Malice in Wonderland

by Rufus King

“I should like your help, Mr. Brandt. I am worried about Herbert.”

  “In what way, Mrs. Waldemar?”

  “Naturally you are familiar with the past fight between the Hotel Owners Association and the organizers who were sent down to force an acceptance of the Hotel Employees Union.”

  “Yes.”

  “Also, that an agreement has been reached and signed. As I understand it from Herbert, it is not compulsory and some of the operators are still holding out. Herbert is one of them. Herbert is possibly the most virulently antagonistic of them all.”

  “Are you implying threats?”

  “Yes.”

  “Surely not directly? The union people would never be so stupid.”

  “Naturally not. It is being done obliquely through a so-called ‘protective’ association. It has been pointed out to Herbert that unless he unionizes, or whatever the proper term is, he is laying himself open to reprisals. The association has offered to protect him from those reprisals. At a price.”

  “It’s a familiar pattern, Mrs. Waldemar. I think your husband can discount entirely that the union is in any way connected with such a setup. You’ll find it’s an independent racket—some of the would-be bright boys cashing in on the local situation.”

  “Does it matter who they are? So far as Herbert’s safety is concerned?”

  “His personal safety? Surely that’s going pretty far. Perhaps there’ll be some sabotage in the linen, utilities put out of commission by imported goons—but not murder.”

  Anne Borney pressed for a moment against the veranda railing, her face moon-white toward the horizon of the metallic silvered sea.

  “Why not? Why not murder, Mr. Brandt, as an example to the other owners who are holding out?”

  “You keep harping on the thought almost as though your husband had received a definite threat.”

  “He has. He threw the association man out on his ear. That was two days ago, and yesterday morning there was that message written in the hard sand left by ebb tide.”

  “On your beach?”

  “Yes. The message read: Waldemar, agree—or die. No more. Just the four words. Herbert said it struck him as laughable. He stamped them out.”

  The message was, of course, not only rankly melodramatic but downright corny. It reeked of the amateur, and I said so, adding that the very location of the message was absurd. A billboard could scarcely have been more public or spectacular.

  “Not really, Mr. Brandt. Our beach boy doesn’t go on duty until eight, and Herbert always takes a morning plunge at seven. The beach is quite private.”

  “Did Mr. Waldemar broadcast the discovery?”

  “Only to us at breakfast. He made some weighty jokes about it.”

  “Lace and Peter were with you?”

  “Yes. It was a send-off meal in a way. Peter caught a plane shortly afterward for the Bahamas. Herbert is sending him on a tour of the islands and later to South America to look up potential motel sites. Herbert’s motto would seem to be: Expansion.”

  (How right, as per schedule, Ilya had been! Remittance stuff in acceptable camouflage.)

  “You said I might help you, Mrs. Waldemar. How?”

  “I should like to arrange through your agency for a guard. I understand your son now runs it, but perhaps you would take it up with him for me?”

  “I should be glad to, but would Mr. Waldemar agree?”

  “Frankly, no. I should like him to be protected without his knowledge. Can it be done?”

  “It would be difficult, but possible. I’ll call Frank in the morning.”

  But Waldemar was dead by morning.

  There were four gunshot wounds in various parts of Waldemar’s anatomy, and the shots had been fired from a sufficient distance so that the bullets had remained in the body. Upon being extracted, they proved to have come from four guns of different calibers—a .38 S & W revolver, a .32 Colt automatic pistol, a .30 Luger, and a .455-caliber bullet tentatively identified as having been shot from a British Webley-Fosbery semi-automatic. Time of death: roughly between 2 and 3 a.m.

  These technical details were given us by Chet Duggan, who is the chief criminal investigator for our sheriff’s department. We are good friends, and he occasionally drops in on Ilya and me for a bull session about criminals who (either because of his personal or my agency’s more collective smartnesses) had bit the dust.

  Duggan’s fondness for clichés amounts almost to a vice, and he announced flatly, “This case is open and shut.”

  “So it would seem,” I agreed, while Ilya remained commentless and continued with a lilac cashmere stole she was knitting for herself for Christmas.

  Succinctly, the official version was that four hoods, imported by the “protective” association for general sabotage and terrorization, had done the job. They were already in custody and being held for the grand jury on suspicion of Murder One. As each relied on the other three for an alibi, said alibis canceled each other out, amounting to zero. The four murder guns undoubtedly were silted at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean.

  A note signed Floss had been found among other personal papers on the desk in Waldemar’s room when it had been gone through by the boys. The note had arranged for a 2 a.m. rendezvous at the scene of the crime, the beach cabana, and Floss had been identified as Miss Bubble Girl of 1957 in one of Miami’s more lurid traps. It was current gossip among her professional set that she was hopeful of becoming, at some future convenient date, Mrs. Waldemar Number Five.

  Floss tigerishly denied having written the note, and a check of her handwriting proved the point. It was officially accepted, however, that she knew about it, inasmuch as she was un- platonically involved with one of the four apprehended hoods, and a check of his handwriting proved the note to have been written by him.

  This he admitted, and further admitted (after a session of judiciously expert treatment only remotely connected with a Swedish massage) that he and his three confreres had gone to the cabana to beat Waldemar up, but the four of them screamed their heads off that Waldemar was already dead when they got there. Both the police and the sheriff’s department thought this very amusing.

  “The whole thing is in the bag,” Duggan said contentedly.

  “They used the note to put him on the spot. Furthermore, even if the trial should slip up here, which it won’t, the bums are wanted for the death of the little Bixby boy in St. Louis and for the shotgun blasting of the girl bank teller in Denver. Come hell or high water, those buzzards are due to fry. You can take your pick of for what.”

  Matters turned out quite along the line that Duggan had forecast. The grand jury returned a true bill, and the four were indicted for murder in the first degree. (Floss was exonerated as having been an unknowing dupe in regard to the murderous purpose of the assignation note, and returned to her bubbles.) Two months later, in March, the gunmen were brought to trial, found guilty, and sentenced to the chair during the week of June 10-17. Appeals were denied, and on June 13 they were electrocuted.

  On what might be called the social side of this period, affairs also progressed. Lace inherited her father’s large fortune, with Anne getting her widow’s third—a fortune in itself—while Peter returned promptly from his motel site-viewing tour and married Lace in a very quiet and unpublicized wedding.

  It was pleasant to consider how just Fate was with its comeuppances. There seemed little question but that Waldemar had been a viciously ruthless and selfish man in his private life. Even though I knew nothing about them personally, with the exception of Anne, his three former wives had been flesh and blood, with all the feelings that women have and all their capacities for being hurt. Especially this must have been true about the first one, Lace’s mother, for surely Lace was a reflection of her and not of Waldemar. Yet he had used these women more as bought-and-paid-for mistresses than as wives and, becoming tired of them, had callously, brutally (according to the records) kicked them out. Now he was dead.

  And the four hoods found gu
ilty of killing him were dead too. If any men deserved execution, they did. There was no question of their guilt in the Bixby boy case in St. Louis, which Duggan had referred to, nor in the wanton slaying of the girl bank teller in Denver.

  Nor did there seem any reasonable question regarding their shooting of Waldemar, even though the state’s case had been purely circumstantial and all four had maintained their innocence to the end. As Duggan had said, “No matter for what,” they had got what they deserved.

  Yes, everybody was satisfied.

  Except Ilya.

  “Tell me, Fred,” she said during supper on the evening after the execution, “how do you feel about Weismann’s theory on genes and on heredity in general?”

  “I feel nothing, Ilya. I don’t even know what his theory is.”

  “It’s about passing character traits on from parent to child during successive generations—traits like horse stealing or homicidal mania. Weismann was a nineteenth-century contemporary of Mendel and Darwin, and his contention is that inheritance consists in determinants which cause character traits to appear—rather, to reappear—under the right conditions. If the conditions aren’t right, the traits still keep passing on from parent to child but they stay dormant. Until.”

  “I take it you mean that if Captain Kidd or Jack the Ripper were my ancestors, their bloodletting proclivities might have lain dormant in my father, grandfather, and et cetera, only to come suddenly to life again in me if the conditions were right?”

  “Precisely.”

  “Well, so what? Why bring the subject up?”

  “Because it explains the murder of Herbert. Those four men never killed him, of course.”

  I’ll admit I felt shaken. In the several homicide cases our agency had handled (our work deals largely with defalcations in banks and corporations), Ilya’s perception and judgment had been infallible. And they had not been based upon that kicked around commodity known as woman’s intuition. If she was right in the Waldemar instance, then who had killed him? Well, Peter stuck out like a sore thumb as a prime suspect.

  “I suppose, Ilya, in your sibylline fashion you are getting around to the revelation that Peter collected four hoods from his gangster-association days and arranged the deal while he alibied himself in the Bahamas?”

  “I am not. Peter had nothing to do with it.”

  “Well, Lace certainly didn’t, nor Anne.”

  “Not Lace.”

  “Anne?”

  “Who else?”

  Like a fool, I laughed. Heartily. A mental picture of the gently bred and nurtured Anne Borney hiring four gunmen, even if she would remotely know how to get in touch with four paid killers, was too much. I said so.

  “What is more,” I added, “why should she? She’d made a bargain with Waldemar when she married him and she’s the type of woman who would keep it.”

  “Granted. Provided the other person to the bargain kept his side of it. You know perfectly well that, as soon as Herbert got all he wanted from her, Anne would have been out on her ear again. With that Floss or some other bubble-dancing expert sliding into her place.”

  “That is still no reason for murder—definitely not for a woman of Anne’s background and character.”

  Ilya sighed patiently.

  “I’ve been in touch during the past few months with Marion Dorchester in Boston,” she said. (I remembered Miss Dorchester vaguely as being one of Ilya’s elderly spinster friends.) “Marion is an officer in one of the genealogical societies of Massachusetts and I asked her to trace the Borney line back.”

  “Why?”

  “Because the same doubts puzzled me that are now puzzling you. Marion didn’t finish her research—that sort of digging takes ages—until this morning and she called me up. The electrocution was an accomplished fact by then, of course. It’s pretty amazing what Marion unearthed, Fred.”

  “A celebrated murder in the family tree?”

  “No. Marion traced the line back into the fifteenth century, when the Borney name was spelled Bonny. Back to the days of pirates. Two of whom were women. You’ll find them listed in the Encyclopedia Britannica. A Mary Read was one of them. The other was named Anne Bonny.”

  “Anne Borney—”

  “Think of her as Anne Bonny. Think of Herbert Waldemar as the bullion-laden prize frigate that would get her and Peter out of all their difficulties. Think, Fred.”

  “I am thinking. I’m thinking of the mechanics of Waldemar’s murder. Regardless of her inherited piratical potentialities, I’m thinking of the difficulty—the impossibility, really—of a woman like Anne Borney getting in touch with and hiring four professional killers.”

  “She didn’t. She accomplished what amounts to the perfect crime. The case is closed and no evidence exists to open it up again. Anne easily could have found that note from Floss making the assignation in the cabana. The hoods undoubtedly kept the rendezvous and did find Herbert dead. Anne simply managed to get there first. She had plenty of time between finding the note and two o’clock in the morning to make arrangements.”

  “Are you crazy, Ilya? Time to shop around and pick up four killers—as if she were shopping for a hat?”

  “I am not crazy, Fred, and she didn’t pick up four killers. I told you this was the perfect crime. It was accepted by the police exactly for what it was intended—a mobster killing. Anne handled it entirely by herself. Guns can be bought a dime a dozen here in Florida, and no questions asked. Anne simply bought four pistols of different calibers and put one shot from each into Herbert.”

  “Not Anne—”

  “Anne Borney, no. But the no-longer-dormant determinants and piratical traits of Anne Bonny, yes. Blood, Fred, will tell.” The question raised was staggering.

  Had blood told?

  Or had it not?

  What do you think? The lady—or the pirate?

  ABOUT RUFUS KING

  Rufus King (1893–1966) was an American author of Whodunit crime novels. He created four series of detective stories: the first one with Reginald De Puyster, a sophisticated detective similar to Philo Vance; the second one with his more famous character, Lieutenant Valcour; Colin Starr, who appeared in four stories in the Strand Magazine during 1940/41; and Detective Bill Duggan, who appeared in three stories in 1956/57. The Bill Duggan stories include his most famous short work, “Malice in Wonderland” (which loaned its title to his 1958 hardcover short story collection).

  Modern critics are rediscovering Rufus King’s work. Mike Grost, on Golden Age Detective, features a long writeup of King, stating: “King had a vivid writing style, with colorful characters, events, and images. He was clearly a born writer.”

  Rufus King’s works include:

  The Lieutenant Valcour Series

  Murder by the Clock

  Somewhere in the House

  Murder by Latitude

  Murder in the Willet Family

  Murder on the Yacht

  Valcour Meets Murder

  The Lesser Antilles Case

  Profile of a Murder

  The Case of the Constant God

  Crime of Violence

  Murder Masks Miami

  Other Mysteries

  The Case of the Dowager’s Etchings

  The Case of the Redoubled Cross

  The Deadly Dove

  Design in Evil

  Diagnosis Murder

  Duenna to a Murder

  The Faces of Danger

  The Lethal Lady

  Murder De Luxe

  Museum Piece No 13

  Murder de Luxe

  The Steps to Murder

  A Variety of Weapons

  A Woman is Dead

  Science Fiction

  The Fatal Kiss Mystery

  Dog Stories

  North Star: A Dog Story of the Northwest

  Whelp of the Winds: A Dog Story