Holiday Homicide

by Rufus King

  How Moon had worked Bruce’s release from the holdover was something he obviously preferred to keep under shroud among Seward and McGilvray and himself, and just how strong the leverage was that Moon employed didn’t come out until the fireworks had banged and damped and friend trigger-squeezer was headed for his last warm-up.

  The official pap to be ladled to an avid public was that the district attorney’s office was satisfied that the murder of Jeffry Smith was a direct outcome of the Jettwick case, and that, as Bruce Jettwick could neither have committed nor engineered same from the Tombs, his detention for investigation terminated automatically and he would be released into the custody of his attorney, Mr. Wallace Emberry, who would produce Bruce Jettwick as a material witness when the case came to trial. Important developments trembled on the brink, as per usual, of occurring soon.

  Emberry was waiting for us at the Tombs and, the formal odds and ends having been well-oiled through, Bruce became a technically free man again.

  The four of us piled into the Daimler after press pictures showing Bruce shaking hands with Emberry, Bruce shaking hands with Moon, Emberry shaking hands with Moon, and me shaking hands with Muddy, just for the hell of it, as Bruce stepped into the car.

  Emberry did some polite anglicized fishing on the run uptown trying to hook just how Moon had worked it, and Moon told him nothing at great length and just as politely, while Bruce sat wrapped in the expression of a one-year-old shaking his first pink celluloid rattle.

  The fatted calf waiting for us on Trade Wind was a canapé spread and champagne at which I found myself the Answer Man to a broadside of questions from Mrs. Schuyler, Helen Jettwick, Elizabeth, and Bruce. Moon had gathered up Miss Jettwick, Emberry, and McRoss and had gone with them into the library to confer.

  Well, I ate and drank and answered questions for half an hour, and marveled at the glossy enamel with which nice people can coat their true feelings. Nobody had to be a star-gazer to see that Elizabeth was doing a Hoover-Dam job to keep from spilling her happiness over at seeing Bruce, and ditto with him, and his mother’s fingers held the stem of a champagne glass while they were aching to touch some part of him just to be sure he was there.

  As for Mrs. Schuyler, you could sense her looking around for ice picks to sink in Bruce, in a nice way of course, to bust up the reunited love feast. I thought then that Moon would have some job in persuading her to be among those present on the Caribbean cruise as she would surely realize, and none quicker, that even ice picks couldn’t combat a star-dusted deck, spiced Gulf Stream air, lush palm trees, and a total oblivion to sticky burrs, mosquitoes, flying cockroaches, and a therapeutic caliber of heat.

  I was wrong. When the conference broke up in the library and Miss Jettwick issued her invitation, Mrs. Schuyler said that she and Elizabeth would be delighted to accept, and her voice was soft about it, too, even though her eyes were flint.

  McRoss was not to be with us. He was going to stay in New York with Emberry and keep right on helping to wind up Myron Jettwick’s estate. In my madness, this made me feel that the cruise would turn out to be a simple picnic party after all, what with First Murderer McRoss off the yacht, and I planned to idle the hours away on the brochure I’m writing on “House Specials” or “Bar Tricks Exposed.”

  Emberry left; we all said good night; we went below. It was half past one. I got busy on phoning the newspapers as per Moon’s instructions, and Moon got ready for bed. This was attended to and I’d just settled comfortably under the covers when Moon called me into the bedroom and said:

  “Bert, look at this.”

  It was his copy of A High Wind in Jamaica and he handed it to me opened at pages 108-109. Some of the words on page 109 were heavily underlined in pencil, and the two paragraphs that had been marked read:

  “Remember,” Jonsen went on over his shoulder while he searched, “money cannot recall life, nor in the least avail you when you are dead. If you regard your life in the least, at once acquaint me with the hiding place, and your life shall be safe.”

  Marpole’s only reply was again to invoke the thought of his wife and children (he was, as a matter of fact, a widower: and his only relative, a niece, would be the better off by his death to the tune of some ten thousand pounds)

  The wallop packed in the message didn’t register until I’d repeated the underlined words aloud: If you regard your life in the least, be off. You can be superior to threat notes and call them as corny as you like, but wait until you get one. No one knows the statistics on the number issued per year but it’s a safe bet that if the government were to put a ten-cent tax on each the national debt would lose a limb. Moon pretends to be very pooh-pooh when he gets one, but they worry and annoy him inside just as much as they do anyone else.

  I said that as threat notes go this number was pretty clever, what with the only thing that could be analyzed being the lead marks of the pencil, and that being impossible except for a wizard, and who ever heard anyhow of going up to suspect after suspect and saying:

  “Lend me your pencil because—” Which was where Moon shut me up.

  He seemed to be very smug and satisfied about the business and said that things were beginning to work, and told me to telephone Jimmy Singer, please, and tell him if he’d located the woman to go ahead as planned. Then he helped himself to some Moreton Bay chestnuts and started cracking them, while staring far, far away through solids such as walls and bulkheads and me and furniture, which was his way of indicating that the interview was closed and kindly shut the bedroom door.

  Early in the game, when I first started working for him, Moon said that no matter how confidential my job was there would be moments when he’d lapse into reserves. He said it wasn’t any reflection on myself as a lid for secrets, but rather on my erstwhile profession.

  He considers bartenders as chronic gossips, claiming that they not only have to take in all the heartaches and local scandals that are handed them across the bar, but also get in the habit of dishing it out. Even if they don’t dish he insists that whatever goes into their ears gets printed on their faces whether it comes out of their mouths or stays buttoned up. He’s right.

  I went to the small switchboard in the coatroom and plugged through to Jimmy Singer’s flat. I said when he came to the phone, “If you’ve located a mouse, known to me only as Madame X, Moon wants you to go ahead as planned,” and he said, “Okay, sonny boy,” and hung up.

  I returned to my lonely cot, crossing my fingers in the deep hope that it would stay lonely and not be a repetition of the previous night, and turned in.

  Chapter Seventeen

  OPENING THE BLACK BOX

  The cot stayed perfectly lonely, and maybe that sound night’s sleep didn’t feel good. It felt good until six o’clock in the morning when some wheezings, puffings, shouts and whistles announced the arrival alongside Trade Wind of the Messrs. Seward and McGilvray, the harbor police, a boatload of suspicious, irritable, and puzzled reporters and cameramen, and again the tug from the Manhattan Underseas Contracting Company and a bright good morning to them all.

  The snow had stopped and, even though the sky was still black, you could smell through the open porthole that when day broke the river would have a Bon-Ami glint. A cheery hand-wave to District Attorney Seward in his police launch brought a grin, whereas a formal bow to Assistant Police Commissioner McGilvray only further dirtied the look he was already sending toward my head.

  The needle stingings of a shower inspired me into a rendition of Did Your Mother Come from Ireland? and I managed to get as far as kissing the blarney when Moon opened the bathroom door, looked pained and said:

  “No, Bert, Mother didn’t.”

  He started to shave. Then he showered, and I shaved and ordered melon, rolls, and coffee, and dressed in a pretty good Bond Street number which was a tweed on the conservative side even if Moon did suggest you could play games on its checks. A silk tie of regimental stripes topped the works off nicely, and Moon said, “Oh, God,”
when he came in for breakfast, but I knew he was only ribbing.

  We enlarged on breakfast in the dining saloon where everybody had collected shortly after seven, the diving outfit, police, and reporters having made of sleep but a hollow mockery and sham. I said this in just so many words to Elizabeth, who was seated beside me, and she said:

  “Nice going, Mr. Stanley. Do you know any others?”

  Then she smiled in that hazy way which is so indigenous to half-wits and young lovers.

  In fact, for the first time in forty-eight hours the general atmosphere was restful and there wasn’t so much tension or barbed nerves. Maybe the morning had something to do with it, because the eastern sky through the ports was a clear grenadine pink. Miss Jettwick had asked Seward and McGilvray to join us, and they had, and Sourpuss McGilvray melted noticeably under some first-rate creamed finnan haddock and popovers that could, when crushed, be put through a needle’s eye, or let us settle on a wedding ring in the interests of bare truth.

  Miss Jettwick had also telephoned to Emberry about the diving outfit and general doings alongside. He showed up toward eight, shaved and lavender-watered to within an inch, and in time for a final round of coffee. This was barely under his braces when Seward’s secretary, Fade-out Wilbur, materialized in the dining-saloon doorway. Under his trembling arm, and dripping, was the black steel box.

  I thought I knew then why Moon had had Harry Lochbittern throw it back into the river: so that he could watch some reactions when it was again produced. I looked around for a couple myself and was sorry to find that outside of three the general attitude was one of well-well-look-what’s-here. The three were Seward and McGilvray and Mrs. Schuyler. Seward smiled in a knifelike way and glanced at Moon. McGilvray froze sour again. Mrs. Schuyler came across fine by turning an ash-white and drinking a glass of water in a manner that left fifty percent of it cutting channels in her dress.

  Seward had Moon’s idea about getting reactions, too, because he said that the box would be opened right then and there, with Miss Jettwick’s permission, and that she and Mr. Emberry could both be witnesses to the fact that none of the estate’s papers were harmed or tampered with by his office although he reserved the right to abstract such ones as he, or Assistant Police Commission McGilvray, might care to impound as evidence.

  This eyewash went down all right, and a steward cleared the table while Mouse Wilbur slid off to fetch the department’s lock expert. He was right outside on the landing stage, because McGilvray had suspected all along that the steel box was what Moon had sent the diver fishing for the day before.

  There was something admirable in the way that Mrs. Schuyler pulled herself together. She couldn’t take her eyes away from the box while the expert worked on its lock, but the old burgher blood in her kept a smile of polite interest on her lips and stopped some shivers going through her from showing too much on the outside.

  It took forty minutes for the department expert to do what Harry Lochbittern had done in twenty. Wilbur had his limp-leather loose-leaf notebook and pointed pencils ready. As each paper was taken from the box, Seward or McGilvray examined it, had Emberry check it, then Wilbur would stop poising his pencil and flick down what it was. As a matter of fact there weren’t many papers, not over fifteen in all, and when the last one was set aside both Seward and McGilvray decided that none was of any value to their case, and turned the lot of them, plus steel box, over to Emberry.

  That was when Spider McRoss sounded off.

  “Odd,” he said. “It’s really very odd.”

  “What is very odd?” McGilvray asked him heavily.

  “I rather expected some papers would be there which seem to be missing, Mr. Commissioner.”

  “Dealing with what?”

  “Dealing with Mr. Jettwick’s last real-estate project. I’ve an unconfirmed impression that it revolved around Staten Island. Perhaps you could confirm that, Mrs. Schuyler?”

  “In what fashion, Mr. McRoss?”

  “I thought that you were interested in the project, too.”

  “Yes?”

  “Well?”

  “Well what, Mr. McRoss?”

  “Why, shouldn’t there be some records, some documentary plans or agreements? I had expected that Mr. Jettwick would have had some in that box, with the rest of his more strictly private papers.”

  “It would seem that he had not.”

  “Perhaps,” Moon said, “the papers which you feel are missing are somewhere else, Mr. McRoss. Perhaps at his office?”

  “Mr. Jettwick had no office.”

  “Then at his apartment? Or possibly somewhere aboard this yacht?”

  Moon was planting some capsules of TNT. I was sure of that, if not just why. I remembered the papers he’d left in the manila envelope in the office safe over at the Manning. His expression was very choirboy and bland, but I knew it was stuffed with canary birds just the same.

  Chapter Eighteen

  THE UNEXPECTED GUEST

  Trade Wind’s departure from the landing stage of Wharf House was a replica in miniature of any sailing whoop-la’d by Queen Mary, and not so miniature at that. Among those present for purposes of bon voyage were: Seward and Fantom Wilbur, Old-lavender Emberry, Poison McRoss, Lettice Laceheart of the Daily Review, newsreel cameramen from World Movietone and Globe News, Ltd., the Press, most of the two thousand residents of Wharf House either cluttering the landing stage or pushing the panes out of their river-view windows, and many, many casual bystanders who didn’t want to be in the way but who did so want to see the fire. It took most of the lads from the local precinct station to keep them safe for the future and on dry land.

  The clans started gathering toward four o’clock, and by four-thirty Miss Jettwick came up to us where we were standing near the gangplank on the main deck, and said to Moon:

  “Must we wait? Can’t we leave now and avoid this? Why wait until five?”

  “We are waiting for a guest, Miss Jettwick.”

  “But everyone’s aboard. I hate good-bys under any circumstances, and I’ve said good-by at length to Wallace Emberry, Mr. McRoss, District Attorney Seward, and Commissioner McGilvray; I’ve said it at such length that my jaw is becoming strained. That columnist, Miss Laceheart, already has interviewed Bruce and Elizabeth into matrimony and Mrs. Schuyler into apoplexy—Really, Mr. Moon, what other guest?”

  “I believe you saw Mrs. Bettling at Santa Monica after that business about her daughter, Eunice, last year. I wonder whether she told you that there was some heathen and some Chinee in me?”

  “In the sense that your ways are strange? Yes, as a matter of fact she did. All right. You don’t want me to question you. You don’t want us to sail until five. Selah! I haven’t the faintest idea what that means, but it seems to represent a period mark among some of our Los Angeles cults.”

  “Thank you, Miss Jettwick. One thing.”

  “Yes?”

  “Could you inconspicuously disentangle Miss Lettice Laceheart from our young romantics, and suggest that if she were to join me on deck she might be given an exclusive?”

  “An exclusive story?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Leave it to me.”

  “Just how good are you as a police dog?”

  “Perfect, if you eliminate jumping over fences.”

  “Then here’s something else. In about ten or fifteen minutes Mr. Stanley, a nameless woman, Miss Laceheart, and myself will attempt to seclude ourselves in the library. A minute or so before sailing, Miss Laceheart will leave and go ashore. Could you guard us during that interview? Could you see that at no time we are interrupted or disturbed?”

  “Yes. Anything else?”

  “Nothing else, Miss Jettwick.”

  “All right, Mr. Moon.”

  Miss Jettwick left and Moon said:

  “When Lettice Laceheart joins us, Bert, please keep an eye on the landing stage for Jimmy Singer. He will have a woman with him and will bring her on deck. If your necktie doe
sn’t stun her into immediate submission, turn on the rest of your charms and get her into the library so fast that she has time neither to see nor to be seen. Miss Laceheart and I will follow.”

  Miss Laceheart still looked like a leopard without its stuffings when she hustled out on deck and up to Moon. She was an exceedingly hail-fellow-well-met sort of woman and you found yourself instinctively ducking from slaps on the back.

  “Hello, hello, hello,” she said to Moon, “I hear you’ve something for me.”

  “Bringing scoops to your column is like carrying coals to Newcastle, Miss Laceheart,” Moon said, turning on the good old F.F.V. gloss.

  “You sweet Southern man, you, let’s cut the camellias and have a few brass tacks.”

  “First, conditions.”

  “Such as?”

  “You are going to reserve the coming interview for your column in the morning editions and not release it as press news for tonight.”

  “Do I look like a zany?”

  “Far from it, Miss Laceheart. You look like a leopard.”

  “Now stop! Of course I’ll reserve it.”

  “It will get you into trouble with your editor as the interview will be of a front-page variety, but you will explain to him that you would not have had it without the condition of withholding it until morning.”

  “This is beginning to sound like something.”

  “It is. Another condition, your role will be a passive one. I shall do all the talking. Your angle will be that of a sympathetic spectator, and the report in your column will be played up in your accustomed, and inimitable, heart-interest manner. Agreed?”

  “Agreed. Who’s the interview with?”

  “A woman whose name you will know when you are introduced to her in the library.”

  “Psst!” I said to Moon. “Psst! Pssst!”

  “I deduce from the noises that Mr. Stanley is making that she is coming on board now.”

  She was. Jimmy Singer was piloting her through the mob on the landing stage, and even in all that mess she looked like a good hot number, in a hammered iron way. Jimmy shot her along the gangplank and up to me, and said to her, “Clark Gable Stanley will take you to Mr. Moon right away.”