Gin and Panic

by Maia Chance

  I sat up straighter. “We must speak with Coral.”

  “Coral?”

  “About the open window in Rudy’s bedroom. Why didn’t we ever ask her about it? That open window was the one out-of-place thing in that room. That open window might have been the killer’s one mistake! We’re supposed to be professional detectives, but we may as well be a couple of caged parakeets for all the—”

  “Calm down, Mrs. Woodby.”

  “I’m calm!” I cried. “Now, drive me to the nearest telephone!”

  “We will go to Rexall Drugs first,” Berta said, serenely stepping on the gas.

  * * *

  Twenty-ish minutes later, I dialed 0 from a coin-operated telephone in the lobby of Mystic’s movie theater, and asked to be put through to Montgomery Hall.

  I wore corduroy trousers tucked into muddy rubber boots, a smelly wool coat, and a wool hat, all of which I had found in the back of the truck. My complexion had been muddied by a liberal application of Tahitian Princess face powder from Rexall Drugs, and my upper lip sported a small, smarmy mustache in the style of motion picture villains. This I had painted on with cake mascara and a brush wet with my tongue.

  Hovering close to me—or, rather, close to the telephone earpiece—was Berta, disguised more or less in the same fashion as I, although her mustache was fuller.

  Mwinyi answered the telephone and then, after a few more minutes, Coral was on the line.

  “I’m so glad you rang,” she said.

  “Oh?”

  “I heard you might have kicked the bucket last night.”

  “I didn’t know you cared. Speaking of kicking buckets, I wonder if I might ask you a question or two about the murder investigation.”

  “Still flogging that dead horse?” Coral laughed. “Lord Sudley told me he hired you to look into Rudy’s suicide because he thought you were cute. There’s simply no accounting for taste, is there?”

  Not for the first time, I wished Coral didn’t have a bulletproof alibi for the time of Rudy’s death. Heck, she didn’t even have a good motive, since Rudy’s death had left her high and dry. “There are oodles of loose ends,” I said, “and Mrs. Lundgren and I aren’t quite ready to throw in the towel.”

  “You’ll have to throw it in soon, sweetie, because Theo sent the police out to arrest you.”

  “Listen, Coral. I must ask you about how Rudy’s window was open when his body was discovered—”

  “Rudy’s window? You really are grasping at straws, aren’t you?”

  “Please.”

  Silence. “Oh, all right. But not over the telephone. Why don’t you come up to Montgomery Hall—”

  “And risk being trapped by Theo?”

  “Fine—what about in the country somewhere?”

  Berta shook her head. “Too exposed,” she whispered to me.

  I said to Coral, “What about … What about in Carvington? On the village green, perhaps?” There were usually enough people milling around Carvington for us to be inconspicuous there.

  “Oh, all right. See you there in thirty minutes or so?”

  “Swell—oh, and we’ll be in disguise.” I hung up.

  “What if this is a trap?” Berta said. “What if Coral brings the police along?”

  “That’s a risk we’re going to have to take,” I said.

  28

  In Carvington, parked motorcars lined Church Street. I’d forgotten that today was the day of the Menchen’s Manikins puppet performance for which we’d seen advertisements.

  “All for the best,” I said as Berta parallel parked the truck to the accompaniment of shouts and honks. “We’ll blend in with all these people around.”

  We got out, and crossed the street to the village green. There, a puppet theater crouched on the muddy grass. This was a red wagon whose side had been hinged and propped open to reveal a red-and-white striped curtain. Children frolicked around a sandwich board reading MENCHEN’S MANIKINS SHOW AT with a removable wooden piece stuck on crookedly reading 12:00.

  We hung back from the crowd, beside a large tree. Sure, we wore disguises, but I didn’t think for a second that they’d hold up to scrutiny. Berta’s mascara mustache was already smudged.

  A teenaged girl was wandering through the crowd with a wooden tray holstered around her neck, upon which doughnuts were piled. “Apple cider doughnuts,” she called. “Two for five cents!”

  I could smell the cinnamon from several feet away. I hadn’t had breakfast yet. I had left my handbag in the truck, naturally, but I’d had the prudence to bring my coin purse along. I pulled it from my coat pocket and popped it open.

  There, twinkling amid pennies, quarters, nickels, and dimes, was the golden curl of paper I’d found outside Montgomery Hall’s conservatory. I’d forgotten all about it. Probably meant nothing. I dug out a nickel, and when the doughnut girl came by, I purchased two doughnuts.

  Still warm, too. Bliss. I bit into one just as tinkly music began, and the crowd hushed. The striped puppet theater curtains opened to reveal a painted forest backdrop.

  A fox puppet popped up, bounced around, and pawed at its whiskers. A trumpet blatted inside the puppet theater, and a theatrical British-accented voice said, “Tally-ho and view halloo!” The fox puppet jostled up and down, and the backdrop behind it moved to give the impression of countryside passing by. Then a foxhound puppet appeared, to the delighted shrieks of the audience, followed by an English gentleman hunter on horseback, his dangling legs quivering. The fox bounced, the foxhound and hunter pursued, and then suddenly the fox twirled around, clacked its little wooden teeth, produced a blunderbuss, and—BANG! BANG!—shot the foxhound and hunter. Shiny red ribbons tumbled from their breasts, miming blood, and they collapsed.

  “To the underdog!” the ventriloquist cried as the fox’s jaws moved.

  The crowd roared with laughter and the curtains swung shut.

  I polished off the first doughnut and started on the second.

  Bang, bang.

  My brain, thrilled by sugar, began to whirr smoothly. Memories surfaced. Dots connected. The open window. The golden curl of paper.

  Bang, bang.

  “I know what that golden scrap of paper is,” I whispered to Berta.

  “You do?” she bleated.

  “Shh! And here comes Coral. Just follow my lead.” I stuffed the remaining chunk of doughnut into my mouth.

  Coral sidled up to us in her cream-colored coat and cloche hat. “My, my. Don’t you two look a treat in your ickle disguises,” she said. “Say, Lola, you’ve got sugar or something on your mustache.” She glanced at the puppet theater, which had launched into what appeared to be a rendition of “The Three Little Pigs.” “Ugh,” she muttered. “I didn’t know there was a puppet show. I just hate puppets. Why don’t we go and talk somewhere else?”

  “I think puppets are rather charming,” I said, watching her closely. I was correct. I had to be correct.

  “Macaroni! They’re creepy. Cut to the chase, girls. I don’t have all day and, let’s be frank, neither do you. Fact is, I saw a paddy wagon on my way here—pointed in this direction.”

  Uh-oh.

  “Why was Rudy’s bedroom window open that afternoon?” I asked, keeping my voice down although it was probably unnecessary, since everyone was engrossed in the three pigs. “That’s how we heard your argument so clearly, you know.”

  “Oh. That. That was because I’d been smoking in the bedroom earlier and it always made Rudy absolutely ratty. He hates—hated—the smell.”

  “Except … I’ve never seen you smoking a cigarette,” I said.

  “What did you say?”

  “You frequently mention a hankering for a cigarette,” I said, “and I’ve seen you with a certain gold lighter in your hand, but I have never actually seen you smoking.”

  Coral’s beautiful elfin face hardened, her lips thinning to a knife’s edge. “Well, you don’t really know me very well, do you? I shouldn’t have come here to meet you. You girls
are cuckoo.” She spun on her heel and strode away across the green.

  Berta and I followed.

  “What is this about cigarettes and lighters?” Berta asked me, breathless.

  “You’ll see.”

  Coral crossed Church Street and glided along the sidewalk, forcing everyone in her path to veer away. We lost sight of her as a motorcar rumbled past. When it had gone, she was nowhere to be seen.

  “Where is she?” I said.

  “Perhaps she went into the Old Whaler’s Inn.”

  “No—look. There she is. She’s going into the alleyway beside Flintock’s Groceries.”

  We crossed the street, hurried along the sidewalk, and turned into the narrow cobbled alleyway. Coral was almost at the end, where it opened out onto another street.

  “I know how you killed Rudy,” I called after her. My voice echoed off the silver-shingled buildings.

  Coral’s shoulders hunched. She stopped, and turned. “I haven’t the foggiest what you’re getting at, sweetie,” she called back.

  “You’re a ventriloquist.”

  “Ah!” Berta murmured. “A ventriloquist.”

  Coral’s face pinched, but she didn’t run.

  “You and Glenn Monroe grew up together, didn’t you?” I said. Berta and I were five paces off, then four, then three. We stopped. “Your families worked in vaudeville and puppet theater—something a lot like Menchen’s Manikins, I’m guessing? What luck that we happened to see them today—it has made everything snap into place for me. Both you and Glenn learned how to produce sound effects and to expertly imitate voices. Glenn was your oldest friend—your only friend, as far as I can make out. He knew too much, didn’t he? He knew what you’d done to Rudy, or he was close to figuring it out, so you poisoned his Alkacine. Your heart must be icy indeed to have been able to kill your only friend.”

  Berta said, “Perhaps, Mrs. Woodby, we should save the philosophizing for a different time. Regarding the cigarettes—”

  “Mrs. Lundgren and I found a fragment of golden paper outside the conservatory,” I said, “and we believed it to be the discarded wrapping of either stick greasepaint or artist’s oil pastels. No. It was from a firecracker.”

  Berta and Coral both gasped.

  “An awfully basic theatrical sound effect,” I said, “one that we should’ve caught on to much earlier.”

  Coral stood frozen.

  “But why don’t we start at the beginning,” I said. “When you caused Rudy to leave the hunting party and return to the house when he realized—perhaps you pointed it out?—that he did not have his lucky rabbit’s foot with him. He hurried back to the house and you followed, claiming that he’d need help finding it. You followed him up to his room and shot him in the head. Everyone in the house heard the shot, but we all thought it was something else. A meat mallet or a champagne cork or a different gunshot from the hunting party in the field. Then, as Rudy lay dead, you employed your ventriloquist’s skills to feign an argument with Rudy. You played both parts, Coral. Then you set up Rudy’s suicide note, placed a door key on the floor just by the door, left the room, and locked it from the outside with a second key. When the police broke down the door, they assumed it was locked from the inside and that they knocked the key to the floor. Once again, misdirection. You’re awfully clever at misdirection, Coral. So clever, we never even considered the possibility that you could be the killer.”

  “Oh shut up, you thick-ankled little meddler,” Coral snarled.

  “After that, you went down the back stairs and into the conservatory, lit a firecracker with that gold lighter of yours—the firecracker must have had a very long and slow-burning fuse, to buy you a minute or so to get away and establish your alibi before the explosion. You hurried to the drawing room—unknowingly passing Glenn in the study on the way—and encountered Mrs. Lundgren and me there. Very soon after that, we heard what we believed to be the fatal gunshot.”

  “And,” Berta said, eyes agleam with comprehension, “since Clementine Brezka happened to open one of the drawing room windows a few minutes earlier, we also smelled gunpowder, which we mistakenly attributed to the fact that Rudy’s bedroom window, just above us, had also been open.”

  “Then there’s the treasure,” I said. “You capitalized on the legend of the Montgomery treasure to distract us even further from the truth. More misdirection. You planted that book, Lost Treasures of the United States, in Glenn Monroe’s valise, knowing that it would be found after he died, and that people might begin to wonder if his death—and Rudy’s—was really to do with the treasure. And I admit, Mrs. Lundgren and I bought it. At least for a time. You were the ghost, too. You did all that theatrical moaning and groaning, you pushed me at the top of the stairs, and you hit me on the head with the rock out in the forest. You overheard Lord Sudley arranging to meet me to spy on the Isobel Bradford impostor at her holiday cottage, and you followed us. Were you wearing that smashing cream-colored coat last night, too? But here’s the bit I haven’t completely worked out yet. You had an accomplice—you must have had. Someone who fired that first shot, out with the hunting party, to disguise the one that actually killed Rudy. It was Lord Sudley, wasn’t it, Coral? Rudy’s bedroom window must have been open so that you could signal to each other, time the gunshots precisely. The one thing I can’t understand is your motive, though. You didn’t seem to gain much from killing Rudy. You weren’t even in his will. Was it jealousy on Lord Sudley’s part, and revenge on your side?”

  The purr of an engine drew all our eyes to the far end of the alleyway. An ink-black motorcar—was that a Duesenberg or a Rolls-Royce?—rolled to a stop.

  “Someone’s here to get you,” I said to Coral.

  “Wrong. Someone’s here to get you.” Coral whipped a pistol from her handbag and pressed it to Berta’s cheek.

  29

  “I’m just like a lioness, sweeties,” Coral said. “I go for the weakling in the herd.” She smiled at Berta. “And that’s you, old lady. Now, you’re going to get into that motorcar, or you’re toast. Go on. March!”

  Berta shuffled toward the motorcar.

  “You, too!” Coral barked at me.

  I followed Berta, with Coral just behind us.

  It was a Rolls-Royce. I couldn’t see who was behind the wheel. Lord Sudley? Miss Murden? Theo? Clementine?

  “Go on,” Coral said. “Get in, or I’ll shoot.”

  “Murder in broad daylight?” I said. “That isn’t really your style.”

  “There won’t be any witnesses. Every last yokel in town is watching that puppet show.”

  Berta opened the door and climbed in. Coral nudged me inside, too, the snout of her gun on my neck.

  No one else was in the backseat. And behind the wheel was …

  “Mwinyi?” I gasped.

  Of course. Mwinyi. He had fired that shot, after all. Eustace was innocent.

  Doughnuts churned in my stomach. I may have cracked the case, but Berta and I had played right into these villains’ hands! First, Berta must’ve given Mwinyi the idea to lie about Lord Sudley firing that gunshot, during their telephone conversation this morning. And then when I’d telephoned Coral, I cemented her suspicions that we knew too much.

  That we had to be eliminated.

  Mwinyi was popping open the glove box, taking out …

  Another gun.

  Beside me, Berta was rigid with fright. I didn’t feel precisely happy-go-lucky myself.

  Coral climbed in beside me and slammed the door. “Only the old one,” she said to Mwinyi. “I don’t want to have to drag both of them around.”

  What did that mean?

  Mwinyi leaned over the seat and thumped Berta across the temple with his gun. She uttered “ouff,” and sagged against the window.

  “You monsters!” I cried. “Berta!” I shook her. “Berta!”

  No answer. Her eyes were shut, and blood trickled from her hairline. But she was breathing. Still breathing.

  “Drive,” Coral sa
id without inflection.

  The motorcar rolled forward.

  “Help!” I screamed. “HELP!” But the streets of Carvington were deserted; everyone was on the village green, and—

  “Shut up,” Coral said. “And if you try to make a break for it, I’m killing the old bird.”

  “Where are you taking us?”

  “That’s a good question, sweetie.” To Mwinyi, she said, “Let’s go to Theo’s mud pit out in the woods. The one he’s finished with.” She leaned back on the seat. “Those stupid mud pits could hold a dozen bodies each.”

  “There is something the matter with you,” I said. “You’re missing something.”

  “Yeah, it’s called a heart, honey. I was only about three years old when my mother told me I was born without one. You know what? It suits me just fine. I look around at all you other women with your sniveling noses and bleeding hearts, and I think, whew, lucky me. ’Cause without a heart, there’s nothing that can stop me from getting to the top. I’ve always used men to get what I want—you oughta try it sometime, Lola. It’s easier than plugging away yourself. Make them do the grunt work, that’s what I say. They’re all a bunch of lunkheads who think girls are like game—hunt ’em down, bag ’em, and move on to the next. So I thought, heck, I’ll beat them at their little sport. I’ll hunt them.”

  I watched Mwinyi’s rigid shoulders, the back of his curly head with the chauffeur’s cap as he motored swiftly along the main road. He was aiding and abetting a murderess—and, quite frankly, a crackpot. Why?

  Coral seemed to read my thoughts. “It wasn’t until Rudy hired Mwinyi last spring that I found a man who’s my equal, a man who is also willing to do whatever it takes to get to the top. I had been thinking of trying to get my claws into Rudy, matrimonially speaking, even though it seemed like a lost cause. But then, once we were all in Africa, I started dreaming really big. Why not have a sheik like Mwinyi, a pile of raw diamonds—Mwinyi stole those from a fellow in Africa—and the Montgomery fortune? Shouldn’t the spoils go to the girl who’s clever enough to figure out how to take it all?”