Holiday Homicide

by Rufus King

  “Oh, come, Mrs. Blackman—a child of ten.”

  “You doubt me? You doubt that it could linger over fifteen years? That the seed would grow?”

  “Hate dies of attrition, Mrs. Blackman. Most elemental emotions do: love, grief, any of them at all. They have to be nurtured, to have the food of propinquity, in order to live.”

  Boy, did that woman pounce!

  “Nurtured? My dear Mr. Moon, what else do you picture Helen Jettwick as doing during those years but fanning the flame?”

  “Conjecture, Mrs. Blackman.”

  “Certainly, but based on her character as I knew it.”

  “A brief knowledge summed up during an ocean crossing.”

  “Surely, my dear man, you must see. See what his invitation to her two weeks ago must have meant. Every newspaper in town shrieks it as an alleged motive for Bruce’s having killed him. Myron Jettwick wasn’t signing a cruise invitation when he sent it to her. He was signing his own death warrant.”

  “Yes, you are right.”

  That stopped her.

  “You really agree?”

  “Yes, but not in the sense you mean.”

  “There is no other sense, no other meaning.” (I’d heard of a woman “possessed,” and saw one then.) “She and her son had built their lives up from ruin, built them financially and socially in a satisfactory enough way, when that quixotic desire of Myron’s to forgive her her sins before he died made her fear a trick.”

  She was right there, of course, because I remembered McRoss’s quote: Tell him that I am afraid to refuse.

  “Surely, surely you see the picture, Mr. Moon? He had been relentless in his punishment of her fifteen years ago, and justly so. Her mind would reason thus: Myron has waited during all the years of our obscurity and penury for this moment when Bruce and I are on top only that the fall may be the greater when he tears us down). You know the all but fanatic code of censorship which obtains in radio. You know that Bruce’s career would be ruined if he were exposed as the son of a woman whose thievery and divorce were a public scandal and a cause célèbre. As his career has been ruined. You know Helen Jettwick mistrusted Myron’s magnanimity, and believed he was using it as a cloak to ‘forgive her publicly’ only to drag out her vicious past.”

  “Yes, I can understand Mrs. Jettwick reasoning like that.”

  “And you know this, too, Mr. Moon. That woman saw ruin staring her in the face. She believed that whether she accepted the invitation or not Myron Jettwick would speak, would expose the ‘Unknown Troubadour’ as her son. She came aboard this yacht in the blind fury of her hatred and passion to avenge a fate she considered inevitable. She had to suffer, yes. Bruce had to suffer. But in payment for that suffering, Myron Jettwick would die. If she could manage it in such a manner that they would escape with their necks, so much the better. Give up this case, Mr. Moon! For your own sake, for the sake of justice. I’ve come here to ask you to give it up.”

  “I can understand that bringing you here, Mrs. Blackman. What brought you to New York?”

  “What?”

  “Why did you leave your home in Akron during the holiday season, when normally you would be engaged in an essential social routine, and put up at a hotel in New York?”

  “Why, the letter, of course.”

  “Letter?”

  “Yes, from Myron Jettwick.”

  “Ah.”

  When Moon says “ah” it means “ah.” Which means that it means no good for the party he says it to.

  Flatty went on:

  “He wrote and asked that I join him in this forgiveness feast, that I join him on the Caribbean cruise, that I add my voice in telling Helen Jettwick that all was forgiven and forgotten. Mr. Moon, do you think the man was mad?”

  “Having met you, Mrs. Blackman, I might be inclined to believe that way. So you did come to New York?”

  “Yes, but the rest was absurd.”

  “When did you get here?”

  “Last week.”

  “What day?”

  “The day before New Year’s Eve.”

  “I gather you had no intention of going on the cruise. Why did you come?”

  “To dissuade him, to stiffen what had once been his determination to make that woman pay until the end.”

  “You saw him?”

  “Yes.”

  “Here?”

  “No, he came to the hotel.”

  “When?”

  “Around four o’clock, on New Year’s Eve.”

  “Your efforts were futile?”

  “Quite”

  “Your efforts at the hotel, I mean. Not later ones.”

  She gave that quite a take.

  “There were no later ones, Mr. Moon. He left the hotel and I did not see him again.”

  “Then why didn’t you return to Akron at once, Mrs. Blackman?”

  What she would have said would have been important, very, but she had no chance to say it because the three of us saw that Helen Jettwick was in the room. The door was ajar and there was no telling how long she had been standing outside in the passageway and listening. It must have been for some time, and she couldn’t have missed much, because she walked over to Mrs. Blackman and said, “Thank you for having come.”

  There are chills and chills, just as there are ice cubes so cold that they stick to your fingers where other ice cubes slide off. Mrs. Jettwick’s voice gave me the sticky kind.

  You could see that it gave them to Flatty, too, because she stood up in a hurry and pulled the chinchilla tighter about her. She said:

  “I must be going.”

  “Thank you, too,” Helen Jettwick’s freezing plant went on, “for having been in New York on the night that Myron was shot. Has the value of an alibi occurred to you, Mrs. Blackman? If it hasn’t, I’d consider it well”

  Mrs. Blackman’s exit was devoid of any social touch. I turned to toss flowers at Helen Jettwick but couldn’t. She had slumped to the floor, and was out.

  Chapter Fifteen

  A HAND WITH A GUN

  There was no time right then for a fireside chat with Moon as to why this and why that, because we’d just gotten Helen Jettwick revived with a swallow of brandy and well enough to be oh-my-poor-deared over by the women when a steward ran up to Moon and said a man wanted to talk to him on the telephone, and that the man’s voice sounded shaky and scared.

  Moon motioned me, and we hurried to the small switchboard in the coatroom off the main saloon. He took the call there, and held the earpiece of the headset so that I could listen in, too.

  “Cotton Moon speaking.”

  “Listen, Mr. Moon, there’s a small bar on Fifty-fourth Street between Second Avenue and Third. It’s the only one on the north side of the block. Got that?”

  “Yes.”

  “Have you the ten thousand dollars reward money in cash?”

  “I have.”

  “Come to the bar and bring it with you. Keep this from the D.A. and the police or the deal’s off.”

  “Very well.”

  “Be there within half an hour and come alone.”

  “I do not work alone. My secretary is always with me.”

  “Oh, him. Okay.”

  The punk hung up before I could think of an answer.

  “Quick, Bert. Our coats.”

  We went ashore and picked up a cruising taxi, which was a break, because the snow was still coming down every which way and nobody who could avoid it was afoot. Moon said to Mr. Mike Guadopopolus—I always check a cabby’s name and number from his license—“There is a bar on the north side of Fifty-fourth Street between Second Avenue and Third. Take us there, please.”

  The cab started south, and felt its way through the blizzard for twenty minutes before stopping alongside the curb. The trip under normal weather conditions would have taken six. We piled out and I paid the driver, and Moon said not to keep him.

  We found ourselves before a café with a disillusioned canopy over its entrance. You could se
e a small bar through an iron-grilled window, with one of my ex-buddies polishing a glass behind it. The door was of solid oak and had an observation glass let into its upper panel as a hang-over from the dear, dead, speakeasy days.

  There was a small sprinkle of cash customers inside, a few at the bar, and the rest scattered around small tables in an extension in the rear. The joint was a typical neighborhood melting pot where the lads from Sutton Place bring their dogs and their glamour to the lads from the tenements. The pooches were on leashes, mostly tied to the legs of chairs, with one drowned dachshund checked at the bar rail and looking nostalgic for Vienna.

  Moon picked out a wall table just at the end of the bar, and sat with his back against the wall so that he could watch both the street door and another door in the room’s rear partition. The bartender finished polishing the glass, racked it, then lifted a flap in the bar and strolled over.

  “What’ll it be, folks?”

  Moon said brandy and water, and I said the same.

  “We got some Napoleon.”

  Moon smiled grimly and said:

  “Prove it.”

  He came over with a tray after a while and put a bottle on the table, two ounce-and-a-half glasses, and two glasses half-filled with water and some ice.

  “It’s a shame to mix that stuff. I’ve got sniffers.” Moon wrapped himself in Spanish moss and said:

  “I prefer it this way, thank you. I am an iconoclast at heart.”

  “Oh, well, iconoclasm’s fun for a while, but it gets tiresome like everything else and you skip it.”

  “Wait—you’re a member of the Book-of-the-Month Club.”

  “I am. That will be two bucks.”

  I paid while Moon sat back and looked as if life were no longer worth living, and old First Edition returned to the bar’s farther end and to a dreamy contemplation of the far-spaced passers-by along the snow-drifted street.

  Five minutes later the door opened and a man came in.

  He was a tall man and his large, pale face had an over-massaged look. He wore a derby and a dark chesterfield coat. His age might have been anything, and he wasn’t one of the glamour boys because he had no Scottie, although you can’t always tell.

  He looked the joint over and then settled on Moon and me. He walked down to our end of the bar, which brought him within two or three feet of our table. He ordered a stinger.

  Moon raised one eyebrow at me, which meant did Chesterfield look like one of the two men in the rowboat, and I raised both eyebrows at Moon, which meant he could search me and I still wouldn’t know.

  The man set his foot on the brass rail, took a cigar from an inner pocket and lighted it. He waited patiently while the bartender mixed his drink.

  “That’ll be fifty cents.”

  The man put a dollar bill on the bar, then pocketed his change. He sipped the stinger until the bartender had returned to the street end of the bar and had presented his back, while contemplating the empty world outside.

  “Have you the money with you, Mr. Moon?”

  The man didn’t look at Moon. His lips hardly moved, but his whisper carried clearly to us, and no farther. A ten-year-old graduate of any neighborhood movie house could have tagged him as an ex-con.

  “I have.”

  “Your primary purpose is to clear your client of having murdered his uncle, is it not?”

  “Yes.”

  “The information which I am about to sell you will indicate a line of investigation which I think will do so.”

  “You know the conditions of the reward. Are you one of the two men who were in that rowboat?”

  “No.”

  “Are you the man who hired them?”

  “No.”

  “Will your information lead us to them?”

  “No.”

  Moon finished his brandy.

  “Come, Bert.”

  “Wait,” the man said, in his grapevine whisper.

  “I feel there is no sound reason for doing so.”

  “I am wanted by the police, and my life is not safe. I had nothing to do with Jettwick’s murder. It is for another reason that I have to leave the country at once. I read your reward and decided that ten thousand dollars would see me through. I know nothing about the men in the rowboat and care less.”

  “There is definitely no purpose in prolonging this.”

  “Yes, there is.” The man sipped some more of the stinger. “My name is Jeffry Smith.”

  Moon stopped pulling on his gloves.

  “I thought you’d stay,” Smith said. “My information is worth a lot more than ten thousand but, as I’ve indicated, I am being pressed and I cannot play the hand as it should be. In what denominations have you got the ten thousand?”

  “There are twenty five-hundred-dollar bills.”

  Smith glanced toward the bartender’s distant and stolid back.

  “Let me see them. Just a minute—someone is coming in.”

  The street door opened, but nobody came in. A hand showed holding a revolver from which five shots blazed. The door closed on their echoes.

  Jeffry Smith hit the floor and twitched and died, while two of the G-boys fainted and the drowned dachshund sat up and you could figure him thinking that perhaps Manhattan wasn’t such a dull dump after all.

  Chapter Sixteen

  THINGS BEGIN TO WORK

  Moon crooked a finger at the bartender and got us two more brandies, heaven alone knew how, because the joint was a madhouse what with Sutton Place and the tenements and the pooches all giving vent in their several ways, and only Smith being calm and quiet and no longer worried about anything at all. Moon had stopped me from hustling out to chase the sniper, as he had noted through the grilled window that a car had beaten it right after the shots, and I was, Moon said, no Balto. I missed this until I remembered the husky who had helped carry the serum to Nome.

  Even with the blizzard a mob had begun to collect on the street, and two scout cars screamed up and emptied four policemen into our midst, while the cop on the beat kept the sightseers outside in check.

  Moon identified himself, and identified Jeffry Smith, and suggested that District Attorney Seward and Assistant Police Commissioner McGilvray had better be summoned as the job unquestionably hooked up with the Jettwick case.

  The usual spade work was done while we waited. All the cash customers gave names and addresses and occupations, when any, and a couple of the names would have shaken the social register to its stockings, while another couple would have had the same effect on a police blotter. It was wonderful the way nobody had seen a thing. Even the bartender remembered nothing but the hand and the gun. The sound of the five shots going off practically in his eardrums had blasted him out of his wits.

  Some precinct boys and the headquarters’ coterie got there before Seward or McGilvray, and one of the homicide dicks recognized Jeffry Smith under two aliases: Jock Severance and Jesse Stone. He knew his record, and told Moon that Smith’s play consisted in petty embezzlements from well-off, middle-class widows. He knew that Smith was currently wanted for a job involving a synthetically helpless woman from Newark who had enough money, gumption and political influence to turn on the heat to a point where Smith must have realized he had hooked a barracuda and that some spot like Venezuela might be a good idea for a siesta.

  Seward looked his own fresh-as-a-daisy self when he got there, and so did McGilvray, only his self was of the sour-puss order, and was right then very, very sour. You could tell he expected more antique gats.

  Moon frankly gave them the setup, starting with Smith’s phone call and ending with the fusillade. He suggested to Seward that if Seward cared to leave the current situation in McGilvray’s capable hands and to return with us to Trade Wind, he, Moon, would like to talk with him, Seward, in a manner that might prove advantageous to both.

  Seward agreed, and after we’d posed for a few family groups for the newspaper camera boys, the three of us shoved off in Seward’s car, made Trade Wind
and went below. Moon told me not to take off my coat, but would I mind sending the steward in with some scotch and soda, and then have the Daimler sent around to Wharf House and wait in it until he came out and joined me.

  Moon always does that, chases me off when he wants to make a deal with any politician or official, they being temperamental that way about coming to any understandings when a third party is present who could later act as a witness. Moon’s deals are never criminal, but some of them do verge on stretching the fine inner tubing of the law, and I never blame the politicians for wanting it a two-way say-so one bit.

  Well, I sent in the drinks, called for the Daimler and sat on dove-colored corduroy for fifty minutes counting snowflakes before Moon showed up. He got in, settled himself under the rug and said, “The Tombs.” I lifted the hand phone and said, “The Tombs,” and Muddy jerked his head and away we glided for the Tombs.

  The clam act was still in order so far as any vital information was concerned, and the run downtown was conversationally confined by Moon to some things he wanted me to attend to. He wanted enough duds shifted from Coquilla to Trade Wind for a couple of weeks’ cruise to Tortuagas, which had been Myron Jettwick’s island in the Caribbean and which was now his sister’s. Yes, we were going on Trade Wind. No, Miss Jettwick knew nothing about it as yet, nor did her yacht, nor did anyone other than Moon and Seward and me.

  When we returned from the Tombs I was to telephone all the city desks and inform the editors of Trade Wind’s proposed departure. Any move on the part of the murder yacht would be front-page news. Moon specified that the newspapers were to be given the hour of sailing. It would be at five o’clock on the following afternoon.

  Miss Jettwick’s guests were also to be listed for the press: Mrs. Harriet Schuyler, Elizabeth Schuyler, Moon, myself, Mrs. Helen Jettwick, and Bruce Jettwick. Yes, Bruce. District Attorney Seward would by now have informed the police reporters that Bruce was to be released.

  I pointed out that all this was just dandy, and that the city editors would love it, especially if any of the parties involved balked. None, Moon said, going Disraeli, would balk.