Puzzle of the Happy Hooligan

by Stuart Palmer

  “The question before the court,” Jed Nicolet told her, “is how young Beale feels about them.”

  Mame Boad blinked. “Oh, for heaven’s sake! Don’t mind him. He looks to me like a man who’s just crazy about dogs.”

  They all looked at Midge. “Well, in a way I am,” he admitted. “Only the doctors said that my asthma was caused by dog hairs, so I—” He gulped. “What’s everybody so serious for, anyway? Will it be okay if I buy a Mexican hairless?”

  Bennington’s face, weathered by years of salt winds and alcohol fumes, was redder than usual now. “Look here, Beale, since you know this much you might as well—”

  It was Helen’s cool, sweet voice which interrupted them this time. “So here you all are! My very nicest guests, hiding out from the party!” Jed Nicolet moved forward, but she patted his shoulder in passing and took Midge’s arm in hers. “Come with me, young man. Don’t be so elusive—Leilani Linton is just dying to dance with you, and we’ve got a lot of new rumba and samba records.” She was smiling, but there was something strange and set in her smile, as if she had turned it on and couldn’t find the switch to turn it off.

  So Midge gladly suffered himself to be led along. Nor was he very surprised to find that neither Leilani nor Aloha Linton happened to be anywhere in sight and that it was Helen herself who wanted to dance with him. She even kicked off her shoes so that she was on his level.

  But instead of taking the position for the rumba, she came breathtakingly close into his arms, the lush perfection of her body and the scent in her hair making his knees suddenly turn to rubber. Her lovely face was flushed, and he would have thought her a bit tight except that he hadn’t seen her take even one drink.

  Helen didn’t want to dance either. She simply wanted to ask him something. It took them one turn around the room before he could guess, because she barely hinted at the thing that was on her mind.

  “Oh!” Midge said. “Well, of course I’m not at all sure that it was Pat. He looked a little taller and straighter, but that could be the Army. I just had a quick glimpse of his face as we came past. You know how Adele drives.”

  “You—you came past?” she breathed in his ear.

  “Oh, yes,” he admitted. “About halfway up the hill. Pat, or whoever it was, seemed headed this way.”

  For a moment she stiffened, and then sagged so that he held almost all her weight in his arms. “Look, Helen,” he whispered. “Is anything wrong? I mean is there anything I can do?”

  “You can get me a drink,” she said, but when he came back with a double martini in each hand she was gone. He looked for her vainly in the drawing room, in the playroom, in the dining room and hall, and finally downed both drinks, for economy’s sake. A pleasantly pink fog began to close in upon him at that point. He had memories later of trying to play ping-pong with Trudy Boad and of losing the ball somewhere and of looking for Adele and not being able to find her either.

  When the fog lifted again he was somehow in the kitchen, that wonderful Flash Gordon kitchen with the automatic everything and the glass-walled stove and refrigerator, drinking milk out of a quart bottle and singing with Bill Harcourt, Doc Radebaugh, and the houseboy, whose name was Jeff and who had a fine deep contrabass.

  “We’ll serenade our Louie

  While life and love shall last…”

  A dirty old man in overalls was screaming at them to shut up so he could use the kitchen telephone, and the quartet moved into the serving pantry. But even there, just as they were going good with “Oh, a Man without a Woman,” they were suddenly silenced by the screaming of the police sirens.

  “The party’s a success!” Bill Harcourt cried. “It’s a raid—don’t give your right names!”

  Then Lawn Abbott, her face whiter than ever, came inside to tell them what was lying at the edge of the swimming pool.

  Chapter Three

  FOR A HOUSE WHOSE EVERY window blazed with light, the Cairns place was strangely quiet. The radio-phonograph was stilled, with a needle stuck in the middle of a record. Dishes and glasses were piled sticky and unwashed in the kitchen sink, unwiped ashtrays slowly overflowed on to the table-tops and rugs, and out on the service porch there was nobody to hear the soft drip-drop of the water which seeped from the body of Huntley Cairns and ran off into a bed of young hyacinths.

  Then Officer Ray Lunney tapped on the front door, then looked in and beckoned to Sergeant Fischer, who immediately joined him outside. “Sheriff’s coming,” Lunney said. “I can hear that heap of his gasping up the hill.”

  “About time he got here,” pointed out Fischer complacently. “We’re ready for him. You know old man Vinge, if he gets the idea there’s any complicated angles to a case, he’s apt to sidestep. He’s not going to risk making any enemies, especially in this touchy section, with him having to stand for election every two years. You go inside and keep everybody quiet while I give him the lowdown.”

  Sergeant Fischer waited until Lunney was inside and then turned and headed out into the driveway. The Sheriff’s conservative black sedan coughed its way up the hill and turned into the driveway, and then a fatherly-looking man started to get out, peering through thick-lensed glasses.

  “We’re taking bows tonight, Sheriff,” Fischer said cheerily. “The case is all washed up and put to bed. We’ve got our man tied up in the back seat of the radio car, all ready to take into town. He’s guilty as a skunk in a chicken yard.”

  Sheriff Vinge nodded a little uncomfortably. “Good, good. Er—who is it?”

  “Don’t worry,” the sergeant assured him. “It’s nobody—I mean it’s only Joe Searles. You know, the old codger that drives around in an old station wagon loaded with junk, talking to himself half the time.”

  Vinge began to relax. “Oh! Yeah, I know him. Lives alone in a shack down by the wharf. Why’d he do it?”

  “There wasn’t any actual quarrel that we can prove,” Fischer explained. “But it’s only natural that the old man would have a grudge against a man like Cairns, who made a lot of money overnight and bought this place. The house that used to stand here, you know, was originally built by Joe Searles’s own grandfather. He owned all the land along here once—used to grow hops and sorghum. I don’t guess Searles has ever got over the idea that it’s rightly his. The old man’s done plenty of talking around the village, too. About how he didn’t like Cairns, and how Cairns didn’t know anything about trees or flowers or how to take care of land. And Cairns seems to have complained about the size of the bills old man Searles was running up at the nursery and the feed store. There was bad blood between ’em, Sheriff, and I don’t think Searles will hold out for more’n two or three hours of questioning.”

  “That makes sense,” the sheriff said, definitely happier now. “Go on.”

  “Well, it figures like this. Searles had been so grouchy around the place that Mrs. Cairns—that’s the pretty, plump girl who used to be Helen Abbott when she came out here summers—she sent him off on some errands, to buy fertilizer and stuff, so he wouldn’t be around growling at the guests during the party if they walked on a tulip bed or picked a rose or something. Only he came back early, and he saw Cairns splashing around in the swimming pool. On a homicidal impulse he took a garden rake and held him under, right against the bottom of the pool. When he was sure Cairns was through breathing he dragged the body out and then rushed to phone us a crazy story about how he saw somebody else doing it. He claims he locked this guy—the usual tall dark powerful stranger—in the men’s side of the bathhouse down there, but of course when we unlocked it there was nothing inside but some of Mr. Cairns’s clothes.”

  Sheriff Vinge nodded. “No witnesses?”

  “There wouldn’t be any, Sheriff. It was sprinkling a little, and that kept the guests inside. Lawn Abbott—that’s Mrs. Cairns’s younger sister—came up the hill past the pool a few minutes after Searles rushed into the house to phone us, but she was too late to see him at work, which was no doubt lucky for her.”


  “Guess so. Well, as long as I’m here I may as well look at the body.”

  “On the service porch. I’ll show you.” Sergeant Fischer snapped on his electric torch and led the way around the house. “We brought it up here where the light was better so Doc Radebaugh could make his examination. Don’t suppose there was any harm moving him, as long as he’d been moved once already.”

  “I got no objection, anyway,” said the sheriff dryly. “And I don’t guess Cairns has.” He looked down upon the uncovered body of Huntley Cairns. “Good God, what’s that thing he’s got on?”

  “An athletic corset, the doc called it. To keep his stomach in.”

  Vinge shook his head. “Bet you it was uncomfortable.” He turned away. “Funny thing Searles would pull the body out of the water before he phoned. And, by the way, where’d he phone from?”

  “He came up to the kitchen. That’s one of the ways we trapped him, because he could just as well have phoned from the extension down in the bathhouse.”

  “But according to his story, he had the murderer locked in there, didn’t he?”

  “In the men’s side, yes. There was another extension in the ladies’ room.”

  The sheriff laughed. “Bashful, maybe? Did you ask him?”

  “Yeah. First he said he didn’t think about there being one in there, and then he changed his story and said that he tried the door and it was locked, or stuck. Worked all right when I tried it. And there was nothing inside, either. It was pretty clear that he was lying.”

  “Joe Searles never had much reputation for telling the truth,” Vinge agreed. “So Doc Radebaugh looked at the corpse, did he? That’s handy, him being an acting deputy coroner. Where’s he now?”

  “With the other suspects, in the living room.” Sergeant Fischer sensed the sheriff’s disapproval and added hastily, “Well, you know Lunney. Before I could stop him he’d told everybody that they were material witnesses and they had to stay until you said they could go. But I handled ’em with kid gloves, Sheriff.”

  Vinge hesitated, and his thick shoulders sagged. “There’s men itching for my job who would change their minds quick enough if they knew what I have to go through,” he said, and headed into the house.

  Kid gloves or not, their detention had made the people in the Cairns drawing room as jittery as water on a hot stove. They all started talking at once.

  “Take it easy, take it easy!” said the sheriff. “We’ll have this all straightened out in a few minutes. Don’t anybody need to get worried or upset, because all I need from you folks is an informal statement.”

  “Here’s a list of everybody,” Officer Lunney whispered, proudly presenting his notebook and then crossing to the front door, where he stood with arms folded.

  The sheriff looked at the list, wiped his glasses, and looked again. “Before we start taking the statements,” he said almost apologetically, “I’d like to ask Dr. Radebaugh just when the deceased met his death.”

  Harry Radebaugh, stiff and professional, stood up as if called on to recite in school and said that in his opinion it was not more than two hours ago and not less than one. The post-mortem on the body might cut it down a little closer. But Cairns had come in on the five o’clock and had arrived at the party about twenty minutes after. He’d gone right upstairs and, presumably, almost straight down to his new swimming pool. “Roughly he died between five-thirty and six-fifteen, because it was six-twenty when Miss Abbott came up and found the body on the tiles, covered with a man’s blue denim jacket.”

  “Searles’s coat,” Sergeant Fischer put in.

  The sheriff nodded. “And the phone call from Searles came in at sixteen minutes past six. That all matches right enough.”

  “If you ask me,” Thurlow Abbott suddenly put in, “they should have used a pulmotor on Huntley. Lots of people have been revived after they’ve been in the water for hours.”

  Vinge looked towards Dr. Radebaugh, who smiled and said that there could be no question of anything like that in this particular case. “You see, Sheriff, for your information, most deaths in the water come almost immediately, from shock. Cairns was dead when he was hauled out on to the tiles.”

  “Or else Joe Searles would never have left him there,” Sergeant Fischer pointed out. “He’d have shoved him back in.”

  “Okay,” Sheriff Vinge agreed. “Now where was I? Oh, yes. The list. First we have Mr. Thurlow Abbott.”

  Abbott stood up, and in his ghostly whisper of a voice he insisted that he knew nothing at all about what had happened. Cairns had taken so long to change that he had slipped away from the party and gone up to his son-in-law’s room to see what was keeping him, but he had found nobody there and no sign of any disturbance and was on his way downstairs again when he heard the sirens.

  “Very good,” said the sheriff. “Next, Miss Lawn Abbott.”

  Lawn leaned against the wall, tapping at her riding shoes with a slender whip. “I’d been out for a ride,” she said. “I have a hunter hack that the Boads keep for me in their stable until Huntley—I mean until Huntley could build a stable here. I was later than I realized, because I’m not too good about keeping time, and I didn’t get up to the party until just before the police arrived. I saw the body as I came past the pool.”

  “On your way up the hill did you see anything at all going on at the swimming pool?”

  She shook her head. “That’s all,” said the sheriff. “Next is Mr. and Mrs. Mitchell Beale.”

  “I was in the library for a while,” Midge began with a sidelong glance at Commander Bennington across the room. “Then I danced a little, and after that I played ping-pong. Then everybody started playing bridge, so I wandered into the kitchen. I didn’t go outside.”

  “I didn’t leave the living room,” Adele put in. “Except once or twice to go up to Helen’s room. Once I was looking for her because she was taking so long to change her dress, and once I wanted to fix my hair. I went out on the balcony outside Helen’s room to get some air because, to tell the truth, I felt a little swacked.”

  “When you were out on the balcony did you see any one down at the pool?”

  “You can’t see the pool from the house because the bathhouse stands right in the way.”

  Sergeant Fischer was writing away for dear life, trying to take the gist of this down. The sheriff waited for him to catch up and then asked, “Mrs. Beale, I understand there is a stair leading down to the rear patio from the upstairs balcony. You didn’t go down that stair, nor see anybody on it?”

  Adele shook her head. Sheriff Vinge turned his attention to the Benningtons, obviously anxious to get the whole thing over with as fast as possible. They were quick to inform him that they had been playing bridge in the playroom with Mrs. Boad and Jed Nicolet. Whoever was dummy would go out scouting for drinks or bring in canapés or cigarettes.

  “But that would only be for a few minutes at a time, wouldn’t it?” The commander agreed that a bridge hand only took around five minutes as a rule, and the sheriff beamed. “We can pass Mrs. Boad and Mr. Nicolet, too, then, because they’re accounted for. There’s Miss Gertrude Boad—”

  Trudy Boad arose, stammering a little, and admitted that for most of the time she had been sitting beside the phonograph, changing records when necessary. She had beaten Mr. Beale four games of ping-pong and later sat in on the bridge game for one hand. “But if you ask my personal opinion about all this—”

  “Thank you very much, Miss Boad,” said the sheriff firmly, and Trudy’s brief moment in the limelight was concluded.

  Bill Harcourt, pale and sad with the alcohol dying within him, had the next turn, accounting for his movements sketchily but with some detail. He had never, he admitted, been more than fifty feet from the bar in the dining room. The only contribution he could make was that Cairns had seemed nervous and in a hurry when he arrived home, though that may have been the lateness of the hour and the fact that the man had to rush through a roomful of cocktails without getting one.
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br />   That ended that list, to the obvious relief of the sheriff. “We already got statements from the hired help,” Sergeant Fischer told him in a whisper. “Name of MacTavish, Jeff and Beulah MacTavish, colored. They been with the Cairnses about four months, and they don’t know nothing and they ain’t saying nothing, except that they got along fine with Cairns. And here’s another list, of the people that were here earlier but left before the body was discovered. They all went away by twos and threes, so I guess we can cross them off.”

  Sheriff Vinge glanced at the second list, noticed the name of Colonel Wyatt, and was very glad indeed that the colonel had departed earlier enough so that he wouldn’t have to be questioned. He did, however, regret not meeting the pair of twins named Leilani and Aloha Linton.

  “I guess that’s about all,” he said to the group. “I suppose, though, I ought to have a word with the widow.”

  “Naturally my daughter isn’t here,” Thurlow Abbott said hoarsely. “She’s up in her room, completely collapsed.”

  “Of course, of course. All I was going to ask her was if her husband was in the habit of taking time for a swim before he changed for dinner.”

  Nobody spoke up to answer that question, although the sheriff looked first at Thurlow Abbott and then at Lawn, who was studiously contemplating the silver knob on her riding crop. Then there came the sound of a thin, strained voice behind them. “How could Huntley have any habits?” cried Helen from the head of the stairs. “Remember, we’d just moved into this house, and the pool was only filled day before yesterday!”

  Everybody stared, but Helen was her own mistress again, giving nothing away. She came into the room like a determined sleepwalked and sat down on the edge of a chair. It happened to be the chair in which Dr. Radebaugh was sitting, and he leaned over to touch her arm, but she gave no answering smile.