by Q. Patrick
“Right here in this building.”
“Get her.”
The boy ran off. Later, the Medical Examiner turned from the body. “You can cut out suicide. It’s murder.” He tossed Trant an evening paper. “And if you want motives …”
Trant read a front page headline:
Joseph Cook, Millionaire Playboy,
Announces Surprise Engagement To Texas Heiress
“Surprise is right.” The Medical Examiner grinned meaningly from The Country Blonde to The Town Blonde who had just made a spectacular entrance. “Guess either of them might be pretty sore about not being that Texas heiress.”
* * *
Trant now had the living-room and the two blondes to himself. Nothing had been touched. On a coffee table, a single fluted cocktail glass, with the dregs of a Martini, and a shaker, where melting ice still floated, stood in crystal transparency. Next to them, in a careless heap, lay strewn a diamond clip, two diamond rings, and a diamond bracelet.
The Country Blonde was standing by the window, frostily ignoring The Town Blonde who lounged on a pink divan.
“Well, ladies, suppose we hear those interesting stories again. Miss Towne?”
Town pouted the red camellia lips. “I read about Joe’s engagement. Sure I was mad, hopping mad. And when I’m mad I do pixie things. What I did this time was to grab up all the junk the jerk had ever given me and come running over here.” She pointed an elegant toe toward the heaped jewels. “When he let me in, I threw them straight in his sinus—and scrammed.”
“You’re sure he was alive when you left?”
“It doesn’t kill you,” drawled Town, “to get a load of diamonds in the kisser.”
Trant had paused at the coffee table. He picked up the diamond bracelet.
“And you, Miss Lindquist, arrived only a few seconds after Miss Towne left?”
“Yes. I too read the paper and am much surprised. I telephone Mr. Cook and he asks me for a drink at six thirty—to explain, he say. I come. I knock. He does not answer. Always he is punctual, so I wait perhaps five minutes, thinking he come. Then I hear the moan. I call quick for the elevator boy and his key.”
“Unshot when Miss Towne left; shot before Miss Lindquist arrived. Trant shook his head. “One of you, I’m afraid, is telling a lie.”
And then, suddenly, as he let the bracelet drop on the coffee table, his self-assurance came back. Because now he knew. He should have known half an hour ago. Very calm now, he took out a cigarette case and offered it. Country accepted abstractedly. Town shook her head. “No minor vices. “
Trant lit Country’s cigarette and turned with an odd smile to Town. “No minor vices? Then perhaps … would you get up?”
Town rose.
“Here.” Trant beckoned. “Nearer.”
Dubiously she moved closer. Trant grabbed her swiftly by the waist and, pulling her toward him, kissed her full and enthusiastically on the mouth.
“Hey!” Town broke away, slapping hard at his cheek.
But Trant, beaming, had turned to tall mirror and was surveying his own reflected mouth, grotesquely smeared with camellia red.
“Thank you, Miss Towne. A very pleasant way of getting a solution. And here it is.” He moved to the coffee table and picked up the fluted cocktail glass from beside the shaker. “Someone drank this Martini recently—dregs in the glass, ice in the shaker. Now Miss Towne sheds her lipstick as freely as she sheds her jewels. Witness my mouth.”
He raised the cocktail glass to the light. “Not a trace of lipstick here. She didn’t have time to clean it, either. Takes too long to wipe lipstick off fluted glass.” He paused. “But if Miss Lindquist, with her admirable Nordic contempt for cosmetics, had drunk it …”
Deftly he flicked the half-smoked cigarette from Country’s hand and held it up. Its end was completely unstained.
‘’See? No lipstick.”
“But I never came in here,” flared Country. “I tell you.
I keep telling you.”
“I know, Miss Lindquist, but perhaps that is the lie. Perhaps you knocked and Mr. Cook let you in. Perhaps you asked him to mix you a Martini to give yourself time to get his gun. Perhaps, as he put the shaker down, you shot him. Perhaps you gulped the Martini to fortify yourself—and then ran for the elevator boy.”
“But is—is crazy. It is Mr. Cook who drinks the Martini himself!”
Trant smiled. “If Mr. Cook had drunk it, there would be absolutely no case against you, Miss Lindquist. I agree.”
“But he did, he did!”
“Oh, no, he didn’t, he didn’t!” Trant looked at her ruefully. “Mr. Cook was fussy about his health. He would never have dreamed of drinking liquor just after a sinus treatment and a penicillin shot. And if he didn’t drink it and Miss Towne didn’t drink it, who else …?”
Trant never really enjoyed out-maneuvering an attractive murderess.
“I can almost sympathize, Ingeborg,” he murmured. “That long trip from Scandinavia—and then a Texas heiress. American dollars marrying American dollars. So inconsiderate!”
Who Killed the Mermaid?
Lieutenant Timothy Trant of the New York Homicide Bureau awoke from a pleasantly unorthodox dream in which his sister had turned into a green and orange necktie. Outside the Pullman window a rugged Vermont had given place to a more domesticated Massachusetts. Young Lieutenant Trant, who found Nature predictable and therefore uninteresting, contemplated moving for lunch into the adjoining diner but decided he was lazier than he was hungry.
He picked up a learned quarterly, entitled Thought Trends, which his intellectual sister had forced upon him at Montpelier Junction. He soon discarded it in favor of a real-life murder magazine bought furtively behind her back. It featured, he knew, an article on one of his recent successes and he had consciously delayed the pleasure of reading his praises in print.
As he ruffled the pages, he became aware that he was under observation. He glanced across the aisle to see that a new passenger, who must have boarded the Flier while he was dozing, was seated in the place opposite him. He was an elderly, thin little man with a white bald head. His face was almost hidden behind a Holyoke Guardian, but one blue eye was exposed and was fixing Trant with a stare of extreme suspicion.
Always intrigued by the unexpected, Trant was fascinated that he should inspire such hostility in a stranger. Then, with a sigh of disappointment, he remembered the terrible green and orange necktie which had been his sister’s birthday present and which he had felt obliged to wear throughout the long weekend with his family.
“It’s only the tie,” he thought sadly, and returned to his magazine.
He found the article which gave him flattering billing as “Ex-Princeton Athlete and New York’s Boy Wonder Policeman,” but the continued stare of the man across the aisle marred the pleasure of the flowery adulation. The orange and green necktie was Lieutenant Trant’s Achilles’ heel. To make matters worse, the photograph of himself which adorned the article looked even more lubberly and sinister than the Line-Up pictures of wanted criminals on the reverse side of the page.
He finished the article, however, and, tearing out the page with his photograph to keep for a certain precocious and bloodthirsty niece, glanced once again at the little man across the aisle.
He was still reading or pretending to read the Holyoke Guardian, but the blue eye continued to observe Trant around the edge of the page with basilisk severity.
Almost for the first time in his life, Lieutenant Trant became unnerved. He rose with a pretense of dignity, took down his weekend bag, and withdrew to the wash room. There he changed the offending orange and green for a discreet black knitted tie and returned to the car.
The Pullman, which was the last on the train, was almost empty. Apart from himself and his sartorial critic, there were only three passengers. Extremely tie conscious now, Lieutenant Trant studied them as he moved to his place. Immediately behind his own seat a jovial business type, who was playing solit
aire on a knee-balanced suitcase, sported an unspeakable butterfly bow of electric blue pockmarked with yellow dots. Beyond, an intense, scholarly young man, holding a small book close to shell-rimmed glasses, wore a shrill and shabby scarlet four-in-hand.
The necktie of the third passenger, if it existed, was hidden behind a large black beard which would have done credit to a Byzantine bishop. The owner of the beard was sound asleep and a solid head bobbed portentously up and down above a black-coated bosom.
“In such company,” thought Trant defensively, “why should I be discriminated against?”
When he reached his own place, his neighbour had dropped the newspaper and had closed the accusing eyes
as if to sleep. But for the first time his own necktie was exposed to view.
To Lieutenant Trant’s delighted surprise, he observed that it was by far the most monstrous of all—a shocking chartreuse on which a pink hand-painted mermaid brandished a cocktail glass. Surely a man with such a taste in neckwear could never have objected to the relatively innocent orange and green. Perhaps there was some other reason for the regard of savage enmity.
“Perhaps he doesn’t like my face,” mused Lieutenant Trant happily. “Or perhaps I remind him of a ne’er-do-well nephew.”
These entertaining fantasies made him hungry, and he soon strolled into the diner. In a short time he was joined by the intense scarlet four-in-hand who ate in quick snaps, his bespectacled nose still buried in his book. Not long after, the jovial blue bow appeared, distributed Babbittish smiles, and ordered beer with his lunch. Trant was toying with a Diplomat Pudding when the Byzantine beard chose a table opposite him. After ordering, he tucked his napkin under the beard and, to Trant’s satisfaction, revealed a glimpse of a most objectionable lavender foulard.
“Scarlet,” mused Trant, smug in the security of his own chaste black, “yellow-spotted blue, lavender, chartreuse with a pink mermaid. Every law of esthetics outraged.”
He paid his check and returned to the Pullman. As he resumed his seal, he noticed that his cross-aisle enemy, alone now in the car, seemed sound asleep with the Holyoke Guardian spread like a tablecloth over his face.
Then suddenly the train swerved around a bend and the dislodged Holyoke Guardian slid from the sleeper’s face and flapped to the floor.
Astonished at what it revealed, Trant jumped up and sprang across the aisle.
His neighbor’s bald head lolled grotesquely against the window pane. The mouth gaped; the blue eyes glared in an unseeing stare. The mermaid necktie, twisted to the left, had been pulled viciously tight into the loose folds of the man’s neck.
“Well!” exclaimed Trant.
And, as he felt for the pulse, he realized two facts. The left blue eye which had surveyed him so sternly was obviously of glass and the owner of the glass eye was obviously dead.
“Murdered,” reflected Trant with shocked but professional fascination, “’by a scarlet four-in-hand, a butterfly bow tie, or a lavender foulard…. ”
Cautiously he surveyed the scene. His own copy of Thought Trends lay on the seat half-obscured by the body; the sheets of the Holyoke Guardian clung around the legs. A pressed buzzer brought a Pullman porter whom Trant sent for the conductor. With a flourish of credentials, he quickly ordered him to wire ahead to the Springfield police and to send in from the diner his three fellow passengers. After final instructions to put two porters on guard at the car’s exit, he searched the Pullman vigorously.
He did not find what he was looking for and, in not finding it, realized rather disappointedly that the case was solved almost before it had begun….
* * *
As the train clattered toward Springfield, the scarlet four-in-hand, the blue bow, and the beard-hidden lavender foulard sat together in shocked uneasiness in the section nearest the wash room. Trant, blocking the aisle, looked down at them soberly. He held the copy of Thought Trends.
“This, gentlemen, is the last car. Since I was next door in the diner, I know no one passed me to come in here and only you three came out.” His gray eyes moved from one face to the other and settled on the jovial blue bow. “Did you, sir, go into the wash room before you went to lunch?” The blue bow gave a sickly version of the Babbitt smile.
“As a matter of fact, I did—to wash up.”
“As I thought,” murmured Trant, as if to himself. “While the blue bow was in the wash room and the lavender foulard was asleep, the scarlet four-in-hand could have strangled the mermaid and arranged the newspaper over the face to simulate sleep. On the other hand, while the scarlet tie was in the diner and the foulard asleep, the blue bow could have done the same. Still on the other hand, while the scarlet and the blue were in the diner, the lavender foulard …”
“But it’s ridiculous,” exclaimed the bearded foulard in a voice that was unexpectedly high and piping. “I don’t even know this dead person.”
Trant smiled ruefully. “Neither do I. But in this case the victim’s identity is insignificant.”
The scarlet four-in-hand jumped up. “This is pretentious bluff!”
“Pretentious, maybe, but not bluff.” Trant waved the copy of Thought Trends. “This magazine is mine. When I went to the diner, it was on my seat. When I returned it was on the deceased’s. Clearly, after I’d left, he ran out of reading material and borrowed mine. But this wasn’t the only magazine I had. I regret to say I also bought a real-life murder magazine. It is no longer in the car.
“Yes.” he continued, “the murderer was daring. If the newspaper hadn’t slipped from the face, he might have skipped the train at Springfield before the crime was discovered. But he made a mistake in disposing of the murder magazine instead of returning both magazines to my seat where they might not have been noticed. In fact, the whole murder was the mistake of an exaggeratedly frightened man. He had nothing to fear but a glass eye.”
He shrugged. “You see, the glass eye had a peculiar life of its own. Earlier, when the murdered man was reading the paper, I had the distinct impression that he was watching me with extreme suspicion. Just a trick of the glass eye, of course. But supposing I’d had a guilty conscience, supposing I saw him watching me reading a real-life murder magazine and happened to know that in it …”
Suddenly the butterfly bow sprang up, knocked savagely past Trant, and plunged toward the exit.
Two porters, appearing precipitously, jumped on him
and held him.
“What …!” gasped the scarlet four-in-hand and the
bearded foulard.
“Yes,” mused Trant, “a very unnecessary murder. He thought the glass eye had unearthed his secret, but, in fact, the significant page wasn’t even in the magazine. By an odd coincidence, I had torn it out—my photograph was on the back.”
He produced from his pocket the folded sheet and studied the Line-Up of Wanted Criminals on the reverse side. Among them, wearing a clipped mustache but immediately recognizable, was a photograph of the jovial blue bow. Trant read:
Wanted For Murder
Joseph Donegan, convicted of embezzlement, wanted for murder of guard while escaping Cook Country Jail, Colorado….
* * *
The case had been exasperatingly simple. Yet there were, perhaps, compensations. New York’s Boy Wonder Policeman Solves Case With Lightning Rapidity. A rather smug smile played around Lieutenant Trant’s lips.
Yes, that would be pleasant. And, in a way, the laws of esthetics had been justified too. Next to the mermaid, the yellow-spotted blue blow had been the most repulsive necktie in the car.
Woman of Ice
Lieutenant Trant first noticed her in the stern of the little steam ferry as it fussed down the Grand Canal. She was standing straight and still at the rail, watching the ancient Venetian palaces glide by.
Her beauty, he thought suddenly, was like Venice— unique and beyond time.
There was too a disturbing sensation that he had seen that wonderful brooding profile before. This, of course was absurd, b
ecause Lieutenant Trant’s exact memory was a byword at the New York Homicide Bureau. If he had seen such a face, even for five seconds, it would have left an indelible mark.
And yet, there it was, that tantalizing half-remembrance. At first glance he had thought her American. Now he wasn’t completely sure. Another quality was present which belonged more here in Europe. A quality of disenchantment. Those gray-green eyes under the gleaming black hair seemed to have looked into the very depths of darkness.
No tragedy, he felt, could move her now. Something in her was frozen.
As always, when he was intrigued, his thoughts crystalized into a phrase.
Woman of Ice….
She left the boat, as did he, at the wharf below the fantastic cupolas of San Marco. He outdistanced her on his way to his hotel, past the Winged Lion of Venice where the pigeons swirled in a cloud of pink-flecked gray.
Suddenly he heard behind him:
“Why, Tim Trant of all people—here in Venice!”
He turned to see two men both with straw-colored hair and welcoming smiles. The younger man’s face was an impish parody of the older’s handsome distinction. Trant recognized Gordon and Mike Hunt immediately. He had been at Princeton with both the brothers and Mike, the younger, had been his classmate.
“Gordon’s living here in splendor in a genuine Venetian palazzo. I’m being the impecunious artist brother.” Mike pumped Trant’s hand. “You’ve got to come to dinner tonight. We insist.”
Trant, his brief vacation over, was leaving early next morning. As he hesitated, he saw the Woman of Ice coming toward them. Mike, obviously, had seen her too and waved.
“Why, there’s Adela.”
She joined them, looking gravely at Gordon. “Oh, Mr. Hunt, I’m afraid I couldn’t match that brocade for your wife anywhere.”
Gordon’s quick smile was vivid. “Never mind, Adela. Incidentally, Miss Wentworth—Timothy Trant. He’s dining with us tonight.” The smile moved to Trant. “You will come?”