by Craig Rice
Helene shrugged her shoulders in the pause that followed. “Well Glen, it’s your funeral.”
“So you did have a motive for murdering your aunt,” Malone said mildly. “Well, well. Live and learn.”
“Are you going to marry her now?” Jake asked.
“My God! Is this any time to think of things like that? I don’t know. I haven’t had time to think. I’ve never really known what I wanted to do about it. Even when I knew Aunt Alex was going to die, I didn’t look that far ahead.”
“What do you mean?” Malone asked a little stupidly.
“Aunt Alex didn’t have long to live. Dr. Neville—her doctor—told us so. Told Holly and me, and old Featherstone. I don’t know if anyone else knew it.”
“Why, in the name of all that’s holy,” Malone said, “hasn’t someone mentioned this before?”
“I don’t know. I guess nobody thought it was important.”
“Important!” For a moment Malone talked briefly and explicitly to God.
“If she was going to die anyway,” Jake said, “what was the use of murdering her?”
“But only Glen and Holly and Featherstone and the doctor knew it,” Helene reminded him.
“What’s the doctor’s address?” Malone asked.
Glen told him; he wrote it down.
“Someone who didn’t know she hadn’t long to live,” Jake mused. “Glen, we come back again to your theory of an outsider.”
“Or,” Malone said, “there was some reason why she had to die on that particular night.”
“What reason?” Glen asked.
“Because she was going to change her will the next day,” Malone told him. He walked to the door, opened it, and bawled loudly for Nellie. She appeared at the end of the hall.
“Mrs. Parkins. Did you tell anyone that Miss Inglehart planned to change her will?”
“No, sir.”
“Not anyone?”
“Not even Parkins, Mr. Malone.”
Malone banged the door and came back into the library. “I’ve no doubt Featherstone will tell me the same thing.” He paused to mop his face. “That’s a break for you, Glen.”
“For me?”
“If you’d known she was going to change her will you might have thought she planned to disinherit you, and murdered her yourself.”
“But why should she disinherit me?” Glen asked wildly.
“Maybelle Parkins.”
Helene frowned. “If Aunt Alex planned to disinherit Glen because of Maybelle Parkins, why didn’t she do it months ago instead of waiting all this time?”
“Maybe she didn’t like to make quick decisions,” Jake said.
Helene snorted rudely.
Malone looked at his watch. “I still have to visit Featherstone’s office and talk to that doctor,” he announced, “and thanks to our having wasted the morning sleeping, it’s three o’clock.”
Again there was something Jake wanted to remember. Oh well, it would come to him. He sighed. “We always come back to one question,” he said. “Where was Holly at three o’clock?”
No one answered.
Malone put his hat on a little crookedly. “I have a feeling,” he said, “this is a murder of motive, not of method. Once I find the motive for it, the method will be clear.” He brushed the ashes off his vest. “Jake, you and Helene will have to talk to my client. You know where she is. Find out if she knew her aunt planned to change her will. Ask her everything you can think of about that night. And for the love of God remember what she tells you, so you can tell me tonight.” He turned to Glen. “You had better stay right here and go on convincing the police that you don’t know how your sister got away from them. And you, Helene, if you have any other clothes, you’d better put them on.”
He was gone before Helene could make an appropriate answer.
She rose a little wearily. “Come on, Jake. We’ll go the back way, it’s shorter.”
They said good-by to Glen, reminded him to keep his chin up, and went out the delivery entrance.
They stepped out into the cold wind and walked along the driveway to where it hid itself in a grove of trees. There they paused for a moment and looked over the expanse of snow that lay between the old house and the lake.
“Nothing to do with the case, but it is a nice backyard,” Jake remarked.
He was seeing it again as he had seen it through Alexandria Inglehart’s window, standing beside Alexandria Inglehart’s withered old body. An acre or so of snow-covered ground, spotted with clumps of great dark trees, blotched and bumpy and discolored with what were undoubtedly shrubs and bushes in the summer. Now it was desolation.
He pointed to a low, odd-shaped building near the cliff’s edge.
“That?” Helene said. “That’s the old summerhouse. Holly’s grandfather built it. I don’t know how long it’s been since it was used. When we were kids, we used to pretend it was haunted. Aunt Alex always kept it locked, never would let any of us go near it. There’s furniture there, of a sort. Want to take a look?”
“Sure.”
They plowed through knee-deep snow to the lake shore. The gently sloping ground suddenly became a cliff that hung over the gray and wind-lashed water. There was a sheer drop, studded with jagged rocks, and below, great round boulders, sharp gray stones with cruelly pointed edges, immense blocks of ice tossed there by the waves. The water, stormy and seething and filled with cakes of dirty ice, beat continually against the rocks, breaking over them in gusts of livid foam.
“Nice place for a fall,” Jake reflected.
“It isn’t so bad in the summertime.”
“It’s just as far down in the summertime,” he said angrily. “Didn’t anyone ever think of putting a railing here?”
Helene shook her head. “Someone did fall over here once, years ago. But no one else ever did, so people figured it wasn’t really dangerous.”
A few wind-twisted trees clung to the edge of the cliff; beyond them the deserted and dreary summerhouse loomed against the snow. It was a dark brown building, ugly and forbidding. They wiped the snow from a window and peered inside.
“Jake! Someone’s been living here!”
“You’re nuts!”
“What’s that got to do with it? Look for yourself!”
He stared in through the window. As his eyes became used to the semi-darkness, he could dimly see chairs and a table, a disordered couch covered with quilts and blankets. There were dishes on the table and the remains of a meal, half a loaf of bread, a hunk of butter on a chipped saucer, a half-empty package of cigarettes.
“By God, someone is living here,” Jake said.
He looked around. “No footprints, though.”
“You forget it snowed again last night,” she told him acidly, “or didn’t you notice?”
“Where was I last night? Oh yes, I guess I didn’t notice.”
“Jake, what are we going to do?”
“Tell the police.”
“Hyme Mendel is the police. Nuts to him.”
“You’ve got to tell somebody,” he said.
“Jake, look.” She caught his arm. “There’s the house, up there. And that window—the big one—looking this way—”
“A pretty picture, but what of it?”
“It’s the window where Aunt Alex was sitting.”
“So it’s not a pretty picture, and still what of it?”
“Whoever is living in the summerhouse could see her. If he happened to be looking that way—”
“By God, you are nuts!”
“Besides, who would be living in the Inglehart summerhouse? Jake, it’s the unknown element—the unknown person.It’s—”
“It’s probably a tramp, taking advantage of a warm place to sleep.”
“Tramps don’t smoke Virginia Grays.”
Jake was silent. He too had noticed the cigarette package.
“Besides,” she said again, “whoever is living here could have seen Glen and Parkins go away, and gone int
o the house and murdered Aunt Alex. He could even have made the phone call that lured them away.”
Jake only stared at her.
“We’ve got to watch the summerhouse,” she said firmly.
He swore indignantly. “Where do we watch from? Camped out here in the snow, like a couple of Eskimos? Maybe you’d like me to build you an igloo.”
“We can see the summerhouse from our garage,” she told him.
“I admit this is important,” he told her, “but seeing Holly is important, too.”
“That’s true.” She looked at her watch. “And I thought we’d pay a visit to Maybelle Parkins. She seems to be the forgotten woman in this case.” She sighed and hummed a line of I Wish That You Were Twins.
“Butch!” she said suddenly.
“What about him?”
“We’ll set him to watch the summerhouse until we can do it ourselves. And until we can tell Malone about it. He’ll know what to do. Come on.”
They started toward the old stone gate.
“I think,” she said slowly, “I think we’ve found something. Possibly Aunt Alex’s murderer. Or a witness to her murder.” She was silent for a few steps. “I wonder. I wonder if he saw—Holly.”
Chapter 17
“I haven’t seen Maybelle since she was about fifteen,” said Helene thoughtfully, parking the big car in front of an apartment building in Rogers Park. “I remember her as a thinnish child with the kind of blonde hair that turns dark early.”
“So?” Jake said, looking at her admiringly. The blue pajamas and fur coat had been replaced by something expensive and beautiful of tweed and fur. He wondered what kind of negligees she wore.
“So the hair will be blondined, the brassy kind. She will have much make-up on, with the wrong kind of lipstick. Her dress will be the latest model, but cost four-ninety-eight, and it will have perspiration stains. Her neck will be dirty. And she will have run-over heels.”
The young woman who opened the door answered Helene’s description perfectly except for one detail. She wore flat-footed bedroom slippers.
“Well, what do you want?” she said suspiciously.
“You’re Miss Parkins?” Jake asked.
“That’s me. You might as well trot right along, because whatever you’re selling, I don’t want to buy it.” Then she recognized Helene. “Oh, Miss Brand. I hardly knew you.”
“So many people don’t,” Helene murmured.
She showed them into a small, garish, and amazingly disordered one-room apartment.
“I’m frightfully sorry everything is in such a mess. I simply didn’t dream anyone would be coming to see me.”
“Perfectly all right,” Helene smiled at her brightly. “This is such a cozy little place.”
“I like it,” Maybelle said, beaming.
She offered them chairs, bright-colored ash trays made in the shape of peculiar little birds, and a grade of whisky that set the fillings in Jake’s teeth to rattling.
“I guess you’ve come to talk about the murder. Isn’t it simply awful? Poor Glen is so upset about it.” She patted her hair. “I’ve been saving all the newspaper clippings and putting them in a scrapbook.”
She found the scrapbook under a pile of gaudy magazines.
“I’ve been terribly exeited about it. It’s the first thing like this I’ve ever been, well, what you might call closely connected with.” She smiled coyly and opened the scrapbook.
Every clipping was there—from the discovery of the body of Alexandria Inglehart, to the disappearance of Holly Dayton. Jake felt a little ill.
“I’m so glad Holly escaped,” she rattled on. “That Mr. Dayton must feel so relieved. To think,” she said wide-eyed, “to think that I used to listen to him night after night on the radio, and simply worship him, and now Glen’s sister is married to him.”
“My” said Helene, “that makes you practically his sister-in-law.” Maybelle stared at her.
“Do you really love Glen?” Helene asked theatrically.
Maybelle began sniffing artistically into a lipstick-stained handkerchief. “I’d die for him. I’d do anything for him. There never could be another man in my life. Never.”
Jake decided Maybelle had been reading a very low grade of fiction.
“When you’re married—” Helene began.
“Oh no. It’s impossible.” Maybelle began to sniff again.
“Why?” Helene asked. “Aunt Alex couldn’t raise any objection now.”
“That isn’t it. Glen doesn’t love me.” The tears threatened to become a flood. “I’ve done everything for him. I was going to take a course in beauty culture and have a little shop of my own someday, and I gave it up just to keep up this little home so that he could come here whenever he wanted to, and I’ve quarreled with my father about him, and given up everything for him.”
She forgot to mention the best years of her life, Jake thought.
She consoled herself a little with the whisky bottle.
“Do you remember the night of the murder?” Jake asked suddenly.
“Remember it! Oh, I’ll never forget it. It was so awful. Really it was. Nellie was here all evening and she was going to spend the night, and about midnight, no I guess it was later, because Glen said the streets were dreadful coming in from Maple Park, and they all thought Holly had been hurt in an accident and we were all so terribly upset, and Glen was just like a ghost, and then they all went on down to the hospital and left me here all alone to worry.” She paused for breath. “And then nobody thought to phone and tell me what had happened and I didn’t find out anything about it until I went to the store in the morning and saw a paper.”
She said it as though she had been memorizing it.
“Did you know Miss Inglehart had left you a thousand dollars?” Jake asked.
Maybelle’s round chin dropped. “She did!”
Jake nodded.
“How wonderful! I mean—I can’t believe it!”
She was silent, staring at them. It seemed to Jake that she was already planning the spending of it.
But Maybelle Parkins had no information that would help them. Jake managed to get them away from her apartment before she could offer them another drink of the whisky.
“Maybelle should go to better movies than she does,” Helene said as they drove away.
“She could have imitated Holly’s voice over the phone,” Jake said thoughtfully. “She knew Holly all her life. And then gone out to the house and murdered the old woman while Glen and the Parkinses were gone.”
“Why?”
“For a thousand dollars,” Jake said. “I bet that dame would murder twenty people for a thousand dollars.”
“I’ll raise it to forty. But she didn’t know about the thousand dollars.”
“She says she didn’t,” Jake said sourly.
“Nice trusting nature,” Helene murmured.
“Besides, the old woman stood in the way of her marrying Glen.”
“Can you really see Glen marrying that floozie?” Helene asked.
“No. But he might have thought he ought to.”
“All right,” Helene said. “So Maybelle lured Glen and the Parkinses away from the house and nipped out to Maple Park and stabbed Aunt Alex, and nipped back again. But where was Holly while she was doing it?”
Jake groaned. “We’ll ask Holly when we see her. Maybe she’ll remember something after a good night’s sleep.” He considered for a moment. “Maybelle would never have thought of anything so elaborate.”
“All right. Pa Parkins thought of it. Maybe Nellie Parkins.”
“Nellie Parkins looks just a bit on the sinister side,” Jake observed. “She’d make a damned promising prospect for the murderer. Except that she couldn’t have done it.”
“She’s a type that could commit a murder without batting an eyelash,” Helene said, “cold-bloodedly and with deliberation. And without changing the expression on her face. But she never would let the blame fall on Holly.”
“The same goes for Pa Parkins.”
“Jake, who murdered Aunt Alex?”
Jake shook his head wearily. “If this keeps up, I’ll begin to believe she never was murdered. Or that I did it myself.”
Chapter 18
They found Madam Fraser engaged in teaching Holly the intricacies of a new knitting stitch.
“Oh, hello,” the gray-haired woman said as they came in the door. Then to Holly, “No, dearie, no. You wind the yam around twice, and then—”
“Show me too,” Helene said.
There was a brief discussion of the pattern, the eventual effect, and the kind of yarn to use. Jake thought it gave a pleasantly cozy touch to the murder.
“What’s been happening?” Holly said, after Mrs. Fraser had gone. “For heaven’s sake, what’s been happening?”
“Everyone is looking for you,” Jake told her. “Hyme Mendel is losing his mind. You’ve been reported seen in Omaha, Nebraska, Lansing, Michigan, and the ladies’ room of the Boston Store. In Bloomington they held six red-haired women in jail all morning on the theory that one of them might be the missing murderess from Maple Park.”
“Why doesn’t Dick come to see me?”
“It wouldn’t do,” Helene said. “Everybody recognizes him from his pictures. We can come here without being watched.”
“You see,” said Jake, “they probably figure that Dick will go to see you and that he’ll lead the police to where you are.”
Holly stood up suddenly and walked to the window. “I keep being afraid that—”
“That what?” Helene asked.
“That he believes I did it and he’d just rather not—well, rather not.”
“Don’t be a dope,” said Jake magnificently. “In the first place, he’s convinced you didn’t do it. In the second place, he wouldn’t care if you’d murdered fifty aunts, one after another. And once you’re cleared of this ridiculous charge—”
“Is it a ridiculous charge?” Holly said slowly.
“Look here,” said Helene, “look here. There’s a lot of things you can do and not remember about, but believe me, anyone who murdered Aunt Alex would never forget it.”