by Rufus King
“Very well, go back to the point from where you left your uncle’s quarters.”
“I went to Mother’s cabin and we talked the thing over. She was as upset as I was, and I guess we talked for an hour or so but there didn’t seem to be any answer, except to keep still and see what happened. Mother told me to go back to my cabin and get undressed. That was around five o’clock. We planned to wait until the body was found, and then act surprised like the rest. Well, all that was all right until I remembered the mirror.”
“You say undress. You had not gone to bed?”
“No.”
“This gun that you took with you, have you a police permit for it?”
“Yes.”
You could tell from Moon’s expression that he thanked God for that small mercy.
“On what grounds was the permit issued you?”
“My agent arranged it. He’s Ben Wolf.”
“When did you get the permit?”
“Two weeks ago.”
“I repeat, on what grounds?”
“Pull. Ben Wolf can get anything.”
“Why did you want this gun?”
Young Jettwick found the old favorite groove again.
“To shoot my uncle with, if I had to. If I had to stop him from ruining Mother’s life once more, and mine.”
“Splendid.”
“I’m only saying this to you, Mr. Moon. You wanted no evasions.”
Moon let that limp look cover his eyes while he stared through a porthole at slow-falling flakes of snow, and the room was quiet except for small noises which the tide made as the river pressed past Coquilla’s port side.
I knew he was trying to make up his mind whether to take a chance on a client talking himself into an electrical exit, or to give up the case plus its thirty thousand dollars. The dollars would have made a contemplated run down to Guiana after some Pekea nuts so much velvet. Moon wanted the Pekea nuts very badly, to use in a recipe for a new soup, and the nuts won. He stayed on the case.
“Who is on board the Trade Wind, Miss Jettwick?’ he asked.
“We’ve two guests, Harriet Schuyler and her daughter Elizabeth. They were to be with us for several weeks at Myron’s place on Tortuagas, in the Caribbean. Then there are Bruce and his mother, of course, and Myron’s secretary, Jepson McRoss.”
I remembered a picture of Elizabeth Schuyler in the Tribune a few weeks ago. I remembered it because you could see a slight difference between it and the pictures of four other debutantes on the same page. There was less expensive fog about it, and the re-toucher had actually left a suggestion of a chin.
She had come out the night before the picture was printed, in a brawl thrown by her mother at the Waldorf, and it struck me as funny that she’d leave town during the height of her first season for a cruise to the Caribbean with a radio singer and his mother and a real-estate operator who was now a corpse.
Moon found it funny, too, although he seemed more interested in Mrs. Schuyler’s reason than in the girl’s.
“I believe that Mrs. Schuyler is interested in real estate,” he said. “Would you have called her a rival of your brother’s, Miss Jettwick?”
“A friendly one, yes. Their tactics were quite different. Myron would consider a possible project down to its least detail, whereas Mrs. Schuyler has been known to plunge her whole fortune blindly on some development that struck her fancy.”
“Were you all on board last night?”
“Yes. We had planned to sail around nine o’clock this morning.”
The steward came back with our coats and the galoshes for Bruce. Moon said to Bruce while he was putting them on:
“Mr. Jettwick, when we board the Trade Wind I think you will find yourself faced by District Attorney John Seward. The people involved are important enough to have him handle the case himself. I am glad of it, because he is a just man and a sensible one. In view of your fingerprints on the silver mirror you have no alternative other than to tell him the exact truth. Be good enough to make just one reservation: ignore your real reason for having taken out a license for carrying a gun. I imagine that your salary as a featured star in radio was a large one?”
“I got two thousand a week.”
“In that case we will presume that you are in the habit of carrying large sums in cash, a fact possibly known to the more predatory habitués of the town’s night clubs. You felt the need of protection, hence the gun. It smacks of evasion, but not provably so. Your safety lies on one thing: the fact that your uncle was dead when you reached his quarters in answer to that deceptive telephone call. I refer to your safety from immediate arrest. Ultimately, of course, it lies in my unmasking the person who committed the crime. Let us go.”
Chapter Three
LAMB OR WOLF
Something should have warned me the minute we hit the deck of Trade Wind that there was going to be more trouble.
Just as Mrs. Roger Bettling’s daughter, Eunice, out in Santa Monica had had red hair, so did Elizabeth, this young prize of Harriet Schuyler’s, have red hair—only redder, and with some yellow gold in it. She was wearing it the way it had been in the Tribune picture, off the ears, and with that crown-roast effect which passed at the time for sophistication and was death on hats.
Her face had the regulation number of features, and would have been a distinct pleasure to look at if she had wiped off the careworn, haggard look of seventeen which, she later told me, was imperative for a girl’s first season.
She had picked out a woolen dress of arsenical Paris green, and a short mink jacket, with muff, as the suitable sort of a costume to start a murder investigation off with a bang. We found her standing by the gangplank when we came aboard, exchanging reminiscences with a hard-faced cop in uniform who was trying to make up his mind whether or not he should look shocked.
It needed no chart to discover that she and Bruce had passed the stage of checking up on mutual acquaintances, common likes and dislikes, and were well on their way toward calling each other by their middle names. This astonished me when I found out that they’d only met each other the night before, but my brief years as a bartender had given me small opportunity for examining the antics of young love.
The examples I’d been used to were mostly exploited by disappointed male turkeys, on the other side of the bar in Harrigan’s waterfront tavern. They had systematically tried to drown their sorrows in drink and a fine flow of four-letter words arranged in epitaph formation for the current tramp who was double-timing them with some wiper off a sister ship.
In spite of the color of Elizabeth Schuyler’s hair I felt that this was going to be different and even looked forward, like a fool, to seeing romance unfold.
Miss Jettwick introduced us.
Coming through the river smells you could catch an impressive short-jab from the perfume that operated from the arsenical green wool and mink. It was called Flaming Sin, and rated eighteen dollars an ounce in an enameled flacon shaped like an apple.
Moon, who can take young love or leave it, was more interested in finding out the official setup. The hard-faced cop told him that District Attorney Seward was on board, Chief Medical Examiner Dutton, Assistant Police Commissioner McGilvray and the usual cast of bright young things from the homicide squad.
We followed Miss Jettwick into Trade Wind’s main saloon.
A man was sitting there alone. Miss Jettwick went over to him and said:
“Wallace, so good of you to come, so thoughtful. Do you know Mr. Cotton Moon, Mr. Wallace Emberry?” I got the name at once. Emberry held a high position in the Bar Association of the state and I judged, which was right, that he had been Myron Jettwick’s lawyer. Anybody would have mistaken him, on first sight, for an Englishman. His whole appearance suggested county, moors, heather, and the better hunts, and you could make a safe bet that the slight bulge around his middle was the result of a daily diet of steak-and-kidney pies. However, his record at the bar was smart enough so that he could get away with it, even to
the accent which out-Harrowed Harrow.
Emberry found one of Miss Jettwick’s hands, pressed it between both of his and said:
“McRoss telephoned me. Naturally I came at once. What a brutal shock this has been.”
“Very, Wallace.”
His focus widened and took in Moon.
“We’ve never met, Mr. Moon, but I have followed your career with the greatest interest and admiration. Your handling of that Harkness Stone business here two years ago was masterly. I wonder whether Miss Jettwick has been wise, and has persuaded you to interest yourself in this regrettable business?”
“Miss Jettwick has, although the wisdom remains to be seen.”
“Nonsense, it was the greatest stroke of luck to have found you within reach.”
This social chitchat was quickly interred, and Moon sent a steward with his compliments to District Attorney Seward, and a request that we be permitted to take a look at the scene of the crime.
Moon didn’t waste the interval while the steward was gone. He said:
“Mr. Emberry, were you familiar with Myron Jettwick’s financial condition as of, to put it bluntly, yesterday?”
Emberry showed a lot of strong white teeth and thickened his English accent a little to catch Moon, who was back again in Virginia.
“Naturally, Mr. Jettwick had his reserves, even from me. Offhand I should say that his finances were excellent. He had the Midas touch, if you don’t mind the cliché. Personally, I like clichés and find them most soothing. They have the warm effect of dust on a fine painting. Wasn’t it Whistler who said it should never be removed?”
Moon didn’t know, and said so, and then asked Emberry if he knew who would benefit, financially, by Myron Jettwick’s death. Emberry again found Miss Jettwick’s hand and pressed it.
“You,” he said. “Myron left everything to you, Emma. He has even named you his sole executor, to serve without bond.”
Miss Jettwick’s nice Western voice was anything but overwhelmed by gratitude or surprise.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I wish that he had felt and done differently.”
This made no sense at the time, and Moon didn’t check up on it until later because the steward came back right then and said that the district attorney would be glad to have us join him. We would find him in Myron Jettwick’s quarters on the cabin deck.
Moon followed the steward, and I followed Moon.
We left Miss Jettwick and Wallace Emberry going into a huddle in one corner of the main saloon, and Bruce and Elizabeth Schuyler in a denser huddle in another. I heard Elizabeth saying as I passed her:
“Certainly I believe that people have the right to kill for cause. But why be stupid about it? Why a gun?”
It sounded fearfully modern and all that, but her seventeen years stuck out all over her, and you knew at heart that she was nothing but a scared kid, and that Bruce was one, too, in spite of his practically senile outlook of twenty-four.
Say what you will, it is next to impossible to get used to the sight of a death by violence. The impersonal and businesslike front put on by the boys from Center Street doesn’t mean a thing. It is constantly messy, unpleasant, and a shock.
Myron Jettwick’s body was no exception. The bullet had smacked in just above the right temple and a liver-blue streak ran down over paste-colored skin, while there was something surprised and childish about the expression on that absolutely still, old face.
Moon greeted everybody, and was greeted back.
Then he and the district attorney and I left the bedroom to its crush of officially busy bees, and moved into the living room of the suite. It was empty, except for a plain-clothes man in an ash-gray fedora who had deduced the location of a bottle of Courvoisier, a humidor filled with Corona Coronas, and nothing else.
Seward chased him out.
Seward had just got back with his wife and two kids from a short vacation in Bermuda, and Moon asked him the usual questions about how he’d liked it, and whether he’d frozen to death, and how were the planters’ punches holding up, and whether the turtle was still eating flaming hibiscus petals in the patio halfway up the hill in Hamilton, and it was all most social except that Moon’s eyes never left the few exhibits that had already been collected, and which were spread out on a table near which we were sitting.
The silver hand mirror was there, all right, carefully protected for transportation down to the identification bureau in makeshift crating made from strips of wood from a cigar box. The fingerprints hadn’t been developed as yet, but they must have been plainly visible in an indirect light because of the smooth hardness of the mirror’s surface.
There were six water glasses, similarly protected and tagged, and obviously from the bathrooms of the five guests and the secretary, McRoss.
There was a dress shirt with a small brown stain on its starched white cuff, waiting to turn out as human blood after a chemical test. Embroidered on one sleeve were the initials: B. J.
The last exhibit, also tagged, was an opened box of revolver cartridges. Even with the reports in from just these few districts it began to look like a landslide for young Jettwick.
Moon believes in attack.
“I can save you a little bother, Mr. Seward,” he said. “The prints on that silver hand mirror were left there by my client, Bruce Jettwick, at three o’clock this morning. He was trying to determine whether or not his uncle was dead.”
Moon leaned over and fingered labels.
“The prints will check with the ones on this glass.”
Seward took this very nicely. He has a pleasant face, very gentlemanly, and strictly on the poker order except for his smile, which is agreeable to look at but doesn’t mean anything at all.
“I suppose,” he said, flashing the smile, “your client wanted to make certain that he had done a good job?”
“Naturally. He will give you a statement to that effect himself.”
“Just a nice Greek bearing a gift?”
“Not only a gift, but a gun. I presume those cartridges were taken from his stateroom? I am delighted to say that he has a police permit for it, and can prophesy with the utmost conviction that when the murder bullet is removed at the post mortem the ballistic expert will announce that it does not correspond with a test bullet fired from my client’s gun.”
“He is beginning to sound like a lamb fitted out with the accessories of a wolf.”
“He is a lamb, Mr. Seward. I refer to him in his complete innocence, not pictorially. It is my intention to see that he is not shorn.”
The bell rang on round one.
Chapter Four
THE BUSINESS OF THE HAT
The arena moved to the dining saloon on the deck above.
Nobody had had any breakfast, and Miss Jettwick, being a wise woman as well as an exceedingly nice one, knew very well the physiological link between the temper centers of the human body and its stomach. She sent a steward to request that the district attorney and Moon and I join her.
Assistant Police Commissioner McGilvray and Chief Medical Examiner Dutton were also included in the invitation, but refused on the grounds of a more pressing engagement. Miss Jettwick, very shortly, had a buffet breakfast set up in a cabin adjacent to the scene of the crime for them and the boys to snack at while they worked. It stopped the investigation for a solid half-hour.
The three other principals in the cast were in the dining saloon when we got there. It was a pleasant room, paneled in Circassian walnut, and warm with a blending of expensive perfumes and the smell of good hot coffee.
Elizabeth’s mother was easy to spot. She had that set, enameled glint of any mother of any New York debutante who has either just paid the coming-out bills, or else is wondering how she is going to do it. Mrs. Schuyler’s glint must have cost around twenty thousand dollars, judging from the account in Nicky Manhattan’s column of the champagne tidal wave that had broken the dam at the Waldorf. Otherwise Mrs. Schuyler was as easy to look at as her daughter, and s
eemed far, far better preserved.
Bruce’s mother was a different matter. If you were to put a woman through a wringer, and then starch her to stiffen her up, you might get some idea of what I mean. There was no dying swan about her, or Camille, or Mimi, or anything like that; it was simply that she looked like a sleek motor job that’s been in a bad traffic accident and has been put together again too quick.
As for Jepson McRoss, he was harder to figure out, and a single look at him gave him my vote for Suspect Number One. All he needed was a good dark night and an opera cloak, and watch him go to town. Which shows how wrong you can be sometimes, and sometimes how right. His face lacked a waxed black mustache and nothing else, but his wavy dark hair made up for it, and it was a cinch that anybody who cared to sink a well in its locks would strike oil.
Miss Jettwick dealt out the introductions, and I found myself seated between Spider McRoss and Mrs. Schuyler, and in front of a handsome plate of baked kidneys, Canadian bacon and potatoes hashed to a brown that would have turned Walter’s face white with envy.
For the sake of everybody’s digestion, Seward started a general conversation based on his stay in Bermuda. This lasted brightly through the first cup of coffee, and then expired.
Mrs. Schuyler nailed the lid shut by saying:
“I dined with Sir Alfred at Government House when Elizabeth and I were there last April. Such pleasant marines, or were they orderlies, Elizabeth? So difficult to translate them into footmen. Subconsciously, I was waiting for them to present arms with the soup. The point is, Mr. Seward, that it must have been a perfect vacation for a man in your profession. Sir Alfred told me that the island was perennially bothered by rain, drunken tourists, and flies, yes, but never by murder.”
Seward’s smile brightened the sudden fog.
“Oh, I believe there have been a few exceptions,” he said.
“Well, of course, if you care to include that colored man who pushed his children down a well. But that’s different, wouldn’t you say? I mean, it’s so racial.”
Spider McRoss didn’t help out any, either. His voice, if you could have touched it, would have felt like a better quality silk.