by Maia Chance
“Actually, poodles have hair, not fur,” Hermie said. “And they don’t shed, so—”
“Inchbald has just lost his sister who was, by all accounts, his best friend.” Raymond spoke to me as though Hermie weren’t there. “He could crack up staying at home by himself. Don’t get me wrong, I know exactly what he’s going through.”
“You do?”
“I lost my own sister years ago. She was my best friend, too.”
“I’m sorry,” I said.
“Sure, back when she died, I was fit to be tied—like Inchbald here is now, I suppose you could say. But it passed. Oh, we also stopped by Willow Acres on the way and picked up Mr. Tibor Ulf. You know, the vigorology instructor? It’s his day off and I remembered him saying he wished to see the real America. I suppose this is it.” Raymond looked around the crowd with a lofty, bemused expression. “I don’t know where Ulf has taken himself off to, though. Probably doing calisthenics on the beach. What are you doing here, Lola?”
“Oh—I’m here to listen to Senator Morris’s speech. And the ice cream here is second to none.”
“Ah.” Raymond’s eyes glittered.
I would’ve liked to ask Raymond to explain why Hermie had heard a woman’s giggles emanating from his room at Willow Acres the night Muffy died. Alas, I couldn’t bally well do that right in front of Hermie. The poor egg was already as twitchy as Charlie Chaplin’s mustache. “Did you happen to notice that Grace Whiddle is competing in the pageant?” I asked both men.
“Is she?” Raymond said. “How amusing.”
Hermie was frowning. “Grace has a lot of explaining to do. Where is she?”
“You’ll see her,” I said.
We turned our attention to the pageant. Toothy, lipsticked girls preened in bathing suits that crept dangerously close to the fork in the road.
Two young bucks squeezed between Raymond and me, and then Hermie squirmed through the crowd to stand on my other side. “Mrs. Woodby,” he whispered, “since you seem to be cultivating a friendship with Raymond Hathorne, I feel it is my duty to warn you that he isn’t who he says he is.”
“Whatever do you mean?”
“He didn’t buy the Pitridge estate. He’s only letting it. I know this absolutely, because I spoke with the leasing agent just before Mr. Hathorne took up residence last month. And there is no such thing as Fizz-Whiz soda pop. No one has heard of it.”
“Nobody knows about anything made in Canada, Hermie. And Raymond told me he purchased his house. He said he’s going to repair it.”
“Pulling the wool over your eyes,” Hermie said. “He is n-not a nice man, Mrs. Woodby. N-not at all.”
“Why, Mr. Inchbald, what did he do?”
“I s-s-see it in his eyes. C-cold. I’d bet he’s one of those g-g-gentleman adventurers, l-looking for a w-wealthy lady to s-support him. I only c-came along today because he w-was s-s-so v-very insistent. But h-he’s slippery. He’s a t-trained actor, you know. He t-t-told me he h-headed up the Shakespearean S-s-society at c-college.”
I could picture Raymond in Hamlet tights. But Raymond an adventurer? No. That couldn’t be correct. Mother had vouched for Raymond’s good family and substantial fortune, and Mother could be relied upon when it came to such things. Hermie must’ve had some sort of axe to grind with Raymond … or perhaps Hermie was attempting to divert attention away from himself.
Berta was the tenth contestant to parade across the stage. When she emerged in a black, scratchy-looking Edwardian bathing suit—where had she gotten that?—in all her stout, ladylike dignity, the audience erupted in cheers and hoots. When she posed center stage with hands on hips, cameras clicked wildly. Berta spotted me in the crowd and sent me a dark look.
More contestants paraded past, and then a man in shabby evening clothes burst from behind the curtains. “Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for attending the first Coney Island Mermaid Queen Pageant!” he cried.
The crowd clapped, although now that the half-naked girls were gone, a lot of men were peeling off. I’d lost track of Hermie and Raymond, and I couldn’t see Beaulah anywhere, either.
“And now, it is my profound pleasure to introduce to you, ladies and gentlemen, New York State Senator Morris!”
Winfield strode onstage to lackluster applause. His suit was dark and expensive-looking and his hair was oiled back from his little forehead. “Good afternoon, citizens of New York. It will be my great honor to crown Coney Island’s first Mermaid Queen. But first, I have a few words I would like to convey to you, my fellow Americans.” He looked around the crowd with a soulful expression. The lady next to me took a huge bite of hot dog, catsup squirting. “Like so many of you,” Winfield said, “I long to return to a simpler age. An age of apple pie and grandmother’s knitting, of mother and father at the fireside, ringed round with the rosy cherubs of their devotion—”
A man in the crowd yelled, “Hey! It’s Schlump!”
Schlump?
Senator Morris made shushing gestures. Except the crowd didn’t require shushing; everyone was silently goggling at a fellow at the edge of the crowd in a bushy beard, a big-brimmed hat, and green-tinted sunglasses.
“It is Schlump!” another man yelled.
Someone reached out and gave the fellow’s bushy beard a yank. It sagged and sprang back on elastic strings.
“Whaddaya doin here, Schlump? Studying the beauty queens to figure out how to throw like a girl?”
“Already throws like a girl!” someone else shouted.
“Like a girl?” yet another person screamed. “He throws like a goddam baby in diapers!”
The irate crowd surged around Pete Schlump.
Pete was obviously there at the boardwalk to see his girl Grace Whiddle compete in the pageant. And why he was in disguise, well, that was pretty obvious, too. A runaway train isn’t as terrifying as a disappointed Yankees fanatic.
Someone threw a punch. Grunts and squawks. More punches. A soda pop bottle went whistling through the air. I was knocked to my knees by a man eager to join the brawl. I clutched Cedric to my chest. Mustard splattered down my arm. Panic careened through me and I struggled to get to my feet, but other people’s blurry legs churned all around me. I was knocked forward, and I braced my fall with my free hand on the wooden planks of the boardwalk. Cedric squirmed in my other arm. Then a woman I couldn’t really see in the jumble trod on the back of my hand with a small, pointy high heel. I yelped.
A huge, wrinkled, suntanned hand appeared in front of my face. I grabbed it. Someone pulled me to my feet and steadied me.
“Mr. Ulf!” I said, my voice thick and quavering. “I almost didn’t recognize you in—in ordinary clothes. Thank you.”
“But of course, Mrs. Woodby,” Ulf said, taking Cedric from me. Ulf still gripped my hand, for which I was grateful. I’d gone fluff-headed and rubbery.
A gunshot cracked through the bellows and hoots and cries. Then a heavy, hollow sound, like a sack of potatoes hitting a wooden floor. Except—I sucked in a breath—that was no sack of potatoes up there on the stage.
That was Senator Morris.
“Someone’s shot the senator!” a lady shrieked. “Someone’s got a gun!”
“Anarchists!” another woman screamed.
“It’s the anarchists!” a man yelled.
The crowd stampeded in all directions.
Ulf wrapped his arm around me and kept me on my feet until most of the crowd had dispersed. In Ulf’s other arm, Cedric yawned with anxiety, his little ears slicked back.
Onstage, two men knelt over Senator Morris. “He’s a goner,” one of them said, shaking his head. “Straight through the heart.”
23
A policeman elbowed through the throng and bent over Senator Morris’s body. Gawkers flocked. I clung to Ulf and we both stared, speechless, at the chaos twirling around us. The sun beat down, but I felt ice cold, even after Ulf had placed Cedric in my arms.
More police roared up in paddy wagons, and they made everyone clear
the area in front of the stage. An ambulance blared through the throng a little after that. I stood on tiptoe and looked around, but with so many people licking ice cream cones and pointing at the corpse, I couldn’t spot Berta, Beaulah, or Grace. Raymond and Hermie seemed to have evaporated, too.
“We must speak to the police,” Ulf said. “It is our civic duty to do so.”
“Did you see anything?” I asked him.
“I did not see the shooter, but perhaps there is something else we have not thought of yet.”
“Look. They’ve found something over there,” I said, pointing. Two policemen crouched in front of the stage. One of them held a small thing up, and it glinted metallic in the sunshine.
“A spent cartridge,” Ulf said. “Then it seems that the killer stood just in the crowd. Not far from where you and I were standing, Mrs. Woodby.”
I looked at the back of my hand. A round purple welt pulsated where the woman had trod upon it. Could the shooter have been that woman?
Up on the stage, a policeman draped Senator Morris’s body with a shroud. How quickly life flicks out. It’s terrifying.
“Ah, I see Mr. Hathorne and Mr. Inchbald are giving their statements to the police,” Ulf said to me. “Come, Mrs. Woodby. We should, as well.” He guided me with a chivalrous air to the haphazard crowd of people waiting to speak with the police near the paddy wagons and the ambulance. By the time we got in line, I’d once again lost track of Raymond and Hermie.
“I tell you, it was an anarchist!” a lady was shrieking to a cop. Her hair looked like she’d just stuck her finger in an electrical outlet, and she wore a mangy bathrobe. “They’re everywhere, those horrible Reds!”
Ulf and I exchanged a knowing glance: Whew. She’s cuckoo.
But as Ulf and I waited fifteen or twenty minutes to speak to the police, people started looking at Ulf funny. They’d heard his German accent. Next came the hostile whispers. Then angry stares. Someone snarled to Ulf, “We don’t want your kind in this country.”
Then it was my turn to give a statement. I told two policemen all about what I’d seen and how Ulf had been helping me up—I pointed him out—when the shot was fired. One policeman took notes and the other one looked bored. I gave them my Longfellow Street telephone number. By the time I was through, Ulf was surrounded by an angry mob of people babbling about European Reds and anarchists, and a lot of people were throwing the term assassination around.
The cuckoo lady in the bathrobe popped up again, telling the police “It was him!” She pointed a vibrating finger at Ulf. “He did it! I saw him pull the trigger!”
“No!” I cried. My pipes were dry. Nobody heard me. The mob closed around Ulf, and the next I saw of him, he was in handcuffs and being pushed by a cop into the back of one of the paddy wagons. Doors slammed and the paddy wagon rolled away down the boardwalk.
“Good riddance,” a skinny man with a sunburned nose said to no one in particular, and took a swig from his soda pop bottle.
* * *
I simply stood there slack-jawed, following the paddy wagon’s retreat down the boardwalk. Berta, back in her dress and hat and arm linked firmly through Grace Whiddle’s, marched out from the backstage area.
“But I must find Petey!” Grace was wailing. Tears and makeup streamed behind her glasses. She wore a sundress over her bathing suit.
Berta said, “My dear, if Pete has even an ounce of sense, he is in a taxicab speeding away from here. Those men wished to tear him limb from limb. You may telephone him from my apartment.” Berta saw me, and her expression cooled. “Oh. Hello, Mrs. Woodby. As you can see, I have apprehended Grace.”
“Oh. Congratulations. Hello, Grace.”
“Hi,” Grace said, her voice cracking. “Isn’t it just awful about Senator Morris? I hated him, and he would’ve made the rottenest father-in-law, but golly, didn’t he look like a big dead hairy woodchuck up there on the stage?”
“Mrs. Woodby,” Berta said, “I do realize you prefer not to wear bathing suits, but it seemed to me that you might have sacrificed a little of your pride for the sake of our—”
“They’ve arrested Tibor Ulf for shooting Senator Morris,” I said. “He’s been accused of being an anarchist assassin.”
Grace said, “That muscly old man from Willow Acres? But how could he hide a gun? He’s always wearing those really small white shorts.”
“Mr. Ulf?” Berta said. “I would not have thought it of him. Anarchists always seem to smoke a great deal and eat unwholesome foods out of tins.”
“It wasn’t him,” I said. “I’m dead certain. Grace, would you excuse us for a moment?”
Grace shrugged.
Berta said to her, “I have my eye on you, young lady, and if you attempt to bolt, I will fell you like a little tree.”
Grace pouted. “Don’t worry, I’ve got blisters on my heels from these shoes. I’m not going anywhere.”
I led Berta over to the boardwalk railing for privacy. I told her in hushed, hurried tones how I’d been knocked down in the boardwalk brawl, how a lady had stepped on my hand with her pointy shoe—I showed her the purple welt—and how Ulf had been helping me up when the shot was fired. “I told the police all of this,” I said. “Should I go back and tell them again?”
“Goodness no,” Berta said. “What is the point? You already gave them your statement that should have exonerated Ulf. Arresting a European makes the police appear heroic to the public, does it not? Protecting Americans from crazed Continental communists and so forth. I imagine they would sooner have their teeth pulled than release him.”
“But he could go to the electric chair!” I cried.
A lady in a loud floral sundress looked at me askance. Grace was all ears, too.
I lowered my voice to a whisper. “I know that our sole employer is dead now, so we’re not going to get paid for any of this, but we must find out who murdered the Morrises. It’s the right thing to do. I can’t sit back and watch an innocent man go to the electric chair.”
“I do agree,” Berta said. “We have no choice in the matter.”
“Now we’re working for justice, not money,” I said. I felt good about this. My pocketbook did not. “How we are going to pay our bills is another problem entirely.”
“I have no doubt that we will sort it all out with great speed,” Berta said, “since it is patently obvious that Beaulah Starr is the murderer.”
“Beaulah? Why do you sound so certain?”
“You must be jesting, Mrs. Woodby. Beaulah had a perfect motive for killing Muffy Morris—clearing the way to become the second Mrs. Morris—and, that plan having failed, she killed Senator Morris in a fit of passion. Beaulah must have had a gun in her handbag. And—” Berta gestured to my bruised hand. “—her shoes were rather pointy, I happened to notice.”
I thought of the inchworm Beaulah had rescued with her Lucky Strikes tin. Yet I couldn’t tell Berta that I believed wholeheartedly that an inchworm cleared Beaulah from suspicion. It sounded too soft-boiled. “Okay,” I said, “then should we tell the police our suspicions about Beaulah?”
“Certainly not.”
“Why?”
“Because you motored her to Coney Island, Mrs. Woodby. You may have aided and abetted a murderess.”
“I may have? What about you?”
“You were behind the wheel.”
Oh golly.
“We must find Beaulah and obtain a confession,” Berta said, “or else gather some harder evidence against her. Matching her gun to the one used to kill Senator Morris would do very nicely. Now. We cannot stand about on this boardwalk forever. Grace has agreed to return with us to Washington Square, where I will feed the poor child, for she tells me she has dined upon nothing but strawberries and champagne for the past two days while—” Berta coughed. “—during her stay with Pete Schlump. Pete has, of course, fled the irate Yankees fanatics.”
“Wait.” I stole a glance at Grace. She was somehow chewing gum and yawning at the same time.
“Could Grace have shot Senator Morris?”
“No. She was backstage with me at the time.”
“Why was she competing in the pageant, anyway?”
“Just as her friend Josie Van Hoogenband told us, Grace dreams of becoming a burlesque dancer or a motion picture star. She theorized that winning a beauty pageant would be the first step to that end. Pete Schlump was only too happy to assist her in the endeavor.”
I threw one last look at Winfield’s shrouded body, now being loaded onto the ambulance like a casserole into an oven. “Let’s go,” I said.
* * *
I made a stop along the boardwalk to purchase chocolate ice creams for myself and Grace.
“Is that a business expense?” Berta demanded. “If so, you must log it in the book.”
“Sure,” I said, waving my fingers.
While Grace was licking her ice cream and crying to Berta about the missing Pete some more, I slipped into a telephone booth, slid in a coin, and asked the operator to put me through to Hare’s Hollow. The Hare’s Hollow exchange girl put me through to Clyde’s Bluff.
“Yes?” Sophronia Whiddle said when I had her on the line.
“This is Lola Woodby. The Discreet Retrieval Agency has located and captured your daughter, Grace.”
“WHAT? Where is she? Is she harmed? Where are—?”
“She’s quite fine, and we’ll tell you the rest when you come to collect her at our Longfellow Street office. Oh—and cash or check will be fine.”
Sophronia did a spot of heavy breathing and then said, “I shall order my chauffeur to take me directly. I’ll arrive in no more than an hour and a half—and do not allow anything else to befall her!” She hung up.
“Who was that?” Grace asked me as we set off once more down the boardwalk.
“Oh, no one,” I said.
24
Back at the apartment, Grace collapsed fully dressed on Berta’s bed and fell instantly to sleep. She’d slept in the Duesy on the way back from Coney Island, too—I guess she’d had quite a tuckering time with Pete Schlump in his apartment—so Berta and I would have to wait till she woke up to interrogate her about the murders. She was, strictly speaking, still a suspect at least in Muffy’s death.
