The Philadelphia Murder Story

by Zenith Brown

  There was such bitterness in his voice that it was hard to believe it was his own father he was talking about, after the way he’d spoken the night before—before he’d heard Abigail Whitney and knew his father had killed Elliot.

  “You see, Trav was crazy about his father,” he went on slowly. “He just took it on the chin and shut up. The only thing he ever said was he couldn’t understand his father taking that kind of out. I mean, he tried like the devil to find some excuse to explain it to himself. I know he went to his father’s doctor. That was the tough part of it. If it was cancer or heart, then he could save something out of it—a decent memory. But there wasn’t.” He gave me a twisted kind of grin. “What I’m getting at, Grace, is my father and old Abigail. Everybody thought they were wonderful, the way they stood by. I guess one of the things that bum me up now is that one of the memories I had of my father is seeing him after the funeral. He brought Trav back to stay at our house. I can see him standing in the library with his arm around Trav’s shoulder, giving him a pep talk about being captain of his soul and not letting another man’s mistake warp his own life. He was wonderful—like one of the old Romans. Trav wanted to pay up and get out—go to New York or someplace where everybody didn’t know him. My father wouldn’t let him. He’d help him build up his practice, and so on.”

  The waiter took away our plates, looking pointedly at the clock.

  “He did that, and he carried Trav’s torch all over the place. He got everybody on his side. He saw that everybody knew Trav was paying up and knew Laurel and her mother were getting everything the guy could scrape together. So everybody pitched in, and Trav got all the breaks he deserved, and it’s been swell.”

  “Then what are you——”

  “What I’m objecting to is Trav thinking my father was doing it for his sake, for him, because he loved his father, instead of doing it to—to ease over a guilty conscience. That’s what I’m objecting to. Trav thinks my father is the Number One guy of the universe. He’s worked like a slave helping him, doing the dirty work on the books my father writes. He goes to see old Abigail all the time, and she could give him the money to replace what his father took without noticing it as much as if I gave a beggar a dime. Both of them, they’ve used him, used him all the time; and they knew all the time that the thing that was eating him was the fact that his father was a suicide, taking a run-out powder instead of facing the music. They’ve built him up, and what for? Just to cover the fact that my father, Judge Nathaniel Whitney, is a murderer. And Abigail—that old whited sepulcher. Pretending she’s bedridden——”

  He took another of the clippings out of the packet and pushed it across to me.

  ACCIDENT AT FUNERAL OF PROMINENT SUICIDE, it said. It was from one of the sensational tabloids. There was a picture of Abigail Whitney in a Merry Widow hat dripping with ostrich plumes that must have been in the paper’s morgue for years.

  FAMOUS BEAUTY’S ACCIDENT RECALLS GOSSIP LINKING HER WITH DEAD LAWYER, it went on.

  Many of Philadelphia’s socially elite are recalling that Abigail Whitney’s elopement with her first husband, a millionaire cotton broker, was widely believed to be the result of a broken heart when Douglas Elliot married another. Her spectacular career was given a setback yesterday when she slipped getting into her limousine and sustained a broken hip. The coolness that has existed throughout each of her successive marriages between Abigail Whitney and her brother, Judge Nathaniel Whitney, is rumored to have resulted from his interference in the match that would have made her the bride of a struggling young lawyer.

  “Is that true?” I asked. “I mean, about Abigail and Travis’ father?”

  Monk Whitney nodded. “The Whitneys, my dear madam, are a practical people. It’s just as simple to fall in love with somebody with money as with somebody without money. Abigail set out to embarrass them with a reductio ad absurdum. And she never forgot and never forgave. She also hates Elsie for having thrown Trav over. Though actually I don’t think Elsie was really in love with him before he was cleaned out.”

  “And what about Laurel?” I asked.

  “Ah, yes,” he said. “Miss Laurel Frazier. She upset the applecart completely. Her mother died at the end of her second year in college, three years after the debacle. They sold their house and moved into a little apartment in Bryn Mawr and scraped along on the interest of what Trav paid back. Then Laurel quit college and said she wasn’t taking anything from anybody, now that her mother was dead, and handed Trav back the principal intact. It’s mounting up someplace now. Neither of them will touch it.”

  His voice had a kind of controlled bitterness and pain.

  “And that’s just some more of the same,” he went on. “She’s just like Trav. She came to my father six months after her mother died, and she’s been there ever since, and she thinks he’s done her a great favor. She thinks she’s deeply indebted to him. And if Douglas Elliot had—had stayed alive, he’d have kept quiet about everything and paid them enough out of his earnings to let them live decently.”

  “She can’t really afford to burn up a fur coat just for fun, then, can she?” I asked.

  “What do you mean?”

  I told him what I meant, with some warmth because of the skeptical lift of his eyebrows the minute I began.

  “Look, Grace,” he said. “That sounds fine—and it’s phony on the face of it.”

  “It wasn’t,” I said flatly. “I was there and I saw her do it. It wasn’t phony at all. She was almost frantic.”

  “All right,” he said. “She was almost frantic if you say so. I don’t doubt it. But why?”

  “Why?” I said. “Good heavens, it was your handkerchief, and it had blood all over it, and she was at the Curtis Building this afternoon. I saw her come out, and that’s probably where she found it; she hadn’t been at your house very long.”

  “Okay,” he said. “But I wasn’t at the Curtis Building this afternoon, and don’t forget it. I don’t know how my handkerchief got there, if it is mine. But the point is a little different, Grace. Laurel Frazier’s been with my father about five years. My father’s a lawyer, and a good one, and she’s nobody’s fool.”

  “Which means——?”

  “Just this,” he said rather grimly: “She knew as well as I know now—and I don’t train with lawyers—that Malone wasn’t going to search the house. You still have to have a search warrant to search people’s houses in this country, Mrs. Latham. The idea of Malone’s getting out one to search Judge Nathaniel Whitney’s house is crazy. If she hadn’t wanted Malone to find the handkerchief, she’d have left it in her pocket and nobody’d have known the difference.”

  “No,” I said. “I don’t believe it, not for one minute. I’m telling you. She really was frantic. She just wasn’t stopping to use her head.”

  “She was using her head all right,” he said quietly. “She got the bloodhounds hot on my trail and off somebody else’s. I call that using the old bean, even if you don’t.”

  I looked at him blankly.

  “You’re being the dope this time, Grace. I know it sounds lovely, but it just ain’t so. Laurel Frazier wouldn’t go two feet out of her way to save me from the bottomless pit. I’ve known her all her life. She’s got the temper of a redheaded hornet and she thinks I’m a louse. Maybe she’s right. I was raising a lot of hell when she came to work for my father, and she got in on all of it. She kept his checkbook, and she used to add postscripts to his—his paternal remonstrances that would take the back hair off an armadillo.”

  “They haven’t got back hair,” I said.

  “Whatever they’ve got, then. And it’s all okay. She thought I was a pain in the neck to my father, and after the Affaire Elliot and her mother’s death, my father meant security to her, and everything her father had meant, and she went all out. She’s just nuts about him. There’s nothing she wouldn’t do for him. And that’s why I don’t think she ought to be bamboozled into marrying Trav. Don’t get me wrong, Grace; he’s a
swell guy; they don’t come any better. But that gal’s got something. If she was really in love with a guy, she’d burn her coat and her hands and she’d burn that hair of hers off to help him out of a jam. But she wouldn’t do it for me. Not that baby.”

  He grinned at me suddenly across the table.

  “There I go,” he said. “You’ve probably read a book about Psychology for the Man in the Street, and you figure I’m always harping on who she doesn’t love and shouldn’t marry because I’m in love with her myself and don’t know it. And you’re wrong. What I’d like to do is break her neck. And I’d like to know who she’s rigging me up for. I’d also like to know what she was doing over at the Curtis Building this afternoon.”

  I was looking at him with bewilderment. “You haven’t heard about the manuscript?”

  “What manuscript?”

  “The profile of your father, Myron’s piece. It’s gone, disappeared from the composing room of the Post this noon.”

  He was looking at me blankly.

  “Before Myron was killed,” I went on. “The work-sheet number or whatever they call it was right by his body. But the script wasn’t. It was taken out of the monotype keyboard basket while the foreman was out to lunch. And the knife he was killed with came from the cutting-down bench in the electrotyping division.”

  He was looking steadily at me. “Go on.”

  I went on. I told him the whole business. At the end, I went back and told him about the ghost of Benjamin Franklin. I thought I was adding a light touch that would relieve for a moment the staggering effect of the rest of it, but I was wrong.

  “Good God,” he said, his voice little more than a whisper.

  “And, Monk, there’s one other thing I think you ought to know. Laurel knows about your father.”

  His face turned an odd sort of flat color, as if that was more of a shock than the rest of it had been.

  “She doesn’t know it was Douglas Elliot—at least, I don’t believe she does. All she knows is he killed a man. Your aunt told her deliberately, to try to push her into marrying Myron Kane, to get that document back. That’s what made her call up Myron at Travis’ last night after your father had left, when you started throwing your weight about.”

  He sat there silently, doing a lot of adding and subtracting in his own head, I imagined, out of a background that I didn’t know anything about.

  “Well, the little fool,” he said then. His voice was hardly audible. “The poor, crazy little fool.” He picked up the packet of papers and stuck them into his pocket. “Come on, let’s get out of here.” He picked up his raincoat and got out of the booth.

  “What about the check?” I asked. “It’s still a civilian custom.”

  He shouted for the waiter through the beaded curtain. The man came running in, looking as if he’d been asleep, as he probably had. He had to go back after the bill, and then he had to go back after some change.

  “Sit down,” I said. “He’s waited long enough for us. Anyway, there’s something I want to know.”

  He sat down impatiently on the edge of the booth.

  “Who is Mr. Toplady?” I said. “And what goes on about him and Myron and your——” I didn’t know whether to say “your father” or “your aunt,” so I said, “your family?”

  His impatience with the agitated waiter evaporated immediately. “Toplady?” He looked at me as if he had never heard the name before and couldn’t possibly imagine what I was talking about.

  “Yes,” I said, “Mr. Toplady. He writes letters and haunts benches, and he doesn’t turn up at his bank to keep an appointment with a representative of the Secretary of the Treasury. You know, Mr. Toplady.”

  He looked at me with complete imperturbability. “Mr. Toplady,” he said. “Sorry, haven’t the faintest idea. Don’t know the guy. If that’s really his name, he ought to change it. Imagine being stuck with a moniker like that all your life. Ready?”

  At the foot of the rickety steps, he stopped. “What do you mean, not keeping an appointment with a representative of the Secretary of the Treasury?”

  “Just that,” I said, a little annoyed, the shadowy figure of Mr. Toplady back in my mind again—his haggard face and his sudden futile agony and despair. “He was supposed to meet Colonel Primrose this morning for a private showing of a movie about somebody’s back income tax, with a canceled check as the heroine. And he didn’t show.”

  He lost interest immediately. “Oh,” he said. “Let’s walk, shall we? Or do you want a taxi?”

  “I’ll have a taxi,” I said. The streets were as deserted as a graveyard at midnight.

  “I’d like to walk too,” Monk said.

  We turned into Locust Street and went along back toward Rittenhouse Square. At 17th he stopped and looked across the street at the brightly lighted windows of the old Yarnall house on the corner opposite the Warwick. A band was playing, and the couples dancing, laughing, past the windows of the handsome ballroom weren’t much different from the ones I remembered there, except that the men were all in uniform. The painted murals were covered with panels with big blue stars painted on them. It was the gayest spot I’d seen in Philadelphia. We stood like a couple of orphans in the storm, watching them through the windows. I didn’t realize what Monk was looking for until he gave up and we started on across the street. He looked back at the 17th Street entrance. A crowd of youngsters in uniform piling noisily in at the door moved aside to let a man in civilian clothes come out. It was Travis Elliot.

  Monk Whitney quickened his pace, but Travis had already spotted us and called out. We stopped and waited.

  “I just took Laurel over,” Travis said, coming up to us. “I sure wish this war would get over; I never see her any more. She’s there all the time. Cook, bottle washer, telephone girl, taxi dancer and everything else. She’s a hostess tonight, and they’re standing in line. I guess she won’t feel much like dancing.”

  He broke off abruptly, a little embarrassed. He’d obviously been talking fast, I thought, to avoid any reference to the late unpleasantness.

  “They do a swell job there, Mrs. Latham,” he went on hurriedly. “The organization that runs this service club’s been going since 1917. They never disbanded. They had over three quarters of a million men in their old quarters in the last war and they’re going way over that here. It’s a beautiful house. They’ve got a sun deck on the roof and a laundry in the basement, with a pool table in the next room, so you don’t have to waste any time while your shirt’s in the drier. They’ve got the snappiest bunch of gals you’ve ever seen.”

  “I guess I’ll resign my commission,” Monk said.

  It was intended to be funny, I suppose, but we fell into a gulf of embarrassed silence for a few moments.

  “Unless the Marine Corps does it for me,” Monk said then. “Well, go ahead. Say it. You might as well.”

  “All right, I will,” Travis said coolly. “I don’t see why the devil you had to get Malone’s back up the way you did. If you want to talk about it.”

  “Why not?” Monk inquired. “There’s no use pretending nothing’s happened.”

  “It seems to me we ought to sort of——”

  “Get together on a story?”

  Travis glanced at him curiously. “Not at all,” he said. “That isn’t what I mean. I don’t think you ought to go around shooting off your mouth until you find out what’s going on. Let me offer you the example of your brother-in-law.”

  “What’s Soapy Sam done?” Monk’s tone was alert and interested.

  “He’s got in touch with his lawyers. To the end that, one, he’s established an alibi for himself, and two, he’s offered a five-thousand-dollar reward for the return of the manuscript ‘purportedly’—I quote—‘stolen from the composing room of The Curtis Publishing Company Building.’ ”

  “Dead or alive, I suppose,” Monk said. “What does he mean, ‘purportedly’?”

  “You’ve got me, unless he means ‘purportedly,’ ” Travis said. �
�But, boy, he certainly went to town. He wanted to offer another thousand bucks for the identification of someone purportedly Benjamin Franklin seen hanging around the place, but the judge stopped him.”

  We’d come to the 19th Street side of the square. The Whitney houses, side by side, pink paint and mellow brownstone, were dark behind drawn curtains, except for the dimly lit panels of light through the front doors.

  “Where is the judge now?” Monk asked abruptly.

  “Home,” Travis said. “A couple of people from the Post are there, and the district attorney. Myron was supposed to have dinner with him tonight, you remember. Colonel Primrose is there, and they expected Malone back when I left with Laurel. They were asking for you, so if you want to look as if you aren’t ducking something, I’d advise you to come on up. Aunt Abby asked me to stand by for her, though I don’t know where she figures she comes in. Her alibi—speaking about alibis—is certainly foolproof, unless you believe in miracles.”

  “Or ghosts,” Monk said. He turned to me. “Do you want to come?”

  “No,” I said. “I definitely do not.”

  I said good night and went up Abigail Whitney’s steps.

  I waited there until I heard the door of the brownstone house close behind Monk and Travis, and then I turned around and looked carefully over as much of the square as I could see. It was so empty that if Mr. Albert Toplady had returned to take up his ominous vigil again I couldn’t possibly have missed him. A moment later I wasn’t quite so sure. A large square black object that I’d taken for a granite monument started to move, and I recognized the heroic proportions of Sgt. Phineas T. Buck. He was coming across the street, and he wasn’t coming to speak to me, but I went back down the steps, so he could hardly avoid it.

  He took it like a soldier and a stoic. “Something off-color, ma’am?”

  “No,” I said. “I was just wondering what you were doing out there.”