The Wrong Murder

by Craig Rice

  “What bet?”

  “The one you made with Mona McClane.”

  “Oh,” Jake said, “Oh, that bet. I’d forgotten it.”

  “Mark my words,” Malone said, “she hasn’t forgotten. She meant every word of it. She’s probably out murdering somebody right now.”

  “I hope to God it’s Von Flanagan, if she is,” Jake said soulfully. Suddenly he groaned. “If Helene finds out about that damned bet, she’ll want to stay here in Chicago just to learn whether or not Mona McClane really did mean it.”

  “All right, don’t tell her.”

  “If I don’t tell her, somebody else will, and she’ll be sore as a goat.”

  “Then do tell her and resign yourself to staying in Chicago.”

  “But I’m going on my honeymoon, and—”

  Malone bellowed, “Damn it, if you want advice, write to Dorothy Dix.” He added in a softer tone, but with a tinge of bitterness, “If I’d known you were going to be this much trouble, I’d have married Helene myself to save you from her.”

  Jake said nothing. For the rest of the way he sat staring moodily out the cab window, watching the snow that still fell in great feathery flakes to be ground to a grayish mud by the wheels of passing cars. Early winter twilight had settled over the city; Michigan Avenue windows were a blaze of colored lights in the violet haze. They passed Oak Street Beach, now a desolate area of sand, snow, and heaps of ice, and turned west on Schiller Street. A few blocks more and the cab skidded precariously to a stop before the hotel that had housed a wedding party an hour or two before.

  “A hell of a wedding night,” Jake growled.

  The little lawyer looked at him with affectionate sympathy. “After all the trouble you had trying to get married to Helene, you ought to consider yourself lucky, even if your bridal suite is the First District police station.”

  Jake grunted and climbed out of the cab. “What’s the rap for breaking into jail?”

  “Well,” Malone said thoughtfully, “it would be the first time in your life you weren’t bothered by house dicks.” He slammed the cab door and was gone before Jake could answer.

  Chapter Five

  The distance from the bedroom door to the corner behind the blue chair to the window and back to the door again could be covered in approximately seventy-five fair-sized steps.

  Jake knew because he’d counted them after the first half-hour.

  When the third half-hour had gone by he sat down on the davenport and looked around the room. This was going to be his home, he reminded himself. He closed his eyes and pictured Helene in house pajamas, making coffee in the kitchenette. He decided he didn’t want coffee, and pictured Helene in house pajamas, blue ones. The hell with the house pajamas. He pictured Helene.

  He opened his eyes again. It was a pleasant room, badly marred now by the remains of the party. A little house cleaning wouldn’t do any harm. Jake rose, straightened a picture, carried three cocktail glasses into the kitchenette, emptied an ash tray, and sat down again.

  In a few weeks he’d be back here. He began thinking about the future. Maybe there wouldn’t be any good jobs for press agents when they came back from Bermuda. A fine time to be getting married, when he was out of a job. Still, if he hadn’t been out of a job, they couldn’t have gone on a honeymoon. Press agents didn’t take vacations.

  Oh well, something would turn up. Something always had. Suddenly he grinned. Now if Mona McClane only carried out her threat and he could win that bet he’d made with her! For a moment he imagined himself owning the Casino.

  Oh well, he might as well imagine himself owning the Michigan Avenue bridge.

  He discovered that by standing at one side of the window and craning his neck a little he could see the cars and taxis turning onto Schiller Street. Maybe one of them was bringing Helene.

  He decided that when twenty-five cars and taxis had gone around that corner, he’d stop watching from the window.

  After the seventeenth car had passed, there was an almost unendurably long wait. He’d almost given up, when nearly a dozen cars and taxis came by in a bunch, too many for him to count.

  There was no sense in going on like this, he told himself sternly. He’d sit down calmly, smoke a cigarette, and think about something else.

  He was out of matches.

  Searching the apartment he found over a dozen packages of assorted brands of cigarettes, and a battered folder holding exactly two matches.

  Well, that would last until Helene arrived. He looked at his watch. Nine o’clock.

  That reminded him he’d had no dinner.

  The hell with dinner.

  Perhaps if he left the door ajar he could hear the elevator as it stopped at the floor. He tried it, and found that he could. During the next half-hour he was halfway down the hall every time he heard a sound.

  He was returning from one of those luckless excursions when a door across the hall suddenly opened and a voice called out.

  “Oh, Mr. Justus.”

  He wheeled around. The voice, dripping with honey and Southern accent, came from the gray-haired woman who had been at the party. Jake blinked at her for a moment before he remembered her.

  She beamed at him. “I kept hearin’ you go up and down the hall, and I got downright worried about you, Mr. Justus. I do hope there’s nothing wrong.”

  “I’m—waiting for someone,” Jake said lamely.

  “But yo’ charming bride—where is she?”

  “She’s not here. It’s—she who I’m waiting for.”

  The woman’s tact rose to the occasion. “Oh.” She managed to make three syllables of it. “Won’t you come in and have a drink while yo’re waiting?”

  Jake hesitated only an instant. Five more minutes of solitude were going to make him a gibbering maniac. Besides, he needed a drink.

  She cocked her head on one side in a pleasantly birdlike manner and added, “Now please don’t feel embarrassed because you can’t remember my name. Nobody gets names right at parties. My name is Lulamay Yandry, I’m a widow and I come from Tennessee, and I’m sure we’re properly introduced. So come right in.”

  He didn’t need any more urging. He followed his hostess into a room shaped like the one he had just left, cozily littered with sewing, knitting bags, and innumerable small, unframed photographs of extremely uninteresting-looking people.

  “Kinfolk,” Mrs. Yandry explained casually, waving an arm. She motioned Jake to an easy chair and vanished into the kitchenette, returning with a large decanter full of a translucent, watery fluid, and two glasses. “I bet yo’re sitting there wondering what I’m doin’ up here so far away from home. It’s a long story, Mr. Justus, and I’m not goin’ to bore you with it even if you urge me.”

  Jake hadn’t the slightest intention of urging her. However, he managed an expression of polite interest while she continued to chatter, filled the glasses and handed him one. “I’m so glad to find some folks who are really neighborly.” She smiled at him amiably. “Here’s how, as you say up No’th.”

  Jake’s first impression was that all hell had broken loose in his throat. He tried a second taste and wondered if he could, by any chance, be drinking some newly developed high explosive.

  “Just a bit strong when you don’t expect it, isn’t it?” Lulamay twittered. “It’s a shot of real corn liquor from Tennessee.”

  “It must have been the shot heard round the world,” Jake hazarded. He had a feeling that the rest of the nation ought to secede from Tennessee, and at once.

  Lulamay Yandry looked almost, but not quite, like the ideal of a dear old grandmother. She was a small woman, somewhere beyond middle age, with a faded, pretty face, and immense blue eyes. Her dress, Jake guessed, was expensive, it fitted perfectly, and was fashioned in a new and rather extreme style.

  She refilled the glasses, sat down, picked up a knitting bag, and began to knit. For a while Jake forgot his troubles as he watched her managing four knitting needles, a cigarette, and a glass of
real corn liquor from Tennessee, all with only two hands, and without losing a syllable from the flow of monologue that went on and on.

  During the first two drinks he looked at his watch every fifteen minutes. After that he didn’t bother. At the fourth drink he gave up all hope of dining with Helene and telephoned to the Pit for barbecued ribs, which Lulamay declared were her favorite food.

  After the fifth drink Lulamay became hopelessly involved in her knitting and laid it aside.

  The sixth drink made Jake remember Von Flanagan, and he decided to go out, find him, and beat the daylights out of him. After a lengthy debate about it with Lulamay, who didn’t know what on earth he was talking about, he gave it up.

  He forgot Von Flanagan with the seventh drink. He was adrift on roseate clouds above a wonderful, wonderful world. If only Helene were there. Helene would like Lulamay Yandry. Who wanted to go to Bermuda anyway?

  He noticed that his hostess had stopped chattering. She was, in fact, as silent as the grave. Well, never let it be said that he, Jake Justus, was one to wake up a dear old lady. Not he. In fact, he could do with forty winks himself.

  Besides, a little sleep would make the time pass quicker until Helene was there.

  He hummed a line of “Rockaby, Baby” to himself, pulled his long legs up on the sofa, took one deep breath, and slept like the dead.

  Chapter Six

  Jake Justus heard bells ringing somewhere. There were fire-alarm bells, church bells, chimes, telephone bells, doorbells, a large assortment of buzzers, and two small carillons.

  They were all, he discovered, inside his head.

  He opened his eyes for a divided second, shut them hastily, and tried to remember what he had been dreaming. Something about betting on a horse race. He’d bet on a horse, and when it came by the grandstand he’d been surprised to see that it was being ridden by Mona McClane instead of a jockey.

  He opened his eyes again, gingerly. It was broad daylight. He sat bolt upright, suddenly wide-awake.

  Lulamay Yandry still slept peacefully in her chair, her gray hair straggling over her face, her mouth open. After a terrible moment of pulling himself together, Jake rose slowly and cautiously to his feet, tiptoed to the door, and went out without disturbing her.

  He was. probably in enough trouble right now without letting a gray-haired Southern belle know that he had compromised her.

  What on earth was he going to tell Helene!

  He opened the door to his own apartment quietly and timidly, and stood listening for a moment. Not a sound. He crept in and closed the door carefully.

  The room was empty.

  He thought it over for a while. Of course. She was asleep. Probably it was early morning, just barely daylight. He looked at his watch and found it had stopped. Oh well, it couldn’t be much past dawn.

  He tiptoed to the bedroom door, encouraging himself with the thought that he could put over a very convincing story. He’d explain that he had been there for hours, and hadn’t wanted to disturb her. She’d probably be appreciative, even grateful, for his thoughtfulness. He congratulated himself admiringly, and opened the bedroom door an inch at a time, praying that its hinges wouldn’t make a sound.

  No Helene.

  The bells began to ring more loudly, and something strange was happening to his knees. He had a curious conviction that he had died during the night. If that was true, perhaps he ought to lie down. He wondered vaguely, if he’d better call the coroner. Maybe it would be illegal for him to move until the police had come to examine his remains.

  With what he recognized as an extremely heroic effort he picked up the telephone and asked for the correct time, adding, “And no matter what time it is, it’s going to be a very, very unpleasant surprise.”

  The time was eleven thirty-two.

  Half the day gone and nothing done. Almost twelve hours since plane time. What had Malone done about the reservations?

  It was then that he saw the note, scrawled with lipstick on a piece of hotel stationery and propped up against the mirror of the dressing table:

  Waited for you until nine o’clock (A.M.)

  and have gone to father.

  After a few horrible minutes he decided to call Malone. While the call was being put through, he tried to realize that he had lost Helene.

  The only thing to do was to jump off Navy Pier. No, the damn lake was frozen. The window would do. “Press agent jumps from window day following marriage to heiress.” That’s how the headlines would tell it. He wondered if Helene would be sorry.

  Malone’s voice was filled with incredulous surprise. “Aren’t you on your way to Bermuda?”

  “No. Where’s Helene?”

  A pause, then, “Don’t you know?”

  “Damn it, would I be asking you if I did?”

  “I left her at the entrance of the hotel about eleven last night. Where are you?”

  “At the hotel.” Jake drew a long breath and added, “I just got here.”

  Malone was silent for a good thirty seconds, then indignantly called on heaven to witness that he had already had enough trouble to last the average man a lifetime just getting Jake and Helene married, and from now on he was going to live his own life.

  When the lawyer paused for breath Jake said unhappily, “She left me a note, and she’s gone.”

  “I don’t blame her,” Malone snapped. “I wouldn’t have bothered to leave a note.” He hung up.

  The fourth time Jake called him back the lawyer swore crossly into the phone and said, “Hold your head under the shower until I get there.”

  That helped a little. Jake examined himself in the mirror and decided that for a man who had just risen from the dead, he didn’t look half bad. By the time Malone arrived he had had a shave and a shower that almost silenced the bells in his head.

  “Married twenty-four hours and she goes home to father,” Malone said, kicking the door shut. “A fine start!” He looked at Jake searchingly. “It must have been a big night.”

  “Malone, did you ever drink any real Tennessee corn liquor?”

  “Once. When I woke up I found I’d been buried three days.”

  Jake groaned. “It’s worse just after you’re exhumed.” He explained his meeting with Lulamay Yandry and the subsequent events. “Damn it, Helene couldn’t have gone far.”

  Malone muttered something incoherent about how fast women could run, and said, “What’s the phone number of George Brand’s club?”

  After fumbling with the phone book for a full minute Jake announced that it was all in fine Chinese print, and suggested calling Information.

  At the club Malone was finally able to get an outraged Partridge on the phone. The gentleman’s gentleman was slightly on the frigid side. Mr. Brand and Miss Helene had left together some time ago.

  “It’s Mr. Justus, trying to find Mrs. Justus,” Malone said.

  Partridge’s voice softened unexpectedly. “You might try the Drake bar, sir.”

  Malone hung up, turned to Jake, and said, “You don’t need to worry. She’ll forgive you.”

  He ordered breakfast and forced food on the protesting Jake. It was a bit past one o’clock when the two men went down the elevator and headed for a press-while-you-wait establishment at the corner of Division and State Streets. When they emerged it was exactly half-past one, and a thin, cold drizzle of rain had begun to fall.

  Jake clutched suddenly at Malone’s arm. “Malone, look. There she is!”

  “You’re having delusions. She’s at the Drake bar.”

  “I don’t mean Helene.”

  The lawyer looked in the direction Jake indicated and saw Mona McClane on the opposite corner, exquisitely dressed and furred, apparently oblivious of the rain. She was looking at her watch, and as the two men looked she hailed a passing taxi, hopped in, and disappeared down State Street.

  “A very pretty picture,” Malone growled, “but what of it? If you’re going to go staring after other women the day after your marriage—”


  “I’m not staring after other women. That bet she made with me. You know what I mean.”

  Malone raised his eyes and complained bitterly about an unjust fate that had mixed him up with a lunatic, hailed a taxi, directed it to the travel bureau, and finally said, “Any more about that insane bet, and I’ll leave you to face Helene alone.”

  By the time reservations had been made for a six o’clock plane, it was nearly half-past-two. The Loop and Michigan Avenue were jammed with holiday traffic that moved with difficulty through the rain, and it was a little after three when the two men arrived at the Drake bar.

  Helene and her father were sitting at a small table in the corner.

  Helene looked up, smiling. “Hello, darling. I was just beginning to worry about you.”

  “Just beginning!” Suddenly Jake glared at her, eyes blazing. “Do you mean to say you haven’t been worrying about me?”

  “Why no. I knew you’d look me up some time.”

  “Fine thing!” He sat down heavily. “Think of what might have happened to me. I might have been run over by a truck. I might have had an attack of amnesia. I don’t suppose you even bothered to call up the police.”

  Helene said acidly, “I’ve had enough of the police to last me for a long time.” Her voice grew unexpectedly tender. “Oh Jake, I’m so sorry I didn’t worry about you!”

  “I forgive you. This time.”

  Jake’s eyes met George Brand’s in a long look of sympathetic understanding, a look that said it wasn’t so much of a muchness to handle these women, once you know how it was done.

  “The truth is,” Jake began at last.

  George Brand interrupted him. “Never tell the truth when you have a lawyer along.”

  Malone signaled to the waiter, ordered a round of rye and seltzer, and said, “The truth is, he was out visiting another woman.”

  The wonderful thing about telling the truth, Jake reflected, was that no one ever believed it. Two drinks later he felt sufficiently recovered to tell of his meeting with Lulamay Yandry. Helene immediately declared that the plane reservations would have to be canceled because she refused to leave Chicago until she’d tried out Lulamay’s corn liquor in a new Confederate cocktail recipe. She even had a name for it. The Rebel Yell.