Malice in Wonderland

by Rufus King

  His experience with decoding in Intelligence had been superficial, but he saw immediately that this message (that must, he thought, have been stitched with such haste and yet such care, and under God knew what a pall of terror) was scarcely a code at all.

  Comprehension iced his blood as he deciphered it and he started out at a brisk pace for the Grunwald home to pick up Hal.

  * * * *

  The flashlight was powerful, one of those two-foot, heavy, cylindrical cases that could throw a beam an eighth of a mile, much farther than was needed for the job on hand.

  “Well, there it is,” Dr. Hollingsworth said. “The serpent ferns and the witches’-broom. Tell me, Alice, what really made you want to come here? I don’t mind admitting that I am interested in extrasensory perception, but in all reality I’m an out-and-out realist. Putting Mrs. Fleury’s alleged witchery aside, why did you want to come?”

  “Because there is something here.”

  “What?”

  “Doctor, I don’t know. That it is connected with Elsie I do know, even though I don’t know the reason.”

  Alice parted the serpent ferns and took several hesitant steps within the large, lush clump.

  “No need to be definite,” Dr. Hollingsworth said. “Just tell me what you feel.”

  “I feel a grave. I feel it is Elsie’s, but I can’t explain.”

  Dr. Hollingsworth moved the light shaft from the serpent ferns full upon Alice’s face.

  “The answer is simple, Alice,” he said. “You are standing on it now.”

  * * * *

  Both Mr. Wickershield and Hal had wasted no time. To reach the steps of the old Fleury house was but a matter of minutes. Hal knocked on the screen door, through which they could see a dimly lighted stretch of empty hall. They waited a moment, then went inside.

  “Anybody home?” Hal shouted, his voice unnaturally loud under the pressure of their dangerous urgency.

  A door at the end of the hallway opened and Jeff came out. “Who’s shouting?” he said. “Oh—oh, hello. I’ve been working in my lab and I thought the house was coming down.”

  “Where is the doctor?” Mr. Wickershield asked tensely.

  “I left him reading on the gallery about an hour ago. I’ve been shut up in the lab since then. Why?”

  “Where’s Alice?”

  “I’ve no idea. Why?”

  “She ran over here to see you. Ten or fifteen minutes ago.”

  “Then where is she? I never heard a thing in the lab until your shout. What’s the matter? What’s happened?”

  Mr. Wickershield explained tersely while blood receded from Jeff’s face in an ebbing tide.

  “Where would he have taken her?” Mr. Wickershield asked.

  “I—think I know,” Jeff said.

  * * * *

  Pinned like a specimen bug in the harsh shaft of the flashlight, still having no knowledge of what Elsie’s last message had meant but no longer needing that knowledge now that the implication in Dr. Hollingsworth’s statement about the grave was so plain, Alice strained every muscle toward flight. But her control was gone. She stood like a statue among the serpent ferns, marbleized by shock and fright.

  “You killed Elsie,” she said in someone else’s voice.

  “Yes.”

  “But you had everything—money, position—Why?”

  “I had no money. I had spent the small fortune I killed my wife for. I needed more.”

  “Your wife—then it wasn’t a hit-and-run?”

  “No. It was arranged.”

  “But Elsie—a little child—”

  “I suggest you think of her rather in terms of fifty thousand dollars, a sum I have pyramided through legitimate business channels into a comfortable fortune. There was no need to continue with crime. Only Sidonia Grunwald’s erratic prying around here offered any threat. Well, an appropriate opportunity presented itself and I took advantage of it.”

  “You involved Jeff. You are making him pay. Don’t you love him? If you don’t, if you never have, why did you adopt him?”

  “For a front.”

  “Front?”

  “Like the flower shops the Chicago gangsters used to run. Gave them a legitimate surface of respectability. Jeff did that for me.”

  “How?”

  “As a son he gave me the desirable standing of being a family man, a good, kind father to a well-brought-up boy. A lone bachelor or a widower is always an object of speculative curiosity, whereas a father with a child is hardly ever suspected. Having reached my goal of financial security, however, Jeff became expendable.”

  “You arranged it so that they would believe he had hit Mrs. Grunwald.”

  “Of course. He stopped the car and passed out at the start of the driveway. Sidonia was going on with her act that night. I trailed her, as I usually had, heard the car, saw Jeff’s drunken condition as he slumped over the wheel, and appreciated the perfect setup.” Dr. Hollingsworth added matter-of-factly, “Before arranging her in the condition in which she was found, I hit her with this flashlight.”

  * * * *

  Although the moon was at the full, its blue-white brightness rinsed but sparsely through the tropical overhead as Jeff led the way.

  “Move quietly so as not to startle him,” Mr. Wickershield warned, the words thick from dread. “There may still be time.”

  Shortly Jeff stopped.

  “They’re over there,” he said. “Step here and you can see the beam from his flashlight—there, through that break in the shrubs.”

  Mr. Wickershield moved beside Jeff and saw it, saw it focused on Alice’s rigid face.

  Then saw it go out.

  “Run for it!” he said.

  It was Jeff who caught Dr. Hollingsworth’s upraised arm before the torch could crash down again.

  * * * *

  The following evening, feeling somewhat like Madame Récamier with her famous levees-a-la-chaise-longue, Alice lay on a bamboo counterpart in the company of her father, Jeff, and Bill Duggan, chief investigator for the sheriff’s department. Hal was not with them. He was at Memorial with Sidonia, who had passed the crisis and was given by the doctors a more than excellent chance for complete recovery.

  Alice herself was fairly over the effects from the blow of the flashlight that had landed glancingly on her head before Jeff had put an end to the murderous attack.

  “Evidence?” Duggan was saying. “We’re glutted with it. The district attorney looks like a canary-stuffed cat. That ransom note, the one the Grimwalds got eleven years ago, was still on file. The B.C.I. boys knew back then that it was written on a blank leaf torn from a book. From some particular book among the hundreds of thousands of books within the area, so that got them no place. But now it does. Once the message stitched on the doll dress put the finger on him, Dr. Hollingsworth’s library was inspected, and the leaf was found to have been torn from a book on forensic medicine—a reference work he would have hesitated to throw away, even if he hadn’t felt so sure of himself. Even the printing on the note, although he tried to disguise it, has been identified by an expert graphologist as being his.”

  “Did the witches’-broom help?” Alice asked. “The specimen Jeff kept?”

  “Definitely. It puts him at the grave.”

  “Why do you suppose he picked that special spot?” Jeff asked.

  “He told me. It’s all down in his statement. He picked the Fleury grounds because, for one thing, they were handy. After a very bad attempt at trying to wheedle Elsie into going to a movie with him, and obviously frightening her enough by his manner and insistence into stitching her message for help, he killed her. Then he carried her from the gazebo, and the large clump of serpent ferns hid her nicely until he buried her in the center of them that night. Naturally he could move about freely. There was no earthly reason why any suspicion would point to him.”

  “Wouldn’t the Everglades have been safer?” Mr. Wickershield asked. “Some far-off place?”

  “He sa
id he had thought of that, then he thought that even if the body ever were discovered under the ferns Mrs. Fleury herself would provide an excellent suspect, what with her somewhat odd habits. Of course he didn’t know then that she had a perfect alibi. Nobody knew until a couple of days later when we turned up the fact that she was in the beauty shop.”

  “I can see why he bought the place as soon as it was put up for sale,” Mr. Wickershield said. “He wouldn’t want other tenants to have it. Their possible ideas on altering the landscaping could conceivably have uncovered the grave. I can even see how he might have got a perverted kick out of it, although Sidonia’s prowlings must have kept him somewhat on edge.”

  “No, for a while they kind of amused him, but the night he fixed up the drunk-driving deal on Jeff was different. You see, he had been tailing her as usual, and she did something that night she had never done before. Signed her own death warrant, you might say.”

  “What was it?”

  “She went into the utility room by the garage and came out with a shovel.”

  Much later at night Duggan got home and told his wife all about it.

  “Like a fairy tale,” he said. “Only a damn grim one. Take that coded message, and the uncanny way the motto pointed toward the sewing on the doll dress. Here—here’s a copy. Mr. Wickershield spotted it right off as simple contraction.”

  Mrs. Duggan looked at the slip of paper.

  DRHOLCRZYHLPM

  DR HOL CRZY HLP M

  DOCTOR HOLLINGSWORTH CRAZY HELP ME

  “And the motto?” she asked.

  “A stitch in time saves nine.”

  AGREE—OR DIE

  The Waldemar estate lazed in semi-tropical splendor the year round. Until, that is, the night of December 10, when Herbert Waldemar, blasted by gunfire, was found in one of its beach cabanas, dead. The case—so pat, so simple on its surface—hid perhaps the most provocative question since Frank R. Stockton posed his famous one concerning the lady or the tiger.

  When we first knew the Waldemar family, Herbert had been in the process of marrying his fourth wife, and Ilya (my only one) had said with her usual passionate interest in the lives of others, “I don’t understand it. It’s so completely off-beat.”

  “Why shouldn’t it be? If he wants it that way?”

  “Because it breaks the pattern. Men who marry a lot always stick to the same last. If I died, Fred, you would settle on my duplicate.”

  “Possibly, but how about the proverbial exception?”

  “Not in this instance. The shift is too extreme. His other three were flaming creatures just one bikini this side of a strip tease, whereas Anne Borney—Well!”

  There was a good deal, as it usually turns out, in what Ilya said. Anne Borney was Boston Back Bay and about as flaming as a thoughtful candle in a homestead window. Not that she was negative or in any sense lacking in personality; rather, you thought of her as the well-mannered surface of a glassy and unarresting tarn that filmed sleeping depths. My own wonderment lay not so much in why Waldemar was marrying Anne Borney as in why she was marrying him.

  “Money,” Ilya said, putting me straight on it. “And then, he’s not entirely impossible, in spite of his steam-roller technique.” This was true because Waldemar, as a whole, was acceptably sleek, while escaping the oiliness of the glad-hand type of some hotel men. It was the minor facets that jarred, a feeling of reserved brutality, of a callousness that was thoroughly ruthless in its nature.

  “Just the same, Ilya, a Boston Borney and a steam roller do not mix. I don’t care how much cash is involved.”

  “She had no choice.”

  It is both ridiculous and a waste of time ever to question the accuracy of Ilya’s information about anybody who has ruffled her curiosity. Almost without exception she will be suffocatingly right.

  “What choice?”

  “She couldn’t take it any longer. Living on tactful handouts from her friends.”

  It made sense, in spite of the natural reaction of questioning why Anne Borney didn’t get herself a job, because at once you saw that she couldn’t get a job. Her age was against her, as were her delicately horselike patrician looks and her entire background of well-bred but, in a business sense, useless Borney womanhood. Obviously it was a tossup between being a society charity case or taking a handful of sleeping pills, and charity in time wears thin, both for the donor and the donee.

  “Had she no money at all? No solvent relatives to turn to?”

  “She has one brother, ten years younger, and what money she did have she wasted on him.”

  “A charming bum?”

  “A charming crook. Not that Peter Borney was ever indicted, but he did have connections.”

  “Underworld?”

  “Racketeering of some nature. He has the build of a chiseled ox and turned to bodyguarding one of the FBI’s most desirable—in the sense of being wanted—men. I don’t know who.”

  “Why not?”

  “Oh, really, Fred!”

  “Is he still doing it? Usually such jobs pay well, so I don’t see why Anne had to give him her pennies.”

  “His boss died, by request, two years ago, and Peter has been living a model, if dependent, life since then.”

  “Where is he now?”

  “He is here for the wedding, of course.”

  “Here” is Florida. The town of Halcyon, to be exact, on the east coast, to the north of Miami, where we bought a home after I had retired and turned the operation of my private-investigation agency over to our son Frank. Frank is running it now from the main office in New York, commuting daily from his home in Scarsdale.

  As for the Herbert Waldemar estate, it is ten times the size of our own, which is nothing remarkable when you consider that our incomes are equally disproportionate, Waldemar’s being a golden flood from a chain of luxury motels located in key resort spots all over the country. His Halcyon operation is on the beach and caters to wealthy jewelers from Cleveland, ardent race-track connoisseurs, elegant divorcees, and a mélange of properly heeled sun chasers.

  The wedding took place in the Waldemar patio on the afternoon of November 4. It was agreeably stereotyped in a champagne-and-caviar fashion, and the only moment of unusual interest occurred when I looked about for Ilya with the thought of breaking for home.

  A casual search led through the estate’s tropical garden and brought me face to face, in a secluded frangipani-scented corner, with the bride’s scamp brother Peter and a girl whom I recognized as being Waldemar’s only child, Lace, the daughter of his first marriage. They were in what is referred to now, I understand, as a smooch. The term is vulgarly unjust because I caught a look in their eyes, when they came up for air, and in it lay love if ever one saw it.

  I did my best to pass by in the manner of an elderly, if well preserved, blind bat, but Lace disengaged herself from the muscular arms of the chiseled ox and said in a voice that held a hint of worry and a premonition of heartbreak, “We’d rather you didn’t mention this, Mr. Brandt.”

  “Of course I won’t, Miss Waldemar.”

  “To anybody.”

  “Not even to Ilya.”

  “You’re very kind.”

  There was an awkward second of parting, then they went off one way and I continued the hunt in another, finding Ilya by the swimming pool, tossing caviar canapés to an immersed male guest, who presumably was imitating a trained seal. Then we went home.

  It stood to reason that any promised silence concerning the Peter-Lace entanglement could not prevent the odds from hitting a hundred to one against Ilya scenting it out, and the odds were absolutely right.

  “At first I took it for another off-beat note,” she said to me during breakfast several mornings later, “but it’s quite understandable, really.”

  “Splendid.”

  “You needn’t upstage me, Fred. You’ve had your mind on it yourself.”

  “I have?”

  “You have. On the surface, Herbert’s paternal opposition
does seem contradictory. I mean, if Herbert accepted Anne Borney plus her tinged brother, why gag at Lace falling in love with him? Especially when you consider Herbert. No one would cast him as the puritanical type.”

  “Scarcely.”

  “But after a few odd bits of information,” Ilya went on, “I realized that Herbert not only would oppose such a marriage but definitely had to arrange for a complete soft-pedaling of Peter and his ex-gangster milieu. I shouldn’t wonder if Herbert made him a remittance man. Somewhere in Mexico or Asia.”

  “Anne would never stand for it.”

  “You’d be surprised at what Anne will have to stand for—Oh, I suppose I do overdo this being omniscient stuff, but can’t you see?”

  “Not having your innumerable sources of information, no.”

  “It’s because of a new motel Herbert is planning for Bar Harbor. Not like his other gaudy places. This one is to be Plaza, St. Regis, Ritz, in the most conservatively proper sense of the word. It’s for Lace’s sake, primarily. She’s of marriageable age.”

  “Light dimly dawns.”

  “Of course it does. Of course it’s why he married Anne. His other three were snap happenstances for their body content or what have you, but this marriage was calculatingly planned. A Boston Borney will be an impeccable magnet for an old-guard clientele, and the place itself a suitable fishing bowl for Lace.”

  “With brother Peter presenting the only soup stain on the joint’s escutcheon.”

  “Exactly. It will be interesting to see just what sort of spot remover Herbert selects.”

  “There is a sort of slow-fuse feeling about all this.”

  “I rather wondered when you’d get around to that.” Then Ilya added absently as she left the table to start out for her morning round of pitiable golf, “Herbert is thinking of calling the new motel The Borney Arms.”

  * * * *

  It was several weeks later—on the eve of the fatal December 10, to pin-point it—when Anne Borney cornered me on the veranda of the Dolphin Club during a standard Saturday-night scrimmage. Possibly it was the moonlight that made her look so pale and somewhat like an unauthorized ghost out of Hamlet. She came directly to the point.