The Mammoth Book of Roaring Twenties Whodunnits

by Mike Ashley

  I could joke about it because he wasn’t that kind at all. We’d been rooming together ever since the days when we only had one dress-suit between the two of us, and whoever happened to wear it, the other guy had to stay home in bed.

  I went in to get a spare collar; parties like those last all night. When I came back he’d hung up already.

  “I’d have been just as pleased without her good wishes,” he told me, going down in the elevator. “That was that Fortescue gal just then.”

  She’d developed rather a bad case of it the year before, before he met Marcia. The minute he found out about it, he started to dodge and duck and go into reverse; her nature was too explosive to have around the house. She’d even tried to have him beaten up by gangsters, probably so she could nurse him back to health, only he fractured the jaw of one and chased the other to the corner of First Avenue and Fifty-fourth Street, where he lost him in the traffic. Tom couldn’t prove it was she, of course, but he’d had his suspicions. After that she’d given up the job as hopeless and we hadn’t heard any more of her – until tonight.

  “Funny thing about it,” he went on, while we were waiting at the door for a taxi, “is the big change in her all of a sudden, saying maybe it was all for the best. Wonder how much of it she really meant?”

  In the cab he suddenly snapped his fingers. “Forgot all about it! I should have sent Marcia some flowers.”

  We stopped by at a florist and he went in. I waited where I was.

  “Where are they?” I asked when he came back empty-handed.

  “He’s rushing them down there by special messenger. Some of the swellest red roses you ever saw, kind they call American Beauties. She must be tired of orchids by now.”

  It was a three-ringed circus when we got there. The Park-Ashley was seething with debs, sub-debs, post-debs, Princeton and Dartmouth undergrads, dowagers, men-about-town, the whole social zoo. The party was supposed to be on the second floor but it was spilling over in every direction.

  Tom and I hired a room together to change collars in later on, before breakfast. We had a highball apiece to see us through the first eighty dances, then we went downstairs and reported for duty. We found Marcia standing next to her mother on the receiving line.

  “Almost thought you were going to renege on your own party,” she smiled.

  “Did you get my flowers?” he asked under his breath, like a fellow in love will.

  She looked blank for a minute, then began to laugh. “You must have forgotten to put a card in, in your excitement! Whole carloads of them have been coming all evening.”

  “I bet I find ’em!” a crystalline voice piped up. Marcia’s kid sister was standing there, eyes alight with excitement. “I know his taste.”

  “Red roses,” I said behind the back of my hand, to help her along. She turned and ran outside.

  Tom began to dance with Marcia, and just as I was girding up my armor to step into the fray, the kid came darting back again. “I see you found them all right,” I said. One was pinned to her dress and she was holding a smaller one, a bud, in her hand.

  “Here, this one’s for you.” She reached for my lapel and drew the long stem through the buttonhole, then snapped it off short. “Ow!” she complained, and put her thumb to her lips for a second.

  “See, that’s what you get!” I grinned.

  We started to dance, but before we were halfway around the room she was leaning against me in a funny sort of way all at once, as if she were tired out. I put my hand to her chin, tilted her head back, and looked into her face. Her eyes were just drooping closed. “Tired,” she murmured. “Dick, I – can hardly stand up any more –”

  Suddenly she crumpled and would have toppled over if my arm hadn’t been around her waist. I managed to half-carry and half-lead her over to the door, and no one noticed; it looked like one of those crazy new dance-steps. As soon as I got her outside I picked her up from the floor altogether and made for the nearest elevator with her. She weighed less than nothing, just somebody’s baby sister.

  “What do you feel, kid?” I breathed, “What hurts you? Old Man Dick’ll take care of you.”

  She opened her eyes just enough to show two slivers of white, like crescent moons. “Old Man Dick ’n’ Little Girl Jean,” she sighed. Then she sort of passed out altogether. The elevator-slide opened and I snapped, “Hurry up, take me up to wherever their suite is! And get hold of a doctor!”

  The Planters seemed to have taken a whole floor for the occasion. I stumbled through three rooms with her before I got to anything with a bed in it. Flowers everywhere; they were all going to be distributed to hospitals in the morning. A pert-looking number with a lace handkerchief cocked over one eye was sitting reading Ballyhoo, legs crossed way up to here.

  “C’mon, get your thrills later,” I ordered. “Help me with Miss Planter.”

  She squeaked like a mechanical mouse and got the expensive covers at half-mast.

  A distinguished-looking man with a silver goatee miraculously found his way in to where we were without a road-map; shoving a bridge-hand into his breast-pocket. He swept aside his dinner-tails and sat down beside her. “Turn the other way,” he said to me and began to undo the shoulder-straps of her dress. Something fell across one of my patent-leathers as he tossed it aside, a huge cabbagy red rose; I kicked it out of the way. “This child is dead,” he said, in the same tone of voice he would have said “Three spades.” The French maid squeaked again, then covered her mouth.

  I picked up the pale-green telephone and asked them to page Tommy Nye in the ballroom. I acted as hard as a callus on a mailman’s foot but I was crying away inside of me; too much Princeton won’t let you show what you feel. There was a long wait and the music from down-stairs came over the wire clear as a bell and out into the room, almost like a radio tuned very soft – that damned waltz of Coward’s, Nevermore. Her first party and her last, she’d never dance again. I made a face and muffled the thing against my shirt-front. “Tom,” I said when he got on, “better take Marcia and her mother back to their house, give them any excuse at all, only don’t let them come up here –”

  “What’s up?” he said worriedly.

  “The kid just died up here. Don’t let it get around, you can break it to them when you get them home. Get back as quick as you can, will you?” He hung up without a word, I couldn’t tell how he was taking it; but then how would anyone take a thing like that? I told the maid to take the Planters’ wraps down to them, and then go home with them; she was too frilly for a death-chamber.

  That society doctor, meanwhile, had gotten in my hair. He’d telephoned in his notification to the authorities all right, and exerted himself to the extent of tipping one of the pale-green sheets over the poor youngster’s mouth. But the next thing I knew he was back at the phone again, had some other suite on the wire, and was bidding in his hand in the game that was awaiting his return. I’d seen some cold-blooded things in my time but that topped them all; I suppose he thought I wasn’t listening. “– in that case my partner and I will double,” he was saying, “you can begin leading, I’ll be right down.”

  “Let me help you get there even quicker!” I blazed, and hurtled him through the three adjacent rooms with one hand at the back of his neck and the other at the opposite end of him. He stumbled when I let go of him, and by the time he had recovered and turned to puff himself up like a pouter pigeon, I had slammed the door in his face.

  I paced back and forth for half an hour amidst the chrysanthemums, gardenias and sweet peas while the medical examiner was busy in the inner room with her. A policeman with hay-fever was sneezing his life away at the outside door. And down below they were still dancing, I suppose, and drinking fizz all over the place. Tom showed up very pale around the gills. “God, what a ghastly experience! They both went all to pieces, had my hands full –” The inner door opened and the examiner came out and went by without a word – or would have but Tom got in front of him and blocked his way. “What’s t
he score?” he asked in a husky voice. Behind him the other two showed up who had come in with him; I hadn’t identified them yet, all this was new to me. But they weren’t leaving yet, far from it. I could tell by the way they strolled out and took in everything; they were there for the night – and maybe then some. The examiner tried to side-step Tom, but the latter wouldn’t let him, snagged him by the lapel. “I’m engaged to her sister – I have a right to know – the whole thing was too sudden – what’s it all about?”

  One of the two watching us spoke up, in a slow drawl dripping with some sort of hidden meaning. “Funny you should say that, about it was too sudden. You seem to be ahead of us. How come you know it wasn’t all jake, when we haven’t told you yet? You a mind-reader by any chance?” His eyes never left Tom’s face.

  “Anyone would say the same thing – she was only seventeen – to drop that suddenly –” Tom broke off. “Who are you, by the way?”

  “Homicide squad, by the way,” the drawl came back. He snapped off a bud from a sheaf of long-stemmed La Frances and drew it through his buttonhole. We both of us sort of tensed at that. That word, ominous-sounding. He nodded to the examiner. “Go ahead, tell him, if he wants to know so bad. Then maybe after that it’ll be our turn, he’ll tell us one or two little things.”

  “Tell, hell,” snapped the examiner, “I don’t get paid for overtime.”

  “Poetic, aren’t you,” I murmured. “You really should be rhyming couplets for tombstones.”

  “She was killed in a poetic way too,” he tossed back just before he closed the door after him, “like this was medieval Italy. Killed by a rose. A rose whose stem was sprayed with something deadly, a rose whose thorns were impregnated with it whatever it was. She pricked herself on it separating it from its mates. The ball of her thumb tells the story. We’re having an autopsy –”

  “That ain’t all we’re having, either,” observed the more truculent of the two detectives. He scanned the cardboard lid of a box he’d brought out with him, then asked for The Fernery, Incorporated, on the wire. “Every floral piece in these three rooms has a card stuck in it – except the bunch that red rose came from. We’re having a talk with the florist delivered ’em –” I gave Tom a look, but he was staring down at the floor, I couldn’t catch his eye. I hadn’t seen him select them, but the kid had claimed she’d found them, and Marcia had said something about his having forgotten to send a card with them; it sounded an awful lot like his. The horticulturist who’d grown them must have made some ghastly slip-up, sent them on to the florist without realizing that death lurked along their stems –

  But then why didn’t Tom speak up, I wondered, save them the trouble of checking with the florist? It would only look worse if they got the information that way. What did he have to hide? He had had nothing to do with it, an accident like that could have happened to anyone. But then maybe he didn’t realize even yet that they were the ones he’d sent.

  I cleared my throat, said “Sounds a lot like the ones –.” And then looked at him, to let him finish it himself.

  He wouldn’t meet my eyes, kept staring down at his feet.

  Meanwhile the detective had gotten through to The Fernery and it was too late to do it the easy way. “Evans, Homicide Squad,” he snapped. “You the manager? You deliver two dozen American Beauty roses to Miss Marcia Planter at the Park-Ashley Hotel this evening? That ain’t what I asked you, I didn’t ask if you delivered ’em personally or sent ’em by messenger! What I wanna know is, did they come from your shop? Well, who ordered ’em? . . . Didn’t write out any card, eh? Well, would you know him if you saw him again?” His eyes flicked over at Tom and back again, as he put the question.

  I shrugged violently at him, gestured with both hands, meaning in pantomime, “Why don’t you tell him, what are you standing there mum like that for?” He just looked at me and smiled a little, with the left half of his mouth.

  The dick, Evans, hung up. “Any objections to accompanying us – and the flowers – up to the shop for a couple of minutes, Mr Nye?” But it wasn’t exactly a question, it was an order.

  Tom saluted with one finger at his brow, turned toward the door without saying a word.

  “Me, either,” I said.

  “Who’s the echo?” the second detective wanted to know. “Ain’t it about time we were finding out?”

  “If you’d taken the trouble to ask, you’d have found out long ago,” I remarked uppishly. “The name is R. Walsh, Princeton ’32.”

  He didn’t pop any collar-buttons over it. “Well, meet B. Doyle, P. S. 62,” he said, without offering his hand.

  I thought I’d kid him a little. “Howju?” I said gravely, ducking my chin. “I’m this chap’s flat-mate and slated to be his best man. Anything else you’d like to know?”

  “Liking,” he said, “has nothing to do with it, Trained Tonsils. I’d like never even to have seen you yet, much less heard of you, but this is business. So pop open your trick hat and tail us.”

  “Tail you?” I said, “What am I, a collie?”

  “Oh,” he protested coyly, “now don’t pin me down that closely!” and went out after Tom and Evans. I caught up with them at the elevator, which I suppose is what he meant by tailing in the first place. The last thing I heard, at the far end of the corridor, was that poor policeman with hay-fever still sneezing his brains out back there.

  The four of us got in a taxi – technically Tom was accompanying them voluntarily, there was no question of an arrest – and went up there to where he’d bought the flowers, which Evans had brought along, box and all, under his arm.

  The proprietor was a silly-looking duck wearing a morning-coat. “Ah, yes,” he said, taking a peep under the lid, “these are from my shop. Is there something wrong?” And he washed his hands without soap or water.

  “That,” said Evans bluntly, “is none of your business. The main idea is, who bought ’em?”

  “Why, this gentleman did, of course.” He turned to Tom, and even asked for corroboration from that quarter. “Didn’t you, sir?”

  Tom said quietly, “I bought two dozen roses from you and told you to send them where these were sent, yes. But I hardly think these are the same ones you brought out of the case to show me – or else there’s something wrong with your stock. You see, they say one of them killed my fiancee’s young sister.” And he looked down at the floor again, like he seemed to be doing all evening.

  The florist went “Ip!” and jumped back about a foot from the box Evans had been holding under his nose.

  Doyle said, “Yeah, let’s see the rest of ’em he picked these out of.”

  Evans gave Tom a dirty look. “Why don’t you let us do the talking? We’ll tell him anything we think he needs to know.”

  He didn’t answer, so I chipped in: “What’s so secret about it? She did die, didn’t she, or are we having hallucinations?”

  Doyle, who seemed to have it in for me – inferiority-complex probably – growled softly out of the corner of his mouth: “One more twenty-five-cent word like that outa you, and I’ll send you home with a note to your mother.”

  The florist shoved back a glass slide all sweaty with steam and showed us triple tiers of long-stemmed roses. They had a blue light shining on them – why blue I don’t know, either to make them look pretty or ultraviolet rays to take the place of sunlight. “They came out of here,” he said nervously, “but I’m sure you won’t find anything the mat –”

  Doyle reached in, said: “Mind if we take a few samples for the research lab on Poplar Street? Nothing like making sure. And don’t sell any more of them till we get the results – that’s a police order!”

  The poor florist acted like he wanted to break down and cry. “They’ll be a total loss, you’re quarantining one of the most perishable items I carry in stock!”

  “Watch it,” Evans advised his pal, who was pawing at them clumsily, “don’t get a puncture like she did.”

  “In which case,” I murmured softly t
o no one in particular, “the poor rose’ll probably be the one to curl up and die!”

  Doyle blew up, violently and completely. I seemed to have that sort of effect on him. “This cake-eater,” he yelled at his partner, “is getting in my hair! He must think he’s out on a party! Do we have to have him along, what’s he doing here with us anyway?”

  “Slumming,” I said nastily.

  Evans didn’t seem interested in this side-feud. “How is it,” he drawled indifferently, “you didn’t put a card with them when you bought them, Mr Nye?” But he was looking straight at the florist and not Tom as he asked it.

  “I didn’t have one with me, and I was in a hurry to get down there, we were late as it was. It was my engagement party, after all.”

  The jittery shop-owner, whom Evans was watching, didn’t seem to have any control over his eye-, eyebrow-, or lip-muscles; they all moved simultaneously. Evans didn’t wait for the signs to become audible. “Meaning he did write out a card – or what? You told me over the phone he didn’t!”

  “N-no, he didn’t.” He stumbled over it, and yet he seemed to mean it. “Did you, sir?”

  “You’re talking to us, not him!” Doyle jumped down his throat.

  Tom was standing over by some kind of a potted plant, idly poking his index-finger into the soft mould around the bottom. I could see him getting sorer by the minute, a pulse in his jaw started bobbing up and down. He looked hard at the florist, then at them. “I didn’t,” he said irritably, coming back again to where the rest of us were. “What’s all this business about a card, anyway? I bought two dozen roses in this shop – without even putting my hands on them, just pointed at the ones I wanted! I didn’t take them down there with me, didn’t even lay eyes on them again, until you two men brought them back here with you just now! Am I supposed to have doctored them up or something? With what object? To – to endanger the girl that’s going to be my wife?” His voice was shaking uncontrollably, which showed me – if not them – how deeply affected he was by the tragedy.

  Loyal-friend-like, I gave them a dirty look, most of it for Doyle. “They’ve got to make a mystery out of it, that’s what detectives are for,” I said scathingly. “You and I, Tom, we’re just laymen. It’d be obvious to us, or to anybody else for that matter, what must have happened. Some sort of spray or insecticide was used on them and wasn’t properly removed afterward. That’s all there is to it, just a frightful accident. But of course that isn’t enough for our fine feathered friends here, they’ve got to go around wanting to know why you didn’t send a copy of your birth-certificate down there with them!”