The Mammoth Book of Roaring Twenties Whodunnits

by Mike Ashley

  I didn’t recognize the figure strolling down the street. I recognized his coat. Vicuna. The pince-nez perched on the bridge of his nose was more comical than even a pince-nez had a right to be. A pork pie hat covered his sleek black hair.

  I intercepted the college boy, and without any unnecessary preliminary remarks, hauled him into a narrow walkway between two asphault-shingled triple-deckers.

  “Hello, Kit. How’s tricks?”

  I squeezed his arm so hard he squeaked like a caught mouse.

  “Just had your palm read? Or was this visit personal?”

  “I – Um –” Kit was trying hard not to look me in the eye. If he tried any harder, he’d have to hide his head in his pocket. From what I make out of his face, a razor had never touched those rosy cheeks.

  I took a fistful of dimpled chin and pointed his upturned nose at mine. The sissified pince-nez dropped free. That’s when I got a good look at him.

  Surprise made me let go. “I’ll be damned! A doll!”

  “Let me go, Mister! I done nothing to you!”

  “What’s your name, tin Lizzy?”

  “K-Kit–Kitty. What’s it to you?”

  I was starting to wonder. I searched her soft features for any resemblance to the missing Helen Reynolds. The commotion caused windows to go rattling up on their sash cords.

  Kitty saw her chance and bolted. I pounded after her like Red Grange after the old pigskin. Would have had her too, but when I was on the brink of nabbing her, she shed the vicuna coat. My big Brogans got tangled up in it. I took a header.

  Crossing the avenue, Kitty sprinted into the concrete tomb that was Forest Hills Station. But I was hot on her heels. The case was starting to unravel, and I wanted my hands on every strand.

  I was taking the escalator steps two at a time when I heard the train doors snap closed. Just as I gained the empty platform, the train was pulling out. I muttered some choice words about the excessive efficiency of the Massachusetts Transportation Authority. That got me nowhere.

  There was nothing to do but return to my post and ponder recent developments. In the high dim space, I re-examined the snap of Helen Reynolds until I decided any resemblance to the mannish Kitty was general, not specific.

  The hours crawled toward midnight.

  Lights began winking out all over the house. They followed an orderly pattern. First the downstairs, except for the parlor. Then the upstairs. Before the top floor lights when out, a solitary window up under the eaves came on for a long minute.

  I spotted what I took to be the shadow of a person, but while I fiddled with the focusing screw of my field glasses, the pane went black. When I thought about it, I decided I’d been looking at the shadow of an old dressmaker’s dummy.

  The parlor light extinguished, a female form retrieved the Hupmobile from the garage. I watched it slither down the narrow street between the kerb-parked machines of the garage-less.

  I waited a good long while before I slipped down to the street and picked the rear door of the Number Sixty.

  I was greeted by a very black cat who went “meow” when I asked if its name were Spooky. I took that to be a “yes”.

  The house was in good order. Furnishings were modern but not quite up to Boston Brahmin tastes. The curtains were Chintz. There was a new Atwater Kent cabinet radio in the living room. Gas fixtures had all been converted to electricity. Over all, the house was the kind you’d expect of a two-bathroom Irish household, so I gathered that the erstwhile Mrs. Jack Diamond had either come down a bit in the world, or was laying low for reasons of her own. There must be a reason she preferred the Hupmobile to the Landau.

  I noted a card table in a corner of the kitchen, covered with a lavender velvet cloth. Beside an unopened pack of London Life cigarettes, a deck of well-worn playing cards stood neatly in an open cedar box. The table was tucked into a corner, with only two straight-backed chairs in place. Bridge and Whist were not played here. This smacked of a fortune teller’s layout.

  I moved on upstairs. I expected two bedrooms, but found only one. It was the smaller of the two. The larger room was furnished in fancy damask cushions strewn about the floor haphazardly. No furniture. Portraits of Hollywood actresses ripped from movie magazines were tacked to the walls. I didn’t know what to make of it. With the pink-bordered floral purple wallpaper, it made me think of a Caliph’s seraglio – minus the harem girls.

  An abbreviated flight of steps led up to a dark attic door. Padlocked. I wondered why people in this neighborhood did that.

  I debated over picking the lock. Curiosity got the better of me. I tinkered with it until it surrendered.

  The light switch was the turn-of-the-century kind that rotated like a rheostat. I twisted it the wrong way and the switch unscrewed and rolled off somewhere. I gave up looking for it, and let my eyes adjust to the lack of light.

  The dressfitter’s dummy began to resolve itself amid the shadows. I felt a chill. It was partly the cold, and partly the size of the dummy. It must have belonged to Paul Bunyan’s wife, it was so tall.

  Using it as a marker, I stepped in, wincing when every floorboard creaked. It was colder than Maclntyre’s attic, a regular ice box.

  A fast-shifting pattern of light followed by the even-uneven crunch of tires on gravel made me freeze. My blood froze, too. I got a good look at the dummy. Not good enough to scare the daylights clear out of me, but enough to send them temporarily scattering.

  I stood in the darkness and waited, my breathing even and measured, cold breath steam drippling out between my lax lips.

  The laughter of women came floating up into the chill beneath the rafters. I counted three distinct voices. But there might be more.

  “Spooky, where do you keep the wine?” a raucous voice cried.

  “There’s a choice bottle of Malagua in the pantry.”

  I waited for them to get settled. The night was still young. And they’d feel the attic draft soon enough. I couldn’t take my eyes off the outline towering not four feet in front of me.

  The wine flowed freely. Jazzy strains squawked from the cabinet radio. I heard dancing. I didn’t detect a single male voice, so I wasn’t worried about the awkwardness of my position. Or my future.

  “Spooky, why are you acting so strangely?” a young voice wondered.

  “Are you talking to me?” asked the smoky voice I knew as Spooky Spookins.

  “No, sugar, the tabby. She’s jumpy and nervous. Look at her.”

  “What’s the matter, baby?” Spooky Spookins asked her namesake. “Cat got your tongue?”

  Another voice wondered, “I feel a draft. Is there a window open upstairs?”

  “No. All the windows are closed.” Worry troubled Spooky Spookins’ voice. “Keep drinking. The night is yet young.”

  She was coming up the stairs. That was it. I knew what to expect next. The curtain was about to fall on the whole matter.

  She had steely nerves. She stopped suddenly. I caught a sharp intake of breath. No cry, no strangled choke or sob. I knew she knew the attic door was open. I let the knowledge sink in to the pit of her stomach.

  Then I took a careful step backward. A floor board creaked, as I knew it would.

  “Who’s up there?” Spooky Spookins hissed.

  “Maybe it’s the ghost of Jack Diamond,” I said evenly.

  She didn’t favor me with a reply. But I tracked the creak of floor boards coming toward the short flight of steps, up the stairs and into the cold confines of the attic. She fumbled for the light switch, found the bare mounting screw, and muttered something under her breath.

  She waited and I waited.

  We perceived one another’s outline at about the same time.

  “Do I know you?” she asked, cool as steel and soothing as a rasp. She had nerve. Ice water was in her veins.

  “No. But I know you, Mary McNulty. Alias Spooky Spookins.”

  “You’re that agency dick. I saw you coming back.” Her voice was thin.

 
I said nothing.

  “In the cards, I mean,” she added.

  “How did it happen?” I asked nonchalantly. “To Helen, I mean.”

  Her voice was just as blase in return. “It was just one of those things.”

  “What things?” I pressed.

  “One of those sad broken-heart blues numbers. Young girl falls in love for the first time and falls too hard for her own damn good. You might say Helen went beyond the call of beauty.”

  I said, “I might believe that. So might a jury. Maybe. If it weren’t for Jack Diamond.”

  “You act like you know things.”

  “Maybe,” I allowed. “I know someone stabbed him in the Place Pigalle section of Paris, employing an Apache knife.”

  In the dark, she lit a cigarette. Her hair was a smouldering copper.

  “I read that, too,” she said softly.

  “But the murderer who took his money left his wallet,” I went on. “A French Apache wouldn’t do that. He wouldn’t risk the few seconds it would take to separate leather from greenbacks. He’d walk away with the billfold and safely dispose of it later. The robber wanted Jack Diamond identified beyond any question. And the way his heart was jugged repeatedly suggested a personal grudge, not common robbery. A woman spurned might do it that way, for instance.”

  She pinched the cigarette dark. Her tone of voice blurred. “Why don’t you come downstairs for a drink? We can talk about it over a bottle of Xerxes wine.”

  “Sorry. It’s not in the cards.”

  She lunged in that moment. I was ready. There was a chair beside me. I had moved it into place beforehand. I flipped it up by the back, and jammed the legs toward the low shadow coming at me.

  She hit it hard. I heard a sharp thuck of a noise. When I twisted the chair hard, the stuck blade came with it.

  Then and only then did Spooky Spookins shriek.

  I expected to be mobbed. Instead, the house simply cleared in a stampede of unsteady heels. Maybe my yelling “Vice squad!” turned the trick.

  And that was all there was to it. Except for fighting a pair of handcuffs onto the erstwhile Mrs Jack Diamond’s struggling wrists. One after the other, I managed it. She scratched and clawed and snapped her white teeth at me with every exertion. She nipped me once, but it was worth it to hear those steel teeth catch.

  I dragged her from the attic, not caring how I did it. Behind us, the dressfitter’s dummy swung in the emptiness, swung on a length of clothesline wrapped around the broken neck that no tailor’s dummy should ever have . . .

  “Mary McNulty was leading the damnedest double life you could imagine,” I told the Chief next morning. “Two names, and an appropriate auto for each of them. She read cards as Madame Diamond, and sang in saloons under the name of Spooky Spookins. Between those occupations, she vamped suggestible college girls for her Sapphic love cult.”

  The Chief was a worldly man. But I had him stumped. He was examining the Apache lingue I’d taken off Dolly Diamond the night before. The thin curved blade was snapped off.

  “Dolly Diamond was what they’re calling a tin Lizzy now,” I explained. “Otherwise, a dyke. I imagine the late Jack Diamond was the first to uncover the truth. So he divorced her, citing mental cruelty to cover his profound embarassment at having married a gold-digging daughter of Sappho.”

  The deepening furrows on the Chief’s freckled brow told me the picture was starting to develop. “You’re certain this woman stabbed Jack Diamond?”

  “As certain as you can be when you know you’ll never prove it in a court of law,” I admitted. “The Diamond wren got her hooks into this Carmine Novelli. He was professionally known as a Bohemian restaurateur, but that was just a blind. He operated a tea room down in Greenwich Village. Still does, as a matter of fact. Served tea and light lunches while canny young things read the cards of school girls, blue-haired matrons and the odd social lion. Did a roaring business. Dolly stabbed Jack Diamond so he wouldn’t expose her past and thereby gum up her marriage plans. Once she learned all she could from Novelli, Dolly ditched him and returned to Boston to set up shop for herself. She took the stage name Spooky Spookins to conceal her jaded past and make a new name for herself with a fresh generation of good-time gals.”

  “Where does the Reynolds girl fit into this?”

  “Like her father said, she fell in with a bad crowd. Spoiled daughters of privilege who know no bounds and respect no laws, natural or manmade. Maybe Helen Reynolds met Dolly Diamond the fortune teller, or maybe she was first introduced to Spooky Spookins, the jazz singer. It doesn’t really matter. One way or another, she found herself in that pink and purple harem room, lubricated by bathtub gin, and drowning in the kind of perfumed bacchanale where you and I would never be welcome.”

  The Chief actually shuddered. Well, he’d come of age long before the days of Flaming Youth and Jazz bands. It was a new era. Besides, he was long married to the same loyal woman.

  I resumed my report. “Somewhere along the way, it all got to be too much for Helen Reynolds. Personally, I’d like to think she had a sober moment and couldn’t face what had become of her. She slipped off during an orgy of unconventional love-making and hanged herself in Dolly Diamond’s attic, too ashamed to face her iron-handed Irish father, and knowing how large an inconvenience her body would be to her corrupter.”

  “What is the Diamond woman saying about the affair?”

  “That Helen Reynolds fell madly in love with her and couldn’t abide all the other women and drinking and carousing. But that might be pride talking. Her story is that she was so shocked to find her chum swinging from an attic rafter that she got drunk and stayed that way until she could figure out who to call about the corpse. Either way, she’s facing a nice variety of morals and other felony charges – being an unlicensed fortune teller among them – which should keep the up-and-coming generation of Harvard co-eds on the straight and narrow for a good long while.”

  The Chief sighed deeply. “I will have to find a tactful way to break the truth to our client.”

  I had given that particular conundrum some overnight thought. “Tell him that his daughter hung herself in the passionate throes of unrequited love. Only leave Dolly Diamond out of it. Tell him it was a Harvard boy out of Houston named Kit Ragland, known to his drinking companions as Rags. Paint him as a tender-cheeked son of Texas who affects a pince-nez and vicuna coat, a whiz with the ukelele who is currently struggling to raise his first moustache. Old Man Reynolds won’t like it, but he’ll get over it in time. And since he’s bound to pull the expected social strings to keep his daughter’s suicide strictly out of the papers, it should all stick.”

  “What about Dolly Diamond? Eventually, she might talk.”

  I picked up my hat to go. “Dolly Diamond is looking at a long stretch at the State women’s reformatory. Knowing her, she should make out very well up there.”

  The Problem of the Tin Goose

  EDWARD D. HOCH

  Among the fads and extremes that typify the 1920s, such as marathon dancing and flagpole sitting, were the aerial stunt-pilots, or barnstormers as they came to be known. These really “took off” in the 1920s, with such pilots as Clyde Pangborn and Pancho Barnes. Ormer Locklear started one of the original flying circuses in 1919. By 1927 new safety regulations had limited the death-defying stunts and the fad began to fade. Not before, needless to say, Edward D. Hoch’s famous doctor of the impossible, Sam Hawthorne, finds himself facing another bizarre mystery. You’ll find more Dr Hawthorne stories in Diagnosis: Impossible (1996).

  “What was I goin’ to tell you about this time?” old Dr Sam Hawthorne asked as he poured two brimming glasses of sherry and then seated himself in the worn leather armchair. “Oh, I know – it was the flying circus that visited Northmont. That was a wild time, I’ll tell you, with murder committed in what could be called a flying locked room. It all began, I suppose, with a romance that blossomed quickly between a barnstorming pilot and a local girl . . .”

&n
bsp; It was a hot, cloudless July afternoon (Dr Sam continued) when I strolled over to the offices of the Northmont Bee to place a classified ad in their weekend edition. I was trying to sell my tan Packard runabout that I’d owned for a little over two years. It was a fine car but it had never replaced my beloved Pierce-Arrow that was destroyed by fire in a botched attempt to kill me back in February of ’28. Now I’d been lucky enough to purchase a beautiful 1929 Stutz Torpedo, almost like new, from a doctor in Shinn Corners who’d lost a bundle in the stock-market crash. The Packard would have to go, so I decided to run an ad offering it for sale.

  “That’s sixty cents,” Bonnie Pratt told me as she finished counting the words. “This sounds like a good deal. I should come out and take a look at it myself.”

  “Why don’t you?” I urged her. “It’s over at my office now.”

  “Oh, I’ve seen you driving it,” Bonnie said. She was a pert young redhead who’d been working at the Bee since she’d dropped out of college when her father died about a year before. The Pratts were good people, and though I didn’t know Bonnie well she was the sort of pretty girl who got noticed in a town as small as Northmont. “But maybe I will come over later,” she added.

  Because I enjoyed chatting with her I lingered a while after I’d paid my sixty cents. “What’s the latest news, Bonnie? Give me a scoop.”

  She returned my grin and said, “You have to buy the paper, Dr Sam. You don’t give out free diagnoses, do you?”

  “No,” I admitted, “but can’t I have a peek at the headline?”

  “Oh, all right.” She relented and held up the afternoon edition. “It’s all about the flying circus that’s coming to town on the weekend.”

  “We don’t have an airport,” I protested. “Where are they going to land?”

  “At Art Zealand’s Flying School. Look at these pictures. There’s a Ford Trimotor, the one they call the Tin Goose because of its all-metal body. They’ll actually be taking passengers up in that one, for a twenty-minute ride across the county and back. And this is their stunt biplane. They’ll take you up in that too if you’re brave enough – five dollars for five minutes. They’ve got the Ford Trimotor and two of these biplanes in the circus. It’s quite a show.”