The Wrong Murder

by Craig Rice

  The little lawyer unfolded it and sat staring blankly at it for a long time. Then he leaned back in his chair, apparently oblivious of Jake and Helene’s presence, reading the document over and over as though he were trying to memorize it.

  “Malone!”

  He didn’t answer. They might have been a thousand miles away. He picked up the telephone, asked for, “Long distance,” and said, “I want to speak to the county clerk of Walworth County, at Elkhorn, Wisconsin. Thank you.”

  At that moment Helene, her patience exhausted, snatched the document from Malone’s hands, looked at it, and handed it, without a word, to Jake.

  It was a certificate of marriage, dated May 21, 1914, at Elkhorn, Wisconsin, between one Mona McClane and one Joshua Gumbril.

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Jake felt like a small boy on Christmas morning who sees his new skates for the first time, knows they are exactly what he wanted, and can’t understand why he is terribly disappointed.

  Heaven only knew how he’d wanted to win that bet. He’d been willing to go to almost any lengths, take almost any risks, to uncover Mona McClane’s motive for the murder of Joshua Gumbril.

  Now that it had been found, now that he held it in his hand, he didn’t feel excited or elated or triumphant. He didn’t even feel surprised. For some inexplicable reason, he only felt disappointed.

  Suddenly he realized that Malone had been talking on the telephone all that time.

  “… second person who asked that, eh?” the little lawyer was saying in a curiously flat voice. “You don’t recall the other person, do you? Is that so? Well, thanks. Glad I didn’t put you to any special trouble. If I can ever do anything for you here in Chicago, you’ll find me in the phone book. Yes, that’s right. M-A-L-O-N-E.”

  He put the receiver down and sat staring at the telephone. “I didn’t expect to find that in the box,” he said in a strange, dazed voice. “I didn’t expect to find anything about Mona McClane in the box.” He paused, looked at them as though their faces might offer some explanation, said at last, “That was what wasn’t supposed to be there.”

  Suddenly he rose, walked to the window, and stood looking out across the roofs for a long time, his hands in his pockets, his shoulders hunched, his head bowed. Jake felt for Helene’s soft hand and held it tight.

  “Go away,” Malone said unexpectedly. “Go away for half an hour and come back. Go get a drink. Go walk around the block. Go and do anything you damned well please, but leave me alone. I want to think.”

  Jake stared at the little lawyer’s back for a full minute, then led Helene gently out to the hall and rang for the elevator. As they rode down he felt her arm trembling under his hand, and saw that her face was very pale. Out on the sidewalk she paused looking up at him.

  “Jake, what is it?”

  “I don’t know,” he said, “and I’m not in the mood for guessing.”

  She frowned. “I need a drink to help me think clearly.”

  “Follow me,” Jake said. “I’m a St. Bernard.”

  They walked through the softly falling snow down Madison Street to the corner of Wacker Drive, turned south for half a block, and entered a noisy, though far from ornate, saloon.

  Jake waved Helene to a secluded corner and called for, “Two double ryes, quick.”

  “Poor Malone,” she said softly, peeling off her gloves. The rye brought a little color back to her cheeks. She lit a cigarette, looked reflectively through its smoke, and said, “Well, anyway, you’ve won your bet. I hope you’re happy.”

  “I’m not,” he told her. “I should be. I made the bet, I wanted to win it, but I’m not happy, and you’re not either. And Malone, least of all.”

  “I know exactly what’s in his mind,” she said.

  “Then you’re a better mind reader than I am.”

  “All along,” she told him, “he’s been hoping he’d find proof that Mona McClane didn’t mean that bet—that the whole thing was pure coincidence. Instead, when he opened the box—there was the motive he hadn’t wanted to find.”

  “That marriage certificate doesn’t mean a thing,” Jake said in what he knew was an unconvincing voice.

  “May, 1914,” she said dreamily. “I happen to know Mona McClane was married the first time—publicly, I mean—on June 25, 1914. I’m sure of the date because it was the day I was born.”

  “That’s impossible,” Jake said. “She could never have gotten a divorce from Gumbril, or even an annulment, in that length of time.”

  “Maybe she didn’t get one,” Helene said. “Maybe she never did.”

  “But,” Jake said, and stopped suddenly.

  Helene nodded slowly. “That would mean her later marriage was bigamous. All her later marriages were bigamous.”

  “Well,” Jake said. “There’s the motive, anyway.”

  “But it isn’t what we wanted to find,” Helene wailed.

  Jake frowned. “I think I know what you mean. But Malone—what the hell did he expect to find in that box?”

  “He expected—” She stopped suddenly, said, “We’d better have another drink.”

  Jake attracted the bartender’s attention, called “Two more of the same,” and said to Helene, “Go on. He expected what?”

  “Wait a minute.” Her eyes had suddenly grown large and dreamy, almost luminous. “He did expect to find a motive for Mona McClane’s murdering Gumbril. But a different kind. Nothing like Gumbril’s having an ugly blackmail hold over her. And you expected it too. I know you did.”

  She paused while the bartender brought two more ryes.

  “Do you see, Jake? There’s been something heroic and gay about Mona all this time. The bet itself—the gesture of sending that muff—everything. We kept finding motives for other people to have killed him—Lulamay, the whole Sanders family, Mrs. Ogletree—but not Mona. So it seemed that the motive must be something as heroic as the bet itself. Now to have it come down to this, a sordid, ugly, ordinary motive for a commonplace crime—!” Suddenly, without warning, tears began to stream down her face. “I can’t bear it. I can’t bear to have it turn out this way.” She fumbled in her purse for a handkerchief, didn’t find one, and said feebly, “Hell!”

  Jake stared at her, drew a handkerchief from his pocket, and handed it to her. She mopped her face, blew her nose noisily, and said, “Now it’s all over and we know just why it happened,” and immediately began to weep again.

  Jake suddenly realized that the enormous bulk of the bartender was shadowing their table.

  “Are you picking on the little lady?” the bartender demanded indignantly. He gentled his voice, looked at Helene, and said, “There, there, there.”

  “Go away,” Jake said vaguely and inadequately.

  Helene buried her face in her handkerchief and howled. The bartender made a sympathetic, clucking noise with his teeth, and said soothingly, “Never mind now, never mind. What’s the matter, is he picking on you?”

  “Yes he is.” Helene said from the handkerchief. “I’m crying because he won’t buy me another drink.”

  “The big palooka,” the bartender said reproachfully. He murmured, “There, there,” again, gathered up the glasses, and added, “If he won’t buy you a drink, I will.” Seeing that the tears had stopped, he scowled once more at Jake and went away.

  “A fine reputation I’ll have when you get through with me,” Jake said irately. “This place is half a block from the Herald-American and it’s full of my friends.”

  “I’m just making sure they’ll never forget you.” She removed the last traces of tears from her face, took out her compact, and began powdering it carefully and artistically.

  The bartender returned to set the refilled glasses on the table. He shoved one in front of Jake and said, “You don’t deserve this, Jake Justus.”

  “It isn’t Jake Justus any more,” Jake said absent-mindedly, “I’m married now.” He thought for a moment and added, “I mean, this is my wife. This is Mrs. Justus.”
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br />   “You’re drunk,” the bartender said suspiciously.

  “That may be,” Jake told him, “but she’s my wife just the same.” He downed his rye, motioned to Helene to do the same, looked at his watch, stood up, and began fastening his overcoat. “We were married day before day before yesterday.”

  “Well, well,” the bartender murmured. “Congratulations. Have another on the house.”

  “Thanks,” Jake said, shaking his head. “We’d love to, but we’ve got to go see my lawyer.” He waved Helene to the door and nodded good-by to the bartender, who worried over the whole thing for days.

  Out in the street, Helene waved at a taxi.

  “It’s only a couple of blocks,” Jake began.

  “We’re not going to Malone’s office yet,” she said. “State and Madison,” she called to the driver. The car lurched forward.

  “What’s the idea?”

  “You’ll find out. Have you a tooth to spare?”

  “One or two, in a good cause. Why?”

  “A tooth for a tooth is worth two in the head,” she said happily. “I want to get a look at that dentist’s office Fleurette was in so conveniently when Gumbril was murdered.”

  “Oh no you don’t,” Jake said indignantly. “I’ll have every tooth in my head knocked out for you, if needs be, but I’m damned and double damned if I’ll have any of them pulled.”

  “Sissy,” she flung at him. “Anyway, the dentist probably went home hours ago.”

  “Helene, be reasonable.”

  “You might as well have it pulled,” she said soothingly. “It’s better than having the toothache, and you never know—!”

  Jake was silent. He had begun to have an uncomfortable feeling that all the teeth in his head were beginning to ache.

  Holiday crowds still swarmed about the corner of State and Madison, despite the snow and the lateness of the hour. The cab stopped on the northwest corner. For a moment Helene stood staring up at the office building that overlooked the spot where Joshua Gumbril and his sister Fleurette had been slain. Suddenly she caught Jake’s arm and pointed toward the building.

  “There it is.”

  Jake looked up at the line of gold lettering that announced the doctor’s name, and shuddered. “Helene, I don’t feel well.”

  “You’ll feel better when it’s over. Maybe you can take gas.” She dragged him into the building and shoved him toward the elevator.

  As they went down the corridor, a girl emerged from the doctor’s office, switching off the lights behind her, and locked the door. Helene hurried to speak to her.

  “Oh, I hope the doctor hasn’t gone. My husband has a tooth that has to come out at once—immediately.”

  “Look here,” Jake began weakly.

  The girl looked at them in surprise. “This isn’t a dentist’s office. I’m sorry, but there isn’t a dentist anywhere in the building. Maybe if you’d call the—”

  “Are you sure?” Helene demanded.

  “Yes, I am. You might find—”

  Helene said, “But I was positive that this was a dentist’s office. Why I had a friend who had some work done here just two days ago.”

  The girl shook her head. “It couldn’t have been here. The doctor’s been away for the past week. And anyway, he isn’t a dentist. He’s an obstetrician.” She went on down the hall toward the elevator.

  “Well,” Jake said, “it seems to be your move. What do you suggest?”

  She ignored him. “My hunch was right. Let’s go back and tell Malone.”

  “What the hell would he want with an obstetrician?”

  “Never mind,” she said fiercely. “I was right that Fleurette didn’t see Joshua Gumbril murdered from a dentist’s office or any other office. I’d suspected as much but now I’m sure of it.”

  “I’m sure of something else,” Jake said happily. “I’ve had a very, very narrow escape.”

  They found Malone hunched over his desk, talking into the telephone. He looked up as they came to the door and motioned to them to come in.

  As they entered the room he said, “Thanks. See you later,” to the telephone, put it down on his desk, and said, “That was Von Flanagan.”

  “What has he found out?” Jake asked, as if he really needed to be told.

  “He says he traced the ownership of the gun with three telephone calls It was one of a pair sold to Mona McClane four years ago.”

  “It was, eh?” Jake said calmly, reaching for a cigarette. “Did it fire the shots that killed Joshua Gumbril and Fleurette Sanders?”

  “It did,” the little lawyer said quietly. He stood up and began getting into his overcoat very slowly and deliberately. For the first time Jake realized how terribly tired he seemed. “Yes, it did,” Malone repeated. He added, almost as an afterthought, “He’ll meet us at Mona McClane’s in a little while.”

  Suddenly, his overcoat half on, he picked up the telephone, clenched his cigar, and called Mona McClane’s number.

  “I’m coming up to see you,” he said into the phone. “I’m on my way now. I wonder if you can assemble the people who were present when you made that bet with Jake. I’d like to have them hear how it came out.” He listened a moment, murmured, “Yes, all of them. That’s fine,” and hung up.

  “Do we need to make a Roman holiday of it?” Helene demanded.

  Malone said nothing. He stood by the desk, apparently deep in thought, for an instant. Suddenly he unlocked a desk drawer, took out the box containing Mona McClane’s muff, and tucked it under his arm.

  Helene told him of their discovery about the dentist’s office.

  The lawyer nodded. “I hate to break your heart, but I’d already found that out. Fleurette probably learned of Gumbril’s death the same way we did, from the newspapers. Not having to waste tíme identifying him, like ourselves, she was able to hike right along to his room and beat us to the box. Being his sister she was probably familiar with his hiding place, and went straight to it.”

  “Then did she—” Jake began.

  Malone motioned him to silence. He ushered Jake and Helene into the hall, followed them, and unlocked the door. They rode down the elevator and crossed the lobby without a word. As they got into the car Malone said, “Helene, just how fast can you drive to Mona McClane’s?”

  Jake groaned. Helene said, “Do you really want to know?” Her voice held the pleased surprise of a small boy asked to demonstrate his ice-cream capacity.

  She started the car as Malone said in a husky, painfully tired voice, “I’d like to have time to make a few explanations before Von Flanagan gets there, that’s all.” He added a few blocks farther, “Don’t think I like this, because I don’t. But you got me into it and I’ve got to go through with it now. And if either of you say one word on the way, I won’t answer for the consequences.”

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  At first it seemed remarkable to Jake that the big, comfortable room in the old McClane mansion should look just as it had when he had seen it last. Then he remembered that had been only the night before.

  The same room, the same, oversized luxurious furniture, the same people. Save for that terribly large gap left by the absence of Fleurette Sanders. She had been sitting on that couch, that one right over there. Strange, Jake thought, that such a little person as Fleurette could leave such an enormous space behind in a room. It was like the tremendous, yawning canyon that always seemed to be left by the extraction of a quite small tooth, a canyon of which one was perpetually conscious. Everyone in the room was trying to pay no attention to the space left by Fleurette Sanders, and everyone was unbearably aware of it.

  All of them avoided the couch where she had been.

  The others were there. Jake looked around the room. There was Willis Sanders, pale and visibly shaken, with George Brand right beside him and an unobtrusively solicitous Partridge hovering in the background. Willis Sanders was beardless, Jake observed, while his companion’s neatly trimmed mustache and imperial were back wher
e they seemed to belong. He wondered how Partridge had managed it. Some kind of glue, of course. There was Daphne Sanders, sitting quite by herself, like an alien in the room, trying to look as though she hadn’t accused the dead Fleurette Sanders of murder only the night before.

  There was Mrs. Ogletree, pleasantly excited and doing her fluttering best to appear shocked and horror-stricken. Jake was reminded of people on trains and buses reading the accounts of disasters in the morning paper, saying, “How awful!” in exhilarated and almost elated voices. There was something almost vulturelike about her. Jake remembered Max Hook’s revelation, and wondered how many tender morsels of gossip had been turned into lucrative blackmail by the arrangement with Mrs. Ogletree.

  Wells Ogletree, beside his wife, looked as though he were trying, with his aristocratic nostrils, to decide on the exact location of a mouse that had perished, not too recently, in the wall.

  Ellen Ogletree and Leonard Marchmont sat together on a sofa. Ellen looked very bored and extremely discontented, Marchmont acted like a man who has just been called to the telephone from a sound sleep. Both of them seemed to feel that the whole procedure was not only definitely distasteful, but also extremely dull.

  Yes, all of them were there, Jake thought, all as tense as harp strings, yet pretending that nothing in the least unusual was going on: None of them looked at him, none of them seemed to remember that he had bet he could pin a murder on Mona McClane, and now was here to collect.

  The only person who looked entirely calm was Mona McClane. She wore the same dark, clinging dress she had worn the night before, with the glittering pendant on its long, slender chain. Her small, pointed face was pale but, Jake thought, no more pale than it had always been. She showed no sign of agitation, only an intense interest in whatever might be going to happen next.

  Opposite her sat John J. Malone, his dark-blue suit wrinkled and a little dusty, his black hair mussed and damp. There was a small smudge on the side of his nose.