Puzzle for Wantons

by Patrick Quentin

  Iris was trying, also unsuccessfully, to look modest. “It was really just chance, Peter. You see, I was sitting here all by myself and I started thinking about the attempted robbery in our room. You and I had decided that the murderer must either have been after Dorothy’s pocketbook or Janet’s will. But it suddenly occurred to me that there was something else in that locked drawer—my piggy bank.”

  “Your piggy bank!” I exclaimed. “Why should the murderer want to steal your piggy bank?”

  “I didn’t know, but I did know I’d had it with me the night Dorothy was killed. So, when you’d gone downstairs to your misogynistic Inspector, I went back to our room and got the piggy bank out of the drawer. I decided that, if my hunch was right and the piggy bank was important, the murderer might come back for it a second time. I thought of that other piggy bank I’d bought for you and you’d never use. It was in one of the suitcases under the bed. I filled it with all the small change I could find and put it in the drawer as—as a decoy.” She smiled meekly. “Then I brought my own piggy bank here. I broke it. Inside, with all those fifty-cent pieces from the jackpot, I found the chip.”

  “So, all the time, it was right there under our noses?”

  “Yes, Peter. Once I saw the chip, I figured out that the murder trap must have been meant for Lorraine. And, as I looked back, I saw that Lover was the only one who could have put the chip in the piggy bank. Remember, Peter? When Dorothy died on the dance floor, Lover was back at the table alone with her pocketbook and my piggy bank. The moment Dorothy died, he knew she’d been poisoned by the chip and that it couldn’t be anywhere else but in her bag. He didn’t know that the murder was going to be hushed up by Wyckoff. He’d naturally have expected that the police would search everyone. He couldn’t risk keeping the chip in his pocket. My piggy bank was the ideal cache—something in no way connected with him, something he could always get at later on when it would be safe to retrieve the chip and destroy it. As things turned out, when he did try and get it back, we’d locked the piggy bank in the drawer and he was in too much of a hurry to do any lock picking.” She shrugged. “I’m glad to say that, by and large, Lover had the lousiest luck of any ambitious murderer in history.”

  We were all watching her then.

  “The rest is simple. I realized there was still great danger for Lorraine. Without making her suspicious, I persuaded her to get out of bed and come in here where she’d be safe. I saw that Lover’s bad luck had in a way worked out to his advantage and that, with everyone believing in a maniac, he still had a wonderful opportunity to kill Lorraine and get away with it. Any man who had tried and failed three times wasn’t going to stop there. So I thought out something. I snuck downstairs and lugged up that loathsome doll and planted it in Lorraine’s bed. It looked extremely life-like and I knew Lover was short-sighted anyway.”

  My wife grimaced. “Feeling awfully silly, I hid in the clothes’ closet with the door ajar and waited. Sure enough, Lover showed up, and sure enough he murdered that doll with all the stealth of the King pouring the poison in Hamlet’s father’s ear. I’d witnessed an actual murder attempt. That was all I needed. When he slipped out of the room, I went after him. I saw him tiptoe down the corridor to our room. He was after the chip in the piggy bank, of course. I’d left the door open as a lure. I’d also put the key on the outside of the lock to make things easier for me. Once he was in our room I just closed the door on him, locked it, and went to wake up the Inspector.”

  She smiled at me. “He was rather suspicious at first. But when I told him I’d caught Lover red-handed, trying to kill Lorraine, he leaped out of bed. I left him just now coping with Lover. I wanted to come here and have Chuck tell us the whole story because everything still wasn’t quite clear in my mind.”

  I stared at her. I gulped. I had been laughing at her when I called her, “Dare-devil Iris Duluth, Hollywood’s lone she-wolf crime-buster.” Now the laugh was on me. With Iris as an eye-witness of his attempt on Lorraine, Lover was as good as in the death cell already.

  Iris slipped her hand into mine. “It was a miserably tangled up case, Peter, partly because Chuck and Mimi were complicating things all the time, but mostly because Lover was such a darn elaborate murderer. Chuck thinks he’s smart. I don’t. He was ruthless enough, heaven knows, and ingenious. Too ingenious. If I wanted to kill one person, I’d kill that one person not three other people. In my humble opinion, Lover, as a master mind, was a fraud.”

  She turned to Chuck. “You mustn’t worry, Chuck. I told the Inspector a couple of things you’d done and I pointed out the ghastly spot you were in. He likes you. Everybody does. I don’t think you’ll get into much trouble. And—well, he’s really a most sympathetic man. He’s promised to soft-pedal everything that involves Lorraine and your marriage.”

  Chuck and Lorraine were both watching her as if she were one of those things in miracle plays that come down from the sky at the last minute and organize happy endings. With a quick movement Lorraine stepped forward and kissed her.

  “Darling,” she said, “you’re wonderful. You’re perfectly wonderful.”

  Iris grinned sheepishly. “Nonsense,” she said. “Just luck and Edna St. Vincent Millay.”

  At that moment the door opened on Inspector Craig. He looked slightly mad in a shabby raincoat and, so far as I could see, nothing else. He had eyes for no one except Iris.

  He said, “Mrs. Duluth, I’ve got one of my men up from town. He’s watching French downstairs. French isn’t talking yet, but with your evidence we’ve got him where we want him. There’s one thing that stops me though. That money Chuck got from selling the Club, the money he gave to Miss Burnett—you told me French would have it. I’ve torn his room down but it isn’t there.”

  “I know.” Iris looked apologetic. “It was awfully stupid of me. I should have had enough sense to realize where it would be. Come on. I’ll get it.”

  Inspector Craig gawped. So did the rest of us. But we followed Iris humbly out into the corridor. She hurried to Chuck’s room and turned on the light. While we crowded behind her, she went around opening drawers and prodding things. At length she came to the bed and yanked up the mattress.

  There, splayed over the top of the box spring, were thick packages of treasury notes.

  Iris glanced at Chuck. “I thought so. You were right. He was planning to throw the blame on you. I guess he’d have planted the poison chip here, too, if he’d been able to get at it.”

  Inspector Craig gave a long, low whistle. The woman-hater stared down at the money and then with dogged adoration at my wife.

  “If I ever make another crack against women,” he said, “shoot me.”

  My wife smiled delightedly. “I’ll treasure that for my memory book.”

  The Inspector was scooping up the packages of money and stuffing them into his pocket. “You’ll get this back, Chuck, but right now I’d better keep it. Since you’re all awake, no point in wasting time. Maybe you’ll come downstairs and start making your official statements.”

  As we trooped out of the room, Iris slipped her hand through my arm. “Darling,” she said, “let’s sneak away from here tomorrow. Now it’s over, we can have ten lovely, glorious days. I’m bored with being a movie star. I’m bored with being a detective. I want to be a—”

  “A what?”

  “A little woman.”

  The world which had been so dark a few hours before was very bright again. “Where’ll we go?” I asked.

  “Anywhere so long as we’re alone. If need be, we’ll rent a prison cell from Inspector Craig.”

  As we passed Fleur Wyckoff’s room, the door opened and Fleur and Wyckoff appeared, she in a revealing pink negligee, he only in pyjama pants. They stared anxiously. Wyckoff said, “We heard voices. Is everything all right?”

  “Sure,” said Chuck showing white teeth in a spontaneous grin. “Everything’s all right. Come on and join the procession.”

  They unembarrassedly came as they were
. We made a motley group trailing down the giant stairway. Craig headed the party, his bare legs sticking out beneath the raincoat. The Wyckoffs, in their various states of undress, followed hand in hand. Lorraine and Chuck came next, with Iris and me bringing up the rear.

  As we reached the hall, I saw Lorraine look up at Chuck, her little pug face ecstatic. “Thank heavens, darling, that Mr. Throckmorton was thrown off the plane. He’s frightfully Bostonian about morals and things. He’ll explode when he finds out we weren’t properly married. But now at least we’ll be able to become respectable before he arrives.”

  We were moving through the hall towards the open door of the living-room when the front doorbell jangled. Everyone stopped and stared.

  “Who on earth—”

  The Inspector went forward and threw the door open.

  A man was standing on the threshold, a large, square, elderly man in a black suit with a fat black briefcase under his arm. He had a formidable, old-fashioned moustache. He looked like a visitor from the Watch and Ward Society.

  “Lorraine!” Pushing past the Inspector, the newcomer moved ponderously into the hall. “I took a train and then a bus and then I managed to find a taxi. It has been a most exhausting trip but since you seemed so eager for me to—”

  He looked around the group then. His eyes widened in outraged disapproval as they played on Lorraine’s pyjamas, Fleur’s negligee, and Wyckoff’s torso. Finally his glance settled upon the Inspector’s legs thrusting out from beneath the inadequate raincoat.

  “Who are these people?” he boomed with immense umbrage. “Who are these naked men? These indelicately clad young women? Have I come all this way to take part in an orgy?”

  He stood there glaring in terrible wrath. Lorraine was speechless. Even the Inspector quailed. It was Iris who stepped into the breach.

  With a smile that would have disarmed the Recording Angel, my wife moved forward and held out her hand.

  “Mr. Throckmorton, I presume.”

  Mr. Throckmorton ignored her. His gaze was fixed now on the open door of the living-room. Just insde it, Lover was visible, with Inspector Craig’s burliest plain-clothes man standing very close at his side.

  “Ah, Walter, my boy!” Mr. Throckmorton brushed past Iris towards Lover, smiling benevolently. “Thank goodness you’re here. Thank goodness there’s at least one solid, respectable citizen to protect Lorraine from this riff-raff.”

  I looked at Iris. Iris looked at me.

  “That,” said Iris, “is one of the great curtain lines of all time. Come on, Peter, let’s get a drink.”

  Turn the page to continue reading from the Peter Duluth Mysteries

  CHAPTER I

  I was awake, but something was wrong. That was the first thought I had. This wasn’t the proper way to wake up. My ominous dreams had faded. The whirring of propellers was scarcely louder now than the murmur of a sea-shell in your ear. But nothing came to take the place of the dreams—nothing but a sense of warmth, a dull ache in my head and the knowledge that I could open my eyes if I wanted to.

  I didn’t want to open my eyes. The consciousness of my closed lids, screening me from whatever there was around me, was comforting. I was confusedly convinced that I had awakened like this—blankly—several times before. A few tenuous memories stirred, a memory of whiteness, of corridors, of the hostile smell of ether, of stretchers and a jogging ambulance. The mental image of the ambulance started the propellers roaring again. I lay passive waiting for them to whir themselves out.

  When they had droned down to a mosquito whine, I made a terrific effort of will. In my mind I managed to form the sentence.

  I am in a bed.

  The effort exhausted me. I lay still, receptive. There was sunlight. I could feel it, half see it, on my lids. There was a smell too. Not ether. A sweet, summer smell. The smell of roses.

  I was lying on my back. I knew that. I knew too that I was uncomfortable. I tried to roll over on my right side. I couldn’t. My right elbow seemed huge and unyielding as a boulder. I felt down my right forearm with the fingers of my left hand. I didn’t feel flesh. I felt something hard, cold and rough. It was too difficult to try to understand. I forgot it and made an attempt to shift onto my left side. Once again I made no progress. This time it was my left leg that obstructed me. It was twice as big as a cow. I groped down to touch it. No flesh there either, just hardness, coldness, roughness.

  I was annoyed. Distinctly and out loud I said:

  “Twice as big as a cow.”

  A rustling sound came, very close to me—the sort of dry rustling, of someone fumbling through a box of candy at the movies. Its closeness, its vague implication of danger, made me open my eyes.

  I was staring straight at a woman, and she was staring back placidly. She sat very near my bed in a shimmering pool of sunlight. A bowl of pink roses stood on a table next to her. She had a large, beribboned box of chocolate candy on her knee. She was putting a piece in her mouth.

  “What’s twice as big as a cow, dear?” she asked. “Me?”

  I knew perfectly well that something was twice as big as a cow, but I was almost sure that it wasn’t she. And yet it might have been. I studied her gravely. She was big—a large comfortable woman with lovely skin and thick auburn hair piled on top of her head in a slapdash attempt at a fashionable upsweep. She wasn’t young. She must have been almost fifty. But she was still beautiful in a rich, overblown way—the way the pink roses would look just before their petals started to drop. She was wearing unrelieved mourning black that didn’t belong with her ripe, autumnal sensuality. My bemused and unpredictable thought processes decided that she was posing as a widow.

  Of course, I thought. Here is a woman posing as a widow.

  For a moment this deduction seemed to explain the entire situation to my complete satisfaction.

  Uneasily, however, I began to remember that she had asked me a question. I knew it was impolite not to answer questions. But I no longer had the slightest idea what the question was. Behind her, broad windows, draped in voluptuous cream brocade, opened onto an unknown, sunny garden. All I could see of the room was light and luxurious as meringue. The woman was eating another chocolate. Had she offered me one? Yes, that was it, of course.

  “No thank you,” I said.

  “No thank you for what, dear?” she asked soothingly.

  “I don’t think I want any candy.”

  Her eyes, large and liquid brown, stared. “My darling boy, I don’t imagine you would—not with all that ether and the drugs and things inside you.” She stretched out a smooth, white hand and caressed my cheek. “How do you feel? Terrible?”

  “Terrible,” I said promptly.

  “Of course. But there’s nothing to worry about. You’ll be all right.” Her hand groped for a piece of candy and then hesitated. “Does watching me eat this turn your stomach? I’ll stop if you really want me to only it’s such divine candy. Selena bought it for you down at that little candy place that’s just opened on the Coast Boulevard. That’s so like Selena, isn’t it—thinking you’d want candy at a time like this.”

  The conversation had become too complicated for me. I just lay watching the woman, listening for the faint whir of the propellers, waiting warily for them to come back. I hadn’t any idea who the woman was. I was sure of that. But I liked looking at her, liked the precarious pile of glossy auburn hair and the full, satiny bosom which thrust so unashamedly out of the square-necked widow dress. I wanted to lay my head against it and go to sleep. Vaguely I started to wonder who she was. I thought of asking her. But wouldn’t that be rude? Disconnected fragments of what she had said were drifting in the haze of my thoughts. Ether, drugs. I considered those two words for a long time and finally decided upon a question that seemed both clever and subtle.

  “Ether,” I said, “drugs. What’s the matter with me?”

  The woman put the box of candy down by the roses and leaned towards me, taking my hand.

  “Don’t worry,
dear. It’ll all come back soon.”

  I felt testy, frustrated. “But what …?”

  She sighed, a full, chesty sigh. “All right, dear. If you really want to know. Feel your head.”

  I put up my left hand. I felt bandages.

  “Bandages,” I said.

  “Good boy.” She smiled showing vivid teeth. “Now try your right arm.”

  I reached my left hand over and touched my right forearm. It was still the way it had been—hard, rough, cold. I turned my head to look. There was a sling and under the sling a cast.

  “A cast,” I said.

  “Go to the head of the class, darling.” She leaned across the bed and patted a hump that pushed up the grey and gold spread. “That’s a cast too. On your left leg.” She turned. Her face, grave and gentle, was close to mine, curved up on a white throat that was only a little thickened. She was wearing an exotic, unwidowish perfume. Its headiness and the warmth of her nearness confused me. “What’s a cast for?”

  I thought, and felt suddenly brilliant. “When you break something.”

  “Exactly.”

  “Then I’ve broken something.” I was pleased with myself. I also felt fond of her for letting me prove how intelligent I was.

  “Yes, darling. You’ve broken your right arm and your left leg. And you’ve also been hit on that poor old head of yours. An accident.”

  “An accident?”

  “An automobile accident. You were out in the Buick by yourself. You smashed head on into a eucalyptus grove.” A smile played around the fresh lips. “Really, darling, you are a naughty boy. You know how dangerous it is to drive when you’ve been drinking.”

  I was struggling hard to keep abreast of her. An automobile accident. I had been in a car. I had run into a tree. I had broken my leg and my arm. Those were facts, the sort of things I should be able to check in my mind. Did I, perhaps, have some recollection, dim as the date on a worn dime, of a car lunging forward out of control?