“Daisy, that picture you took of me yesterday to sell to Mr. Stone, is it developed yet?”
“Geeth no, Mith Duluth. I ain't got the developing money yet. Theventy–five thenth. Ma don't give me but a nickel an hour for practithing thith gothdarn piano.”
“Here.” Iris thrust a ten–dollar bill into her hand. “I'll buy the whole roll. Run get the camera. We'll have it developed right
away.”
“Geeth.” The mercenary Daisy stared with blank incredulity at the ten–dollar bill. I stared just as blankly myself. I wasn't being bright at all.
I wasn't much brighter an hour later. We were back in our apartment, waiting for Inspector Green. Poppy, all for love, was trying to climb into my lap. Iris, who had charmed Barney Stone into developing Daisy's films, clutched the yellow envelope of snaps in her hand. She had sent our policeman away on a secret mission, but an infuriating passion for the dramatic had kept her from telling or showing me anything. I had to wait for Inspector Green.
Eventually Iris' policeman returned and whispered with her in the hall. Then Inspector Green came. He looked cold and hostile. Poppy didn't like him. She growled. Sometimes
Poppy was smart.
Inspector Green said: “you've been running all over town. I told you to stay here.”
“I know.” Iris' voice was meek. “It's just that I wanted to solve poor Miss Crump's poisoning.”
“Solve it?” Inspector Green's query was skeptical.
“Yes. It's awfully simple really. I can't imagine why we didn't think of it from the start.”
“You mean you know who poisoned her?”
“Of course.” Iris smiled, a maddening smile. “Henry Blodgett.”
“But ...”
“Check with the airlines. I think you'll find that Blodgett flew in from Ogden Bluffs a few days ago and flew back today. As for being sick in bed under his wife's care, I guess that'll make Mrs. Blodgett an accessory before the fact, won't it?”
Inspector Green was pop–eyed.
“Oh, it's my fault really,” continued Iris. “I said no one came to the house yesterday except those three people. There was someone else, but he was so ordinary, so run–of–the–mill, that I forgot him completely.”
I was beginning to see then, Inspector Green snapped: “And this run–of–the–mill character?”
“The man,” said Iris sweetly, “who had the best chance of all to poison the hamburger, the man who delivered it – the man from the Supermarket.”
“We don't have to guess. We have proof.”
Iris fumbled in the yellow envelope.
“Yesterday morning as we were going out, we bumped into the man delivering Miss Crump's groceries. Just at that moment, a sweet little girl took a snap of us. This snap.”
She selected a print and handed it to Inspector Green. I moved to look at it over his shoulder.
“I'm afraid Daisy is an impressionistic photographer,” murmured Iris. “That hip on the right is me. The buttocks are my husband. But the figure in the middle – quite a masterly likeness of Henry Blodgett, isn't it? Of course, there's the
grocery apron, the unshaven chin ...”
She was right. Daisy had only winged Iris and me but with the grocery man she had scored a direct hit. And the grocery man was unquestionably Henry Blodgett.
Iris nodded to her policeman, “Sergeant Blair took a copy of the snap around the neighborhood groceries. They recognized Blodgett at the Supermarket. They hired him day before yesterday. He made a few deliveries this morning, including Miss Crump's, and took a powder without his pay.”
“Well ...” stammered Inspector Green. “Well ...”
“Just how many charges can you get him on?” asked my wife hopefully. “Attempted homicide, conspiracy to defraud, illegal possession of poisonous drugs. ... The rat, I hope you give him the works when you get him.”
“We'll get him all right,” said Inspector Green.
Iris leaned over and patted Poppy's head affectionately.
“Don't worry, darling. I'm sure Miss Crump will get well and we'll throw a lovely christening party for your little strangers. ...”
Iris was right about the Blodgetts. Henry got the works. And his wife was held as an accessory. Iris was right about Miss Crump too. She is still in the hospital but improving steadily and will almost certainly be well enough to attend the christening party.
Meanwhile, at her request, Poppy is staying with us, awaiting maternity with rollicking unconcern.
It's nice having a dog who pays the rent.
Stuart Palmer & Craig Rice
(1905–1968) & (1908–1957)
Over a fifteen–year span from the late 1940's to the early 1960's, Stuart Palmer and his good friend and fellow mystery writer Craig Rice (Georgiana Ann Randolph Craig), who had worked together on the scripting of the 1942 film The Falcon's Brother, collaborated on half a dozen novelettes for Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine. Each story teamed Palmer's crusty New York schoolteacher, Hildegarde Withers, that “tall, angular person who somehow suggested a fairly well–dressed scarecrow,” with Rice's hard–drinking, womanizing Chicago lawyer, John J. Malone. All six were collected in People vs. Withers and Malone (1963). Working in tandem, the pair solve what the book's dust–jacket blurb describes as “hectic, hilarious homicides.” Both Palmer and Rice wrote cleverly constructed, fair–play whodunits flavored with sometimes wacky humor, and the blending of their talents produced some memorable stories.
One is the present selection, a jolly spoof of the intrigue–on–the–Orient Express genre, which takes place on the Super–Century en route from Chicago to New York. It features a dead man lurking sans clothing in Miss Withers's compartment, the murder weapon having been planted in Malone's adjoining compartment, and a combination of quick thinking on the lawyer's part and a bizarre dream on the spinster's that unmasks the culprit. The story was one of two Withers and Malone tales sold to MGM – ”resulting finally,” in Stuart Palmer's words, “in Mrs. O'Malley and Mr. Malone, a starring vehicle for James Whitmore, in which Miss Withers changed into Ma Kettle [Marjorie Main].” Palmer and Rice were two of the scriptwriters on that deservedly obscure 1951 film.
Stuart Palmer was the author of fourteen novels featuring Miss Withers and her friend and foil, New York police inspector Oscar Piper; notable among them are The Penguin Pool Murder (1931), Murder on the Blackboard (1932), The Puzzle of the Red Stallion (1936), and The Puzzle of the Happy Hooligan (1941). Several of the early novels were filmed in the 1930's with Edna May Oliver, then Helen Broderick, and finally ZaSu Pitts as Miss Withers and James Gleason as Oscar Piper. The pair also appears in two collections, The Riddles of Hildegarde Withers (1947) and The Monkey Murder and Other Hildegarde Withers Stories (1950).
Craig Rice introduced John J. Malone in Eight Faces at Three (1939), in which he shares the crime–solving spotlight with the husband–and–wife team of Jake and Helen Justus. Several other novels featuring Malone and the Justuses followed, including Trial by Fury (1941), which many aficionados consider her best novel. A second well–regarded series also starred a detective duo, street photographers Bingo Riggs and Handsome Kusak, who appeared in such lethal romps as The Sunday Pigeon Murders (1942) and The Thursday Turkey Murders (1943). A versatile writer, Rice also penned a somewhat autobiographical mystery, Home Sweet Homicide (1944), in which thinly disguised versions of her own children serve as sleuths; and a trio of nonhumorous psychological crime novels published under the pseudonym Michael Venning. Her work was so popular in the 1940's that she was the subject of an article in Time and her photo was on the magazine's cover.
ONCE UPON A TRAIN
HILDEGARDE WITHERS AND JOHN J. MALONE
TRAIN EN ROUTE
FROM CHICAGO TO NEW YORK C. 1950
“It was nothing, really,” said John J. Malone with weary modesty. “After all, I never lost a client yet.”
The party in Chicago's famed Pump Room was being held to celebrate the mirac
ulous acquittal of Stephen Larsen, a machine politician accused of dipping some thirty thousand dollars out of the municipal till. Malone had proved to the jury and to himself that his client was innocent – at least, innocent of that particular charge.
It was going to be a nice party, the little lawyer kept telling himself. By the way Larsen's so–called friends were bending their elbows, the tab would be colossal. Malone hoped fervently that his fee for services rendered would be taken care of today, before Larsen's guests bankrupted him. Because there was the matter of two months' back office rent.
“Thank you, I will,” Malone said, as the waiter picked up his empty glass. He wondered how he could meet the redhead at the next table, who looked sultry and bored in the midst of a dull family party. As soon as he got his money from Larsen he would start a rescue operation. The quickest way to make friends, he always said, was to break a hundred–dollar bill in a bar, and that applied even to curvaceous redheads in Fath
models.
But where was Steve Larsen? Lolly was here, wearing her most angelic expression and a slinky gown which she overflowed considerably at the top. She was hinting that the party also celebrated a reconciliation between herself and Stevie; that the divorce was off. She had hocked her bracelet again, and Malone remembered hearing that her last show had closed after six performances. If she got her hand back into Steve's pocket, Malone reflected, goodbye to his fee of three grand. He'd made elaborate plans for that money.
They not only included the trip to Bermuda which he'd been promising himself for twenty years, but also the redhead he'd been promising himself for twenty minutes.
Others at the table were worrying too. “Steve is late, even for him!” spoke up Allen Roth suddenly.
Malone glanced at the porcine paving contractor who was rumored to be Larsen's secret partner, and murmured, “Maybe he got his dates mixed.”
“He'd better show,” Roth said, in a voice as cold as a grave–digger's shovel. The little lawyer shivered, and realized that he wasn't the only guest who had come here to make a collection. But he simply had to have that money. $3,000 – $30,000. He wondered, half musing, if he shouldn't have made his contingent fee, say, $2,995. This way it almost looked like ...
“What did you say about ten per cent, counselor?” Bert Glick spoke up wisely.
Malone recovered himself. “You misunderstood me. I merely said, `When on pleasure bent, never muzzle the ox when he treadeth out the corn.` I mean rye.” He turned to look for the waiter, not solely from thirst. The little lawyer would often have been very glad to buy back his introduction to Bert Glick.
True, the City Hall hanger–on had been helpful during the trial. In fact, it had been his testimony as a prosecution witness that had clinched the acquittal, for he had made a surprise switch on several moot points of the indictment. Glick was a private detective turned bail–bondsman, clever at tapping wires and dipping his spoon into any gravy that was being passed.
Glick slapped Malone on the back and said, “If you knew what I know, you wouldn't be looking at your watch all the time. Because this ain't a coming out party, it's a surprise party. And the surprise is that the host ain't gonna be here!”
Malone went cold – as cold as Allen Roth's gray eyes across the table. “Keep talking,” he said, adding in a whisper a few facts which Glick might not care to have brought to the attention of the district attorney.
“You don't need to be so nasty,” Glick said. He rose suddenly to his feet, lifting his glass. “A toast! A toast to good ol' Stevie, our pal, who's taking the Super–Century for New York tonight, next stop Paris or Rio. And with him, my fine feathered friends, he's taking the dough he owes most of us, and a lot more too. Bon voyage!” The man absorbed the contents of his glass and slowly collapsed in his chair.
There was a sudden hullabaloo around the table. Malone closed his eyes for just five seconds, resigning himself to the certainty that his worst suspicions were true. When he opened his eyes again, the redhead was gone. He looked at his watch. There was still a chance of catching that New York train, with a quick stop at Joe the Angel's bar to borrow the price of a ticket. Malone rushed out of the place, wasting no time in farewells. Everybody else was leaving too, so that finally Glick was left alone with the waiter and with the check.
As Malone had expected, Joe the Angel took a very dim view of the project, pointing out that it was probably only throwing good money after bad. But he handed over enough for a round trip, plus Pullman. By the time his cab had dumped him at the I.C. station, Malone had decided to settle for one way. He needed spending money for the trip. There were poker games on trains.
Suddenly he saw the redhead! She was jammed in a crowd at the gate, crushed between old ladies, noisy sailors, and a bearded patriarch in the robes of the Greek Orthodox Church. She struggled with a mink coat, a yowling cat in a traveling case, and a caged parrot.
Malone leaped gallantly to her rescue, and for a brief moment was allowed to hold the menagerie, before a Redcap took over. The moment was just long enough for the lawyer to have his hand clawed by the irate cat, and for him and the parrot to develop a lifelong dislike. But he did hear the girl say, “Compartment B in Car 10, please.” And her warm grateful smile sent him racing off in search of the Pullman conductor. Considerable eloquence, some trifling liberties with the truth, and a ten–dollar bill got him possession of the drawing room next to a certain compartment. That settled, he paused to make a quick deal with a roving Western Union boy, and more money changed hands. When he finally swung aboard the already moving train, he felt fairly confident that the trip would be pleasant and eventful. And lucrative, of course. The minute he got his hands on Steve Larsen ...
Once established in the drawing room, Malone studied himself in the mirror, whistling a few bars of “The Wabash Cannonball.” For the moment the primary target could wait. He was glad he was wearing his favorite Finchley suit, and his new green–and–lavender Sulka tie.
“A man of distinction,” he thought. True, his hair was slightly mussed, a few cigar ashes peppered his vest, and the Sulka tie was beginning to creep toward one ear, but the total effect was good. Inspired, he sat down to compose a note to Operation Redhead, in the next compartment. He knew it was the right compartment, for the parrot was already giving out with imitations of a boiler factory, assisted by the cat.
He wrote:
Lovely lady,
Let's not fight Fate. We were destined to have dinner together. I am holding my breath for your yes.
Your unknown admirer,
J.J.M.
He poked the note under the connecting door, rapped lightly, and waited.
After a long moment the note came back, with an addition in a surprisingly precise hand.
Sir, You have picked the wrong girl.
Besides, I had dinner in the Pump
Room over an hour ago, and so, believe, did you.
Undaunted, Malone whistled another bar of the song. Just getting any answer at all was half the battle. So she'd noticed him in the Pump Room! He sat down and wrote swiftly:
Please, an after–dinner liqueur with me, then?
This time the answer was:
My dear sir: MY DEAR SIR!
But the little lawyer thought he heard sounds of feminine laughter, though of course it might have been the parrot. He sat back, lighted a fresh cigar, and waited. They were almost to Gary now, and if the telegram had got through ...
It had, and a messenger finally came aboard with an armful of luscious Gruss von Teplitz roses. Malone intercepted him long enough to add a note which really should be the clincher.
To the Rose of Tralee, who makes all other women look like withered dandelions. I'll be waiting in the club car.
Faithfully, John J. Malone
That was the way, he told himself happily. Don't give her a chance to say No again.
After a long and somewhat bruising trip through lurching Pullman cars, made longer still because he first headed f
ore instead of aft, Malone finally sank into a chair in the club–car lounge, facing the door. Of course, she would take time to arrange the roses, make a corsage out of a couple of buds, and probably shift into an even more startling gown. It might be quite a wait. He waved at the bar steward and said, “Rye, please, with a rye chaser.”
“You mean rye with a beer chaser, Mr. Malone?”
“If you know my name, you know enough not to confuse me.
I mean beer with a rye chaser!” When the drink arrived Malone put it where it would do the most good, and then for lack of anything better to do fell to staring in awed fascination at the lady who had just settled down across the aisle.
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