“Got a horse in the third he had to see about,” replied Aleck. “What’s the update?”
“Well, Freddie Trombley could not identify the corpse as that of his dead wife, Joan. He didn’t need to see the woman’s face, because he knew at once it wasn’t she: This woman was completely gray-haired; his wife’s a brunette. And Joe says that the identification found in the dead woman’s bedroom was a made-up identity, because there is no person with that name at the address on her papers and passport, which stated she was a resident of Houndstooth-on-the-Heath, Surrey, England. No one can say for sure who she was or from whence she came. She was not on the ship’s passenger manifest, although this woman, posing as one “Margo Hemmings,” bought a one-way ticket on the Midnight Owl to New York City.”
“So, we know nothing more than we did before,” I said.
“Well, we know who she is not, and where she didn’t come from.”
“That’s a lot of help.”
“We do know that she was concealing her real identity. She was up to something, carrying a bomb, an innocent man her pawn in some crazy scheme. By the way, your overnight case was left in the driveway of Last Call. The Nassau County Police found it. They and our own NYPD are working together because the second murder was probably committed on the Island, but discovered in the back of my car here in the city. Also, because the murdered man was on the train at the time of the murder of this so-called Margo, the Bureau of Investigation is threatening to take over the cases because they ring of a bigger conspiracy. While they argue who’s in charge, little will get done as they step on each others’ gumshod toes.”
I said, “So, let me get this straight: The two murdered people may or may not have been anarchists, or they may have been jewel thieves, but there is a possibility that they were lovers, murdered by a third member of a love triangle, am I right?”
“I haven’t a clue.”
“Oh, I’ll bet the clues are all around us; we just can’t see them through the red mackerels!”
“The term is ‘red herrings,’ my dear,” corrected Aleck, and Mr. Benchley said, “Herrings, mackerels, something’s fishy!”
Before the conversation could turn to fishing in Lake Bomoseen, I said: “I wonder if Freddie Trombley’s story checks out, that he just arrived yesterday from England?”
“You’re thinking he’s been playing us along? That he might have murdered the couple?”
“He could have just called up to the room at the Sherry to see if the coast was clear before he went up to take evidence away of his relationship to the victims.”
Mr. Benchley considered the possibility that the cuckolded husband had had his revenge. “Clever, if he did, and more clever to say the dead woman isn’t his wife—gray hair and all. In that way his wife remains still missing, not dead.”
I considered the motive. “So that he can be eliminated as a suspect in a murder! And Fanshaw’s murder will appear to be tied to the chance discovery and ultimate silencing of a crime that had nothing to do with his tracking Trombley’s wife.”
“And this Italian fellow, just off the boat?” asked Aleck, “Why try to kill him?”
“Perhaps Giusto would recognize him, remember something that could point a finger at Trombley.”
“I’ll call Joe back and ask him if they’ve checked out Freddie’s story, his movements over the past few weeks.”
“Giusto has got to be kept out of this. I know he’s safe, now,” I said, “but the murderer knows who he is, and if anyone outside of our little group finds out where we’re keeping him, he is liable to be targeted again, and his brother and his family hurt, too.”
“Dottie,” prefaced Aleck, “you’ve got to keep out of this thing.”
I knew why Aleck was warning me to take care. The murdered man had been tailing my movements, and perhaps Mr. Benchley’s, too. We had led the culprit down to Little Italy and the home of the Maggioranis. And whoever murdered Featherstonhaugh had obviously been following him, too. Lots of people following each other . . . .
Mr. Benchley picked up where he’d left off: “The various police departments combed the grounds at Last Call and found, in the hydrangea bushes lining the drive, a crumpled-up telegram addressed to our deceased Mr. Fanshaw.”
“The date when that telegram was sent is important,” I said. “What it said is even more important if it is to corroborate Freddie’s story.”
“Sorry, but I don’t buy the lovers’ triangle angle,” said Frank. “Have the Mellons or their guests reported any burglaries during the party? Because the whole melodrama smacks of a burglary ring planning a jewel heist.”
“I suspect you are probably right,” nodded Mr. Benchley. “A string of very pricey pearls has gone missing, according to one of the guests. But according to Sgt. Joe, witnesses say the woman making the claim she’d been robbed had been seen stripped down to her skivvies and frolicking through the woods while spouting Hermia’s lines from A Midsummer Night’s Dream in the company of a very eager Lysander, an actor with the Royal Shakespeare Company.”
“Hey,” I said, an idea popping into my head. “Do you think the Mellons had anything to do with trying to claim insurance money by setting up a fake robbery? According to a kid I met at the party, Roger’s business is failing.”
“Don’t you believe it,” interrupted Frank. “Mellon Industries just bought up Amalgamated Coal and Gas!”
“Bilking an insurance company doesn’t tie in with the murders, though,” said Mr. Benchley. “Anyway, the Mellons took a personal inventory of their art collection and the family—uh—jewels and didn’t find anything missing.”
Chico was about to comment, but Aleck glared at him from behind thick spectacles: “One more joke about your ‘nuts,’ Chico, and I will feed them to the squirrels, my boy!”
“I’ve got to get out to Long Island more often,” said Frank. “I’ve been missing all the fun!”
“Oh, and very important,” resumed Mr. Benchley, “it appears to the coroner that our dear Fanshaw had been dead far longer than just the eight hours suspected before his discovery in the trunk. Tallulah had to have been wrong about seeing that fellow on a bench at the edge of the woods making love to a woman, because by that time he’d already been dead for at least eight hours.”
“Whew! I imagine he smelled as bad as a mackerel in Jane’s cupboard on a hot day,” said Aleck.
“You mean a trout, of course,” corrected Mr. Benchley.
“And I thought it was only your recitations that were stinking up the car,” I said. “You may be my friend, but you slaughter the classics!”
“Too many critics!” said Mr. Benchley to a table full of critics. “As I was saying before I was so rudely reviewed, it suggests he was killed early during the evening of the party.”
I said, “This ring of thieves is getting smaller.”
“Hold on there,” said Aleck. “What about the bomb on the train? If you think it all has to do with jewel thieves, why the bomb on the train?”
“Sounds like a bunch of anarchists running amuck to me!” said Ross.
“Or, a very clever plan by thieves wanting the police to think the trouble is with anarchists running amuck,” said Heywood. “Perhaps they were planning to burgle some of the train’s more affluent riders of their valuables, and the plan went awry. Maybe they had their eyes on robbing the Mellons. After all, the Mellons were the only folks in our train car with valuables and then a few days later a man is killed on their Long Island estate?”
“That makes sense, you know,” said Aleck, finished with his dessert, his coffee cup drained, and suddenly focused on the murderous puzzle set before him. “They botched up the job on the train and then tried to burgle them in their home.”
“The thieves must have been after something very valuable—so valuable they’d kill each other for the prize,” said Ross.
This was getting frustrating, listening to all the speculation about the crimes, and coming up with even more scenarios
for the motive. Of course, understanding the motive could lead us to the culprit, but we were no further along in any kind of understanding at all. We were pretty much back to the beginning of our conversation. And so I repeated: “The two murdered people may or may not have been anarchists, or they may have been jewel thieves, but there is a possibility that they were lovers, murdered by a third member of a love triangle, am I right?”
“Frank, who are these people, the Mellons?” asked Aleck.
“Just your average rich folks. He was an ex-patriot living in Paris these past few years while his wife was being treated in a Swiss sanatorium for various ills.
“Roger Mellon made his fortune in munitions during the War. Then, while on safari in Africa, he met a British coffee baron with plantations all over Kenya. They got friendly. A couple of years later, Roger married the man’s daughter, who’d been left the whole kit and caboodle after her parents were killed in a freak accident. Soon after the wedding she became ill. Mental problems, I heard.”
“Was it the merging of two great fortunes that has people interested in them?” asked Aleck.
“Aside from his fame as an industrialist, and the fact that his wife—Hermione—has been a woman of mystery until now, well, yes, the biggest deal about the Mellons is that they are fabulously rich,” said Frank, leaning back in his chair, bellowing smoke as he lit his cigar. He puffed like a trout out of water. “And that seems to be enough reason people find them attractive.”
“I’ve never been a millionaire but I just know I’d be darling at it,” I said.
Frank continued: “Rich people want to be rich with other rich people and do whatever it is rich people do; poor people want to be around rich people, hoping to collect the coins they shed along the way and that some of the golden fame and glory will rub off on them, if only by association.”
“I didn’t ask for a speech, Frank, keep it for your column,” said Aleck.
“Want to know what I think?” said Ross.
“Not particularly, you addle-minded duck,” said an acid-tongued Aleck, still angry that the poker game got booted out of the house on Ross’s watch while he was away in Vermont. He would not be happy until they found other accommodations for the weekend card games. Anyway, he liked verbally abusing Ross. Ross abused right back. They’d been doing it to each other for years and they weren’t about to stop now.
“Shut up, you overgrown cantaloupe; I wasn’t asking you!” pitched back Ross.
“Fawn’s behind—”
“Pin-head—”
“Prick face—”
“Lard ass—”
“Fart face—”
It could go on forever, with Chico and Frank joining in, much to the embarrassment of Heywood and George—especially George, who at such times shrank his six-feet-four frame down into his size twelves in an attempt to hide under the table. Actually standing up and leaving the table would have brought too much attention to himself.
Jane and I sat back in our chairs, waiting for the nonsense to pass, reflecting that even in a gathering of such brilliant personalities, men were still boys and would easily resort to adolescent tantrums. I figured they spent most of their time dreaming up new and better insults to throw at one another. Aleck, not to be outdone by the likes of high-school-dropout Ross, probably spent his free time scanning Shakespeare’s play-scripts for nasty alliterations to pitch at the “illiterate.” Where else could he have picked up, “I will knog your urinals about your knave’s cockscomb!” or “You stale old mouse-eaten dry cheese!”
Aleck was now delving into his mental list of the Bard’s insults, and Ross was still calling Aleck less-sophisticated names like “puke face” and “monkey balls,” so I leaned in and offered Ross a couple of my own off-the-cuff inventions. He looked grateful for, “You scourge on nature, pox on humanity!,” and thrilled when I tossed him, “You puss-oozing canker sore; you spittle on my spectacles!”
Mr. Benchley stood up among the name-calling idiots and tapped the side of his water glass with a fork. “Your attention, please!” he said with a laugh in his voice. “I have something more to add that I’m sure you’ll be pleased to hear: ‘Ode to a Grecian Urn, by John Keats—seventeen-ninety-five to eighteen-twenty-one . . . .”
Everybody whined as he pressed on: “Thou still unravish’d bride of quietness—Thou foster-child of Silence and slow Time!”
He droned on as we rose en masse from the table, dropping dollar bills to pay for our luncheon fare and tips, and then left for our various destinations.
Mr. Benchley caught up with me and Woodrow as we strolled outside for our afternoon constitutional. Halfway down the block we spied a couple of familiar faces from the train in the compartment next to the Brouns’—the ukulele-playing Harvard boys—standing outside of the Harvard Club a few doors down from the Gonk. We stopped to speak with the young men, who recognized Woodrow from the train, but neither me nor Mr. Benchley. Knocked down a rung lower on the evolutionary ladder below the canine species, we introduced ourselves and explained that we had traveled on the Midnight Owl last week, returning from Boston.
“Benchley, did you say?” asked one of the dimwits. “Harvard grad, you say?”
“Class of ’12, Delta Upsilon,” said Mr. Benchley, rocking on his heels.
“Oh, yeah, I think I’ve heard about you,” said one of the young men, “but you’re dead—I mean, someone said you were dead.”
Taken aback, and landing firmly on his soles, my friend said, “Well, you can put that rumor to rest and not the man.”
“Sorry,” said the other boy, “my friend here is a dolt.”
“Noted.”
“And I know who you are!”
“You do, do you!” Mr. Benchley turned to me. “You see, Mrs. Parker, I am fondly remembered along the halls of academe for my scholarship and contributions as president of the Lampoon, as well as the cup holder of the Obscure Secret Ritual Competition against the Skulls four years in a row.”
“Is that so?” asked the kid. Getting nothing but a burning stare from my friend, the boy continued, “I remember seeing a cartoon of you with another fellow carrying a table down the steps of a house, captioned, ‘We’ve come for the sideboard.’”
“We were carrying a davenport, and the caption reads: ‘We’ve come for the davenport.’”
“You hadn’t that little moustache, but the artist caught your peculiar nose perfectly. That’s why I remember you.”
“Well, Mrs. Parker, there you go: I am remembered for something, at least. Harvard has gone to the dogs—my apology, Woodrow! Remind me to withdraw my annual alumni donation.”
“I didn’t get what was funny about it,” continued the boy.
“Well, you see, young man, it was a prank. We’d knock on the door of a house on Beacon Hill and tell the maid we’d come to pick up the davenport, and then we’d deliver the sofa to the house across the street.”
“But—well, tell me, what was so funny about that?”
Mr. Benchley burned.
“You had to be there,” I said.
Mr. Benchley bridled: “Listen here, young man. Let me be the judge of what’s funny and what’s not.”
I couldn’t resist: “I’ll have you young whipper-snappers know that Mr. Benchley is the drama editor and critic for Life magazine. When he said Abie’s Irish Rose ain’t funny, it closed!” I got down to business: “What I want to know is, did the police—or that detective—Gum, was his name—did he ask you and your friends any questions about what you may have seen or heard on the train when the woman in Bedroom Two was killed?”
“We were sleeping it off, I suppose,” said the lanky kid. “Me and Boner and Sprat. Beaner, here, was gagging, I think.”
“I was puking my guts out in the men’s lavatory, back and forth for half the night,” said Beaner. “Like Bobo says, everybody was plotzed.”
“Pie-eyed!”
“Pol-lut-ed!”
“Blot-to!”
“Blitzed!�
��
“Be-fud-dled!”
”Bombed!”
“Blasted!”
“Clobbered!”
“Crapped!”
“Young man, there’s a lady present,” interrupted Mr. Benchley.
“We beg your pardon.”
“Awww shit, don’t mention it!” I replied.
“Now that we know that you had imbibed enough to reel you off to oblivion—”
“Juiced!”
“Looped!”
“O-blit-er-at-ed!”
My friend sought an opening. “Yes, as boiled as an owl—”
“There’s a new one!” screamed Bobo.
“As boiled as an owl—on the Midnight Owl! Ha, ha, ha, ha!” said Beaner, slapping his thighs.
Eyes rolling toward heaven, Mr. Benchley interjected “—and you didn’t see anyone in the corridor, or hear anything unusual?”
“Well, no. No one was about, really, that time of the night; everybody was asleep, but me.”
“That’s right, we were snoozing,” confirmed Bobo.
“Catching forty winks—”
“Boys!”
“Oh, yeah,” said Beaner, “except for that one time when I was trying to get to the john in time and I passed the fellow in the hall.”
“What did he look like?” I asked.
“Why, he’s the famous one. Everybody knows who he is. The writer. Social stuff. You know—whatsisname . . . ?”
“Heywood Broun?”
“Who?”
There could have been only one other famous man—other than Heywood and Mr. Benchley—in our Pullman, so I suggested another name.
“That’s right, the socialist, the muckraker,” nodded Beaner.
“Where’d you see him?”
“At the door to the dead woman’s room, but she wasn’t dead, then, I don’t think. I heard her voice through the door; I don’t remember what she said. Then he walked back to his compartment.”
“Did you tell Detective Gum about that?” asked Mr. Benchley.
“He didn’t ask me, and I didn’t see anything, really. I was back and forth to the john half the night. Why? Is it important?”
[Dorothy Parker 04] - Death Rides the Midnight Owl Page 16
