Date for Murder

by Louis Trimble

  “Where is she?” he demanded excitedly. “Where is she now?”

  The Chief’s expression said he thought Mark crazy. “In the kitchen, I guess. Dinner ain’t been over much more’n a half hour.”

  “Come on,” Mark said.

  He led the way hastily down the stairs and along the hallway into the kitchen. Sing was alone in the kitchen, checking over a list of groceries and humming a whiny Chinese dirge to himself. “Please?” he said.

  “Cut it,” Mark said. “Where’s Catrina, Sing?”

  Sing grinned, showing mostly wrinkled gum. “She went home,” he said.

  “I hope she got there,” Mark said. “Is her father there?” he asked as an afterthought.

  “He went to Indio for some beer,” the Chief said. “Somebody told Grant he was low on beer, and so Grant sent the old man as usual to do his shopping. He could have ordered it today if he hadn’t been so drunk …” He rambled on in his usual vein about the crazy rich people.

  Mark said impatiently, “To hell with the beer. The old man would have to go at a time like this. Come on!”

  Chapter XV

  NO ONE answered Mark’s knock, and the Chief said thickly, “Break the damned door down. I’ll take the responsibility.”

  Mark wasted no more time. He slipped a shoe from his foot quickly and smashed the heel against the glass. It shattered, and he continued to hit it until he had a hole large enough for his arm. He reached down and felt for the key. There was none.

  “Christ!” he said. His breath came heavily as he slipped into his shoe, backed off and lunged forward. His shoulder jarred and pain raced through him, bursting in his head. He smashed again, and the lock gave. The Chief raised his foot and kicked, and the door flew open, banging noisily against the wall.

  Mark plunged into the room, then stopped. “The shower,” he said. “Hear it?”

  “Hell, yes,” the Chief said. “With that and the damned radio, it’s a bughouse.” He plodded after Mark toward the bathroom, which was in the tiny hallway, separating the two bedrooms. Mark hammered on the door.

  “Catrina! Catrina!” he called.

  There was only the sound of the shower. Cursing, he tried the door. It opened easily beneath his hand, and they both entered the room. The light was off, and Mark’s fingers fumbled agonizingly over the wall before they found the switch.

  When the light flooded the small enameled bathroom both men had themselves set for a shock. The sight of the shower curtain made Mark feel anticlimatic. He hesitated but an instant, then stepped forward and jerked back the curtain.

  “Lord!” The Chief spoke in a hoarse whisper.

  Mark looked away after an instant’s scrutiny. Catrina lay in the tub, on her face, and water had flooded up so that her head and nose were buried beneath it. On the back of her head, showing through her red hair, was a nasty bruise. Mark looked again before he examined the bathroom. One heel had caught in the drain spout, keeping the water from running down to the sewer and causing it to back and flood the tub. A mashed cake of soap lay near the foot, looking oddly angular beneath the water, which had already risen to a level with her ears, causing her hair to float out and away from her head.

  Mark thought of Idell: “I saw him—his face so awful and his hair streaming out …” He compressed his lips.

  He bent and raised one of Catrina’s eyelids. She was beyond hope.

  “Poor kid,” the Chief said. “They say more people get killed in the home than any place else.”

  “What do you do when you take a bath?” Mark asked sarcastically. “How do you dry yourself, with a hot air blower?”

  The Chief looked around. “Lord,” he said, “no towel.”

  “No towel and no mat,” Mark said pointedly.

  “Catrina was killed because she had seen the murderer, Chief. Now let’s figure that angle.”

  They went soberly into the living room. The Chief spied the house phone and picked it up. He said, “Get me Bayless, Queen … Bayless, come out back to the gardener’s shack right away. Leave Henderson there.”

  Mark sat on the sofa and packed his pipe in slow thoughtfulness. He rose and switched off the radio and then paced the floor slowly. He knew what was in his mind but he wanted to reconstruct it carefully before he spoke to the Chief. He said finally, “She went out this morning around nine to bury her bird. It was either that way and she met the murderer accidentally, or she was coming from here and spotted him and trailed him, thinking it was funny for a guy to be out with a spade, say, when everybody else was sleeping or talking to the cops.”

  The Chief’s eyes were narrowed in thought. He said shrewdly, “I get it. She spots this guy. She trails him; he sees her. They’re out in the open, cops within a few hundred yards. She can bellow; she doesn’t.”

  “Exactly,” Mark said. “She doesn’t. Why? Because he buys her off. We don’t know what he tells her; maybe we never will know. But he buys her off. And Catrina still doesn’t know it was murder. When she finds out she gets scared. When we question her she is all jittery. But she had this figured out. She has a dead canary, and it fits. She buries it in the garden, so if there is anything said that way there is protection so—” His voice trailed off. “Chief, when Bayless comes we’re going to take his flashlight and go digging.”

  “Grave robbing,” the Chief said knowingly.

  Mark grinned half-heartedly. “That’s the way I see it. We probably never will know just what happened, whether she was there with the bird first, or she spotted somebody and saw a chance for some coin. Anyway, thinking about it tonight gave her the jitters. She had the money but now she knew it was murder. If the police ever found out what she had done, she was in a spot. And she realized the murderer knew that too. Catrina couldn’t get rid of the money—she couldn’t erase things from her mind that way. She wasn’t smart enough to come to you; that seemed to her to be a worse deal than any. She came home and locked herself in the house. She turned on the radio and felt better. She started to fix herself something to eat. Somehow the murderer came in. I have an idea he pushed the key out of the inside of the door and used a pass key, like he did on Link’s room. None of the locks here are any good. Nobody uses locks in Indio, anyway. There isn’t enough thievery.”

  “Only down in Mex town they lock the doors,” the Chief grinned.

  Mark nodded. “So he came in, sneaked into the kitchen, grabbed her and carted her off to the bathroom. Maybe it was an inspiration—accident. But before it was all finished we burst in here. He ducked out the back door.”

  “So we check on who was missing from the house,” the Chief said.

  Mark grunted. “Maybe, but I think your murderer is too smart to get caught that way …” He broke off as Bayless came in. The Chief waved his man to a seat, and Mark went on, “This morning he managed to sneak out—if we’re right—and get back in again before Bayless wakened everybody.”

  “Farman!” Bayless said. “He was dressed.” He didn’t know what had happened, but since morning, when they had found Chunk Farman with his clothes on and his hair wet, Bayless had been convinced of his guilt.

  “Maybe,” Mark said. “Anyway, there are lots of stairs and outside stairways going off balconies in this house. It’s typical California Spanish that way. The groves come right up to the house on both sides. The murderer could have sneaked out that way this morning and circled around.”

  “Yeah,” the Chief objected, “but what about tonight?”

  Mark paused in his pacing long enough to light his pipe. “I don’t think he would have done it if an opportunity to get away by himself hadn’t shown up. He would have waited until later.”

  “Then Dad Curtis would have been back. Things fall into that murderer’s hands,” the Chief said.

  “Maybe he gets the breaks,” Mark said slowly. “Maybe he makes them. He’s clever, Chief. But he confuses the issue every time. Drowning a poisoned man. Making this look like an accident. He’ll trip up.”

  Bayle
ss had his mouth open. “You mean Catrina’s dead?”

  “Murdered,” the Chief said. “Drowned in the bathtub.”

  Bayless looked ill for a moment. “Gee,” he said hollowly. “She was a swell piece, too.”

  Mark waved the Chief to his feet. “I think Bayless had better stay here in case Dad Curtis comes back.”

  “Yeah,” the Chief said. “Send him to the house, will you? Keep him out of here for a while. The old guy’s liable to go nuts if he sees her like that.”

  “Sure,” Bayless said. “Sure, I’ll send him over to Queen. She can handle him.”

  The Chief took Bayless’ flashlight and followed Mark outside. At Mark’s suggestion he puddled the light into the tool shed long enough for Mark to get a spade. Then they went along the path to the angle, and down the west pathway almost to the end of the grove.

  Dried grasses were around their ankles there, but there were cleared spots between some of the evenly rowed trees. Around the circles surrounding the trees themselves was baked sand, showing where Dad Curtis had irrigated that day. It was in a cleared spot, out of the path of the water, that Mark found the little wooden gravestones Catrina had mentioned. They were chips of shingles or plain pine board, and each one had pencil marks scrawled on it. He bent and flashed the light on them.

  “Toby, died in the spring,” he read. “Timothy, died in the summer. Two years old.” Mark got up from his knees. “This is it,” he said. “Timothy was the canary.”

  He took the shovel and started to dig. A foot beneath the top his spade touched something resilient. After a moment more he uncovered a shoe box and lifted it from the ground. The Chief took the lid off, and both stared at the contents. It was a tiny yellow canary, lying on his back on a bed of cotton batting, his claw-like feet held against his chest and face upward. Mark dropped the lid on the box again. That tiny creature lying there seemed symbolic; it was as pathetic as Catrina in the tub, although much more peaceful.

  Mark went to work again in silence. He dug more carefully, and after a moment his shovel struck something that crinkled. “Got it,” he said. “This proves it, Chief. It was a clever dodge. Planting the canary on top that way would stop anyone normally from digging farther.”

  When he straightened, he held two things in his hand beneath the yellow circle of the flashlight rays. One was a package of dates, sand-covered, with a half dozen taken from the open end of the package. The other was a cheap hypodermic needle without fluid in the barrel.

  “Okay,” the Chief said. “I guess you’re right, Mark. These’ll probably show plenty of cyanide. An’ that needle—that’s the works.”

  Mark said, half aloud, “I wonder if anyone has any money that smells like Catrina.”

  “Smells like her?”

  Mark grinned. “Her perfume, I mean. She carried the money in her brassiere.”

  “Yeah, unless she hid it before she got bumped—took it out herself.”

  “I don’t think so,” Mark said. He went to work replacing the shoe box and refilling the grave and finally sticking the wooden marker deftly back into the sand.

  “Rest in peace,” he said; he was thinking of Catrina Curtis.

  “Somebody ain’t going to,” the Chief said grimly. “We’re going back to that house and tear it apart. Some guy’s going to find he wasn’t so damned smart after all.”

  Chapter XVI

  BY THE time they reached the house the Chief’s grimness had been replaced by an assumed worried air. He ambled into the living room and dropped into a convenient chair. Idell sat alone, curled on a divan, sipping at a cool frosted glass. Mark tried to relax the muscles that had tensed his mouth into an angry line, but he found it difficult.

  “Where is everybody, huh?” the Chief demanded.

  Idell shrugged. “I don’t know,” she said. “Myra wandered off somewhere, and Leona pled a headache and went upstairs.” She smiled a little too brightly. “Everyone seems to get headaches at our house, don’t they?” She got up and, at a nod from the Chief, brought them both glasses and stubbies of beer. “We’re about out,” she said, “but Dad Curtis should be back with more soon.”

  The Chief said, “Yeah. ‘Scuse me.” He rose and moved ponderously from the room.

  Mark said to Idell, “You say Dad Curtis went to town?”

  “Those two are the last bottles of beer,” she said. “Clint asked Dad to run in for more—he said he felt beery tonight.” She laughed a little. It was not a natural sound to Mark’s ears.

  Mark could think of nothing to say, and there was a short silence, broken by the Chief’s heavy-footed return. He spoke to Mark in a low voice.

  “I told the Queen so she can take care of the old man. She was pretty upset. I called the Doc again, too.”

  “I imagine Queen took it hard,” Mark said. He drained his glass and poured more beer into it, slowly and carefully so as not to get too much head. “I suppose you want to get them all in here?”

  Idell was looking curiously at them. “What happened? Anything serious?”

  Mark smiled automatically. The Chief answered “Catrina’s been killed. Where were you this last half hour, huh?”

  Idell gasped, and then her eyes blazed at him. “You think I killed her?” She looked more worried than angry, Mark thought. Too worried to attempt banter.

  “This is routine,” the Chief said in a complaining voice. “We got to ask questions.”

  Idell relaxed very little. “Sorry,” she said. “I was in here.” Her eyes expressed horror.

  “And the others?”

  “Myra and Leona left just after you did,” she said. “Grant went to bed with a book, you know. I suppose Chunk and Clint are still playing pool in the game room downstairs.”

  “What about your uncle?” the Chief asked. He sipped at his beer almost delicately, his eyes watching her over the top of the glass.

  “He came in a few moments ago and went into the library,” she replied.

  The Chief sighed and got to his feet. “I guess we might as well start asking,” he said sadly. “Seems a man don’t get no rest at all around here.” Mark followed him into the hall and nearly to the kitchen where the door leading to the basement game room was situated. There was a light above the stairway, and when they reached the bend and turned they could see the room was brilliantly lighted. The pool table, the holes now chocked for billiards, was a green carpet beneath its shaded lamp. Chunk Farman was completing a short run. He missed as they stepped to the hardwood floor, and stepped back with a grin.

  “All yours, Clint.”

  Jeffers was standing across the room by a radio. Myra was with him, and they were dancing without moving from one spot. He dropped his arms from around her and moved toward the table. He stopped and raised his eyebrows quizzically when he saw Mark and the Chief.

  “Hello,” he said; “want a game of billiards?”

  Mark looked around him. The room was low-ceilinged, with beams running full length across it. On the walls, and over the mantle of a real fireplace, were pictures of ships and ships’ models. The floor was made for dancing, and in one corner a shuffleboard layout had been painted. Besides the pool table, a ping pong table was folded against one wall. A radio and rattan chairs and a divan completed the arrangement. Near the foot of the stairs a passageway led to the right, and a bar had been made by opening a closet door. It was very neat and compact.

  “No,” the Chief said in answer to Clint’s question, “We got some things to ask. You two been here all the time?”

  “If you mean since we came down,” Farman said, running his cue between his hands, “no.”

  “Yeah? Where’d you go?”

  Farman said, “Does it matter?”

  “It might,” the Chief answered warily. “Anyway, we got to ask.”

  Farman shrugged. “I left about half an hour ago and went up to see how May belle was getting on. She had a beastly sick headache. Migraine.”

  Mark murmured his sympathy for Maybelle’s af
fliction and asked, “Did anyone see you go up or come down?”

  Farman looked thoughtful, and poked the tip of his cue at a rough spot on the floor. “I don’t think so … Oh, yes. Leona was going into her room when I came out of Maybelle’s. She said she had a headache, too.”

  “When was that?”

  “About fifteen minutes ago,” Farman said. “Why? What’s so infernally mysterious now?”

  The Chief ignored him. He said to Jeffers, “What about you?”

  “I’ve been in here all the time,” he said. “Or around here, that is.”

  “What’d you do after Farman left, play by yourself?”

  Clint Jeffers shook his head. He was leaning against the table, looking cool in white palm beach clothes, his blond hair glistening with a light oil. “I mixed a drink while waiting for Chunk to come back.”

  “He was in here when you got here, huh?” the Chief said to Farman.

  “No. Myra and I came down together. I met her in the hall.” Farman grinned. “But he was here a minute later.”

  “Yeah? Where’d you go?”

  Clint Jeffers’ smile was lightly amused. “Right down the hall, Chief, to the second door. The first is a broom closet.”

  Myra’s laugh was almost mocking in Mark’s ears. “I heard the water running,” she said.

  The Chief reddened with embarrassment. “Why in hell didn’t you say so?” he complained to Jeffers.

  Mark looked at Chunk Farman. “How long were you gone?”

  “About twenty minutes,” he said. “Right, Clint?”

  “About,” Jeffers agreed. “What is this, Chief? Why the mystery?”

  The Chief said casually, too casually, “Catrina’s been murdered.”

  Mark’s eyes swept the trio: Myra standing idly by the radio playing with a knob; Jeffers leaning against the table; Farman poking his cue at the floor. All three stiffened, and Farman straightened with a tight gasp.

  “The maid, you mean?” Jeffers asked hoarsely.

  “The little redhead,” the Chief said. “Yeah.”

  “When?” Chunk Farman demanded. “Why?”