Murder by Latitude

by Rufus King

  “I do not know what you mean by a euphemism, and I am bitterly disappointed at this continued uncertainty, Valcour.”

  “I will try to be plain: No rational and completely normal person commits murder. This man has, I believe, already committed two—the one in New York, and that of Mr. Gans. I say that he is exceptionally abnormal because I firmly believe him to be one of our men passengers. If that is so, we have been in constant contact with him since the ship sailed, and yet by no shade or decisive expression has he betrayed himself. That is cunning, and it is a type of cunning that is only possessed by the very abnormal when it is exhibited in such an unusual degree. For those reasons I say that he is mad.”

  “But you do not think that he will steal a slicing knife and cut throats promiscuously?”

  “No, Captain; nothing like that. His objective centers in or closely about Mrs. Poole.”

  Captain Sohme gestured helplessly. “I have nothing but your opinion for all of this. Do not think that I undervalue it, Valcour; I am simply a very confused man. I frankly do not know what to do, and I shall give grateful thanks to God when we reach our port and can clear the ship of this confusion. I have already received a strong kick from one of the passengers—that Mr. Stickney. He tells me you announced at breakfast that you included the passengers among the suspects for the killing of Gans. He says that unless you prove your statement before the voyage is over he will sue the owners for defamation of his character.”

  “And what did you say, Captain?”

  Captain Sohme’s eyes were suddenly cleared of confusions. “I told him, Valcour, that I and I alone was responsible for the conduct of the persons on board this ship, and that whatever you did and whatever you said had my unqualified approval. I do not like that man one little bit.”

  “Thank you, Captain.”

  “I may be easily upset and confused, but I am not a fool, Valcour. If you made such a statement at breakfast I believe that you had a good and sufficient reason.”

  “I had. Establishing Gans’s death as a murder and including everyone on the ship among the suspects makes it possible to question the passengers on some sort of an official standing. I intend doing so after lunch. Then we may get someplace.”

  “And I thank the dear God for that.” There was a knock on the door. Captain Sohme looked inquiringly toward Valcour, who nodded, and he then said, “Come in.”

  Mr. Dumarque opened the door and held it open until Mrs. Poole had stepped inside. She went directly up to Valcour.

  “You have that will?” she said.

  “Yes, Mrs. Poole.” He took the paper from his pocket and gave it to her.

  She turned to Captain Sohme and said, “I knew that you were in here, Captain, with Mr. Valcour, and it seemed a good opportunity to ask both of you to witness this. I persuaded Mr. Dumarque to come along and make a third. It’s my will.”

  The world, for Captain Sohme, had become a kaleidoscope. “Your what, Mrs. Poole?”

  “It’s my will—my last will and testament, to give it its full title. Mr. Valcour typed it out for me last night, and now I want to sign it. You have a safe, haven’t you?”

  “Yes, Mrs. Poole.”

  “Then perhaps you’ll be good enough to lock the will up in it for me until we get to port.” She added, almost defiantly, “I’m leaving everything to Ted. Shall we use your desk? I see there is a fountain pen there. I’ll sign first, as I understand that the witnesses have to affirm that the signature was affixed in their presence.”

  Valcour watched her moving whitely in the gray dim cabin over to the desk and flattening the document out on it. She picked up a fountain pen, unscrewed its cap, and filled the blank space left for it with her name. It was, he felt, the end of the reprieve.

  “I believe,” she said, in her efficient, not unpleasant voice, “that this attestation clause should be read aloud in the presence of all the witnesses before they sign. If you’ll listen, please, I’ll read it.” She did so. “Now if you’ll sign, Captain Sohme—?”

  Captain Sohme moved heavily to the desk and automatically wrote his name on the line she indicated. “And you, Mr. Valcour?” Mrs. Poole gently loosened the pen from Captain Sohme’s fingers and offered it to Valcour.

  “You’re still positive that you want to do this, Mrs. Poole, even after sleeping on it over night?” Valcour said.

  “Quite.” She smiled absently and said, “And I shouldn’t have called it a sleepful night.”

  Valcour signed his name, his address, and gave the pen to Mr. Dumarque. There was a singular smile on Mr. Dumarque’s characterless lips as he took it. “My cup,” he said, “is almost overfilled.”

  Valcour stood staring at Mrs. Poole. She was the solvent for these obscurities, if he could only read her…or could determine whether it was willfulness or genuine ignorance which prevented her from reading herself… (Mr. Dumarque had finished with witnessing the will, and Mrs. Poole was handing it to Captain Sohme)… If he could unlock those obstinate doors of her memory before the fog thinned out to show its dangers… (Captain Sohme had opened the safe and had put the will inside of it. He was closing the safe and asking Mrs. Poole whether or not she wanted a written receipt for the will, explaining that such was customary when passengers left valuables in his charge.)… Now that the reprieve was ended and the will because of black lines written on its white blank surfaces had become again, in Valcour’s eyes, an instrument of death…somewhere, surely, was the key that could unlock that stubborn vault… The husband? The three-day husband? Scarcely… (“But of course not, Captain,” Mrs. Poole was saying. “The paper is of no conceivable value in itself, and if someone were to steal it I should simply draw up another one. I dare say you would be aware at once if the safe were tampered with.”)… Light suddenly crashed swiftly at him through the murk: what about the maid?

  * * * *

  Cable from port authorities at Bermuda to Commissioner of the New York Police Department:

  UNABLE SO FAR TO ESTABLISH RADIO COMMUNICATION WITH SS EASTERN BAY STOP AWAITING FURTHER ADVICES FROM YOU STOP OUR SERVICES COMPLETELY AT YOUR DISPOSAL

  CHAPTER 17

  LAT. 35° 3' NORTH, LONG. 64° 31' WEST

  “What is your name, please?”

  “Anna Wickstod, sir.”

  They were alone in the cabin of the Eastern Bay’s sole stewardess. Mrs. Poole’s maid occupied its only chair, and Valcour sat upon its hard thin-cushioned settee.

  “I am, as you perhaps know, Lieutenant Valcour of the New York Police force.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Her middle-aged face was bony beneath a vanishing softness which had rounded it so pleasingly in youth. Her eyes were steady and very calm, and fringed with short thin lashes. Her whole body showed a placidity that was fundamentally one of temperament, and her features were receptively expressionless.

  “Have you been a long time in Mrs. Poole’s service, Miss Wickstod?”

  Anna Wickstod’s mental processes were as placid and as fundamental as her physical traits: when the law questioned, one answered as truthfully and as correctly as possible, otherwise one went to jail, and suffered numerous disagreeable excitements. This man was the law.

  “For twenty years, sir.”

  Valcour stared at her speculatively, seeing her down through those two decades: a secure and landlocked harborage of placidity into which Mrs. Poole must so successively have sailed from marital and worldly storms.

  “Mrs. Poole was very young when you entered her service?”

  “I do not know. She was then a grown woman and looked older than she does now, because she had a pompadour and long dresses. I did not know her age. I do not know it now. I would be pleased if you would ask me these questions before her. I do not like to talk behind her back.”

  “I am questioning you entirely for Mrs. Poole’s own good, Miss Wickstod. I wonder whether I can convince you of that?”

  “She is in trouble?” Anna Wickstod was getting the necessary bodily machin
ery under way in order to rise.

  “At the present moment, no.” Valcour injected a persuasive earnestness and an impressive note of authority into his manner. “But unless you assist me, Miss Wickstod, Mrs. Poole will find herself in serious danger. I am referring to her safety—to, bluntly, her life.”

  Anna Wickstod receded again into her chair. Her eyes looked frightened. She was frightened, and her mastery over her adopted tongue grew incomplete. “Kill—killing? It is to be more kills, with maybe one of her?”

  “There is certainly a danger, which I believe we can avert. Mrs. Poole was married, wasn’t she, when you entered her service?”

  Anna Wickstod’s fright was as leisurely in its exit as it had been in its entrance. “Yes, sir. Her name should then be Lane. He was a good big man, very handsome, and the best of all her husbands. I am told in my country that the first one is always the best of all the husbands. Well, it was so with her.”

  Valcour thought briefly of the last time he had seen Lane, only shortly over a week ago, flattened on the tiles of the Lorelei’s washroom, his drunken, protuberant, pink-shot eyes staring in astonishment at the ceiling, and his soft-bosomed shirt a sponge of thick red blood…

  “What position did you hold at that time, Miss Wickstod? Were you Mrs. Poole’s maid, then, too?”

  “Yes, sir, but not all of the time.”

  “What do you mean by that?”

  “She had other maids, and one who traveled with her. There were then three houses; one down in Virginia, one in New York, and one at Southampton. There was a staff of servants kept in each house, and the houses were kept open all through the year. She did not like hotels, and she did not like to open up and shut up houses.”

  “Which house were you in, Miss Wickstod?”

  “The house in Virginia, sir. It was the house which Mr. Lane liked best, and which they stayed in least.”

  “The marriage lasted for about four years, if I remember correctly?”

  “Yes, sir. He was very good to her and she could have everything she liked. It was a house of goodness.”

  “I understand that there were no children; that Mrs. Poole has never had a child.”

  “Oh yes, there was a child. She wanted one, and so Mr. Lane he gave her a child.”

  Valcour felt a curious tensing of his nerves. “Excuse me if I speak bluntly, but did Mrs. Poole give birth to this child, or was it adopted?”

  “She did not give any birth to it. That is a thing she has never done, which in my country is considered a pity and something of a shame, but the customs of different countries are different. I do not think the child was even adopted, but when her second husband disapproved she made provision for it.”

  “Disapproved?”

  “Yes. Mr. Jones he did not like children and so she fixed it that the child should be paid a certain sum by her lawyers every year. That was her goodness.”

  Valcour stepped softly on this precious ice that was mirroring so valuably the past. “How old was the child when she sent it away and made provision for it?”

  “I do not know exactly. I think it had about nine years. She does not speak of ages, and I was not then familiar with the ages of children.”

  The light was growing astoundingly clear—too clear. Valcour could vision it so easily: this child, acquired from heaven knows where as a caprice to please a rich and willful woman; a pampered, petted, played-with child, swamped in indulgences up to the problematic age of nine and then, with goodness, discarded into some dreary ill-favored realm provided for it by lawyer-paid checks, for impressionable years of bitter brooding… (My dear good man, he warned himself, you are plunging into melodrama and this solution is much too good to be true.)

  “Where is this child now?” he said.

  “The lawyers do not know. For the last few years the checks have been returned undelivered.”

  “But surely Mrs. Poole knows?”

  “She does not speak about the child. She tells me it is bad to talk about the past. She says that talking about a thing makes it live all over again, and if we do not talk about the past there is no past, and if there is no past no one can get old.” It was a lesson learned by rote.

  “What was his given name—the color of his hair and of his eyes? Were there any identifying marks—birthmarks—scars, or anything? Any deformities?” Valcour was blindly eager.

  “‘His,’ sir?”

  “Yes, Miss Wickstod, the child’s.”

  “Oh, the child was a girl, sir. She had brown eyes and yellow curls and her name was Toody. I do not know about any scars as I only saw little Toody in her dresses.”

  Valcour still clung on. “There were, in later years, no other children?”

  “No, sir. After Toody, she got tired of children. When she was finished with Toody, she was finished with children.”

  Valcour stood up. He went to the cabin door. “Thank you, Miss Wickstod,” he said.

  “Yes, sir.”

  She remained seated in her unshakable placidity, and he tried to grasp what was going on behind her calm, blank eyes, if there were any deeps behind them for things to go on in. He went outside and closed the cabin door and he wondered, as he walked along the dim and deserted passage, which man among the men passengers was a woman…

  CHAPTER 18

  LAT. 35° 4' NORTH, LONG. 64° 31' WEST

  Cable from Commissioner of the New York Police Department to port authorities at Bermuda:

  REQUEST YOU WORK THROUGH LOCAL AGENTS FOR MERCANTILE TRANSPORT LINE IN APPROXIMATING PROBLEMATIC POSITION OF SS EASTERN BAY STOP PLEASE COMPARE THIS WITH ALL TR POSITION REPORTS RECEIVED BY RADIO AND DETERMINE IF ANY OTHER SHIP OR SHIPS ARE LIABLE TO BE WITHIN COMMUNICATING RANGE BY SPEAKING OR BY VISUAL SIGNAL WITH SS EASTERN BAY STOP PLEASE REQUEST SUCH SHIP OR SHIPS TO TRANSMIT FOLLOWING CODE MESSAGE ADDRESSED TO LIEUTENANT VALCOUR ON BOARD SS EASTERN BAY QUOTE CABKA LKCLB 5513O TTGYR IILHS RPEZZ UNQUOTE PLEASE ADVISE US AT ONCE OF RESULT OF THIS EFFORT STOP CANNOT STRESS URGENCY OF MATTER TOO STRONGLY

  * * * *

  Valcour went into his cabin and closed the door. It was extraordinary how difficult it was to obtain any privacy on a small ship. He wanted five minutes of lucid quietness in which to think (if you could call it lucid) about this Toody business. Somewhere in its indecisiveness it offered the nearest approach yet to a theory that might prove tenable, and it had its value even if he could do nothing else with it beyond using it as a key to unlock the distant and forgotten places in Mrs. Poole’s memory.

  The theory in itself was starkly swamped in improbabilities. Except in extraordinary cases, women did not masquerade successfully as men. He tried to convince himself of error in this stand, and listed a formidable array of cases in which women had done just that. Take, he suggested severely to himself, Russia’s quixotic Battalion of Death, with its sub-strata resting on the unstable sands of a national hysteria. There in bulk, in wholesale quantities, were your women as men. As for isolated cases, there were authentic and recent ones, too. (He refused to go back to the Amazons even for a point of origin.) One case in special occurred to him of a British officer who for years and years had satisfactorily prevented any penetration of her disguise. One found cases among people of the sea. One found cases here and there. One found them for sound reason, and for no reason at all. But still he refused to believe it, even though he wanted to, and even though it would have been so very handy to.

  With the exception of Russia’s gallant and acknowledged Battalion, each was a case where no suspicion had arisen to make observers of the masquerade sharply critical, whereas here—Mr. Stickney? With that chin so obviously blued and in such constant need of a razor? Never. Mr. Sanford? Womanly, perhaps, but not a woman; furthermore the Toody of sixteen years ago (for the Lane marriage had terminated then) had been around nine, making her present probable age verge on the middle twenties, and here was Mr. Sanford with his horse-like face and thin gray hair and wrinkles—no art however consummate could have translated him so
effectively far from the twenties, nor could experience so swiftly have stamped him with the markings of age.

  Mr. Dumarque, with (Valcour’s eyes narrowed a little) his high-heeled shoes and black lisle stockings, with his voice that fringed on curious softnesses? The young and beautifully featured Mr. Force whose smooth cheek (it was almost downy) clamped him in the twenties, and who flushed when one mentioned his business—and after all, in this enlightened age, commercial art required no flushing.

  Mr. Poole himself Valcour automatically excepted from any Toodyism. And that left Mr. Wright, with his unattractive pudginess and thin veneers so suggestive of grease. Mr. Dumarque, young Force, and the pudgy, indeterminably yeared Mr. Wright—Toody?

  If one of them were Toody it would fit so nicely: the bitter child snatched into opulence by a whim and sent back into mediocrity by a similar whim; sent back to think sullenly of lost heritages, with bitterness rising like a slow-growing and deep-rooted tree through cast-off years of gibing—years when Toody, with a child’s boastfulness, had undoubtedly clung with insistent words to her fallen-from estate, and had probably been rudely disbelieved by whatever class of children constituted her companions. And this bitterness with its deep, deep roots would have drained, for sustenance, all finer fibers from her nature until that first break had come, several years ago, and the first gun had been fired—for Valcour felt that that might have been the reason behind the returned and unclaimed checks—that first swift bitter gun fired by tortured pride; then the consequent economic stress and the added irritations brought on by financial worry; then the killing of Lane, the man who had originally picked her out of her environment, as easily as he would have chosen a gift from a shop, and just as carelessly; and, lastly, the following-up and closing-in-upon the woman who with such a bitter and ugly sort of goodness had dismissed her…to please Mr. Jones who did not care for children… Yes, it was a pretty theory and a tenable one.

  Even the unfinished message in the unmailed letter fitted in: “Death comes again and again when one is young, even though the body does not die. I know where you are and I am coming to you because—”