Holiday Homicide

by Rufus King

  A steward announced District Attorney Seward just then, which shortly focused my duck egg into the spotlight. Seward came in with his overcoat on, his hat in his hand, and several late editions tucked under his arm. His smile and greetings had the temperature of an icebox cake all ready to serve. He spread the newspapers out on a table and though everybody collected to look at them the verbal play turned into a duet between him and Moon, like any of the duets in La Tosca that have the true lethal touch.

  Well, there were some good pictures of the diving act, with McGilvray’s puss grinning front and center in each, but what Seward was hot about was a brief stop press about my shy breakfast in the living room with bump. The reporter had squeezed the bald facts from the room steward and had suggested the rest, hitting a bull’s-eye in an alleged supposition that I had been attacked during the night, and pinning it on the blood I’d left on the face towels when I’d washed it off my head before going in to see Moon.

  “I want the facts about that,” Seward said, opening the duet.

  Moon answered for me.

  “It is true. Mr. Stanley was attacked. He was struck on the head by the butt of a revolver held in the hand of an unidentified man.”

  “Why wasn’t I informed of it?”

  “The injury was inconsequential, Mr. Seward.”

  I restrained myself perfectly. So did Seward.

  “You know I don’t mean that. The attack on Mr. Stanley certainly must have had its bearing on the murder of Myron Jettwick. Tell me what happened, please.” Moon did.

  “I take it,” Seward said when Moon was finished, “your presumption that the men were grappling for something was the reason for your sending down a diver?”

  “Yes, Mr. Seward.”

  “For a gun?”

  “For the murder gun.”

  “For that relic you palmed off on McGilvray?”

  “Relic?”

  “That’s right, Mr. Moon, relic. Our ballistics man reported that it hadn’t been fired in years. It didn’t even have a firing pin.”

  “I don’t see the reason for this touch of heat, Mr. Seward. Surely you aren’t holding me responsible for the futility of the diver’s search? That gun was turned over to Commissioner McGilvray the instant he demanded it. If I remember correctly, it was still dripping.”

  “Dripping, yes, but no mud.”

  “Mud?”

  “Yes, mud. River-bottom mud.”

  Moon went ancestral and became Southern patience itself.

  “Surely any silt or bottom mud would have been washed from the gun while the diver was bringing it to the surface.”

  “The ballistics man doesn’t believe so. He said some would have seeped in and stuck there. Furthermore, we’ve questioned the diver, and he refuses to make a positive statement that he did bring the gun up to the surface. He admits that he carried up the grapple, but doesn’t know whether the gun was caught on it or not.”

  “Odd how things like that happen.”

  “Very odd.”

  “Especially odd when you realize that those two men last night in the rowboat must have hooked the gun with the grapple at the exact moment when Mr. Stanley shouted at them and they dropped the line overboard in their fright.”

  Seward got a good wine red under the handsome sun tan he’d brought back with him from Bermuda.

  “I suppose that is the way the story will have to stand, Mr. Moon.”

  “I don’t see how it could be otherwise.”

  “We’re sending our own diver down, of course.”

  “Of course. I left as soon as Commissioner McGilvray impounded the gun. I saw nothing further to wait for. Did my man bring up anything else?”

  The wine became burgundy.

  “Just a dress form.”

  “Oh, surely not! Of the hourglass type?”

  “Of the hourglass type.” Seward turned several pages of the Daily Review and pointed to a full-page ad. “If you considered Mr. Stanley’s injuries so inconsequential, in the sense that you felt them of no interest to my office or the police, what is the meaning of that?” The “that” was the full-page ad, which consisted of a ten-thousand-dollar reward for information leading to the identity or arrest of one or both of the two men who had attacked me from the rowboat. The information was to be sent or given directly to Moon and would be treated as strictly confidential. Moon listed his address as Trade Wind, located the yacht as being moored at Wharf House, and included the number of the land telephone installed on board.

  The reward was all news to me, and I couldn’t dope out why Moon had done it. The reason he gave to Seward was, of course, just so much meringue. He said: “I have every respect for the ability of the police department and for your own, Mr. Seward. I have a greater respect for the efficacy of money. Plenty of money, under which classification I would place ten thousand dollars. It is the type of sum that not only gets action, but gets it quick.”

  And the funny part of it is that Moon, in his devious way, was right.

  Chapter Fourteen

  A WOMAN POSSESSED

  Seward left with a parting crack that he hoped Moon had enjoyed his sail down the harbor, or wherever he’d gone in the blizzard, and complimented him on having introduced a new winter sport, although doubting whether it would receive much favor among the yachting fraternity. Moon said he accepted the compliment in the spirit in which it was meant, and we went below to dress for dinner.

  I sat on the edge of the bathtub and tried, as one says, to pierce his reticence by conjecturing on the reward stunt while he shaved and made the usual faces and grunts which go with lather and a razor. Moon uses the straight kind. He claims that they’re here to stay.

  I said what did he think we were up against, a gang? So far we had the two bundled dopes in the rowboat, Bruce in jail, Madame President Schuyler with her duds and a hat on before the murder dawn, the wife of Senator Blackman far from her Akron home during the festive season and holed in at the Waldorf, Rat Jeffry Smith any place, and my own nominee, Spider McRoss.

  Providing the two boatmen with the grapple weren’t principals, who had hired them? Surely the bulk of our suspects were far too chic to be able to step out and pick up for a sum such an accomplished brace of maritime thugs for their dirty work? Moon asked me to shut up because, even though he’d mentally lowered the asbestos between us, just the sound of my voice had made him nick his chin.

  He told me to go see the chief steward and arrange that whatever man was detailed to the small switchboard installed for land service be warned that any telephone call coming through for him, Moon, be plugged through immediately to the extension in our quarters, or to whatever other spot on the yacht Moon might happen to be. No questions were to be asked the caller, who was to be assured that Moon was on board and would be connected at once. The same general routine was to hold with anyone who came personally, and the man on deck watch was to be instructed of the fact.

  After I had cleared that up, he wanted me to run over to Coquilla and gather ten thousand dollars in twenty five-hundred-dollar bills from the safe. He always keeps some cash on hand as he hates to be caught short, and insists that ready money is as important a weapon in his business as is a gun.

  I began to get the feeling that it looked like a big night and thought enviously of hockey and football players with their head guards, shin guards, and scatter of Ostermoor padding, while running my errands and then coming back to Moon. I asked him where he wanted me to put the ten thousand dollars, and he told me to get into my dinner clothes and put the money in my pants pocket and to complete the ensemble by wearing my shoulder holster under the left armpit.

  Dinner went along about as you would expect, with most topics of current interest being touched on, with the exception of Bruce. Emberry rehashed the funeral, and practically a blow-by-blow account of the pastor’s eulogy of Myron Jettwick. Emberry alone of them seemed to have taken the old buzzard’s death hard, and that looked strange, until you realized he’d not only
been associated with Jettwick for years but had just lost, through Jettwick’s death, what had probably been his fattest account. I did find out later, just as a whim of curiosity, that Jettwick’s legal business had brought him in an average of ninety thousand bucks a year. In a case like that, I’d have felt pretty blue and grim myself.

  Well, we’d struggled through some woodcock a la Talleyrand, with a green salad, and were spooning out a very good sabayon prepared, for a change, with Kirschwasser when a steward hustled in and handed Moon a folded note. It plugged Emberry in the middle of a Technicolor description of the funeral’s floral arrangements. It plugged everybody with a good cold chill, even me.

  Moon read the note quickly and then said to Miss Jettwick:

  “This is from Mrs. Blackman, the former wife of Senator Blackman. She wants to see me. She asks me to apologize for the informality of coming on board, but says that her business is imperative.”

  It was the last name that any of us expected to hear. Helen Jettwick turned a sickly white. Miss Jettwick’s nice friendly face hardened to a point where she looked like a different person. Emberry said, “What? What?” and popped his eyes. Elizabeth just looked blank. McRoss upset his glass of champagne on the table, and don’t think I didn’t put that little fact down in the book.

  Mrs. Schuyler ran true to form and said, “Blackman? Wasn’t she the woman on the Leviathan—oh my dear!” She reached some finger loads of square-cut rocks set in platinum across the table, and pressed Helen Jettwick’s cold hand in a gesture pleading for forgiveness. Oh yes indeed.

  Moon turned to the steward and said:

  “Where is Mrs. Blackman?”

  “In the library, sir.”

  “Miss Jettwick, with your permission?”

  “Certainly, Mr. Moon.”

  “Thank you. Come with me, please, Bert.”

  There are some people who look sunken in, and that’s the way Mrs. Blackman looked. She seemed to have no raised places at all, just flat places with dents. Her clothes were more extreme and more expensive than a woman of similar position in New York would buy, and her hat probably set her back fifty bucks, which made it worth about ten thousand times its weight in gold. As of when there was gold. Her coat was chinchilla, and her perfume was that new kind that was bottled in a leather boot, only heaven knew why.

  Moon introduced himself and me, and she looked us over fast in a cold, nervous way and said she wanted to confer with Moon in private. He gave her the usual rigmarole about me being completely confidential and very private and, having so reduced me to a par with one of the library’s walls, asked her to speak up.

  “Very well. Mr. Moon, the newspapers have informed me that Bruce Jettwick is your client. I am liée with your career as an investigator. I am satisfied that in all your cases you have believed in the innocence of your client, and that that has been a factor in your unbroken line of success. Unbroken to date.”

  The “to date” curdled the soft soap, of course, and Moon got very blue-grass-plantation and said, “I gathered from your note that you have some information for me, Mrs. Blackman?”

  “It is my purpose to convince you that you will never expose the true murderer of Mr. Jettwick until you see her through my eyes.”

  “See who?”

  “Helen Jettwick, naturally. Whether she herself or her son fired the gun is of little consequence. The driving power was hers. I firmly believe it was she. I also believe you will free Bruce and, by doing so, will free his mother, too. That is what I have come to prevent.”

  “Just why, Mrs. Blackman?”

  “Would you feel charitable toward a woman who had ruined your life?”

  “I am to infer that Mrs. Jettwick ruined yours? Is a life so easily ruined by the loss of a few jewels? And I understand they were recovered, and that you exacted full payment for their theft. I do not understand you, Mrs. Blackman.”

  “The jewels were nothing but a handle that I grasped to control her.”

  “To control her from what?”

  My pencil was going like sixty while taking down this dialogue, for that’s what it sounded like to me, sort of a hash made up of some problem plays and seasoned with a reminiscent dash of Clyde Fitch.

  “I suppose, Mr. Moon, you have made yourself familiar through old newspaper files with that Leviathan scandal.”

  “Yes.”

  “They are incomplete. Let me fill in the gaps for you.”

  “Thank you. Tell me this, just how well did you get to know Mr. and Mrs. Jettwick on the way over?”

  “My husband, the Senator, got to know her too well.”

  “In what way did the intimacy develop?”

  “Via the cocktail lounge, mostly. They held a mutual interest in Clover Clubs that amounted to devotion. And my husband was then a very attractive man, Mr. Moon.”

  “Was Helen Jettwick the cause of your later divorce from him?”

  “Indirectly, yes. He considered her a tragic and a maligned woman, even to a point where he flatly said that my attitude toward her was and had been cruelly indefensible. I think you will understand. I mean even after her trial and her divorce from Myron Jettwick she was always between us, almost physically so, if that doesn’t put it too strongly. Finally, it seemed better that the Senator and I divorce each other on the usual blanketing grounds of incompatibility. That is why I say, Mr. Moon, that that woman ruined my life, and my home, and my entire happiness.”

  Well, what with chinchilla and the rest of her streamlined scenery, she certainly got no tears from me in her character of a cast-off glove, but her flat, bluish eyes had suddenly come alive in her flat face, and the thing they were blazing with was the finest eruption of downright hate I’d seen in years. Moon gave it a moment’s inspection, too, and then said:

  “Tell me your version of the thefts that took place during the voyage, Mrs. Blackman. The papers stated you were not the only victim.”

  “No, there were several, all in first class. Fanny Windemere lost an emerald dinner ring. Alice Colton lost a star sapphire pendant. She was that corset man’s wife, his third, I think, and I lost my diamond bracelet.”

  “When was it taken?”

  “It was stolen from my jewel box on the fourth night out. The Senator gave a dinner party in our suite, and there were ten guests, including Mr. and Mrs. Jettwick and Bruce. My husband could never get over a political aptitude for children. Anyhow, Bruce was quite large for his age and looked nearer fifteen than ten. There was the young daughter of another guest there as well. I wore my pearls that night—the Djavinski string—and the diamond bracelet was in the jewel box in a dresser drawer in my bedroom. There was a bathroom just beyond my bedroom doorway, and most of the guests went to it at some time or other during the evening. That gave Helen Jettwick her opportunity for the theft, of course.”

  “Did the bathroom have any door opening directly into your bedroom?”

  “Yes, a door into the corridor, and one into the bedroom. It was terribly simple, really.”

  “How late did the party last?”

  “The two children stayed until after nine, and the rest were there until around midnight. I was tired and completely fed up with the way my husband carried on”

  “With Helen Jettwick?”

  “Yes. It was the reason why I put the pearls back in the case without noticing the rest of the jewels. I didn’t miss the bracelet until the following night when I wanted to wear it at the captain’s dinner.”

  “Did you suspect Helen Jettwick?”

  “No, not of being that sort of a thief. I did know, though, that she wanted money.”

  “How did you know, Mrs. Blackman?”

  “By plain eavesdropping. I’ve never had the slightest scruple about it. I’m sure that you, as a detective, will sympathize with my point of view.”

  “To a point, Mrs. Blackman.”

  “Well, there were palm trees in the Leviathan’s lounge. She and the Senator were behind one, and I managed to be on its ot
her side. It was after dinner and Mrs. Jettwick was well caught up on her daily quota of Clover Clubs and brandy. She said to the Senator: ‘I can’t stand it much longer. I’d leave him if I had any money to take care of Bruce with. I’d do almost anything to establish Bruce in some sort of a career.’ Significant, wouldn’t you say?”

  “Completely so, on its surface.”

  “No, deeply so, too, Mr. Moon. The Senator asked her why she didn’t divorce Myron Jettwick and get some sort of settlement, and she said: ‘He wraps his cruelties up in kindness. He’d win out in any proceedings I might bring, and then I’d be penniless again and so would my son.’ That’s why she stole. My bracelet was worth twenty thousand dollars, and I imagine the rest of her loot totaled fifteen or so more. A very golden sort of nest egg, it struck me.”

  “A scene was reported on the dock when the jewels were recovered. The accounts were indecisive. Can you amplify it for me?”

  “Vividly, Mr. Moon. The customs men were searching the luggage more carefully than usual because of the thefts. They found my bracelet shoved in the toe of a slipper among Helen Jettwick’s things. The other stolen jewels were similarly hidden. Everyone heard the commotion up at ‘J,’ and I went there and identified the bracelet and insisted that Mrs. Jettwick be placed under arrest. That was when Bruce attacked me.”

  “Yes, I read of that.”

  “He was standing beside his mother, who was perfectly hysterical and denying the whole thing. So stupid, don’t you think? I mean with the evidence of her guilt right there for anyone to see. Bruce leaped at me as I was demanding her arrest. He was like a savage beast and screamed the most terrible things. It terrifies me when I think of the average nice child’s vocabulary. Then he turned on Myron Jettwick and said, ‘If you let them touch my mother, I’ll kill you.’ Mr. Moon, I have never seen murder so plainly written on a human face.”