by Craig Rice
Jake felt for the comforting pressure of Helen’s slender hand, and told himself fiercely that owning the Casino was going to be worth all this.
Malone cleared his throat and said, “Captain Von Flanagan of the Homicide Bureau will arrive any minute now. I came here first because I wanted to explain a few things before he arrived.”
The room was very still. Someone struck a match. It sounded as loud as an explosion.
“A few days ago,” Malone began again, “you heard a bet made between Mona McClane and Jake Justus here. Perhaps most of you put it down as a rather absurd joke. Perhaps some of you took it seriously. I don’t know. At any rate—” he paused for a long breath, “the following afternoon one Joshua Gumbril was shot at the corner of State and Madison Streets under circumstances corresponding to the terms of the bet.
“It was not my bet,” he said, “and I had no intention of becoming involved in subsequent events. However, circumstances were such that I did become so involved, and that is why I am acting as spokesman for Mr. Justus now.”
No one spoke. No one stirred.
“Usually,” Malone went on, “the discovery of a motive for the murder of a man or woman is a great step in the direction of finding and proving the identity of the murderer.” He appeared to become less tired as he continued. “Curiously, the reverse was true in this case. A crime was committed. It was not the discovery of a motive, but the discovery of the absence of a motive that pointed to the identity of the criminal.”
Jake wrestled with that statement. He wondered if the exhaustion of the past twenty-four hours had been just a little too much for Malone.
The little lawyer continued, “Because the motive for a crime points so clearly in the direction of the criminal, the first act of the criminal after committing his crime is the destruction of the apparent motive.” He paused and repeated, as though to himself, “The apparent motive—!”
With a great effort Jake brought his eyes to Mona McClane’s face. It had become very white; her eyes were as large as a fox’s in the dark, but she retained enough of her poise to smile at him.
“By a curious coincidence,” Malone said, “when that bet was made, there were a number of people present who had excellent reasons for desiring the death of the late Joshua Gumbril.”
Jake was sure that he heard a faint, tremulous sigh from somewhere in the room.
“I trust you know what you’re talking about,” Wells Ogletree said coldly.
“I do,” Malone told him, “and so do two others who are here. One of them murdered Joshua Gumbril and Fleurette Sanders. The other is Willis Sanders, who knows who committed those crimes—though he had no part in them himself.”
Willis Sanders’ face turned gray. Suddenly he buried his face in his hands with a kind of sob. Everyone in the room tried to look away from him, save Mrs. Ogletree. She seemed to be trying to look everywhere and miss nothing that went on.
Malone went on again almost dreamily, “A motive is always the key to a murder. But this time it was not the discovery of a motive that made everything clear. It was the absence of one. The motive for the murder of Joshua Gumbril should have been in a green metal box in his room. It was not, and because it was not, there was no doubt left as to what it was.”
Wells Ogletree’s voice cut sharply into the silence. “Did you come here to tell us something definite, Mr. Malone, or to ramble on about motives and a lot of pointless rot none of us understand?”
Malone looked at him coldly, yet almost pityingly. “I’ll be more specific if you like, Mr. Ogletree. The person who murdered Joshua Gumbril because he was a blackmailer, and then murdered Fleurette Sanders because she too—”
A cry from Helene interrupted him. She sprang to her feet and started for the hall. As Jake went after her, he heard the library window thrown open, and ran into the library just in time to see a car starting in the driveway. He realized then that its driver had gone quietly out of the room while Wells Ogletree was speaking. The drawer of the library table was wide open; it took only one quick glance to tell him the gun it had held was gone. As he raced back into the hall and down the steps he could hear Malone swearing close behind him.
At the same moment that the car he had seen turned out of the driveway another passed it, coming in. It stopped before the house just as Helene, in her own car, started the motor. Jake slid into the seat beside Helene as Von Flanagan called, “Who drove away?” and Malone shouted back, “The person you want!”
Then Malone was in the seat beside him, Helene was pressing her foot on the accelerator, and they were spinning around the corner into the street. Far ahead he could see a tiny red taillight flickering in the dark, threatening to disappear. The police car with Von Flanagan was right behind them.
The car ahead, Mona McClane’s, was built for speed. So was Helene’s.
They turned into the Drive and headed north, driving with a fine disregard of red lights, stop signs, and icy pavements. Traffic hastily turned aside to let them go by. Now and again the big, heavy car would slide sideways, right itself by some miracle, and continue in the right direction. Once the car ahead, rounding the curve into Lincoln Park, missed a southbound Chicago Motor Coach by inches, skidded insanely for half a block, and kept on going.
Behind them the police car’s siren wailed mournfully.
Inside Lincoln Park, the traffic thinned, yet once or twice the car ahead was almost lost to them, only to reappear as the stream of cars spread out.
Jake found himself wondering what time it was. It occurred to him too that he had had no dinner. No dinner, and no sleep for what seemed to be days and days. None of those things mattered now, in this insane chase up the outer drive with the siren on Von Flanagan’s car screaming somewhere behind them, and the car ahead slowly and steadily losing its lead. None of those things mattered, but he remembered them just the same.
He glanced at Helene; her profile was dead white against the darkness, as though it had been cut out of cardboard.
Suddenly he wished with all his heart that the car ahead would magically acquire miraculous speed, be lost forever to its pursuers. He thought there must be a time in every hunt when the hunters wished desperately, passionately, that the fox might get away.
But even as he wished it, the pursued car streaked past the Edgewater Beach Hotel, struck an unexpected patch of ice a few blocks farther north, spun madly around for one terrible moment, missing several passing cars by a shuddering hair’s breadth, and skidded off to the lake side of the Drive as though it had been shot from a cannon. There was a splintering crash as it struck a tree, and then silence.
He felt Helene’s big car shiver like a living thing as its brakes were applied, closed his eyes for one sickening second as it slid sideways, opened them in time to see Helene skillfully maneuver it to the right and bring it to a stop just off the pavement.
The screaming siren was right behind them now.
Jake was out of Helene’s car almost at the instant of its stop, two seconds behind Malone. He saw a small figure in a tan polo coat emerge from the wreckage ahead of them, stagger a moment, and run toward the lake.
After a few steps the figure turned suddenly. There was the sound of a shot, the sharp crack of breaking glass as a bullet struck the windshield of Helene’s car. The figure ran on blindly a few feet farther, wheeled to fire again.
Jake could think of nothing but to dive at Helene and get her out of the line of fire. With only a fraction of his mind he realized that Von Flanagan and the red-faced policeman, Kluchetsky, had caught up and were ahead of them.
There were two more shots from the fleeing figure.
He dimly heard Von Flanagan shout something at Kluchetsky. The big policeman slackened his speed, drew his gun, and fired three or four times, even in that moment taking careful, deliberate aim.
Jake caught Helene in his arms. As in a dream, he saw the small figure of Ellen Ogletree as it stopped suddenly, wavered for only a moment, and then fell.
Chapter Th
irty-Six
The little patch of sand and snow between the Drive and the lake was suddenly full of people.
Not more than a minute after the police car had screamed to a stop, another car coming from the same direction paused at the curb. George Brand emerged from it, Leonard Marchmont, and then Mona McClane. They came over to join the group around Malone and Von Flanagan.
The tall, lanky Englishman was a little ahead of the others. He walked up to the huddled little body in the snow and stood looking at it. “She’s dead, isn’t she?” His well-bred English voice seemed curiously incongruous in that setting.
Kluchetsky looked up from where he was kneeling in the snow. “Yeah.”
“Oh.” That was all Marchmont had to say. He stood a little away from the rest after that, half in the shadows, his face impassive.
Von Flanagan gave a few quick orders to the men with him; the body of Ellen Ogletree was covered to protect it from the snow that was beginning to fall again. Then he turned to Malone.
“What did she have to do with it?”
“She murdered Joshua Gumbril,” Malone said wearily, “and Fleurette Sanders. When she realized I knew it, she tried to get away. That’s all.”
Mona McClane started to speak, glanced at the wreckage, at the covered body, at Kluchetsky examining his gun and putting it away to use again, and said nothing. Malone reached out and tucked her arm through his.
“That’s your car she was driving, isn’t it?” he asked.
She nodded.
“Your keys were in it?” the police officer asked.
She nodded again. “I always leave the keys in the car when it’s in front of the house.”
“Would she have known that?”
“I imagine so.”
Von Flanagan finished dusting snow from the gun that had fallen from Ellen Ogletree’s hand. He held it out to Mona McClane.
“That yours?”
She examined it closely. “No. I never saw it before.”
Jake looked and turned his face away. He had seen that gun before. He himself had put it in the library table drawer from which Ellen Ogletree had snatched it in her mad attempt to escape.
“Do you have a gun?” Von Flanagan asked.
“Yes. Two, in fact. One is kept in the library table, and one in my dressing table. They’re a pair.”
Von Flanagan described the gun Malone had given him. “Are they anything like that?”
Mona McClane nodded. “That sounds exactly like mine.”
Waving the police officer aside, Malone said, “Do you have a large platinum fox muff?” He added a few descriptive details.
“Yes, I have. I had it made for me in Paris.”
“Where is it now?”
She smiled wanly. “In a blue cardboard box in my closet, labeled ‘fox muff.’”
“That’s where you’re wrong,” Malone told her. “It’s in the back of Helene’s car, in a bright red box labeled ‘Merry Christmas.’”
Mona McClane and Von Flanagan said, “What are you talking about?” almost simultaneously.
Malone told them about the muff, the gun that had been inside it, and the way he had received them both.
The snow was falling more heavily now. On the sidewalk two policemen were keeping back the growing crowd of curious onlookers.
“I don’t understand,” Mona McClane said.
“What’s the last time this girl visited you, before Gumbril was shot?” Von Flanagan asked.
“The night before. She spent the night at my house.”
“Could she have gotten that muff and the gun out of your house without your knowing it?”
“I suppose she could.”
“Well, I guess that explains that,” Von Flanagan said. He turned to Malone. “How do you know so ding-danged much about it?” He added without a pause, “How come she did it, anyway?”
Malone ignored the first question and said, “He was blackmailing her. A few years ago Ellen Ogletree was kidnaped, her father paid fifty thousand ransom money. That money went to Ellen herself less Gumbril’s cut. She wanted it because she had an expensive boy friend and her old man always gave money to her a nickel at a time.”
Jake looked through the gloom and snow for Leonard Marchmont. He had disappeared.
Von Flanagan said, “What—?” stopped, and said, “Go on.”
“Fleurette Sanders was Gumbril’s sister,” Malone said. “She put the girl in touch with Gumbril in the first place. After the kidnaping, Gumbril began systematically blackmailing the girl until she was all out of money. Then to keep Gumbril quiet, she got herself engaged to a wealthy young man—what was his name?”
“Jay Fulton,” George Brand said.
“That took care of Gumbril for a while. She promised him that as soon as she was married to Fulton, she’d go on paying him. Then she decided to murder Gumbril, and broke her engagement to Fulton. That same night she stayed at Mona McClane’s house, helped herself to the gun and the muff, next day she made an appointment with Gumbril that would necessitate his going up State Street to keep it, trailed him to the corner of Madison, and shot him. Then she went to his hotel room, searched it, removed and destroyed whatever evidence Gumbril had kept for the purpose of blackmailing her.”
“But the Sanders woman,” Von Flanagan said, brushing the snow from his face.
“She was Gumbril’s sister, remember,” Malone told him. “She knew all about the kidnaping and the subsequent blackmail. As soon as she heard Gumbril was dead she went to his room too and made a search of her own. When she saw the evidence that Ellen Ogletree had planned her own kidnaping was missing, she knew who murdered her brother. Evidently she decided to tell me what she knew. Today Mrs. Ogletree, Mrs. Sanders, Ellen Ogletree, and Mona McClane lunched together. Mrs. Sanders left the table to make a telephone call. Ellen excused herself and listened in. When she heard Fleurette Sanders make an appointment at my office, she guessed why. Fleurette had already threatened her.
“She had checked the muff and the gun in a department-store checkroom. Probably when she shot Gumbril she went right into the store there on the corner, got a gift box at the first counter she came to, put the muff into it, had the whole works wrapped, and checked it. Today she got it out again, trailed Mrs. Sanders—figuring she’d pass the same corner on the way to my office from Field’s—and just repeated her performance. But this time she got a messenger boy and sent the muff with the gun inside it to my office.”
Von Flanagan shook his head and murmured, “The things people will do!” In a louder tone he asked, “Why did she send it to you?”
“She wanted me to defend her,” Malone said quickly. “She knew the game was up. You’ll find notes on all this in my stenographer’s notebook in my office, just as she told it to me.”
Helene started to speak. Jake kicked her quickly on the ankle.
“You told me you didn’t know where the gun came from,” Von Flanagan said angrily and accusingly. “What’s more, you told me you didn’t have any client—”
“I didn’t, when I talked to you,” Malone said smoothly. “The gun came to my office, tucked inside the muff, this afternoon, delivered by a messenger boy. I had a crazy hunch it might be the one used in the killings, and so,” he assumed an air of righteousness, “the first thing I thought of was to deliver it to you.” He added with an air of injury, “You don’t think I’d hold out on you, do you?”
“Oh no,” Von Flanagan assured him hastily. He stood for a moment staring into space, as though he were trying hard to remember something of great importance. Suddenly a light broke over his face. “But what happened to the clothes on Mrs. Sanders’ body?”
“Oh, that!” Malone cast a look around him, indicated by gestures to Von Flanagan that some things could only be discussed apart from the presence of women, and drew the police officer away from the group. For a minute or two he carried on a dramatically gestured discussion with the officer, during which the latter nodded twice, shook his head in
blank incredulity once, and lifted his eyebrows four times. As they returned to the group Jake heard Von Flanagan say, “Yes. I understand. Yes, I’ll fix it up somehow for the papers. But honestly, Malone, I never would have believed it of him.”
That was the last Jake ever heard about Fleurette Sanders’ clothes. Malone never would confess what he had confided to Von Flanagan.
The little lawyer took a quick glance at the tiny mound under the police blanket and looked away again.
“If she’d known what a good lawyer she had,” he said, “she’d never have tried to make a break for it.” Suddenly his voice rose in anger. “Your damned Kluchetsky. I ought to sue him.”
Von Flanagan roused himself from thought long enough to ask, “Why?”
“He did me out of a client!” Malone growled.
Chapter Thirty-Seven
George Brand poured a double rye into a glass of seltzer, gazed at it dreamily, and said, “How did you know all that?”
“I didn’t,” Malone said promptly. “I was making it up as I went along. But damn it, I had to tell Von Flanagan something.”
It was past midnight. There were five of them in the booth in Gus’s place on 72nd Street: Jake, Helene, Malone, George Brand, and Mona McClane. They had selected Gus’s partly because it was easy driving distance from the airport from which Jake and Helene were to take the dawn plane (though Malone swore that Milwaukee would be easy driving distance with Helene at the wheel) and partly because Helene declared that she liked Gus and refused to go anywhere else.
“You mean,” Mona McClane said, “that Ellen didn’t tell you anything?”
“Not a thing,” Malone said cheerfully.
“But that stenographer’s notebook,” Jake said, “with notes in it. How did you manage that?”
Malone said, “While you two were out, I got hold of Maggie and had her come down to the office in a hurry and take it all down as I told it to her.” He poured his drink down his throat, shuddered slightly, and said admiringly, “I think of everything.”