Holiday Homicide

by Rufus King

  “But the evidence in the box?”

  “That proved unethical legal conduct alone, not murder, and would only have resulted in his being disbarred. It also, as I’ve said, pointed the way to Mrs. Schuyler, in a general fashion to McRoss as a confidential associate in his capacity as secretary and to the men in administration who had been bribed.”

  “Is that why you arranged the cruise?”

  “Yes, with Mrs. Smith frankly being bait. Emberry would feel, as he did feel, that he had to stop her before she talked, and after the yacht docked at Tortuagas was his first chance.”

  “Why did Mr. McRoss come with him?”

  “McRoss knew too much, to a point where Emberry felt the time would come when McRoss would know all. I think that McRoss’s death was sealed at the moment when the box was opened before us in the dining saloon, after Commissioner McGilvray had had it brought up. Perhaps you remember McRoss stating that there should be a paper or an agreement concerning the Staten Island project, giving us the impression that he missed other important papers, too?”

  “Yes, I do remember that.”

  “Any reasonable excuse would have served to make McRoss accompany him on the flight down to Key West to join the yacht at Tortuagas. The one Emberry did use was that the missing papers might be found in the house on the island. The murder-suicide setup of McRoss and Mrs. Smith was his plan. Emberry himself, when they landed at Key West, made arrangements for hiring the launch to go over to Tortuagas. He hired it under the name of Jesse Walker, representing himself and McRoss as wealthy sportsmen who had flown down for several days’ fishing among the keys. All Southerners think all Northerners are crazy and millionaires and never question their whims or antics.”

  “How did he persuade Mr. McRoss not to join us immediately when they reached the island?”

  “He killed McRoss as soon as they reached the island. There is evidence that he stunned McRoss before he cut his throat. Mr. Seward and I both recognized the fact that McRoss had not been murdered on Mrs. Smith’s bed, nor that he could have committed suicide there. His jugular vein had been cut. That causes an almost unbelievable spurting of blood, and there was little, if any, blood on the bed sheets or about the room. On the other hand, when Mr. Stanley captured him in Mrs. Smith’s cabin, Emberry’s clothes were saturated with blood, wetly so, from it having become loosened by the rain.”

  “I know he was familiar with the house on Tortuagas. He had been there several times with Myron. But even so, to carry Mr. McRoss’s body into Mrs. Smith’s room, to strangle her and place the body on the bed—”

  “Surely there must have been noise?”

  “Not much, Miss Jettwick. Just enough, fortunately, to awaken Mr. Stanley.”

  I experienced at that point a good hot flush.

  “I can see,” Miss Jettwick said, “why he felt compelled to follow Mrs. Smith aboard the yacht. He had seen her, of course?”

  “Yes. He had watched the whole boarding business from the thick growth along the pathway. It was simple for him to come aboard unnoticed in the blinding rain, the darkness and the complete confusion of the moment. He waited in an empty cabin, the one just across the passage from Mrs. Smith’s. He saw her and Mr. Stanley go into her cabin. He saw Mr. Stanley leave it. He did not expect Mr. Stanley to return, although he waited for a moment to see. Then he entered Mrs. Smith’s cabin.”

  “Why wouldn’t he have shot her immediately?”

  “He had to find out whether she had talked and, if so, to whom. She told him that Mr. Stanley had gone for a drink and would return. He forced her to keep still during Mr. Stanley’s return under threat of shooting both of them instantly if she made any overt move. He felt certain that the yacht would put in at Key West, both to turn McRoss’s body over to the state authorities and also for repairs she would be sure to need after the storm. He expected no difficulty in stowing himself away for that short run, and especially under hurricane conditions. Once in Key West he would again become Jesse Walker, take a plane back to New York and be Emberry again. An Emberry who had never left his estate on Long Island.”

  The shrimps, need I say, were pretty nearly all gone.

  “What is more,” Moon added, “he would have been secure in his position and no longer in dread of exposure, public disgrace and a complete loss of the wealth, the comforts, and the time-honored standing which he had carved for himself from life. And now, Mr. Seward, I believe you flew down to collect these. Our bargain is at an end, all its conditions having been fulfilled.”

  Moon took the manila envelope from his pocket and gave it to Seward. Moon had picked it up at the Manning, he later condescended to tell me, just before we had sailed. I never did know just which members of the city and state administrations were involved. Which is, for them, just as well, because, even if Moon does exaggerate the point beyond all reason, I do chat.

  Little remains to be said.

  Warrenby Dorset joined us before we left Key West. His report on the storm effects at the island was terrific. You got the impression of what had once been a lushly treed paradise having been turned into a shaved pancake. All of which had made Dorset and the black boys very doleful indeed because there was nonsense in a job which called for just sitting about on a pancake. Miss Jettwick settled that by giving the black boys a good bonus and by hiring Dorset to manage her holdings out West.

  Also, before we left Key West, the complete story had broken in the nation’s press and the Violet Vane Cosmetic Hour was almost delirious in its haste to sign Bruce up again, and at four thousand instead of two thousand a week.

  It’s a pure waste of breath to say that this sat very well with Mother Schuyler. The Staten Island business was all shot and her dough was shot with it, except for the petty twenty percent she still could haul down from her housings up near Columbia University. Trade Wind’s run north was, in consequence, a very different affair, so far as she was concerned, than had been the run down. Not only was young Bruce thoroughly whitewashed, but gilded as well, and if Mrs. Schuyler ever once formed herself into a threesome during those moonlight nights on deck, I certainly didn’t see it.

  I must say, however, that she hovered, because she was right on hand to come gliding out from behind the wheelhouse in order to burst into happy tears and bestow her blessings at the break of the clinching clinch.

  Yes, love had its way, and Moon had his thirty thousand bucks, and there was I, packing our things again aboard Coquilla with nothing more romantic in view than a run to Guiana after Pekea nuts whose destiny in life was to be boiled by Moon in a soup.