Invitation to Murder

by Zenith Brown

  “They don’t sell human foals at any price, Miss Linton,” he said.

  “I know they don’t,” she answered soberly. “You want good ones if you can get them, though. But it doesn’t matter. I shouldn’t have asked you, and I’m sorry. I’ll go get dressed now. I’d like to go home with you, Mr. Reeves, if you don’t mind.”

  She padded off through the kitchen. Neither Fish nor Caxson Reeves moved for a moment. Then Reeves uncrossed one leg and crossed the other. He cleared his throat again.

  “I regard that as a very flattering estimate of your potentials, Mr. Finlay,” he remarked gravely. Then, as Fish looked at him, he saw that the Vice-President and Trust Officer of the Merchants and Mechanics Bank was shaking with silent laughter.

  He flushed again. “Very funny,” he said. But as Caxson Reeves went on laughing, he gave in at last to a grudging smile of his own. “To hell with both of you,” he said.

  Reeves sobered gradually, his face returning to its desert dust. He took a deep breath—he must have used muscles he had no idea were there, Fish thought—stretched his diaphragm, breathed deeply again, and sobered up in real fact.

  “What’s this about young de Gradoff? I hear he skidded and smashed up on the West Road last night? Is that what the police are over at the house for?”

  Fish nodded. “And you can’t take Jenny home with you. Bestoso wants her here till he gets back.”

  The phone rang. It was Bestoso speaking from Enniskerry. Fish felt his spine stiffen and the gooseflesh crawl again. He turned to see Jenny come in from the kitchen, still in his bathrobe, and stand there watching him.

  “Say that again, Lieutenant,” he said quietly. He listened as Bestoso repeated, and put the phone down. Jenny had come silently on into the living-room. Reeves waited impassively.

  “It was Bestoso,” Fish said. “He’s got the report on Jenny’s car. I don’t know the technical language, but the drag link at the base of the steering column was filed and the feed line tampered with. At high speed or on a sharp right turn the car was bound to leave the road and almost certain to burst into flames. Skidding on the wet road had nothing to do with it. It . . . wasn’t meant for Peter.”

  He couldn’t look at Jenny, but he knew she was moving over to sit down and steady her own shaking knees. Then he heard her voice.

  “It wasn’t meant for Peter alone,” she said, very quietly. “But it was meant for Peter and me . . . and Mrs. Emlyn too. It was meant for all of us. Because we were all supposed to be in the car, on this trip we were to take today. Nikki’d arranged it. All three of us were supposed to . . . to burn up on the road. On Sunday morning, nobody would have given it a second thought. A new car and a girl driving. And Peter and Mrs. Emlyn and me, all of us, dead. All of us burned.”

  She said it with perfect calm, her voice steady, and quietly folded up and started to topple over. Fish caught her before she hit the floor.

  CHAPTER : 22

  Fish Finlay came back into the living-room. “She’s just worn out, the poor little devil. The maid’s with her.” He went over to the sofa and sat down, his head in his hands. “If Peter hadn’t taken that car out last night . . . Dear God.”

  Reeves looked silently at the polished toe of his black boot.

  “Finlay,” he said at last, “may I ask you a question that I grant seems to be none of my business?”

  “Shoot.”

  “Are you in love with Jennifer Linton, or are you not?”

  Fish steadied himself. “I am, sir,” he said evenly. “Very much. But I’m not going to marry her. For the reasons you both stated, and one other. She thinks it’s me she’s in love with. But it isn’t. It’s the romantic beauty of self-sacrifice that she’s got herself all mixed up in. First it was for Anne Linton. I met her on the road then and gave her a lift and some azaleas. She saw I was lame, and unhappy too, so she included me in the deal. Up here she’s sacrificing herself for her mother, and I’m still on the scene. A couple of months of normal life and she’ll come out of it. I don’t want her coming out of it and finding herself tied to me, no way out but the divorce court. I don’t want it to happen to her . . . or to me.”

  Reeves shook his head. “That other girl. I should think you’d have thanked your stars you escaped her. Curiously, in my opinion, Jennifer is the only person here who’s not in the least mixed up. It’s Jim Maloney’s theory . . . the flower against the weed. However. . . .”

  He was silent a moment. Fish glancing up at him saw that he looked tired and very old.

  “Why, may I ask? I mean, why do you ask?”

  “I’d hoped you were in love with her and would marry her, and produce one of those . . . foals, as soon as possible.”

  He was not being funny. He was deeply in earnest.

  “I’m thinking about the Maloney Trust,” he said, “and my own responsibility to it . . . to be honest and accurate. It is very important to me for Jennifer to marry and have children. Her safety would be assured as it is not assured now. As she certainly is in love with you—for whatever reasons—I had some idea you’d be enough concerned about her safety to marry her at once, so there’d be no question of her going back to her mother. I have a number of reasons for not wanting her at my sister’s house. There is, in fact, no place for her to go.”

  “Her grandfather?”

  Fish Finlay asked quietly. “You’ve got on to that, have you?”

  Fish nodded at the scattered black ashes in the fireplace. “There’s the report he got from Ferenc Blum. I owe you an apology, I guess. How long have you known it was Mr. Maloney who hired him?”

  “I assumed it must have been he when you kept bringing the fellow up. You took Dodo’s word that no one else cared who she married. There was one other person. But I told you I’ve never seen Jim Maloney since the morning he walked out of my office, and that’s still the truth.”

  “You knew where he was?”

  Reeves nodded. “From the February after he came. When he got pneumonia, Vranek was alarmed and called me. I’d have known it at the end of that year, however.” A gleam half-flickered under his lids. “The greenhouses paid for themselves. The next year they showed a profit, and the gardens the same. Jim Maloney can’t help making money. He always left in June, for the season. This year he stayed on because of a letter he got from an old Frenchman who’d lost touch during and after the war and didn’t know Maloney had disappeared. He addressed his letter to Enniskerry. Maloney got it, and instructed him to keep on the job and keep his employer’s name out of it. I did write to Vranek explaining why you were here. When you said yesterday a report Blum had made his client would enable the police to lay de Gradoff by the heels, I went by the greenhouses and told Vranek to tell him. Vranek told me that Blum had phoned from the Randolphs’ that everything was set. You and Blum and Maloney were to meet here and decide how you and Blum would present the whole thing to Dodo and Jennifer, with de Gradoff present. Blum’s death wrecked that. I assumed Maloney decided to present what he had left to Dodo when he knew she was alone. You see what happened to it. I can hardly ask him to take Dodo’s daughter, in addition to what he’s done.”

  The sound of heavy feet scrunching the scallop-shell drive broke the silence in the shadowy loft. It came from the clock tower stairs a moment later. Fish opened the door. Lieutenant Bestoso came in. He nodded to Fish and went to Caxson Reeves.

  “Glad to see you, sir.” They shook hands. “Where’s Miss Linton?”

  “In the other room,” Fish said. “She keeled over when she heard about the drag link. I suppose they told you over there she and Peter and Mrs. Emlyn were scheduled for a long drive today.”

  “They did.” Bestoso sat down. “De Gradoff told me. He was knocked cold. He’s a nice fellow.”

  “That’s what everybody thinks. That’s just the trouble.”

  Lieutenant Bestoso’s jaw dropped for the second time as Jenny came in, unconcealed admiration and pleasure sparkling in his black Latin eyes. She had on shoes,
for one thing, simple and very Newport, her curls tight, still damp from the shower, lipstick on, a young lady, not a barefoot kid in an outsize bathrobe and somebody else’s pajamas drooping around her ankles. Fish felt the sudden spark of pride ignite in him again, and something more than pride, or less, a sharpening of his own sense of acute unworthiness.

  She’s lovely. It was the moment of seeing her on the porch again.

  She came over to the sofa without looking at him. “Everybody thinks he’s charming . . . so he can just go on murdering everybody he wants to and nobody can stop him. You needn’t look surprised.” Her eyes rested gravely on Bestoso’s. “It’s the truth. If it hadn’t been for Mr. Meggs knowing that girl, and following her and Peter, and connecting them up with the Frenchman and Polly, you wouldn’t have had the car gone over, would you. You’d just have had it towed to the junk yard, wouldn’t you.”

  Bestoso nodded uneasily. “That’s so. But your stepfather—”

  “Don’t call him my stepfather.” Her eyes blazed. “He’s—”

  “That’s one of the troubles here, Miss Linton. You’re accusing him of murder. He doesn’t accuse you of anything, he just says you don’t like him. Animus against him, was the way he put it. He said you’d probably say—”

  “Wait a moment, Art.” Reeves interrupted him. “I’d like to get straight what happened to Miss Linton’s car. Then I think Finlay and Miss Linton ought to tell you, without acrimony if possible, just what their reasons are for feeling the way they both do. I think it’s time one responsible person was told the whole story. I’ve known you, and your father and grandfather before you. You’re all good men, in the summertime anyway. I’ve never had the opportunity to observe you in the winter.”

  Bestoso grinned. “And you wouldn’t want to get yourself out on a limb.”

  “I’m talking for Finlay and Jennifer’s benefit, not yours.”

  “Okay. The car was tampered with. The drag links down at the base of the steering column. They connect the steering arms to control the wheel. A link was filed. I’m no mechanic, it’s what the boys told me that worked the car over as soon as it got cool enough. It could go along at low speed and make a left turn without anything happening. High speed and a sharp right turn and it’d go out of control; the gas line that was tampered with would catch fire and you’d be off to hell in nothing flat. The driver wouldn’t have a chance, the other passengers might get thrown loose. In this kind of a country they’d probably land on a rock and be killed, or paralyzed like the girl was. Whoever doctored that car was a mechanic. It’d take him about eight minutes, they tell me.”

  Jenny Linton nodded. “It didn’t take him much longer.”

  Bestoso looked at her, startled.

  “I was out in the garden in the rain when he was in the garage. Around three o’clock this morning.”

  “You saw him in the garage?”

  She shook her head. “I heard him. I knew it was him.”

  Bestoso drew a long breath and sat back in his chair. “Okay. Go on. Tell me what else you know but don’t know.”

  “Fish,” Reeves said quietly, “you’d better start. At the beginning. Jenny can add anything she knows that you don’t. Jenny, will you be quiet until Fish is through.”

  She put her head back on the sofa and closed her eyes, her long lashes fringing her cheekbones, her hands folded in her lap, and sat motionless.

  “As far as I’m concerned, it began when I found de Gradoff listening at the keyhole when I was having a conference with Mrs. de Gradoff in early April,” Fish said. “Then I met Miss Linton on a road in Virginia a week later, and she told me about the Argentine girl.”

  Bestoso listened. At the end he stared silently down at the mass of charred paper in front of him.

  “This hunchback fellow identified the little detective,” he said. “That’s all. He must have known it was de Gradoff the little guy was after.”

  He got up and took four or five turns around the room, came back and sat down. He rubbed his scalp vigorously, his weather-toughened hands like coarse sandpaper on the curly stubble of his black hair.

  “Sure. I can arrest him.” He was abruptly answering the question no one had asked. “How long would I hold him? Long enough for Dodo Maloney to get to the telephone. There’d be a lawyer down there to spring him before I got the cell door shut.”

  He glared angrily from Fish to Caxson Reeves and around to Jenny.

  “Okay, you people,” he said bitterly. “Maybe somebody knows he murdered his first wife, but nobody can prove it. They got a crazy drunk locked up in a fancy sanitorium says she’s the one knocked off Miss Randolph. Miss Linton says it was him in the garage but she didn’t see him. His wife tells me it’s funny she and he didn’t hear Peter take the car out because they stayed awake talking until the clock in this tower struck four. Miss Linton says he was out in the soggy wet rain and over here in the garage fixing up a death trap at three or shortly after. I don’t think Miss Linton’s lying about what she thinks is the truth and I damn well don’t think Dodo Maloney is either. The burden of proof’s on Miss Linton. How would she hold up on the witness stand?

  “ ‘You love your stepfather, don’t you, Miss Linton?’ says the prosecutor. ‘Yes,’ says Miss Linton, eyes blazing hell-fire and black brimstone like just now, and the jury knows she damn well hates his guts. ‘Animus!’ shouts the defense, only they don’t shout, they say it nice and gentle. ‘Isn’t it too g.d. bad the girl hates her poor stepfather just because he married her mother and she’s a jealous brat.’ ”

  Jenny Linton didn’t open her eyes. “That’s what they’d say. They’ve been saying it for years.”

  “Okay,” said Bestoso. “I’m just telling you what I’m up against. People think the cops are dumb. Hell, they read stories. The big-brain private eye gets everybody together over at Enniskerry. At the psychological moment he points to de Gradoff. ‘You,’ he says. ‘You were all fixed to poison your wife last night. But your stepdaughter tells you you won’t inherit, because the dough belongs to her. So you’ve heard her say tomorrow she’ll drive at seventy because she’s got her thousand-mile checkup. So you say “Peter and Mrs. What’s-her-name and my stepdaughter must drive to the Cape” and you run out and file the drag link so the minute they hit seventy or make a sharp right turn they’re off to kingdom come and no trace left. But I’ve got you, de Gradoff!’ And de Gradoff turns pale and reaches in his pocket and takes put a pellet of cyanide and he’s dead and the case is solved.

  “And the lame-brain cop, that’s me, is sitting in the corner, surprised as hell. Sure he’s surprised . . . he knows if de Gradoff had sense enough to file a drag link he’d have sense enough to know all he had to do was look at Big-Brain and say ‘Nuts, where’s my lawyer?’ ”

  He stopped for breath, still glaring at them.

  “Motive? Sure you’ve got motive, and it points the finger all right. But that’s all you have got and it isn’t enough. What does de Gradoff say after he’s said that to Big-Brain? Exactly what he did say half an hour ago. ‘I understand the Maloney Trust officers feel I’m pathologically interested in my wife’s money. They’re so wrong that I rather wonder if they aren’t . . . let’s say, the interested ones. Has anyone examined into what motives they might have? It’s particularly diabolical because they know—or Finlay knows—that my one and only job was in an automotive works and I’m perfectly competent to perform the clumsy operation you describe—if I was stupid enough to do it.’ That’s what de Gradoff said to me and B. Meggs half an hour ago.”

  Fish looked at Caxson Reeves. “He couldn’t have heard that the Maloney Trust, or some document thereto appertaining, has been laughingly referred to as ‘Invitation to Murder,’ could he?” He asked it with admirable coolness, or so he thought. “In the privacy of the office only, of course.”

  He saw Reeves draw in his breath and expel it, slowly.

  “Which is precisely what I’ve been talking about ever since I came here, Finl
ay,” he said evenly. “If de Gradoff has heard that, it must have come through Dodo from Jim Maloney himself, last night; and I doubt that Maloney would put in her hands the weapon he personally designed against just such adventurers as de Gradoff, to protect both his daughter and Jennifer. Especially as Vranek told me yesterday the only time he’d seen the old man moved—he put it differently—was when Jenny came and took time to go through the greenhouses, obviously loving them. That’s why he sent her his prize orchids.”

  Jenny still sat motionless, but Fish saw her lashes move, a glint of moisture on them.

  Reeves turned to Bestoso. “You weren’t surprised when Finlay mentioned Maloney. You’ve known he was here?”

  Bestoso moved uncomfortably. “Well, there was some talk I didn’t put much stock in,” he said gruffly. He colored a little. “A few people talked about it, among themselves. I guess they had a lot of sympathy for the old man. It was sort of like one fellow said. Quotation, I guess. The world forgetting, by the world forgot. So if I knew it, it wasn’t any of my business. He wasn’t breaking any law. You were talking about some weapon.”

  “The reversion of the Maloney Trust.” Reeves looked at Fish. “The reason I suggested you and Jenny get married at once and have a family.” He turned back to Bestoso. “It’s a document Jim Maloney signed in my office that morning he walked out, going on seven years ago. He brought a rough draft of it for me to draw up. It was witnessed by the president of the bank and one of the legal officers. They were the ones who originated what Finlay calls ‘the gag’ about Invitation to Murder. And it is that. It puts a . . . a terrible responsibility—” He broke off for an instant. “It was an act of faith. Of a faith I myself would not have in any human being without a soul-searching that only a higher power would be capable of performing.”

  He moved in the wing chair and drew his breath in again. “In the event of the death of Dodo Maloney and of her daughter, if Jennifer died without issue before she reached the age of twenty-two, the entire corpus of the James V. Maloney Trust was to pass, without restraint of any kind, to a third individual, named in the document Jim Maloney drew up.”