Murder On the Way!

by Theodore Roscoe

  Mr. Drupievsky grinned. “If you keep this up I’ll think crime doesn’t pay and go back home and get a job. Seven of those rats in twenty-four hours!”

  “And Mr. Cartershall and I were the only ones left.” Pete paled. “I — I was the last name on the will, you see.” She made an apprehensive gesture.

  It brought a squeak of dismay out of Tousellines. Brows gathered in a troubled frown, the old darkey waved his portmanceau at Pete. “Ma’mselle, forgive me for not speaking of this at once. The will of your uncle — it appears there are complications. It is not, I find, valid, and — ”

  I broke him off with an angry: “You mean to say Miss Dale won’t get the estate after all this God-awful — ”

  “I don’t want anything,” Pete protested vehemently.

  “But there is no estate,” the little black lawyer blabbed regretfully. “I am this morning advised by cable that M’sieu Proudfoot’s holdings on the New York Exchange are completely nothing. A matter of unpaid margins. Château Morne Noir has not paid the taxes and faces confiscation, and the plantation was heavily mortgaged only last month and — ”

  “And Repeal wiped out the bootlegging business,” Pete cried, “and that’s what lay behind this whole desperate plot. The rum runners were under pressure from the police on the Browninshields murder. The gang was broke. Uncle Eli was penniless, facing bankruptcy — ”

  “Un moment,” the commandant interposed with a colonial bow. “Ma’mselle is not penniless. I do not know if the good American agent, M’sieu Drupievsky, has yet informed you, but there is a posted reward of ten thousand dollars for the dead or alive capture of the gunman responsible for the Browninshields murder.”

  “Yeah,” the consular agent stood up. “And it goes to Miss Dale.”

  Pete stood up. “Then half of it belongs to Mr. Cartershall.”

  I stood up. “The dickens it does. I don’t even know, yet, how that corpse got out of its grave or who the real — I mean, how it — ”

  Narcisse stood up. “It looked like M’sieu Proudfoot — ”

  Pete insisted: “Mr. Cartershall gets half because he — ” she looped an arm through my wooden one, “because you spied that half loaf of raisin bread and I’d never have noticed it. I was too rattled to see it, Cart, down in that tunnel room, and if you’d missed it we — we wouldn’t be hearing about earthly rewards, anyway.”

  “Pete,” I mumbled, “what in the world!”

  “Afterward, back in the house, alone with Corporal Louis, I began to be sure about it. Raisin bread down in that tunnel! On a kitchen table. Somebody was — hungry. Corpses don’t — don’t eat. How did it get down there? Why? And that fugitive you’d chased had to be somewhere.”

  “But we pounded all over the walls and floor of that room!”

  Pete said quietly, “And never thought about the ceiling.”

  “The ceiling?” My head was out of order again.

  “Yes, and alone in the house with the rest of you gone up the morne to exhume Uncle Eli, it — it came to me. Honestly, I wanted to die with fear. I knew right then the killer might be there in the château. The gendarme corporal stood guard outside my closed door; I just was on the point of calling to him when — I heard the murderer speaking out there on the balcony. The corporal fled in terror, and I don’t blame him a bit. Then there were two shots — in Cart’s room — and I heard the gunman go racing downstairs, and then for a long time I didn’t hear anything.”

  Perspiration watered my collar. “He fired two shots in my room?”

  “Your door must have been open a little way. He stepped over the threshold, fired twice, then ran. Then I guessed where he’d gone — the raisin bread — everything came clear in every detail — I knew who it was!”

  “I saw the paint on his shoe,” I whispered. “The tube I dropped up there. He must’ve stepped on it.”

  “He meant to kill me,” Pete said tightly. “He’d got me down here in Haiti — his first plan was to keep me here. Then he heard Cart and me — talking together — he thought we were engaged — it maddened him, I suppose. So he tried to shoot me. It took me a long time to get up courage to leave my room. Finally I took a candle and started — down to the office — down the tunnel. Nobody was in the cave at its end when I got there, but I — I heard a terrible sound above the ceiling. Shouting and calling. Right over my head. Like a delirium in the air. Cart’s voice!”

  “The tunnel!” I guess I hollered. “It led from the house out under that grave on the hill!”

  “And I could hear you in the grave.” She put a hand over her eyes. “I stood on the table and pounded with my fists on the ceiling. I pounded and pounded. Finally I struck something and the wooden ceiling — a big piece of it — swung down like a sort of trap door. There was a foot of space above the opening and — and I was looking at the bottom of the rosewood coffin!”

  “Say!” The consular agent’s face was wry with incredulity.

  “I didn’t know how to get through. You see, the sides and ends of the casket were resting on ledges of hard earth. Anyone looking down into the grave from above wouldn’t see any hole under the coffin. Looking up at the thing from underneath I could only see a patch of rosewood about the size of a — a big washboard. Just big enough to let a body pass through. Remember, how the casket was especially constructed and kept hidden in the storeroom? Well — it had a trap door, too.”

  She put her hands on my arm. “That’s how the runner vanished in the tunnel ahead of you, Cart. In the pitch dark, he jumped up on that table. You ran straight across the room and bumped into me. We rolled and fought on the floor and that beast opened the trap in the ceiling and the trap in the coffin and crawled up into the grave. That’s when he dropped that bread on the table.

  “I didn’t know how to open the door in the coffin’s bottom. A hidden spring built in the casket somewhere. I suppose there was a release inside where a man could work that false bottom, too. Anyway I had to smash off a table leg, and finally with that I pounded the rose-wood to pieces. Cart tumbled out and I thought he was smothered. I had a terrible time dragging him back through the tunnel, he kept fainting and groaning — ”

  I gagged. “But if Uncle Eli was — ”

  “He was never dead in the first place,” Pete said, tight-lipped. “His suicide was a fake. Dr. Sevestre, in on the scheme, simply palmed a bullet from his head and pretended an autopsy. The adhesive tape merely hid the fact that there wasn’t any bullet hole. That’s what the doctor knew, and that’s why Uncle Eli killed hint first. We know why he slaughtered the rest of his gangmen. And he planned to make himself dictator of Haiti.”

  “He called himself the Emperor,” Tousellines blurted. “As a zombie,” Pete nodded, “he could play on the superstitions of these people and bring the Cacos under his control. He’d lost his estate, now he wanted the whole island. Mad, yes. Hitler complex. He planned to seize all of Haiti. He would have made me — his slave or something, and, playing the living dead — ”

  “But the stake in the grave!” I groaned. “And when the grave was dug there wasn’t any hole down through because I saw the bottom, earth, puddles — ”

  “Plenty of room in Uncle Eli’s casket,” Pete whispered. “He could bug against one side and the stake would miss him entirely. Driven down, it sprung the trap in the bottom of the coffin. Don’t you see? The grave diggers were instructed to go down exactly ten feet. Which left a foot or so of earth between the grave bottom and the roof of that underground room. Remember the floor of that dugout was scattered with dirt? That’s where it came from. The stake pounded through the coffin lid, drove open the trap in the floor of the coffin, broke through the floor of the grave and forced open the door in the ceiling underneath. The dirt in the space between poured through and Uncle Eli dropped out of the coffin into the tunnel. Then it was easy enough to paint those horrible smears on his chest and back. And when he heard the police were going to exhume his body it gave him a chance to play zombie better
than ever — ”

  “He,” said the consular agent, “was a pediculous guy.”

  “At the last he was going back under the coffin to nail it up — with Cart inside.” Pete put her face in her hands.

  I sat down hard.

  Pete sat down. “To think he should have died of heart trouble, then. He thought he’d shot me, and when I walked out of the office, playing his own game — well, I wouldn’t have imagined he had any heart to have trouble with — ”

  But E. E. Cartershall had a heart to have trouble with. I sat staring at Pete so long that the afternoon mellowed into twilight. I heard the consular agent chuckle. “Well, Miss Dale gets the reward,” he said. And, “That plane will stop for you both tomorrow.” I heard people bidding us, “Bon soir,” and “Mille merci,” and departing the courtyard of the Hotel Merveilleux. I sat staring at Pete and having heart trouble.

  Finally I had to light a cigarette and resign.

  “Send me to the foot of the class, Pete. Why should Uncle Eli fire two shots into my room and think he’d killed you when — ”

  “Wait.” She disengaged her hand from mine; ran through a screen door into the nice hotel.

  I fingered a slab of beefsteak lashed to my crippled eye, and waited, thawing slowly in blond sunshine.

  Presently Pete reappeared with an oil painting in her hand. “Southern Hospitality, by E. E. Cartershall, ’35.” Life size, Patricia Dale in afternoon frock with a straw hat swinging at her side.

  I was cold all over, glaring like Richard Cœur de Lion.

  “It was tacked on the closet door.” Pete held up the canvas and tears shone blue in her eyes.

  There were no tears in the portrait’s eyes. The portrait had no eyes. Two little holes had been burned through the canvas where the painted eyes had been.

  “Pete,” — at last I could smile — “do you remember promising you’d give me an answer on something when this painting was finished?”

  “Yes,” Pete replied.

  “Well,” I said, “it’s finished now, for a fact. How about you and I — and a penthouse — ”

  “Yes,” Pete said.

  The End

  About the author, Theodore Roscoe

  Theodore Roscoe (1906–1992) wrote for pulp fiction magazines such as Argosy, Wings, Flying Stories, Far East Adventure Stories, Fight Stories, Action Stories and Adventure, while travelling the world. Following World War II he was commissioned by the United States Naval Institute to write detailed histories about the United States Submarine Operations in World War II (1949), and United States Destroyer Operations in World War II (1953). The submarine and destroyer works were rewritten for public consumption entitled Pig Boats and Tin Cans. Other books on the history of the US Navy include This Is Your Navy (1950), and The Trent Affair, November, 1861. Roscoe became a Scribner’s author under Burroughs Mitchell with novels To Live and Die in Dixie! and Only in New England. The prolific writer was among the first to see declassified documents connected to the Lincoln assassination, resulting in his work The Web of Conspiracy, which became the basis for a television docudrama.

  About the editor, Jim Noy

  Jim Noy blogs on the subjects of impossible crimes and classic detective fiction at The Invisible Event. He lives in London. His first encounter with detective fiction was Agatha Christie’s The Murder of Roger Ackroyd in 1999. Immediately bitten, he has since read very widely in the genre, with a particular favouritism for the “golden age” detection of the 1920 to the 1950s, his favourite authors from this era including Christie, John Dickson Carr, Rupert Penny, Anthony Berkeley and Erle Stanley Gardner. He has a particular fascination for locked room mysteries and impossible crimes, in the pursuit of which he first encountered Theodore Roscoe and his works. Jim blogs on his dual loves of detective fiction and locked room mysteries at The Invisible Event. [https://theinvisibleevent.wordpress.com]

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