The Thursday Turkey Murders

by Craig Rice

  “And where did you come into the story of his life?” Bingo asked.

  “When I—” Something changed in her face. Suddenly she wasn’t quoting Uncle Fred any more. She said, “Grandfather was a good man. He was gentle. He didn’t want to make my mother marry my father, because he knew they wouldn’t be happy and stay married. My mother was very young, and my father had just come from Chicago, to work in a bank. But Grandfather was sort of afraid of Uncle Fred. So they got married, and my father disappeared, and I was born, and my mother ran away from home and nobody knows yet whatever happened to her. And Grandfather wanted to keep me out on his farm, but Uncle Fred said that was no place for me and he took me away and legally adopted me, when I was two years old.”

  Then all at once she was quoting again. “He did everything for me. In spite of the fact that his wife was sick and couldn’t do any work, and in spite of the fact that it cost so much to feed me and clothe me.”

  “If your uncle Fred’s wife was sick,” Bingo asked, “who did the housework?”

  “Oh, I did,” she said, “after I was old enough. One of his relatives—he wasn’t my real uncle, you know, Aunt Ella was my mother’s sister—well, this relative, a niece, I think, lived with us until I was about six, and then she ran away and got married. But after that Aunt Ella was able to tell me what to do around the house. I was glad to, because it was my duty.”

  Bingo said gravely, “I can see how you would feel deeply obligated to him.”

  “Huh?” Handsome said. “I don’t get it.”

  “I’ll explain it to you later,” Bingo said. “Go on, Henny. We got you up to the age of six now, doing the housework.”

  “I did it because I wanted to,” she said, almost angrily. “Because Uncle Fred had given me a home. He wouldn’t have forced me to.”

  “Of course not,” Bingo said. “What did he do when you disobeyed him, if you ever did?”

  “He shut me in the closet,” she said, “and talked to me through the door.”

  Bingo nodded. “I bet he talked about how you were born to be a bad girl because your mother was a bad woman and your father was a bad man, and there wasn’t any hope for you, but he was doing the best he could.”

  “How did you know?” It was a whisper, and she stared at him.

  “An uncle brought me up, too,” Bingo said. “But he didn’t get me early enough to make much impression.”

  “Bingo,” Handsome said unhappily, “I don’t get it. Here you go talking about some uncle of hers. But how did her picture get in the cigarette ads? There was one of her in a white sport blouse. It was on the back of the July 19th, 1940, issue of—”

  “We’re just getting to that,” Bingo said.

  She smiled suddenly at Handsome. All at once she looked and talked like a New York model. “That was always my favorite picture. Did you like it?”

  “Sure,” Handsome said. “Only, your hair should have been off your forehead more. I liked it better than the one in the December Vogue, in the black-lace negligee, or the one in the toothpaste ad. You look sort of silly with your teeth showing that much.”

  “Handsome’s a photographer,” Bingo said hastily. “Let’s get back to Uncle Fred. And the story of your life. It’s beginning to be interesting.”

  “Well,” she said, still being the New York model, “Grandfather died.” All of a sudden she was a scared little girl. Tears began to roll down her cheeks. “He wasn’t sick at all. He just died.”

  “Grandfathers do,” Handsome said. “I remember when Grandfather Kusak died. He had the swellest funeral there ever was in our block. Forty-seven cars.”

  She stopped crying. She blew her nose. “Well, anyway. My father came back. Because he’d found out Grandfather had died. I didn’t see him. Uncle Fred wouldn’t let me. But Aunt Ella heard them talking and she told me. There was a neighbor girl heard them, too, and she told everybody in the neighborhood. Uncle Fred knew that my father had changed his name, and robbed a bank of a lot of money. But my father was angry, because of the money.”

  “Money?” Bingo said. “I’m getting a little mixed up.”

  “The money my father had sent, to provide for me,” she said, as though Bingo should have known all the time. “He sent it to Grandfather, because, naturally, he didn’t know I wasn’t with Grandfather. And Uncle Fred had taken it and invested it for Grandfather. It was to be a surprise for Grandfather, to know that he had the money laid away for his old age.”

  “Oh,” Bingo said. “Tell me. How old was your grandfather when he died?”

  “He was old. Very old. He was sixty.”

  “And he’d never been sick before?”

  “No. Uncle Fred found him. He said it was a heart attack. Why?”

  “Just curiosity,” Bingo said. “And what happened then to the money your uncle Fred had invested for your grandfather?”

  “Why,” she said, “Naturally, it belonged to him. There wasn’t any other heir with a real claim. And, after all, he was entitled to it, considering all he’d done for me.”

  “Of course,” Bingo said. He was silent a moment. “It’s too bad your father didn’t see you when he made that visit.”

  She closed her eyes for an instant. She looked like an unhappy child. “It was for my own good. So I wouldn’t be corrupted by his influence. And, of course, he—my father—couldn’t do anything Uncle Fred didn’t want him to do, because he’d read about the bank robbery, and he’d recognized Father from the photographs. He threatened to call the police. Aunt Ella told me about it. My father demanded to see me. He wanted to take me away with him. Uncle Fred said that if my father would turn over to him the money he got in the bank robbery, he’d let me go with him.”

  Handsome whistled. Bingo said, “Your uncle Fred would of done O. K. running a racket.”

  “Oh, no,” she said. “No. You don’t understand. He explained it all to me later. He just wanted to find where the money was, so he could return it to its rightful owners. That was his way of doing it. Of course he wouldn’t have really let me go away with my father, to be exposed to all kinds of evil influences. He’d have found out about the money, and then turned my father over to the police.”

  Bingo said, “Look. Did anyone ever tell you that two and two make four?”

  “I don’t know what you mean.” She looked at him blankly.

  “Never mind,” Bingo said. “Let’s forget your uncle Fred. Anyway let’s try to forget him. Let’s talk about you. I bet your father felt sorry as the devil that he couldn’t see you.”

  This time she really began to cry. “I wish he had seen me. I wish he’d taken me away with him. The hell with the money. I wish I’d gotten here before he was murdered.” Uncle Fred was entirely out of her speeches now. “Those sons of bitches, those dirty bastard sons of bitches, I’d never seen him in my life, and they murdered him.”

  Uncle Fred would definitely not have approved of that speech, Bingo reflected. There was a gap to be filled in here, a gap between a girl in Uncle Fred’s household, and a girl in white sharkskin slacks and an Elizabeth Arden hair-do who used words that would have sent Uncle Fred running for yellow soap and a toothbrush.

  “Maybe I shouldn’t have run away from home,” she gasped. “But I had to. Because. The neighbor girls spilled everything that had been said, all over town. And everybody believed I knew where all that money was buried. And boys began to ask me out for dates. I was almost seventeen.”

  “Began to ask you for dates,” Bingo said. “Where had you been? Hidden under a basket? Or did you have braces on your teeth?”

  She giggled. She said, “Honest. I’d never been asked for a date before. I’d been out of school for a year because Uncle Fred said I couldn’t do the work around the house and go to school too. So I didn’t get around much. And I never could leave the house after supper. And when I was going to school I always had to be home at four-fifteen, and, anyway, I didn’t dress like the other girls—I was the only girl in my class that wore
ribbed cotton stockings—so nobody paid any attention to me.”

  Bingo looked at her. The red-and-white-striped jersey and the gorgeous girl that fitted it like plaster poured in a mold. The dusky black hair, loose over her lovely shoulders. The kind of mouth you dreamed about all your life and saw once in a lifetime. He tried to imagine anyone not paying a lot of attention to her. His imagination wouldn’t reach that far.

  “Well, anyway,” she said, “Herbie asked me for a date. No one ever had, before. I guess I told you that. His father was a grain broker with a lot of money, and Herbie had a swell car. All the girls in town were crazy about Herbie. So, I sneaked out of the house and met him. He was nice to me. He was very nice. He just took me for a drive and we talked. And he took me home and I climbed in through the bathroom window. The next day he met me when I was going to the grocery and he had a present for me. A pair of real silk stockings. And he asked me to go out with him that night. I know now it was wrong to go. I really knew then that it was wrong.”

  She closed her eyes. All at once her face was the face of a girl, almost seventeen, who’d never had dates before, and now was asked out by the most popular boy in town. “I borrowed a dress from a girl I knew, down the street, and a lipstick. I hid them under my pillow, and after supper I did the dishes and washed up the kitchen, and went upstairs and got dressed. I put on the silk stockings, and the dress, and lipstick, and I went out the bathroom window to meet him.”

  She shuddered. The look on her face changed. She went on, woodenly. “All this is leading up to the fact that I committed a sin, a terrible sin, that night. We went to a roadhouse. I’d never been to one, before. It was fun. I didn’t know how to dance, but it was fun, anyway. Then we went for a drive. Herbie kissed me. No one ever had, before. And then he asked me if I really knew where all that money was hidden, and why didn’t we run away and go find it. It all came over me like—well, like something comes over you. I’d been having such a good time. And he hadn’t really wanted to be with me at all, he just wanted to know where all that money was. I got out of the car and hid in the bushes. He looked for me, but he couldn’t find me. Then finally he drove off. I walked back to town, it was four or five miles, so it was pretty late when I got back, almost four o’clock. And Uncle Fred had found out I wasn’t home, and he was waiting for me when I got there.” She closed her eyes.

  “Never mind,” Bingo said hastily. “I can guess.”

  “I decided to run away,” she whispered, her eyes still closed. “He’d said—well, after what he said, I had to run away. I left the dress and lipstick on the doorstep of the girl I’d borrowed them from. And I walked to the next town and caught a bus. And then I caught a train in Chicago and went to New York.”

  Bingo said, “Yes, but how about this terrible sin you committed?”

  “I stole,” she said. “I stole eighty dollars. It was in Uncle Fred’s desk drawer. And I stole the clothes he’d bought and paid for, that I wore when I ran away. I’m a thief.” She looked up and said, “Let’s skip all that.”

  “It’s skipped,” Bingo said. “We’re in New York now, and you’re the world’s most beautiful model. Anything of importance that happened in between?”

  “Not much. I was broke when I got to New York. Oh, I had about three or four dollars. I slept in the railroad station for a week and then I got a job. I wrapped packages in a department store, and then I got promoted to be a salesgirl, and then I was promoted to being a dress model. And one of the girls that worked there took me with her to a photographer and then we went to a model’s bureau, and after that, well, I made a lot of money and got along fine.” She drew a long breath. “I changed my name, of course. First I changed it to Mary Smith, when I looked for a job. Then when I got to be a model, Mary Smith didn’t seem to fit, so I picked Elayne LaRue out of a confession magazine. But Uncle Fred found me, anyway.”

  “He would,” Bingo said, reaching for a cigarette. “That Uncle Fred, he has his nose to the ground.”

  “He saw my picture in a magazine. It was a crime-story magazine. I’d posed as a girl in a chemise, screaming while somebody threw a knife at her. He wrote to the magazine. And then there was a story in the magazine about a girl whose missing father knew where a lot of money was hidden. After that, I had lots of friends.”

  Her whole expression had changed again. She was the New York model, now. “Lots of friends. The bastards. And I was the sap that believed them all. Flowers and presents and pretty love talk, and sooner or later, ‘Say, where is all that money buried, anyway?’ As if I wouldn’t have dug it up and spent it, if I’d known. After all, I have criminal tendencies. I was born with them. I can’t help it. I’m just bad.”

  “So your Uncle Fred told you,” Bingo commented. “When was the last time you saw him?”

  “About—two or three years ago. He came to New York, he got my address from the model’s bureau. He—forgave me for—everything. It was hard to make him believe I didn’t know where my father was, but finally he told me that if I ever found out where he was, to wire him—Uncle Fred, I mean—right away.”

  “That’s when he told you about the bad heart,” Bingo said.

  She nodded. Uncle Fred began to look out from her eyes again. “I’m dying, you know. Really dying. While I sit here talking to you, I’m dying. I might drop dead at your feet, any minute.”

  “And if you did,” Bingo said cold-bloodedly, “and if that money was ever found, who would it go to?”

  “Why Uncle Fred, of course. I made a will. So that if it was ever found, he could restore it to the rightful owners.”

  “We’re back to that again,” Bingo said. He yawned. “Suppose you just tell us what the blazes you’re doing here in Thursday, Iowa, and then I think we’ll be caught up on your life story, except for the next few chapters.”

  “Father sent for me,” she said. “He sent Clancy to see me, and sent a letter. Clancy was a friend of his. He’d been in jail, but he was a very nice person. He took me to dinner at the Diamond Horseshoe. He gave me a message from my father. My father had something important to tell me, something that would affect my whole life. And my father didn’t know where the money was hidden, but he was going to find out, soon. Clancy arranged for me to come here and meet him. Clancy described him to me. Imagine having to have your own father described to you. Anyway, I was to meet him tonight. And I got here. And he’s dead. They murdered him. And that’s all.”

  “All,” Bingo said, “except who are they?”

  She looked at him and her eyes went blank. “I don’t know what you mean. And I’m sleepy. Terribly sleepy.”

  “You said, ‘they murdered him,’” Bingo hesitated. “Who?”

  “I don’t know. You must have mistaken what I said. A mistake, that’s all. I’m very tired.” She curled up on the bunk and tucked her hands under her cheek, like a child.

  “You’re a liar,” Bingo said amiably. “But I won’t make a point of it now. Only, don’t wake us up in another hour and tell your life story all over again. We’re tired, too.”

  She didn’t stir. He walked across the room and looked at her closely. She was honestly asleep, no fooling about it. When he walked away from the bunk, it was on tiptoes.

  “Bingo,” Handsome whispered, “what do you think?”

  “I think she dreamed the whole thing,” Bingo said. “Or maybe we dreamed the whole thing. We’ll wake up in the morning and she won’t be here.”

  Handsome said drowsily, “Saw—her picture. Maybe we should of—paid the ten dollars and—gone on to Nebraska.” He nodded. His eyes closed.

  Bingo thought the situation over. It was Handsome’s turn to guard the place. But Handsome was dead asleep. He, on the other hand, was wide-awake, his mind filled with a lot of things that needed consideration.

  It was a gruesome thought, staying up alone in this dreary and haunted little hut.

  Still, Handsome had driven three hundred miles that day, and a lot had happened on top of that.

/>   If those goons should come back—

  Why should he worry? He had a gun.

  He’d sit here, facing the door. There were some old jelly glasses on a shelf beside the door. If anything happened, if anyone came to the door, he’d shoot at those jelly glasses. The noise would wake up Handsome, and then everything would be O. K.

  “Bingo,” Handsome said, very drowsily, from the bunk where Bingo had shoved him. “I know. She’s nuts.”

  “Sure,” Bingo said. “Who wouldn’t be.”

  He hoped something very unpleasant would happen to Uncle Fred some day.

  The room was very still. He braced himself against the wall, resolved to stay awake. Since he had to stay awake, he might as well think about something cheerful.

  It would be wonderful to arrive in Hollywood with over two hundred thousand dollars.

  They’d stop and buy another, better car, on the way.

  Clothes, too.

  Would those guys come back tonight? Maybe they should have told Sheriff Henry Judson all about it, right when it happened. But he was busy. The sheriff’s office was shorthanded. Somebody had to protect Christine.

  He wondered if Christine and Henny would like each other. Probably not. Better to keep them apart.

  Those guys might have been the escaped convicts. Would there be a reward for them? Oh, sure, there must be. If they came back, maybe he, and Handsome—

  Had they killed Henny’s father? Possibly.

  Who was Clancy? Could he be found? Would he turn up? Did he know where the money was buried?

  Bingo yawned.

  He remembered something. Her name. It had been Henrietta Siller before she switched to Elayne LaRue. But Henry Siller was the assumed name of the man who’d wormed his way into a smalltown bank, with stolen references, and lent a helpful hand in its robbery.

  According to very simple chronology, that man had deserted the then unborn Elayne LaRue, née Henrietta Siller, quite some time before he’d become Henry Siller.