Holiday Homicide

by Rufus King

  Miss Jettwick left it to Warrenby Dorset to bed us down, and only specified that Helen Jettwick’s room should adjoin hers. Dorset had arranged dinner for half past eight so we scattered behind our black boys to go to our rooms and bathe and dress.

  Moon had talked to Dorset, with the result that Moon and I and Mrs. Smith and Seward were lined up along the southern gallery in the order named. Moon splashed happily in the tub of our connecting bathroom while I shaved, and I asked him when his capsules of TNT were scheduled to pop off, and he asked me for God’s sake not to wear a white mess jacket, so I put on a white mess jacket with a cummerbund of black silk because Mrs. Smith had said if there ever was a physique for one it was mine. I told Moon this, and he submerged in the tub and blew bubbles until I hauled him up.

  Dinner was a good enough meal, with pompano for an entree and hot stone crabs with melted butter as a main course, all sluiced down by a light German wine. Brother Dorset sat himself beside Miss Jettwick and spanked the conversation with a verbal Cook’s tour of Tortuagas which was, he said, roughly fifteen square miles in area, was densely impenetrable over most of its surface, but did contain a citrus grove of a size and productivity that had made the island not alone self-supporting but capable of showing a profit as well.

  Coffee was served in the patio, and it was fun to watch the sweet job Seward made of herding Mrs. Smith over into a corner where the shrubs were densest. They sat there, deep in the shadows, and I was thinking of strolling over there myself when Moon said he’d like me to get my notebook and join Helen Jettwick and Miss Jettwick and himself in Miss Jettwick’s room.

  Moon started right in as soon as I got there and said, “Mrs. Jettwick, the time has come when I shall have to revive some memories that will be painful to you.”

  “About my marriage to Myron?”

  “Even further back than that; say, from the time when you left your home in Vermont and came to the city.”

  Helen Jettwick was, she told us, the daughter of a good New England family with a lieutenant governor, a bishop, and a wealth of lesser fry on its tree. Her father had been a Methodist minister with an almost literal belief in the heating apparatus of hell, which was why she had gone to New York, to escape, and to marry Myron’s younger brother Alfred.

  “How did you happen to meet Alfred Jettwick?”

  “Myron introduced me to him.”

  Miss Jettwick drew her breath in sharply and said, “Myron? You knew Myron first?”

  “Yes. Didn’t he ever tell you? His original interests in real estate were around Greenwich Village, in the smallest sort of a way, of course. He had a rental agency for the cheaper type of lodgings, and I happened to go to it when I was looking about for a place to stay. We became friends. He took me out frequently to dinner, and sometimes to a concert afterwards.”

  “Myron? Well!” Miss Jettwick continued to be amazed. “I never was aware of his interest in music.”

  “He had none, really. I was a lonely sort of dreamy little fool in those days, and felt terribly grateful for the least sort of attention from anybody. There was an assured sort of kindliness about Myron that I liked. About a month after we had met each other he took me to an art students’ dance at Webster Hall, and it was there that he introduced me to Alfred.”

  Helen Jettwick looked speculatively at her sister-in-law. “I wonder whether you realized how different both of them were?”

  “Of course I realized, Helen. They were completely different, in looks and in everything else.”

  Helen Jettwick’s smile fanned a chill along my spine, not one of fright, but the kind you sometimes get when you’re in church and thinking of this and that and look up and see the lips on the picture of a madonna.

  “After I met Alfred there wasn’t anyone else on earth but Alfred. We neither of us had any doubt from that first moment when we danced together. Nothing could have kept us apart, and nothing did.”

  “And Myron?” Moon said, with his foot jammed hard on the soft pedal.

  Helen Jettwick turned again to Miss Jettwick, looking for understanding. She just sat there thinking back on things for a moment, while palm fronds clashed their soft clatter out beyond the gallery, and you could hear voices from the patio below. Mrs. Schuyler’s voice was very plain, and she was saying:

  “No, Elizabeth, I shall not have you strolling down to the dock with Bruce or any place else. That pathway on the way up was cluttered with tarantulas, blue lizards, and that ghastly iguana. Either continue your backgammon or else go to bed.”

  That settled that, and Helen Jettwick picked up the thread:

  “Myron was in love with me, but he hadn’t realized it until he saw me dancing with Alfred. He told me that, one night in Africa.”

  You could almost see the effort it took her to control herself at some memory before she could go on.

  “Myron proposed to me. I think it was about two weeks after the dance, and I didn’t learn until years later how deeply my refusal had hurt him. Hurt is such a weak word for what he felt, because it never left him, but just took root and rankled and festered inside of him while he went right on loving me and wanting me more and more. Does it seem impossible to you that a man could feel like that?”

  “No,” Moon said, “it doesn’t.”

  He picked out some of the nastier, but terribly human, stuff that the cops would come across almost in their daily work: youngsters of the age that Myron Jettwick had been, bashing their girls’ heads loose with tire tools, giving them multiple wounds with a knife or blasting them with a pepper grinder when the girls had turned them down. A man scorned, he said, was just as lethal as a woman scorned, possibly because a lot of men have a lot of woman in them, and that was one of the ways it cropped out.

  “It was there all the time,” Helen Jettwick went on. “It was there after Alfred and I were married, only Myron hid it awfully well. I think that he liked to torture himself with it, in the sense of a mental flagellation, because he couldn’t have been kinder to Alfred and me whenever we were in actual want or trouble of any financial sort.”

  She detoured for a minute to give us a picture of her home life with Alfred after the wedding. You got it that young Alfred had had a good baritone of a church-choir variety, plenty of good looks, in contrast to Big Brother Myron’s more candid-camera mug, but no dramatic ability whatever.

  She and Alfred had lived very happily in a dumpy hovel under the el, mostly on a diet of Italian pastas larded with garlic, and he made what pennies he could by singing in fourth-rate concerts and with choral societies that were formed for their members’ own satisfaction and little else.

  Both of them had idolized from this mole’s viewpoint Brother Myron’s grandiose plans and dreams, which were shortly to start bringing home the bacon as facts.

  “I think it really did give Myron a sort of masochistic pleasure to help us out,” Helen Jettwick said. “Alfred and I naturally looked on him as some sort of a god, one whom we only had to appeal to and all of our difficulties were smoothed away. There were ten years of that, and Bruce had grown to be a boy of nine, and then Alfred was killed.”

  A sort of bleached look settled on her face before she went on. Myron had asked her to marry him, right off the bat, and you knew she had agreed to, in order to repay him for his ten years of many kindnesses.

  She also had Bruce’s future to consider, and had doped it out that the kid would be more secure as Myron’s stepson and living under Myron’s various roofs than as a nephew getting handouts whenever the flour ran low.

  She put it this way:

  “It was like something that he had bought after bargaining for with fate for a long time. Myron’s getting me to marry him, I mean. I must sound terribly conceited saying all this, but that happens to be the way it was.”

  “Mr. Moon did not know Myron,” Miss Jettwick said incisively, “but I did.” She leaned over and pressed one of Helen Jettwick’s nervous hands. “You did, too.”

  How well, it seemed,
nobody had ever known until then. You caught the nightmare that had followed her marriage to Myron, so shortly after Alfred’s funeral in Vienna; a nightmare made up of knowing that Myron loved her passionately but hated her, too, hated her with a vindictiveness that had made every moment of her life with him a hell. Because she had turned him down. Because he was physically ugly and Alfred hadn’t been, and because she had loved Alfred. Because (and this was the hottest because of all) she had married him out of sympathy for the kindnesses he had done, so pervertedly, for her and for Alfred and for Bruce.

  Miss Jettwick said:

  “He always wanted his revenge, Helen. Even when we were children he would want it whenever he fancied some slight to his pride or couldn’t have his own way. He would generally manage to get it.”

  “It was Myron, of course, who stole the jewelry aboard the Leviathan?” Moon said.

  Helen Jettwick looked at him curiously. I did, too, as the statement seemed a pretty big rabbit to pull out of anybody’s hat. Then I remembered the manila envelope in the safe at the Manning and realized it probably wasn’t only full of rabbits, but goldfish bowls and the flags of all nations.

  “You know that?” Helen Jettwick said.

  “Yes.”

  “I didn’t think of it, not for many years, and then I began to feel positive that nobody else could have hidden the jewels among my things, or would have. It was a certainty, a conviction that came too late.”

  “And the divorce, Mrs. Jettwick?”

  It was then that she started to cry. It was a good downfall but she kept talking right on through it.

  “I would have turned,” she said, “to a stone for sympathy. The deadest, cheapest, foulest person in the world could have said to me, ‘I’m sorry for you,’ and I would have clung to him. I did.”

  “Jeffry Smith?”

  “Yes, Jeffry.”

  “And then?”

  “But don’t you see? Jeffry had been hired by Myron and paid for doing just that. I can’t prove it, but nothing will ever make me believe anything else.”

  Well, we left them with Miss Jettwick doing the mopping up, and I asked Moon just what new enlightenments he had gleaned from all of that. Strangely enough, he answered me.

  “I am now thoroughly convinced that no arguments or pleas on the part of his murderer could have swerved Myron Jettwick from his plan.”

  “What plan?”

  “A plan to blast the world apart, if he had to, in order to shoot a sparrow down.”

  He couldn’t have made things plainer if he’d written me a letter in invisible ink.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  “HE’S IT!”

  We turned in shortly after eleven and it was that night, during the narcotic hush of the steaming tropics, that friend killer got busy again and cut another notch in the grip of his gun. Only it wasn’t a gun.

  There was no wind, and heat from the torrid day still formed a thick blanket on the dead night air. All of the latticed doors opening onto the gallery were left open, and the night became very mute with the only thing you could hear being the splash of water from a fountain in the patio’s central pool. It was all very trickle and Spanish and correct, but it sounded like a leaky tap to me.

  For Moon suggested, just before he went to sleep, that I stay up. He wanted me to take my gun and my thoughts and camp out all night on a chair beside the lattice door to Mrs. Smith’s room. Well, I did just that, pushing the chair under the shadow of a white-flowered vine with a thick sweet odor that would have gone over great at a funeral.

  I sat. I didn’t smoke, being used to giving it up during vigils of that nature. I contemplated all my thoughts, wondering whether the dead silence and oppressive heat spelled storm as it had that time Moon chased Coquilla after some inocarpus edulis in the South Sea Islands, they being Tahiti chestnuts and the exclusive property of the natives for all of me; wondering about the memo which Emberry and Snake-eye McRoss had found in the book on artichokes and whether it did refer to some paper which Moon had cached at the Manning, or if the paper were hidden somewhere else.

  In Jettwick’s apartment? Aboard Trade Wind or—I rated a mental kick for not thinking of it before—right here, right on Tortuagas, which was remote enough and private enough, and what else had given Moon the notion of coming down here, otherwise, in the first place?

  And then—that’s right—I went sound asleep. The eastern sky looked as if it had been hit by a box of ripe raspberries when I woke up. Dew had given me a good chill, and the world seemed queer for the first few seconds while I was trying to shake loose from a bad dream dealing with portholes, rowboats, and blistering socks on the head. Anyone could see pneumonia, rheumatism, and swamp fevers leering out of that humid dawn so I started to stand up and stretch when I heard the noise.

  Nothing can freeze you quicker than a strange noise in a world that’s dead. It came from Mrs. Smith’s room and it sounded like a defect in a bathtub drain, only muted the way trumpets are muted by a coked player in a sugar band. It was a whole lot darker still in that room than it was outside and the thought of silhouetting my physique with all its vital spots in the lattice doorway seemed a bad hunch, so I flattened on the tiles and looked inside.

  At first you could see nothing but a thick violet haze and then, over by the room’s inner doorway, I saw what looked like a bundle and the bundle seemed to twitch. That was enough to kill the Fenimore Cooper method of advance and I hit the bundle in two leaps and found it was Mrs. Smith. She was not only trussed up, but was very quickly choking to death from a length of fishline that had been wrapped and knotted around her throat.

  She was, as has been hinted, a case-hardened baby, which was just as well, as otherwise, another minute or two would have seen her swinging a harp. A penknife took care of the fishline, and there was far too much to do right then to lead her safely through the after-effects of attempted strangulation to go chasing after the bird who had done it.

  Anyhow, it seemed reasonable at the moment that said bird was synthetically snoring beneath bedcovers all ready to wake up surprised when the attack or corpse was announced.

  Mrs. Smith was conscious after ten minutes of good, honest work, which left me in one of the deepest and most thankful sweats on record, when she croaked in a fool sort of whisper:

  “I woke up just as he slid the cord under my neck. Did you get him, Mr. Stanley?”

  “No, I didn’t. Quit talking for a while.”

  “Who was it?”

  “I don’t know. Keep still.”

  If her, thought I, why not Moon, too? He has an uncanny ability for taking care of himself and hates being worried about, but I lifted Mrs. Smith from the floor just the same, and started to head through the murky haze for the bed when Moon said from the lattice doorway:

  “No, Bert, not the bed. There is someone on it already.”

  I did not drop Mrs. Smith. No matter how many times either she or Moon may claim so, I did not drop Mrs. Smith. His voice, his whisper, had given her a convulsive start, and could I help that?

  “Why not,” Moon said, “some light?”

  He left me to re-collect Mrs. Smith, and went to a wall switch and turned on the ceiling lamp, which was an ormolu nifty patterned after the kind once in vogue aboard Spanish galleons.

  McRoss was on the bed.

  He had come, I figured, to a very horrible, but fitting, end. A razor blade had slipped from the fingers of his right hand and lay, just beneath them, on the tiled floor. A slash across his throat oozed red, and the setup looked a natural: he’d come down to get the incriminating paper referred to in the memo and to stop Mrs. Smith before she remembered and talked; then he had sliced himself in that fit of remorse which sometimes hits amateur killers directly on top of their crime. I said to Moon:

  “He’s it, isn’t he?”

  Moon said, “Yes, Bert. He’s it.”

  It was hours later, after a good deal of messy this and that, that I knew Moon’s “it” referred to the
goat in the game of tag, and this error in understanding went a long way toward almost losing me my only and valuable skin.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  EARTHQUAKE

  Well, Moon told me acidly that Mrs. Smith would revive herself, and this time to let her stay on the floor as it was better for her than being constantly dropped, and he asked me to wake up District Attorney Seward and send him in. Then he wanted me to go down to Trade Wind, radio-telephone Wallace Emberry and find out when was the last time he had seen McRoss and if he knew anything in connection with McRoss’s having left New York.

  I woke Seward and warned him of the surprise waiting for him in the next room, then went down to the patio and took the path for the dock. It was a relief, as it always is, to picture the case as closed, and I daydreamed while stepping along between the bougainvillea hedges of a pleasant run back North, with Mrs. Smith being deeply grateful during moonlight nights on deck for having been saved from a good garroting, even if she should happen to be lame for a couple of days from her own spasmodic exits from my arms.

  The dock was deserted. So were Trade Wind’s decks and those of Flamingo, the small cruiser which Warrenby Dorset used to ferry between the island and Key West.

  Kenny Mattson was sound asleep in his bunk, but he woke up with a perfectly natural grouch, put on espadrillos, lit a cigarette and went with me into the wireless room. I gave him the news about Mrs. Smith and McRoss, and, being a screwball like most wireless operators, he was cheered almost to pieces at being in the vicinity of attempted murder and violent death. If I missed a detail in describing the horrible scene it certainly wasn’t that lad’s fault. He even wanted to know the make of the razor blade which wasn’t, when I came to think of it, such a dumb question at that.

  He had some trouble in raising New York because, he said, of atmospherics, and, when he did get through, he was told that Emberry’s apartment didn’t answer. He tried the Long Island number, and after ten minutes or so told me that the call was through.