The Second Fletcher Flora Mystery Megapack

by Fletcher Flora

  “Somewhat. Don’t worry about me, Marty. I’ll be all right.” She turned back to me. “I assume that you two have met.”

  “Yes, we have.”

  “In that case, what can I do for you? I thought that our business was ended.”

  “Not very satisfactorily, I’m afraid. I’m sorry.”

  “Don’t be. One can’t be called to account for every mistake. Did you come here just to apologize?”

  “Partly. Not entirely.”

  “Why, then?”

  “You paid me a large fee for something I didn’t do. An excessive fee. If there’s anything I can do, I’d like to earn it.”

  “There’s nothing to be done. Nothing at all.”

  “This woman your husband was with. Myrna, you called her. I’ve been thinking that I might help to find her.”

  “Surely the police have far greater facilities for that than you have. Let the police find her.”

  “I have one advantage. I’ve seen her. I might recognize her if I saw her again.”

  “It’s doubtful that you will see her again. It’s probable that she has run away. If so, the police will follow her, or have her picked up and returned, if they can find her trail. I don’t want to commit myself to anything that might interfere with their job.”

  “The police and I have worked together before.”

  “Please do as I say, Mr. Hand. I sent the police to you, and when you told them what you knew, you did all that was necessary. Now stay out of it.”

  “Right. Thanks, anyhow, for seeing me.”

  “Not at all. And now you must excuse me. I’ve had a difficult day, and I need to rest. Marty will show you out.”

  She turned away and left the room, and Marty, minding the manners of a shirttail cousin, showed me out. He said goodbye at the front door, and I crossed the veranda and got into my car. I drove forward to the concrete apron, U-turned and came back down the drive, around the ellipse, and out the exit.

  On the way downtown I decided that I might as well spend some time, just for luck, in the Normandy Lounge. I went there and crawled onto a stool at the bar. I ordered a beer from the same bartender who had drawn my beer yesterday. A television set on a high shelf behind the bar was alight and alive with the organized antics of a couple of college football teams, reminding me that it was Saturday. The teams took turns trying to move the ball, but the only time they moved it very far was when they kicked it.

  “Another beer,” I said. The bartender drew it and served it. Bored by the game, his services temporarily unclaimed, he was ready for an ear to bend. Mine, being conspicuous, seemed to attract him.

  “You been in the fight game?” he asked.

  “Not I,” I said. “Things are rough enough.”

  “Seems like I seen you before. A picture or something. Somewhere.”

  “Maybe it was yesterday. I was in here.”

  “Oh, sure. I knew I’d seen you somewhere. A guy don’t forget a face like yours. You’re no beauty, Mister. No offense meant.”

  “None taken. I guess it’s true you remember the extremes. The uglies and the lovelies. Like that platinum-headed honey a couple of stools down.”

  “Where? What lovely? Mister, you’re seeing things.”

  “Not now. Yesterday.”

  “Oh. That one. A doll. A sexpot. Plenty of class, though. You can always tell the ones with class.”

  “That’s right. I could go for a woman like that. If I knew who she was I could work out a strategy.”

  “Mister, if you don’t mind my saying so, you ain’t exactly the type.”

  “You never know. Lots of lovelies go for uglies. You know her name?”

  “Nix. We didn’t introduce ourselves.”

  “She come in here often?”

  “Never seen her before. Probably a guest in the hotel. Just someone passing through.”

  “How about the man she was with?”

  “Was she with a man? I never noticed.”

  A customer down the bar held up his empty glass, and the bartender went to fill it. I helped myself to a handful of salted peanuts and left. Outside on the sidewalk, I ate the peanuts one by one while I tried to make up my mind if I should quit or give it one more try. One more try, I decided. Asking questions was a harmless diversion, unless I began to get some significant answers, and I had in mind the person to ask who would be most likely to have the answers.

  I found her hunched over a typewriter in a blue fog, a cigarette, dripping smoke, hanging from a corner of her mouth. A pair of goggles was clinging to the end of her nose, and her red hair looked like it had recently been combed with an egg beater. She was wearing a sweater that fit her like a sweat shirt, and a skirt that she must have picked up at a rummage sale. I couldn’t see her legs, but it was ten to one that her seams were crooked. It would be a mistake, however, to jump to any rash conclusion.

  If you looked behind the goggles, you could see a face worth looking for. Inside the ragbag were a hundred and ten pounds of pleasant surprises. If you wonder how I knew, you are free to speculate. I will only say that she was a lovely, however disguised, who had no aversion to uglies. When she chose to make the effort, after hours, she could knock your eye out. Her name was Henrietta Savage, Hetty for short, and she wrote a column concerning things about town. You know the kind of stuff. Mostly about the fun spots, and who’s doing what, where. It was innocuous enough, the kind of gossip that never goes to court, but in the process of gathering it Hetty had become a veritable morgue of interesting and enlightening items that had never seen print. She peered up at me over her goggles without appreciable enthusiasm, and the limp cigarette assumed a belligerent position.

  “Don’t bother to sit down, Percy,” she said. “Go away. I’ll meet you in the bar across the street after five.”

  “You’re an avaricious female,” I said. “How did you know I just got paid a fat fee?”

  “Thanks for the confession. In that case, we’ll have dinner later and a night on the town.”

  “Not unless you renovate yourself. I’ve got my reputation as a playboy to consider. Do you sleep in those clothes?”

  “There’s a possibility that you may find out. In the meanwhile, goodbye. Go away. Wait for me in the bar.”

  “I’m going, and I’ll wait. Right after you answer a couple of questions for me. Come on, Hetty. Dinner and the town for a couple of answers?”

  “Maybe lobster?”

  “Pick him out of the tank yourself.”

  “What questions?”

  “You know Benedict Coon III? That’s just preliminary. It doesn’t count.”

  “Your tense is wrong. He’s dead. You’ll find the story on page one. Anyhow, I knew him, and make the next one count.”

  “All right. Who was the blond he was playing footsie with?”

  “Benny? Playing footsie? Percy, you’re libeling the dead.”

  “Not I. I believe in ghosts. I saw them together only yesterday, in the Normandy Lounge. Just barely, of course. You have to strike a match in that place to see your watch.”

  “You can buy a girl a drink without playing footsie. Maybe she was a cousin, or an old schoolmate or something.”

  “I have other evidence. From the best of sources. Never mind that, though. The thing is, I can’t get any lead on her. I don’t know who she is, or even how to start looking for her.”

  “Well, you won’t learn from me. Who asked you to look?”

  “No one, I’m just practicing.”

  “Go practice somewhere else. Damn it, Percy, I’m busy.”

  “Her first name was Myrna. That much I know.”

  “You know more than I. If there was another woman, I never saw her or heard of her. Benny must have been pretty cute about it.”

  “What sort of fellow was he?”

  “Solid citizen. Something of a do-gooder. Bit of a prude, as a matter of fact, which helps to account for my skepticism. I can’t quite imagine Benny among the primroses.”


  “Oh, can it. Hasn’t anyone ever told you about the deacon and the soprano?”

  “Tell me at dinner. Before you leave, however, here’s something else that makes me scoff. Benny had been taking very good care of himself for the past year or so. Bum heart. Hospitalized after an attack. Strict diet, early to bed—the routine. Benny’s hide was important to him. Gymnastics with a blond just doesn’t fit.”

  “You never saw this blond. I did. The earlier to bed, the better.”

  “Blonds are deceptive. Anyone can tell you that redheads are superior. Get lost, Percy. Go wait in the bar.”

  I thought it would be worth a lobster, so I went and waited, and it was.

  * * * *

  Who was Myrna? What was she? A blackmailer, presumably. A spook, apparently.

  Whoever and whatever she was, where in the devil had she gone, and where was she now? So far as I could discover, she had simply disappeared like a puff of smoke. No one knew her full name, no one knew her address, no one could remember her in association with Benedict Coon, and no one except me and a bartender could remember her at all. It was frustrating, it was uncanny, and moreover, it was incredible. A woman like that was a woman to remember. The bartender had said so, and I say so.

  I was like a kid with a riddle in his head. I couldn’t get it out, and I couldn’t solve it. I worked at it when I didn’t have something else to do, and I took it to bed with me at night, and I got nowhere from nothing.

  Was it possible that Benedict Coon had killed her and disposed of her body, later killing himself in despair and fear and hopelessness? I was lying in bed when I had the thought, and it brought me straight up in the darkness. Then, jeering at myself silently, I lay down again. There is no suicide on record, so far as I know, who has shot himself in the back of the head and disposed of the gun afterward.

  Perhaps the police had the answers. Perhaps, with all their facilities, they had gone somewhere while I was going nowhere. For the sake of my mental health, I decided to find out. The next day I went to police headquarters and found Brady Baldwin at a desk in a cubbyhole that may have covered a few more square feet than my reception room. If he was not exactly happy to see me, he was at least amiable.

  “Sit down, Percy,” he said. “What’s on your mind?”

  “Myrna,” I said.

  “Mine, too.”

  “You mean you haven’t got any leads yet?”

  “Not a one.” He rubbed his naked skull and looked at me with an expression that was slightly sour. “As a matter of fact, I’m beginning to suspect that in your mind is the only place she ever was. How many martinis had you drunk, Percy?”

  “I hadn’t drunk any. I had a couple of beers. Brady, I saw her. She was there. She met Benedict Coon, and she left with him.”

  “All right, Percy, all right.” He spread his hands and raised his brows. “But where is she now?”

  “I was hoping you could tell me.”

  “I can’t.”

  “You sure you’ve checked all possibilities?”

  “All stations. Air, train, bus. Hotels, motels, apartment houses. The county boys have run all over the area trying to find someone who saw her walking, gave her a lift, anything at all. We can’t go everywhere and check everything and ask everyone, but there’s more. Shall I go on?”

  “Sorry, Brady. I’m just frustrated. How far out was the car when it was found?”

  “Not far; just far enough to put it in county jurisdiction. The state troopers are giving an assist out there. Benedict Coon, like I told you, was behind the wheel. Slumped against the door. His head had fallen forward. He hadn’t bled much, a little seepage into his hair around the wound, that’s all. This has been in the papers, Percy.”

  “I know. I just want it from you. When was he killed?”

  “It must have been pretty soon after you lost them. The coroner says sometime between two and five. You know how those guys are. Try to box them into an hour, say, and they’re slippery as a meteorologist. Thanks to you, we know that it was well after three. Probably past four.”

  “The paper said he was found by a real-estate agent.”

  “True. He happens to own the land beyond that dead-end road. He plans to push the road on through and finance an addition. He and a contractor had gone out to look the situation over.”

  “I can’t quite locate the place. Where will the road come out when it’s finished?”

  “It won’t actually come out anywhere. It’ll dead-end again, against the rear of the Cedarvale Country Club golf course. The addition’s projected for the upper brackets. As a matter of fact, Benedict Coon was a member of that club. Mrs. Coon was there the afternoon he was killed. She’d gone out to play golf with Martin Farmer, a family connection, and they stayed on for drinks and dinner in the bar. It was a clear day, you’ll remember, after a rainy one.”

  “Is that where she was? I wondered. I tried to call her and couldn’t get her.”

  “That’s where. We checked it out just as a matter of routine. They were seen on the course and in the bar, and Farmer’s car was seen in the parking area. It’s a late model. There’s a kid who works around the area, trimming the shrubs and controlling the litter, and he remembers the car particularly, because it had a full house.”

  “Full house?”

  “Like in poker. On the license plate. This kid’s sort of simple, and he amuses himself by trying to find the highest hand on the plates. Farmer’s has three sixes and a pair of treys. It was his car, all right. Registry verifies it.”

  “Well, that’s good work, neat and conclusive, but it doesn’t get us any closer to Myrna.”

  “Forget Myrna, Percy. She’s our problem. We’re working on it, and we don’t need you getting in the way.”

  “Thanks.” Knowing when I’d been dismissed, I stood up to leave.

  I went away, and with the help of several distractions I was able to keep Myrna pretty well confined to a dark closet at the back of my mind until that night when I was home in bed. Then she got out and began to make a nuisance of herself. I tried deliberately to think of someone else in her place, namely Hetty, but it didn’t work. Lying on my back and staring up into the darkness, I let her prowl my mind without restrictions, and she began to repeat her performance in the Normandy Lounge, the whole sequence of action; I saw her crawl onto the stool, saw her lift a martini glass toward a face that was a shadow in a dark mirror, and then, all at once she was walking swiftly across the hotel lobby beside Benedict Coon, and I could see the back of her. No more.

  No more? Well, not quite. I could also hear her. I could hear the staccato rhythm of her spike heels on terrazzo, and I could hear at the same time, like an echo, a fainter, farther sound. Not another sound, but the same sound at a different time, and in a different place. The different time was a rainy afternoon not long ago, and the different place was the hall outside my office. There is a distinctive quality to the rhythm and cadence of a person’s walk, if only you have the big sharp ears to pick it up, and I was ready to back my ears with odds that the person walking down the hall was the same person walking across the terrazzo floor.

  Why? I asked myself the question with my breath caught in my throat and the short hair rising on the back of my neck. Why should Dulce Coon, wearing a blond wig and spike heels and Hollywood goggles and superimposed sex, meet her own husband in a downtown bar?

  Well, that was easy enough to answer. Lots of wives met lots of husbands in various places for various reasons. As for the wig, women who could afford them were wearing them nowadays like hats. They changed hair with their mood and their dress.

  What was more pertinent, why had she lied about a blackmailer who had probably never existed, and why had she deliberately arranged for a certain Percy Hand to witness a phony meeting in a shadowy lounge that had surely been carefully chosen for that reason?

  That was a two-part question, and the answer to the first part was obvious even to me. She had simply wanted to plant a red herring, a
blond bomb to divert suspicion from where it might otherwise have been directed. The answer to the second part was also clearly implied, and the implication was that Percy Hand, plying his trade in a side street with most of the trappings of failure and few of success, was a made-to-order sucker for a clever woman with murder on her mind. I didn’t like the idea, but there it was, and it annoyed me considerably.

  But wait a minute. Dulce Coon had been at the Cedarvale Country Club. She had been playing golf and drinking drinks and eating early dinner with her shirttail cousin. There were witnesses who said so, and the witnesses had satisfied Brady Baldwin, who was a hard man to satisfy. Could I be wrong? Had old Percy’s big ears and little brain collaborated to lead him astray? Well, it was entirely possible. It had been done before. But still, lying there in bed and listening again to the sound of a woman walking, allowing for the differences in flats and spikes and wood and stone, I had a grim conviction that it was, in both times and places, no one but Dulce Coon.

  Then another gorgeous idea bloomed all at once in my little hothouse brain. Not really an idea, though. It was more the remembrance of a minor observation that suddenly assumed a significant relationship to a scrap of information. Maybe it meant something, and maybe it didn’t. But it brought me up and reaching out into darkness for the phone, and I dialed in darkness a number that I knew by heart and touch. At the other end of the line, another phone rang and rang, and I kept hanging on and on. Eventually a blurred and cranky voice broke in.

  “Wrong number,” the voice said. “Get off the line.”

  “Wait a minute, Hetty,” I said. “Don’t hang up.”

  “Who’s this? It sounds like Percy, but I don’t believe it.”

  “Percy’s who.”

  “Damn it, Percy, it’s almost three o’clock in the morning.”

  “Hetty, I just want to ask you a simple question.”

  “The answer is no. I’m too young, and you’re too poor. It wouldn’t work out.”

  “As you say. Now, will you answer my question?”

  “You haven’t asked it yet. How can I answer it if you won’t ask it?”