Murder, She Wrote: Gin and Daggers

by Jessica Fletcher

  “How can I enjoy it? I’ve seen it fourteen times.”

  “Then see it for the fifteenth time and analyze how it has changed over the course of the years. I’d enjoy hearing your comments about that.”

  “Jessica, you are extremely exasperating.”

  “I know, and I have a great deal to make up to you. I’ll try to do that at first opportunity. Thank you for understanding, Lucas. You are aptly named Darling.”

  I hated to lie to Lucas and was uncomfortable making my excuses based upon a fabrication that Morton Metzger had taken ill, but it seemed the most expedient way to get out of the evening. I hung up and looked across the suite to where Wilfred, Marjorie’s chauffeur, sat stoically by the window, very straight and proper, one leg neatly crossed over the other, his uniform cap resting precisely in the middle of his lap.

  I put on my raincoat and stood in the middle of the room. I drew a deep breath and said, “Well, Wilfred, I think I’m ready. My friends should be downstairs by now.” I’d instructed Seth and Morton to meet us behind the hotel, just outside the entrance my assistant manager friend had shown me. Wilfred had parked the Morgan there a half hour ago.

  He stood. I said, “You’ve done a wonderful thing, Wilfred, for Miss Ainsworth.”

  “It’s Dr. Beers deserves any pats on the back, Mrs. Fletcher. The lady was fortunate to have him as a friend.”

  “And fortunate to have you, too, Wilfred. We’d better go.”

  We started for the door, but I stopped. Should I call George Sutherland one more time? No. He was too efficient for me to worry about his following through.

  Seth was dressed in a black turtleneck, tweed sport jacket, and new Burberry raincoat he’d bought that afternoon. Morton was in his Cabot Cove sheriff’s uniform. “Ready?” I asked them.

  “I hope you know what you’re doing, Jess,” Seth said.

  “I think I do. Besides, if I don’t, I have the two of you for support.”

  Wilfred drove at a leisurely pace through London and towards Crumpsworth. Morton, Seth, and I said little to each other during the trip. It wasn’t until we’d turned onto the road leading to Ainsworth Manor that my heart began to trip. “Remember,” I said, “we’re not here to take any physical action. The important thing is that our arrival be a surprise.”

  “I’ll take only what action is necessary,” Morton said, his jaw jutting out.

  “I’m sure there won’t be any action necessary, Morton, but it is comforting to know an officer of the law is with us.”

  Wilfred went through the process of opening and closing the gate and headed for the manor. Instead of veering to his left, however—which would have placed us at the front door—he turned right and followed a narrow gravel road to the back of the house and to the garage, which had been added to the main structure. He clicked an electronic door opener that was clipped to the sun visor, and the garage door slid open. Inside was one other vehicle, a blue Ford Escort belonging to Jane Portelaine. Wilfred guided the Morgan into the garage, turned, and clicked the electronic device again. This time it closed the doors. He turned off the Morgan’s lights, leaving us in virtual darkness, except for a small, low-wattage lamp at the far end, beyond the Escort.

  “Careful as you walk,” Wilfred said as we got out of the Morgan and quietly pressed the two back doors shut. Wilfred closed his door with normal force, and we fell in line behind him until reaching the door leading into the house.

  “What’s beyond this door?” I asked.

  “The pantry, ma’am, which leads directly into the kitchen.”

  “Is Mrs. Horton still away?”

  “Yes.”

  I looked at Seth and Mort. “Ready?”

  They nodded.

  Wilfred used a key to open the door and led us into the house. The pantry was very large, and its shelves were stocked with enough provisions to ride out a replay of World War II. Our path was illuminated by light from the kitchen. A large butcher block took up the middle of the room; copper pots and pans hung from a circular rack above it. The four of us stood around the block and listened. The sound of voices could be heard coming from the adjoining dining room. There was laughter, it sounded like a party.

  I turned to Wilfred and whispered, “I think you have gone far enough with us. What I would like you to do now is to go upstairs and let us take over from here.”

  He was about to protest, then simply nodded and left through another door connecting the kitchen with a narrow flight of stairs leading to the upper floors.

  I went to the dining room and pressed my ear against it. Now I could hear the voices with more clarity. A man said, “It actually worked, it bloody well worked.” He laughed raucously.

  “I propose a toast,” another male voice said, “to literary excellence and to the world of books.” Everyone laughed now. As I heard glasses clink together, I opened the door and stepped into the room. It took those at the table a few seconds to realize that someone had joined their dinner party. Jane Portelaine was the first to see me. She half rose, and her face reflected her shock. The others realized something had happened and turned. I took a few more steps into the room, and Seth and Mort joined me.

  “What in hell ... ?”

  “Good evening, Mr. Harris,” I said. “I see you’re sitting in Marjorie Ainsworth’s chair at the head of the table. How appropriate.”

  “Who are these people?” the publisher Walter Cole asked.

  “These people are my friends. Officer Metzger is a law enforcement officer. I see you and Mr. Simpson have joined this celebratory party.”

  Harris, who’d displayed some initial bravado, turned and looked at Jane Portelaine with eyes that sought help.

  She stood, came around the table, and faced me. She looked the way she had at the reading of her aunt’s will—rose-colored lipstick outlined the contours of her mouth, and her hair was in that loose, becoming style. And, of course, there was the heavy scent of Victorian posy. “How dare you enter my home without my permission,” she said.

  “I didn’t think you’d mind, Jane. After all, you’d instructed Marshall to accommodate me at my convenience.” I looked at Marshall, who’d abandoned his butler’s uniform for a more appropriate jacket and open shirt. He looked panicked.

  Harris stood. “What in bloody hell is she talking about?” he snarled at Jane. “Invite her?”

  I said, “Mr. Harris, Jane did not invite me this evening. She invited me yesterday while she was soaking up sun on the Costa del Sol.”

  “It was a good time to let her do her snooping around,” Jane angrily answered Jason, “when no one was here.” She turned to me and said, “Please leave this house immediately. You are not welcome here.”

  “I don’t think your aunt would feel that way, Jane.”

  “My aunt is dead!”

  “Yes, we all know that. The question is whether it was necessary to brutally do away with her in order for Mr. Harris to gain some measure of financial success that his own literary talents aren’t capable of generating.”

  Harris sat down again and assumed a posture of nonchalance. He smiled at me, which offended me deeply, and said, “I don’t see why you should be upset, Mrs. Fletcher.” He lighted a cigarette and drew casually on it. “After all, I think you’ve had enough evidence presented to you to make the point that I did, in fact, write Gin and Daggers. You’ve had a chance to go over the manuscript.”

  “I assume it was you who gave it to your stepbrother, Mr. Simpson here.”

  “Yes ... well, not exactly, but what does it matter?”

  “It doesn’t. I had an opportunity yesterday to see Marjorie’s original manuscript. It contained none of the names and events you marked on the copy given to Mr. Simpson. Obviously, you, with Jane’s help, inserted those things after Marjorie had finished dictating it to embellish your claim of authorship. Unfortunately for you, there was one name you should have changed.”

  “What’s that?” Harris asked, trying to sound incurious but fail
ing.

  “The name of your mentor’s friend and lover.”

  “She had no such person,” Jane said.

  “Oh yes she did, Jane.”

  David Simpson displayed no emotion at all. He sat and stared at a large silver candelabrum in the center of the table.

  “You are not his stepbrother, Mr. Simpson. That relationship was created so that you could identify the body dragged from the Thames as Jason. How big a slice of the pie were you to receive for that criminal act?”

  He said nothing, but continued to stare at the ornate centerpiece.

  I looked around the room before asking, “Where is Ms. Giacona?”

  If Jane Portelaine had appeared to be angry before, her face now flooded with rage. “How dare you mention her in my house.”

  “You didn’t have to hit her so hard, Jane. She didn’t deserve that.”

  “She’s nothing but a slut.”

  I looked at Jason. “But a useful one, obviously. She is a very good actress, Jason. She had me thoroughly convinced at first that she was deeply in love with you and was anxious to right the wrong of having your work attributed to someone else.”

  Harris got up once again, came around the table, and stood next to Jane. “Why don’t you get out of here, Mrs. Fletcher?”

  “To do what, make my announcement that you wrote Gin and Daggers? You didn’t really think I intended to do that tomorrow, did you?”

  The first words out of Walter Cole’s mouth were “I thought you were going to. You damn well announced you were going to. That’s why we’re celebrating tonight.”

  “A wasted celebration, I’m afraid. I think the only announcement to be made will be that Jason Harris murdered Marjorie Ainsworth.”

  I said it directly to Harris, and my words had their intended effect. His mask of defiance cracked a little, and he took a step toward me, as though to strike. Seth and Morton took their own instinctive steps forward, which caused Harris to think better of it.

  “You can’t prove anything,” Harris said, leaning back against the edge of the table.

  “I don’t think it will be difficult for the police to establish the fact that the body found in the Thames, and falsely identified as being you by your bogus stepbrother, was part of an elaborate, ill-conceived scheme.”

  Harris started to say something but stopped himself.

  I shook my head and smiled. “What a wonderful play this would have made. Why didn’t you write it, instead of acting it out? It might have had a long run in the West End.”

  Walter Cole stood. “I don’t know what any of this is about, but I’m leaving. I’ve done nothing but agree to publish Jason’s works. No crime in that for a publisher.”

  “Unless you were part of the conspiracy to enhance Jason’s worth in the marketplace. I have a feeling, Mr. Cole, that you were in on this from the very beginning—that the four of you sat down one night, probably with a few bottles of wine, and decided to pull a grand hoax on the world.”

  I looked at Jane Portelaine. “How could you have betrayed your aunt this way?”

  Until I asked that, she’d been glaring at me with a face of stone. There was a discernible tremor in her long, lean body, and her fists were clenched at her sides.

  “Marjorie Ainsworth was a difficult person, Jane, but she did not deserve to have her life end that way.”

  “She was old, about to die anyway,” Harris said from where he sat in Marjorie’s usual chair, a freshly lit cigarette dangling from his fingers.

  Now I was angry. I said, “I suppose the person floating in the Thames was old and about to die, too.”

  Suddenly the room was bathed in harsh white light that poured through the window. Automobiles could be heard outside, along with the voices of many men. Marshall bolted from the table and ran into the adjacent drawing room. He looked through windows to the front, turned, and shouted, “There’s bloody police everywhere.”

  “We can continue this discussion at Scotland Yard,” I said.

  “There’ll be no discussion with me,” Jason said. “I didn’t kill the old lady, although I wouldn’t have minded doing it. I hated her, but I didn’t have to be the one to kill her.” He looked up at Jane. “Tell her how you did it, Jane, how you drove the stake into the witch’s heart.”

  I stared at Jane, said nothing.

  “It wasn’t hard, was it?” Harris said to Marjorie’s niece. “Over as quick as that.”

  I continued to look at Jane and noticed that the nature of her trembling had changed. Now it was less born of anger and more rooted in other emotions. I asked softly, “Why, Jane?”

  She slowly shook her head and lowered her eyes.

  “Was it so important to you that Jason have a career he didn’t deserve that you would kill your own aunt?”

  Jane’s voice matched the softening of her face. She slowly shook her head and said, “No.”

  “Why did you kill her, Jane?”

  “Because ...” She slowly turned and looked at Jason Harris, who was smiling at her. She looked at me again and said, “Because I would lose him if I didn’t.”

  The smug expression on Jason’s face caused me to want to rake it with my nails, throw lye in it, disfigure it the way the body dragged from the Thames had been disfigured.

  The heavy metal knocker sounded against the front door. Marshall returned to the dining room, his face plastered with fright. “What do we do?” he asked Jason.

  “Invite them in,” Harris said, stubbing out his cigarette and standing. He came around the table and said to me, “I have news for you, Jessica Fletcher.”

  “And what might that be, Jason?”

  “That I win no matter what. When this is over, my name is going to be very big and valuable in the publishing community.” He looked at Walter Cole. “Am I right, Walter?”

  “I had nothing to do with any of this,” the publisher said again.

  The police, led by George Sutherland, came through the front door and surrounded the dining room table.

  I started to say something to Jason Harris, but was interrupted by a voice from the group. “I knew it all along, I did.”

  Jimmy Biggers pushed past two uniformed police officers and winked at me. “We did it, Jessica.”

  “Yes, Jimmy, we did. When you told me that Mr. Simpson was on his way to Ainsworth Manor, and that he had someone with him whose description matched that of Mr. Cole, I knew my instincts were right, and that there would be a gathering of sorts here tonight.”

  “We’ll do us a press conference together, Jessica, as soon as we get back to London.”

  “I’m not sure I’m up to press conferences, Jimmy, but we certainly will stand together.” I winked at him. “Good for business.”

  He returned my wink and grinned.

  I looked at Jason Harris and repeated what I’d started to say before Biggers interrupted. “You know, Jason, you’re absolutely right. The public loves a name embroiled in scandal. The problem is you don’t have the talent to give the public what it will expect from you. Then again, you’ll have plenty of quiet time in the penitentiary to sharpen your literary skills. Some pretty good books have been written by lifers.”

  Chapter Twenty-three

  Seth Hazlitt, Morton Metzger, Lucas Darling, and I sat with George Sutherland in his office at Scotland Yard. It was the following morning: the weather in London was what tourists always claim it is, chilly and damp. Tea in Styrofoam cups had been purchased from a vendor who serviced the Yard. It wasn’t an elegant tea service, but the tea tasted good.

  “I can’t believe that dreadful man Montgomery Coots,” I said, “bouncing up and down on TV this morning, claiming he knew all along it wasn’t Count Zara who’d killed Marjorie; that it was Jane. The nerve of him to talk about how Scotland Yard almost derailed the investigation by accusing Zara.”

  Sutherland, who’d removed his jacket and sat behind his desk in shirt, tie, and dark brown sleeveless sweater, laughed gently. “I think we can withstand
the attack on our reputation by the Crumpsworth inspector.” He leaned forward and said to me, “I must admit, Jess, that when you asked me to announce that we’d identified Zara as the murderer, I came this close to denying you.” He held his thumb and index finger an eighth of an inch apart. “But I must admit it was effective. Obviously Harris, Ms. Portelaine, and the others felt confident they were off the hook.”

  “Well, George, all I can say is that I appreciate your going along with me for twenty-four hours.”

  “What an evil woman,” Lucas said.

  “Jane?” I said. “I don’t think she’s evil, Lucas. I’m not excusing her for having killed Marjorie, but there is a mitigating factor, I think.”

  “Which is?” Sutherland asked.

  “A lack of premeditation. The others were involved in a classic conspiracy. For Jane, ramming the dagger into her aunt represented extreme frustration and fear. I suspect she’d never had a relationship with a man before, let alone with such a handsome, dashing, and supposedly talented one as Jason Harris. She would have done anything to keep him.”

  “Ms. Giancona has been very cooperative,” Sutherland said. “According to her, Harris had Marshall, the butler, plant the pendant your husband gave you in Miss Ainsworth’s bedroom to cast suspicion on you, Jessica.”

  I touched the pendant and said, “If Inspector Coots had his way, I’d be defending myself in the Old Bailey right now.”

  I looked at Lucas. “I don’t wonder that Maria is being cooperative, after taking Jane’s blows. When I saw that girl’s face—and I am not excusing her, either, from having been part of the scheme—I knew deep inside that Jane had killed Marjorie. Until I saw how capable she was of physically venting her anger, I would have dismissed that notion.”

  “Any word on the Maroney fella?” Morton asked.

  Sutherland shook his head. “We’ll find him.”

  I said, “I certainly was wrong there. I assumed it was Maroney who’d been killed and dumped in the Thames, but then I thought back to when I’d seen the body. It was such a fleeting glance, but the head was too small.”

  “Harris was certainly effective at getting others to do his dirty deeds, wasn’t he?” Seth said. “He got Jane to kill Marjorie, and then convinced—or paid off—Maroney to find a drifter down by the docks, kill him, and disfigure him so that he was unidentifiable, then dump him in the river.”