Set For Murder (Showbiz Is Murder Book 1)

by Jolie Beaumont

  There was no answer.

  She looked at the clock on the nightstand. It was only five o’clock. Peter must have gone to the drawing room for afternoon tea.

  She thought she might also go to the drawing room and have her tea. She could go wherever she liked now, without having to worry about seeing her. Honey Lynde—Lady Margaret never referred to her stepmother as the Duchess of Tarrington—was dead.

  She tried to sit up. She felt very dizzy. After a few moments—and after a glass of water—the dizziness passed. What she really needed, though, was a strong cup of tea. She staggered over to the wardrobe and pulled out a dress. She had a vague recollection that she had worn it the day before, but what did she care about silly conventions? What she wanted was her tea.

  Inspector Travers reached the ship’s cinema just as the matinee was getting out. He was scanning the faces when he heard a small commotion going on behind his back. He turned and saw several people, including a few stewards, standing around the body of woman stretched out on the floor. For a moment his mouth went dry and his heart contracted. Then, to his great relief, he saw the woman raise her hand to her head. She was alive.

  As one of the stewards helped the woman to her feet, Travers saw it was Lady Margaret who had fainted. He could see she was getting adequate help and so he returned his gaze to the last of the people straggling out of the cinema.

  “I want to talk to you,” he said, taking Bert Ayres by the arm.

  “Hey, what do you think you’re doing?” Bert tried to shake himself free from the inspector’s grip.

  “Your wife is dead, and Mabel Watson is dead,” Travers replied. “We’re going to have another little talk.”

  On the way back to his office, Travers had collected Jeffrey Baird. Ayres had made a small fuss when he saw the two Garnetts, telling them to contact the American Embassy in London, protesting that this was no way to treat an American citizen. But by the time they reached the room, Bert Ayres had lost most of his fight. He sank down into the chair he had been directed to and stared down at his hands, as though he didn’t recognize the objects resting in his lap.

  “I didn’t kill her. I didn’t kill anybody,” he said.

  “Let’s take this one step at a time,” said Travers. “Was Honey Lynde your wife?”

  “No!”

  “This wire says the two of you were married in New York City on March 23, 1920. It was a Tuesday, if that will refresh your memory. ”

  Travers showed Bert Ayres the wire he had received that day. He was glad that one of his colleagues in the New York City police force had woken up and recalled the dancing duo and dug deeper into their past than whoever had done the initial inquiry.

  Bert slowly read the wire. When he had finished, he crumpled it in his hand and tossed it onto the desk. “All right, so we were married. That’s not a crime, as far as I know.”

  “Why didn’t you say before that you were married to her?”

  “What for? I told you, she walked out on me.”

  “Without bothering to get a divorce?”

  Bert’s jaw dropped open.

  “Was it because she didn’t want one, or because you refused to give her one?”

  Bert continued to stare at the inspector.

  “What was the game, Ayres? Blackmail?”

  “You can’t prove that!”

  “How did you pay for this boat ride?”

  “I told you. I work for—“

  “That job lasted for a few months and ended last year. It will be better for you if you admit to the blackmail. Blackmailers usually don’t murder their victim.”

  Bert laughed. “Victim! If anyone was the victim, it was me. Honey always landed on her feet.”

  “What was the plan, Mr. Ayres? What are you doing on this ship?”

  “We were partners. I gave Honey her start in show business. I created the act. I paid for the costumes and the train tickets and the hotel rooms. If it hadn’t been for me, Honey Lynde would have still been a twelve-dollar-a-week typist working in a dingy office in Indianapolis. So why shouldn’t I have gotten a cut from her earnings, after she left the act? I invested in her when she was nobody. I deserved something.”

  “Well, that’s an original way of looking at it,” said Travers. “So what happened? Did she try to cut off the payments? Is that why you booked passage on this ship? So you could threaten to reveal her secret to the Duke of Tarrington, if she didn’t continue to pay?”

  “You’ve got it all mixed up, Inspector. That morning in her cabin, I told Honey I was willing to give her a divorce. There’s a little woman back in Indianapolis I want to marry, and I want to make it legitimate. This was the only way I could get to Honey and talk to her, after she became a duchess and surrounded herself with all those high-class people.”

  “Wouldn’t it have been cheaper to send her a letter?”

  “And say in writing that she was a bigamist, when anyone might pick up the letter and read it?”

  “So you’re a little angel? After eight, ten years of blackmailing—excuse me, getting a return on your investment—you were going to give her a divorce and ask for nothing in return?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Baloney, as I believe they say in your country. Why did you steal the pearls?”

  “I didn’t take them! They were already missing. Honey opened the safe and pulled out an empty pouch and said they were gone.”

  “Why did she open the safe?”

  “She wanted to give my fiancée a little wedding present.”

  “The pearls?”

  “I’m not a greedy man, Inspector. I told Honey it wasn’t necessary. But if she wanted to do something, that expensive perfume would do just fine. That’s why my fingerprints were on the bottle, see? Honey was always generous, though—extravagant, you could say. She insisted on giving me a bracelet or a necklace for my new bride. Then she discovered the pearls were missing and, naturally, she was upset. So I left.”

  “When you went back to get your wedding present—”

  “I didn’t go back to Honey’s cabin, Inspector. I never saw her again. And that’s the truth.”

  Part of what separated a good detective from a mediocre one was knowing when a suspect was lying and when he was telling the truth. Travers knew that the rosy picture Bert Ayres had tried to paint of his blackmailing scheme was false, and yet almost by accident Ayres had proved his innocence of the more serious crime. If Honey Lynde had discovered the loss of her pearls during her conversation with her real husband, it made sense that she would call Roberto, a trusted friend, soon after Bert Ayres left her cabin. It also made sense for Ayres to keep his distance for a day or two, until the trouble about the pearls blew over. He wouldn’t want to be seen hanging around the duchess’s cabin while the police were searching for the missing pearls. Still, Travers had to be sure that Bert had acted logically. And even if he did, murderers sometimes acted with logic too.

  “Where did you go last night, after dinner, Mr. Ayres?”

  “I went to the ballroom to see Penny and Nick Garnett perform their act.”

  “There was a thirty-minute interval before the performance began.”

  “I was in the bar, having a drink.”

  “Anyone see you there?”

  “The bartender did, unless he’s legally blind.”

  “Anyone see you in the ballroom?”

  “No, but I saw Baird.” He nodded his head in Jeffrey Baird’s direction. “I was sitting behind him. There was some woman sitting next to him making sucking noises with her candy all through the performance. She was driving me nuts. I would have changed seats, but I was sitting in the middle of the row.” He looked again at Baird. “You remember her, don’t you? I remember you shooting her some dirty looks too.”

  “Oh, yes, I remember her,” Jeffrey Baird said, grinning in the direction of Travers, who was rolling his eyes. Not only had Bert Ayres confirmed that both he and Baird were in the ballroom, he had confirmed that
any attempt to leave while the performance was in progress would have caused a small but noticeable disturbance. In addition, a person who had planned beforehand to leave in the middle of the performance would have chosen a seat on the aisle, not one in the middle of the row.

  But there was still the suspicious death of Mabel Watson to account for, and so the inspector continued with his questions. “Was Miss Watson the little woman you planned to marry?”

  Bert looked surprised. “I only met her on this ship.”

  “Yet you became close friends very quickly.”

  “I wouldn’t say that, Inspector. We just took a walk together, to pass the time. It didn’t mean anything.”

  “She didn’t talk to you about her troubles?”

  “What troubles?”

  “These are hard times, Mr. Ayres. It would be natural for a woman working as a companion to have some worries.”

  “If she did, Mabel didn’t mention them to me. She said her luck had finally changed and she was about to cash in on something big.”

  “Something big?”

  “Those were her words, poor kid.” Bert looked wistful. “I wish I knew what it was.”

  CHAPTER 16

  INSPECTOR TRAVERS RETRIEVED the crumpled wire and, after smoothing out the creases, placed it in his notebook. Bert Ayres was gone, and Jeffrey Baird was looking at him with a smug look that underlings sometimes put on when they thought they could handle a case better than their superiors. Travers didn’t care. At that moment he would have gladly exchanged this high-society affair for an old-fashioned, no-surprises bank heist—and he didn’t care who knew it.

  “You know what the trouble is, don’t you?” he said.

  “Bert Ayres refuses to play the role he’s been cast in?” Jeffrey Baird replied.

  “Even more elementary,” said Travers. “We have two dead bodies. One of them, Mabel Watson, apparently had every reason to want to be alive, and yet she supposedly committed suicide. The Duchess of Tarrington had several reasons to take her own life—fear her marriage to Bert Ayres would be discovered and blackmailing debts to pay off, to name just two—and yet she’s the one who gets murdered. Women! If it had been two men, there wouldn’t be this confused mess.”

  Travers was saved from bemoaning his fate any longer by the entrance of Dr. Wallace, who was looking uncommonly jovial for someone who had recently performed two autopsies.

  “I may have solved one piece of the puzzle for you, Inspector,” he said, sitting down in the chair that Bert Ayres had recently vacated. “Mabel Watson died from an overdose of potassium chloride.”

  “That’s a new one for me.”

  “It’s not very common, but if you’re a ship’s physician long enough you eventually run across just about every type of ailment.”

  “Is it legal?

  “Perfectly. It’s used to treat people with very low levels of potassium in their body, which can happen after a very serious bout of gastroenteritis, commonly known as the stomach flu, or some of those tropical ailments that cause distress to the intestines. It would be useful to know if Miss Watson was ill before she came on board the ship, which would explain her having the drug.”

  “Is it something a person would carry with them, just in case they became ill in the future?” asked Travers.

  “They might. Especially when traveling to a foreign country, people will sometimes stock up, bother their physician for all sorts of pills and powders. I personally wouldn’t prescribe potassium chloride, unless I knew the person would be under my supervision while they were taking it. An overdose is often lethal. It causes cardiac arrest. That’s what aroused my suspicions. Miss Watson seemed to be a healthy young woman. I could find no medical reason for her heart to fail so suddenly on its own.”

  “Is it possible Miss Watson thought she was taking a sleeping draught and put a large dose of potassium chloride in her glass of water by mistake?”

  “It’s possible in theory, but in this case I would say no. The body of an otherwise healthy person will reject excessive amounts of the stuff, in its powder form, albeit with some discomfort. Only an overdose of the drug in its liquid form will cause instant death, in the majority of cases. Besides, there weren’t any traces of the stuff in the glass. Therefore, it must have been an injection.”

  “Did you find a mark left by the needle?”

  “Yes. Once you know to look for something, you usually find it. I did another check of the duchess and found a similar mark on her as well. She was probably given the stuff too, which would explain why there were no signs of struggle when she was stabbed by the knife. Even if she didn’t die instantly, the limbs often feel paralyzed when there is an overdose. She wouldn’t have been able to fight back.”

  “Let’s keep this among ourselves, for the time being,” said Travers. “All we know at the present time is that Mabel Watson died from cardiac arrest under suspicious circumstances.”

  “It’s your show, for now. But when we get to port I’ll need to make a full report.”

  “When we get to port I hope to have the murderer in tow.”

  After the physician left, Jeffrey Baird commented, “It’s not the easiest thing in the world to give someone an injection, if you’re not a doctor, that is.”

  “Yes, and there is the danger you’ll stick yourself instead. So it suggests that our needle-wielding friend knew both women rather intimately.”

  “Nasty bit of goods, if that was the case.”

  During dinner that evening, Jeffrey Baird was at his usual place at table and so was Inspector Travers. The atmosphere in the dining room had recovered from the heavy gloom that had followed the announcement of the duchess’s death, and the waiters were serving the courses and clearing away dishes with their customary smooth efficiency. While he was in no way a socialist, Travers did observe with a touch of cynicism that a paid companion didn’t rate the same sort of solemn respect or even polite notice as a member of the titled class. Or perhaps there was more truth to the Oscar Wilde witticism than Travers had credited the playwright for. “To lose one parent may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose both looks like carelessness,” Lady Bracknell had said in The Importance of Being Earnest. Was it the same here? One murder was a tragedy, but if there was going to be a slew of them one might as well have dinner and a bit of bridge after. Or romance, the inspector realized, once he returned his attention to the conversation of his dinner companions.

  “You have an admirer, Countess,” Roberto was saying.

  “Do I?”

  Countess Scharwenka pretended not to care. But now that he looked more closely, Travers realized she had paid more attention than usual to her toilette—and she was a woman who always paid attention to her dress and makeup. Her dress was a black velvet creation that shimmered with the light of black sequins when she moved and they caught the light. The neckline wasn’t daring, but it was alluring. Only a woman who was sure of her charms would dare to dress so simply, inviting admirers to concentrate their attention on her flawless features and complexion, which could still glow, at least in the right lighting.

  “Yes, the charming Englishman was looking our way—and I do not flatter myself to think it is I who has attracted his attention,” Roberto continued. “It is too bad he is only the heir to the title and not the Duke of Tarrington, eh, chérie?”

  “Sometimes you talk too much, Roberto.”

  “So people say. Ah, there is Mrs. Pinkerton. I will give her my greetings. Her new husband is a very rich industrialist. Do not wait for me to order dessert.”

  “More wine?” asked Travers, after Roberto had left them.

  The countess shook her head.

  “Cecil Arden doesn’t seem like your type.”

  “And what is my type, Inspector?”

  “A somewhat elderly man with a title, a fortune and a dubious past.”

  The countess laughed. “One must be more flexible as one grows older. Besides, I have become literary myself lately.”
/>   “Really. Writing your memoirs?”

  “Not exactly. I’m surprised you haven’t questioned me about why I am on this ship.”

  “I was going to get to that. Are you sure you wouldn’t like more wine?”

  “I have no secrets, so you don’t need to make me drunk to make me talk.”

  Travers poured another glass for himself. “Well? What are you doing here?”

  “I was invited out to Hollywood, to be a consultant on a motion picture.”

  “A consultant? That sounds important. I hope it paid well.”

  “It did. A studio was doing a movie about a female jewel thief. The star insisted they bring me in to show her how it’s done.”

  “Was she any good?”

  “She had talent. But it’s not only a question of having a charming smile and agile fingers, as you know. You must also know how to dispose of the jewels—without the assistance of a screenwriter—and that takes brains.”

  “You had no wish to stay there?”

  “At first, I thought I might. But everyone is very young in Hollywood, very young and very beautiful. I didn’t like being mistaken for some child star’s mother. So I took my money and now I’m on my way back to Europe.”

  “And you expect me to believe that your being on the same boat as the Tarrington pearls is pure coincidence?”

  The countess gave him one of her charming smiles. “The market for pearls is not what it once was, Inspector. Motion picture stars are photographed wearing diamonds, and today it is the Garbos and Dietrichs who set the fashions—not your English duchesses.”

  “I must do a better job of keeping up with the times.”

  “It is very kind of you not to suspect me of murdering the duchess.”

  “How do you know I don’t?”

  “You haven’t questioned me, like you have questioned the others.”

  “I was just waiting for the right opportunity. Where were you last night between the hours of nine-thirty and eleven?”

  “After I left the dining room, let me see … Roberto and I went to the bar for a liqueur.”

  “Did you recognize anyone else who was there?”