The Philadelphia Murder Story

by Zenith Brown

  Even in the dark, I could see his face turn slowly to a sort of tarnished copper.

  “The colonel wanted to make sure you got in okay, ma’am,” he said.

  “Oh, all right,” I said, and started up the stairs again, always glad to co-operate.

  Sergeant Buck cleared his throat. It sounded like a foghorn doubling in brass. It meant he had something more to say, so I turned back.

  “If you run into the little lady, ma’am, tell her she don’t need to worry none.”

  “I’ll tell her,” I said.

  “But tell her she’d ought to try to clarify her skirts, ma’am,” he added very seriously.

  It disturbed me a little. Usually, when Sergeant Buck extended the protection of his rock-ribbed wing, it was with an entirely mistaken if complete conviction of innocence indirectly involved with the clarification of skirts. Or so Colonel Primrose always said.

  I nodded.

  “And now if you’ll go to bed, ma’am,” he said patiently, “I got work to do. No offense meant, ma’am,” he added hastily, as if his own skirts might do with a bit of clarifying.

  “None taken, sergeant,” I said. “Good night.”

  He waited on the curb until the door opened. I caught a glimpse of him as I went in, turning his head and spitting over the hood of Travis’ car. As far as Sergaent Buck was concerned, I was in the finished-business basket for the night.

  Closing the front door of Abigail Whitney’s house was not, however, synonymous with getting directly to bed. I still had the second-floor gantlet to run, and I saw, as soon as I reached the mirror on the stairs, that it was going to be a delaying task. Mrs. Whitney’s door was open, her light was on, and she was sitting up in her yellow cushions like a crafty old spider in the middle of her web.

  “Come in, Dear Child,” she called as I passed the shell recess in the upper hall.

  I went in. She was sitting up against her cushions all wrapped up in soft fluffy marabou, and looked grotesquely like an amiable old buzzard who’d eaten a gosling, except for its downy jacket, which she was now wearing. Her eyes were alert and very bright, and I wondered how she managed to keep herself in bed when she was as excited as she plainly was. She tried to relax as I came into the room, and appear Interested But Detached.

  “Dear Child,” she said, “I must Tell you. The Police have been here. And Colonel Primrose. They are Delightful People; they couldn’t have been More Charming.”

  “I’m sure they couldn’t,” I said.

  And I imagined they were. I could see them, all of them, practically turning handsprings, trying not to disturb the invalid in her sanctuary more than they could help.

  “But Captain Malone is a very Strange Man, Dear Child,” she said. “I’m sure if the taxpayers Really Knew——”

  “Really knew what?” I asked blankly.

  “Well, Dear Child,” she said. “Surely it isn’t customary for the Police to go to Fancy-Dress Balls when they’re investigating murders. Or is it? I’m sure you’re much more Familiar with their Procedure than I.”

  “I don’t know what you mean, Mrs. Whitney,” I said.

  “Well, it’s rather awkward, to be sure,” she said, her voice going vaguely off. “I suppose it was Unfortunate, Really. But, you see, he came with his valise, and my man, whose hearing is most imperfect, mistook him for a guest, and laid out his things in the guest room downstairs. And would you realize, Dear Child, what he had in his bag?”

  I shook my head and waited, for some reason holding my breath a little.

  “Well, I’ve told you, Dear Child. It was a masquerade costume. Of an Eighteenth-Century Quaker gentleman. I would assume he was going as Benjamin Franklin. But it’s most Extraordinary, carrying it around with him while he’s investigating crime. But the most extraordinary thing, my dear; it had Blood On It.” She looked at me with bland open blue eyes. “You would have thought,” she said, “that he would have been grateful to my man for cleaning it off—as any well-trained servant would do. But not at: all. Dear Child, you won’t believe it, but he was Livid—Absolutely Livid.”

  10

  It was bootless, of course, to try to speculate on where Captain Malone had found the clothes that Benjamin Franklin had worn and got blood on, especially with no help from Abigail Whitney. Having said he was livid at finding them neatly cleaned and pressed, she promptly dismissed both the subject and me.

  “You may leave the door open, Dear Child,” she said, “I find the atmosphere of Philadelphia rather Oppressive at Times. But many people do, of course.”

  I was glad to get up to my room and leave the door closed. And I had the feeling that if Sergeant Buck could forget his distaste of me sufficiently to ask me to tell Laurel she didn’t have to worry, it was of considerable importance. She had plenty to worry about already, and if, in the long night ahead of her, there was one point on which she could be at rest, it would be a good thing to let her know about it.

  The telephone was still plugged in and on my bedside table. I looked up the United Service Club and dialed the number. A pleasant voice answered. I asked if I could speak to Miss Laurel Frazier.

  “I’m sorry,” the woman said. “Miss Frazier wasn’t feeling very well, so she went home. She didn’t stay but a moment. If you’ll wait, I have her number here.”

  After I had dialed it and waited, hearing the periodic burr at the other end of the line, I looked her name up in the phone book, wondering where she lived when she wasn’t at the brownstone house next door. It was a number on Locust Street between 17th and 18th, which meant it was just across the square, a stone’s throw from the club. I put down the phone and dialed again, just to make sure, but there was still no answer. She had probably gone back to Judge Whitney’s, I thought. Nevertheless, I tried her number again after I’d got ready for bed and put the windows up. Wherever she was, she wasn’t at home.

  I turned off the light and lay there. It was hard to relax enough to go to sleep, wondering what was going on next door, and wondering also whether my hostess was prowling around the house. Finally the meeting next door broke up. I could hear men’s voices, and then their feet on the brownstone steps, and a succession of car doors slamming and motors turning on. The sounds died gradually away, leaving the street silent for a few moments.

  Then I heard the door close again and Travis Elliot speaking. “I guess I’ll go over to the club and pick Laurel up.”

  “I’ll come along, if you don’t mind.” I recognized Monk’s voice. “I need some fresh air.”

  “Sure, come on,” Travis said. “We’ll have a chance to talk.”

  I wondered first whether Monk Whitney was actually fooling himself that it was fresh air he wanted, and then whether Travis Elliot would have agreed with as much readiness if he’d pondered that book Monk had been talking about. I also wondered whether Monk had got around to telling Travis, as friend and well-wisher, that Laurel Frazier wasn’t the girl for him to marry. If he weren’t so determined that Psychology for the Man in the Street didn’t apply to him, he’d have a better chance, it seemed to me, than he appeared to have now. He’d probably have to wait until he woke up some morning in a foxhole somewhere thousands of miles from home, the way he’d waked up out in the Pacific realizing how much his father meant to him. And if Laurel had married Travis before he came back, it would be too late. She’d be too loyal and too stubborn—and so would he—to admit there’d been a mistake. I heard their footsteps echoing and fading out across the square, and then the faint faraway rhythm of dance music.

  Then I awoke with sudden and appalling clarity. Judge Nathaniel Whitney was speaking. It was his voice that woke me up, right there in the room.

  “I am here. What else do you want me to do?”

  I sat up, the cold, deliberative force of his voice in my ears robbing me of all power to move or to speak to him. But I couldn’t speak to him or see him; he wasn’t there. A sudden sort of panic seized me, and I grabbed at my dressing gown and put it around my
shoulders and switched on the light. The room was quite empty. I looked around it blankly, and then I got up and went over to the closet door and opened it. A light came on in the ceiling, but all it showed was the cedar lining and cedar shelves built in against the wall and covered with yellow rosebud chintz. Judge Whitney was certainly not lurking anywhere in there.

  It could have been a dream, I thought, closing the door again, but I hadn’t been dreaming up to that time, as far as I knew, and there was no dream content mixed up with what I remembered.

  The words and the tone of Judge Whitney’s voice were still vividly clear in my mind. “I am here. What else do you want me to do?”

  It might have been the jinni in the Arabian Nights, coming at the call of the lamp but rebuking Aladdin for his presumptuous demands. That was precisely what it sounded like, with the “else” definitely emphasized.

  I sat on the edge of the bed, looking around—I couldn’t quite bring myself to look under it—half expecting I’d still find him or that he’d go on and say something else. But that was that. The room and the house and everything around me was as silent as the grave. I decided I must be getting psychic as a result of all the ghosts around, and then I decided that was nonsense. I had heard Judge Whitney. I hadn’t imagined it at all.

  I turned out the light and went over to the window and looked out into the square, just to get a sense of other people, and to get out of my mind, so I could go to bed again and go to sleep, a feeling that I was a kind of prisoner cooped up in the third floor of a madhouse. I wasn’t exactly frightened, but I’d have been pleased to see Sergeant Buck standing down there or even Mr. Albert Toplady—or even the squirrel, for that matter. Actually, the person I saw was none of them. It was Judge Whitney.

  I’d just started to go back to bed when I heard a sound and looked down into the street. There was a widening oblong of light as the door of the brownstone house opened and a heavy shadow elongated against it. It closed then, and I saw Judge Whitney come out, putting on his hat. He stopped halfway down the steps and glanced up at Abigail’s window. I thought for an instant that he might be trying to see whether she was still awake and watching in her mirror, and then I saw that it was quite the contrary. He was holding his cigar lighter up much longer than was necessary to light his cigar, looking up at her mirror, his face illuminated there, so that if she was watching at all, she wouldn’t fail to see him. Then he snapped off the lighter and went on down the steps and along 19th Street toward Walnut.

  “I am here. What else do you want me to do?” I could hear the words again. It was his sister Abigail he was talking to, and in some way I didn’t know about, I’d overheard it. I had a sudden intuitive certainty of it as clear as the words themselves had been. He’d been downstairs, talking to her again as he’d been the night before. How he’d got there or got back to his own house—— That dilemma vanished as I heard the sound of hurrying feet out in the square.

  I looked quickly across. For a moment I couldn’t see anyone, though the steps on the paved walk were coming closer. Then a small dark figure materialized out of the shadows full into the light, and I saw Mr. Albert Toplady again. He was coming from the Locust Street end of the square and headed toward the pink house, I thought, drawing back from the window sill. He was looking up at it, but before he came to the curb across the street, he changed his course and went to the brownstone house. At the bottom step he hesitated, but only for a second, and went up and rang the bell.

  It seemed to me a very long time before I heard the door open and the muffled sound of voices. They weren’t muffled long—at least one of them wasn’t.

  The Irish maid’s Irish rose, and her voice with it. “. . . I’m tellin’ you it’s no decent hour for you to come disturbin’ the judge! You can come back in the mornin’, and see you keep a civil tongue in your head when you do!”

  The door slammed shut emphatically. In a moment, Mr. Toplady came slowly down the steps and went off—if he had known it—following Judge Whitney toward Walnut Street, a forlorn figure, his brief candle of courage snuffed rudely out.

  I don’t know at what point it was during the night that it came into my head that Judge Whitney was going on some errand for his sister. That “What else do you want me to do?” implied, of course, that he had already done something. If it had been anybody but Judge Whitney, it might have occurred to me that what he had done had been the little matter of chopping Myron Kane. But that was an absurdity that even I boggled at.

  11

  One of the things about men is that they’re never around when you need them. I went downstairs the next morning at a quarter to nine, my date with Captain Malone at the Second Detective Division, 12th and Pine, weighing a little heavily on my mind. I’d sort of taken it for granted that Colonel Primrose wouldn’t let me go alone, but I hadn’t had any word from him since he left Abigail’s before Laurel tried to burn Monk’s handkerchief. I couldn’t exactly blame him, considering that I’d been anything but helpful—and not reasonable, but when has any woman been reasonable? Nor was there any reason I shouldn’t go alone. A police station is probably the safest and most respectable place in the world.

  Nevertheless, I thought Colonel Primrose was playing me a dirty trick, and I was glad when Abigail called me as I came downstairs, so I’d have a chance to tell somebody so. She was sitting up in her swan’s bed, her breakfast tray still across her lap, her henna hair still done up in aluminum curlers, which looked very funny above her fancy lace and sea-green quilted-satin bed jacket. It was surprising, too, because Travis Elliot was there, having a cup of coffee with her, and I’d have thought her vanity would have at least demanded a frilly handkerchief over the curlers if there was a man around.

  “What are you Doing out at This Hour, Dear Child?” she demanded. From her surprised incredulity, you’d have thought it was a quarter past five.

  “It’s a command invitation from Captain Malone,” I explained. “I thought Colonel Primrose would be here to escort me, but I expect he’s down at the Quaker Trust Company doing his job for Mr. Morgenthau.”

  Abigail put her chocolate cup down. “Are you suggesting that you’re going alone, Dear Child?” she said. “To a Police Station?”

  The polite horror in her voice put the whole thing in its proper perspective at once.

  “Surely,” I said. “Why not?”

  “I’ve never Heard of Such a Thing,” she said. “Never. And you’re doing Nothing of the Sort. . . . Get up, Travis. Get up at once. You’ll Go With Her, Dear Boy. You should, anyway. My husbands were all very Intelligent and Far-Seeing men, and there was only one point on which they were in Unanimous Agreement. That was that one should never talk without his Lawyer Present. While they never went to Police Stations, I’m very Sure if they had they wouldn’t have dreamed of going without Legal Support.”

  Travis put down his cup and got up obediently. He was trying not to laugh. “I don’t think it’s as dangerous as all that, Aunt Abby,” he said. “But I’ll be glad to go along if Mrs. Latham would like to have me.”

  “You’ll go whether she likes it or not, Dear Boy,” Abigail said. “I’ve had one of my guests murdered. I don’t intend to have the other thrown into prison by that astonishing man who carries Bloody Clothes around in Satchels.”

  “Isn’t she wonderful?” Travis said. “Come on. I’ve got my car out here.” We went out the front door and down the steps. “What I’d like to know is what this is she’s saying about Malone’s fancy dress. I’d say Malone hasn’t had a fancy dress since he wore a sheet on Halloween.”

  “Didn’t they talk about it last night?”

  He shook his head, looking inquiringly at me.

  “About Benjamin Franklin’s ghost turning up at the Curtis Building yesterday when Myron was—was murdered?”

  He’d put the key in the lock. He turned and looked at me. “You don’t think you ought to go back to bed for an hour or two?” he asked with a grin. “Or am I crazy?”

 
; “It’s someone else, I believe,” I said. “Captain Malone thought it was the watchman at the reception desk—he was the one who saw the ghost. Now that he’s found the raiments and they had blood on them, I gather, I guess he’s decided the ghost was real enough.”

  He shook his head.

  “Well, I don’t know what it means either,” I said. “But apparently the watchman wasn’t making it up entirely.”

  As he opened the car door, the door of the brownstone house opened and Monk came out. He was in uniform, and looked very snappy except for the lined patches under his eyes.

  He came over to us. “Where you guys going?”

  “I’m taking Mrs. Latham to the police station for Aunt Abby,” Travis said.

  Monk looked quickly at me. “Twelfth and Pine?”

  I nodded.

  “Give me a lift then, will you, Trav? I got a summons this morning too. I was going to ask if you thought you ought to go along, and then I thought I’d let them make the first move.”

  “What does the judge think?”

  They had both become serious all of a sudden.

  “I don’t know,” Monk answered shortly. “I haven’t seen him since last night.”

  “Maybe we’d better——”

  At that moment a taxi came to a stop at the curb. I thought for a moment, seeing Sergeant Buck in it, that his colonel was there, too, but he wasn’t. Sergeant Buck got out, started toward the pink house, saw the three of us standing there, and came toward us. He advanced to within six paces, came to a formal halt, and gave the impression of not actually but still, in effect, saluting a commissioned officer.

  “My orders, sir, were to accompany the lady to the police station at Twelfth and Pine,” he said. “Be there at nine-thirty, sir.”

  Monk looked inquiringly at me.

  “I’m going with Major Whitney and Mr. Elliot, sergeant,” I said. “You tell Colonel Primrose.”

  Sergeant Buck didn’t actually take me by the scruff of the neck and put me into his taxi, but he got in himself, and when we turned out of Rittenhouse Square, he and the taxi were just behind us.