Invitation to Murder

by Zenith Brown

  Bestoso leaned forward. “And who does it go to?”

  “To myself,” Caxson Reeves said.

  His voice was expressionless. “He assumed I would lean over backward to see that nothing preventable happened to Dodo and Jennifer. My colleagues at the bank called it ‘Invitation to Murder’ . . . as indeed it was if I had coveted the Maloney money. In that sense de Gradoff is unwittingly correct. If possible motive points the finger, then I’m your man, Art. It’s me you arrest . . . and I shall say, ‘Nuts, where’s my lawyer.’ ”

  The gleam in his eyes died instantly. “But we’ve wandered. The point is Jennifer’s safety. We can’t afford to gamble on what de Gradoff knows or doesn’t know. The reasonable assumption on his part is that in the event of Jennifer’s death the Trust will go to Maloney’s one remaining heir, namely de Gradoff’s wife.”

  His voice was like a brittle stick scratching out letters in the desert sand.

  “Jennifer is obviously not to go back to Enniskerry. I’d prefer, for a reason that is now obvious to you, that she doesn’t come home with me. She can’t spend another night here with Fish, if only because he’s being put out himself. That leaves two courses.”

  He stopped as the clock in the tower struck, and waited until the last resonant murmur had died.

  “Art can put her in jail and keep her there, while he gets to work to scrape up evidence. Her mother, of course, may force her release at once.” He nodded down at the hearth. “And it may be that’s the fate of all the evidence once available. We should remember also that a wife cannot be made to testify against her husband. There is an alternative.”

  A faint undertone of irony came into the grit-dry level of his voice.

  “Fish here can nobly sacrifice himself, and marry the girl. He can then keep her with him, in a suite in a hotel, her guardian if not her husband, for so long as it takes Art to find what he needs. Then we can have the marriage annulled. That seems to me the sensible course. I don’t feel it’s too much to ask of my Assistant Trust Officer, in line of duty, in this emergency.”

  CHAPTER : 23

  “No,” Jenny Linton said. She opened her eyes quickly and sat up. “No,” she repeated.

  “You serious?” Lieutenant Bestoso demanded.

  “I’m very serious, indeed,” Caxson Reeves said.

  Then Lieutenant Bestoso, a plain man, spoke plainly.

  “Look, sister. You spent the night with the guy here last night. What’s poison about him now? It’s just a couple of weeks of the same thing. Nobody’s asking you to marry him for keeps. It’s just a . . . a ruse to protect your reputation at the same time we’re taking care you don’t get killed that’s all. Unless you’ve got some other place that’s safe you’d rather go.”

  “I . . . I don’t have any other place,” Jenny said unsteadily, the tears suddenly coming out along her lashes. “My stepmother’s in Europe. The house is closed.”

  Bestoso and Reeves looked at Fish Finlay. He was the color of firebrick.

  “All right,” he said curtly. “I’ll marry her. For protective custody only. I don’t like any part of it.”

  “And I don’t like it any better,” Jenny said hotly. “I don’t want . . . I just want to stay alive, is all.”

  Reeves looked at both of them, his eyebrows moving upward an impatient fraction of an inch. “Can you arrange it, Art? Or shall I.”

  “I’ll do it.” Bestoso looked at his watch. “I’ll have to get the medical examination waived. It’ll take a little time, Sunday, but I’ll get hold of the Clerk and get a special license. I’ll have it and a preacher over here.” He took out his notebook. “Name, age, and place of residence, please.”

  “James Fisher Finlay, unmarried,” Caxson Reeves said imperturbably, when there was complete silence. “Twenty-eight, Cransville, New Jersey. Jennifer Louise Linton, spinster. Eighteen, Dawn Hill Farm—”

  “Better make it Enniskerry, Newport. So the Clerk won’t think she’s a runaway on account of her age.”

  Jenny Linton’s eyes smouldered, but she was silent. Bestoso put his notebook in his pocket and got up, glancing sardonically from one to the other of them. “Anybody’d think it was the electric chair.” He grinned at Reeves, and picked up his hat. He looked at the ash in the fireplace. “I guess that’s too far gone for any use, but I’ll scoop it up and send it to the FBI along with the note we got off Blum and a sample of de Gradoff’s handwriting. But I don’t put much stock in that for evidence.”

  At the door he stopped. “B. Meggs and I went down to the Randolphs’ fishing platform last night. My guess is, what happened there is exactly what Mrs. Winton said. A ‘Voice’ told her Miss Randolph was down there and to shove her over and she’d get the job. Everybody says she was hunting Miss Randolph all night. The lanterns are still up down there. The way those roses cover the rock at the bottom of the steps, B. stood and bopped me over the head coming down, and I didn’t see it even when I knew it was coming. Blum was first. He was dumped overboard. Miss Randolph was left hanging over the rail for Mrs. Winton to shove. I yelled my head off down there and B. up in the garden couldn’t hear me even without the band and all the other racket. We found the white rope under the roses in the poison ivy. Neat setup. The few sober people were inside playing bridge. Mrs. Winton doesn’t remember even wanting Miss Randolph’s job. What on earth would she want Polly’s job for? It doesn’t make sense to her this morning, her doctors tell B. They won’t talk to the cops but they’ll talk plenty to the press.”

  He started out and stopped again at the sound of a car coming into the courtyard. “Who’s that?”

  Fish went over. A huge black limousine was slowly coming to a stop under the porte-cochere. The driver got out, opened an umbrella and the door, and a familiar grotesque figure emerged, was assisted down to the ground and escorted under the canopied carriage drive.

  Fish turned back to Reeves. “It’s Durban. What do you think he—”

  “He’s a friend of Mrs. Emlyn’s. He may have come on account of Peter. Or,” Caxson Reeves added, very calmly, “it’s barely possible he’s taking the advice I gave him at the dance last night. To see Dodo and collect if possible. As Jennifer’s indiscretion about the Trust was running like wildfire, I saw no use in being other than frank about the whole thing.”

  “Frank,” Bestoso said. He grinned at Reeves again. “Ha. I’ll give you one thing, though. You sure know the last ditch when you see it, sir. Most people figure there’s always one more they can duck down in. I’m sealing the garage, nobody takes a car out till I’ve had the place gone over for filing traces.”

  Fish Finlay watched Durban go up the porch steps and disappear inside, and turned back, his eyes drawn unhappily over to Jenny Linton, the hinges of his heart dissolved in painful inarticulate yearning, the gates down, as he stood there wishing Reeves was somewhere else, wanting to go over, touch her, tell her. . . .

  “Jenny. . . .” It sounded like the croak of an old frog buried in the mud at the bottom of the marsh, scarcely audible with the rain scudding in again, pelting the roof and the shingled sides of the stable. She heard it, or at least she moved. She stood up, steadying herself, not looking at him, just at Caxson Reeves.

  “If you’ll excuse me,” she said, “I’m going to get a glass of milk and go to my room awhile. Till he . . . gets back. I’m sort of . . . well, I guess my knees are still a little weak.”

  “Lie down and see if you can’t rest,” Reeves said. “It’s all this—”

  “No, it’s just me. I’ve always been a horrible nuisance to everybody. Maybe I’ll feel better if I get something to eat.”

  She turned halfway to the kitchen door. “I really want to thank you, both. It’s . . . it’s terribly sweet of you to . . . to take so much trouble. Thanks, ever so much. I’ll be all right if I just lie down awhile.”

  She managed a grave smile at Caxson Reeves and one not so steady somewhere in the direction of Fish Finlay, lowering her lashes to keep her eyes from me
eting his. Then she went out. Fish heard the icebox door open and the scrape of a milk bottle and the door close again, heard it with a misery that numbed as it ate his vitals.

  “I guess I’ll go in and—”

  He started forward, and stopped, hearing her heels click across the kitchen tiles and the door into the foyer swing shut. He heard them then till she reached the rug in his bedroom, and he imagined them then until he knew she must have reached the bed in her own room and thrown herself down on it.

  “I guess I’d better let her rest awhile,” he said.

  If Caxson Reeves would just get the hell out of there. . . .

  He stopped himself sharply. His conduct ever since he’d opened the door at nine o’clock and seen B. Meggs and Bestoso standing there had been, in general and in particular, the conduct of a clumsy, self-righteous, wholly stupid, eternally to be damned so-and-so of a first-rate low-grade swine. He took a deep breath, got out a cigarette and lighted it. Reeves’s foot at the end of his crossed leg was twitching. His hands on the arms of the wing chair were very still, his face the face of the patriarch of all Gila monsters, watching long and long, frozen in absolute immobility on the sun-baked rock, only his lids, half-opening, half-closing, and the turgid pulse in his throat, to indicate he was still alive. His face, expressionless by any ordinary standard, still managed, paradoxically, to convey a malevolent disgust that Fish had seen on it before but never in so concentrated a form as he saw it now.

  “All right, sir,” he said. “I’ve been acting like a bloody fool. Say it if you want to.”

  Reeves’ foot stopped twitching. A kind of smoky film seemed to cover his eyeballs as he raised his lids and looked at Finlay. His jaw tightened, while he took a deep breath of his own, no doubt, because the fire and brimstone stinking up the air in the loft room dissolved slowly, like a miasma of some especially offensive nature, and when he spoke his voice was surprisingly its quite restrained and dessicated self.

  “It’s perhaps because I’m not in love with the girl that I can see your abysmal folly with such extraordinary clarity,” he said mildly. But the effort made him pause and draw his breath full into his bony chest and let it out slowly before he could go on as mildly, succeeding in tone, if failing in content.

  “Anybody, Mr. Finlay, anybody not totally blind, preter-naturally deaf and dumb, feeble-minded to the point of Mongoloid idiocy and beyond, would have known that when Miss Linton walked out of this room she was giving you, instinctively, what I regard as an almost heartbreaking opportunity to retrieve your . . . your. . . . But it’s Sunday, and we’re in New England. In any case, I haven’t the words in my normal vocabulary to tell you what I think of your ineptitude as a lover.”

  His eyeballs clouded smoky-gray again, his foot twitched dangerously.

  “But if you don’t quit standing, staring at me like a . . . like a paralyzed ox, and go in there to that girl, I swear, I swear to God, I’ll . . . I’ll. . . .”

  He relaxed abruptly. “I swear I’ll break a blood vessel,” he said, to himself and to the empty space where Fish Finlay had been.

  “Bless me. . . .” He pulled out his handkerchief and patted his forehead, listening to the doors opening and banging shut behind his assistant trust officer. He took a long breath and settled himself back in his chair. Then the continued silence, suddenly ominous in its intensity, made him draw his brows together. In front of him across the end of the sofa was the window. He looked out, through the slanting rain, across the emerald courtyard, and dropped his hands to his sides. He turned them as Fish came back through the kitchen.

  “I know,” he said. “She’s gone.”

  He took the sheet of paper out of Fish’s hands. “I’m sorry. It’s my fault, I shouldn’t have waited for you to see it for yourself.”

  He took out his spectacles.

  “Dear Mr. Reeves,” the note said. “I was being a coward. It’s like Mr. Bestoso’s last ditch and I don’t want Fish to be that for me. I don’t want him to marry me because you tell him to or just so I’ll be safe. Until he told Mr. Bestoso and us just now, I didn’t know Nikki tried to push him over the Rock, and nobody can pretend that’s a sacrifice he’s supposed to make in line of duty, can they. Anyway, I can’t go on forever being a nuisance to other people. I’ll be perfectly safe, I really will. And thanks for trying, but it wouldn’t work and I wouldn’t want it that way if it did. I’d just rather take my own chances and not have anything happen to Fish or you, or anybody trying to help me. Love, Jenny.”

  It wasn’t any tear-blotted scrawl. The pen had flown over the paper without hesitation, direct and to the point, from a hand with a mind made up. The only place the pen seemed to have wavered was in the postscript she’d added, a sort of last will and testament of Jennifer Louise Linton, spinster.

  “Just in case,” it said. “I’d really like the mortgage on Dawn Hill Farm paid. Anne won’t want to take it, now, but she did it for me and it’s what my father called a debt of honor and I wish you’d pay it—if you possibly could, I mean. Love, J.”

  “We who are about to die salute you,” Caxson Reeves murmured. There was a faint smile on his face that vanished at once as he looked sharply at Fish Finlay coming back in from the bedroom, pulling his raincoat on, his jaw set.

  “Where do you think you’re going?” he inquired dryly. “Not to Enniskerry. You’ve been ordered out of here. You’d be kicked out of there.”

  He folded Jenny’s note and handed it to him. “Here. It’s the first love letter she’s written you. Let’s see it’s not the last. Have the postscript copied when you get back to the office, pay off the mortgage and I’ll okay it. And now, if you’ll take that coat off, we’ll begin to use our heads. There’s no use your trying to see Jennifer. She won’t see you, you’ll make a bad matter worse. . . .”

  His voice hung in an arid void for an instant.

  “. . . Hippolytus,” Fish finished for him. “Go ahead, say it.”

  “No,” said Reeves. “The parallel’s gone far enough. I don’t expect Jenny to hang herself for you, as the lady did for love of him. And de Gradoff is not going to do it for her. I’ve never killed a man, but I. . . .”

  He broke off, shocked at himself. “That was a fool thing to say,” he remarked evenly. “No doubt it’s what’s in your mind too. You’ll get it out at once. We wouldn’t be as clever as de Gradoff, we’d land in the electric chair. And there’s no use saying that’s agreeable to you,” he added. “There’s no sense being a damn fool twice in the same day. Get the phone book and get Bestoso’s number. Let’s approach this thing as intelligently as possible.”

  Fish took his raincoat off and picked up the telephone book to look for the number of Arturo Bestoso.

  “You won’t get him at home, but start there. He may have called his wife. We’ll keep on till we find him.”

  It was while Fish was waiting for a busy line to clear on his fourth call, that his own phone rang.

  “Perhaps that’s him now,” Reeves said.

  It was not Bestoso. It was a woman’s voice, a strange taut voice that Fish thought he had never heard before.

  “Mr. Finlay, please,” it said.

  “Speaking.”

  “Sorry. You don’t sound like yourself,” the woman said, and he still did not recognize her. “Alla Emlyn, Mr. Finlay. I want to talk to you. It’s stopped raining. Will you come down in the rose garden? By the back way . . . the way you came last night. I’ll be there in a very few moments now. I want to talk to you . . . about my son.”

  “About your. . . .”

  “Yes,” the quiet voice said. “Peter was my son, Mr. Finlay. I’ll see you in the garden in a few moments. I have a . . . a debt of honor that must be paid.”

  He stood there holding the phone, the line empty, eerily empty, until he heard the operator’s voice. He put the phone down and turned to Reeves.

  “Alla Emlyn,” he said slowly. “Peter wasn’t her nephew. He was her son. She wants me to meet her in th
e garden. She’s got a debt of honor that must be paid.”

  “What debt of honor does she owe you?”

  “None that I know of.”

  Reeves’s brow contracted. “She doesn’t think some way that it’s you who killed her son? De Gradoff couldn’t have convinced her of that kind of lethal nonsense?”

  “I don’t know. Unless she’s off her rocker. I see now why she was so intense about Peter at the drugstore yesterday. Maybe she thinks it’s my fault Jenny didn’t fall head over heels in love with him.”

  He picked up his raincoat again. “I’ll go and see.” He shook himself a little. “I’ll also keep damned well away from the Rock when I do. Her voice came straight from hell. It didn’t sound quite sane. Will you keep after Bestoso?”

  He looked out of the window by the telephone. The rain had stopped, but long gray arms of fog still hung from the angry clouds. The sea was angry too. He could hear it churning, beating against the cliff, and see the white crest of the waves tossed over the heather-dark ledge. The tide must be high, he thought . . . the Devil’s Chasm gorging and disgorging itself with the unleashed ferocity of hell itself.

  He went to the door. “Well, so long,” he said. “Take care of yourself, sir.”

  Reeves stopped on his way to the telephone.

  “A man who contracts a debt of honor with a woman,” he remarked evenly, “is hardly competent to proffer advice. And don’t forget it was Neptune who rose and finished off the other Hippolytus. I’d watch him, if I were you. I shall be at Enniskerry when you return. If you will pack your bag, I’d like you and Jennifer to come to my sister’s house with me tonight. Separate rooms will be arranged. I could insist Dodo let you stay on here, but curiously enough, I’m as interested in the preservation of your health as I am of Jennifer’s. I got you into this thing, it’s my duty to get you out of it, I’m afraid.”