“It’s okay,” he said. “Wyckoff signs the certificate. They’re not sending up a police doctor. They under stand how Miss Pleygel and Iris Duluth and the Del Monte feel and they promise to keep the reporters off. No inquest, no anything. There won’t be any stink.”
That was all there was to it. In less than fifteen minutes Dorothy Flanders was well on her way to a respectable coffin.
The manager was almost purring now. Chuck turned to Lorraine.
“Listen, baby, there’s nothing you can do. Get Flanders and the others home. Wyckoff and I will attend to everything, see she’s taken to a funeral place. When we’re through, I’ll drive Wyckoff back and sleep at your house. Okay?”
“Why, yes. darling. Yes, of course.” Lorraine’s face, which was so naive for all its sophistication, was puckered like the face of a little girl who’s just seen a puppy run over. “But poor Dorothy. How perfectly ghastly. Who ever dreamed Dorothy would die of a weak heart?”
Lorraine, Bill Flanders, the manager, and myself were hustled out of the office. The manager scurried away, presumably to soothe his customers. Lorraine linked her arm through mine.
Her words were still echoing in my ears.
Who ever dreamed Dorothy would die of a weak heart?
Who indeed? Maybe Lorraine believed in that heart attack. Lorraine could believe anything she put her mind to. Maybe the manager believed in it too, it was so obviously to his advantage to do so.
But did Wyckoff? Did Flanders? Did Chuck Dawson?
Did I?
V
Iris had locked her piggy bank with its hoard of ill-gotten half dollars in the dressing-table drawer which served as her private Fort Knox. She slipped out of her black evening gown and sat, very decoratively, at the mirror, combing her dark hair. It was a relief to be over with the noisome evening and to be alone with my wife again.
I was hanging my uniform in the closet when Iris remarked, “So Dorothy Flanders died of a heart attack.”
“That’s what they say.” I started to unbutton my shirt. “Incidentally, never rhumba with someone who’s going to die of a heart attack. I don’t recommend it.”
Iris went on combing her hair noncommittally. I grabbed up my pyjamas, a fancy blue silk pair bought largely to impress Lorraine’s domestic staff, went into the bathroom, and started brushing my teeth.
My wife’s voice sounded again in competition with the running water. “Considerate of her, wasn’t it?”
I knew she was sending up a trial balloon. I grunted a guarded, “Sure,” through toothpaste.
My wife appeared in the door of the bathroom, slender and beautiful, and watched me brush my teeth.
“Darling, you want your leave to be a nice leave, don’t you? Nice and peaceful?”
“Sure.”
“And you like being alone with me?”
I’d have kissed her if it hadn’t been for the toothpaste. She looked so exactly like something you wanted to kiss.
“Being alone with you’s the only thing I like without reservation,” I said.
My wife’s forehead puckered. “In that case, we leave here tomorrow. We’ll live in a tent in the desert if necessary And”—she paused—“and Dorothy Flanders died of a heart attack.”
She withdrew to the bedroom, leaving me with my teeth and my thoughts. My thoughts gave me more trouble than my teeth. By every law of reason, I should have been panting to exchange the unappetizing situation here for a brief period of peace and quiet with my wife. And yet, in the old frivolous days before I joined the Navy and Iris became a movie star, we had been mixed up in a couple of murders. We had always maintained that we had hated every moment of them. But somehow, whenever a chance came to become embroiled again, there we were. Something happened to us—something funny and tingling in the spine. I was tingling now.
I scrambled into my very civilian pyjamas. Hardly knowing I had said it, I called, “Darling, remember that old drunk with a beard in Frisco who warned you that Eulalia Crawford was going to be murdered?”
“Yes.” My wife’s reply was prompt.
“And remember Fogarty in the strait-jacket at Dr. Lenz’?”
Iris was at the bathroom door again. She had changed into a Magnificent Pictures black negligee which had almost certainly shocked the staider members of Lorraine’s domestic staff. Her eyes were shining with a gleam I knew of old.
“So you do want to stay too, Peter. We are going to find out what really happened.”
I watched her. “Remember, baby. You’re Iris Duluth of Magnificent Pictures now. You belong to the world. If there was any scandal, what would Mr. Somethingstein—”
“Don’t call him Mr. Somethingstein, Peter. He’s Mr. Finkelstein. And who cares what Mr. Finkelstein thinks? If there is a scandal and if Will Hays finds me unsavoury, they can rustle up someone else to belong to the world.”
Having disposed of her movie career, my wife grabbed my hand and pulled me down onto the edge of one of Lorraine’s wildly modernistic beds.
“Darling, with her husband threatening to kill her and everything, Dorothy couldn’t have died of a heart attack. It’s too much of a coincidence. Besides you just had to look at her to see she was as healthy as a water buffalo. Tell me—exactly what happened in the manager’s office?”
I told her. She said, “Then, if Dorothy was murdered, Wyckoff risked his entire professional career making a false diagnosis. Why?”
“There’s a lot of whys about Wyckoff anyway. Why did he come here in the first place? Certainly not to get reconciled with his wife. He hasn’t even spoken to Fleur since he arrived.”
“If he was faking, he took a terrible risk, passing the buck like that to Bill Falnders. Bill might have denied knowing about Dorothy’s weak heart.”
“He had to take that risk. No one would have believed his story unless it was backed up by Dorothy’s husband. Besides, he was at dinner. He’d have known Bill had everything to lose if it came out that his wife had been murdered. Bill’s the obvious one to have murdered her anyway. And if he did, I can’t say I’d blame him much.”
“Neither would I.” Iris paused. “But what about Chuck Dawson? Do you think the two of them managed to fool Chuck?”
“As a matter of fact, he seemed as eager as they were to sell the heart attack theory. He was actually the one who made it possible, using his influence to keep the police from investigating. It doesn’t make sense, his helping to hush up her murder. So far as I know, he’d only known her the week she’d been here.”
“A week of Dorothy’d be enough for anyone.” Iris crossed her knees and clasped her hands around them. “Peter, if she didn’t die of a heart attack, how did she die?”
“I guess she’d have to have been poisoned. And if she was poisoned, I have a hunch where the poison may have come from.” I told her about the curare-tipped Indian dart which might possibly have been missing from the cabinet in the trophy room. “I didn’t tell you when I noticed it. I didn’t want to worry you.”
“Curare!” Iris whistled. “The Count Laguno made that crack about curare to Dorothy this evening.”
“Exactly.”
“Peter, what do you know about curare?”
“Just what you read in detective stories. It doesn’t hurt you if you swallow it. Dorothy wolfed down a chicken sandwich at the Del Monte. But I guess that couldn’t have been poisoned. It has to get in your blood stream. But one prick with a pin’s enough to kill you.”
“Dorothy certainly had enough naked areas to prick. It works quickly, doesn’t it?”
“Yes. But I don’t know how quickly. Anywhere from three minutes to twenty minutes, I think.”
“That cuts out Chuck’s club then. We were in the Del Monte more than twenty minutes. But it doesn’t help. Anyone could easily have struck her when we were all crowding to the table.” Iris looked puzzled. “Darling, somehow I don’t see Bill Flanders doing something as wild and imaginative as sticking Dorothy with a poisoned dart. He wanted to
kill her, yes. But he’s the sort who’d have bashed her over the head or—”
“Or chased her with a steak knife,” I put in. “But it doesn’t have to be Bill. The Lagunos and the Wyckoffs knew the Flanders in San Francisco. Lorraine knew her too. Anyone who knew Dorothy might have been proud to murder her.”
Iris’ face was determined. “Come on, darling. Let’s get our teeth into this. Let’s begin at the beginning and reconstruct everything that happened this evening.”
We were still reconstructing in our individual zebra-striped beds an hour later. Iris’ reconstruction got more and more vague until it faded in a sigh and she was asleep.
But I was not sleepy. I lay in bed, smoking in the dark, thinking. Our rehash of the evening had made it clear that, apart from vague suspicions, there was no evidence of murder. We couldn’t even be sure that a dart had been taken from the trophy room. Only an autopsy could tell whether or not Wyckoff had been lying. And Iris and I were hardly in a position to barge around demanding autopsies on other people’s wives.
Around two, Chuck Dawson and Dr. Wyckoff came back. I heard them outside my door. Chuck said a low “Good night, Wyckoff,” and two sets of footsteps sounded as they moved off to their rooms.
Dorothy, presumably, had been safely stowed in a Reno funeral parlour.
I found myself sliding into an uneasy doze, dominated by a grisly vision of Dorothy’s bluish-white corpse, with its tumbling blonde hair, laid out on a marble slab in a bleak room.
I must have slept, but only lightly because suddenly I was wide awake again, sitting up in bed, my heart racing. The luminous dial of my watch showed three-thirty. I tried in a sleep-confused way, to think what had wakened me. Then I understood.
Outside my door, audible against the bare cedar of the corridor floor, sounded the faint tap of footsteps.
Footsteps, even at three-thirty in the morning, should not have been particularly disturbing. But these were, because they were so furtive. A gentle shuffle, then a tiny squeak. A shuffle, a squeak….
It was as if someone were passing my door on tiptoe, his heart in his mouth.
I lit a cigarette and lay back in bed as the footsteps grew dimmer and then quite inaudible. They had been going down the passage towards the head of the stairs. I smoked the cigarette to its butt, thinking about them. It was none of my business who was going where, but, as a self-appointed investigator, my curiosity was more than I could bear. About five minutes later, when the footsteps hadn’t returned, I tumbled out of bed, into slippers and robe, and eased my way into the corridor.
The moon must have set. The darkness in the passage was thick as tar. I stood a moment, getting my bearings. Then I saw a faint streak of light fanning out from under the door of a room on the other side of the passage, between me and the stairs. As I watched, it snapped out. I heard the rattle of a cautiously turned doorknob. Then the footsteps were there again, coming straight towards me from the room which had been lighted.
Shuffle, squeak…. Shuffle, squeak….
It was an odd feeling, standing in the darkness, having that unknown person creep closer and closer. In the early desperate days in the Pacific I had sharpened my instinct to associate any stealthy creeping sound with danger.
The footsteps were almost abreast of me now, on the far side of the corridor. I could have reached out and touched the person, whoever it was. But I didn’t. In a millionairess’ mansion, house guests don’t pounce on each other without provocation.
Instead I said, “Who’s there?”
There was a second of utter silence. Then, with a scurrying like the Rabbit in Alice In Wonderland, the invisible presence darted past me. Almost before I had time to turn around, I heard a door open and shut behind me. Again there was nothing in the corridor but the darkness.
It was impossible to tell into which room my invisible fellow guest had vanished, and obviously I couldn’t follow. I turned back towards the stairs. The geography of the house had fallen into place in my mind now. There were only three rooms between myself and the head of the stairs. Chuck Dawson and Janet Laguno had the two rooms on my side.
But the single room across the corridor, the room from which the prowler had just come, was the room that had belonged to Dorothy Flanders.
I hurried to it. The door was ajar. I slipped in, closing the door behind me. I stumbled around for a lamp, found one, and turned it on.
Dorothy had been given one of the few sedate rooms in Lorraine’s crazy house, a sort of. Early American affair. Its condition, however, was far from sedate. The drawers in the antique highboy had been tugged open. The exotic dresses in the closet were in confusion. Empty suitcases were sprawled all over the carpet.
I made a brief survey of the place. Rings and necklaces were lying in full view on the vanity. I found a pile of silver dollars in one of the open highboy drawers. It was only too plain that the person who had just ransacked the room so ferverishly had been no common or garden sneak-thief.
This seemed to be one up for the murder theory. People don’t play havoc with the rooms of women who die from respectable heart attacks.
But what had the burglar been after? I looked around. There was nothing to give me a clue. I was mad as a hornet for having let him or her slip through my fingers in the passage. The lamp I had lighted was by the window. I crossed, turned it out, and stood a moment, staring into the night and wondering what to do next. Immediately below, the edge of the terrace was dimly visible in the starlight. Something else was visible too—the red tip of a lighted cigarette.
Anyone up at that hour of the night was worth investigating. I slipped out of the room into the corridor and down the stairs. Passing through the great living-room, I pulled open one of the plate-glass windows and stepped onto the terrace.
It was lighter outside than in. Stars were gleaming with a high polish in the Nevada sky. The red tip of the cigarette was no longer where it had been. For a moment I thought the terrace was deserted. Then, further up, beyond the huddle of potted shrubs, I saw its gleam. Behind it, I could just make out a shadowy silhouette.
I strolled up the terrace, making no attempt to conceal myself. I was just someone who couldn’t sleep taking a walk in the starlight. The figure in front of me was a man. I could see that now. He was sitting, hunched forward, in a white wooden chair. Something was propped against the chair. A crutch.
At least I knew one thing. It hadn’t been Dorothy’s husband who had rifled her room.
I went right up to Bill Flanders. He was fully dressed, the way he had been dressed that evening. He was staring out across the faint shimmer of Lake Tahoe, unconscious of me and everything else.
“Hello,” I said.
He started. The cigarette dropped from his hand.
“Who—? Oh, it’s Lieutenant Duluth, isn’t it?”
“Couldn’t sleep,” I said. “Guess you’re having the same trouble.”
“Sleep! Did you expect me to sleep?”
Somehow I felt like a heel. I half suspected him of murdering his wife, and here I was spying on him. I turned away, but surprisingly the ex-boxer-marine grabbed my arm.
“Don’t go, Lieutenant,” he said hoarsely. “I gotta have someone to talk to or I’ll go nuts.”
I didn’t say anything. I just perched myself on the balustrade of the terrace, close to him. Although I couldn’t see his face, I could tell he had worked himself up to a pitch where his nerves had almost gone.
“I gotta tell someone this, Lieutenant, because it’s weighing on my mind. Last week, before she quit to go to Reno, I tried to murder my wife.”
So much that was startling had happened in so short a time that this very remarkable confirmation of what Dorothy herself had Claimed neither surprised nor shocked me.
He was glaring up at me, his hands twisting together. “Maybe you’ll think I’m a maniac or something and oughta be put away. Maybe you’re right at that. I don’t know any more. In the old days, I was always kind of a peaceable guy. I w
as a boxer. But when I was up there in the ring, I didn’t feel like it was fighting. It was just my job, see? I was just working like any other guy, salting money away because all I wanted was to settle down some place with Dorothy, settle down quiet and have kids. Then the War came, and Saipan. And there it was kill or be killed. But all the time I was kind of dreaming how it would be different someday and I’d be back again with Dorothy. I knew she was much smarter than me. She’d been married before, been around with society people and all. But after all, she’d married me and I thought—”
His voice choked. I didn’t like having to listen.
“Then I lost my leg and I came back, Lieutenant. And—well, you know what I found. She’d run through all my dough. She’d been carrying on with every 4F in sight. And I got to figuring. I’d been out there fighting the Japs for her and what had she been doing? How was she any better than the Japs? And she started throwing all those bills at me she expected me to pay and—Oh, what’s the use? I couldn’t never make you understand.”
“Sure,” I said quietly, “I understand. If I’d come back to a wife like that I’d probably have tried to kill her too.”
“You mean that?” He sounded pathetically eager. Then his voice went flat again. “But that ain’t all, Lieutenant. Day before yesterday this Lorraine Pleygel calls and invites me to come up here, to get reconciled with my wife, she says.” He laughed. “That struck me as funny, that did. Reconcile with Dorothy. But scarcely before I knew I’d done it, I was saying, ‘Sure. Sure I’d like to come.’ And I did come, and for only one reason.” He added huskily, “I accepted that invitation and I came here just for another chance to give Dorothy what was coming to her.”
Puzzle for Wantons Page 5
