by Q. Patrick
From what he could see of her in the dim light, Sheila Dent looked pretty and nice. For a man like Heller, who traded in wives as if they were automobiles, she should make a charming 1958 family model. Clementina Coldwater’s ex-husband, the producer, looked merely fat and anxious. All three of them, whispering together, were tense as kittens.
* * *
The last act was reaching its climax now. Both actresses had arrived at the millionaire’s apartment, convinced they had hooked him, only to find him unaccountably absent.
All through the play there had been a running gag about the millionaire’s stinginess with liquor. Now, with uneasy suspicion of the double-cross, the two glamor girls made a dive at the Scotch decanter.
The Panther reached it first. There was only enough liquor for one drink. She poured it into a glass and added ice. She was just about to gulp it when the Lioness snatched it from her. A skirmish followed which ended in a glacial stalemate, with the two of them, determined not to let the other touch it, leaving the drink on a central table and sitting down to wait for the millionaire, stabbing at each other with rapier chitchat.
When the tension had become almost unendurable, the millionaire’s butler entered and announced that his master had just telephoned from the airport. He was sorry to disappoint the ladies, but he knew they would forgive him because he was flying back to Texas to marry his boyhood sweetheart.
The mood instantly changed. The rivals, both realizing they had been defeated and each trying to make it appear that the other was the harder hit, started with appalling sweetness to press the single drink on each other.
“You, darling!”
“No, you poor dear, you need it!” Then, suddenly, they both made a lunge for the Scotch. But the mousy little butler was too quick for them. Daintily lifting the glass, he toasted the two frustrated felines with an unctuous smile and swallowed the drink as the curtain fell.
The first-night audience roared its applause. The curtain came up again. The entire company took the call. The butler, standing between the Lioness and the Panther, still clutched the glass and stared unsmilingly in front of him with a curious dazed expression.
Trant heard Sheila Dent in front of him exclaim, “What on earth’s got into Arthur?”
And Stephen Heller barked, “He must be out of his mind.”
Both of them and the producer got up as the curtain was lowered and then raised again. This was obviously a solo call for the two stars. To Trant’s intrigued surprise, the little actor who played the butler was still standing between them, ghastly pale and staring vacantly at nothing. Then, as Clementina Coldwater and Lottie Lamb went on bowing, the glass dropped from his fingers, and he swayed.
Jake Fisher, Stephen Heller, and Sheila Dent were hurrying down the aisle toward the stage. Just before the curtain reached the boards, Trant saw the butler’s legs crumple and lurch sideways. Professionally agog, he muttered an apology to his sister and sped down the aisle after the producer and the authors.
He followed them through curtains, up a flight of stairs, and onto the stage. There, the Lioness and the Panther were standing as if turned to granite, staring down at the “butler” who lay sprawled on the floor between them.
The producer and Sheila Dent dashed forward and dropped at the actor’s side. Sheila Dent cried, “Stephen, called a doctor!” As she was agitatedly loosening the butler’s collar, Trant knelt down and studied the sinister stiffness of the little man’s body and his twisted, bluish face.
Feeling faintly incredulous, he picked up the empty decanter which stood on the coffee table. He lifted its stopper and sniffed. The bitter almond odor trailing up to him confirmed his suspicions.
He looked up at the huddle of people around the body. “Get away from him, all of you. He’s dead. The drink
was loaded with potassium cyanide. He’s been murdered.” The producer’s fat cheeks wobbled. “Murdered? But—who are you?”
“Homicide,” said Trant.
Clementina Coldwater suddenly came to life. She started to scream.
Lottie Lamb, equally alive again, spat, “For pity’s sake, Clementina, stop auditioning for Dracula. There’s an audience out there.”
But Clementina Coldwater spun around to Trant, her face scrawled with terror and fury. “It’s me!” she shouted. “I was the one who was meant to drink the Scotch. It’s me they tried to murder!”
They were all crowding around Trant, all talking at once, including a young stage manager in shirt sleeves. Finally the haughty, impressive Stephen Heller took over.
“Miss Coldwater’s right, Lieutenant. As I directed it, she was meant to get the Scotch. What Arthur Russ—the stage butler—did wasn’t in our script. I don’t know what got into him. He stole the third-act curtain! The nerve of it! An obscure little nobody whom we only hired out of kindness, a—”
But Clementina Coldwater’s famous booming voice drowned out his indignation. She had flung herself toward Lottie Lamb and was screaming, “You did it! It’s just your gutter level. How to land a TV show—kill off the competition!”
Lottie Lamb’s answering laugh was a panther’s roar. “Really, darling, what a charming idea! I haven’t told you because I was saving it for a lovely surprise. But you aren’t competition any longer. I signed that contract this afternoon.”
“You signed …”
There was a hopeless confusion of struggling glamor. While Stephen Heller separated the two stars, and the producer hurried off to stall visitors from coming backstage, Trant unobtrusively talked with the stage manager.
He learned that the same decanter had been used throughout the play. Since drinks had been drunk from it in the first two acts, the poison could only have been put in the decanter during the second intermission.
“Soon as the curtain fell,” said the stage manager, “I ran on stage and fixed the decanter for the last act, pouring out all but a little of the prop Scotch.”
“Who went near the decanter after that?”
“Gee, I don’t know. Mr. Heller sent me out to buy a Vogue magazine. You see in the last act Miss Lamb picks up a Vogue from the table. It’s got to be Vogue because she has a line about it and she holds it up for the audience to see. But, somehow there was a mess-up. Mr. Heller noticed in the second intermission that we’d got Harper’s Bazaar instead. I don’t know how it happened. I could have sworn …”
Trant’s pulses quickened. “What did you do with the copy of Harper’s Bazaar?”
“I left it right there on the table with the Vogue.”
Trant skirted the corpse and picked up the copy of Harper’s Bazaar from a table. He leafed through it and then stopped abruptly at a page because, from a group of three “Portraits of Current Celebrities,” one photograph had been neatly cut out.
Everyone was swarming around him again, dominated by Clementina Coldwater who was intoning, “Lieutenant, I demand protection! If it wasn’t Lottie who tried to murder me, it—” “It was someone,” put in Trant quietly, “who had access to potassium cyanide. Prussic acid isn’t easy to get, you know. You can’t just walk into a drug store and order it.”
His gaze settled on Stephen Heller. “As I remember, Mr. Heller, you were quite a hero in the war. Didn’t they drop you by parachute into occupied Denmark?”
The director-author gave a self-satisfied toss to his blond head. “I thought that was common knowledge.”
“And, Mr. Heller, on dangerous missions like that in Europe, didn’t they always give you a poison capsule—in case you were captured by the Gestapo?”
“Of course!” exclaimed Lottie Lamb. “Stephen’s got that coat button with poison in it. It’s his star souvenir.”
“A button!” Trant turned to the stage manager. “Do you keep a sewing kit in case the actors need repairs during the performance?”
“Why, sure.”
The stage manager scurried off and returned with an old, beat-up round tin. He took off the lid, revealing a jumble of buttons of various si
zes, needles and spools of thread.
Stephen Heller glared at it, gave a grunt, and picked up one of the buttons—a large, brown one which might have come from a raincoat. He turned it over and, flicking a tiny lever, made its back spring open.
“This is my button! But how did you know it was in that box?”
“The murderer had to hide it in a hurry.”
Trant took the button and sniffed the hollow interior. Once again the tell-tale almond odor trailed up to him. “It wasn’t difficult to figure out that the safest place to hide a button is with other buttons. When did you last see it, Mr. Heller?”
“This afternoon. It was at the house when we stopped by for a drink.”
“Who is—we?”
“All of us. My wife and I, Clementina, Lottie, and Jake Fisher.”
“Jake!” Clementina Coldwater, on the warpath again, swung around to her producer ex-husband. “So! You got tired of paying alimony, did you?”
“Please, Miss Coldwater,” broke in Trant. “The man who died was the man who was meant to die— Arthur Russ.”
“But how can that be?” Sheila Dent’s pretty eyes were puzzled. “The scene was written and directed for Clementina to drink the Scotch. Arthur must have had just a sudden scene-stealing impulse.”
“I don’t think so,” said Trant. “Arthur Russ snatched the glass because he’d been told to by someone whose word he would obey—by the author or the producer.”
His eyes, ominously calm, shifted over the whole group. “By the person, in fact, who knew Arthur Russ had to be killed tonight, who brought the cyanide button here, and who—” he gestured with the magazine which he still held in his hand—”replaced the Vogue, which the stage manager had correctly put on the table, by this Harper’s Bazaar, so that he’d be out buying a new Vogue while the decanter was poisoned.”
Dramatically he opened the copy of Harper’s Bazaar, exposing the page from which the picture had been cut out. “Does anyone recognize this?”
“Why, it’s my copy!” blurted Stephen Heller. “There was a photograph of my wife. I cut it out at home yesterday. I—”
“Of your wife!” Trant felt that odd, fizzy sensation of approaching triumph. “And it was your wife, perhaps, who in the second-act intermission drew your attention to the fact that the magazine was wrong?”
“Why, yes, it was, but—”
“It’s easy enough,” continued Trant, “to hide a button, but it isn’t so easy to hide a magazine.”
He leaned toward Sheila Dent and flipped the briefcase out of her hand. As she gave a startled gasp, he tugged open the zipper and withdrew a copy of Vogue.
“Congratulations, Miss Dent, on a nice try. The stage is one place where someone has to go on drinking a drink, whatever it tastes like, and once you’d told Arthur Russ in private to try the new ending, the whole thing would have looked like an attempt on Miss Coldwater.
“I wonder why you had to murder a little actor who was hired out of kindness. Was it, maybe, through your kindness he was hired? Because you had to hire him? Because he had some hold over you? An unknown girl who’s married Hollywood’s and Broadway’s biggest catch, an unknown girl who’s written a play with him, who’s on the fringe of great success—that sort of girl, Miss Dent, is apt to be vulnerable, if …”
He broke off, his face oddly pensive. “I wonder why it was you who dashed to help Arthur Russ, why it was you who loosened his collar. With that overcoat of yours, it would have been easy to transfer something from his jacket to—”
While the others stood in total silence, he crossed to the stunned Sheila Dent and felt through the pockets of her coat.
“Ah!” He produced a paper ad and studied it. “A marriage license dated 1949, made out to Arthur Russ and Sheila Dent.
“So that was it. When Mr. Heller proposed to you, it was too good a deal to let slip, wasn’t it? No time for divorce from that obscure little husband. But the obscure husband showed up. He had to be paid off with a part in the play. But that wasn’t enough. He gave you until tonight, didn’t he? If you didn’t promise to cut him in on your newly found bonanza, he’d threatened to show Mr. Heller the license after the show. The scandal …”
But there was no need to go on. The girl who was nobody but who would be a celebrity tomorrow slumped to the floor, and Stephen Heller was gazing down at her with as much emotion as might be expected from a man who, having lost three wives, was now losing a fourth.
Trant looked down, too, almost sadly. Well, his sister’s prophecy had in a way, come true. Sheila Dent would hit the headlines tomorrow.
His eyes moved back to the others. An extraordinary change had come over Clementina Coldwater and Lottie Lamb. Both were beaming.
“Think of it!” said Clementina Coldwater. “The author a murderess. An actor poisoned on stage! We’ll run for years.”
“For years and years,” said Lottie. “Darling!” purred the Lioness. “Darling!” purred the Panther.
Sources
“Detective’s Who’s Who” Four-and-Twenty Bloodhounds, ed.
Anthony Boucher, 1950.
“She Wrote Fini.” MacLean’s, 4 parts, December 1, 1940-January 15, 1941; Woman (UK), December 20 to
December 27, 1941.
“White Carnations.” Collier’s, February 10, 1945. “The Plaster Cat.” Mystery Book Magazine, July 1946.
“The Corpse in the Closet.” This Week, 1947; ElleryQueen’s Mystery Magazine (hereafter, EQMM) January 1948.
“Footlights and Murder.” This Week, 1947; EQMM, September 1948, as “Farewell Performance.”
“The Wrong Envelope.” Mystery Book Magazine, Winter
1948.
“Murder in One Scene.” This Week, 1948; EQMM, August
1949.
“Town Blonde, Country Blonde.” This Week, 1949; London Evening Standard, December 14, 1949; EQMM, August 1951.
“Who Killed the Mermaid?” This Week, 1949; London Evening Standard, January 13, 1950; EQMM, February 1951.
“Woman of Ice.” This Week, 1949; London Evening Standard, December 31, 1949; EQMM, February 1953.
“Death and Canasta.” This Week, 1950; EQMM, April 1954. “Death on Saturday Night.” This Week, 1950; EQMM,
January 1953.
“Death on the Riviera.” This Week, 1950; EQMM, September 1952.
“Girl Overboard.” Four-&-Twenty Bloodhounds, ed. Anthony Boucher, 1950; London Evening Standard, January 13, 1951.
“This Looks Like Murder.” This Week, 1950; EQMM, March 1952.
“Death Before Breakfast.” This Week, 1951; London Evening Standard, April 5, 1951; EQMM, December 1954.
“Death at the Fair.” London Evening Standard, November 9,
1951.
“The Glamorous Opening.” This Week, 1951; London Evening Standard, June 20, 1951 as “Death on a First Night”; EQMM, January 1954.
“Murder in the Alps.” This Week. 1951; London Evening Standard, December 26,1951; EQMM ,January 1952.
“On the Day of the Rose Show.” This Week, December 7, 1952, as “Revolvers and Roses”; EQMM, March 1956. “Going...Going...Gone!” This Week, May 10, 1953; EQMM,
October 1956.
“Lioness vs. Panther.” This Week, April 3, 1955 as “The Two Deadly Females”; EQMM, July 1958.
The Cases of Lieutenant Timothy Trant
The Cases of Lieutenant Timothy Trant by Q. Patrick, edited by Curtis Evans and Douglas G. Greene, with an introduction by Curtis Evans, is set in Palatino and printed on 60 pound Natures acid-free paper. It was published both in full cloth and in trade softcover. The cover is by Gail Cross. The Cases of Lieutenant Timothy Trant was printed by Southern Ohio Printers and bound by Cincinnati Bindery, and published in May 2019 by Crippen & Landru Publishers, Cincinnati, Ohio.
Table of Contents
Detective Who’s Who
She Wrote Finis
FINIS
White Carnations
The Plaster Cat
The Co
rpse in the Closet
Farewell Performance
The Wrong Envelope
Murder in One Scene
Town Blonde, Country Blonde
Who Killed the Mermaid?
Woman of Ice
Death and Canasta
Death on Saturday Night
Death on the Riviera
Girl Overboard
This Looks Like Murder
Death Before Breakfast
Death at the Fair
The Glamorous Opening
Murder in the Alps
On the Day of the Rose Show
Going … Going … Gone!
Lioness vs. Panther
Sources
The Cases of Lieutenant Timothy Trant