by Craig Rice
“But why?” said Jake blankly. “What was the idea? Why go around advertising the time of the murder like that? Unless there was some reason for wanting the world to know that the old woman died at exactly three.”
“There is a reason,” Malone told him, “only we don’t know what it is. It all fits into some kind of pattern, only we can’t see what the pattern is yet. What’s the matter, Helene?”
“Wait. I’m thinking of something.” She was examining the enameled clock. “Listen. There can’t be any doubt. These clocks were all stopped by some human hand—someone who went all through the house deliberately stopping every clock, from the French clock in Aunt Alex’s room to the electric clock here, not even missing the alarm clock in the Parkins’ room. That’s true, isn’t it, Malone? There can’t be any doubt?”
“Not a doubt in the world,” Malone said.
“You two big lugs. You’re missing the most important thing these clocks have to tell you. They’re trying their damnedest to tell you what it is and here you sit like a pair of dopes.”
“What in hell are you talking about?” Jake growled.
“Listen. Suppose you started, exactly at three o’clock, at the top of this house and went straight through it, stopping to put every clock you found out of commission—what time would it be when you got to the last clock?”
“My God,” said Jake after a long silence.
“The first clock,” said Malone, slowly and meditatively, “would have been three, exactly. The next, a couple of minutes past three, and the next perhaps five minutes past three, and so on, unless—”
“Unless,” Helene finished for him, “you turned the hands of each clock back to three when you stopped it, which is obviously what this mysterious bird did do. And that bit of information points to something else, which you two guys may be able to see for yourselves.”
“You’re damned right we see it,” said Malone bitterly. “And it knocks everything sky-high. So far everybody has been going on the theory that Alexandria Inglehart died at three o’clock, and every clock in the house promptly stopped. Now we know a hell of a lot less than we did when we got here.”
“The clocks could have been stopped at any time,” Jake said, “at three o’clock or at two o’clock or—well, any damn time. At the time of the murder or before it or after it.”
Helene sighed. “We all simply leaped to the conclusion that Aunt Alex met her Maker on the dot of three. It’s even possible that she did.”
“There’s just one thing we do know about the time of her death,” Malone said grimly. “It comes somewhere in the time between the hour when Glen and Parkins left the house—when the old woman was still alive—and the hour when Glen and the Parkinses came back.”
“Between the hour when Glen and Parkins left the house,” Jake said, “and the time when Holly walked into her aunt’s room and found the body.”
“All right,” Malone said, “we’ll go on that theory. But we don’t know what time it was when Holly went into the room.”
“Except that it was sometime after three,” Jake began, and stopped. “No, we don’t know that either.”
“No. Because the clock-stopping might have been done at any time, as far as we know.” Malone groaned heavily. He searched through his pockets, finally located a half-eaten pencil and an old envelope.
“Let’s try to get some sense out of this. Glen and Parkins left the house a little after eleven. Call it eleven-fifteen. They came back a little before four. Let’s call it quarter to four. All right. That leaves us four hours and a half. The old lady was dead when they got back. So obviously the murder—and all this damned monkey-doodling with the clocks—took place between eleven-fifteen and a quarter to four. There, by God, we know something definite.”
“Who has what alibis for that four and a half hours?” Helene asked.
“Well, let’s see. Start with Holly,” Jake said.
“Holly—question mark,” Malone said. “Dick Dayton?”
“In view of two or three hundred people at the Casino,” Jake said. “I was there until about three-thirty. And I couldn’t have gotten here before four if I’d used a rocket ship. You’ll have to check us both off the list.”
“Too bad,” Malone muttered. “I’ve been hoping for years to pin something on you. All right—Glen and the Parkinses. They were driving to Chicago and back. There’s no doubt about that. Even if the three of them were in cahoots and were all lying, their story was checked with an attendant at St. Luke’s Hospital.”
“And that leaves—?” Jake asked.
“Helene. Helene, where were you at three o’clock?”
Helene started. “As a matter of honest-to-God fact, I have no alibi in the world. I was out driving.”
“You could have done it,” Malone said. “You could have called up and imitated Holly’s voice and gotten away with it, too, after knowing her all your life. And you could have gotten into the house—you admitted you have a key.”
“Motive?” Jake asked.
“When you’ve known me long enough,” she said, “you’ll probably find I have a motive for damn near anything.”
There was a silence.
“Only”—she frowned—‘‘only it doesn’t explain where Holly was all that time.”
“It doesn’t explain a lot of things,” Jake said.
Malone scowled. “Well, we learned something anyway. And we’ll keep it to ourselves for a while. Let Blake County go on believing that she was killed at three o’clock.”
“Damn it,” Jake said, “we get back to the theory that this was done by an outsider. Maybe the little dude, and then someone murdered him. Or someone we haven’t caught up with yet.”
“Either that, or Holly,” said Malone wearily.
There were heavy steps in the hall.
With remarkable presence of mind, Helene hopped up on the library table and spread the heavily furred skirts of her coat over the clocks. Malone adroitly kicked the electric clock under the table.
In the next moment the library door opened and in walked Hyme Mendel and the pessimistic Mr. Fleck.
Chapter 26
Later Helene declared that never before in her life had she understood just how a setting hen felt. Any minute, she said, she expected one of the infernal clocks to hatch, probably a cuckoo. It was a difficult few minutes.
It would have been difficult even without the clocks.
Hyme Mendel wore the look of a man who has been exasperated just a little beyond human endurance. In addition, Jake suspected, he had a hang-over.
Had he discovered the murder of the man in the summerhouse, Jake wondered. Or had he discovered that the man was staying there, and would he go down that snow-covered slope in another minute to find the man dead?
And if he did—what?
Hyme Mendel was glaring at Malone. “Well,” he said explosively, “I’m certainly glad to see you! ”
He didn’t look it.
John J. Malone raised his right eyebrow. “Something?”
“Damned well something, and you damned well know it.” The angry young man seemed to be uncomfortably full of words. “Where have you got her?”
“Got who?” Malone said mildly.
“He means Miss Inglehart,” Jasper Fleck said helpfully.
“Mrs. Dayton,” Hyme Mendel corrected him.
“But I haven’t got her,” Malone said in a hurt voice.
“How did you get her away from here?” Mendel asked.
“I didn’t get her away from here,” Malone told him, “and I haven’t got her. I don’t know where she is. In fact,” he added, “I wish to God I did.”
“Nuts!” said Hyme Mendel indignantly. It seemed to relieve his feelings.
“If you care to,” Malone went on, “you can check on all my movements the evening of the jailbreak. Or rather, her escape. Not technically a jailbreak since she didn’t actually get out of jail. In any case, you’ll find that I couldn’t possibly have had anyth
ing to do with it. And I didn’t. So help me God, I didn’t know a thing about it until I read it in the papers the next day.”
Hyme Mendel stared at him. “Are you telling me the truth?”
“Of course I’m telling you the truth.”
Hyme Mendel looked suspiciously at Helene, who was wondering why the Parkinses had to have such a big alarm clock.
“Miss Brand—”
“Surely,” she said, looking at him with very wide eyes, “you can’t think I had anything to do with it. You remember Mr. Justus and I were right here all the time, and we even helped you hunt for her.”
“But if you knew where she was—”
“If I knew where she was,” Helene said, “wouldn’t you think I’d tell Mr. Malone, when I’m doing my best to help him?”
Hyme Mendel thought that one over. “All right,” he said to Malone, “all right. Right now I can’t do anything but believe you. But I’ll say this much. Even if you don’t know where she is, I believe you can find her. And if you don’t deliver her to me in twenty-four hours, I’ll have you put in jail for obstructing justice.”
“Go right ahead,” said Malone nastily, “and I ’ll get myself out of there so fast it’ll make your ears pop.”
Mendel thought that one over too, decided to change the subject. “Miss Brand, there’s something I want to ask you, too.”
“If it’s did I murder Aunt Alex, no, I didn’t,” she told him.
“I didn’t say you did. I just want to know what you were doing here at the Inglehart house that night.”
“I came over to return a scarf I’d borrowed from Holly,” she said promptly. Too promptly, Jake thought.
“Why didn’t you say something about it before?”
“Nobody asked me.”
“You’ve been concealing evidence,” Hyme Mendel told her irritably. “That’s what you’ve been doing. The woman next door told me she saw you driving in here before midnight. You were here and you didn’t say a word about it. I could arrest you for it.”
Hyme Mendel would feel a great deal happier if he could just arrest somebody, Jake decided.
“I didn’t think it was important,” Helene said. “I was only here for a minute. In fact, I hadn’t even remembered it until now.”
“Was Mrs. Dayton here then?”
“She was,” Helene said. “She was in bed, just going to sleep.”
“But God damn it, she couldn’t have been,” exploded the district attorney.
“But God damn it, she was,” Helene said coolly.
“Miss Brand,” said Mr. Fleck miserably, “you hadn’t ought to use language like that.”
Nobody paid any attention to him.
“All right,” said Hyme Mendel furiously, “all right. I can’t get anything out of any of you. But if Mrs. Dayton isn’t turned over to me in twenty-four hours, there’s going to be hell popping.”
Malone looked at him coldly. “She will be.”
Mendel stood up, fastened his overcoat, spun his derby by the brim a few times, dropped it, blushed, picked it up, mentally kicked himself. “She’d better be.”
He led the unhappy Jasper Fleck out of the room. A moment later they heard the front door close.
Jake looked at Helene. “Now will you tell me,” he began in an ominous voice.
Just at that moment the Parkins’ alarm clock took it upon itself to ring, long, loud, blatantly, and enthusiastically.
It was the last straw.
Helene hopped off the hen’s nest of clocks, fell into a chair, and collapsed into a state of shrieking hysteria.
Jake shook her into silence. “A thread of your coat got tangled up with the alarm release and set the alarm going.”
“If it had happened while they were here!” Helene gasped.
“Well, it didn’t.”
She drew a long breath. “We,” she said, “are the three most absent-minded people this side of heaven.”
Jake stared at her.
“The alarm clocks,” Helene said. “Where are the alarm clocks Holly heard that night?”
He continued to stare at her.
“Assuming,” she continued, “that she really did hear alarm clocks ringing.”
“If she says she heard them, she did,” Jake said. “But where? Why?”
“Don’t ask me why. Don’t ask why about any of this or you’ll tempt me into saying something unnecessarily rude. As for where—” She shrugged her shoulders. “She heard one ringing in Glen’s room. When she got there, it had stopped. Then one began to ring in the Parkins’ room—but not the Parkins’ clock.”
“Obviously not the Parkins’ clock,” Malone said.
“And then one rang in Aunt Alex’s room. Where were those clocks hidden?”
“They must have been hidden,” Jake began.
“Of course. If they hadn’t been, she would have seen them. Remember, she was clock-minded that night. If they hadn’t been hidden, the police would have found them when they got here. Simple process of reason.”
“Don’t ever get beyond the simple processes,” Jake implored, “you leave me winded.”
She ignored him. “Malone, where are those clocks?”
“I don’t know.”
“Look here,” Jake said, “the morning after the murder, the police really searched this house. Andy Ahearn may be dumb, but he’s thorough. If those alarm clocks had been here, they would have been found—no matter how well they were hidden.”
“But,” she said, “but you believe that she heard them.”
“Has it occurred to you,” he inquired calmly, “that whoever hid them has probably had ample opportunity to take them away again?”
She looked at him thoughtfully. “That’s what must have happened. But where are they now?”
“Probably at the bottom of the lake,” Malone said.
She sighed. “Well—listen. No one would ordinarily own three alarm clocks. If we could find where someone had bought three alarm clocks—a clerk would notice anyone buying three of them at a time.”
“Have you any idea,” Malone asked icily, “how many stores sell alarm clocks? And have you thought that whoever bought the clocks thought of the same reaction on the part of the clerk and bought one alarm clock in each of three stores?”
“We could find out all the people who bought alarm clocks in any stores lately and see if any one of them was connected with the case.”
Jake groaned. “You do everything the hard way.”
“Do you know an easier one?”
“Find who had an opportunity to murder Alexandria Inglehart in the time between when Glen and Parkins left—when she was alive, and the time Holly walked into her room and found her dead, and among those people find one who had a motive to murder her—”
“And you say I do everything the hard way,” Helene commented.
“In the meantime,” Malone said, “shut up, and we’ll go talk to Parkins.”
Parkins was discovered in the butler’s pantry, industriously polishing silver. His face was white and drawn; there were deep shadows under his eyes. Jake felt a sudden rush of sympathy for him.
“We want to talk to you,” Malone said.
Parkins nodded without surprise. “Yes, sir. I’d rather expected it, sir, if I may say so.” He wiped his hands carefully on a towel and led the way into the kitchen. “If you don’t mind coming out here—”
“Not at all,” Helene said, “it’s the only cheerful room in the house.”
“Now,” said Malone. “Where did you go after you talked to Mr. Justus last night?”
“Go, sir?”
“Did you go back to the summerhouse?”
“Oh no, sir. After my encounter with Mr. Justus, I had an intimation that it might not be wise.”
“Were you here all evening?”
“No, sir. I went out a little before nine.”
Nine, Jake thought. It had been about nine when he had seen the dapper little dude going back to the summerh
ouse.
“Where did you go?”
“Well sir, Joe—the houseboy next door—asked me to run over and have a look at the oil burner. It wasn’t working just right. So I repaired it for him, and a ticklish job it was, too. We were there till about ha’ past ten, and then he came back with me for—” the little man coughed apologetically—“a bottle or so of beer.”
“Did you leave the house after that?”
“Oh no, sir, Mr. Glen had a guest who stayed till quite late, and he kept me rather busy waiting on them.”
“Who was the guest?”
“Mr. Mendel, sir. Mr. Hyme Mendel.”
Malone showed no sign of surprise.
“He’d come here to question Glen?”
“Oh no, sir. It was more in the nature of a social call, sir. Mr. Glen had telephoned Mr. Mendel and asked him to drop in and discuss what progress had been made, and then they had a few drinks, and well, you know how those things are, sir.”
“What time did he leave?”
“It was nearly three, sir.”
“They were talking all that time?”
“No, sir. They were—ah—shooting craps, sir. Mr. Glen was complaining this morning that he’d, ah, lost his shirt.”
Helene snickered.
“Where was Mrs. Parkins last night?” Malone asked.
“Mr. Glen gave her the night off, sir, and she left about seven to visit a sister in Oak Park.”
Otherwise, Jake thought, Joe from next door would not have run over for a bottle or so of beer.
“What time did Mr. Mendel get here last night?”
“I really couldn’t say for sure. Mr. Glen said he got here about nine o’clock. But I wasn’t here to let him in. That was while I was next door.”
“Do you usually repair the oil burner next door?”
Parkins nodded modestly. “I rather keep an eye on all of them in the neighborhood. I seem to have—well, something of a way with oil burners, sir.”
“What was the matter with the one next door?”
An indignant light flared suddenly in Parkins’ eyes. “Someone had been monkeying with it.”
“Intentionally disabling it?”
“Yes, sir. Might have seriously injured it, too. Imagine anyone deliberately trying to damage a fine piece of machinery like that. Sheer vandalism, sir. It was a bit of a job to fix it, too. I told Joe they’d better be getting locks on the cellar windows. Anyone could get in and out as easy as butter.”
