by Rufus King
Contents
COPYRIGHT INFORMATION
THE CASE OF THE THREE BALEFUL BROTHERS
THE CASE OF THE PRODIGAL BRIDEGROOM
THE CASE OF THE SUDDEN SHOT
THE CASE OF THE IMPERIOUS INVALID
THE CASE OF THE BUTTONED COLLAR
THE CASE OF THE LONELY LADIES
COPYRIGHT INFORMATION
Copyright 1939, 1940, 1941 by Rufus King.
Copyright renewed 1969.
Cover art © Sector 2010 / Fotolia.
THE CASE OF THE THREE BALEFUL BROTHERS
Furs relieved her face from looking negligent, two handsome pelts of soft blue fox, while an effective French hat set off dark hair of an unexciting brown. Only the young woman’s fine eyes seemed vital, and they were activated by a gripping, a profound sense of fear. She was young. She would be twenty-two next month, on the eleventh of May.
She left Onega Drive and turned her car in between entrance gates, on one of which a small, severely plain sign read: Colin Starr, M.D. She drew up before a mansion, the spacious unrailed verandas of which were more suitable to a plantation than to southeastern Ohio. It was an ugly, a substantial house, built in the days of Dr. Starr’s father when solid mass (without the least condescension toward line) spelled substance. Its two high stories were crowned by the reluctant awkwardness of a mansard roof and it, in turn, was knobbed by a cupola from where a magnificent view of the Onega River and the surrounding hills and town of Laurel Falls could be obtained but never was.
Miss Wadsworth, Starr’s secretary, opened the heavy oak door. You felt a starched white severity in Miss Wadsworth, a guardian quality: one in defense against any frittering away of moments which should be fortressed against all but the most pressing things. The young woman’s eyes shocked her.
She said, “Good morning, Miss Shepmann. I’m afraid the doctor’s appointments don’t start for several hours. He could see you, I think, just after two.”
Eleanore Shepmann’s gloved hands were trembling.
“It isn’t that, Miss Wadsworth. I’m not ill.”
“No?”
“May I come in?”
“Forgive me. Of course.”
The heavy oak door closed, shutting out pale April sunlight which hinted at storm, leaving the large hallway cool and very quiet and dim.
“You haven’t heard?”
“Heard what, Miss Shepmann? The doctor has been dictating all morning. He is reading a paper tomorrow in Columbus on blood dyscrasias.”
“Milton Forstair has been shot to death.”
Miss Wadsworth looked at her sharply.
“My dear child, you are ill. Sit here. Wait.”
Miss Wadsworth moved swiftly through a reception room, through another doorway and into an office furnished with an agreeable simplicity. The doctor looked up from across a rosewood desk and she felt that exciting sense of a magnetic virility which was there whenever Starr’s eyes turned suddenly upon you, making you forget the all but ungainly planes of his strong body and of his features, which were not quite ugly.
“Miss Eleanore Shepmann is here, Doctor. Her fiancé, Mr. Milton Forstair, has been shot. He is dead.”
His expression changed a little, almost as though the news were not news but rather a period mark to a sentence which he had believed conceivable for quite some time. He asked Miss Wadsworth to show Miss Shepmann in. He went to a cabinet and started to mix, in a glass, an anodyne for nervous shock.
He knew Eleanore Shepmann well, also her three brothers: Humphrey, Walter and Douglas, with the somewhat sinister facades and viperish manner of tongue which it pleased the young men to present to the world. He knew, too, the glamorous Milton Forstair who had been Eleanore’s fiancé and who now was violently dead.
He was (Forstair) an importation from the caviar-and-Courvoisier intellectuals of New York and had been lured to Laurel Falls by a Mrs. Selldon Poole to hatch her latest movement: a community theater. One production had occurred to date, an elegant spy affair, larded with military secrets and revolvers and tinged, Starr had thought, with pseudo-Chekhov and the more depressing aspects of international sex.
He recalled the reports of Forstair’s arrival, which had galvanized the social nerve centers of the town over two months back. Trunks, suitcases, shoe and hat boxes in assorted calf, linen and pigskin had held the young Apollo’s collection of knockouts from wine-toned dinner jackets to absolutely rugged tweeds. Edna Poole had attended to Forstair’s temperamental passion for privacy by installing him aboard her husband’s houseboat, Buckeye II, which was moored to the dock of their estate on Onega Drive. Forstair had there, presumably, communed in peace on the bosom of the river, with all catering and maid service supplied from the house.
Edna’s husband, Selldon Poole, had accepted this installation with the same almost patrician courtesy with which he had become accustomed to accept, for the past several years, Edna’s assortment of energetic enthusiasms and, alternatively, depressive moods. Edna was his second wife and had been met, the town understood, during a Southern cruise aboard Buckeye II in Florida waters. Her background, the town also understood, was Aiken and New Jersey.
Selldon Poole’s first wife had died a decade ago, leaving him a son Jeffry, who was now twenty-five: a healthy and wholesomely pleasant young man with a stolid interest in polo, golf, Gaspe salmon expeditions and very little else. In common with the rest of the country-club crowd Starr had always taken it for granted that Jeffry Poole and Eleanore Shepmann would marry, whenever Jeffry could get his mind off sport for long enough to suggest it. They had grown up together, and the Shepmann and Poole estates touched.
The glittering invasion of Milton Forstair had, however, blasted all that.
Starr went to Eleanore as she came into the office. He took her hand. He attempted to readjust his viewpoint of her under this new light reflected from murder. She had never occurred to him as apt for the role of a femme fatale against whom the more emotional waves of life would break violently. That still struck him as nonsense. Her attributes remained unchanged: a pleasant, girl-scout face and the Shepmann money. There was a lot of money, and it had been in the children’s own control since their parents’ death. He handed her a glass.
“Drink this, Eleanore.”
“Thank you, Doctor.”
He asked her to sit down. He stood beside her and said with a grave, curiously old-fashioned courtesy, “What can I do?”
“They think that my brothers did it. I could tell that, Doctor, from the things that District Attorney Heffernan asked me.”
The distaste of the three Shepmann boys for the engagement between Eleanore and Forstair had been open and poisonous ever since the engagement had been announced early last week.
Starr said, “Just tell me.”
“It’s so unfair—I mean, simply because there were so many shots…you’ve helped others in cases like this, Doctor—I hoped that somehow you would help my brothers—help me—”
She started to tremble, to cry, and he saw it was no use. It would be a good ten minutes before the sedative would quiet her nerves from their brutal shock. He rang for Miss Wadsworth. He asked her to stay with Eleanore. He went into the reception room and dialed a desk phone. He asked to speak with District Attorney Heffernan.
Heffernan was exact.
Milton Forstair had been found dead at nine o’clock that morning by the maid who had brought his breakfast down to the houseboat. His bed had been slept in. He was wearing a tweed suit. An overcoat and hat were thrown on a sofa. A packed suitcase stood beside the sofa. Forstair had died on the floor of the main cabin. He had been shot seven times.
The coroner had extracted the bullets and had established the damning fact that they had come from three guns of different calibers: a .25 automatic Colt, a .32 Smith & Wesson Long, a 7.63 Mauser.
Heffernan said that the fact was damning insofar as the three Shepmann brothers were concerned. The Shepmann family had originated in Tennessee, atavistic (if Starr wished) to feuds, to a removal in the grand manner—the brothers had simply reverted to the habits of their forebears, had got out their guns and had pumped lead. Not, Heffernan pointed out, that the case rested on the gun angle alone.
Starr asked on what else.
There seemed to be plenty. In addition to the generally known hatred on the brothers’ part for Milton Forstair there had been specific threats. Douglas Shepmann had stated at the yacht-club bar on Saturday that he would remove Forstair’s liver and fry it before he would let any velour-lined G-boy marry his sister. Humphrey had specified tweezers, while Walter, the youngest, had gone into detail about asps.
Starr contended that the threats were perfectly in character and just so much wind blown out for effect.
“I’d agree with you, Colin,” Heffernan said, “except for the circumstances of last night. Forstair was killed around midnight, say half an hour’s leeway either way. Well, none of the Shepmann boys has been seen since an hour before that time.”
“They’re missing?”
“They couldn’t be more so. We know that Humphrey Shepmann left a poker game at the Downtown Club at eleven. He looked at his watch and said that he and his brothers had ‘something to attend to.’ He cashed in his chips and left. He left, according to old Colonel Wattrous, in a blasted hurry and looking like a mad tiger about to pull off a job. The colonel’s own words, Colin.”
“The colonel had probably been a heavy loser.”
“Perhaps. Take Walter Shepmann. He was last seen at half-past ten at the bar of that pesthole run by Spinelli. He was, according to Spinelli, awash with scotch. His eyebrows formed a black lead pipe. Appropriate muscles twitched in his colorless face and he patted a hip pocket significantly. I’ll grant you some rear-view propheticism, but Spinelli swears that the pocket housed a gun.”
“Personally I suspect a flask. And I admire Spinelli’s imagery, if nothing else about him.”
“The official mind still favors the gun. Walter also looked at his watch, commented on the hour, and Spinelli has him leaving the bar with ‘murder hot in each eye.’”
“Which is just so much Sicilian histrionics.”
“We prefer to think not. Finally, take Douglas Shepmann. He was last seen at a quarter to eleven running for the main exit of the Bijoux, where that sea film is playing. The one where everybody sinks but Tyrone Power. Douglas knocked an usher down on the way. Evidently the usher had repressions. He simply said that ‘Mr. Shepmann had seemed distrait.’”
“And that’s your case?”
“It is to date, and it’s enough, isn’t it?”
Starr admitted that it was. The whole pattern was in keeping with the Shepmann brothers’ flair for the dramatic, with their utter disregard for the consequences of anything that was ever said or done. He admitted there was no sound reason why warrants should not have been issued for their arrest: the charge, murder. He thanked Heffernan and hung up.
Eleanore was better. Her nerves were under control, but there still was a certain bright and unreal quality in her manner which puzzled Starr and made him suspect that she was holding herself on guard.
He said, after Miss Wadsworth had left them, “Where are your brothers, Eleanore? You know, don’t you?”
Her smile continued strangely bright.
“Yes. I wouldn’t tell the police, but I’ll tell you.”
“All right.”
“I wired them about Milton. I got an answer just before coming here. They said, ‘Let us be the first to congratulate you.’ They wouldn’t, they couldn’t have sent that sort of a message if they’d shot Milton, Doctor.” (Unfortunately, Starr thought, they most certainly could.) “They’re flying back.”
“From where?”
“From New York. They took a plane from Columbus at two o’clock last night.” Forstair was shot close on midnight; the brothers were last seen at eleven; their time between then and two o’clock was so far unaccounted for—more grist for Heffernan’s mill, Starr thought.
“Why did they fly to New York, Eleanore?”
“To stop the elopement, Doctor.”
“Of you and Milton?”
“Yes. They were so horrid about the engagement that Milton and I decided to elope and sort of get it over with. They couldn’t have been more beastly, Doctor, more pig-headed. They were convinced that Milton was simply marrying me for my money.”
Starr said carefully, “There were others who thought that too, Eleanore.”
“I know. I didn’t care about them, but I did care about my brothers. Milton had money. He carried a checking balance of five thousand with the First National here in town and one of fifteen thousand with the Merchants Trust in New York.”
“He told you that?”
“No, Doctor. He insisted on proving it. He knew how the boys felt. He brought them certified statements from both managers. They—well, the boys simply insisted that he did it with mirrors and that they disliked him for his tweeds anyhow.”
“How did they find out about the elopement?”
“Through Douglas. He’s always been an awful sneak. He’s so perfectly barefaced about it. I mean he’ll steam open the flaps of envelopes and then won’t even bother to seal them up again. Milton said that my last note hadn’t been resealed. I should have known that Douglas had steamed it. If I hadn’t been so excited about everything I would have.”
“It discussed your plans for the elopement?”
“Yes, and it mentioned the Ambassador as where we’d stay in New York. That’s where I wired them. I was to meet Milton at the Columbus airport at half-past one for the night plane. That’s how I happened to be there when the boys drove in at two and chartered a Boeing job to chase me to New York. I kept out of sight. They didn’t see me.”
And still, Starr thought, no alibi. The Shepmanns could well have gone to the houseboat and blasted Forstair before setting out for Columbus. Their subsequent flight to New York to prevent an elopement with a prospective bridegroom who was already a corpse was thoroughly in keeping with what they would have devised as a bright and macabre false trail.
Eleanore’s smile, with its quick, artificial strain, was suddenly gone, and her voice tightened as she said, “I decided Milton knew the boys had found out about the elopement and that he had therefore decided to call it off. I drove back. I kept thinking on the way that possibly they’d gone to the houseboat and possibly—well, thrashed Milton.”
“In that case why would they have taken a plane to New York?”
“I don’t know. It’s—not having the answer to that is what’s been frightening me so. Perhaps they thought I’d gone on alone. I don’t know, Doctor.”
“Perhaps. When did you get home?”
“Around four. I put the car in the garage. I took the path along the river over to the Poole dock.”
“Do the police know this?”
“No. Nobody does, Doctor.”
“You found Milton shot?”
“I didn’t go into the cabin. I looked inside through a porthole. The ceiling lights were on.” She said, with a dreadful sort of earnestness, “I—anybody could have told he was dead.”
“Did you love him, Eleanore? Really?”
“I don’t know. I don’t know what love is. I thought I knew, but I’m no longer sure. It was like something hitting you when you first met Milton, not a physical thing but more like a light, such a blinding light that it kept you from seeing anything else.” She looked at him helplessly and said, “The thing is it’s gone, whatev
er it was I felt for Milton. Is it stupid to believe that it, too, was killed when he was killed? You know about those things, Doctor.”
“I sometimes fool myself into thinking I do. Then it just adds up into a general knowledge, which is rarely helpful for any specific case.”
“I know. You have to do your own spring cleaning if it’s to be a good job.” He was glad she saw it like that. House cleaning, wiping off the slate, the terms didn’t matter. The thing was, she’d be in shape soon to realize her love for Jeffry Poole again, unexciting, perhaps, but right and lasting. He thought her ever so lucky that Forstair was dead before disillusionment had come, as it would have, souring her entire life and blunting her abilities to feel things with the honesty and zest of youth.
He said, “What’s really troubling you, Eleanore?”
She stared at him earnestly.
“There’s no earthly sense in not being completely honest with you, telling you everything.”
“None. If I’m to help you.”
She took a silver cigarette lighter from her bag.
“This was on the deck. I gave it to Plumphrey last Christmas.”
He left it lying on the desk where she had placed it.
“I shall have to tell Mr. Heffernan all of this, Eleanore.”
“Yes, I thought that. I wanted you to know first, to know everything, Doctor.”
“I’ll do everything I can.”
“Does it—is it all pretty grim?”
He smiled at her gravely.
“Yes. Pretty grim.”
* * * *
The police photographs of the scene of the crime were good. One close-up of the body interested Starr especially. It showed Forstair flat on his back on the cabin deck. It was a view from the waist up, in excellent focus. The left arm was twisted and partially hidden beneath the body. The right arm was crooked, with its hand and fingers rigid and held, through an after-death muscular contraction, about a foot away from the body. It had then been fixed there by rigor mortis. A dark speck showed in the center of the back of the hand.
