Gin and Panic

by Maia Chance

  “You figured that out? Perhaps you aren’t as dumb as you look.”

  “I don’t look dumb!”

  “Who wears high heels in the woods? And what kind of detective wears a bright yellow raincoat?”

  “Just answer the question.”

  “My name is Clementine Brezka and I live in New Jersey. I was doing a little work up in Boston—”

  “What sort of work?”

  “Let’s just say I make it my business to relieve rich fools of their excess booty.”

  “You’re a con artist.”

  “Call it what you wish. It’s a time-honored profession. I was making a canvass of Marlborough Street, saying I was collecting funds for the Museum of Fine Arts—all the rich Boston ladies go in for that—and while the butler left me waiting in the foyer, I perused the mail. The invitation hadn’t been opened yet, but I took a peek. And the funny thing was, Montgomery Hall rang a bell. I’d read about it in a book, you see.”

  “Lost Treasures of the United States?”

  “You’ve read it?”

  “Um. Yes.”

  “I recognized Montgomery Hall as the location of a legendary buried treasure, so I swiped the invitation, thinking that it might be my ticket to search for the treasure. And it was.”

  “How did you know Rudy Montgomery had never seen Mrs. Bradford before?”

  “He’d written a personal note in the invitation, saying he hoped that they would finally meet.”

  “Lucky for you.”

  “I’ve always been lucky.” A siren wailed in the distance—someone had telephoned the police—and I heard Eustace crashing around in the underbrush. He must not have been able to find us in the dark. I didn’t shout for him; I didn’t wish to stem Clementine’s confession. “I’ve done nothing but make an honest stab at finding the treasure.”

  “You’ve impersonated, scammed, and trespassed,” I said.

  “Something tells me you do the same sorts of things on a regular basis.”

  “It’s my job.”

  “Well, then it looks like there isn’t much difference between a gumshoe and a con artist.” Clementine snickered. “I’d wager that you and I aren’t much different, Lola. Was your husband an alkie, too?”

  “Womanizer.”

  “Ugh. Dead?”

  “Yes.”

  “Mine, too. And I suppose you had a rough-and-tumble childhood like mine, and perhaps you went on the stage at a tender age?”

  “What? No.”

  “Oh. I suppose all the mascara threw me off.”

  Clementine was backing away, and I didn’t try to stop her, because suddenly, strangely, I was rooting for her. From the start, she had been a doozy of a murder suspect. Yet several minutes earlier, she had come running through the woods from an entirely different direction from that white flitting form. Clementine wasn’t the “ghost.” She wasn’t the one who had hit me on the back of the head, or pushed me at the top of the stairs, or tried to frighten me off the case with all that moaning business. And more and more, my gut told me that the murderer and the ghost were one and the same, which made Clementine … innocent. Or, innocent of murder, at least.

  Clementine was several paces way, and about to turn.

  “Did you murder Rudy Montgomery and Glenn Monroe?” I blurted. The sirens were louder.

  “Of course not, dear. Why would I? All I want is the treasure. That’s all I’ve ever wanted.”

  Men’s shouts and flashing lights advanced through the trees. Clementine slipped away into the shadows.

  “Lola,” Eustace cried somewhere behind me. I turned to see him striding forth. “Lola, are you quite all right?”

  “Yes,” I said, suddenly going limp, “although I wouldn’t say no to an aspirin.” I told Eustace how I’d heard that ghost voice and seen a figure flitting amid the tree trunks, and how I’d been hit in the head. I also told him I’d tackled Clementine, how she’d confessed to being a con artist and gotten away.

  “How ghastly,” Eustace said when I finished. “About the ghost, I mean to say. Someone is quite intent on drawing out that macabre prank.”

  Prank seemed a little mild, according to the throbbing bump at the base of my skull. “Where did you find that bicycle?” It was still crumpled on the ground nearby.

  “It was leaning against a tree farther up the path.”

  “I think it might belong to Theo. I saw him riding a similar bicycle.”

  Eustace chuckled. “Do you suppose Theo is your ghost, then?”

  “Why not? Theo isn’t a large man, and his voice is on the reedy side. Why are you looking at me like that, Eustace? It’s only a few bumps and scrapes—What are you—? Oh.” Oh no: Eustace had taken both my hands in his and gone down on bended knee.

  “Lola, you are simply magnificent.” He reached into his jacket and withdrew something small—it was difficult to make out in the poor light—oh yes, a little box. A box too small for, say, a handgun. Too small for much of anything but a few shelled peas or—

  The box popped open. Nestled inside, a large canary diamond pierced the darkness.

  “Lola, would you do me the great honor of becoming Lady Sudley at the soonest possible juncture?”

  I tore my eyes from the ring. I was seeing stars again. Sparkling, canary yellow stars. I tried to speak, but instead my tongue made a sound like peeling cellophane.

  Eustace’s voice grew husky. “I know it’s premature, but I simply cannot help myself. I have never felt this way about a woman before. I am mad about you, Lola. I cannot eat, I cannot sleep … no, don’t reply—I see you’re uncertain. This is a rotten moment, isn’t it? Don’t give your answer now. Think it over. Tell me later—but soon.”

  I swallowed. “All right.” A pause. “Where did you get that ring?”

  Eustace stood, snapped the ring box shut, and it vanished into his pocket. “It belonged to my aunt Iphigenia. I telephoned her—she lives in New York City—and asked if she had anything she’d be willing to part with to aid her lovesick favorite nephew. She sent it up by courier on the afternoon train.”

  “Hey!” a man yelled. “Who’s over there?”

  “Lord Sudley,” Eustace called. “And a lady.”

  Eustace curled a protective arm around me, and soon the woods were alive with two tromping policemen and swinging flashlight beams. I’d have to wait until later to examine how I felt about Eustace’s offer.

  The policemen said they had received a telephone call from Montgomery Hall, describing suspicious lights and shouting in the forest. Eustace smoothly explained that he and I had been taking a romantic moonlit stroll when we came upon a woman digging beneath a tree.

  “Who was it?” one of the officers asked.

  “I’m not entirely sure.” I wouldn’t throw Clementine to the wolves. “But she went that way.” I pointed west, the opposite direction than Clementine had fled.

  “I suspect she’s dangerous,” Eustace told the officer. “She has been using an assumed identity, and as far as I can make out, she has been trespassing regularly on this estate.”

  After the police had finished questioning us, Eustace led me through to Montgomery Hall’s garage, helped me into his motorcar, and gave me a lift back to the Old Whaler’s Inn.

  “I hope Berta is all right.” I scanned the blackness beside the road as we drove. “Once she went off to take those photographs, she simply disappeared.”

  “I meant to ask—for what earthly reason could you possibly require photographs of that warehouse?”

  “Oh, nothing.”

  “Ah. Well, your Berta is a tough nut. I shouldn’t worry too much about her.”

  23

  At the inn, Eustace escorted me upstairs and we went straight to Berta’s door. She flung it open after one knock. Cedric yapped and squiggled on her bed.

  “Thank goodness you are all right, Mrs. Woodby!” Berta still wore her boots and dress. “When I heard those sirens—”

  “Thank goodness you’re all righ
t.” Despite Berta’s unpartnerlike habits, I would be shattered if something befell her. I turned to Eustace. “Thank you for your help.”

  “You haven’t forgotten what I asked?”

  “No,” I said gently. “Please allow me a bit of time to get my head on straight.”

  “Of course, my dear. I do hope you feel better. Good night.”

  I closed Berta’s door, went to her simmering orange electric fire, and flopped onto the rug in front of it with a moan. “Oh golly, my wrist and my head. Berta, have you any aspirin?”

  “Only a flask of gin, I am afraid, and even that is somewhat depleted.”

  I peered up at her, my assorted pains momentarily forgotten. “Depleted? What’s the occasion?”

  “I will get to that.”

  “Why must you always be so mysterious? Gin will do.” I stuck my hand in the air.

  “What did Lord Sudley ask you?”

  “Nothing important.”

  “Wives are not required to testify against their husbands in courts of law, you know.”

  “Exactly what are you implying, Berta?”

  “I think you know perfectly well what I am implying.”

  “Is it so very difficult to picture me as Lady Sudley? Never mind! Don’t answer.”

  “You would live in England, I suppose?”

  “Of course not. Not most of the time, anyway.”

  “Oh dear. Then there are the stewed tomatoes at breakfast to consider. And quite a lot of tweed would be required as well, Mrs. Woodby. I am aware of your feelings about tweed.”

  “I could work around that.”

  “Croquet?”

  “Absolutely manageable.”

  “What about foxhunting?—”

  I gasped and looked at Cedric.

  “—or any hunting, for that matter? You do not like guns.”

  “All minor details.”

  Berta stuck an unstoppered flask in my hand.

  “Thanks.” I took a long gurgle of gin.

  “I will only add that Lord Sudley is very persistent, Mrs. Woodby, but you must not mistake persistence for seduction.”

  “Persistence means he cares.”

  “But if he must be so tenacious, it suggests that you do not care.”

  I fluttered dismissive fingers. I wasn’t in the mood for a Sigmund Freud session starring Berta. There were too many other things flapping in the wind.

  Once the pains in my wrist and head had receded to a dull roar, I told Berta everything, culminating in my capture of Clementine Brezka. The one bit I glossed over was how I had allowed Clementine to slip away. That seemed like a private matter. A private matter that Berta would condemn.

  Berta said, “Lord Sudley proposed marriage to you moments after you told him you had made headway in the murder investigation? How very distracting of him.”

  “You’re missing the point,” I said. “I unmasked a con artist, and if my gut is telling the truth, I’ve eliminated one of our suspects.”

  “Your gut is telling you that Clementine is not the murderer?”

  “Yes. What about you?” I rolled over to toast my B-side before the electric fire. “Did you get the photographs?”

  “Indeed I did. I began by snapping several shots of the warehouse interior, which will come out a treat due to the electric light—we must get them developed and mail them to Lem Fitzpatrick without delay. No sooner had I finished than I heard the sound of a motor. I slipped out of the warehouse and went down to the beach to have a stealthy look. It was a powerboat, proceeding slowly up the coast just past the breakers, without a single light on.”

  “Yes, I saw that boat.”

  “Suspecting the boat might be of interest to Lem Fitzpatrick—although realizing that in the darkness I had no chance of snapping a good photograph—I stole up the beach, following the boat’s progress.”

  “You must’ve been going at a good trot,” I said, taking another sip of gin. A warm snuggly feeling was spreading through me. Perhaps, however, that was because Cedric had descended from Berta’s bed to curl up on my liver.

  “I was going like a pig to market, Mrs. Woodby. Granted, the boat was traveling at a remarkably slow pace. All of its lights were unlit, so I strongly suspected that the sailors wished to avoid detection. It passed the beach in front of Montgomery Hall, rounded the point upon which the lighthouse sits, and disappeared from view. By the time I was able to see around the point—”

  “Golly, you must’ve trudged a mile.”

  “I am exhausted. As I was saying, by the time I was able to see around the lighthouse point, the powerboat had begun to make slow passes back and forth across the water.”

  “Where?”

  “In that cove—you know, the one that lies just around the lighthouse point.”

  Cove. Cove. Now, why was that making my weary mind go ding-a-ling?

  “But what was the powerboat doing?”

  “I do not know. I assume that that cove belongs to the Montgomery family—to Theo, I mean to say—but as it turned out, I was prevented from further investigation.” Berta’s eyes flashed.

  “Oho,” I said. “Now we’re getting to the part that made you slosh down half of this gin.” I gave the flask a shake.

  “Surely I did not drink half.”

  “But it’s almost gone.”

  Berta sniffed. “As I traversed the beach, I presently became aware of a flashlight beam swinging about behind me and someone calling my name. I turned and, to my relief, saw that it was none other than Mr. Eccles, the lawyer.”

  “I see.”

  “You see nothing, Mrs. Woodby, although I saw a bit more than I wished to, considering that Mr. Eccles wore only his nightshirt and shoes beneath his coat. When you see a man’s bare calves, it so often alters your opinion of him.”

  “Were Mr. Eccles’s calves so unsightly?”

  “No, no, it is not that. I do not mind men with robust calves. It is that I saw him in all his vulnerability, you see, and it became clear to me that Mr. Eccles—no matter how dashing a figure he cuts in his Madison Avenue suits—is really only a trained sea lion. He forbade me from continuing my reconnaissance mission.”

  “The bossy buttons! On what grounds?”

  “That I was trespassing on his client Theo Wainwright’s property. Well. I allowed Mr. Eccles to escort me back to Montgomery Hall, and I accepted a ride from him back here to the inn. But I assure you that I turned down his invitation to dinner. If there is one thing I cannot abide, it is an officious person.”

  “You prefer fellows who aren’t afraid to break the rules for your sake.” I slid her a glance. “Fellows like Jimmy the Ant.”

  Berta patted her bun. “Theoretically, yes.”

  “Was Mr. Eccles the one who telephoned the police?”

  “Of course. He grew alarmed, he said, when he saw lights and heard shouts in the forest.”

  Deeper and deeper. Weirder and weirder. If I were a wimp, I’d hang it up on the Rudy and Glenn murders, head back to New York, and get busy on whatever cushy retrieval jobs were piling up on Mrs. Snyder’s telephone memorandum pad. But I’m not a wimp. I blame my mother.

  “I need to go to bed,” I said. “I’ll tell you the rest in the morning.”

  “I think that is a fine idea,” Berta said, “because the electric fire is beginning to make your raincoat smoke.”

  * * *

  When Berta and I entered the Red Rooster the next morning, the locals weren’t precisely staring, but I couldn’t ignore their sneaky-eyed whispers. News of the debacle in the Montgomery woods last night had made the rounds.

  But I had bigger fish to fry. Number one, my aching head. (I hadn’t yet decided whether it was the lump at the base of my skull or my gin hangover that hurt more.) Number two, Eustace’s proposal of marriage. I had tossed and turned all night without reaching any sort of conclusion. I didn’t know him very well, but thirty-one-year-old widows don’t turn down offers from landed gentry. At least, that’s what my mot
her would say.

  The snag was … Ralph. If I married Eustace, propriety would demand that I never saw Ralph again. Was I up for that?

  Once we were seated at a corner table, Berta unfolded one of the newspapers we’d purchased at Wolcott Tobacco & Stationery on the walk from the inn. I picked up yesterday’s New York Evening Observer and flipped through.

  There it was, Glenn Monroe’s obituary. He was born and raised in Portland, Oregon, where he performed alongside the rest of his family first on the vaudeville stage and then in some sort of itinerant theatrical production. As a young man he tried his hand at “serious theater,” eventually winding up in New York, but since his knack for vocal impersonations and sound effects was wasted there, he entered the new field of radio broadcasting. The rest was history. The piece ended, “Mr. Monroe is survived by one sister, Undine French of Corvallis, Oregon.”

  I passed it over to Berta.

  Where had that farmer puppet in Glenn’s apartment come from? The vaudeville stage?

  The gossipy blond waitress, Judith, poured our coffee and then hovered, wiping her free hand on her apron. “Now that my boss isn’t watching,” she whispered, “did you hear what the ghost did up in the woods last night? Clobbered some treasure hunters over the head with rocks?”

  My skull throbbed. “Actually, that was—” Berta stopped me with a kick under the table.

  “What else?” Berta asked.

  “Well, Al and Gert—those are the policemen here in town—they chased some lady in a Chevrolet clear to Rhode Island before they lost her.”

  “Judith!” the man behind the counter bellowed.

  She scurried away.

  “Clementine Brezka is on the lam, then,” I said.

  “Why are you pleased?” Berta demanded.

  “I’m not!”

  “You are smiling.”

  “Only because I’ve been pining for coffee. Although…” I explained to Berta how Clementine couldn’t have been the “ghost,” and thus that I no longer considered her a murder suspect.

  “Why must the murderer and the ghost be one and the same?” Berta asked.

  “Well, the ghost could be someone who believes that the woman-in-white ruse will keep people away from the treasure. But the ghost has been trying to harm me, and I’m not looking for the treasure. I’m looking for the murderer. So it stands to reason that the so-called ghost and the murderer are one and the same.”