Murder and Blueberry Pie

by Frances

  If there were a conspiracy, it must be directed against another man. He must, therefore, be a victim of mistaken identity. He tried to swallow that, and found it as difficult to get down as anything else. He reread the Times’s account.

  The police believed that Jeanette Larkin had been forced, or enticed, into the cab and killed there. If she had been killed elsewhere, it had been only minutes before she died (since she had bled so profusely in the cab) and there would have been “traces” of blood on the sidewalk outside. There had been none.

  Joe Abrams—could it be that Joe was, somehow, also involved in whatever this was?—had been questioned “at length.” He had not, according to the police, changed his story—his story that he had left the cab parked while he went to a restaurant, returned to it and not seen anything amiss, picked up Mr. Grant at around seven-thirty and been with him when he discovered the girl’s body.

  “Abrams, according to the police, insists he did not see Mr. Grant in the vicinity prior to the time Mr. Grant signaled him and he drove a quarter of a block and across the street to pick him up. He says that when he first saw Mr. Grant, the lecturer was standing at the curb. He did not see him come down the stairs from the building in which he has an apartment.”

  Why was that stressed? A moment’s consideration made the answer apparent. For all that Joe could testify to, Reginald Grant might have been out of his apartment for any length of time, and wandered anywhere in the fog and rain, including to the parked cab and back again.

  “According to the police, Mr. Abrams insists that Mr. Grant appeared to him to be very shocked at discovering the girl’s body, and gave no indication of knowing who she was. It was, he says, he, rather than Mr. Grant, who suggested that they drive the cab to the station house without first calling for an ambulance. He says, as the police report him, that it was Mr. Grant who made sure the girl was dead.”

  Fair enough—and with a residual implication. Intended by Joe Abrams? Believe Joe until proved wrong; a good egg, Joe, to all outward appearances. Reg read on. It was never said; he was merely wanted to “amplify” his earlier statement. It was never said that he had killed a girl he was having an affair with and pushed her into a cab and then, presumably as a cover story, “discovered” her body. Such things are not said in newspapers. If newspapers must leave space between the lines, that is a requirement of typography.

  Reg did not like what he read between the lines.

  At the bottom of the main story there was a briefer item, separated from it by a rule. Reg had not read it the first time; he read it now.

  “Special to the New York Times.”

  “London, November 15—Reginald Grant, widely known as a poet and critic, has contributed to numerous publications in England and Scotland. In literary circles, he is considered one of the nation’s leading modern poets.

  “He is the son of the late Canon and Mrs. Arthur Grant, and is reported to be independently wealthy. He was educated at Cambridge. He is unmarried. At one time he drove in sports car races as an amateur, but according to friends has not raced in recent years.

  “He is a cousin of Dr. Benjamin Cutler, Oxford don, who was long active in left-wing causes. Dr. Cutler disappeared three years ago last spring under circumstances which remain mysterious. It was suggested, but not confirmed, that he had defected to the Communists and is now somewhere behind the Iron Curtain. During the Second World War, Dr. Cutler served the government as an authority on Slavic-speaking nations. It was officially denied at the time of his disappearance that his duties had made him privy to classified material in which the Russians, or others, might be interested.”

  Poor old Ben, Reg thought. Why drag him into it? Water long ago under the bridge, carrying its flotsam with it. He had known Ben slightly as one may know a cousin—their interests and their tastes (particularly political) had been as far apart as was easily possible, more than twenty years separated them in age. Of necessity, the police—not actually the police, he supposed, but near enough—had had a good many questions to ask him, as they had his father and, more especially, his mother, whose much older sister had been Ben Cutler’s mother. It was to those questions he had known no answers—no helpful answers. Everybody had been most polite about it, and most sympathetic. The United States consulate had not brought the matter up when he had applied for a visa, and in such matters the Americans were notoriously—and to most English minds ridiculously—sticky.

  He had not thought of Ben for years. If he liked Moscow, or wherever he was, it was all right with Reginald Grant. He wouldn’t, himself. It must be hellishly cold in Moscow in the winter, among other disadvantages.

  Why, now, drag him—the memory of him—into this? Merely to make it more preposterous? Or, merely to prove that the Times is a thorough newspaper?

  Reg ate the eggs, which had gone soggy cold. He left the bacon; American bacon was for those who liked it, a group in which he was not included. He finished the coffee. Much better than he would have got at home.

  He opened the suitcase and found that it contained precisely what he expected—electric razor, toothbrush, underwear, two shirts, hairbrush and comb, socks and handkerchiefs. All, he thought, precisely the things a man in a hurry to get away from somewhere would throw into precisely such a small suitcase as these had been thrown into. No wonder the police—the real police—thought he had made a run for it.

  Well, he might as well use what had been provided. Squeezing dentifrice onto his toothbrush he did, to be sure, momentarily wonder if the paste had been poisoned. Anything, at the moment, was as possible as anything else, in a world turned upside down. The toothpaste tasted much as usual. He shaved. A man is at a disadvantage with stubble on his face.

  With these small chores completed, and a shower postponed—a man is at a disadvantage naked under a shower—he went back into his comfortable cell and examined it. No convenient trap doors. The window would not open because it was nailed shut. The room was, of course, too warm. That was to be expected. The wooden door seemed heavy, needlessly solid. That, also, was to be expected. He thought of something and continued his examination—the nail heads were not shining new. So, this place had not been prepared for him. Had there been other transients?

  A great many questions; no useful answers. There was, clearly, nothing to do at the moment but wait. He read The New York Times. He read the Daily Mirror. Curious thing, the Mirror.

  He had finished both newspapers and returned to thought long before they brought him lunch. Thought had, again, got him nowhere. As to why he should be plotted against, if he was being plotted against, he still had not a glimmer. Whatever the plot, it did not, evidently, require his extermination—not, at any rate, his immediate extermination. He had been fed, and not poisoned. That was something.

  It was a little after two when they fed him again—again the same two men, the square man carrying a tray and the dark man a gun.

  “I suppose there’s no use—” Reg began, when they came in, and did not finish because the square man did not wait for him to finish, but said “Nope,” with emphasis. He brought newspapers with the lunch and said, “Read all about it,” and put the tray down on top of the New York World-Telegram and Sun and the Journal- American. The food this time was in a compartmented aluminum tray—what presumably was, or had been, turkey in one pocket, peas in another and mashed potatoes in the third. Reg was momentarily puzzled, then recalled of having heard of something American called a “TV Dinner.” Presumably this was it. He ate it while he read the newspapers.

  The World-Telegram reported that “Search for Missing Poet Widens” in an eight-column headline. “Sought Poet Had Red Ties!” the Journal-American exclaimed. This briefly puzzled Reginald Grant, who was a conservative dresser and elected rather somber cravats. The first paragraph of the news story clarified the matter:

  “Reginald Grant, Dyckman lecturer sought for questioning in connection with the brutal slaying of a pretty co-ed, is a near relative of a notorious English
left-winger who fled to Communist Russia several years ago, the Journal-American learned today.”

  (Learned, Reg thought, by reading The New York Times.)

  “This was not denied by police officers in charge of the investigation when it was brought to their attention by a Journal-American reporter. Asked whether the police were pursuing this angle, on the chance that the knife-murder of nineteen-year-old Jeanette Larkin might be linked with Red underground activities, a police spokesman would say only that all angles were being investigated.”

  Reginald Grant interrupted his reading briefly and tried to picture the flight of a pursued angle. Failing, he continued with the Journal-American’s account, which proved to be largely repetition, in shorter sentences, of what he had read in the Times. The police did, to be sure, decline to say whether they had uncovered leads to the whereabouts of the missing man. And associates of the poet-lecturer at Dyckman University professed themselves astonished that Mr. Grant should have been involved with one of his female students and found it difficult to believe that he could have had anything to do with murder. “A quiet and rather withdrawn man,” one of his associates said of Reginald Grant.

  Grant, reading this—it was a little like reading one’s own obituary notice—was mildly surprised. He had never thought of himself as particularly withdrawn and no man who lectures several times a week can reasonably be called “quiet.” It was true that he had not run up and down Dyckman corridors shouting, and waving a knife, if that was what was meant.

  The account did, as he read it carefully, somewhat intensify his feeling of unreality, and with that intensification came, curiously, a kind of detachment. He found himself mildly hoping that this fugitive, who had the same name as himself but no other resemblance to himself, would get away.

  In the World-Telegram, police “scoffed” at the suggestion that there was any “red angle” in the case. In the World-Telegram the police had “by no means abandoned” the theory that the “pretty co-ed” was a victim of juvenile gang violence, although her sister scoffed at the suggestion that Jeanette could have had any connection with a “gang.”

  People scoffed a good deal in the World-Telegram and Sun, Reginald Grant thought, reading about this unlucky victim of circumstances who bore his name and was now the subject of a “man-hunt” along, apparently, the whole of the Eastern seaboard.

  Miss Peggy Larkin, in the World-Telegram, declined to add to her earlier statement that her sister and Mr. Grant had been friendly and had had “dates.” In the journal-American, Miss Peggy Larkin was unavailable to reporters and said to be in a state of shock and under the care of a physician.

  The Journal-American had editorial comment, which Reg almost missed. It was somewhat indirect. The first paragraphs read:

  “The presence in the United States of an English lecturer who purportedly has Communistic connections raises again the question of our national vigilance. Was his association with atheistic Communism known to the officials who granted him a visa to come to these shores? If it was known, why was the visa granted?

  “These and other questions are obviously raised. It is to be hoped that they can be satisfactorily answered. The American people are in no mood to tolerate—”

  A little cousin certainly seemed to go a long way, Reg thought, and put the newspaper down. To be, by implication, called a murderer was certainly bad enough. But to become an infilterer—Come now, Reg thought. Why, dash it all! I’ve voted Conservative since I was old enough to vote. And my father was a canon. And poor old Ben was, by wide agreement, the family crackpot. Come now!

  But with it all read and the newspapers laid aside, the attitude of detachment was laid aside too—it and the slight tickle of amusement which came when he read so many American newspapers; it and the indignation at being made, so unfairly, a new cause for viewing with alarm.

  He could not detach himself from this room, or from memories of a limp girl whose blood had stained his hands. Nor could he, much longer, sit inertly here, merely waiting for others’ actions. He had not killed the girl; therefore, someone else had killed her. The police would not find that someone else while they looked only for him.

  That was the altruistic side of it. There was also, immediately, the question of saving his own hide. Whatever the square man and the dark man, and others if there were others, were up to it was not to his good.

  He went back to the window. He could get through it easily enough if he could get it open. He looked down through it. Quite a drop to the ground below. Still, if he hung by his hands from the sill he just might make it without too much damage. The trouble was, there seemed to be little chance to get the window open.

  Break the glass in the lower sash? Pick the splinters out carefully—there would be no point in adding lacerations to the contusions which would more or less inevitably result from the drop. (At the least; a broken leg was a nasty possibility.)

  It might be safer to try it now, while there was still light. He could, at least, see what he was dropping on. Rain-softened earth would be one thing; rocks, or pavement would be quite another. He could not, standing as tall as he could stand, looking down as sharply, see what lay directly below the window. Grass grew up to the line at which his vision stopped; a concrete path might hug the house.

  But—if he waited for darkness, he might make an escape undetected. They might sleep, and sleep soundly. If he dropped now, he might come falling down past a window directly below this window, and they might be sitting at it, waiting contentedly to take pot shots.

  There was no enticing prospect. He might as well toss a coin. Mentally, he tossed one. Wait for darkness. That was the way it came up. Wrap padding of some sort around one of his shoes to deaden sound. Hope that falling glass would hit only the softness of earth.

  He sat down on the couch and waited for light to fail. Gradually, darkness seeped into the room. After a time, he got up and turned the light on. They would expect that.

  It was a little after eight when he heard them walking in the corridor outside. Two of them again; presumably bringing him food. If it weren’t for that damn gun. Even with the gun—No, he’d wait and see. No use, at this stage, of going up against a gun. Too bad the door opened outward. One can hide behind an inward-opening door and jump those who enter. At least, one can in the flicks. Odd to find that ancient, non-U word jumping into his mind. Melodrama appeared to deteriorate the vocabulary.

  They came in, in order as before, square man with tray and dark man with gun. The square man put the tray down on the table and pulled off the napkin. Involuntarily, Reginald Grant leaned down over the low table to see what, this time, he had to eat.

  He did not really see. It was some time, indeed, before he again saw anything.

  Buy The Drill Is Death Now!

  About the Authors

  Frances and Richard Lockridge were some of the most popular names in mystery during the forties and fifties. Having written numerous novels and stories, the husband-and-wife team was most famous for their Mr. and Mrs. North Mysteries. What started in 1936 as a series of stories written for the New Yorker turned into twenty-six novels, including adaptions for Broadway, film, television, and radio. The Lockridges continued writing together until Frances’s death in 1963, after which Richard discontinued the Mr. and Mrs. North series and wrote other works until his own death in 1982.

  All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 1959 by Frances and Richard Lockridge

  Cover design by Andy Ross

  ISBN: 97
8-1-5040-5068-5

  This 2018 edition published by MysteriousPress.com/Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.

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