The Mammoth Book of Roaring Twenties Whodunnits

by Mike Ashley

  Doyle threw down the flowers, stepped up close. “I don’t like your face,” he said, “and haven’t all evening! Here’s where I change it around a little!” And he swung back, in good old 1890 style.

  “Fine!” I said agreeably, “but not in here where there’s so much glass. There’s a perfectly good sidewalk outside –”

  “Not there or anyplace else,” said Evans, getting in between the two of us. “Grow up, Doyle.” And to me he remarked less than affably, “You’re excused, Mr Walsh. We can get along without your company, if you don’t mind. We’re just a pair of ignorant dicks, I know, and you could carry out our routine much better; that’s why we’re being paid and you’re not. The police-lab will tell the story; shoot out there with those roses, Doyle. Keep the two bunches separate.”

  “Lounge-lizard!” Doyle was muttering throatily in the background, “Ice-cream destroyer!”

  “You’ll never get to meet the right people that way,” I warned lightly over my shoulder as I went out.

  Tom and the two dicks got back in the cab and left me behind, sort of persona non grata. Evans wanted to ask him a few more routine questions at Headquarters – again it was a request, not an order.

  “See you up at the place later,” he said to me. “Leave the key under the mat if you turn in before I get home.”

  “And don’t forget to brush your teeth like a good little boy!” was Doyle’s insulting farewell out the cab-window.

  “Come back and I’ll brush yours with my foot,” I promised.

  The last thing I saw was the two of them holding him back by main force from jumping out then and there and taking me up on it.

  It had been warm in the flower-shop and I’d taken off my neckcloth and crammed it in my pocket while we were in there. Also my gloves. When I started to put them on again, I saw that one had fallen out, I’d lost it. I turned around and went in again abruptly.

  The proprietor, who evidently hadn’t gotten over the effects of our visit yet, gave a jittery jump when he saw me show up like that again. I wouldn’t have thought anything of it, but he happened to be standing close to that potted plant when he did so.

  “I dropped a glove,” I said, but I let him look around for it. I looked, instead, at the finger-holes Tom had absent-mindedly punched into the mould around the plant that time when that card-business was going on.

  “Here it is, I’ve found it,” he said. He meant the glove, but I suited my action to his words, pulled a hundred-dollar bill, rolled into a cylinder, out of one of the finger-holes. He promptly dropped the glove a second time – and a lot of complexion with it.

  “What was he slipping you this for?” I asked quietly.

  “Why, why I’m sure he didn’t mean that for me! He must have dropped that in there by m-mistake –”

  “Oh no,” I said tonelessly. “He gave you a hard look just then, I saw him. I thought he was sore at the time, but it was a signal it seems. Not to tell – what?”

  He didn’t know, hadn’t any idea, and all that sort of stuff.

  “You’re not thinking hard enough,” I chided coldly. “I’m his friend. Wouldn’t you prefer to tell me and keep it sort of en famille? Or suppose I page those two missing links and let them start the whole thing over again?”

  I wouldn’t have dreamed of doing it, because this didn’t look so hot for Tom. They’d gone already, anyway, but he didn’t know that.

  Since then, people have said to me, Why didn’t you butt out? Why be nosey? I mean, what business was it of yours whether your friend had left a century-note in a florist-shop or not? Well, that’s just the whole point. If he’d been only an acquaintance, I certainly wouldn’t have snooped. He was like a brother to me; either you get the idea or you don’t.

  He gave in, rather than face the detectives again. “I’m really not absolutely certain what he meant by it myself,” he stammered, and possibly he was telling the truth, “but I judge, I imagine, he didn’t want the second two-dozen roses mentioned – in front of them. So I didn’t.”

  He evidently hadn’t, if there’d been any such, because he’d neglected even to mention them to me. “I imagine so,” I agreed, as though I’d been in on it all along.

  He wasn’t sure I had been, though, I could see that; the mere fact I’d cross-questioned him about the bribe made him wonder. “You know about the other young lady of course?” he said hopefully.

  I did now. And it wasn’t in character at all. I nodded non-committally. He shrugged, trying to appear sophisticated. “I know how those things go, young fellows about town like you. But if I’d told them, right away it would have been in the papers – one of those gossip-columns maybe – how he sent flowers to his ex the same night he was getting engaged. Get him in hot water. That’s why I caught on and shut up about it.”

  I’d been racking my brains. But there wasn’t really much of a list to check. “Fortescue?”

  “Yes, on 54th, over by the river.”

  “You don’t have to tell me,” I assured him. I was remembering the year before. How often he’d come away from there with bites on his neck. “Same messenger take them to both places?”

  “Yes, he stopped off there first, then went on the Park-Ashley.”

  I locked my teeth. “Why, that devil!” I thought “Is it possible she snagged them away from him – the second bunch – long enough to do something to them, hoping to harm Marcia? She must have caught on whom they were for, no trick to that at all; pumped the kid.” I walloped my gloves viciously against the edge of the case. “I’m going down there,” I said to myself, “now – right now! Dirty little murderess!”

  I speared my finger toward him, with the century curled around it the way it must have been curled around Tom’s when he stuck it into the mould. “Well, this is yours,” I said disapprovingly. “He seemed to want you to have it – and it’s his money, not mine.” It would have to come out, anyway, if she’d really done what I thought she had – Tom or no Tom.

  He took it all right; I would have collapsed if he hadn’t. “D’you think I’ll get in trouble?” he wanted to know, though. “They didn’t ask me point-blank, you know – ”

  I wasn’t interested. “See you around,” I said, and went out.

  I got in a cab and went down seven blocks to 54th and over five to the river. I thought: would that torch-bearer be capable of doing a thing like that? But how had she known ahead of time he was going to send her flowers? How had she managed to have – whatever it was – ready? Was she a modern Lucretia Borgia or something? And yet it didn’t seem possible she’d kept the messenger-boy waiting there any length of time, Marcia’s flowers had gotten down to the hotel ahead of us, and we’d had just a straight ride in a taxi.

  I vowed, I’ll knock all her front teeth out with my own little fist, if I find out –! And that sap – I thought he knew his way around! That’s what comes of picking up loose odds and ends at Twenty-One on rainy Fall nights!

  But the sight of Third Avenue through the cab-window seemed to bring out the good old-fashioned qualities in me, the sense of fair-play and even a vestige of chivalry that I hadn’t known was left any more. She hasn’t brains enough, I told myself. Her speed would be to try to have him beaten up, like she did once before. Why jump at conclusions? That’s what comes of associating with detectives, even for half-an-hour! Simply an accident – and what’s more, if one bunch was tainted, then the whole consignment was, and she’s in danger of having the same thing happen to her if she fools around with them! So between wanting to sock her in the teeth and wanting to save her from a fate worse than death, I was in a hurry to get over there.

  “Get across, get across there!” I prodded the driver.

  “That pretty color up ahead,” he said sarcastically, “is red. They put it on just to make the street look nice. It don’t mean a thing. This your first time in a New York cab?”

  “Did I ask you for a civil service examination?” I flared. “You’ve talked yourself out of á quarter ti
p.”

  “You were just looking for an excuse to welsh, you probably haven’t got one,” he let me know. “Just for that you can open the door yourself. No tip, no service.”

  I didn’t seem to get along with anyone tonight. I got out, bent down, and put sixty cents on the curbstone just out of reach. “You can get out and pick it up if you want it!” I said.

  A bedecked janissary inside the Taj Mahal (the décor suggested that, with just a dash of the Colosseum and a touch of the Kremlin) wanted to know who was calling on Miss Fortescue. For which bit of red tape she, I mean Somebody, paid $5 a month extra on her rent.

  “Mr Tom Nye,” I said unblushingly.

  It was all right, it seemed, for Mr Tom Nye to go up. Whether it would have been just as all right for Mr Dick Walsh, I misdoubted me. She’d never bit me on the neck that I recalled – and I have a very good memory for those things, the twice it’s happened.

  I read into his look that Mr Tom Nye carried an aura of something as far as he was concerned – interest, without friendliness – but since he obviously didn’t know him by sight, I couldn’t get it. Had the lady spoken out of turn when she was being poured home drunk once or twice?

  I tipped my hat elaborately – upstairs. Well, at least her roses hadn’t played a dirty trick on her. “Hi, Fritzie,” I greeted her.

  Her face dropped down to her scanties nearly – and there wasn’t very much interference in between, I assure you. “What’s the idea?” she said huskily, “Don’t you know your own name any more?”

  “I know how it is,” I soothed her, “a nickel’s worth of last-minute perfume behind the ears shot to hell! And all the sofa-pillows punched together for nothing! Wouldn’t I do for a stand-in, at least?”

  “Don’t get so wise,” she said sultrily. “You’re jealous ’cause you never got to first base, that’s all.”

  She never poisoned anyone, I told myself; just a child of nature. I walked past her as though I owned the place. “My, what nice flowers,” I said. “And some tastefully arranged too. Some guys get flowers. When I call anywhere I seem to get grocery-bills.” I sat down, flattened my hat with my elbow. Pop!

  She took something out of the folds of her negligee, stuck it under one of the pillows, sat back against it. I caught a flash through her fingers, though.

  “Mmm,” I said, “so he was going to get flowers – in a different way, without being able to smell them. I thought you liked him.”

  “What’s on your mind,” she said wearily. “Do I have to sit here all night and listen to you talk like Noel Coward?”

  She had one pinned to the shoulder of her gray negligee. There was another spray of them arranged in a flat blue bowl near me. I pulled one out – with a wicked webbed thorn sticking up from its stem – started to play around with it. Prod it gently with my thumb, watching her. Not hard enough to break the skin, I assure you.

  Judging by her look, she didn’t seem to give a rap whether I lived or died – not even if it happened right there on her premises. So I quit doing it, because I did give a rap. I pitched the thing over my shoulder.

  “Why did you figure you’d need a gun if he came here to see you tonight?” Doyle couldn’t have done it any better. “What’d you done to make you afraid of him? What was on your mind?”

  She looked hostile, rather than frightened or guilty. “What’d I done?” she yapped. “That’s a good one! What’ve I ever done to make me afraid of him? When haven’t I been afraid of him?”

  Which didn’t make sense to me. “Well, when haven’t you been?” I parroted.

  “Not since after I first found out –” Then she let it down easy. “A few things about him.”

  There was a tap at the door. One of those prearranged taps, I somehow got the feeling. She went over and opened it and the janissary was standing there. He didn’t say anything, just looked at her.

  “No, it’s all right,” she said, “it wasn’t Mr Nye.” So she’d coached him over the house-phone before she let whom she thought was Tom in, “Look in on me in a minute or two, I might need you!”

  Meanwhile I switched the gun to under my own pillow.

  She came back and said to me virtuously, “You know, I ought to go to the police. I should have long ago.”

  I knew how she meant it, but I distorted the meaning. “You ought to,” I agreed. “And maybe you will yet before the night’s over.”

  “If he comes near me again I will.”

  “No, it’s not a case of his coming near you. You know, a young girl died down there tonight –”

  She took it big. Closed her eyes and let her head loll back and put the back of one hand between her eyes. “Oh my God!” she shuddered, “Oh, that poor girl – I should have phoned – oh, if I’d only had the courage to phone down there! I was afraid, oh I was so afraid –!” She got up and did a couple of half-turns, this way and that. “I’ve really killed her – I’m to blame –!”

  “Now Dickie,” I said softly to myself, “we’re really getting somewhere. And Doyle thinks he’s so hot! Why, there’s nothing to it!”

  “I’ve got to have a drink!” she shivered, and poured herself enough to launch a battleship in.

  “Have one on me too,” I encouraged when she’d downed it without stopping to breathe. “And then I suppose it’ll be up to me to call the police or something. Although I hate to be a snitcher. Maybe I’ll let them do their own dirty-work.” She looked at me and I looked back at her. “So you should have phoned!” I mimicked. “That and a couple of other little things. I’ll tell you what you should have done! You should have let those g.d. flowers alone – then there wouldn’t have been anything to phone about. You’ll probably get away with it at that. ‘Beautiful love-slave mad with jealousy. I didn’t know what I was doing, I didn’t want her to have him.’”

  The second drink fell out of her hand and parted over her satin slippers like a gold wave. “What are you talking about?” she said in a stifled voice. “Flowers –” She gestured vaguely at the ones scattered around. “– what’ve they got to do with it?”

  “You put something on them, didn’t you, and then sent them on to her from here.”

  “I!” She screamed it. “I got them from him!” She glanced in horrified fascination down at the one on her shoulder. “Is that how – what happened to Marcia Planter anyway?”

  “Not Marcia, her younger sister. But at least you admit whom you intended it for – which is no news to me. Why ask what happened? Something deadly on their stems got into her blood-stream –” I snapped my fingers. “Or didn’t you intend to go quite that far – did you just want to give her prickly-heat and spoil her beauty? Amateurs shouldn’t experiment with poisons –”

  But she had no more time for words. I think, woman-like, my latter suggestion had frightened her even more than the thought of death itself. She was afraid to take the thing off her, the one pinned to her negligee, or touch it with her fingertips in any way, so she started pulling and tearing the whole flimsy off her shoulders. And as she did so, she kept giving little bleating wails and side-stepping around in a macabre sort of rhumba.

  It should have been excruciatingly funny; it wasn’t of course anything of the kind. “Stand still!” I ordered and caught at her. “You’ll make it happen twice as quickly that way! I’ll get it off for you, I’m not afraid of it –”

  I was too, but, well I wasn’t afraid enough not to try and help her. I pulled the pin out carefully, and the thing dropped of its own weight and I kicked it away with my foot.

  “So you didn’t – have a hand in it,” I said, breathing hard and sitting down again. What else was there to say – after what I’d just seen? Tallulah Bankhead would have been just as convincing, but not ad lib without a rehearsal or two.

  She was all in, reached up and pushed her hair out of the way. “But why before?” she said. “Why before – tonight was only the engagement, wasn’t it? I thought it was after their marriage that – that she had to worry about.”
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  She poured us each a drink this time – to make what she had to say go down, perhaps.

  “There are two sides to the story,” she said, when she was down to the ice-cube in her glass. “Mine – and the one you’ve heard from him, or gathered from what he’d let drop. I know about that, because he’s said to me ‘Dick thinks I’m off you. All the better, let him think so.’ I can just about imagine what his side of it is – that he cooled off, that I’ve been running after him ever since, that I even sent some friends of mine out to beat him up. Now listen to my side of it – and it’s not a pretty story.”

  I chewed ice with my back-teeth, noisily.

  “I did go for him, I was sold on him. Then one night a year ago we were sitting here eating apples. I’d given him a fruit-knife to pare them with. All of a sudden without any warning he had me pinned down here in a corner of this same sofa we’re sitting on, was bending over me with that knife aimed at my throat. No rational reason, no jealousy, nothing like that -just a sudden urge. One look at his eyes, and I knew enough not to struggle. I just lay there limp, talking to him quietly, saying ‘You don’t want to do that – wait’ll tomorrow night –’ Oh, anything and everything that came into my head. Dick Walsh, it was a solid hour before I got him to put it down and take up his things and leave. When I got the door locked, after him, I fell in the most beautiful faint you’ve ever seen – just behind it.

  “It happened once again, about a month later. Not quite as bad. I was laughing and had my head back. ‘Gee what a soft little neck you’ve got,’ he said, and closed his hands around it, sort of measuring it. He didn’t put on any pressure, and I distracted his attention by pointing to something behind him.