The Cases of Lieutenant Timothy Trant (Lost Classics)

by Q. Patrick

  “Kate, have you told Trant about this?”

  “I’ve only just remembered.”

  “He can’t have found it or he’d have told us.” Toby’s voice was edged with excitement. “Try and remember what happened to it.”

  “She sniffed it. She put the cap on again. Then she picked up the Manhattan. The inhaler must have dropped when the cocktail dropped.”

  “It wasn’t on the floor when I came. Martin must have taken it.”

  Her excitement subsided. “Yes. He must have.”

  “You’re sure you didn’t see it again after it dropped?”

  She struggled with tangled memories. A cold, hard feeling under her skin. What had that been?

  “Yes!” she exclaimed. “When I dropped down at Angelica’s side, I felt something under my leg. I moved my leg and looked down. It was the inhaler. I tossed it away.”

  “Where?”

  “Under the couch, I think.”

  * * *

  Both Kate and Toby jumped up and started for the other room. Kate found a lamp and turned it on. Together they hurried to the couch. The inhaler wouldn’t be there, she told herself. The police would have searched and, since they had found nothing, Martin must have managed to get it back.

  They pushed the couch aside. Nothing was there, but in the center of the newly exposed patch of carpet was a neat round hole gnawed through the carpet itself and the floorboard beneath. It was the hole Francis had told her about, the hole the rat had made the night before.

  She began: “You don’t suppose that when I pushed it, it rolled—”

  But Toby was already on his knees. He lit a match and peered down into the hole.

  “There is something, Kate.” The match went out. He lit another. “Yes, it’s there. I can see it gleaming. Quick! Bring something to get it out.”

  She looked around, ran to the desk and brought two pencils. He inserted them in the hole, juggling them like chopsticks. Once the head of the inhaler appeared above the edge and dropped down again. At last, with a grunt of achievement, he managed to ease the little metal tube out onto the carpet. Gingerly he unscrewed the cap and sniffed. He got up, his face solemn, and handed Kate the inhaler.

  “Be careful.”

  She held it for a second to her nose. She could smell the menthol but another odor was unmistakably there too. With a little thrill of horror, she said:

  “Almonds. So I was right.”

  Toby took back the inhaler. He was talking briskly about calling Lieutenant Trant. They had all the evidence now. It was time for the police. She dropped onto the couch, feeling absurd panic for what she had done. Martin’s fate was sealed. And it was she who had sealed it. She, alone.

  “Kate, are you all right?” Toby was leaning solicitously over her. “You look pale. A drink, maybe?”

  “Yes, Toby. Perhaps it would help. I’m rather shaky.”

  He moved away into the kitchen. Without him, the room was quiet and desolate. Her hearing seemed unnaturally sharp. The ticking of the clock on the mantel sounded like a distant, ominous drum-beat, drumming Martin to execution. Suddenly she stiffened.

  A sound, quiet but alien, had come from the bedroom.

  Her skin crawled. She thought of the fire-escape outside the open window. The sound came again, the stealthy pad of a footstep. It was a footstep. She knew. There could be no mistake. Someone had slipped in. Someone was standing in the darkness of the bedroom behind her.

  Martin had come.

  She opened her mouth to call Toby, but checked herself. No. Don’t let Martin know she’d heard. Get up. Tiptoe to the kitchen. Warn Toby.

  She had half risen when Toby came bustling out of the kitchen. He held two small jiggers in his hands. He was beaming happily.

  “Managed to scare up some brandy.”

  He came to her and offered her one of the glasses. “There, my sweet, swallow it down. Do you the world of good.”

  She took the glass. She looked up at him, her eyes wide with fear, as she lifted the brandy unsteadily to her lips.

  “Toby,” she whispered, “in the bedroom. He’s there. I heard him. He’s there!”

  An explosion roared through the silence of the room. She screamed. She felt the glass splinter in her hand. She stared at her fingers. Blood was streaming over them. She watched it stupidly.

  “Kate—Kate!” She heard Toby’s voice infinitely far away.

  The blood seemed to loom up toward her. It blurred in front of her. Red. Everything was red and swimming.

  Then there was nothing but blackness …

  * * *

  Kate opened her eyes to see her own bedroom. She felt confused, and her right hand throbbed. She glanced down at it and saw a neat white bandage. Someone was standing by the bed. She turned her head. It was a tall young man with a red and gray bow tie. He was watching her gravely.

  Who? She remembered. Lieutenant Trant. “Feel all right, Miss Laurence?”

  Everything was coming remorselessly back. “Yes. Yes, thanks.”

  “You passed out. Don’t worry about the hand. Only a graze.”

  She said: “You got the inhaler, the shorthand pad?”

  “Sure.” He sat down on the bed. “Got him, too. And a

  confession. He had to confess with that stack of evidence against him. Quite a little detective you turned out to be.”

  Misery throbbed in her like the pain in her hand. “I was right. He did switch inhalers at the office?”

  “He did. Your friend Mrs. Mills must have been quite an impulsive girl. At the office she confronted him with the pad, told him she was going to pass on the facts to you. He realized he had to kill her, so he switched inhalers. Might have been risky. She might have died right there under his nose, but it seems Mrs. Mills was funny about drugs. Meticulous. If the doctor told her to do things a certain way, she stuck to it. He knew that about her.”

  Kate knew it too. A memory came back of Angelica’s saying: “What a day at the office, sneezing my head off, sniffing my dreary inhaler every hour on the hour.”

  “The doctor told her to use the inhaler every hour on the hour,” Kate said.

  “That’s it. And our friend switched inhalers after five. He knew she was pretty certain not to sniff again till six. By six she should have been back home. He’d heard her call her husband and send him off on an errand. He was hoping she’d die alone. There was a chance, of course, that you would show up before six, but that was a chance he had to take.”

  “And he was planning to come himself later?”

  “Yes. As it happened, things worked fine. Angelica had died without telling you anything. And the spilled drinks were a cinch. He had more of the poison with him. He mixed some in the mess on the carpet. That was to make us think the poison had been in the cocktail.”

  “And that I’d put it there.”

  His gray eyes were sympathetic. “That’s it, Miss Laurence.

  I’m afraid you were to have been the fall guy.”

  She could think with cruel clarity now. Martin had had good luck—and bad. Good luck had provided the spilled drinks. Bad luck had hidden the inhaler down the rat hole and had made it impossible for him to sneak the pad out of the apartment.

  Trant was still watching her quietly. “Feel up to a visit from your lawyer? He’s wearing the rug out in the next room.”

  The thought of Toby was the one warm thing in this bleak world of dejection.

  “Yes—yes, please.”

  He patted her shoulder and moved out of the room. Alone, she felt on the brink of tears. If only they could have caught Martin without her help. If only it hadn’t been she. Where was he now? She pictured him in some grimy little cell, behind bars, slouched on a bench, his blond hair shining in the light from a bare ceiling bulb. Martin, whom she had loved.

  The door opened and he walked into the room.

  She sat up, staring as if he were some mocking hallucination. But he was no hallucination. He was solid and big and fair and very
real.

  He sat down on the bed, smiling at her. “Well, baby, how d’you feel?”

  “Martin.” She put out her hand and touched his sleeve. “Martin, I don’t understand.”

  “Didn’t Trant explain?” ‘’Yes, but—”

  The smile became a grin. “Baby, you still thought it was I. You should be ashamed.”

  Happiness surged through her uncontrollably, choking her words.

  “Kate, didn’t you realize? It wasn’t Father who robbed the estate. It was Toby. He did it cleverly, faking a signature, making it look like Father. Father found out. That’s what brought on the attack that killed him. Without Father, Toby thought he’d be safe. No one would ever know. But I came back unexpectedly. He knew I’d be sure to find out something was wrong, so he told me himself. He managed to convince me, too, that it was Father who had stolen the money. I paid it back at once from my own estate. That’s why Toby was so keen for you to marry me. I’d covered up his crime. I’d even paid back the money he lifted.”

  She stammered: “And Angelica?”

  “Was fooled, too. At the office she stumbled on evidence of the theft. She was sure it was Father. And because she was a lioness in your defense against fortune hunters, she was certain I was mixed up in it. That’s why she warned you against me and sent the letter to try to stop the wedding. She found that shorthand pad. Just before he died, Father had scribbled down the truth, putting the blame square on Toby. His heart attack came before he had time to type it out. It was just lying there in his desk. Toby knew nothing about it.”

  Before she died, Angelica had said, “I was wrong.” Why hadn’t she, Kate, realized that could only mean she had been wrong about Martin? She had asked Kate and Martin to the apartment not to accuse Martin but to apologize to him and tell them the truth.

  She whispered: “So it was Toby she confronted at the office.”

  “Of course. She was going to tell you—and the police.”

  She could see how everything she had applied to Martin applied just as well to Toby. Better. When he brought her the wedding present, he already knew he would have to kill Angelica. His advice to go to her apartment and confront her with the letter was a cunning trap. He had told her to get there at six-fifteen, told her to call him if anything went wrong. If she hadn’t arrived early, his plans would all have worked out.

  She had been ready to turn against Angelica and Martin, the two people who had loved her. The only one she had trusted had been Toby.

  She looked at Martin, feeling shame, hurt and welling happiness too.

  He was saying: “That Trant was one smart guy. He found the pad and the inhaler on the first search. Once he’d had the pad transcribed, he knew Toby was guilty. That’s why he put on such a show of suspecting you—to make Toby feel safe. He put the inhaler back in the rat hole and the pad in the drawer. He knew Toby would have to go back and search for them. Trant was waiting out on the fire-escape to catch him red-handed.”

  “It was Lieutenant Trant out there. Trant who shot me?”

  “He hadn’t planned on your showing up. But you called Toby, so that made it okay. Toby’d have come anyway, of course. He’d got Angelica’s extra keys from the office. He was just leaving the club when you called.”

  She was still trying to take it in, to realize that Toby with his endearments, his funny little jokes, his sentimentalities, had been deceiving her all the time.

  Martin was saying softly: “From the start Toby intended to have you take the rap. But once you’d discovered the pad and the inhaler, you were much too dangerous to be allowed to live. You were to have committed suicide, Kate. That was the idea. You were to have killed yourself by prussic acid in Angelica’s apartment.”

  She suddenly saw what he meant and a twinge of horror came.

  “The drink! The brandy!”

  “Thank God Trant realized it in time. That’s why he shot—to break the glass. He found poison on Toby, of course. Kate, we should have realized from the butterflies. You kill butterflies with prussic acid. That’s how he happened to have it handy.”

  There had been enough bad things. Try to forget Toby. She looked at Martin, close to her on the bed. Shame, incredulity and gratitude battled in her.

  “You even paid back all the money and never told me.” His smile broadened. “Noble, wasn’t I?”

  “Oh, Martin!”

  “That’s it, baby. Cry.” His arms went around her. “Use up all your tears. I guess you won’t be needing them, from now on.”

  Murder in One Scene

  Lieutenant Trant of the New York Homicide Bureau was dawdling over his breakfast in his pleasant apartment.

  He buttered a piece of brioche and glanced at the three letters in the mail.

  They didn’t look interesting. One was from his mother in Newport. He opened it and read Mrs. Trant’s usual garrulous account of her social life with its usual undercurrent of pained surprise that her son should choose to be a New York policeman pursuing murderers when he might be escorting the toniest dowagers through the best drawing rooms of the Eastern Seaboard.

  The second letter came from a Princeton classmate who was starting a cultured magazine and thought Trant might like to sacrifice five hundred dollars on the altar of Art.

  The third was even less promising. The long envelope bore his name and address in type and on its left hand top corner the printed words: Big Pal. Trant knew the organization. It was a worthy one which found sponsors for delinquent boys on parole. Lieutenant Trant slit the envelope, anticipating the printed plea beginning:

  Dear Friend …

  But the envelope did not contain the usual form letter. Inside was a folded sheet of elegant blue stationery. Lieutenant Trant blinked. He unfolded the sheet and looked at what was written on it. He blinked again.

  Beneath an embossed Park Avenue address had been written in a round feminine hand:

  Dear George:

  Since you insist, come at five tomorrow. But this is to warn you. I shall have Eddie there. I have also bought a gun. If you try what you tried last time, I will use it.

  Marna

  Lieutenant Trant, whose passion for the unorthodox was unbridled, smiled happily. Offhand he could think of nothing less orthodox than the arrival of so personal and interesting a communication in the envelope of an impersonal and unexciting charitable organization.

  He realized that a mistake must have been made with envelopes. Appeals are usually sent out by volunteer ladies who have been given a “sucker” list and envelopes and who salve their social consciences by typing addresses and providing stamps. This particular volunteer lady—this unknown Marna — must have been very absent-minded or very jittery.

  Judging by the nature of the letter she had mailed in the wrong envelope, she had been very jittery.

  Trant looked at the date. It had been written the day before. “Five tomorrow” therefore meant five o’clock that afternoon. He let his thoughts toy pleasingly with a picture of the jittery Marna with her gun and Eddie waiting at five for the mysterious George who might “try” again what he had “tried” last time.

  It was, of course, his duty as an officer of the law to investigate.

  He put the envelope and the letter in his pocket. He was humming as he left his apartment.

  * * *

  A few minutes before five Lieutenant Trant, in an elegantly inconspicuous gray suit, arrived at the house whose address appeared at the head of Marna’s letter. Although the house had a Park Avenue number, its door was on a side street. It was an old private residence which had been converted into apartments.

  Since he did not know Marna’s name, he stepped into the small outside hall and studied the names above the door buzzers. There was no Marna anything. Most of the names were discouraging. But above the buzzer of the penthouse apartment were two printed cards. One said: Miss Joan Hyde. The other said: Mrs. George Hyde.

  Marna could be Mrs. George Hyde. That would make her the wife of the potentially
sinister George. Miss Joan Hyde might be her daughter. Lieutenant Trant was disappointed. Romantic about mystery and the possibly mysterious, he had imagined Marna blond, beautiful—and young.

  He was about to press the Hyde buzzer when a girl came in from the street behind him and, fumbling through her pocketbook, brought out a key and opened the door. She glanced at him questioningly and kept the door half open. He smiled and followed her into the house.

  The girl had started through the neat mirrored hallway toward a self-service elevator, but she stopped and turned back to him a little suspiciously.

  “Are you looking for someone?”

  She was young and pretty with shining dark hair, cool eyes, and a sort of lazy self-assurance which went with the silver fox coat.

  How nice, thought Lieutenant Trant, if Marna had looked like that.

  He said: “As a matter of fact, I’m looking for Marna Hyde.”

  “Oh.” She smiled. “How interesting.”

  “Is it?”

  “To me it is.” She moved to the elevator. “I’ll take you up.”

  Lieutenant Trant got into the elevator too. The girl’s perfume was pleasant. As she made the elevator ascend, she glanced at him sidewise.

  “Don’t say Marna’s got herself a new beau.”

  “Do I look like a beau?”

  “Very. But I wouldn’t have thought Marna’d have the energy to take on a new man—what with George to get rid of and the faithful Eddie hovering.”

  So far so good, thought Lieutenant Trant.

  The elevator reached the top floor. They got out to face a single door. The girl started to fumble in her pocket-book again.

  “So you live here too,” said Trant.

  “I moved in when George moved out. I’m a bodyguard.

  Hasn’t Marna mentioned me? I’m Joan.”

  “George’s sister.”

  “Yes.”

  “And you’re not on George’s side?”

  “About the divorce?” Joan Hyde turned. “Are you kidding?”