by Craig Rice
“You mean none of that was true?” Jake demanded.
“All of it was true. But I couldn’t prove it. The notebook was the clincher. As long as Von Flanagan had the case closed, he didn’t give a hoot anyway.”
The little lawyer took out a cigar, looked at it, lit it, and said, “If I’d used my head I’d have known it this afternoon.”
“You’d have known what this afternoon?” Helene demanded.
“That it wasn’t Mona McClane. At least I should have tumbled the minute I looked at her.”
“Why?”
“Because of her furs,” Malone said. He cast a quick glance around the table and bawled an order to Gus.
“She never would have had time to go home and change her furs in the time between Fleurette’s murder and when we met her.”
“I may be dumb,” Jake began, “but—”
“You are,” Malone said acidly, “if you don’t see right away that no woman as well dressed as Mona McClane would carry a big platinum fox muff with the pale beige fur she had on this afternoon.”
Gus delivered five more ryes.
Malone took a folded paper from his inside coat pocket and handed it to Mona McClane. “You might want this,” he said. It was the marriage certificate.
“Thanks,” she said. She glanced at it, her eyes suddenly softened, and she said gently, “It was one of those mad impulses you can’t resist when you’re very young and impressionable and sheltered. You wouldn’t believe it, but he was an extremely attractive young man, with no money and no prospects. I didn’t dare tell anybody, and all of a sudden I found myself being pushed into,” she made a wry face, “a fashionable marriage. I I didn’t dare do anything about an annulment, and he had disappeared. When you’re seventeen and something like that happens to you, you don’t know what to do. I just went ahead with the fashionable marriage, scared to death. It was years before I saw him again.”
She drew a long, quivering, sighing breath and went on, “I only saw him once. He’d become wealthy then, he’d also become a criminal. I learned then that he’d gone away when he read in the paper of my engagement because he thought it was the only thing to do.”
“Did he ever try to blackmail you?” Malone asked very gently.
“Never. It was one of those things one forgets. Because there was nothing to be done about it. After that meeting I didn’t even think of him again until,” she smiled with just one half of her mouth. “I read of his murder in the newspapers.” She looked long and thoughtfully at the certificate, folded it and put it in her purse, and said, “Where did you find that?”
Malone told her of its discovery in the metal dispatch box.
“Until I found that,” he said, “I believed that you’d killed him.”
Jake stretched his long legs under the narrow table and said, “What the hell is all this about motives and no motives, anyway?”
Malone said, “As long as I couldn’t find her motive for the crime I believed Mona had killed him. As soon as I found it, I knew she hadn’t.” He paused and said, “Look. Suppose Mona knew of the existence of that certificate in that box. Suppose Gumbril had been using it to blackmail her, and, consequently, she killed him. That’s how it appeared, wasn’t it?”
“Well?” Jake said crossly.
“Would she, then, have calmly gone away and left that certificate there for anybody in the world to find?”
After a moment Jake said sheepishly, “No, she wouldn’t. But maybe she wouldn’t have known where to look for it.”
“Neither did you,” the lawyer said, “but you found it. And you didn’t have the advantage of knowing what to look for. Even if she hadn’t discovered the box was unlocked, she’d have guessed that the certificate was in it and carried the whole thing away. That’s why, when I found what was in the box, I knew I’d been wrong all along. That’s why I was so dumbfounded when I discovered it, because, by all my reasoning, it shouldn’t have been there.” He finished his rye, wiped his lips on his handkerchief, and said, rather pompously, “Any more questions from the audience?”
“Thousands,” Jake said, “but I’m damned if I’ll ask.”
Mona McClane said, “How did you know it was Ellen?”
“For the reverse of the reason I knew it wasn’t you,” Malone said. He paused and yelled, “Gus!”
“Don’t mind him,” Helene said. “He makes his living by confusing people.”
Malone ignored her. “Of the people in that room tonight, five had definite reasons for wanting to murder Joshua Gumbril and, later, his sister. Mona McClane, Willis Sanders, Daphne Sanders, Ellen Ogletree, and Mrs. Ogletree. The same line of thought I applied to you applied to them. Before Gumbril was killed, there must have been papers in that box relating to the killing of the first Mrs. Sanders and to the Ellen Ogletree kidnaping. Possibly, something relating to Mrs. Ogletree’s personal-information service.” He explained to Mona McClane what he had learned from Max Hook. “When I opened the box, only that marriage certificate was there. The Ogletree papers were missing because they were the reason Gumbril was killed. The Sanders papers were missing because Ellen took them to use in blackmailing Willis Sanders into giving her boy friend a job. Anything about Mrs. Ogletree was missing because she was Ellen’s mother.”
George Brand emerged from a long, trancelike communion with his glass. “But those papers about the murder of the first Mrs. Sanders—” He paused, gulped, and said, “They’re incriminating to Willis.”
“Incriminating is a mild word for it,” Malone said.
George Brand turned pale. “If they should be found—! My God, Malone! Where are they?”
“In my pocket,” the little lawyer said complacently. He drew out two typewritten documents on cheap paper. “There’s the receipt Little Georgie was so anxious to get, stating he’d received one grand for his part in the arranged kidnaping of Ellen Ogletree. I’ll give it to him and let him burn it—after his performance this afternoon he deserves that pleasure as a reward.” He looked at the other paper, held it over the ash tray, and set a match to it. “That was signed by the man who shot and killed the first Mrs. Sanders because he was paid to do so by Fleurette.”
They watched it burn in silence.
Suddenly Jake said, “How the hell did you ever get those papers?”
Malone said proudly, “I knew Ellen Ogletree was the sort of girl who would carry important papers in her handbag. While I was talking to Von Flanagan there on the beach I moved the handbag from his pocket to mine, slipped the papers out of it, and put the handbag back.” He paused and added, “I had a client once who was a pickpocket.”
“He must have been a damned good one,” Jake said in admiring reverence.
“How much of what you told Von Flanagan was true?” George Brand asked.
Malone sighed and said, “I wish to God I knew.” He rubbed the burned paper from his fingers and picked up his cigar. “I knew Ellen had a motive for murdering Gumbril. She was kidnaped. He received fifty-grand ransom money and his bank-books told me he didn’t keep any of it. As we learned tonight, Max Hook’s boy only got a grand. Someone got the rest. It might have been Ellen’s father or it might even have been Ellen’s mother. Or it might have been Ellen. Helene told me once that Ellen’s father never gave her any spending money. Yet Daphne told me that Ellen was winning Leonard Marchmont’s affections with valuable presents.”
Helene nodded. “It adds up. Then Gumbril blackmailed her?”
Malone nodded. “Fifty grand seems like a lot of dough, but on the one hand the boy friend was expensive, and on the other Gumbril was shaking her down regularly. The first thing Ellen knew, her bank account was down to rock bottom again. Speaking of rock bottom—” He looked in his glass and bawled, “Gus! How do you expect to get rich if you don’t tend to business?”
Helene said thoughtfully, “I thought there must have been some good reason for getting engaged to a guy like Jay Fulton.”
“Maybe she really meant to marry him,” Malone said
. “She was desperate. Then she heard Mona McClane make that bet with Jake. She saw a chance to murder Gumbril and lay the blame on Mona McClane. Maybe even then she knew about that certificate in the green metal box. But even if she didn’t, she probably figured the bet would do the trick. She couldn’t wait to break her engagement to Fulton, she did it right away. Then she spent the night at Mona McClane’s, took the muff and the gun the next morning, probably called Gumbril and made some appointment with him that would cause him to walk to State Street, trailed him to a crowded corner, and shot him.”
He drew two lines on the table with a match. “Here’s Ellen and here’s Fleurette. Ellen’s first act after the murder was to break into Gumbril’s room—she’d probably been there before when she paid him off—found the box and the key to it, and removed the paper dealing with the kidnaping. When she found the paper dealing with the Sanders shooting, she saw a chance to induce Sanders to give her boy friend a job, and took that paper along too. The other she left to be Mona McClane’s motive for murdering Gumbril. She even called up the county clerk of Walworth County and had him check up his records to make sure the certificate was genuine.”
He moved the match to the second line on the table. “Here’s Fleurette, now. She read in the papers that her brother had been killed. Her first act was to hurry to his room to get hold of that incriminating paper. It was gone. The Ellen Ogletree paper was gone too—and Fleurette must have known of its existence. That gave her a hint as to what had happened. Then when Fleurette learned that Willis Sanders had given Ellen’s boy friend a job, Fleurette knew for certain that Ellen had killed Gumbril.”
“But why did she make up that yarn about the dentist office?” Jake asked.
“She was trying to frighten Ellen into giving back that Sanders paper,” Malone said. “That’s why she telephoned me today, too. She knew Ellen would overhear her make that call. You can’t tell me a smart woman like Fleurette would be overheard if she didn’t intend it. She figured that if Ellen thought she was coming to see me and spill what she knew, Ellen would trade that paper for her keeping her mouth shut. Instead,” he said after a long breath, “Ellen killed her.”
He took up the match and drew a third line, a little away from the other two. “Willis Sanders knew that Ellen had killed Gumbril, as soon as she came to him with what she’d found in Gumbril’s box. But he was in no position to talk. Then Daphne went berserk. He was scared clear through. When Daphne left home, his first move was to ask Ellen to help find her and talk her into returning. Daphne went home when she cooled off, but Sanders was still scared, and so he came to me. When he learned of Fleurette’s death he knew who had killed her, but he didn’t dare speak, not even to me.”
He sighed heavily and said. “What a lot of bother would be saved if clients would only be honest with their lawyers. Well, that’s how it all happened. Of course, it’s speculative. But hell, everything in the world is speculative.”
Jake said nothing. He’d heard all the explanations he’d wanted to hear. His dream of owning the Casino seemed to have faded, but somehow it didn’t matter much now. Frankly, he was a little bored with murder.
He squeezed Helene’s hand under the table and whispered in her ear, “Listen, sweetheart. When people are married—”
She squeezed his hand in return.
“What are you looking so gloomy about? We’ve nothing to do now but honeymoon.”
“I’ve just been remembering,” he whispered back, “that there’s no damn privacy on those transport planes.”
George Brand looked at his watch. “Time for one more before we leave.”
Malone muttered something about damned good riddance.
Mona McClane leaned across the table and smiled at Jake. “Too bad about the bet.”
He smiled back at her. “Imagine my surprise,” he said, “when I found I was tracking down the wrong murderer.”
Mona McClane stirred her drink for a moment before she spoke. When she did, her voice was almost gay.
“Imagine my surprise,” she added, “when I found you were solving the wrong murder!”
THE END
Turn the page to continue reading from the John J. Malone Mysteries
Chapter One
The pudgy, red-faced man sitting alone at the bar was crying into his gin. From time to time he raised his glass, drank from it, stared into it as though it were a crystal ball reflecting all the sorrows of the world, and set it down again.
It didn’t matter to him that the other customers in Joe the Angel’s City Hall Bar—most of them his friends, too—were having a wonderful time. Even the loud trio at the 26-Game table didn’t distract him. Once he did lift his head when he realized that the group of men next to him was celebrating the election. He lifted his head because it puzzled him. The election had been over two months ago. Then he discovered it was Cleveland’s election they were celebrating, and returned to his incipient melancholia.
The short, stocky, red-faced man was John J. Malone, Chicago’s most famous criminal lawyer. At the moment, he was also the unhappiest man on earth.
It wasn’t just because the long-legged brunette from Chez Paree had hocked his expensive Christmas present and gone off to New York with a new prospect. It wasn’t because he had reached that stage of being broke where the only thing he could afford to do was to get expensively drunk. Nor was it because this was New Year’s Eve and he was all alone in the big city. It was just that the two people he liked best in the world had gone off to Bermuda on their honeymoon, and he missed them.
Malone pushed the thinning, damp black hair back from his forehead, mopped his face, shoved his empty glass and a five-dollar bill at Joe the Angel, and said, “Let me know when this is used up.”
If Jake were only here. Red-haired Jake Justus was the greatest press agent alive, just as, by his own admission, he’d been the greatest reporter on earth until the Examiner fired him. If Helene were only here. Helene—blonde, beautiful, rich, glamorous, the terror of the traffic department and the delight of every bartender between Lake Bluff and Gary. But Jake and Helene were honeymooning in Bermuda. John J. Malone hoped Jake and Helene were having a wonderful time, and cried into his gin.
The four men to his immediate right began singing Did Your Mother Come from Ireland? The little lawyer roused himself long enough to wonder why it was that whenever four men sing in a barroom, three of them turn out to be Irish.
A city-hall hanger-on chose that inauspicious moment to edge up to him and say chummily, “Say, I hear you certainly were a lot of help in clearing up those State and Madison shootings.”
Malone said, “Sorry, I’d like to buy you a drink, but—”
“That’s O.K., pal. Did the girl really confess to you that she’d done the killings?”
The morose man stemmed the flood of questions with a long, cold, and perfectly vacant stare.
“You’re John J. Malone, aren’t you?”
“Hell no,” the lawyer said. “You’ve got the wrong guy. I’m Admiral Byrd.”
The intruder took the hint and went quietly away.
John J. Malone heaved a long, indrawn, and outgoing sigh that would have pulverized a heart of stone, ordered another gin, and wished that the subject of murder hadn’t been called to his mind.
He knew he would have to make one more mental excursion over the events of the past few weeks.
The day Jake and Helene had been married, Jake had made a bet. The other half of the bet had been the much married, magnetic social leader, aviator, author, explorer, millionairess—Mona McClane. She had bet Jake that she could commit a murder, and Jake would never find it out. The stake had been the far-famed Casino, Chicago’s favorite drinking and dancing spot.
Then someone had been murdered, several people, in fact, and Malone, Helene, and Jake had worn themselves to a frazzle pinning it on Mona McClane, only to find out that it was somebody else’s murder all the time, which was okay, except that Mona insisted they had followed th
e wrong corpse.
Now Malone found himself in the uncomfortable position of knowing that a murder had been committed and knowing the identity of the murderer, without knowing the identity of the victim. It irked him. It wasn’t his bet, and it wasn’t his business, but it bothered him just the same. If Jake and Helene were only here.
Malone discovered he was crying into an empty glass. He called for another gin and said, “Remember, Joe, I want to go home at five minutes after twelve, even if it is New Year’s.” He knew that he wouldn’t.
Joe the Angel’s City Hall Bar was small and far from ornate, but it was handy. One longish, narrow room, the bar running from end to end, the extra space occupied by the 26-Game table, a few small tables and chairs, and a telephone booth—that was all. But it was located in the very heart of Chicago’s Loop, and you couldn’t toss a stone in any direction from its doorway without hitting a politician who probably deserved it. If you wanted to bet on a horse, cash a check, get an interview with the mayor, meet the buxom, red-haired girl in the Rialto chorus, or just buy a drink, Joe the Angel could fix you up. He was one of John J. Malone’s closest friends, and he knew enough to keep the gin flowing and his mouth shut.
The group at John J. Malone’s right had stopped singing Did Your Mother Come from Ireland? and were trying to remember the opening bars of Killarney’s Lakes and Dells The little lawyer sighed again. On top of all his other troubles, he could foresee exactly how the night was going to end. He was going to be drawn into conversation with some of the men at the bar. People would start buying drinks for each other. He would lend his silver-plated tenor to There’s a Little Bit of Heaven, and be coaxed into reciting the “Elegy for Robert Emmet.” They—he and his new-found friends—would move to a number of other bars, ending up in Cicero. There would be a fight and he would get the collar torn off his shirt by some perfect stranger from Rock Island. He would wake up eventually, either jailed for disorderly conduct or in some woman’s apartment at least a forty-five-minute train ride from the Chicago Loop.