by Rufus King
“Goody,” she said in a voice fresh out of the glowing forge.
Well, Jimmy gave me one of those things it pleases him to think of as a kittenish look, dropped her arm and beat it, and I hooked her arm and started swinging her along.
“Where to, handsome?” she said, and I said, “Ever read a book, thunderbolt?” and she said, “What is a book?” and I said, “You’ll see lots of them right now,” and buried the persiflage, hefted her into the library and shut the door.
Moon opened it right away again and let in Miss Laceheart, then closed it, and said to Lady Vulcan, “I believe you have a grievance, Mrs. Smith? This is my secretary, Mr. Bert Stanley, and Miss Lettice Laceheart of the Daily Review”
Miss Laceheart let out a squeal. “Not—not Mrs. Jeffry Smith? The wife of the man who was bumped—Oh, my dear child, do forgive me! Your grief—”
“You can tie a can on my grief. I’m here on business.”
Moon firmly grabbed the throttle.
“Mrs. Smith, I understand from Mr. Singer that the situation is this. He found you at your hotel last night after the sudden demise of your husband and suggested that if you changed your hotel you would not be inconvenienced by the police who, in turn, might locate you for questioning. I doubt strongly whether they could have. They do not quite have all of Mr. Singer’s facilities.”
“Singer did. He told me Jeff was all set to take a powder.”
“Precisely, utilizing the ten-thousand-dollar reward I had offered.”
“Which should now be mine, by rights.”
“Possibly, Mrs. Smith, it shall be yours.”
“Jeff filled his part of the bargain. He got shot for it.”
“He was shot, unfortunately, before he had given me any information whatever.”
“That’s what you say.”
“It is also what you will have to believe. I had Mr. Singer bring you to me to make you this proposition: tell me what your husband was on the point of disclosing when he died, and the ten thousand will be yours.”
“I don’t know.”
“I was afraid of that.”
“Jeff kept a lot of stuff from me. He had funny ideas about women.”
“I am told that you married him shortly after he acted as correspondent in the divorce case between Myron and Helen Jettwick?”
“That’s right.”
“I think that the information he was about to sell me concerns that general period. My proposition is this, Mrs. Smith. Accompany us on this cruise. During it I shall attempt to spur your memory as to every small detail you recall of the early years of your marriage, your memory of every reference which your husband may have made to you that touched on the Jettwick divorce, of everything Mrs. Jettwick may have told your husband regarding the jewel thefts on the Leviathan, and any reference, no matte how slight, to Senator Blackman and his wife.”
“Suppose I can’t remember anything important, Mr. Moon?”
“I am satisfied to make a bargain with you right now. If you do your part honestly, and help me with every remembrance that can be brought back, I will give you the ten thousand dollars whether your information proves to be important or not. I am satisfied that it will. Well, Mrs. Smith?”
“It’s a deal. I’d be a dimwit if it wasn’t.”
“Thank you. Miss Laceheart, there is your story. I suggest you play it from the angle of the grief-stricken widow who is racking her brains even through cruel heartache to remember the vital clue which her husband was about to impart when he was brutally shot; the clue that will lead us to his murderer.”
“I’ll probably get canned for holding this stuff back, but it’s worth it.”
“You are holding it back under compulsion of your promise to me. Also, please radio a complete copy of the item as it appears in your column to our operator on board. He will incorporate it in the ship’s news.”
I began to get it right then. People believe what they see in print. Moon wanted somebody on board to read that item and, because it had been printed in a New York newspaper, it would be accepted as a fact. The edges were still hazy, but Moon stopped further cogitations by saying to Miss Laceheart:
“We are about to cast off and I advise you to go ashore and—vanish.”
She did, almost dropping her spots in her hurry, and I said to Moon:
“Seward and McGilvray are going to be too pleased for words about all this.”
“By tomorrow morning, Bert, we shall be far beyond their jurisdiction.”
“What about the coast guard? I understand they float?”
“We are committing no felony. Mrs. Smith is accompanying us of her own free will. She will inform the press of that fact by radio-telephone tomorrow. I know of no precedent for removing on the high seas a person who is wanted for simple questioning. The very thought is an absurdity.”
“Hey, listen, you two,” Mrs. Smith said. “What about clothes? What am I supposed to do? Morning-noon-and-night in these?”
“I dare say Miss Schuyler or Mrs. Jettwick will be glad to help you out. You are about their size. Naturally, when you return with the ten thousand dollars, you can buy all the clothes you like.”
“You’ve got some warm ideas, Mr. Moon. My bet is that you’re a bachelor.”
“I am, shall we say, for the time being? There is one thing which you must understand, Mrs. Smith. I speak for your own safety, and I speak seriously. Mr. Stanley is not only my secretary; he is an efficient bodyguard. That is, in any situation which does not involve a porthole. You will be forced to put up with a close attendance on his part both on the run down and during our stay at Tortuagas. I trust you will be freed from this attention on the run back North as I expect that the case will be closed before we leave the island. My sympathies.”
Baby Ironside’s pretty violet-colored eyes took a round-trip ticket starting from my head and said, “Don’t waste them on me, Mr. Moon. Give them to him.”
I thought I was shivering because I suddenly realized what Moon really wanted her on board for. The papers from the black steel box which he’d packed at the Manning weren’t enough to prove his case. He had to force the killer’s hand by setting a trap, and Jeffry Smith’s happy relict was to be the bait.
But I wasn’t shivering. It was Trade Wind, and we moved over to the starboard portholes and stared out. The gangplank had been lowered, and water showed and widened along Trade Wind’s side. You could see Emberry and McRoss and Seward and McGilvray lined up with the mob on the landing stage, and I waved a kiss to McGilvray that almost rocked him into the drink.
Then Trade Wind’s nose swung out, her whistle blew and her turbines throbbed her gently forward into the chop.
Chapter Nineteen
ABSENCE OF BLOOD AND THUNDER
Hatteras, Charleston, Savannah, Jacksonville Beach, the hard sands of Daytona, Miami Beach with its buildings sticking up like gaunt white fingers, Key West, all were dropped astern and we were due to raise Tortuagas toward evening. Not being a seventh son and having no facility with tea leaves whatever, even if my grandmother had been an O’Michael of Kilkenny, there was no way of knowing the terrible sort of hell that Tortuagas was due to raise with us.
I had tried on the run down, during a lull in my bodyguard act over Mrs. Smith, to pry Moon loose from the answers to several key questions which struck me as summing up the case, and being pertinent as all get-out.
Who, I asked him, had packed down the snow on Trade Wind’s small aft-deck, leaving footprints and the icy patch where “who” had stood for some time and looked in through the open porthole. And why?
Could a woman as well as a man have imitated the general tones of Myron Jettwick’s voice when Bruce had been summoned by the boat telephone to his uncle’s quarters in order to place Bruce on the scene of the crime? I pointed out that some waterfront packets I’d faced across the bar at Harrigan’s Tavern had had voices like stevedores, and vice versa, so what?
When had the bottle of Jamaica rum been stolen
from Trade Wind’s stores: the bottle which the man with the white dress shirt front had given to Terrence, the steward on deck watch, in order to grease him into a fade-out? When had the sapucaia nuts been stolen from Bruce’s pocket, and how?
Who had lifted the black steel box from behind the books of botany, and when had it been tossed over the side?
Who were the two punks in the rowboat who had been grappling for that box, or who had hired them?
How had Mr. Who known that Jeffry Smith had made a date to meet us in that bar on Fifty-fourth Street? When had the threat note been underlined in Moon’s copy of A High Wind in Jamaica?
Had the ex-wife of Senator Blackman lied when she claimed she had not seen Myron Jettwick again after his call at the Waldorf?
What was the true answer to Mrs. Schuyler’s hat: the fact that it had been on her head at six-thirty in the a.m.?
Moon answered me by asking a question. Which probable motive struck my fancy? There were three: profit, revenge, and fear. Just those three shells, he said, and under one of them would be the pea, so I saw he was only going to play games and that any further prying at the moment would be a waste of breath.
This happened on the third day out and Moon was sitting on the main deck wearing, with white linens, a huge straw farmer’s hat. He thinks getting sunburned is silly and always uses my painful initial lobster stages in tanning as proof of his point. He got rid of me by asking me to call up Emberry on the radio-telephone and find out what papers, if any, had turned up in Myron Jettwick’s apartment that might have a bearing on the Staten-Island-project end of the investigation.
Kenny Mattson, Trade Wind’s radio operator, was an agreeable kid, very plump and addicted to penny ante and to whistling off key. He put me through to Emberry’s apartment in New York City, which was a duplex and terraced affair complete with four exposures and four views. Miss Jettwick had told me about it.
A man’s voice said, “Hello?”
I said, “Hello.”
That being got over with we attacked business.
“Mr. Wallace Emberry, please. Bert Stanley speaking.”
“This is Plymouth, Mr. Emberry’s man, sir. Mr. Emberry is not at home.”
“Is he over at Mr. Myron Jettwick’s apartment?”
“No, sir. Mr. Emberry is at Cotswold.”
“At what?”
“Cotswold, sir. His estate on the north shore of Long Island.”
“What’s the number?”
Plymouth gave it to me, and I gave it to Kenny Mattson, who put it through, and Emberry answered the call himself. I told him what Moon wanted.
“Yes, Mr. Stanley, I have.”
His voice sounded pale and upset, if you can imagine a voice doing anything like that. He said he had been on the point of calling Trade Wind up and telling Moon all about it. He and McRoss had continued their search after papers in Jettwick’s apartment that morning, and a memorandum had been found between the leaves of a book on the cultivation of artichokes. The memorandum obviously referred to a more important document which, it said, was among the papers in the black steel box.
Well, Emberry had gone to his retreat on Long Island where he had transferred the box and the apparently unsignificant contents, but, unless some of the stuff was code, he still could find no paper to which the memo might have referred.
It wasn’t that, however, which had made his voice pale and upset. He had been robbed. Someone had broken into Cotswold and had lifted a sterling silver tea service, and, apart from the intrinsic loss, there was the sentimental one as well. The tea service had belonged to his grandmother. He had gotten in touch with the state police, but, outside of covering the known fences and pawnshops, I knew, he said, what that meant.
From my vague knowledge of Emberry’s origin the sentimental angle was just so much prize beef on the hoof, as the height of his grandmother’s elegance in tea services probably never reached beyond an earthenware pot marked “Souvenir of St. Louis’ World Fair.” So I said dear-dear and my-my and promised to tell Moon all about the memorandum and the theft, then sent my regards to Poison McRoss, and was about to ring off when he stopped me and wanted to know whether Mrs. Smith had been able to remember anything of importance as yet. I said no, but she was trembling on the brink, and said good-by.
I reported this riffle of useless information to Moon, but the theft of the tea service seemed to interest him and he said, “Thank you, Bert,” and waved a smoke screen about his person which meant that he wanted to be alone.
My charge was sun-tanning herself on deck up in the bows so I went within eyesight of her and sat down to add a paragraph to my brochure as I thought she was safely asleep. She was beside me before I could put a period after the title to the paragraph “House Specials So What.”
She twisted her neck over my shoulder.
“Often I have wondered about house specials, Mr. Stanley. How come the cash customers don’t get wise to the fact that they’re tea?”
Because, I told her, they are not tea: they’re the accumulated rinsings of the liquor and cordial bottles before the bottles are so wastefully broken because of the ABC law. These rinsings are then bottled and given a fancy name which no liquid gourmet ever heard of in his life. They have plenty of flavor but no kick, and whatever wren in the clip joint the purchasing sucker is honoring at six bits a drink can pack them away all night and still keep her wits about her, even if she does lose her sense of taste. The profit to the house being just one hundred percent.
She poured sun-tan oil on my back and started to rub it in. Suppose, she said, the sucker reaches over and takes a drink of the special himself? Sometimes, I told her, they do, and if they like the backwash of a week’s rinsings and order one for themselves the waiter signals the bartender who then spikes the special with a shot of gin. This cuts down on the profit a little, but mellows the sucker into the proper state of putty for being shortchanged and totally gypped.
Well, all that had been two days before we were due to raise Tortuagas, and, so help me, not another thing had happened on the trip. The wireless-news’ item of Lettice Laceheart’s scoop on Mrs. Smith had apparently been received by all on board without an eyelash being batted, and Mrs. Smith herself had been received in the same manner. The girls couldn’t have been nicer to her if she’d been lightly dusted over with powdered arsenic; very formal and very right whenever they spoke to her, and most kind about lending her their duds to wear, but you could tell that Mrs. Smith got it and felt it, too.
The only squawk about Mrs. Smith’s having joined the party had come in a radio from McGilvray to Moon saying, under quotes: “A wise man will not reprove a fool,” and Moon had made a spill of the message and dropped it over the side. He said it was a Chinese proverb and he hadn’t thought McGilvray had had it in him, which kept it still in the original Chinese to me.
As for the lovebirds, Elizabeth might just as well have been in a cage, her mother being the cage, because there wasn’t a minute when Mrs. Schuyler wasn’t on hand whenever Bruce was near by and awake.
Not that this absence of blood and thunder made for peace; on the contrary, it was like the slow building up of an invisible pressure within sealed walls with the time shortly due when the whole works were to burst, and our first sight of Tortuagas came as a relief.
We raised the island just at twilight on the evening of Trade Wind’s fifth day out, and District Attorney Seward was waiting for us on the dock.
Chapter Twenty
TO SHOOT A SPARROW DOWN
Long shadows of the royal palms with which Myron Jettwick had landscaped the harbor’s fringe of Tortuagas were like indigo pencils on copper sand in that swift tropical descent of the setting sun. Grouped on the dock around Seward as Trade Wind gently nosed her way alongside were several white-jacketed black boys from the house, and a Mr. Warrenby Dorset who served, Miss Jettwick told us, as a year-round major-domo on the island.
Moon called down to Seward from the starboard rail, where h
e was standing with the rest of us.
“I might have known you’d be here.”
Seward grinned up.
“I realized it was just an oversight on Miss Jettwick’s part, my not having been asked.”
“Did you bring anybody else?”
“No, I’m all.”
“How did you get here?”
“I flew down yesterday.”
“Here?”
“No, to Key West, and chartered a boat to bring me over. Quite a place you have here, Miss Jettwick.”
“Is it? That’s nice.”
You could see that Miss Jettwick felt a sudden stab of fear in spite of these pleasantries. It was a cinch she was figuring that only one sane reason could have brought Seward down from New York: to make an arrest.
She glanced at Bruce, who was standing beside her, and his face was undoubtedly pale under the tan he’d coated it with on the way down. Helen Jettwick had a strained look in her eyes, too, while Mrs. Schuyler’s normally well-trained features had frozen into a snow face from the moment when she had identified Seward on the dock.
Elizabeth managed to keep on looking sophisticated, if none too happy, and Mrs. Smith just gave Seward the once-over as she did with anybody in pants.
“How do you do, Miss Jettwick?” Dorset called up. “I’m Warrenby Dorset. Your brother frequently spoke about you—beastly thing, his death. I’d like to welcome you to Tortuagas.”
“Thank you, Mr. Dorset. Myron often spoke to me of you, too.”
The landing ladder was lowered and we went ashore and followed a path bordered with hedges of bougainvillea that wound through a lush jungle of bamboo trees and coconut palms with some flame trees brightening the gloom. The house itself was a natural for a night club, and of the Spanish type which they knock together so well at Palm Beach and practically nowhere else, including Spain.
A large inner patio had a pool in its center, while galleries surrounded three of its sides, with latticed doors opening into bedrooms. There were outside staircases of Spanish tile and wrought-iron work going up to the gallery.
