had already taken Bruce’s statement?”
Seward smiled, very cold, very correct.
“The police department and the district attorney’s office frequently pursue independent lines of investigation, Miss Jettwick.”
“I see.”
Seward turned to Moon.
“Do you and Mr. Stanley wish to be with us?”
“Thank you, Mr. Seward. Yes.”
Well, there was Emily Post all over the place and things were just too soigné for words, and the four of us beat it for the library where Wilbur copped a seat before the desk and laid out a limp-leather loose-leaf notebook and six pencils sharpened into needles.
Moon hoped that Seward had enjoyed his festive New Year’s meal with Mrs. Seward and the two little Sewards, and Seward admitted pleasantly that he had, and said that the turkey had weighed eighteen pounds, stuffed with chestnuts and oysters, and that the two kids had each weighed a hundred pounds by the time that the mince pie and hard sauce had come along and were now blissfully in the arms of indigestion.
Then Bruce came in.
Bruce looked about the way you’d expect any youngster to look who’d been up all night going through hell and was being forced to face one of the smartest prosecuting officials that had ever held office.
Seward asked him to sit down.
“Mr. Jettwick,” Seward said, “I must warn you that my secretary will take your statement down in shorthand. It will later be transcribed and I shall ask you to sign it. It is your privilege to refuse to do so, inasmuch as you have not been charged with any crime. I suggest, however, that you wai
ve that privilege.”
“Certainly I’ll waive it,” Bruce said. “I told everything to Mr. McGilvray, and I can only repeat it to you.”
“Thank you. As Mr. Emberry undoubtedly instructed you, a statement is of small practical value in a trial court unless it is backed up by tangible circumstantial evidence or corroborated by an eyewitness. I have no desire to trap you, Mr. Jettwick, so I will admit freely that evidence has been brought to my attention which convinces me that your uncle was still alive when you went back to see him in his quarters at three o’clock this morning. I cannot be fairer than that.”
There was no movement from Moon. I knew he had been expecting something like this.
Bruce hadn’t. Bruce had a set of good, honest, dark brown eyes, and they suddenly looked more than just dead tired. They looked sick.
“I’m sorry, Mr. Seward, but you’re mistaken. My uncle was dead.”
“I advise that you reconsider.”
“I can’t reconsider, Mr. Seward. He was dead. His breath would have shown on the mirror if he hadn’t been.”
Moon said to Seward:
“Forgive me, but you’re not leading up to any cataleptic trance condition, are you?”
“No, it’s nothing obscure, nothing like that. Mr. Jettwick, please go back to the point yesterday when you and your mother came aboard the yacht. You did arrive together?”
“Yes, we got here shortly after six.”
“What luggage had you? Just yours, not your mother’s.”
“I had two wardrobe suitcases, and a small case fitted with toilet articles, and a hatbox.”
“Were they all locked when they were brought on board?”
“Yes.”
“Were they taken directly to your cabin?”
“Yes. Mr. McRoss greeted us. He suggested that Mother and I go down to our cabins and unpack, and then join my uncle and the rest for cocktails in the main saloon in about an hour. A steward brought my bags down with me, and left them in the cabin.”
“Did he unpack them or did you?”
“No, he offered to, but I said I preferred doing it myself.”
“Be patient with me, please, if I seem to harp on precise detail. Were the bags still locked when the steward left the cabin?”
