by Tony Medawar
‘How long are you going to hold me here? I tell you, I had nothing to do with what happened. Do you think I’d kill my own father?’
‘Father—by adoption, wasn’t it?’ Miss Withers put in softly. ‘Didn’t I read something about it, some years back?’
Ronald Farling stopped short. His eyes clouded for a moment. Then— ‘Yes, by adoption. David Farling and his wife adopted me nine years ago, when I was twelve. It was just after my own father …’
‘Yes? Go on!’ Piper pressed forward.
The boy gulped. ‘Just after my real father was—was executed for murder! Dan Farling as his lawyer couldn’t get him off, though it happened in a pitched battle between union men and company scabs. So he promised to take me, and bring me up as his own son. And he did …’
The boy stopped short, realizing too late what he had said. His fists clenched, and then opened helplessly. ‘Like father like son, eh? I suppose that’s what you’re saying?’
‘You had a fight with your foster-father in his office yesterday?’
Ronald nodded. ‘Well, an argument. But not—’
‘What was it about?’
‘He didn’t want me to get married.’ confessed Ronald Farling simply. He drew a deep breath. ‘And if you want the name of the girl you can rot in hell before I’ll tell you and drag her through this!’
He subsided sullenly into his chair. During the latter course of the questioning Miss Hildegarde Withers had been doing a little quiet snooping nearby. She reappeared with a leather golf bag full of sticks in one hand. The initials on the bag were ‘R.F.’
‘This is yours?’ she asked the prisoner.
He nodded. Miss Withers opened the zipper pocket and brought out half a dozen golf balls. Three were old and battered. The other three were almost new, showing only a few nicks. Each bore a tiny red heart as a trademark,
‘Could I see the one you have?’ she asked the Sergeant. She took it gingerly. ‘Just as I thought. They don’t match.’ On an impulse she showed Ronald Farling the ball with the smear of blood. ‘Recognize this ball. young man?’
He stared and frowned. Then his eyes widened. ‘Why, that’s my father’s!’
The cops gathered instantly. ‘What?’
‘It is! You see, when we started out this morning each member of the foursome bought three new balls. Ask the girl inside at the counter—and of course we each got a different colour and mark so we could tell them apart easily. Most makes of balls are designed in sets of four that way. Firth chose clubs, Sullivan diamonds, my father—I mean my foster-father—chose spades, so that left me hearts. They were kidding me about it …’
‘So David Farling was killed with one of his own golf balls!’ said Miss Withers slowly. ‘Can we prove that by comparing this with other balls in his bag?’
But the dead man’s bag was empty of balls.
‘This isn’t getting us anywheres,’ Captain Platt finally objected. ‘Okay for me to take young Farling away, Inspector?’
Piper looked at Miss Withers, rubbed his jaw, and nodded. ‘Keep him safe and sound,’ he said. ‘And don’t yell at him all night,’ he added firmly.
The young man was half-led, half-dragged, to a waiting police runabout, and Miss Withers had a last glimpse of his white, drawn, frightened face.
There was a brief interlude during which a grey ambulance lumbered out into the gathering darkness of the little golf course, its lights shining like two glaring tiger-eyes … at last David Farling was to be removed from the edge of the muddy pool. It was high time, thought Miss Withers.
The Inspector had left her to make a telephone call, and she wandered out through the littered yard in the rear. Here were old car tyres, sand boxes, broken greens-flags, and an ancient piano box—souvenirs of dead days. For the first time in her life she wished that she had taken up music and games and golf in her youth. A knowledge of what the Inspector called ‘pasture pool’ would be a great help to her now. She had a feeling that an essential clue was eluding her—and the police. Perhaps it was a clue that would cry out like a trumpet to a more experienced devotee of golf.
She sank down on a convenient bench overlooking the fairway, and rested her chin in her hand. Far ahead she could see the lights of the morgue wagon swing across the sky and then beam back towards the club house, its silent passenger safely aboard.
‘A ride that each of us must take—and some before our time,’ she was musing to herself.
At that moment a guttural torrent broke out almost in her ear. She turned suddenly, and realized that the speaker did not see her on the bench. He stood not far from the doorway of the living quarters, a gnarled, bitter figure leaning upon a long rake.
‘Ach, der Schwein …’
Miss Withers had a vague knowledge of German and of French left over from her schooldays, and after a moment she realized that this endless torrent was a combination of both, which must be Swiss. Yet most of the words were, luckily, unfamiliar to her. Here and there she caught one which made the back of her neck turn bright red.
She made ready. There was always something to be said for the power of a surprise attack. She jumped up like a jack-in-the-box.
‘Who are you?’ she demanded, raising her umbrella threateningly.
‘Who am I? She asks me, who am I?’ The harsh voice rose shrill and high. ‘Me, I’m poor Chris Thorr. Me, I’m the slave who must work week in and week out to make all smooth the grass where those verdammte pigs go joyriding with their unspeakable ambulance …’
His voice was full of great sobs. Suddenly Miss Withers felt a certain sympathy for him, especially now that the ambulance came lurching back towards the club house, leaving dark deep furrows in the soft turf, wheels spinning erratically right and left …
She tried to make some properly sympathetic remark. But Chris Thorr turned back towards his lighted doorway, shoulders slumped despondently. ‘Es ist nicht der Mühe Wert!’ was his parting shot.
Miss Withers turned to see the Inspector beside her. ‘I don’t like that old buzzard,’ he observed. ‘What was that last crack?’
‘Something about life being a bowl of cherries,’ Miss Withers translated freely. ‘I’m afraid Thorr is a pessimist.’
‘Maybe,’ said Piper, as they walked back towards the shack. ‘From what I hear he’s got reasons. This place barely pays expenses, next spring they’re going to condemn most of it for the new Parkway, and his wife ran off with a travelling man or somebody last August.’
‘But didn’t I see a girl in the office?’ Miss Withers asked.
Piper nodded. ‘That’s Molly Gargan, a neighbourhood girl that he hires to take care of the office and sell tickets to the players. Which reminds me, I’d better tell the boys it’s okay to let her go home. We’ve been holding everybody …’
‘Hold her a while longer,’ Miss Withers decided. ‘I want to see Molly.’
Molly Gargan was something to see, beyond a doubt. Miss Hildegarde Withers was prone to attach more importance to feminine brains than to beauty, but the black-haired girl with the bright blue eyes and full sculptured body was positively breathtaking.
She sat at a stool behind the counter, staring out of the window at the darkness of the golf course. Oddly enough, her blue eyes were raining tears down an utterly calm and lovely face. She wore a modest pink dress that was obviously homemade, and as Miss Withers came through the doorway she noticed that Molly Gargan had torn that dress in five or six places along the collar. Now, as if no part of herself, her long fingers were busily tearing yet another place …
Miss Withers cleared her throat. ‘Whatever happened out on the course, it can’t affect you, young woman, can it?’
Molly started, and then her lips tightened. ‘Of course not …’
Miss Withers tried a rather mean trick. ‘The young man whom they arrested,’ she said casually, ‘insists that this morning, when the foursome started to play, they all purchased balls here.’
Molly nodded her lovely dark
head.
‘And he claims that all four of them bought balls with a red diamond on them—is that true?’
‘Why, no! They—’ Suddenly Molly stopped short. ‘Yes, that’s right,’ she said evenly. ‘I remember now.’
‘Like fun you do,’ Miss Withers said under her breath. ‘Where do you live, Molly?’
Through the window Molly Gargan pointed to a white house perhaps a mile away, where the lights of the boulevard were glaring. ‘My father runs a filling station,’ she confessed.
‘Very well, Molly,’ Miss Withers advised. ‘The police asked me to tell you that you may go home now.’
‘Thanks!’ said Molly Gargan fervently. With one quick motion she pulled a sweater over her dress, slapped a tam-o-shanter over her dark hair, and was out of the door.
Miss Withers watched the girl as she took a short cut across the darkened golf course in the direction of that dim white blotch in the distance which was home. Then she was aware that someone watched beside her.
It was Chris Thorr, shaking his head. ‘They are all alike,’ he observed gutturally. ‘Women!’
He crossed to the cash register, pressed the ‘no sale’ key and scooped out the day’s takings, a sorry morsel. Then he ostentatiously locked the display case, as if Miss Withers would have been likely to go in for shoplifting golf balls and wooden tees.
‘You can’t blame her for hurrying away on a day like this,’ Miss Withers reminded him. ‘What if she did forget to close up? She’s a very pretty girl.’
Chris Thorr didn’t seem interested in pretty girls. ‘Bah!’ said he. ‘The prettier they are the less they know. I hope soon she gets married, and I hire a good sober girl, homely as a mud fence, ja!’
He moved around, turning out electric lights. ‘You go home now—everybody go home, ja? I go to bed.’
Everybody went home—except for one chilled and unhappy cop who was assigned, according to regulations, to cover the scene of the crime. Patrolman Walter Fogle spread out a newspaper on the damp grass under the elms, and prepared for a long and lonely vigil above the dark and leaf-choked pool …
The wind howled eerily in the tree-tops that night, and the pale October moon was hidden behind ragged wisps of cloud. Patrolman Fogle realized that it lacked but a night or two of being All Hallows Eve, and towards morning he dozed off into a nightmare of witches and goblins and howling, dancing wraiths …
He awoke with a jerk to see a spectral white figure moving near the edge of the pond. Fogle blinked, pinched himself, and blinked again. But the figure remained.
‘Hey!’ he mouthed, through dry and trembling lips.
The white figure became a statue. ‘What the hell are you doing there?’ demanded the patrolman. ‘Stop or I’ll fire!’
The apparition dissolved in the direction of the clump of trees and brush further down the gully.
‘Stop!’ yelled Fogle. His gun came out, and he blazed away furiously. But to no avail.
Next morning, shame-faced, he made his report. ‘Maybe it was a dead ghost and maybe it wasn’t,’ he insisted to Captain Platt. ‘But I know for one thing that it could run like a rabbit. And it wasn’t old Chris Thorr nosing around, because I went back to the club-house and dragged him out of bed.’
‘Look at his shoes?’ asked the captain. ‘Heavy dew, wasn’t there?’
The cop nodded. ‘His shoes were dry, and he was sound asleep.’
‘Okay,’ said his chief. ‘Go home and grab some sleep. We may want you this afternoon.’
At that moment Miss Withers and the Inspector were in deep conference. ‘It’s funny about the medical examiner’s report,’ Piper was saying. ‘The doc insists that Farling’s skull was of normal thickness and that a golf ball would have to be travelling with the speed of a bullet to make such a wound.’
‘Oscar,’ suggested the school-teacher, ‘isn’t that an idea? I mean, couldn’t you shoot a golf ball out of a gun?’
He shrugged. ‘Certainly not without leaving powder marks, even if you could get a gun barrel improvised out of a pipe or something. And as for that, Max Van Donnen just reported to me that while that golf ball bears traces of blood which check with Farling’s, it has never been struck with a golf club! The waxy covering is intact, under the microscope! So there goes your gun theory.’
Miss Withers nodded. ‘I suggested the gun because, you see, Oscar, I spent two hours this morning taking a golf lesson from a professional at the Lakewood Country Club. He’s a better golfer than even young Farling, and he can drive a ball four hundred yards or lift one neatly into a tin pail twenty feet away. But not both at the same time, Oscar! By that I mean you can’t combine speed with absolute accuracy in golf!’
‘Which means that we’re right back where we started,’ said Piper.
She shook her head. ‘We know that Ronald Farling didn’t kill his foster father—at least not by driving a ball at him. Oscar, I think we’re making this case too complicated. Did you get the report from the telephone company?’
He shook his head. ‘Takes them time to trace those calls,’ he pointed out. ‘But I don’t see why you think we’d learn anything if we knew how many phone calls, if any, have been made from the club house to Farling’s office on Broadway, and vice versa. You don’t think—’
She nodded. ‘When there’s a girl as startlingly beautiful as Molly Gargan in a case, you can take it for granted that she is somehow a part of the picture. Suppose the dead man had been playing regularly on that little course just to see the fair Molly, had become involved with her somehow, and then cast her adrift? And suppose the odd little Mr Thorr secretly nursed a love for his pretty clerk, and wanted to avenge the slight?’
She stopped, and shook her head. ‘Thorr doesn’t love the girl. On the contrary. And besides, Farling would not have brought his friends and son to play golf at the course after he was through with the girl …’ She sank into a chair. ‘I’m afraid we’ve drawn another blank …’
Just then the telephone rang, and Piper listened eagerly. He made notes on a piece of paper. ‘Well!’ he said. ‘In the past three months there have been fourteen phone calls from the golf course office to Farling’s office—twenty-three from Farling’s office to the course, and seven from the Farling home on Fifth Avenue to the course!’
‘Which means that your case against young Farling is blown higher than a kite,’ Miss Withers reminded him. ‘Besides, he couldn’t have been the midnight prowler who frightened Patrolman Fogle out of his alleged wits last night.’ She frowned. ‘Oscar, you ought to drain that pool!’
Piper laughed. ‘So you are looking for another body!’
‘Another body—or another golf ball,’ she reminded him. ‘A golf ball with specks of powder burns on the cover, and a trademark which might be anything but a black spade.’
‘Draining that pool seems like something of an engineering problem,’ Piper objected. ‘Besides—’
‘And I think you ought to turn Ronald Farling loose,’ she went on. ‘There may be more to discover from him if he’s free than if he’s in the lockup.’
‘The more we discover the worse off we are,’ Piper objected. ‘I naturally have had the other two members of that foursome investigated. Sullivan has been talking over the radio in behalf of the Citizens Committee, and naturally has been panning some of Farling’s friends in politics. But the two men were personal pals. As for the partner, Sam Firth, he didn’t gain anything from Farling’s death, and he’s probably lost a good share of his law business. Neither of them—’
‘Business!’ Miss Withers snapped. ‘We’re missing the whole key to this affair. I wish I knew more about pretty Molly Gargan. I still believe that she’s the catalytic agent—’
Piper shook his head. ‘Doesn’t look like she’d throw a fit, to me.’
‘I said catalytic, not epileptic,’ Miss Withers snapped. ‘Don’t you remember your chemistry? Well, with a girl as beautiful as she around, anything that happens involves her somehow. Oscar, I�
��m going to telephone her, and arrange for a quiet little talk—’
She asked for Information, and then was connected with Gargan’s Gas Station on Queens Boulevard. It was a worried Irish voice which answered her.
‘Molly? This is her father speakin’. No, she’s not here. She went out early this mornin’, without giving me my breakfast. What? No, she didn’t pack a suitcase. She was wearing a pink dress, I suppose.’
Miss Withers put down the phone. ‘Oscar, doesn’t pink look white at night?’
She gave him no time to answer. ‘Come on!’ she insisted. ‘I think we’re on the trail of something, and I don’t like the scent.’
‘Now listen!’ objected her old crony. ‘Good heavens, woman, I’ve got a Bureau to run …’
‘It’ll run by itself,’ she came back. And the Inspector followed, for he knew her of old.
‘We’ll first have a talk with young Farling,’ she decided. ‘Tell the man to drive us to the Queens lockup.’
But when they had reached that outlying station they found that the talk with young Ronald Farling would have to be postponed indefinitely.
‘He’s flew the coop!’ was the way Captain Platt put it. ‘About half an hour ago Sam Firth, his father’s partner, came out here with a writ of habeas corpus. They’d got wind of the medical examiner’s report which cast doubt on the golf ball angle, so it was up to me to book the kid for murder or let him go. And we didn’t have enough on him—’
‘We can get him again if we need him,’ said Piper. ‘Well, Hildegarde?’
‘We need him now,’ she said shortly. ‘Find out for me just what is the situation out at the golf course, will you? Anybody there?’
Captain Platt reported that Fogle was due to go back on duty at the course within the next few minutes, having had a short relief. ‘We always keep a cop around the scene of the crime for a couple of days,’ he informed her. ‘Otherwise the place is closed up.’
Miss Withers then realized that Molly Gargan couldn’t possibly be on duty. There would be no need to have her sitting on the stool behind that counter in the club house … yet where was she?