Murder in Pastiche

by Marion Mainwaring

  I was on my way out, but I stopped. “Confucius?”

  Beare frowned. “Samuel Johnson.”

    

  I brought Win along myself some time before the others were due. Beare was polite, explained that his failure to rise was not due to lack of courtesy. Then he got to work.

  It turned out that of course she did know something about her uncle and his column, but none of it mattered. It was all old going back to the period before she’d left for France. She didn’t know what he’d done in Paris, aside from breaking up her love life, and in London he’d been out most of the time while she moped around the hotel writing letters to Llewelyn.

  I saw she was going to take a turn at the questions herself, but before she could the others began to arrive.

  I got them seated somehow, borrowing chairs and squeezing myself on the end of Beare’s berth.

  It wasn’t the group you’d have selected if you wanted a party, unless you hoped for another murder. Pictorially it had a wide range, from Win and Dolores Despana, neither of them open to any real criticism, to Homer T. Anderson at the other end of the spectrum, looking like something from a 3-D horror film. His face was cross and smug at the same time, if you can visualize that. Win was pale and jumpy. The Purser sat down near her and spent most of his time trying not to be too obvious about looking at her. The Doctor looked bored, and kept scribbling surreptitiously in a notebook. Mrs. Chip-Ebberly had taken her usual precautions against being exposed to drafts, and she pulled her skirts in as if she didn’t like her company; but, seeing she had Anderson on one side and Dolores, who’d accused her of murder, on the other, you couldn’t really blame her for that. She brought out her knitting, but she didn’t get any work done on it; whether it was because her hands were too shaky, I couldn’t quite tell. The last to come in was the First Officer. He stared at Beare for a full thirty seconds, which was normal since it was their first meeting and Beare’s four hundred pounds affected people that way. Then he realized he was being rude and got red under his tan. He looked away and gave me the paper, and I handed it to Beare.

  Beare read it through twice. His face didn’t change. After the second time through he folded it up and began his questioning. He didn’t mention the paper.

  The most you could say for that session was that it killed a lot of time. Nobody contradicted anything he’d said before, and I couldn’t see that anything new that came out was crucial. Nobody there had known anyone else on the ship before sailing. The only ones who had known Price before were Win, naturally, and Dolores whom he’d bought a drink or two. Even being on board the same ship, of course, didn’t necessarily mean you’d had to meet him, and the fact was that of this group Beare and the First Officer had never exchanged a word with him; I had had just one short but colorful exchange when he’d told me he was going to interview Beare and I’d told him the contrary, tersely; and the Doctor had spoken with him only a couple of times, when Price wanted medical attention. One time, he’d come by for a pill when he was sick, the Doctor explained—

  Anderson made another of his unsolicited donations to the cause at that point. “Yeah! And it wasn’t just a medical visit, was it? It so happens I passed the door just then, and I heard him telling you off.” He turned to Beare. “Price called him a no-good incompetent! I heard him.”

  The Doctor drew himself up, and his face, which was definitely on the chubby side, looked more dignified than you’d have expected. “He had very bad manners!” he exclaimed; his accent got so broad that he sounded like a Scotchman, which I gathered from the other Limies was a sign of excitement in him.

  “Manners!” Anderson was scornful.

  Beare looked at him, his lips compressed, and refused to cross-examine the Doctor on the subject. I couldn’t tell if it was because he disliked Anderson so much or because he really didn’t take the Doctor seriously.

  Mrs. Chip-Ebberly, accused by Dolores of a mysterious connection with Price, denied it cold. Any interest she had shown in him, she said, was due to his obvious involvement in a sinister matter which she could not discuss in public. There was no reason why he should have cut out her picture or followed her aboard. Beare couldn’t break her down. Looking at her jaw, I decided no one could.

  He didn’t ask the Purser about his encounter with Price in the Lounge, and you could tell that Win was thankful for that.

  There was only one question that took me by surprise: Beare asked Win, “Did your uncle ever go to school in England?”

  Her mouth fell open and she said: “Why, no, he was never abroad before this trip. He went to school in Minnesota, the same as my father. It was the same school I went to myself when I was a kid, and I think it explains a lot in his personality; it was a traumatic experience for me—”

  Beare cut off the reminiscences. “Or in Canada?”

  “No.”

  After a while Beare sighed and looked at the torn page from Price’s typewriter again. “I should like you all to take part in a little exercise. Ernie! Will you please pass out pencils and paper?”

  This took me completely by surprise, but I carried out the orders, dead-pan.

  Beare said: “Will you all be good enough to write the following sentence at my dictation. ‘In the last election, the vote was 200 to 175 in favor of the Labor candidate.’”

  Right away there were some rumblings. Anderson sputtered: “Crazy! What’s the sense of all this?”

  Mrs. Chip-Ebberly looked past him as if the butler had made a mistake and shown the plumber into the drawing-room. “Obviously,” she said, “it is a test of our handwriting. The purpose, I cannot fathom; but any innocent person will surely cooperate.”

  I initialed their papers and passed them over to Beare. He looked through them briefly and stuck them inside his book. Then he started in on where the suspects had been last night at the time when we’d figured the paper must have been shoved under my cabin door. But when he was done I still didn’t know who had done it.

  Mrs. Chip-Ebberly and Win had been in their cabins. Dolores Despana had been at the bar. A few minutes later it turned out that Anderson had been at the bar too, at the very same time. I gave Dolores an approving nod to show her I appreciated her taking my advice so soon, but she pretended not to notice.

  The officers had been busy at work. By “work” it appeared the Doctor meant writing his poem, not observing the Hippocratic oath; and to everyone’s boredom Beare went off on a tangent with him, discussing rhyme schemes and meters and nodding sympathetically when the Doctor said he never read prose any longer lest it spoil his ear. I worked out a scheme for making Beare think the clue to the mystery was in that epic, so he’d have to read through all 57,000 lines, but I gave it up because he might have made me do the reading. Just as the Doctor was getting really worked up and offering to recite the Invocation and Canto One to our little gathering, a steward came to tell him he was needed in the sick-bay. He groaned and went out looking as if he would much rather stay and read to us.

  Beare changed the subject again. I could tell he was just feeling around now. He turned to Win. “Do you know what income your uncle received from his column?”

  She shook her head.

  I said, “It seems he made more by what he didn’t print than by what he did.” I don’t usually butt in when Beare is at work, and this interruption was tactless since two and maybe more of the people in the room had been blackmailed by Price; but I hoped to get a rise out of Anderson. I didn’t like the shape of his head.

  But the one who reacted was Winifred. She cried out: “You all think I’m awful for inheriting that kind of money. I know! I shouldn’t take it! I won’t take it! I’m not going to! It’s tainted!” She looked at Mrs. Chip-Ebberly, the only person in the room who looked as if she’d boggle over accepting coins with a few spots on them. Mrs. Chip-Ebberly made motions indicating she thought the outburst was in bad taste; and watching Win in operation I could see, myself, what Atlas Poireau had meant by calling her melodramat
ic. But then I saw the Purser watching her too, and from his expression you might have thought she was the heroine at the end of Act II, where she spurns the villain and his gold. I was interested, because any Purser who applauds that attitude towards money is miscast, and also, remembering how he’d flown out at Broderick Tourneur, I had a feeling something would go pop when Anderson, with a sneer at Win in her noble posture, threw another sneer in the direction of the Purser:

  “You’ll disappoint some people if you don’t take it.”

  Sure enough, the Purser jumped up ready to deliver a right to his jaw. I grabbed one arm and Mr. Waggish got him by the other. His face was bright red, and he was breathing hard. Anderson was on his feet waving his arms about and gobbling: “Look at him! He’s a killer! He’s the murderer!” With no particular logic to his timing, the Purser calmed down as quick as he’d got mad; and he only shrugged when Anderson refused to apologize. But while it lasted I’d never seen anyone look more as if he’d like to knock a head in.

  That broke the party up. Nobody protested about going so soon. Following instructions from Beare, I kept Dolores back. She was all set to make a fuss about it, but then he showed her the paper. She was like a mother recovering her kidnapped child.

  When he could pry her loose from it, Beare asked her if it was exactly the same as when she’d seen it in Price’s typewriter. Had she read the other items through?

  “What other items?” she asked. Then she got the point. She looked at the bottom half of the paper. First she said yes, it was the same, then she said no, she didn’t think there had been quite so much written there. Then she said yes, and then no … Then she got it into her head that if she said no, the whole works would be invalidated and her chance of getting the thing published would be lost, so she said positively, yes, it was exactly like that when she first saw it and she’d swear to that in any court.

  Beare didn’t say a word while she stood there making up her mind. At last, I took the paper from her gently but firmly, saying I’d take care of it, and propelled her through the door. I left the door open to clear the air and went back to Beare.

  “Well,” I said enthusiastically, “there are only two possibilities, yes or no. Either Price wrote that, or he didn’t. Just go eeny, meeny, miny, mo—”

  “Pfui. There was never any doubt that the bulk of the last paragraph is a forgery. The question was simply whether the forgery had taken place before Miss Despana entered Price’s cabin.” He sighed again and looked around.

  I knew it was beer he wanted, so I went into the bathroom for a glass. Then I heard him yell.

  “Ernie!” His eyes were popping. He was pointing at the door. “Some one reached in and took that scarf!”

  The green box with all the Price exhibits was on the table just inside the door. I didn’t stop to talk, but jumped to it, losing a little time because the way was jammed with extra chairs from our recent gathering. When I reached the door the thief was just in sight at the end of the passage, turning a corner. I tore after him, and would have caught up with him only one thing went wrong. I wasn’t running on pavement, I was running on a deck that rocked up and down at a thirty-degree angle sideways and a ten-degree angle back and forwards. I’d developed good enough sea legs to take that into account, even running; but I’d forgotten another factor. As I raced along something came up and caught my ankles. I crashed down, banged my forehead, and went out cold.

  The next I knew, someone was screaming, “Murder!” I managed to look up, and there were some dopy women. One of them said, “Oh, he isn’t dead, after all!” She sounded as if I had cheated them. I tried to make a suitable comment, but my head hurt. Then the Doctor was bending over me.

  “That’s a beautiful bruise,” he said.

  I scrambled to my feet then, but my left ankle hurt like hell. The Doctor said to wait, but I preferred staggering to Beare’s cabin to remaining on display in the operating theater. I made it to his door, and fell into a chair.

  Beare was on the edge of his bed, upright, clutching his safety-belt so he wouldn’t fall off, and breathing hard. He did not say a word.

  The Doctor had his bag with him. He put a plaster on my head, and felt my ankle. “Just a strain,” he said. “You’d better not use it for a day or so.… You know it’s dangerous to run on board ship, Mr. Woodbin.” He sounded reproachful.

  “I was chasing a thief. You got there pretty quick.”

  “I was just around the corner in the crew’s quarters, with my patients.”

  “It’s funny you didn’t see the guy I was chasing. He was headed that way.”

  He shook his head. “I did hear someone running by, but it was two or three minutes before I came out into the passageway and saw you lying on deck.”

  Beare said, fuming: “What the devil happened?”

  The Doctor said, “Mr. Woodbin isn’t used to ships. He forgot to pick up his feet when he came to a bulkhead, so he tripped and fell on his face.”

  Beare frowned at me. “You were not struck down?”

  “No.” I was curt. “I don’t think so. It was one of those bulkheads that stick up a few inches. I forgot that a race on shipboard would be a steeplechase.”

  I was still furious with myself, but Beare was sympathetic; it was proof for him of the danger of stirring from a berth. The Doctor said he was sorry too, as if he meant it, and he went out promising Beare to ask the First Officer to stop by at his earliest convenience.

  Beare asked: “Could you see who it was?”

  I shook my head carefully on account of the throbbing. “He was short, he wore a light jacket. It could have been a steward—or someone in a steward’s coat. He headed towards the door to the crew’s quarters, as if he knew where he was going. And he didn’t forget to pick up his feet. He capered like a goddam mountain goat.”

  The First Officer let out a whistle when he saw my head. He said he was sorry; but I got the impression it wasn’t only personal sympathy—rather, a feeling also that I’d let him down. He told Beare he was trying to check on the crew now. He looked at Beare uncertainly.

  Beare said: “We had better discuss this preposterous fraud.” He tapped the gossip-sheet from Price’s machine.

  The First Officer was startled. “Fraud? What do you mean, Mr. Beare?”

  Beare waggled a finger. “You recognized it yourself, sir. Subconsciously, at any rate. When Mr. Woodbin showed you the paper you said it was ‘daft.’”

  “Aye.” Mr. Waggish nodded emphatically.

  Beare inclined his head. “The first two paragraphs I take to be genuine. Mr. Price typed them. The last one is, on the whole, sheer flummery; the latter part of it was typed by someone other than Mr. Price—presumably after his death. Presumably too, the second typist was the intruder who tore the paper from the machine. As to the contents of the paragraph, it is pure gibberish and attempt to confuse.”

  “Then it’s of no use to us?”

  “On the contrary. It may help us to limit the number of suspects. On the basis of this forgery, I am inclined to eliminate Miss Despana, Miss Price, and Mr. Anderson.”

  I had figured this out by now, but I didn’t wonder that the First Officer didn’t get it. He stared at Beare and asked, “How?”

  “The style,” Beare told us, “is a tolerable imitation of Price’s even as it disintegrates into nonsense. That suggests an American as forger. But observe this word.” He pointed: “‘Colour.’ That is the British spelling. When I dictated, just now, the analogous words ‘labor’ and ‘favor,’ the Britishers in the group spelled them, as one would expect, ‘o-u-r’; the Americans ‘o-r.’ And, more conclusive to my mind, the word ‘whilst’ is used where an American would, without exception, say ‘while.’”

  “Oh, I see— Good heavens!” The First Officer looked respectful, and I was glad that Beare at least had come up to expectations. “I never would have known that.”

  “No. Precisely. An Englishman would not notice. An American would.”

  �
��Then it must be one of the Britishers who wrote the forgery!”

  “Not ‘must,’ sir. It may be an American subtle enough to have adopted British usage in hopes of bamboozling us. Theoretically, that is possible.” Beare sighed. “But in actual fact, which of them could have done so? Anderson, a Caliban who has been given electric buttons to push? Miss Price, an immature schoolgirl? Miss Despana, a—”

  “Siren?” I suggested.

  “No.”

  “Houri?”

  “A barbarian. No. Or at least … Confound it!” Beare was peevish. “The obvious inference is that one of you gentlemen, Mr. Waggish, or Mrs. Chip-Ebberly, is responsible for this mess.”

  “That helps a lot,” I said brightly.

  “But I resent the obvious.” Beare scowled. “I want to think.”

  He sat up against his pillows, eyes closed, and he began to suck his lips in and then pop them out again. I felt myself get tense. I’d explained to the First Officer how I always looked forward to this stage in an investigation. When Beare did that with his mouth it meant he was beginning to let his mind work. It meant he might come up with an answer. Mr. Waggish looked puzzled as minutes passed, and then, looking at me, he remembered. His face brightened, and he looked at Beare as if he hoped for an answer this time. We both sat there watching.

  Finally Beare let out a good loud pop. He opened his eyes.

  “Ernie,” he said. “Please ring for the steward. I want some beer.”

  Miss Fan Sliver

  “This is a fine, pleasant sight. It makes the ship seem quite homelike.” The First Officer smiled down at Miss Fan Sliver as she sat quietly, knitting, in a straight-backed chair in the Lounge. It was a short time before Mr. Trajan Beare’s conference.

  Miss Sliver beamed at him. “How kind of you to say so!”

  He inspected the soft, fuzzy white strip which hung from her needles. “A—a sweater, is it, ma’am?” he asked.

  “An infant’s vest.” Miss Sliver explained that a niece had just had quadruplets, and that she hoped to have a set of warm garments for each baby by the time she returned to England. “I shall be kept busy, but I should really not have felt justified in a holiday trip, were it not that this sort of work can be carried on whilst one travels.”