The Bronze Mermaid

by Paul Ernst

  Stengel had stayed at the street door and now he called, “Here’s the kid, chief,” and Amado, Joe’s nephew, came into the room beside the big plain-clothes man.

  I got up and went to him. He was pretty worried, not knowing exactly about what, and his hair and dress showed that he’d got up from a deep sleep.

  “You’re okay, youngster,” I soothed him. “We just want to ask you a few more questions. About last year when you were with Joe in the kitchen. Polish up your memory—and get things straight.”

  I looked at Ryan and he looked back at me with the gray agate eyes as full of cheer and comfort as chips off a glacier.

  “Your play,” he said to me.

  I turned to Amado. “Last year about this time, a suitcase was left by the expressman at the service door and your uncle paid the charges on it.”

  Amado nodded his bushy black head.

  “The suitcase held the effects of Dick Rosslyn, who usually danced here with his sister, but was killed in an accident at a New Jersey resort.”

  “That’s what Uncle Joe said later,” Amado replied. “I didn’t know, at the time.”

  “It was sent from the Ring and Rose, near Euler’s Grove, New Jersey.”

  “I wouldn’t know,” Amado said. It wasn’t flippant; he was trying hard to recall everything.

  “Your uncle told you to take it back to the sister’s dressing room. Rose Rosslyn’s room.”

  “That’s it.”

  “All right, now. You didn’t get up front here, in this room, often, did you?”

  “No. Just a couple times. There was no reason for me to leave the kitchen.”

  “Didn’t you ever get sent back to the dressing rooms with coffee or sandwiches?”

  “No. If there was a call, a busboy took it. And there weren’t many calls—Mr. Checckia was tight that way.”

  “So you came from the kitchen with the suitcase. Was there anyone in the main room here, that day?”

  Amado nodded.

  “You’re sure?”

  “Yes. I’ve been thinking about this all the way down here, remembering everything I could.”

  “Who was here?”

  “Just about everybody that day, Mr. Cates. Duffy had the orchestra rehearsing, and the girls were here going over a new dance number, and the singers.”

  “Was Rose Rosslyn here?”

  “Well, no. Anyway, I don’t remember her. I expect she was excused, her brother just dead, and all.”

  “But everybody else was here?”

  “I think so, Mr. Cates.”

  “All right, you went on through this room and past the orchestra dais and back into the corridor. With the suitcase.”

  “Yeah.”

  “And where did you take it?”

  “To Miss Rosslyn’s dressing room.”

  “You didn’t look around in there?”

  “No. I didn’t even go in. I just opened the door, set the suitcase inside to the right, closed the door and went back to the kitchen.”

  “Let’s do it again,” I said. “You have a suitcase in your hand. Take it back to Rose’s dressing room just as you did last year. You can remember clearly?”

  “Sure. I remember that, all right.”

  Amado, self-conscious about it but with his right hand curled down at his side as if around the handle of a suitcase, went toward the curtained doorway with Ryan and me after him.

  “It’s just like I said,” he told us earnestly—the boy who wanted to be an engineer and had only worked at the 50 for a few weeks and hence couldn’t be expected to know the layout very well. “I was told right where to put it, and that’s where I did put it. Here—Miss Rosslyn’s dressing room.”

  He opened the door of Larry Mansfield’s room.

  15

  MANSFIELD could have made us trouble. The prints on the envelope were smeared past identification; we had nothing much on him at that time.

  Sure, there was gum on the murder envelope, and he was a habitual gum chewer. But nearly everyone chews gum sometimes, which knocked that out.

  Sure, Dodge Duffy said that in talking over the smashing of Barkasy’s fiddle later with the crowd, Mansfield had been present and heard that Barkasy had a spare which he had taken to Venuccia’s. And Ryan, knowing now what to look for, had found the singer’s prints on three of the bull fiddles at the shop. But while this proved that it was Mansfield who had broken into the shop, it was inconclusive as murder evidence.

  So Mansfield could have stretched things out and made some trouble for a while. But he didn’t. He was not too bright, and he was shy on guts, and turning Ryan loose on him was like mashing flies with bowling balls.

  In his office that afternoon Ryan had Mansfield spit into a Dixie cup and gave the cup to Stengel, who went wordlessly out with it. Then Ryan unfolded a newspaper and began to read it, feet on desk. Not a word to Mansfield.

  A man in uniform came to the door with a chambermaid from Barkasy’s hotel. She looked at Mansfield, and nodded. Ryan went back to his paper. Mansfield began to sweat.

  The man came again presently with a waiter and one of the cancan girls from the 50. They looked at Mansfield, and nodded. Ryan returned to his paper, and Mansfield seemed to be having trouble swallowing.

  After above five minutes the singer said belligerently, “Well?”

  Ryan glanced at him. “Well, what?”

  “You brought me here to ask questions, didn’t you?” Mansfield said. “So go ahead and ask them! Anything you want!”

  “Questions?” Ryan said. “Oh, we’re past that.”

  Stengel came back with a neatly typed laboratory report in his hand. “Saliva test okay, chief,” he said stolidly. “Chemical analysis, bacteria count—it checks with what we got from the gum that stuck the envelope to the fiddle.” Ryan stretched and yawned. “All right, Stengel, that does it. Lock him up and we’ll all go out and have some dinner. I’m damned glad this is over—maybe I can get some sleep tonight… On your feet, Mansfield.”

  Mansfield, however, couldn’t seem to manage this; his knees weren’t working very well. He was innocent, he screamed. They couldn’t prove a thing on him. Then glaring fearfully at the official-looking report which Stengel had tossed to Ryan’s desk—it was self-defense! He hadn’t meant Rose any harm. An accident! A crazy woman came at you with a gun—what could you do but try to take it away from her—

  It was about as we had worked it out before—making the sole, but rather important, mistake of applying the theory to the wrong person.

  Mansfield came into his room that day to find a suitcase there which he recognized as Dick Rosslyn’s. Dick dead, his effects probably not inventoried, let’s look and see what’s there. Mansfield was that kind of guy.

  He looked, and saw a yellow developer’s envelope, and got a glimpse of the pictures inside. Enough to recognize a girl he had seen Dick meet in the time he’d shared a dressing room with Dick. Then Checckia burst in and commandeered the suitcase. He was manager here, he would deliver it to Rose himself.

  With the first or second worried trip to Checckia’s office of the girl in the snapshots, Mansfield saw what he had missed. Money for those pictures. And it could have been his if he hadn’t spinelessly turned the stuff over to Checckia at the manager’s peremptory demand. From then on, Mansfield thought of nothing but getting them back. Not so young any more, his future on the edge of becoming his past, he needed money badly.

  Then, the night of Ellen’s appearance with the diamond. Mansfield sang and sang. He bowed and started off, and turned back for an encore. He bowed again and went toward the curtained doorway—and through the crack saw Rose Rosslyn steal into the manager’s office. What was the sister of Dick Rosslyn after? He followed and found out. And left her dead—for Checckia, scared green, to carry from his office to her dressing room in the hope of throwing Homicide off the trail.

  It wasn’t clean. The vengeful manager, if no one else, knew where those pictures probably had gone; he knew Mansfiel
d had seen them. Checckia ordered Mansfield to his apartment next night and bluntly accused him of killing Rose and taking the envelope. It could have been a bluff, but Mansfield didn’t feel like taking chances with the chair. He shot Checckia with his own gun, ran from the apartment—and tangled with a possible witness on the stairs.

  Now he had to have money to get away on. And the envelope wasn’t in Barkasy’s fiddle where he had hidden it, and it wasn’t in Barkasy’s room, and later at Venuccia’s he couldn’t tell which fiddle was which, and there he was…

  This came out a little later, though. First, after Stengel had half-led, half-supported Mansfield from the room, Ryan opened a desk drawer and tossed the blood-stained envelope onto the desk. He lived up to his bargains, according to his lights.

  “You’ll want a look at these,” he said, fanning the contents of the envelope out on the desk. Negatives, a motel registration card signed Mr. and Mrs. R. Roswell, and pictures.

  Dick Rosslyn and a girl standing by his convertible. Dick Rosslyn and a girl in front of the bronze mermaid at Sea City. Dick in front of the mermaid; the girl in front of the mermaid. Dick Rosslyn and a girl, arms around each other, in front of one of the cabins at the Crescent Motel.

  Dick Rosslyn and a girl.

  Marylin Keppert.

  People, in and out of Ryan’s office. Denham’s turn, with night gathering in the sky beyond the steel-meshed window.

  Ryan said, “What got you into this act?”

  His tone was almost mild, but Denham glared at him and clamped his mouth shut.

  Ryan stared at him for a minute, then touched with a fingertip the two envelopes on his desk. One was the plain white one with the bloodstain, the other was the smaller, developer’s yellow envelope originally inside the white one.

  “In here,” said Ryan, as if thinking aloud, and touching the white envelope, “are a motel registry card and a poorly snapped picture showing Dick Rosslyn and a girl, but with the girl’s face turned away so that she could hardly be identified. I think that’s all we need—” he touched the yellow envelope—“but I’d certainly hate to lose this, with the negatives and all the rest of the pictures in it.”

  Ryan got up then, and lit a cigarette, and turned to a filing cabinet behind his desk. He began pawing through this, back toward us, paying no attention to me or Denham or the envelopes.

  Denham’s eyes were desperate on the yellow envelope. He stared at it, and at Ryan, and Ryan showed no signs of turning.

  Denham grabbed the yellow envelope and put it in his pocket, and his face was kind of crumpled around the edges when Ryan finally left the filing cabinet and sat down at his desk again.

  “As I was saying, Denham, what got you into this?”

  “I’d rather not tell what first got me into it,” Denham said. “I don’t think you’d really want to know. I’ll just say that for a long time I’d wondered if Marylin weren’t in some kind of trouble, because of the way she acted. I’d seen the mermaid and snapshot Rose had—she and Marylin were good friends. Finally, on a hunch, I went down to Sea City and pieced together what was happening. Then I got up ten thousand dollars and went to Checckia to try to buy Marylin off. In about ten seconds I saw that that sum was peanuts in his game, and I left his office and came out to try to figure some other angle. It was figured for me when Rose was killed.”

  Ryan glanced at me, and I don’t know that he actually grinned but he looked as if he were considering it. And I looked at Denham and thought of all the shady theories I’d manufactured around his ten thousand dollars, and the simple, decent one I’d missed because my training led me to look last for simplicity and decency among the motives of the average citizen. Time for me to quit my job, perhaps, and take up bookkeeping or farming.

  Ryan looked around his desk. “Funny. I thought two envelopes were here. Guess the yellow one must be misplaced in the files somewhere. Good night, Denham.”

  He shook Denham’s hand.

  I paused a second before following Denham to the door. I don’t know why the thing built up so in importance, but it did; I’d have been disappointed beyond all reason if Ryan had just nodded and let me go. He didn’t.

  With his faint, reflected hint of a possibly considered grin, he shook my hand, too, and I followed Denham to the door.

  On the street we walked together for a moment, and then I said, “What did first get you into this, the thing you didn’t want to tell Ryan?”

  He thought that over for a while before deciding that he’d answer; he was not a man to blurt things out. Then he smiled a little, feeling at his breast pocket to be sure the yellow envelope was safely in there.

  “I was with Marylin when we came back and found Ellen tied up and the Duysberg diamond gone, a month ago. Remember? That clothesline Ellen was tied with… I’d seen Marylin tie knots before. Or try to. It clinched the feeling I had had that she was in a jam of some kind.”

  “Well, well,” I said. “So you knew all about the big gem robbery, too! Hi, there, accessory.”

  Mama came up to the door with her short-legged waddle when Ellen and I walked into the Auberge de Marseilles at nine o’clock. She beamed at Ellen and then beamed twice as much at me. A lovely night, monsieur, was it not that it was? A night for amour.

  I said, “Yes,” and tossed my hat at the check girl. “Mama, this is Miss Keppert. We may—keep the fingers crossed—be in together a lot from now on.”

  “Keeps the fingers crossed!” said Mama. “She can do much better than the monsieur.”

  “You have an idea there,” said Ellen. And she grimaced and Mama grimaced, and Papa trotted up and beamed and was introduced and kissed Ellen on both checks. Just being a host, of course.

  Papa led us to a secluded table, darting romantic looks at Ellen.

  “What do we want?” I asked Papa, to get rid of him.

  “Hors d’oeuvres, onion soup… We have such onion soup, mam’selle! The swordfish baked in black butter. The…”

  “Swell,” I said, handing him the menu.

  “And the wine, of course. I myself shall select the wine.”

  “Wonderful,” I said, turning my back.

  “And for the salad…”

  “Beat it,” I said. “Didn’t you hear Mama? It’s a lovely night for amour.”

  I looked at Ellen, and at the short upper lip—what was it about that slight difference from all other lips? I said, “Will you marry me?”

  “Marry you!” she repeated, with the finest look of surprise I’ve ever seen outside the movies.

  “Yeah,” I said. “You know—first you get engaged, and then you get a license, and then you get m…”

  “You’ve seen me—what? Three times?”

  “Six, I think.”

  “What about my past? I still could have had affairs, you know. Innumerable affairs!”

  “Your past is yours,” I said. “Though I think you were a chump for taking on someone else’s. Even your beloved cousin Marylin’s.”

  “She was engaged to be married, and I wasn’t,” Ellen said, more seriously. “Poor dear. She met Howard after Dick died, and she found out then what it really meant to love somebody. But she’d thought she was in love with Dick. They were going to get married as soon as they could think of a way to do it without giving Auntie and Uncle a stroke. A senator’s daughter and a night club dancer—I’m sure Marylin meant it, and I think Dick was playing square. I met him through Marylin and he seemed quite nice. But they couldn’t wait, and they went to the shore together. And Dick got killed.”

  “All right,” I said. “You didn’t have to take all the risks for Marylin. That diamond stuff!”

  “She was scared to death that Howard would find out. So when Checckia said he’d give her the pictures and everything in exchange for Aunt Beatrice’s diamond, she finally told me what was going on, and we hatched up the robbery.”

  “And you volunteered to take the thing to Checckia. You ought to have your head ex…”

  “M
arylin had a lot more to lose than I did. And everything I have has been given to me by those nice people. Including trust. You saw how Uncle and Auntie backed me up.” Ellen nodded forlornly. “Anyway, nobody had any idea something like someone being killed would happen.”

  “It did happen, and you got caught in the middle, and still you played it out. You lied in my teeth.”

  “The expression is, ‘You lie in your teeth.’ Not somebody else’s teeth—”

  “Why didn’t you at least tell me that you weren’t the girl Checckia was tormenting?”

  “Would it have helped by then? It was murder, then, not theft. I was all the way in, and I might as well play it through. It wouldn’t have helped me any at that late date to throw Marylin to the wolves. Anyhow, why should I tell you things? Poking and prying around, trailing me to the Club Fifty.”

  “And walking out with your confounded diamond in my pocket! And if you laugh again I’ll—I’ll astound the Auberge de Marseilles!”

  She didn’t laugh. She sampled an hors d’oeuvre. “Mmmm, good,” she said. “I wonder how they make…”

  “Another thing,” I said. “Precisely what did you and your precious cousin think you’d do about the sixty thousand dollars the Home Protection Company paid your Aunt Beatrice for the loss of the Duysberg diamond?”

  “Why, return it. After all the smoke and shouting had died down, and when Marylin was twenty-six. She comes into quite a lot of money when she’s twenty-six.”

  “Peachy,” I said. “And how did you propose to go about returning it?”

  “Why,” Ellen began confidently. “Why—” she said, less confidently. “Why—I guess we hadn’t quite figured that out.”

  “Send it back in an anonymous letter?” I snorted. “Heave a certified check for it over the transom? You hadn’t figured it out at all. You need a smart accomplice, that’s what you need. Now if you marry me…”

  “Marry!”

  “Sure. Like I said. First you get engaged, then you…”

  “Oh, no, you don’t! First you meet the girl, then you try to sell her on your charm and other more steadfast virtues, and then you get engaged.”