Holiday Homicide

by Rufus King

  “Mr. Wallace Emberry, please,” I said. “Bert Stanley talking.”

  “Speak a little louder, Mr. Stanley. I’m Emberry. Your voice sounds like a catastrophe in tin pans.”

  “So does yours, Mr. Emberry. I’m calling about McRoss.”

  “Yes?”

  “He’s dead. He committed suicide with a razor blade.”

  “What? What? God bless my soul! Where? In town?”

  “No, down here—Tortuagas.”

  “But he isn’t down there. He’s up here.”

  “No, he isn’t, and Moon wanted me to find out from you when you saw him last.”

  “Last? Why, yesterday morning when we met at Jettwick’s apartment. Why on earth did he do it?”

  “Remorse.”

  “He confessed? This bowls me completely over. He left a confession?”

  “No, but it’s obvious from what he tried to do to Mrs. Smith. He tried to strangle her.”

  “I can’t believe it—McRoss—McRoss of all people!”

  “What time did you leave him at Jettwick’s apartment yesterday?”

  “Early—around ten or eleven in the morning, I think, because Plymouth called for me then and we drove out here to Cotswold.”

  “That’s all you know.”

  “Yes, and I wish to heavens you’d tell me more.”

  “Maybe later, Mr. Emberry. Right now I’ve got to report to Mr. Moon. Good-by.”

  “Good-by.”

  Six bells struck, and a very odd-looking sky greeted us when we stepped out on deck, a very odd sky for seven o’clock in the morning. It was like a new copper penny, without a trace of blue.

  “Oh, boy!” Kenny Mattson said, taking a look at it. “Maybe it’s a tropical storm—wait until I take a look at the glass. Oh, boy!”

  He was off for the chartroom and back again in no time with Captain Plummet, who wore a singlet, white-duck pants, boiled-beef skin, and a worried look.

  “She’s dropping,” Kenny said. “Oh, boy, is she falling down!”

  Captain Plummet gave him a suet eye, confirmed the fact that we might be in for a bit of weather, then studied the heavens absently while I recounted again, and with several promptings from Kenny Mattson, the doings last night up at the house.

  Moon and Seward and Warrenby Dorset came down the path and joined us on the bridge deck by the time I was through. The amenities were negligible, and it turned out that Dorset was going to send Flamingo over to Key West with a couple of the black boys. This was at Seward’s request, as the inquiry into McRoss’s death fell under the jurisdiction of the Florida state authorities, and, what with the climate and everything else, the sooner they hustled over and took a look, the better everything would be.

  Flamingo shoved off and we went back to the house, where I put on white linens under the irrepressible delusion that they would be cool. Everybody was up, of course, and in a fine lather of shock and fright and worry even though the general opinion coincided with mine: that McRoss had been the villain and that the case was closed. It was an opinion that neither Seward nor Moon, the rats, made the slightest effort to contradict.

  We gathered for breakfast in the patio at eight, and a fine crew we looked, too, because of the excitement and the drenching heat, and with only Mrs. Smith looking chilly whenever she glanced toward me. What air there was filled with why’s. Why had Myron Jettwick been killed in the first place? Why this? Why that? Why? Why?

  Moon told them, in part, while the women waved palm-leaf fans, and us men mopped at dripping sweat and a couple of worried parakeets chattered about the perilous weather from a flame tree near the table.

  The case hinged, Moon said—still shying clear of the word “solution”—on a remark that he had made last night to me: on the fact that Myron Jettwick had been willing to blast the world apart, if he had to, in order to shoot a sparrow down.

  Moon said:

  “I think we must accept the fact, Miss Jettwick, that your brother Myron was a thoroughly egocentric man. I mean that the slightest thing which affected him personally became of paramount importance, to a point where any means seemed justifiable either to attain that thing or to defend himself against it. Whenever he could do so, however, he preferred to sugar-coat his means to the end.”

  Moon shifted to Helen Jettwick and said:

  “His implacable hatred of you and your son is my case in point.” (I settled back and became Patience, because when Moon starts handing out words like egocentric, paramount, and implacable, he’s fogging an issue which, while important and true enough in itself, is simply a mask to screen an issue that is more important still. It gave me a hint that all was not well among the Danes and I started to guess. The trouble is, I didn’t guess right.) “You were perfectly correct, Mrs. Jettwick, in your reaction to his invitation for the Tortuagas cruise.”

  “He did want to hurt me through Bruce because Bruce was successful and secure? He did want to tear our life apart again?”

  “Yes, but let me make this plain to you. It was acting, but it was such sincere acting that he deceived himself. I refer to the reconciliation angle, the setting of his house in order before he died. They were the sugar-coating of his means to their cruel end. The stroke he suffered from blood pressure unquestionably accented the possibility that death could be close, and he did want, as the Reverend Munster Grant put it, an insurance policy for his soul. Do you see the double feature of his plan?”

  “Yes, I think I do. He would save his soul by admitting to me that he himself had done the Leviathan thefts in order to brand me as a thief and had arranged the divorce to brand me as a wanton. No, it still isn’t clear, Mr. Moon. How could he admit those things publicly without clearing my name? If Bruce, as the Unknown Troubadour, were exposed under such circumstances as my son, he would be thought of as the son of a martyr, a woman who had been bitterly wronged. Surely that wasn’t what Myron wanted, was it?”

  “No. His plan seems complicated until you reduce it to simple moves. ‘A’: he had a press release prepared, which he intended to mail to the newspapers on the morning that Trade Wind sailed. I have that document in my possession.”

  “Really?” Seward said coldly.

  “Yes. The release mentions the precarious condition of Myron Jettwick’s health and his desire to effect a reconciliation with his divorced wife and his nephew so that the short span of life left him may be passed with a sense of amity among them. He states that Mrs. Jettwick and Bruce accepted his invitation for the Caribbean cruise to cement that reconciliation. He does not omit the fact that Bruce is professionally known as Bruce Lane, the Unknown Troubadour. Well, Bruce is prominent enough to be news, and Jettwick stopped right there and left it to the yellower of the sheets to go to their morgues, dig into the past and attend to the rest.”

  Miss Jettwick said:

  “Helen would have combated that release with one of her own, stating that Myron had admitted to her his responsibility for the theft and the divorce.”

  “Admitted to her, Miss Jettwick, yes. It would be her word against his, and the damage would have been done.”

  “Then what about his precious soul? How could he squirm validity into its insurance policy if he didn’t back her up?”

  “That question brings us to move ‘B’: he had written out a confession as to the thefts and the divorce. It is a detailed confession, explaining his motivation and every move that he made.”

  “You have it, of course?” Seward said, and a whole lot colder than before.

  “Of course. It was kept, he planned to tell Mrs. Jettwick, among his most private papers, papers that would not be examined until after his death. It would offer her complete exoneration and he would have given it to her at once—this is still what he planned to tell her—but for ‘C.’”

  Seward was ice.

  “May I suppose that you have ‘C,’ too, Mr. Moon?”

  “Yes, Mr. Seward, you may. It is not in itself, however, of a documentary nature. Can any of you truly
grasp the blackmail of revenge? The higher animals—I refer to ourselves, to human beings—have used it in varying forms throughout the ages. Any long-drawn-out torture covers the idea: the effects whipped up by the Spanish Inquisition, by our earlier Redskins, by our more current gangsters, in other words by Man. Withholding a glass of water just beyond reach of a victim parched and dying from thirst is perhaps the simplest of the effects I mean. Well, that confession was Myron Jettwick’s glass of water, with Mrs. Jettwick and Bruce being the parched victims, of course.”

  “It was to be ours,” Mrs. Jettwick said, “only after he had died?”

  “Oh no. If that had been his plan he would have been alive today. There was still his soul, you see.”

  “No, Mr. Moon, I do not see.”

  “I’m sure that you will. You, Mrs. Jettwick, and your son were only part of his sins. I speak naturally of those he committed against you. If he had white-washed his soul simply through a confession of those, it would still be black. He had other offenses that required confession, too.”

  I damned the heat which was making my head dizzy and tried to reduce Moon’s chatter to an even simpler form than his ABCs. Okay. Heel Jettwick wanted to torture his ex-wife and nephew right up to within the last few moments of his death, or maybe hours or maybe days. Then, to save his soul, he’d release his confession and exonerate them, after having had the pleasure of watching them stew. He would also release a confession as to his other sins, and so ride up to heaven in a clean white sheet. So he thought.

  “Consider,” Moon was saying, although how he could keep on talking in that torrid air was more than I could understand, “the number of people who were partially familiar with Myron Jettwick’s intentions to purge his soul. All of you who were invited on the cruise knew it. His doctor, his lawyer, his minister, his secretary knew it. And the former wife of Senator Blackman knew it. In fact, you, Mrs. Smith, and your husband were, I believe, the only two people who didn’t know it. And now, Mrs. Schuyler, shall we discuss real estate?”

  Mrs. Schuyler looked, if I may say so, as dead as mutton, and I’ve always heard that that’s as dead as anything can look. She stayed in the ring, however, even though her voice and her actions did seem under the influence of some remote control.

  “Isn’t it,” she said, “a trifle hot? Why don’t you discuss it, Mr. Moon, if it appeals to you as a topic?”

  I knew that Moon considered most real-estate operators on a par one shade this side of horse thieves, and prepared for the worst, but he stayed nice, very impartial, very academic and very, very nice.

  “Real estate can be fairly dirty at times, and in the Staten Island plan it was rather much so. I refer, Mrs. Schuyler, to the one in which you and Myron Jettwick were mutually interested and in which you had sunk the largest part of your fortune.”

  Moon’s glance gathered the rest of us into this confidential exposé on the doings of big business.

  “It wasn’t just a question of buying up some lots and developing them with houses and then selling them at a profit. It involved great tracts of land bordering the secret route of a proposed trunk highway which would terminate at a vehicular tube linking Staten Island with Manhattan.”

  “Fantastic!” said Miss Jettwick. “Although when you think of the Golden Gate Bridge—”

  “So would the Hudson tubes have sounded fantastic, Miss Jettwick, not so many years ago, or the Empire State Building or the brevity of Hughes’ flight around the world. It was a real-estate promoter’s dream: a beautiful suburb brought within swift distance of Manhattan’s teeming downtown business section, with an almost unlimited fortune in the pockets of the promoters who brought it to pass. A dream so big that even Myron Jettwick was unable to tackle it alone and had to enlist Mrs. Schuyler to help him. Shall I take up some of the unpleasanter essentials to such a scheme, Mrs. Schuyler?”

  “If you wish,” Mrs. Schuyler said tightly.

  “Shall we touch on the bribery of politicians and of men in high office whose advance knowledge of that secret route was of required value, a bribery that you and Myron Jettwick had already gone in for to the extent of a good large sum? On the fact that all of that bribery was to be brought out, too, by Mr. Jettwick in this purging of his soul?”

  “All right,” Mrs. Schuyler screamed, “I stole that box. I threw it in the river.”

  She started to tremble. I started to tremble. The table started to tremble, while a crackling hiss like wind was in the air, but the heat-baked palm fronds did not stir. Moon was white.

  “Earthquake,” he said.

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  THE MAN BEHIND THE DOOR

  The light temblor was not repeated. A hush gripped the island and the sea, gripped every living thing, and the sun lost its orange look and deadened to the color of a dark ripe plum. I had a mad mental picture of young Kenny Mattson almost falling to pieces from sheer joy.

  Warrenby Dorset was the lad who took command. He knew these little tropical upsets if ever a man did. He pushed his chair back and stood up in the unnatural haze that hovered over the patio floor. We must go at once to the yacht, he said, in a voice that screeched like a foghorn through the incredible stillness of the sky and earth. We must put out to sea and do what we could to outrun the storm, a feat which he thought possible if we were to cast off within the hour.

  He was himself prepared to stay, and the black people would stay, too, but he refused, he said, to be responsible for the safety of the rest of us, as our sure salvation lay upon the water.

  His loud voice and the sheer melodrama of his statements gave me the first and welcome chill of the day. In regard to the body of McRoss, he said, Moon and Seward could do what they liked. He could either leave it in the house, where the authorities were supposed to examine it before it was moved, or some arrangements could be made to care for it aboard the yacht.

  If the center of the disturbance passed over the house, there would be no house left to shelter it. He and the black boys would secure themselves in a small cellar that was prepared for just such an emergency, and would salvage whatever they could of value after the fury of the storm had been spent.

  There was suddenly no more day.

  A rain that was, but believe me, torrential poured down out of the blackened sky as the advance lash of the storm broke on Tortuagas. Nobody remembers much of what happened during the next hour. The male drowned rats got the female drowned rats on board Trade Wind, and then brought down McRoss’s body wrapped in the bed sheets. We even hauled luggage, groping blindly through the solid whip of rain, stumbling, sweating, and cursing a path through the obstacles of the storm. We were finally lined up in the main saloon with our noses stuck against the portholes, watching a vague blotch on the dock that must have been Dorset, because his voice shouted something unintelligible up to the bridge, and the landing ladder was raised, the lines cast off and Trade Wind heeled shudderingly out for the open sea.

  There was only one idea in what was left of everybody’s head: to get to a cabin and into dry clothes. That wasn’t as simple as it sounds, for all of us were doing a Virginia reel at the will of the bounding floor. Pairs were formed on the old-fashioned theory that the gentlemen would assist the ladies down the companionway and deposit them, preferably intact, at their cabin doors on the deck below.

  Moon coupled with Miss Jettwick after signaling me to take care of my charge. Seward offered his arm to Mrs. Schuyler, but then thought better about it and took a firm hook around her waist. Bruce did the handsome with his mother and Elizabeth and, I understood later, between them, they managed to get him safely to his door. I must say that Mrs. Smith looked at me suspiciously when I staggered alongside to take her in tow. I refuse to admit that she shied. All she said was:

  “On the feet this time, Handsome. On the feet.”

  So Mrs. Smith and I bounced, curtseyed and rolled our way below as the motion of Trade Wind increased. The boat would slant, quartering up a sea, and hang suspended on a crest;
then plunge with a groaning crash flat into the trough with a force that would almost break her and Mrs. Smith and myself in two.

  The passageway on the cabin deck was pitch-dark which led me to the bright conclusion that the lighting system had fallen before the storm for the count of ten. I counted, by the sense of touch, the cabin doors as we passed them, and my nose told me when we had reached Mrs. Smith’s. I opened it and we hurtled inside.

  The cabin swam in furniture and murk, but at least there was murk, and the general outlines were plain enough to be identifiable. Mrs. Smith put her lips close to my ear, from where we were sitting on the floor, and said:

  “Listen, Prince Charming, I have had a busy day. I am wet, I am cold, I am bruised all over, thanks both to you and this restless ocean. For God’s sake go get me a drink, and try to get back here with it without breaking your neck. I need that drink.”

  I again found myself under way, and finished the course down the passage like a piece of popcorn that has just fluffed white. Moon, as I might have expected, was calm, cool, and perfectly vertical in the midst of our possessions and the general furnishing of the suite. I said, as I shuffled-off-to-Buffalo past him:

  “Mrs. Smith wants a drink. I’m going to take some of your Demerara rum.”

  Of course he couldn’t hear me through the shriek of the storm, but he smiled calmly out of the murk and, for some reason or other, gave my exit into the bedroom a round of applause. I got a bottle of rum from his steamer trunk and waved it at him as I flew past on the return trip to Mrs. Smith.

  Her cabin seemed lighter when I reached there, even though the seas slashed a solid wall of water across the ports, turning the place into a purple darkness until the sea fell back. She was sitting on the bed, holding herself there by gripping the footrail. She had taken off her wet clothes and was wrapped in a woolen bathrobe, damp at its neck from the water still dripping from her hair, which was far from being arranged off the face. I shouted: