Date for Murder

by Louis Trimble

  “Mind, Chief?”

  “Hell,” the Chief said, “you met lots of these kind of people where you come from. I expect you might get some ideas, huh.”

  Mark took the wandering compliment for what it was worth. He turned when Idell came from the breakfast room with Bayless, and looked at her suggestively. She took the key from her shirt pocket and handed it to him.

  “Thanks,” he said. “Miss Manders was smart enough to lock Link’s door, Chief, after she realized it was murder.”

  “Messed everything up, huh?” The Chief showed his distrust for women.

  “I think not,” Mark said. He explained how she had kept from disturbing prints on the doorknob. They started upstairs, Idell and Bayless behind them.

  Leona remained in the breakfast room, apparently occupied with her own thoughts.

  “Who is that dame?” the Chief asked, glancing back. “And who all was at this party last night? The way these rich people carry on don’t make sense half the time.”

  “Leona Taylor,” Mark said in answer to the first question. “New York showgirl, I think. A friend of Link’s and of Grant Manders. I don’t know much about her. The party was made up of the people here—you’ll meet them soon enough—and Myra Cartwright.”

  “Myra, huh?” the Chief said, sounding wise. “She go home?”

  “I took her home.”

  “Yeah? What time?”

  Mark grinned at the Chief’s tone. “About four. I got back to the station before four-thirty.”

  “I’ll ask Babe,” the chief said, but his tone told Mark he didn’t mean it. “What were you doing up here, huh?”

  Mark wondered just how much he should tell the Chief about the shooting. He decided it would all come out sooner or later and it was best to hide nothing.

  “Idell Manders pulled into my station about one this morning, for gas,” he said. “She bought two gallons. A car came off the Palm Springs highway as she drove past it and shot at her. They turned and started chasing her, so I got in the jalopy and followed.” He said it slowly, using the slow drawl he had cultivated. “I found her hiking back about a half mile this side of Coachella. She can tell you the rest of it.”

  “Shot at her, huh!” The Chief didn’t sound overly surprised. “I tell you these rich folks are nuts,” he added, lowering his voice on the off chance Idell quite a ways below might hear him. “Hit anything?”

  “Got the top of the car once,” Mark said. “She set the throttle and jumped out. Skinned herself up, but not badly.”

  “You see the guy chasing her?”

  “Not very well. It was a black convertible sedan. The plates were dusted over. It was a foreign-sounding exhaust, deep and powerful.”

  “What happened to her car?” the Chief wanted to know.

  “It wasn’t her car,” Mark said with heavy emphasis. “It was Link’s.”

  The Chief stopped in the middle of the hallway and said, “Huh?” He sounded surprised. He took a stubby cigar out of his mouth and bit off the end. He put the cigar back in his pocket and began to chew with a steady, cow-like rhythm. “Mistook her for him, huh?”

  “I hope so,” Mark said so fervently that the Chief glanced at him.

  The Chief waited until Idell reached the landing.

  He pointed to a phone on a stand by the head of the stairs. “This hooked up?”

  “Go ahead,” she nodded.

  He called his office and gave sharp orders to the man there to go out and haul in the convertible. Idell gave him its description; she didn’t know the license number, only that it was New York registered. When the Chief had finished, he came back to where Mark stood idly puffing his pipe.

  “Which room is which here, huh?” the Chief demanded.

  Idell pointed west along the broad hall. “On this side,” she said, indicating the side where the stairs opened into the hall, “the far end room is empty; Clinton Jeffers used that bath. It opens into the hallway as well as the room. Next to that is Chunk Farman, and next to him his cousin, Maybelle. That door next to the stairs is a linen closet. Then on this side of the stairway is Link’s room. Next to it is an empty, and then Uncle Frank.”

  “All these others private baths?” the Chief asked.

  “Yes. The bath between Clint’s room, on the far end across the hall, and Leona’s, next to it, she uses altogether. Next to her is Grant’s room, and then mine right there. That door opens into a storage closet between my room and the Major’s suite. It goes all the way to the far end.”

  “All right, Bayless,” said the Chief, “might as well start waking ‘em.” He went to Link’s door and inserted the key.

  The lock clicked over, and the Chief took his handkerchief and gripped the outer edge of the knob. Fingerprints on a doorknob were usually inside where a man’s fingers would grasp to turn. The door wouldn’t open.

  “Stuck?” Mark asked.

  The Chief shook his head. “It wasn’t locked,” he said, turning the key back. The door opened easily. “I thought it turned backward before.”

  “Are you sure you locked this door?” Mark called to Idell. She was standing in front of Maybelle’s door, and she turned and walked up to them.

  “Quite positive,” she said. “I tried the knob after I turned the key.” She edged into the room behind Mark and the Chief. “Look, Mark!”

  Mark looked. She was pointing to the nightstand beside the head of the bed. The bed itself was to the right of the door, the head butting the hall wall, and the nightstand between it and the door.

  “That package of dates!” she said excitedly. “It wasn’t there before.”

  Chapter VIII

  MARK stroked his chin and idiotically found himself thinking he needed to shave. The Chief looked at Idell and then back to the nightstand. The excitement in her voice was too obvious to ignore.

  “What dates?” the Chief demanded. “What you mean they wasn’t there before?”

  Idell pointed to the nightstand. A cellophane-wrapped pound package of dates with a little sticker in the center proclaiming them to be Manders’ finest was there with the opened end facing away from the bed. Other than that, the table held only an ashtray containing cigaret butts and a half dozen pits, and an empty whiskey glass. Mark noticed that approximately a half dozen of the dates had been removed from the opened end of the package.

  “As I told you,” Idell said, “after I called Mark I came up here. Everything was just as it is now except there were no dates on the table.”

  “And that was funny, huh?” the Chief deduced wisely.

  “I thought so,” she explained. “Link always ate a package a day at least, and there were only a few pits in the ashtray and no dates at all. It made me feel that—” She stopped and looked at Mark.

  He said to the Chief, “Idell thinks someone poisoned Link’s dates.”

  The Chief grunted and stared at the nightstand. “Yeah,” he said. “Bayless, take this package and hold it. Fingerprints show good on that cellophane. We’ll analyze them dates and see if they got cyanide.” He bobbed his head as if in agreement with himself.

  Mark said, “I don’t think you’ll find any cyanide in those dates, Chief. My guess is that our murderer took the poisoned ones and destroyed them. After Idell went downstairs he came back here and put these here to sidetrack suspicion. Also, they were fixed to make it look like the original package. Notice that six have been taken out and there are six pits in the ashtray.”

  The Chief cocked his head at Mark. “You said ‘he,’ speaking of the murderer. You got any ideas, huh?”

  Mark grinned. “Simply a habit, Chief. A woman could have put the poison there too.” He hesitated and then added, “But a woman couldn’t very well have dragged him out to the pool. He was a big man.”

  “Okay,” the Chief said. “And I suppose you’ll say ‘cause the package is turned away from the bed that’s a clue too, huh?”

  “Possibly,” Mark admitted. “But I’ll bet you a double Scotch at Mic
key’s there isn’t any poison in these dates.”

  “And that the autopsy’ll show poisoned dates undigested in Link’s stomach, huh?”

  “I’ll add that too,” Mark said. “He wouldn’t have had time to digest them after that cyanide hit him. My guess is that maybe alternate dates in each row were poisoned, and he ate five before he came to the one that held any. When he got that—it was all over.”

  Idell shuddered a little at the picture Mark’s words brought before her. The Chief smiled sympathetically at her. “You can go with Bayless, now, Miss Manders, if you will.”

  After she and Bayless left the room, the Chief closed the door carefully and walked to the windows. He raised the shades, letting the morning light flood into the semi-gloom of the room. “Better,” he grunted.

  Mark looked around. At first there seemed to have been little disturbance, but a closer inspection showed differently. The bed had been disturbed but little; it was across the room by the dresser and in the closet that signs of a search showed most clearly. Mark went to the dresser and drew open the drawers. Inside, Link’s clothing was balled and bunched as if someone had run through it swiftly. The Chief followed Mark, grunting when he saw the condition of the drawers and the angle at which the dresser scarf lay.

  “This guy had something somebody wanted, huh?” he surmised.

  “I guess,” Mark said. He opened the closet door. The Chief whistled in surprise. The closet looked as if a whirlwind had struck it, a particularly vicious, compact whirlwind. The clothing lay on the floor—the linings torn out of suits and coats, the inner soles removed from shoes, the heels taken off them, and even the sweatbands ripped from three lightweight Panama hats. The suitcases and the single trunk which the closet held were as badly treated.

  “That,” Mark said, “is what is known as chaos.”

  The Chief nodded. “There ought to be prints laying around after this. I wonder if whoever it was got what they was after?”

  “Evidently,” Mark said. He led the way back to the bed. “The mattress isn’t ripped up. It would have been had the search gone on any more.”

  “Or unless they got interrupted,” the Chief suggested.

  “There’s that,” Mark admitted.

  “The floor ain’t scratched,” the Chief mused. “He was carried out, not dragged.”

  “Out into the hall, down the stairs and out the back?” Mark asked. “It was a pretty big risk.”

  The Chief looked around for a place to spit, located the wastebasket by the dresser and peered in. It was empty. He made the metal side ring with a mass of brown tobacco juice. “He didn’t fly out and tie himself up,” he said.

  There was a rap on the door, and the Chief opened it carefully. Bayless stood in the corridor, sweat streaming from his heavy red face.

  “They’re all downstairs,” he reported. “All but young Manders. He’s dead to the world. His sister says he passed out last night.”

  “I can believe it,” Mark said. “He was well on his way when I saw him.”

  The Chief shifted his tobacco from one cheek to the other. “They all asleep when you got to ‘em?”

  Bayless said, “All but the Farman boy,” in a suspicious-sounding voice. “He had his clothes on already.”

  “How was his hair?” Mark asked. “I mean was it wet like he had been swimming?”

  Bayless looked as if he wanted to remember but wasn’t having much luck. “It’s black and he wears it plastered on his head,” he said. “But I couldn’t say if it was wet or just held down with grease.”

  The Chief scratched his round cheek with a stubby finger. “Nobody else was awake, huh? You got ‘em all out of bed.”

  “All but Mr. Manders,” Bayless said. “He’s right at the end of the hall. I was trying to wake him when the Queen came up and did it herself.” He grinned half-heartedly at the recollection. “She said I was making too much noise and that he was a sick man. She wouldn’t let me wake up young Manders, neither.”

  “She’s a busybody if I ever saw one when it comes to this family,” the Chief grunted. “Okay; fix the library up. I’m going to start asking questions.”

  Bayless’ footsteps had hardly began to move down the stairs when a pair of lighter, more swiftly moving ones were heard coming up. Mark and the Chief stepped to the doorway to see a light, thin young man with a wispy blond moustache propel himself toward them in brief jerks. He carried a black bag in one hand.

  “It’s about time, Doc,” the Chief said. “Take it easy; there ain’t no hurry on this case.”

  Dr. Nesbit stopped and wiped perspiration from his high forehead. In spite of his life in this desert country, he was very pale. To Mark he had always been a local seven day wonder. Where everyone else lolled, Dr. Nesbit bustled; where they grew tanned he seemed to grow more pallid.

  “You said to come up here right away,” he said. “I couldn’t—obstetrics case, very important—but I made it as fast as possible.” He spoke in explosive sentences. “What’s the trouble?”

  Mark said, “Before we go down, Chief, how about a look at Grant Manders?”

  The Chief regarded him owlishly. “Think he might be faking, huh?”

  “It’s a chance,” Mark conceded.

  “What is this?” the Doctor demanded. “Is there someone ill? Come, Chief, I haven’t all day.”

  Mark grinned. “Down the hall, Doc. Take it easy; it’s hot.”

  “Bah! Hot! Only two heat prostration cases this week.” He sounded put out.

  The Chief wagged his head and led the way down the hall to the door of Grant Manders’ room. He put one hand on the knob and then dropped it. “The Queen ain’t around anywhere, is she?”

  Mark glanced toward the stairs. “Not that I can hear,” he grinned.

  The Chief turned the knob, and the door opened. The three men went quietly inside; Mark closed the door behind them. The room was quite large, with one side hidden by opened decorative screens. The bed stood against the far wall, between the bath and the French doors opening onto the balcony. Grant Manders lay out at full length, completely relaxed, his lips blowing and falling with his heavy breathing. His body, clothed only in the bottoms of a pair of blue silk pajamas, was damp with sweat in spite of the air-conditioning, and his brown hair was plastered in locks over his forehead. His eyes were closed loosely.

  “What is supposed to be the matter with him?” Dr. Nesbit demanded, bustling up to the bed.

  “He got drunk and passed out last night,” the Chief said. “We want to know if he’s still so full of liquor he can’t wake up.”

  Dr. Nesbit shrugged. “I’ll see what I can do.” He bent over Grant and carefully raised one eyelid with the ball of his thumb. He peered into the exposed eye, moving his body so light from the windows fell across Grant’s face. “He is quite drunk,” he said. He bent and sniffed at Grant’s breath as it blew outward. “But it certainly didn’t occur last night.”

  “Four this morning,” Mark said.

  “Nonsense,” the Doctor snapped. “This man hasn’t been in this condition over three hours or so. Possibly since seven o’clock. Merely an estimate, of course, but a fairly close one.” He removed his thumb and let the eyelid slide back into place. Grant Manders didn’t even turn over. “This is a much more recent case than the one you mentioned. Sometime between then and now he has had more to drink, a good deal more.”

  The Chief sucked in his breath. “You mean he might have woke up and then got himself drunk again?”

  “Certainly. I mean he did just that—or someone did it for him.”

  Mark said, “I wonder if he could have faked it last night, Chief?”

  “He isn’t faking now,” Dr. Nesbit assured them.

  The Chief spotted the wastebasket and spit into it from ten feet away. He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. “I’ll damn soon find out if he was. Let’s go downstairs. The body’s out there, Doc.”

  Chapter IX

  DR. NESBIT blinked in the brig
ht sunlight as he bent over Link’s remains. He looked quizzically at the Chief, a half grin on his face. “Who covered the corpus delicti, Chief?”

  “Idell did,” Mark answered.

  The doctor lifted the candy-striped towel which draped the corpse’s middle and dropped it quickly. “She could have gone upstairs for a sheet; much more fitting to cover the face.”

  The Chief snickered. “I’ll tell her, Doc. Now, what’s the verdict?”

  Dr. Nesbit shrugged and turned toward a splash of shade closer to the house. He stopped there, the others beside him, and lit a cigaret. “I know little more than you, Chief. It was cyanide, of course. Any infant can tell that As to the time of his death—” he waved his cigaret at the Chief’s rotund face—”I can only guess now. Say between five and eight. Close to seven. Merely a guess, though. I’ll know more after an autopsy, naturally.”

  “Okay,” the Chief said. “They can haul him away any time.”

  Mark grinned half-heartedly at the Chief. “Now what?”

  “Now I got to ask all these people a lot of fool questions,” the Chief said, “and get a lot of fool answers. If I can guess who’s lying and who ain’t, then I win.”

  “What’s the prize?” Mark grinned.

  “There ain’t no first prize. Booby prize goes to the loser—the gas chamber, I hope.”

  The Chief chose the library for his questioning. It was a small room bulging off the east side of the living room, and was fitted quite comfortably with leather easy chairs grouped around a fireplace. The fire had lain dead in it for some time, and would remain that way.

  The Chief swung one chair around so it faced two others. He sat down, Mark beside him. After a moment Bayless ambled into the room and blinked expectantly at the Chief.

  “You want the Farman kid?” Bayless asked him.

  Mark was surprised when the Chief shook his head. “Not for a while. Anybody else.” He spit into the fireplace, turning slightly to face it.

  Bayless brought in Clinton Jeffers. He was in a lightweight dressing gown with light tan silk pajamas showing underneath. Both were tailored to set off his broad shoulders and slim hips. He was still very much the athlete, moving quietly and surely across the floor to the chair indicated by the Chief. His yellow hair had been quickly brushed and stood out from his temples in short tufts, and sleep still clung to his heavy-lidded blue eyes. He stifled a yawn and grinned apologetically.