Murder to Go

by Emma Lathen

  “I vote for Willoughby,” Thatcher had said unhesitatingly.

  The Akerses had made it clear their hospitality was informal. They were now all crowded into the back room. The ladies had been provided with chairs. The men were perched on counters while Vern and Dodie bustled to and from the kitchen. There was no question of entertaining guests there. The kitchen hummed with activity; oven doors were slamming, phones were jangling and the whole effort was being directed by Sue Akers and her invaluable Bob.

  “Our orders are just coming out,” Dodie declared from the doorway. “Sue had to squeeze them in.”

  As she hurried back to the kitchen, Frank Hedstrom capitalized on the lull before the storm.

  “But why did Ogilvie want to ruin Chicken Tonight?” he asked.

  “Oh, he didn’t care about ruining Chicken Tonight. He was simply determined to stop the merger,” Thatcher said.

  Ted Young was shocked. “And for that he poisoned over a hundred people and killed a man?”

  “He killed two men. You’re forgetting that poor old guy in Elmira,” corrected Hedstrom, who had a soft spot for patrons of Chicken Tonight.

  “I always said Ogilvie was crazy.” Tom Robichaux wagged his head sadly. So this was what clients of Robichaux & Devane were coming to.

  “I doubt if he intended to kill anybody,” said Thatcher before Robichaux could get them all pounding after some false hare. “He probably made a mistake in dosage on the Elmira box. And I’m certain he didn’t expect to kill Sweeney. He was convinced he would never have to see Sweeney again.”

  “Hey!” Vern Akers protested, arriving with the food. “I want to hear about Clyde. Don’t explain yet.”

  Obediently Thatcher waited, surprised to find how hungry he was. He eyed Dodie’s tray with interest when she rejoined them. It held onion rings, french-fried potatoes, cole slaw, rolls and relishes. Tantalizing smells eddied around the table. Thatcher’s salivary glands answered the call of duty. Meanwhile Vern was isolating subgroups.

  “Chicken Mandarin for the Youngs,” he murmured, “chicken Creole for the Akerses, chicken Tarragon for everybody else.”

  Dodie started to serve out heaping plates. Thatcher had wondered at first how the Akerses would react to their reunion with Iris Young. But the problem had never materialized. The smartly styled Iris who had tried to spearhead a dump-Frank movement was not in evidence tonight. This was largely thanks to the weather and the style of transport acquired by Hedstrom.

  The party had split up in Trenton. Robichaux and Thatcher had driven to Willoughby with the Akerses while the others waited for a vehicle from the warehouse. In the interim the women, mindful of cold ears and wet hair, acquired wool caps. They had already been wearing fashionably high boots. The long stocking caps, red for Iris and blue for Joan, made them look ready for an ice-skating party. On top of that, the Trenton warehouse had come through with the familiar orange-and-gold-striped truck. It was this vehicle which had pulled up in the Akerses’ back yard, horn tooting loudly. Ted Young had been at the wheel; the other three were sitting in the rear, feet propped on a crate of beer acquired, and opened, en route. They were all singing with tuneless gusto:

  Give a cheer! Give a cheer!

  For the boys who drink the beer,

  In the cellars of old Oak Park High!

  As a quartet, they seemed a good deal younger than Sue Akers and Bob, more like the tag end of a high-school cheering section than anything else. And Dodie treated them accordingly.

  “All right, Mr. Thatcher,” said Vern Akers at last. “Now tell us about Clyde. I didn’t follow what that man said about Bly Associates. I thought he was just talking about some merger.”

  “That’s how it started. Morgan Ogilvie hired Bly Associates in good faith to investigate Chicken Tonight. He asked for a very thorough study.”

  “I knew he was doing it,” Hedstrom said quietly. “And I circulated the word to cooperate. I never realized how far he’d go.”

  “Of course not. Because when the reports started coming in, Ogilvie realized that the merger offer was too good for him to stop by ordinary means. He decided to stop it by starting a poisoning scare and causing the stock of Chicken Tonight to nose-dive. That may sound easy, but it meant he had to find a very special kind of man at Chicken Tonight, a man like Clyde Sweeney. And that isn’t easy to do, not without leaving a trail. It bothered me, and I know it bothered the police. That’s why they found it difficult to believe an outsider had been behind the scheme. What we didn’t realize was that Morgan Ogilvie very cleverly used Bly Associates as camouflage. He demanded the names of personnel who had left the company or were thinking of leaving. Then he wanted lists of employees terminated because of cost-cutting programs, supposedly to judge if the programs were efficient. So you see it’s not surprising that no one remembered furnishing him with particulars about Clyde Sweeney. The girls in the personnel office, acting under instructions, pulled literally hundreds of records for Bly Associates, as part of a routine business transaction.”

  “The smart bastard,” said Ted Young, almost admiringly. “He didn’t try to wipe out his tracks. He just buried them under a snowdrift.”

  “Exactly. It seems to have been a natural instinct with him, as you’ll see,” Thatcher promised.

  Vern brought them back to essentials. “All right. But what about Clyde?”

  “You already know how he was hired. It was exactly as Captain Johnson postulated. Ogilvie telephoned and arranged one meeting. Naturally he didn’t give his real name. That was supposed to be his only personal contact with Sweeney. Then it didn’t make any difference to him whether Sweeney was arrested or not.”

  “But they must have met down in Maryland,” Iris Young objected. “What happened? Did something go wrong?”

  “A great deal went wrong, from Ogilvie’s point of view.” Thatcher smiled at the Youngs and the Hedstroms. Ted Young, he noticed, was getting through a remarkable amount of beer. “And he immediately involved you in his troubles. Try to think back to the Thursday before the murder. Sweeney was in hiding at a hotel in New York. He was frightened, he had no plans and he had no one to turn to. Then he opens his morning paper, checks the progress of the police search for him, turns to the sports page and what does he see?”

  Thatcher’s attempt at drama was promptly torpedoed. Tom Robichaux had not been listening to a word.

  “This isn’t so bad,” he said into the silence, having cautiously essayed his chicken Tarragon. Surprise yielded to judicious savoring. In spite of themselves, the Akerses, the Hedstroms and the Youngs were professionally riveted, until finally the gourmet said, “Not bad at all!”

  Vern Akers was the first to recover. “What did Clyde see on the sports page?” he almost howled.

  “He saw a picture of the horse which had won the Garden State Futurity. Next to the horse was the owner, described as ‘Morgan Ogilvie, owner of the Ogilvie Stable in Paton, Maryland.’”

  “Good heavens!” exclaimed Joan Hedstrom. “That was the horse Mrs. Browne kept talking about.”

  Thatcher refreshed himself from his can of beer and continued explaining to the Akerses. “You see, against all odds, a horse owned by Morgan Ogilvie had won a race that week. The picture was picked up by a good many papers and carried on the one page Sweeney never missed. As soon as Clyde Sweeney saw that picture, he packed his bags and started south. By Thursday evening he had checked into his motel and was calling Ogilvie to announce his arrival.”

  “The phone never stopped ringing all day,” Iris Young suddenly echoed in genteel tones. She blinked when everyone stared at her. “I’m sorry. I was remembering what Mrs. Ogilvie said.”

  “It must have been a real boot in the belly for Ogilvie,” said Frank Hedstrom with every sign of approval.

  “I’m sure it was. And I’m sure at first he panicked, agreed to everything that Sweeney demanded and arranged to meet him at the parking lot of the Calvert Hunt Club on Saturday night. He may have been instinctively
stalling for time. But you have to admit that he recovered magnificently.”

  Dodie Akers was indignant. “You mean murdering poor Clyde!”

  “Certainly not!” Thatcher was outraged himself. “I mean that, having made up his mind to kill Sweeney, he decided to flood the Calvert Hunt Club with murder suspects! His old snowdrift principle, you see.”

  The trouble with Tom Robichaux was that his deafness was highly selective. Now he rounded on Thatcher in righteous wrath.

  “Do you mean to tell me that he got us down there to—?” He became speechless at the enormity of the suggestion.

  Thatcher smiled beatifically at his old friend. “That’s right, Tom. We were gulled from the start. Morgan Ogilvie had been behaving fairly reasonably about the merger until that Friday, if you remember.”

  Hedstrom remembered, if Robichaux did not. “That’s right. He said he was sorry about our troubles and hoped things would work out. But that was all politeness. He was preparing to cut the rope.”

  “Then suddenly we had to rush down and save the merger,” Ted Young contributed briefly. He did not have much attention to waste on speech. He was emerging as one of those small, spare men who eat like horses. He was surrounded by debris. On one side there was a plate with the carcasses of several chickens, on the other a neat pyramid of empty beer cans. “I said it was crazy.”

  “I said the same thing myself,” Robichaux began expansively.

  “We all said it.” Thatcher was dampening. “Instead, we should have wondered why he suddenly cast himself in the role of lunatic. The reason was plain enough. He wanted as many people connected with Chicken Tonight as possible on the scene of his murder. That is also why he insisted we dance. He knew that with an uneven number of men and women, there would always be some men wandering about without an alibi.”

  “I did wonder about that. But then,” said Hedstrom simply, “I thought maybe that was how they did things at these hunt clubs.”

  “Not with that ill-assorted a party. And when Ogilvie had us all where he wanted us, he went out to the parking lot, met Sweeney, mugged him and strangled him.”

  Hedstrom’s voice grated. “With Joanie’s scarf.”

  “He must have taken it when he came over to pick you up for your business conference,” Joan said calmly. “There were all those open suitcases in the hall.”

  “Yes. I’m afraid he believed in improving on the occasion,” Thatcher answered. “He was desperately anxious to tie the murder in with your house. Because he was enormously vulnerable if the police ever started to look at him. In fact, from what Mr. Denton tells me, his machinations didn’t succeed very well. Captain Stotz started narrowing down to Morgan Ogilvie almost immediately.”

  “You’re joking!” Frank Hedstrom was incredulous. “What about the grilling they gave us?”

  “That was at the beginning, before they located the motel owner. Stotz is not a man who can’t see the forest for the trees. He is not afraid to ignore the trees. As soon as he knew that Sweeney had been making local calls in Maryland on Thursday night, apparently arranging appointments for Saturday night, he became very suspicious of Ogilvie’s invitations—on Friday. Then, he appreciated that Ogilvie, in addition to stage-managing that weekend, was the one with local knowledge. You didn’t even know where the hunt club was. And it was extremely unlikely that any of you knew there would be a horse show to add to the confusion.”

  Iris’ eyes darkened dangerously. “Do you mean that Frank and Ted have been in the clear for days and nobody has had the decency to tell us?”

  “You’ll have to ask the police about that. But I do know that Stotz had very few doubts. Not since he learned that Ogilvie knew Sweeney’s bribe was four thousand dollars long before he should have.”

  “Ogilvie did say something about that,” Hedstrom murmured. “But for the life of me, I can’t remember when.”

  Thatcher was relieved to see that Hedstrom was not the perfect machine. “Apparently Ogilvie was incautious enough to repeat that remark to Stotz. They had just searched Sweeney’s room, and at that time only the police should have known the total amount.”

  “It sounds pretty watertight. But about that local knowledge. I know it may sound nuts”—Hedstrom grinned apologetically—“but did anybody ever consider Pelham Browne? After all, he had local knowledge, too. He’d know about the horse show and that sort of thing.”

  “Browne certainly acted oddly enough, but Stotz refuses to believe in miraculously good luck. Assume Browne set up an appointment with Sweeney on Thursday night, long before Ogilvie broached weekend plans to anybody. He would have to be the luckiest murderer in the world to have a crowd of suspects descend on the scene at the critical moment without any contrivance on his part.”

  Hedstrom continued to argue thoughtfully. “But he could have heard that we were planning to open the house. We’d ordered the utilities turned on, and that sort of thing gets around.”

  “No.” Thatcher shook his head. “What good would it do him to have the four of you playing bridge, under the eye of a maid, twenty miles from the scene of the murder? And you could easily have been doing that. Besides, there were other points against Browne as a candidate. He had no access to the scarf. He had no access to Sweeney. And, finally, his motive doesn’t hold water. That is where I feel you and I fell down. We should have been able to distinguish the motive.”

  Before Hedstrom could speak, Vern Akers leaped at the chance for enlightenment. “Yes, what was so special about this Ogilvie’s motive? You said he wanted to stop the merger with his insurance company. Why didn’t he just say no?”

  “Oh, Vern! You know it’s going to turn out to be the kind of thing they do in big business.” Dodie didn’t believe rational explanations applied.

  “Not often, Mrs. Akers,” Thatcher replied gravely. “You see, it wasn’t Ogilvie’s insurance company. He just worked for it. But it had once been a family company. I am afraid Morgan Ogilvie came to look on Southeastern Insurance as a cow designed for milking by the Ogilvie family. His uncle and he both drew handsome salaries. His nephew was an executive in the company. And—”

  Robichaux interrupted. “He said his son was going into it, too. Makes your blood run cold, doesn’t it?”

  “There you are,” said Thatcher. “Everything in that family was planned around the company. But if the company was merged, those plans would all come to nothing. There wouldn’t be any more handsome incomes. And there certainly wouldn’t be the civic position that Ogilvie held in Philadelphia as a leading businessman. To add insult to injury, Morgan Ogilvie no longer held any substantial amount of stock. So he wouldn’t reap any of the profit coming to the stockholders.”

  “Jesus!” Hedstrom exclaimed. “Do you think he had the gall to sell out and invest in a stock that paid better?”

  “I wouldn’t put it past him. But to return to Mr. Akers’ question. Morgan Ogilvie couldn’t say no. He didn’t have the power to. All he could do was object as long as possible, and then give in gracefully when the other directors made up their minds. But he was determined to stop the take-over just the same. His difficulty was that the directors thought the offer too good to turn down. He decided to do something that would make the offer much less attractive.”

  Vern nodded. “Now I understand.”

  Dodie looked skeptical, but Thatcher plowed on.

  “When I said Ogilvie’s motive was distinguishable, I meant it had a time dimension. We all know that a merger offer is never valid for long. Conditions change too rapidly. Either the offer is taken at flood tide or it disappears. That’s why Ogilvie arranged the poisoning in the manner he did. He wanted one short, very sharp blow. He wanted a public scandal and a fall in the value of Chicken Tonight. If he had wanted a different effect, he could have instructed Sweeney to distribute his poison, or even a noxious taste additive, in the boxes in the warehouse. That way he would have achieved a much less intensive but more protracted result. Now, if Pelham Browne had a motive, it
was to distract you from going into the broiler business. He would have wanted to tie you up with problems. He wouldn’t have wanted to destroy his customer.”

  Hedstrom had caught the hint of reserve in Thatcher’s voice. He was half smiling as he challenged, “And?”

  Thatcher met the challenge. “And if anyone inside the company had wanted to dispossess you—like Mr. or Mrs. Young—” Thatcher very carefully did not look at Iris, “then they would have even more reason to space out their program. The whole point of such an operation would have been to preserve the company while undermining you. There wouldn’t be any point to killing the goose that lays the golden eggs.”

  Ted Young had long since leaned back against the wall and closed his eyes. Now he half opened them.

  “The golden chicken,” he chuckled sleepily.

  Thatcher risked a glance at Iris. She was deep in thought, heedless of his accusations. If his ears did not deceive him, she was crooning over and over again, “Sam Levin . . . Sam Levin . . . Sam Levin . . .”

  Hedstrom had risen to his feet and was giving a mighty stretch. “I guess that about ties it up. You’re right, we got misled by the trees. Ever since we heard the description of the man who met Sweeney—you know, the sport shirt and slacks—I’ve been thinking about Browne. It’s just the sort of outfit he’d wear to a downtown hotel.”

  Thatcher began to help him collect dirty plates. As he added Robichaux’s to the pile, he noted that Tom had somehow equipped himself with a copy of the gold-and-orange menu. He was deep in conversation with Dodie Akers.

  “I think we can take it that the sport shirt and slacks represented an attempt at disguise by Ogilvie. He was trying to look different than he usually did, so that he would be safe from casual recognition by Sweeney. From what you tell me of Browne’s habits, he would have to go into charcoal gray to achieve the same effect.”