The Big Book of Female Detectives

by The Big Book of Female Detectives (retail) (epub)

  I promised, and the curtain went up just then. During the intervals Mrs. Bradley would not discuss the case, but bought us pink gins and made weird hieroglyphics all over her programme while we stood in the bar and drank them.

  “Keep me in touch with any developments, child,” she said that night, before we parted. John took me out to supper. It was an extension night. We danced a good deal, and I was so tired that Ethel had to wake me in the morning.

  “I brought your early tea, miss, nearly an hour ago, but you was off that sound!” she said. “So now I’ve brought your breakfast, and here’s the letters, miss.”

  So I breakfasted in bed, and read Mrs. Dudley’s second letter. They were going away to Broadstairs, it announced, and if I would write the certificate which had been asked for—they understood from the medical directory that I was entirely qualified to do this—they need not trouble us further. The letter bore the postmark of ten P.M., and was headed, “Nine forty-five.”

  I rang up Mrs. Bradley at her house. The conference began at eleven, so I knew she would still be at home.

  “Telephone Inspector Toogarde and tell him to watch the house. I wish he’d arrest the niece, tell him,” said Mrs. Bradley.

  Next day I called for her and we both went round to what Americans would call the Dudley residence. It was an old house with a basement.

  “Well, any developments, Albert?” asked Mrs. Bradley, for the inspector had put a man outside the door.

  “No, ma’am.” He saluted.

  “Not even a light in the basement?” asked Mrs. Bradley. The constable looked puzzled.

  “Yes. There was a light in the basement. I never thought anything of it. There wasn’t no noise,” he observed.

  “Oh, wasn’t there?” said Mrs. Bradley briskly. “When your officer comes along, you’d better tell him to go down and dig for the body.”

  She went up to the door and knocked. There was silence. Then there came the sound of footsteps, and, at the same time, a kind of rushing noise. Mrs. Bradley pulled me aside so that both of us were pressed against the coping at the top of the short flight of steps.

  “Lean back as far as you can. Here come the cats,” she said. As soon as the door was opened, out they came—Siamese, Persian, tabby, Manx, males and females—one animal, I am certain, was a lynx, and I’m sure I saw a Scottish wild-cat, but they all shot past so quickly that it was impossible almost to see them. Then a whining voice said sadly:

  “Oh, dear! That’s all auntie’s cats.”

  “Your cats, you mean,” said Mrs. Bradley sharply. She put out a yellow claw, seized the woman by the wrist and stared down at the writhing fingers.

  “Albert, child, do you want your promotion?” she called. The prisoner bent her head towards Mrs. Bradley’s wrist.

  “Not ’arf ma’am, please,” said the policeman grinning. He swung up the steps and grabbed Mrs. Bradley’s captive, who was fighting and clawing, more like a cat herself than a human being.

  “Quiet, will you?” demanded the constable. The prisoner began to cry. “And what shall I charge her with, ma’am?—assault and battery, or is it an R.S.P.C.A. case with all them cats?”

  “Charge her with murder, and see how she likes it,” said Mrs. Bradley brutally. And sure enough, it was not much later that she and John were watching Inspector Toogarde taking the body up from under the basement floor. Mrs. Bradley sighed when she saw me again.

  “It’s a pity I had that conference yesterday. Still, Toogarde has got his prisoner, and I expect that’s all he’ll care.”

  “But did that spineless creature really murder her aunt?” I could not believe it possible.

  Mrs. Bradley looked at her yellow wrist where teeth-marks were plainly visible. She did not answer the question. There was no need.

  “There were one or two interesting points about the story you told me,” she said, “although I don’t think you noticed. The first thing that struck me was that evidently you had taken it for granted that the older woman must be the married woman. This was not necessarily true. Then came the extraordinary contrast between the way the younger woman spoke when something important was on hand, and her remarks when the matter under discussion was not germane to her purpose.”

  “Oh? Do you mean the lucid way she told me her aunt was going to get her certified, and wanted me to testify she was sane?” I began to see the point of that interview now.

  “It was when you told me she wanted you to send a copy of the certificate to her banker, that I became so extremely suspicious,” said Mrs. Bradley. “It so happens that one of the most unpleasant experiences of my life was when I helped to certify a perfectly sane man on the evidence of relatives who wanted to administer his estate. Luckily, we put that right in time, but since then, as soon as I hear lunacy and bankers mentioned together, all my suspicions are aroused. In this particular case, for instance, if Miss Dudley were the older woman and Mrs. Dudley the younger, why didn’t the younger one undeceive you?”

  “Well, why didn’t the older one? It was equally apparent to her.”

  “I fancy, if you refer to your notes of the conversation, that she did attempt to put you right on the point, but that you yourself interrupted her, and then you sent her away. Well, the whole thing sounded, to my possibly morbid mind, just sufficiently extraordinary to warrant my interference. But I think the affair was well on its way by the time they came to you here. Of course, it was the aunt who took drugs, I knew that from your description of her face. It was the niece who procured enough of the valerian for murder.”

  “Valerian?”

  “Cats,” said Mrs. Bradley succinctly. “It was when John mentioned the cats and their smell and then the other smell which he almost thought he could recognise, that I began to smell, not a rat, but a murder. You see, in that American hospital he mentioned, they gave the patients small doses of valerian as a sedative. They stain the stuff pink there, and slightly flavour it with essence of clove. It was the clove, I dare say, that he smelt.”

  “But I still don’t understand about the certificate.”

  “Miss Dudley, the older lady, the aunt by marriage, had made a will in niece Mrs. Dudley’s favour. The latter wanted Miss Dudley—Lily Dudley—certified sane, so that, whatever happened later, the will remained valid and no other relatives could plead unsound mind in the testatrix, because of our medical and psychanalytical evidence.”

  “But how do you know that the young one was Mrs. Dudley? The thing seems to turn upon that.”

  “When I grasped her hand at the door, I looked for the mark of the wedding ring, child. It was there.”

  MID-CENTURY

  DETECTIVES: IRIS AND PETER DULUTH

  MURDER WITH FLOWERS

  Q. Patrick

  HUGH CALLINGHAM WHEELER (1912–1987) and Richard Wilson Webb (1901–c.1970) collaborated on the series featuring Peter and Iris Duluth, but both authors were part of a coterie of writers that mixed and matched on many other books published as by Q. Patrick, Patrick Quentin, and Jonathan Stagge. It was when Wheeler and Webb moved to the United States in the 1930s that they created the Duluth series, which changed their books from a recognizably British style to American in speech and tone.

  Wheeler and Webb created the Patrick Quentin byline with A Puzzle for Fools (1936), which introduced Peter Duluth, a theatrical producer who stumbles into detective work by accident, and Iris Pattison, an actress suffering from melancholia whom he meets at a sanitarium where he has gone to treat his alcoholism. He eventually marries her. Iris is irresistibly curious about mysteries and draws her husband into helping her solve them. The highly successful Duluth series of nine novels inspired two motion pictures, Homicide for Three (1948), starring Warren Douglas as Peter and Audrey Long as his wife, Iris, and Black Widow (1954), with Van Heflin (Peter), Gene Tierney (Iris), Ginger Rogers, George Raft, and Peggy Ann Garner. Webb dropped
out of the collaboration in the early 1950s and Wheeler continued using the Quentin name but abandoned the Duluth series to produce stand-alone novels until 1965.

  Oddly, all the Duluth novels were published using the Patrick Quentin nom de plume but the short stories were originally published as by Q. Patrick—until they, as well as non-series stories, were collected in The Ordeal of Mrs. Snow and Other Stories (1961), which was selected for Queen’s Quorum.

  “Murder with Flowers” was originally published in the December 1941 issue of The American Magazine; it was first collected in The Puzzles of Peter Duluth by Patrick Quentin (Norfolk, Virginia, Crippen & Landru, 2016).

  Murder with Flowers

  Q. PATRICK

  IRIS AND I WERE DANCING at the Opal Room. A rumba orchestra was doing wicked things. We were very groomed and expensive and chic that night. Very gay, too, because it was our first wedding anniversary and we were pleased about it.

  Other people were dancing there, too, I suppose. I didn’t notice them, except maybe to feel sorry for them for not having Iris, wonderful and dangerous in a gown that didn’t cover much territory above the hips.

  “Darling,” she said, “we do a mean rumba, don’t we?”

  “Yes, darling,” I said. “We do.”

  “Mr. and Mrs. Peter Duluth!” she said. “Twelve months later, and it still sounds—voluptuous!”

  It was then that we saw the Black Beard.

  He was sitting alone at a table close to the dance floor. A massive, imperial gentleman, immaculately black and white, with a white carnation in his lapel. His beard sprouted magnificently—jet-black and godlike.

  There was an empty champagne bottle at his side. It didn’t look as if it was the first empty champagne bottle that had been there that evening. He was gazing at it and weaving slightly in his chair.

  We were only a couple of feet away when he looked up and saw us. At least, it was Iris he saw. Naturally. Somewhere, above the beard, his eyes lit up, and the beard waggled in a roguish, satyr smile. One heavy lid lowered at Iris in a ponderous wink.

  Then suddenly, as he really focused on her, his face went blank, and another expression came—a kind of shocked amazement that was almost horror. “You!” he said.

  He tried to get up, sank back, and then did get up. He leaned across the table toward us. Very slowly, he said, “I warned you. On page eighty-four I warned you. You must be mad dining out tonight—of all nights—when your picture is all over The Onlooker?”

  That was an odd thing for a complete stranger to say. But I didn’t rumba Iris away. Something kept us there. I think it was the Ancient Mariner quality of the black beard and the steady, unwavering stare.

  He swayed slightly. The black beard bobbed in a refined little hiccup.

  “The white rose!” he said, “And the red rose!” And then, emphatically: “They mean blood.”

  He stopped. I pushed Iris backward and then sideways. Fantastically, I was a little scared. I don’t think Iris was. I think she was just curious.

  She smiled suddenly and said, “Go on. The white rose and the red rose…What about them?”

  “The white rose—and the red rose. They’re out. You know they’re out.”

  He raised one of the large hands. The gesture practically toppled him forward into the champagne bottle. Pointing a weighty, ambassadorial finger, he said, “It’s life or death for you, young lady. You must realize that.” He paused. “The elephant hasn’t forgotten.”

  The music was throbbing, and all around us sleek, expensive people were dancing sleekly and expensively. He was only an old drunk with a black beard. There was nothing to be alarmed about.

  And yet…

  “Life or death,” he said. “You mustn’t die, young lady. You are too beautiful to die.”

  No one around seemed to have noticed anything. The music was seething. I started pushing Iris away from the man.

  We were on the opposite side of the floor when I said, “Is that Beard a part of your past, darling?”

  “I—I never even saw him before.” There was a shaken look in her eyes. “Life or death! Why should the white rose and the red rose mean blood—for me?”

  “Just drunken nonsense,” I said.

  “He said my picture was in The Onlooker. It isn’t in The Onlooker, Peter. Or is it?”

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  We neither of us read The Onlooker. But millions of other people do. It tells you all about everything so snappily. We pretended we had lost interest then. We went on acting like two elegant people being gay on their wedding anniversary. But it was all rather synthetic.

  Suddenly Iris said, “After all, Peter, you’re a famous play producer and I’m a sort of actress. Maybe I am in The Onlooker.”

  “Maybe.”

  “Let’s—let’s buy a copy.”

  “Yes. Let’s.”

  We scuttled off the dance floor. That showed just how skin-deep our indifference was.

  The Opal Room is part of the ultra-swank St. Anton Hotel. We hurried through the tables with the music tom-tomming behind us. We were out in corridors with inch-thick carpets and enormous mirrors. We reached a sort of central lounge which housed a magazine stand.

  We went to the stand. Everyone turned and stared at Iris. They always do—especially after midnight. One man stared in particular. He was thin and sharp-nosed and youngish in a gay trench coat with a light gray hat. I noticed him vaguely because he was biting his nails. Biting them savagely and looking at Iris, with something nasty about his mouth.

  At the stand I said, “The Onlooker, please,” to a depressed blonde.

  She gave it to me. Iris snatched it and started leafing through the pages. I stood at her side.

  Two women with exotic perfumes swished by, patting their necks. The man in the gray trench coat stood there nibbling at his nails and watching Iris sidelong behind a cigarette.

  “Farming,” read Iris. “Sports…female discus-throwing champion…that’s not me…Theater…Circus opens at Lawrence Stadium tomorrow…No…Art…Oh, look, Peter!”

  I was looking, all right. It was uncanny. There under the heading Art was a photograph. It was a photograph of a very beautiful woman, a woman whom anyone except a husband could easily have taken for Iris. Dark, with those same amazing eyes, that devastating bone structure.

  Under the photograph it said: Eulalia Crawford. And under that: She does everything except stick pins in them.

  “Eulalia Crawford!” said Iris.

  “She’s a dead ringer for you.”

  “Nonsense.” Iris looked ominous. “She’s at least ten years older.”

  “Not to a drunken Beard in a dim light,” I said, trying to wriggle out of that. “It’s obvious he mistook you for her.”

  We read what it said about Eulalia Crawford. It didn’t help much. It told us that Eulalia Crawford was a “pulchritudinous, amazingly talented” doll-maker. She had a studio downtown. She made the smartest portrait dolls for the smartest people. In fact, after a modest beginning designing carnival figures, she had lifted the doll business into the realms of art. “I do everything with dolls,” she had told the reporter laughingly, “except stick pins in them.”

  “Eulalia Crawford, the doll-maker!” said Iris. “Peter, I’ve—I’ve heard of her. She—she’s a sort of a relative.”

  “A relative?”

  “Yes.” Iris looked excited. “A fifth cousin, or something like that.”

  “It explains why you look alike,” I said. “But that’s all it explains.”

  “But she’s in danger—terrible danger,” said Iris slowly. “I could tell he meant it, Peter. The Beard, I mean. I could tell from his face. He really knows there’s danger for her. The red rose, and the white rose, he said life or death.”

  We stood there in that elegant lounge. From somew
here far off the rumba sidled through to us, a torrid echo of the South. I looked up. I caught the eye of the man in the gray trench coat. He glanced away.

  “If there’s danger for Eulalia,” said Iris suddenly, “we must warn her.”

  “Warn her?”

  “Yes.” Iris looked beautiful and purposeful. “After all, she’s blood of my blood and—”

  “But just because a crazy, drunken Beard—”

  “He wasn’t a crazy Beard. He was very sane.”

  “Then, if you think so, go back and get the truth out of him.”

  She shook her head. “He’d be suspicious once he knew I wasn’t Eulalia. And if I was Eulalia he’d know I wouldn’t have to ask him the truth. I must telephone Eulalia.”

  “But what will you say?” I asked.

  “Tell her about the Beard and the red rose and the white rose and page eighty-four and the elephant.” Iris looked calm.

  She started toward a lighted sign saying Telephones. I sighed and followed. As I did so, I happened to glance over my shoulder, and I noticed that the man in the gray trench coat was strolling very casually after us.

  Iris reached the Manhattan phone book ahead of me. Efficiently, she started turning pages, murmuring, “Crawford, Eulalia…Crawford, Eulalia…Here she is.”

  She disappeared into a phone booth. The man in the trench coat loitered aimlessly. Soon Iris came out again, and said: “Cousin Eulalia—I liked that ‘Cousin!’—wasn’t there, Peter. But she’s expected any minute. A man answered, a man with a stammer.”

  “A stammer?”

  “Yes. A stammer. He said it would be fine for us to go down right away.”

  I stared. “You mean we’re going to Eulalia now?”

  “We certainly are.” She looked dreamy and thrilled to the bone. “We’ve wined and dined and danced, Peter. Now we plunge into a romantic adventure, and that, darling, is exactly my idea of how to celebrate our first anniversary.”