The Wrong Murder

by Craig Rice

  The girl seemed a little uncertain and anxious. “The lobby is unusually full of people, isn’t it?”

  Jake nodded calmly. “There was a shooting this morning. Nothing serious, but it drew a crowd. What can I do for you?”

  She blinked a minute, decided he was joking, and let it go at that. “I’m looking for Daphne Sanders.”

  Jake shook his head. “You’re asking the wrong guy. She wasn’t the girl I took home last night.”

  Ellen Ogletree frowned. “This is serious, Mr. Justus. She’s disappeared.” She hesitated a moment, looked around again. “This isn’t a very good place to talk.”

  “Have you had breakfast?” Jake asked.

  The girl shook her head. He led the way into the coffee shop and found a table that was reasonably secluded. The thought of breakfast was faintly revolting to him, but Jake couldn’t pass up this chance to find out if Marchmont would order tea. He didn’t. He sent out to the bar for brandy and soda.

  Jake shuddered slightly and waited until his coffee arrived before he spoke. The thought that he might be responsible for Daphne Sanders’ disappearance worried him. If Little Georgie was still in the snatch racket, possibly the well-meant introduction had been the wrong move.

  Ellen Ogletree’s next words put his mind at rest. “She’s had a frightful row with her family when she got home last night, and she left home.”

  “Is that all?” Jake said disgustedly. “People are leaving home all the time.”

  The girl lit a cigarette. Jake noticed that her fingers trembled ever so little. “Her father is almost losing his mind.”

  “As long as he doesn’t lost his beard,” Jake said calmly, “he should worry. What was the row about, or do you know?”

  “Over—what Daphne said last night. About Fleurette, I mean.”

  Jake nodded gravely. “Statements like that do bring on family arguments.”

  “Daphne’s very excitable,” Leonard Marchmont put in. “It’s hard to tell just what she might do.”

  Jake agreed with that, but he kept his thoughts to himself. “Just what am I supposed to do? Find her?”

  The girl smiled wanly, and shook her head. “We thought maybe you’d seen her. We’ve been out looking for her all morning.”

  “Sorry, I haven’t. Any idea where she might have gone?”

  Marchmont said, “She went back to Mona McClane’s and spent the night there. But she left there about nine this morning. Ellen thought she might have come here.”

  “She’ll turn up,” Jake said reassuringly. “Forget it. Maybe Helene will have some bright ideas when she wakes up.”

  Ellen Ogletree looked at her watch. “I’ll have to forget it for the time being. I’m meeting Mona and Fleurette for lunch and I don’t want to be late.” She made an appointment to meet Marchmont later and said to Jake, “If you do see her, try and persuade her to go home, won’t you? I’m terribly sorry for poor Mr. Sanders.”

  “I’ll do my best,” Jake said, “but persuading girls to go home is rather the reverse of my specialty.”

  Leonard Marchmont was still puzzling over that five minutes after Ellen had gone. At last he gave it up.

  “Women are the devil,” he said gloomily. “But I suppose you know that.”

  Jake said, “I’m beginning to suspect it. Why is it any of Ellen’s business whether the Sanders girl leaves home or not?”

  “Dashed if I know. Let’s go into the bar, I can think better there.”

  Jake finished his coffee, accompanied the Englishman into the bar, ordered a lemonade and felt very heroic about it, took one sip of it and called for rye.

  “How do you figure in this, or is it impolite to ask?”

  Evidently it wasn’t. “I don’t. I used to go about with Daphne a bit. Really you know, I didn’t want to come along this morning because of that, but when Ellen got the phone call she insisted on my helping look for the girl.”

  “Either you’re a little mixed up, or I am,” Jake said. “What call do you mean?”

  “From Mr. Sanders,” Marchmont said. He reached for one of the drinks, said, “Thanks awfully,” and went on. “You see, it was just a bit late when I brought Ellen home. She suggested that since it was so late perhaps I’d best linger about and explain that I’d just arrived to take her shopping. So I lingered about and Ellen popped up the backstairs and changed her frock, and came popping down again by the front stairs and told me she’d found a message from Mr. Sanders asking her to call and that we must duck right out to the corner pharmacist’s and call him back.” Being completely out of breath he ended with a gesture indicating that the call had been made.

  Jake took a gulp of his rye and said, “It’s still a little confusing to me.”

  “Mr. Sanders wanted Ellen to help find Daphne,” Marchmont explained slowly, mopping his high, domed forehead. “So we went out to search the neighborhood. Sanders seemed to be frightfully upset. That’s quite understandable, but Ellen—”

  Jake shook his head. “I don’t see why she should be so concerned about the Sanders’ troubles.”

  “No more do I,” the Englishman said, “unless Ellen’s grateful to Mr. Sanders about the position.”

  “Position?” Jake repeated stupidly. He wondered if he’d slept through something.

  Marchmont nodded. “My position. Ellen talked Mr. Sanders into giving it to me. Frightfully good of him, really you know. All I have to do is to meet a few out-of-town people now and then and take them to lunch. Quite a decent remuneration, too.” He sat staring gloomily into his brandy.

  “You know,” Marchmont said confidingly, “when I came over here five years ago, I really thought I’d have no trouble in finding a good position. I do know a bit about motorcars, you know. Spent a good many years at it. But it seemed to be so frightfully difficult to find anything. Everything was so infernally strange here, you know. I couldn’t go home because I knew there wasn’t an earthly thing there either. There was really nothing to do but stay on here, and that’s frightfully hard when you’ve no money you know.”

  Jake felt a moment’s sympathy for the Englishman. He could especially understand the money part.

  “Ellen spoke to Mr. Sanders last night,” Marchmont said suddenly. Jake had a notion the Englishman wasn’t talking to him, but to himself. “Curious Mr. Sanders never thought of engaging me himself, when I spoke to him. Ellen turned the trick somehow. Nothing to do with motorcars, though. Something to do with advertising. I’m not sure just what. Mr. Sanders assured me I didn’t need to know much about it.” He looked faintly puzzled.

  “It’s something no one knows much about,” Jake assured him.

  Marchmont smiled at him gratefully. “I really am most appreciative of the position. I presume marriage with Ellen goes with it, but that’s not so bad, even with her parents thrown in. Her father’s all right if you never ask him for money, and her mother’s easy to get along with if you let her win from you at cards now and then, and if you pass along all the gossip you hear to her.”

  Jake said, “I guessed the latter about Mrs. Ogletree, but not the first.”

  “She’s a passionate gambler,” Marchmont told him, emphasizing the words. “But she invariably loses unless you let her win.” He sighed. “Oh well, it isn’t so bad. I could have done much worse.” Suddenly he looked speculatively at Jake. “I say, you haven’t done badly yourself, not half badly.”

  The reason for Leonard Marchmont’s friendly acceptance of him, what had seemed to be a sense of kinship in Marchmont’s attitude, suddenly became clear to Jake. They were in the same line, but working different territory.

  That explanation flashed through Jake’s mind in half of a second. In the other half second a punch, brought all the way up from the floor, landed on Leonard Marchmont’s aristocratic English nose. Into it went not only Jake’s rage at the Englishman, but his past rage at everyone and everything that had irritated him in days. As it landed, sending Leonard Marchmont toppling off his bar stool, Jake re
alized that for a long time he had wanted to punch someone, damned near anyone, in the nose.

  He flung a bill at the bartender and went out, letting the door slam behind him. It seemed to him that his feet didn’t come within hailing distance of the floor all the way to the elevator. Indeed, he was so exultantly happy that he had reached the door of the apartment before he began wondering what the morning’s events really meant.

  Helene still slept, one arm curved around her blonde head, her face childlike, exquisite, a little pale. Jake forgot Ellen Ogletree and her Englishman, Daphne Sanders, and everything else.

  As she stood looking at her, deciding just how she should be wakened, her eyes suddenly flew open, like the eyes of a doll. She stared at him for an instant, blinked, and sat up.

  “The Casino! That’s the link?”

  “You’re still dreaming,” Jake said. “Do you know where you are? Do you know who I am?”

  She paid no attention to him. “The link we’ve been looking for. The missing link. That’s it.”

  “You’re thinking of bonds,” Jake said patiently. “The bonds of wedlock. Remember?”

  There was a knock at the door, and a voice called, “It’s me. Malone.”

  Jake sighed. “All right, damn it. That clergyman was just kidding me along. But tonight, murder or no murder—”

  He opened the door and let the little lawyer in.

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  John J. Malone looked a little more disheveled than usual. Jake suspected, not unjustly, that he had been sleeping in his clothes.

  He pulled a newspaper from his overcoat pocket, unfolded it, pointed to the front page, and said, “That’s what I expected. I thought you’d like to know.”

  With the death of Lulamay Yandry, the case of the Gumbril slaying had been brought to a satisfactory conclusion, according to Daniel Von Flanagan. Another paragraph told of the execution six months before of Lulamay’s younger son. There was a rehash of his trial, with the news, now printed for the first time, that the information leading to his arrest and conviction had been provided by the late Mr. Gumbril. The Gumbril murder was described in detail. A highly sentimental story, headlined “Mountain Justice” and written by a well-known woman reporter, built a colorful picture of the gray-haired Lulamay coming to Chicago to avenge the death of her boy.

  Jake glanced rapidly over the page, tossed the paper on the table, and said, “I wondered why I’d lost my popularity with Little Georgie and Von Flanagan’s cops. In fact I was beginning to wonder if it’s true what they say in the advertisements. Now I see it’s just that I’m in the clear again.”

  Helene looked at the paper and then at Malone. “Is that what you went tearing off to find out about this morning?”

  “No, it wasn’t,” the lawyer said. He tossed his overcoat inaccurately at the arm of a chair, lit a cigar, and sat down. “I’ve just been checking up on the early history of Joshua Gumbril, not overlooking his family obligations.” He paused, looked at the cigar, and said, “I thought it might be important, and maybe it is.”

  “Whether it is or isn’t,” Helene said, “tell us quick.”

  Malone cleared his throat. “Joshua Gumbril was born in Waukegan. His father was a harness maker. He had one sister, quite a bit younger, and no brothers. Both his parents have been dead about twenty years. He was considered exceptionally bright in school. So was the sister. She was a little thing, evidently pretty, and very talented.”

  “How the hell did you find out all this?” Jake demanded.

  “If you must know, I’ve been to Waukegan and back,” the lawyer snapped. He puffed at his cigar and went on, “The sister’s name was Flora, but everyone called her Flossie. She grew up to be a chorus girl. While Joshua Gumbril didn’t seem to have much affection for his family he did have a certain sense of obligation. Enough, at least, to arrange for the death of the first Mrs. Sanders at what must have been some financial loss to himself.”

  He was looking at the floor, not at their faces.

  “After the death of the first Mrs. Sanders,” he continued, “Joshua Gumbril’s sister, whose name had now become Fleurette, married Willis Sanders as soon as it was decently possible, thus disposing of Mr. Gumbril’s family obligations for all time.” He knocked ash from his cigar. “Is there a drink for me?”

  While Jake stared speechlessly at the lawyer, Helene went into the kitchenette, mixed a drink, came back, and handed it to Malone. “I always suspected Fleurette Sanders had been a chorus girl. She was much too well bred and well mannered and conservatively dressed to have been anything else. These days the only women who have what my great-aunt used to call refinement are chorus girls and night-club hostesses.”

  Jake said, “That’s all very well. But you didn’t find Mona McClane sitting on one of the branches of the Gumbril family tree.”

  “I had fun,” the little lawyer said moodily. “I always wanted to see what Waukegan looked like in the daytime.”

  Helene looked at the newspaper again. “Of all the collections of coincidences—”

  “There were others,” Malone said. He chewed on his cigar for a moment. “It’s a curious thing that when Mona McClane made that bet, no one knew the prospective victim she had in mind. Yet of that little group present, outside of ourselves there was hardly one person who didn’t have a perfectly good motive for murdering the same man.”

  He appeared, as he went on, to be talking to some invisible jury. “Take Wells Ogletree,” he mused.

  “All right, I’ll take him,” Helene said briskly. “Did he get the fifty-grand ransom money that was paid to Gumbril?” As the two men stared at her she went on, “Yes, I noticed what Ellen Ogletree said. That money came out of her own fortune which was under her old man’s trusteeship. Would Wells Ogletree kidnap his own daughter for fifty thousand bucks?”

  “For anything over six bits,” Jake said promptly, “Wells Ogletree would kidnap the Statue of Liberty.”

  “It’s probable,” Malone said absently, “and not impossible. How about Ellen herself?”

  “She might have had. a motive for murdering Gumbril,” Jake said. “It depends on what happened to her while she was in the hands of the kidnapers.”

  “If you mean what I think you do,” Helene commented, “I doubt if Ellen would consider that a motive for murder.”

  Jake ignored that and said, “How about Daffy Sanders?” He went on to tell of the morning’s events. Malone listened, scowling.

  “Daphne may just be a little tetched, or she may actually have learned something about her mother’s death,” the lawyer said. “We can’t tell which. We can count her in, though. Willis Sanders likewise. He might have been blackmailed by Gumbril after the slaying, or been afraid that he would be. That’s true of Fleurette, too.”

  “Do you think Gumbril would actually have blackmailed his own sister?” Helene asked incredulously.

  “If he had a dual personality,” Malone said, “he probably blackmailed himself.”

  Jake scowled. “Almost everyone there seemed to have a motive for murdering Joshua Gumbril—except Mona McClane.”

  “There’s some link between Gumbril and Mona McClane, all right,” the lawyer said savagely, “but what the ding-danged hell is it?”

  “It’s something to do with the Casino,” Helene declared. “I don’t know just what it is, but I know it’s there, and if you two don’t heckle me too much, I’ll find it.”

  Malone sighed. “The question is,” he said, “do you want to find her motive?”

  “Damn you, Malone,” Jake said, “are you going to back out now?”

  The little lawyer rose and walked back and forth across the room a few times, his hands in his pockets. “I’m not an officer of the law,” he said grimly. “My profession has always put me on the other side of the fence. I’ve never served the cause of justice,” he added gravely, “but rather the cause of injustice.”

  “If that’s your real reason,” Helene said smoothly, “I’m a monk
ey’s aunt.”

  Malone glared at her, took a long draw on his cigar, stamped it out very slowly and deliberately, and said, “Every girl I’ve considered calling up for a date in the past three days looks like Mona McClane, if that tells you anything at all. The only reason I have for helping pin this crime on her is to win a damn silly bet that never should have been made in the first place.”

  “All right,” Jake said angrily, “forget it.”

  Malone put on his overcoat, adjusted his muffler, and stood fingering his hat. “Just what are you going to do next?”

  “Get the box,” Jake said. “It looks like our last hope.”

  “Look here, Malone,” Helene began earnestly, “you can’t desert us this way—” Jake waved her to silence.

  The lawyer gave his hat one last twirl, finally put it on. “Well, don’t get into trouble.”

  “If I do, I’ll get out,” Jake said.

  “O. K.,” Malone said. “I’m sorry.”

  “Forget it,” Jake said miserably.

  “Well, I’m sorry anyway,” Malone said. He slammed the door on his way out.

  The clock above the elevators said two-thirty when the lawyer arrived at his office building. He paused at the drugstore to replenish his supply of cigars and went on up to his office.

  He wondered what Jake and Helene were doing.

  Suddenly he felt very tired and lonely. Life was all at once very meaningless and very full. Perhaps, he decided, he was getting old.

  He opened the door of his office and saw Willis Sanders, very pale and heavy-eyed from lack of sleep, sitting in the anteroom. He was still wearing the neatly trimmed false gray beard.

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Willis Sanders rose to greet Malone with a well-managed but unconvincing air of calm.

  “Your secretary here said she hadn’t the faintest idea when you’d be in, but I decided I’d wait just the same—on the chance that you might come along any time.”

  Malone said, “I seem to be a little late getting down this morning,” He opened the door to his private office and added, “Go right in. I’ll be with you in a minute.”