Puzzle for Wantons

by Patrick Quentin

  As the service progressed, I grew more and more conscious of the irony of the situation. Almost certainly one of those eight discreet mourners had murdered Dorothy. Certainly several others had been more thankful to get her out of the way. I started to think of the reddish stain on the finger of Dorothy’s glove, trying to guess its secret.

  It was while these godless reflections were sneaking through my mind that I glanced down and saw Fleur’s large black pocketbook lodged on the shiny surface of the pew between her elbow and mine. Why hadn’t I thought of it before? We had searched Fleur’s room for the thing she had stolen from Dorothy, but it had never occurred to us that little Mrs. Wyckoff might be carrying the object—whatever it was—around with her.

  This case seemed to be developing into a tragi-comedy of pocketbooks.

  Fleur was staring at the minister, absorbed, it seemed, with the melancholy course of the service. The pocketbook, like Dorothy’s, had a block clasp which had only to be pinched to jump open. Feeling rather guilty, I reached my hand down until it hovered over the clasp. Fleur did not move. I gripped the clasp between two fingers and squeezed. The pocketbook sprang open and slid towards me on the pew, revealing its pink lined interior. To me the faint snap of the clasp sounded as deafening as a fusillade. But Fleur did not seem to hear, I peered down into the open bag, and my heart began to thump.

  Because, inside it, sticking up between a handkerchief and a little suede purse, was a letter. And on the front of the envelope, I could just make out, in ink, the words:

  Mrs. Dorothy Fland …

  With an agility that became a pickpocket rather than a naval lieutenant, I flicked the letter out of the bag and into my own pocket. I reached back to snap the clasp and, as I did so, the organ started playing and people began rustling. Fleur half turned. The pocketbook was still open. There was only one thing to do. Making a clumsy grab for a hymn book, I managed to tilt the pocketbook off the pew with my elbow so that it flopped to the floor, disgorging its contents out onto the bare stone. It happened so quickly that I was pretty sure Fleur had not realized the clasp had been open before the fall.

  Grinning sheepishly, I bent, stuffed the things back into the bag, shut it, and handed it to her. She was lost in some gloomy reverie. She just took it absently and slipped it under her arm.

  It looked very much as if I had found the mysterious object which Fleur had stolen from Dorothy Flanders’ room.

  A letter written to Dorothy—by whom?

  Chuck had business in Reno and did not come back with us. Iris and I drove in the station wagon with Lover, Mimi, and Fleur.

  When we reached home, Lover went to put the station wagon away, Mimi and Fleur drifted off together, and Iris and I became tangled up with Lorraine who had driven back in the other car. She was brandishing a telegram and bewailing the fact that Mr. Throckmorton’s priority had collapsed under him and he had been thrown off the plane at Cheyenne. He would not be arriving until tomorrow.

  Making vague sympathetic noises, I managed to brush Lorraine off and bundled my wife upstairs to our room, where I proudly produced the letter with the necessary explanations. Iris was flatteringly impressed with my theft.

  “Quick, darling. Let’s read it. Quick.”

  Ignoring the delicate ethics of the situation, I pulled the envelope out of my pocket and extracted from it a single sheet of notepaper, covered with a blunt, masculine handwriting.

  With Iris eagerly at my side, I read:

  Dorothy,

  At least you’ve achieved something. You’ve opened my eyes once and for all. I see now what sort of a person you are and what a monstrous fool I’ve let you make out of me. I don’t understand what you want. Surely it can’t be marriage. I suppose it’s money. Well, blackmail is blackmail, however daintily you express it, and I will not be blackmailed. So go on. Do your worst. Shout from the housetops that Dr. Wyckoff, the favourite son of a hundred ailing dowagers, made unwelcome advances to you when you visited him as a patient. As I remember it, the advances were not altogether on my side. But if it gives you pleasure to ruin my career out of spite—go ahead. I deserve nothing better. I am making plans to see that you can hurt no one but myself. This will be the last communication between us. I shall remember you till the day I die—or you do.

  David Wyckoff

  I looked at Iris. She looked at me and grimaced. “Wyckoff, too! The more we find out about Dorothy the less attractive she becomes, if possible.”

  “Sure. She cheats on Flanders, runs through all his dough, has a tawdry affair with Laguno at Janet’s expense, sneaks five-dollar chips from her hostess, has a tumble with Wyckoff and tries to blackmail him with threats to ruin his career. The sort of girl any man would be proud to murder.”

  “‘Till the day I die—or you do,’” mused Iris. “It looks as if Wyckoff had murder on his mind, doesn’t it?”

  “Exactly,” I said. “Which brings us to Fleur.”

  Fleur’s position seemed as obvious now as it was pitiful. Clearly she had lied to us last night about her reason for divorcing her husband. She must either have known or suspected about Dorothy. And then, when Dorothy died and Wyckoff diagnosed the death as heart failure, Fleur must have jumped to the conclusion that it was murder and that her husband was hushing it up because he was guilty. She knew Dorothy was the careful homebody type who keeps incriminating letters tied up in pink ribbons. So she had sneaked into Dorothy’s room to make sure there was no evidence against her husband floating around. She had found this letter and Laguno’s letter to Dorothy which she had slipped under Janet’s door. Since then she had been lying herself black in the face to protect Wyckoff.

  One thing was certain, Dorothy or no Dorothy, divorce or no divorce, Fleur was still in love with David Wyckoff.

  “The poor kid,” said Iris, “she must have been suffering the tortures of the damned.” Her face clouded. “But what do you think? Wyckoffs by far the most likely one to have murdered Dorothy. Everything fits that way.”

  “But why kill Janet?”

  “Don’t you see? Wyckoff knew Janet had Laguno’s letter to Dorothy. He assumed that Janet was the one who had ransacked Dorothy’s room and that therefore Janet had this letter which incriminated him.”

  “Could be.” I folded the letter back into the envelope. “But before we stick our necks out, we’ll give Wyckoff a chance to talk. Once he’s confronted with this letter, he’ll have to talk willy-nilly.”

  Iris, greedy for action, said, “Shall we go find him now?”

  I kissed her. “Not we, darling—I. This is going to be one of those delicate talks with sex and things rearing their ugly heads. I think it’d better be carried out on a man-to-man basis.”

  I left her, taking the letter with me, and went in search of Wyckoff. I tried his room first and he was there.

  Dr. Wyckoff had one of the most startling of Lorraine’s many startling rooms. Built on a corner, it was dominated by two huge plate-glass windows, each of which took up an almost complete wall. The afternoon light was fading, and the two views were as fiat and unreal as gigantic photo-murals. One stretched all the way to the hump of Mount Rose with Lorraine’s steep, zigzag drive tumbling precipitously in the foreground. The other showed the walled-in approach to the house and the gleaming expanse of Lake Tahoe with its brooding sentinel mountains beyond.

  This Wagnerian setting made David Wyckoff seem small and forlorn, although he was over six feet He gave me a make-shift substitute for a smile.

  “Oh, hello, Lieutenant Duluth. I’ve got a bottle of rye somewhere. Have a drink.”

  “No, thanks.” I could have done with a shot, but it didn’t seem cricket to gulp down a man’s liquor when you were planning to accuse him of double murder. “I’ve just come in for a chat.”

  “Chat?” He echoed that sissy little word with surprise. “You mean—about something in particular?” “Something very particular.”

  “I hope I’ll be able to help you.” His voice was changed. I
t was all dressed up with society doctor charm. “Just what is it?”

  “It’s this,” I said. “I think Dorothy Flanders was murdered and I think Janet Laguno was murdered. I know a dart tipped with curare was stolen from the trophy room some time before Dorothy died and I know it was put back again the next day with its tip faked. I’m pretty sure Dorothy was poisoned with curare by a trap set in her pocketbook. I’m pretty sure you know she was poisoned, too.” I paused, giving that time to sink in. “That’s what I want to chat about.”

  Wyckoff bore up very well under my blitz. Very softly he said, “I shall ask you what I asked Count Laguno when he made a similar accusation. If you believe what you say you believe, Lieutenant, why didn’t you demand an autopsy before Dorothy was buried?”

  “Because I’m Lorraine’s guest here. I didn’t want to mess everyone up in a scandal before I was sure.”

  “You’re accusing me of giving a false diagnosis in order to hush up a murder. What reason would I have for jeopardizing my entire professional career?”

  Wyckoff had a nice face really, open and good-natured. That supercilious expression didn’t suit it.

  I said, “Your entire professional career was so nearly jeopardized already. Just a little mud slung in the right places can ruin a doctor. Dorothy alive, going around accusing you of having made attacks on her virtue when she visited you as a patient, was dangerous enough. Dorothy murdered, with a good chance of everything breaking, was a thousand times more dangerous. You stood to gain everything if a little professional lying could whisk her respectably into a coffin with no questions asked.”

  Dr. Wyckoff was gripping the back of one of Lorraine’s interior decorator’s apologies for a chair. Against the great Nevada backdrops of the windows, he seemed a gaunt shadow with no substance.

  “What are you trying to tell me?” he managed to say.

  “I don’t like reading other people’s mail as a rule, but this was just one of those things.”

  I produced the letter from my pocket and handed it to him. He took it with shaking fingers, staring down at it like a man staring at his own death warrant. He looked old and beaten.

  “You’re going to the police, Lieutenant Duluth?”

  “I’m afraid I don’t believe in getting sentimental about murderers.”

  He handed the letter back to me. He stood up straight, trying to square his shoulders.

  “All right. We might as well get this over as quickly as possible. I killed Dorothy and I killed Janet.”

  XI

  That had me staggered for a moment I had evidence against him, yes, but certainly not enough evidence to make a murderer throw in his hand that wholeheartedly.

  Firing the question at him, I said, “What was the trap to kill Dorothy?”

  “I—I—” he foundered. “I just—”

  I saw then. “Don’t bother. Things are complicated enough without your getting noble. You didn’t kill her, did you? You think your wife did. That’s your trouble.”

  He flared. “That’s a lie. If you think you can—”

  “This is all rather funny. Here you are ready to take the rap for Fleur while she’s been running around in a swivet—faking alibis for you, making up stories, breaking into people’s rooms, stealing things—just because she thinks you’re guilty.”

  I told him all I knew about Fleur’s carryings-on then. It was amazing how he changed. He looked boyish again, excited, almost gay. And when I had finished, he was pathetically eager to talk.

  His story was pretty much what I had expected it to be—a sordid tale about a woman who needed a sound kick in the pants and a man who forgot for a few heady moments that you can’t have your cake and eat it too.

  Wyckoff and Fleur had been married for eight years and for eight years they had been devotedly in love with each other. Then one day Dorothy had showed up in Wyckoff’s office, referred to him by another physician for a slight heart ailment.

  “She did have a slight systolic murmur, but it wasn’t transmitted, wasn’t serious at all. After I’d examined her, she stayed on. We got to talking. And—oh, well, you knew her. I don’t have to go into the grisly details of those unwelcome advances, do I?”

  Dorothy, apparently more than satisfied with the unwelcome advances, had continued to pay him regular visits. To give their sessions an air of professional respectability, she had insisted on his sending her periodic bills which she merely left for the still hospitalized Bill Flanders to face on his bitter homecoming.

  In spite of Dorothy’s heady fascination he was still in love with Fleur, lived in constant terror that she would find out, and felt more and more of a heel as the weeks dragged tawdrily on. It was the same old story with the same old sting in its end. At last, Dorothy, bored with his scruples and self-recriminations and on the loose again with Laguno, had turned nasty and tried to hold him up for money. In a fury of disgust he had written her the letter. Soon he received a reply, pointing out that the letter had admitted her charges and that it would come in handy if she chose to bring a law suit for damages. She would give him a couple of weeks, she said, to make up his mind whether to settle the matter or not. He realized that he might as well kiss his career goodbye. By then he felt he deserved anything that came to him anyway.

  But he wasn’t going to have his beloved Fleur dragged through the mire with him. Before anything could break, he had gone to her, told her nothing about Dorothy but asked her to divorce him, giving her no explanations. She had been terribly shaken but had asked no questions.

  “She’s as proud and stubborn as they come,” he said, a note of pride in his voice. “I never dreamed she’d known about Dorothy all the time. She never let me guess. She wanted to spare me that final humiliation.”

  And so Fleur went off to Reno with her little heart breaking while David Wyckoff waited at home, expecting the worst every day. He thought it had come when Bill Flanders showed up at his office. But all Flanders was worrying about was his wife’s bills. Wyckoff told him the half true story of Dorothy’s weak heart, and Bill fell for it. During the interview Flanders let it slip that Dorothy had gone to Reno.

  “She had to,” I put in. “Flanders had got wise to her. He’d started chasing her around with steak knives. San Francisco wasn’t healthy for her any more.”

  David Wyckoff’s lips were still pale. “It was a few days later that Lorraine called me with her crazy invitation. I accepted. It wasn’t because I ever hoped for a reconciliation with Fleur. After what I’d done, I wasn’t even worthy to tie her shoes. I dreaded having to see her again. But I did come because Lorraine said that Dorothy was here, too. I was terrified of what might happen with Dorothy and Fleur in the same house, terrified of what Dorothy might tell my wife. I was half crazy with worry by then anyway. I had a mad idea that if I came, maybe I could argue with Dorothy, persuade her to give me back my letter—something. I knew she’d probably just laugh at me. But, well, it was a last desperate chance to save something from the wreck.”

  “And when you got here, you did talk with Dorothy?”

  “I never had the chance. But I did see Fleur. She came to my room just before we all went in to Reno. She was very quiet, very cold. She just said, ‘It’s Dorothy, isn’t it?’ And then, when I didn’t say anything, she laughed and said, ‘It’s funny really, funny that my whole life’s ruined and it’s all because of Dorothy—something any drunk sailor could pick up on a Saturday night. I suppose you’re going to marry her. Well, I wish you happiness.’ Then she was gone, running down the corridor. She never gave me a chance to speak to her again.”

  That same evening Dorothy had died at the Del Monte. David Wyckoff’s face lived again some of the torture he must have gone through when he examined her body in the manager’s office. He had seen at once that she had died from heart failure. But there were symptoms of paralysis, and he was pretty sure that heart failure was secondary to the anoxia of respiratory failure due to paralysis of the diaphragm and the thoracic muscles. E
verything pointed to the fact that death had been the result of a poison working on the respiratory system.

  “You talk about curare, Duluth. It’s not much in my line but I’ve seen it used at the hospital in tetanus cases and I must admit the idea of curare crossed my mind. But—well, you can imagine how I felt.” He watched me intently. “I knew that if any other doctor saw the corpse, he would discount a diagnosis of simple heart failure. I thought of my letter. Dorothy had it in Reno. If the police knew she’d been murdered, they’d be bound to find that letter which would mean the end of me. And then Bill Flanders was there in the room. I knew what he felt about Dorothy. If he had murdered her, who was I to blame him? But that wasn’t all. It was Fleur. She thought I was in love with Dorothy, thought I was going to marry her, knew her life had been ruined by her. What if Fleur had—That’s what decided me. It was a mad thing to do, but there was just a chance of my getting away with it since the doctor who sent her to me honestly believed she had a weak heart.” He pushed the dark hair back from his forehead. “Heaven knows what would have happened if I hadn’t convinced Chuck. It was his influence with the police that made the whole dirty thing possible.”

  Later that night, when he came back from Reno with Chuck, he had gone to Dorothy’s room in search of his letter. He found the room in disorder and the letter gone. He did not know, of course, that it was Fleur who had taken it. He had straightened the room because he knew if it were found that way next morning people would start wondering.

  That explained the miraculous fashion in which the room had tidied itself during my midnight talk with Flanders on the terrace.

  “About Janet,” said Wyckoff, “I don’t know. She wasn’t poisoned with curare. I can tell you that. But—I suppose you must be right. I suppose she must have been murdered, too—held under the water—though I can’t imagine why unless Laguno—” He came to me, gripped my arm. “I’ve told you the truth. I swear it. What I did was a criminal thing for a doctor to do and I’m ready to take the consequences. But you’ve told me yourself that Fleur’s been thinking I did it. That means you can’t possibly suspect her, can you?”