Holiday Homicide

by Rufus King

  Moon heard me in the bathroom and called to me to come in. I finished washing away dried blood, swabbing the cut with iodine, and plastering an antiseptic pad across a lump the size of a duck egg before doing so. Moon hates to be frightened at any time, but especially right after he wakes up in the morning.

  “I had an idea,” he said after one look, “that something would happen if we stayed aboard here. I’m glad that we’re not disappointed.”

  He told me to have some melon, a mushroom omelet, and coffee and rolls sent in, and that he’d hear the details of the battle while we ate. Then he shaved, bathed, murdered Rodolfo’s narrative from La Bohème, and dressed, while I received the steward bearing our breakfast in the living room, and explained my clinical appearance by giving him the stock excuse that my skull had hit an open door in the dark. His answer was very stock, too.

  Moon chased the steward and said we’d serve ourselves. He finished his melon while listening to a general sketch and then made me go back, during the mushroom omelet, and take up every little detail that I could remember. It was useless to attempt any description of the two thugs because, as I told him, all that they had looked like had been a couple of noses. He seemed interested in the fact that the one guy had taken his mittens off and wanted to know just when, and how long afterward it had taken him to pull the gun out from under the reefer.

  During his second cup of coffee he spread out the lecture on elementary physics, stressing especially some theory about two solids never yet having been able to occupy the same space, and then said:

  “Bert, we will keep this to ourselves for a while.”

  “How can we? Look at me.”

  “You stumbled in the dark.”

  “You should have heard the steward on that one.”

  “The explanation will be accepted. It doesn’t matter what they think as long as they do not know the truth before this evening. I refer principally to District Attorney Seward and the police.”

  While I finished my own mushroom omelet, he gave me the schedule for the day. He said, which was news to me, that the medical examiner had released Jettwick’s body and that Miss Jettwick had decided to have the funeral that afternoon. Emberry, he said, had given him the information last night after dinner. Miss Jettwick wanted the funeral to be as swift and as private as possible because of the circumstances of her brother’s death, which was reasonable when you consider the mob of morbid curiosity seekers that the funeral of any murdered person draws.

  A brief ceremony was to be held at the Jepson Funeral Chapel and the interment would follow immediately at Woodlawn. This would occupy the hours between two and five o’clock in the afternoon.

  Moon had informed Emberry that neither he nor I would attend. He felt reasonably certain that during that period Trade Wind would be empty both of suspects and the police.

  “I shall want,” he said, “a diver.”

  Sometimes I can do nothing but repeat, so I repeated, and said:

  “A diver?”

  “Yes, Bert. Please have one here with his equipment by half past two. Charter a boat for him to work from, and whatever else he may require. He is to be prepared to search the bottom of the river beneath the hull of this yacht.”

  “What’s he to look for?”

  “We will tell him that just before he descends. Naturally what those two men were grappling for last night was the missing black steel box. I want it. I want to open it and examine its contents before either Seward or the police get hold of it. Arrange some satisfactory and speedy getaway for us to use as soon as the box is brought up.”

  That wasn’t all. Oh, no. I was to put the goad on Jimmy Singer and tell him that the dope on Senator Blackman’s wife and on Jeffry Smith had to come through by express. Then Jimmy was to have a man aboard Trade Wind at a quarter past two with some powdered graphite and a camera. Finally, I was to make an appointment for some hour before lunch with the pastor of the church over in Chelsea which Myron Jettwick had started going to after he got religion. In the meanwhile Moon planned to catch up on his reading of A High Wind in Jamaica.

  Well, I left Trade Wind and boarded Coquilla to do telephoning in private from there, also to evade comments on the model of Mount Everest which I was carrying on my head. Coquilla’s crew have been trained to indifference to things like that.

  The diver was simple. The Classified Telephone Directory listed three concerns, and the Manhattan Underseas Contracting Company listened to my story and accepted the job with the nonchalance of a bakery taking an order for cake. The only difference was in the bill.

  I checked with Jimmy Singer. Nothing had been turned up immediately on Jeffry Smith, but Senator Blackman’s wife had been easily located. Her home was in Akron, Ohio, but she had been spending the holiday season in New York and was at present registered at the Waldorf. Naturally, nothing as yet had come through on her dossier during the past fifteen years beyond the easily ascertained facts that she and Senator Blackman had been divorced thirteen years ago, that neither had remarried, and that she was a hot shot locally in Akron in society, all the clubs, movements, charities and drives. She had no children, but had evolved a book of verse entitled Women Pirates of Today. Just a bee.

  Arranging the getaway for the black steel box and Moon and me, providing the diver brought it up, was more complicated, as most getaways are. In spite of Moon’s feeling that Seward’s office and the police and the press would be covering the funeral and ignoring the yacht, there seemed no sense in taking that chance.

  As somebody always says, two bowstrings are better than one, so why not cover the river as well as the land? I called up Moon’s chauffeur, Muddy—his face has the color of a delta—and told him to hold the Daimler ready for a quick start from two-thirty on, and to park himself on the avenue, one block south of Wharf House.

  Then I went up to Captain Walsh’s quarters—he’s the master of Coquilla—and asked him to have the speedboat lowered and manned and held ready alongside the portside landing ladder by half past two. I asked him to put in the speedboat a length of thin strong line with a small grapple fastened at one end.

  Both Seward and the police have an annoying habit of blowing their tops when any evidence connected with a case is even temporarily snatched away from under their noses. They have even been known to take steps. So the idea was this: if we did have any official spectators, and the diver located the box, he wasn’t to bring it to the surface but was to make it fast to the loose end of the thin, strong line. Then he was to bring the small grapple end to the surface and inconspicuously, if a diver can be inconspicuous, place the grapple in the speedboat. Then he was to submerge again, as if he were still looking for whatever object he was supposed to want.

  Of course, while any official observer would still be watching and waiting for the diver to come up again with treasure-trove, Moon and the grapple and I would be gently away in the speedboat, dragging the steel box behind us, and getting it aboard as soon as we were out of sight, and then hitting as fast as the screw would turn for the north shore of Long Island. I fixed it with Jimmy Singer to have a fast car waiting at a landing near Oyster Bay, and that was that. It all seemed to me to drip with honey.

  As for the pastor of the church in Chelsea, that was reasonably simple, too. A sad-voiced woman housekeeper told me, after a hold-the-line-please of five minutes, that the Reverend Munster Grant would receive Mr. Moon and Mr. Stanley in the parsonage at eleven o’clock.

  I shook Moon loose from A High Wind in Jamaica in time and we taxied over to a high-stooped house in the Twenties, west of Tenth Avenue. It was a fine old building, having a back yard that abutted the rear of the church on the block north of it. Moon had asked me on the ride over whether everything was satisfactorily arranged for the afternoon and I said that it was, and that was all. He dislikes bothering about the mechanics of any plan, unless they don’t work, and part of my job is to see that they do.

  A middle-aged maidservant ushered us into a high-ceilinge
d parlor, darkened by heavy curtains and drapes at the windows, and shadowed like any Karloff set with a couple of candelabras that were lighted and standing on an Empire table. Moon said that the several portraits and paintings on the long dark walls were early Flemish, which was all right with me, as you couldn’t see them anyhow.

  A plump old man with soft white hands and a Roman collar came in shortly and introduced himself as the Reverend Munster Grant. He asked us to sit down, and picked out for himself a Spanish throne chair covered in faded maroon velvet and showing a worn embroidered crest.

  “Gentlemen?”

  “You can help us, Mr. Grant,” Moon said. “I understand that Mr. Myron Jettwick attended your church during the last month of his life. If you will overlook the impertinence of my prying into a man’s spiritual affairs, I would appreciate a frank opinion from you on Mr. Jettwick’s sincerity. I assure you the question is one of importance.”

  “Of importance to whom, sir?”

  “To a determination of the guilt of his murderer.”

  The Reverend Grant drew a finely carved snuffbox from a pocket of his jacket, picked out a pinch, and sniffed deeply. Then he lightly waved a cambric handkerchief across his lapels. It was something that I had always wanted to see done, in the flesh.

  “There are two kinds of sincerity,” the Reverend Grant said. “There is the one which is rooted innately in a man from his birth, and the other which is inspired through the hysteria of some shocking moment. Mr. Jettwick’s was of the latter. It was nonetheless genuine, for all that.”

  “Did you talk with him very much, Mr. Grant?”

  “Yes. He invariably came here to my chambers after morning services and would stay sometimes an hour, sometimes two.” You could hardly see the Reverend Grant’s dark eyes in the heavy shadows. “Precisely what is it that you want to know, Mr. Moon?”

  “The things that he told you about his past.”

  “I have not the right to disclose them. If generalities will be of assistance to you, Mr. Jettwick did have a genuine fear of some spiritual retribution. His conscience was bothering him. What he sought from the church, from me, was an insurance policy for his soul.”

  The Reverend Grant exposed placid palms.

  “I gave him what comfort I could.”

  “Let me ask this. Did his conscience bother him in reference to his divorced wife or her son?”

  “Among other things, yes. He felt a compulsion to make amends. He would reiterate that he had treated her more harshly than he had evidently come to consider just.”

  “In what way?”

  “I cannot be franker than that.”

  “Were the amends because he had wronged her, or because he had punished her too severely for her having wronged him?”

  Chimes started going from some place in the house. The Reverend Grant stood up. He seemed to be studying Moon for a moment patiently and with a sort of meekness.

  “There is only one suggestion I can make that may possibly help you, Mr. Moon.”

  “Yes?”

  “If your own resources, or the resources of the police will enable you to do so, I would locate a man by the name of Jeffry Smith.”

  The way he said it was like the end of a ghost story. You know the sort—where you get a cold chill from a “Boo!”

  Chapter Twelve

  TWO-THIRTY—AND AFTER

  I dropped Moon at Trade Wind and then went over to Coquilla to fix up some added frills that I’d remembered were necessary for the getaway. I asked Captain Walsh to have heavy ulsters, wool helmets, and fleece-lined gloves stowed in the speedboat for Moon and me, and to have Walter fix up a thermos jug of hot spiced rums to go, too.

  Then I went to Harry Lochbittern’s cabin and saw him. Harry is Coquilla s chief engineer, and Moon hired him on the waterfront of New Orleans after Harry had reformed from some happy and wonderful years ashore as a safe-cracker of nationwide repute.

  I told Harry to pack a brief case with the odds and ends he’d need for opening a small steel box, to be done in his inimitable fashion so that nobody would know he had done it, and to wrap himself up warm and take a stand on the landing stage of Wharf House from two-thirty on. I would signal him from the deck of Trade Wind. If no official observers showed, one signal would mean for him to climb into the Daimler. If the law did show, another signal would mean for him to get into the speedboat and wait for us there.

  The short stroll from Coquilla to Trade Wind was uneventful except for a word or two with Elizabeth, who was pacing mournfully up and down the starboard side of the main deck. She brightened a lot on seeing my head and said, “So you hit a door in the dark?” and I said, “However did you guess, Miss Schuyler?” and she said she hoped it would do Bruce some good, and I said I was tired of having my very painful duck egg considered as a jumping-off-place for other people’s good luck, and went below.

  I did not, due to the duck egg, join the rest for luncheon but had some curried pigeons with rice, plus Pilsner, sent in to the living room, and read the morning and early-afternoon editions while eating and drinking same.

  They all sang the same song under similar scare-heads: Bruce was this and Bruce was that, and his mother’s scandalous past was carefully dusted and shot off again, and advanced as the alleged motive for Bruce’s alleged cooling of his uncle, and not a sheet but had him already half-fried in the electric chair come spring.

  Elizabeth and her mother came in for a pretty basketful of publicity, too. Elizabeth’s coming-out riot at the Waldorf was revived, vintage bottle by vintage bottle, and the fact of her having suddenly canceled the main joint of her first social season for a lengthy cruise to the ordinary Caribbean on an ordinary yacht was put down in cold type for anybody to dope out as he liked.

  The bright, redheaded, little witless had furthermore given what could pass, legally, as an interview to Lettice Laceheart, whose column in the Daily Review was the saccharin in the female portion of the town’s morning coffee.

  Elizabeth told me about it after I’d told her what I thought about it. All she’d done, Elizabeth said, had been to yell a few words from Trade Wind’s deck down to a nice-looking young woman covered with skinned leopards, who had yelled a few casual questions up to her from the landing stage, and had then asked a dyspeptic prize fighter in a turtle-neck sweater to take Elizabeth’s picture.

  What she had as a result to paste in her scrapbook was, in part, this:

  “The dashing young debutante, wearing vivid green and mink, refused to admit that she had known Bruce Jettwick previously to their meeting on New Year’s Eve aboard his uncle’s palatial yacht, the Trade Wind. In spite of this denial, Miss Schuyler did admit to such a deep interest in the handsome young murder suspect, and radio singer, that it made your correspondent wonder whether they mightn’t have known each other rather well in, shall we say, some other incarnation”

  (Elizabeth’s version of this: LETTICE LACEHEART, shouting: “How long have you known Bruce Jettwick?”

  ELIZABETH, shouting: “Only met him last night.”

  LETTICE, shouting: “Like him?”

  ELIZABETH, shouting: “Certainly I like him. Who wouldn’t?”)

  “When asked whether she believed in his innocence, Miss Schuyler pressed back tears from her deep violet-blue eyes, and said: ‘Yes.’ She blushed and seemed confused when I then asked her whether she would wait for Bruce Jettwick, no matter how many years it might be, and providing he escaped the dread, full penalty of the law. My heart ached to see the tears spring back again, to see her cheeks flush a deeper red, and to hear the words choke in her mink-wrapped throat as, speechless, she gave me one poignant parting glance and fled with her breaking heart down to the seclusion of her luxurious cabin.”

  All of which was nice fast going and not a libel in it.

  Moon came down from lunch at half past one and told me I hadn’t missed anything as it had been like most pre-funeral luncheons, fairly dead pan and not much general appetite, and with Mrs. Sch
uyler tossing the conversational pigskin for some lateral passes of a here-today-and-gone-tomorrow nature. Moon asked me to give the bunch time to get on their things and start for the Jepson Funeral Chapel, and then to go up on deck. He said he would cut one quarter-hour from his after-lunch nap in order to give instructions to Jimmy Singer’s man who was due on board at a quarter past two with the powdered graphite and the camera. Moon told me to stay on deck, but to send the man down and to tell the man to wake him up; then he went into the bedroom and closed the door.

  I got into a British warm which I’d picked up five years ago when we were in London, and which refused to wear out, and went on deck. Snow was with us again, sifting down from a lead-nickel sky and stinging along on a fresh wind from the northeast.

  My watch said a quarter of two. Evidently the next half-hour called for giving the impression of a fresh-air fiend being robustly exhilarated by a whole lot of deck-pacing and fresh air.

  You could walk right around the deck housing on Trade Wind’s main deck, so I did just that, eying the landing stage of Wharf House while steaming along the starboard side, and eying the river for the Manhattan Underseas Contracting Company’s tug while dittoing the portside.

  I thought, for a while, that the landing stage was innocent of dicks or cops, but on the fifth lap around I spotted a stern-eyed young thing in the plainest of clothes gloomily chewing gum just inside the plate-glass door leading into Wharf House’s river entrance. He had his hat on, and you knew he was holding himself on leash for any tail job that came along. There were probably three or four more just like him inside in the superintendent’s office, and playing the fingers’ game, while he chewed his gum and kept a lookout on the yacht.

  That meant the speedboat and the river, and very soon indeed things began to happen. Jimmy’s man showed up right on the dot at a quarter past two. I sent him down to Moon and then forgot about him, while wishing for four sets of eyes because Captain Walsh was getting ready to lower the speedboat over on Coquilla, the diver company’s tug was steaming up and would soon drop her hook alongside, Harry Lochbittern was sedately walking down Coquilla’s gangplank, well wrapped up and with the brief case in his hand, and Young Chewing Gum had opened the plate-glass door and was now outside on the landing stage and getting interested. Cops, and don’t I know it, develop a sixth sense which tells them when something tinted is in the wind.