Punch With Care

by Phoebe Atwood Taylor

  And he’d spent perhaps fifteen minutes here at the Douglass’s in stark, lonely solitude.

  It all boiled down to the fact that an hour and eight minutes ago, Mrs. Boone’s body had been lying on the floor of the Pullman.

  He felt gratified, on looking at his watch, to find that his estimate wasn’t too far off. It was now five minutes to three.

  Seventy minutes exactly.

  And that was just about sixty-five minutes more than anyone really needed!

  For someone who had previously armed himself with a newspaper and a damp wash cloth, slightly less than five minutes would have sufficed for the task of replacing that vase, scrubbing the red carpet, dropping the newspaper, and making off with the body.

  Harold Douglass would have had plenty of time to do it, after rushing back from the village in the new roadster!

  “Without even breathin’ hard at the end! Yessir, Mayo, you went an’ gave somebody enough time to make away with her about fourteen times. Puttin’ it the other way, I s’pose fourteen separate people each had the opportunity—”

  Asey shook his head as he stared out of the car window.

  Putting it that way wasn’t as silly as it sounded. After all, there were more than fourteen people who could have been milling around!

  There was the project bunch, for example. Twenty of them. Douglass said they’d been offered the run of the place. He’d even mentioned that some of them were over at the beach.

  Then there were the Douglasses themselves. And their daughter.

  “An’ that aunt Mrs. Somebody-or-other that was out huntin’ Mrs. Boone in’ a beach wagon!”

  And Dr. Cummings—where in thunderation was Cummings?

  Where were the lot of them? Where’d they gone to? What had become of them?

  Twenty-six people, more or less. Call it twenty-six.

  Why, twenty-six people—and a corpse!—couldn’t just vanish off the face of Pochet Point!

  Asey got up suddenly from the plush chair and walked through the car to the end platform.

  There was the Douglass house, neat and white, and quiet as a tomb. There were the rolling marshes, bare and empty, looking even a little forlorn with the tide out. The snatch of outside beach that was visible showed no signs of being inhabited. The pine woods were still.

  Except for an occasional ripple of wind that moved the marsh grass, the whole place was as lifeless as a tourist post card. Even the sea gulls, huddled on the far side of the point, were quiet as they waited for the tide to change.

  Twenty-six people.

  And a corpse!

  What had become of ’em?

  And where were the police? At least by now they should have sent someone here in response to Cummings’s telephone call!

  Of course, he thought with a grin, explaining the current situation to them was going to be just a little awkward!

  “Dear Mr. Elalbert, whose uncles are so good in politics,” he murmured, “we used to have a body here that would have put you on the front page of every newspaper in the whole country. But it seems like all we got left now is a green ticket with a diamond-shaped punch in it! Huh!”

  He swung down from the platform and marched off back to the house.

  On this new tour of inspection, he looked under beds, examined closets and cupboards, crawled up into a stifling attic, poked around eaves closets, and subjected the cellar to what amounted to a cross-examination.

  Then he tackled the barn, whose sprawling first floor was a combination garage, workshop, tool house and general catch-all.

  The more compact second floor was an elaborate guest apartment, obviously where Mrs. Boone had stayed. Her rawhide suitcase was perched on a luggage rack, but she hadn’t bothered to unpack more than a pair of green silk pyjamas, a dressing gown that matched, and a few toilet articles. A green pocketbook that looked like a large envelope lay open on the maple bureau, and Asey raised his eyebrows as he glanced at its impersonal contents. A folding check book, a sheaf of Travelers’ Checks, a leather change purse, a gold pencil, and a lipstick. Clearly, Mrs. Boone wasn’t a woman who believed in clutter!

  Asey’s footsteps seemed to him to echo hollowly as he descended the stairs to the lower floor, and he began to feel oppressed by the stillness of the place.

  As he paused for a moment at the entrance to the workshop, he found himself remembering the stories he’d been told as a boy, of crewless ships that sailed along all by themselves—whole ships, unhurt and uninjured in any way, but just strangely and mysteriously abandoned.

  This place was like that, he thought. He couldn’t find any signs of trouble, or struggle, or violence, or of anyone’s having left with great haste, or under duress.

  And heaven knew if anything had happened to Cummings, he’d have left some clue behind, even if it had necessitated his amputating one of his own fingers!

  The notion that he might have overlooked something bothered him sufficiently to send him searching the house and the barn all over again.

  And again he wound up without any scrap of tangible evidence to prove that anything at all untoward might have taken place during his absence.

  To all intents and purposes, there never had been any murder at Pochet Point!

  ‘‘But doggone, there was one! An’ I still feel uncomfortable! Something’s awful wrong here somewhere—I just keep missin’ what it is!”

  The only thing left which had escaped his minute attention was the water tower, the relic of an old windmill water-pumping system that plainly hadn’t been used in many years.

  Asey strode over to it.

  A really ingenious person, he thought as he mounted the weatherbeaten side-ladder, would have hoisted Mrs. Boone’s body up here. There were blocks and tackles back in the barn workshop, and plenty of good stout rope. And considering that the tendency of the world was to hunt looking down, and not looking up, you couldn’t pick a better place!

  The idea pleased him so much that he felt genuinely disappointed when he found nothing there—not even a bird’s nest. The wooden platform planks were rotten, the seams of the tank had split, and the whole structure seemed to sway with his weight.

  “Sensible birds!” he observed. “Know enough to keep away!”

  Just as he gingerly started the downward climb, feeling that at any moment everything might collapse beneath him, he caught sight of something flashing in the meadows beyond the pine grove to his right.

  A mirror?

  The ladder rung on which his left foot rested actually disintegrated while Asey waited for the sun to come out from behind a bulbous white cloud.

  Yes, something was shining there through the trees!

  Not a mirror, though. That was the chrome-plate of the prince’s roadster!

  The old water tower was not only trembling like a leaf but groaning as well when he reached ground two seconds later.

  But he hesitated for a moment over on the gravel turntable by the house.

  While it certainly would be quicker to cut through the woods on foot, he would feel pretty silly if he got there and then had to stand by flat-footed, like a bump on a log, while someone—probably someone named Harold Douglass—went flashing past him in the new roadster!

  He slid in behind the wheel of his old car and started down the driveway even before he had the door fully closed.

  Five minutes later, he turned off a rut road, parked in a clump of bayberry bushes, made a few brief calculations, and started off on foot in the direction of the place where he had seen the chromium gleaming.

  He came on it almost sooner than he expected, standing on another rut lane that ran between the edge of the pine grove and the rim of the meadow.

  Asey stopped short.

  Then he drew a long breath and surveyed the scene before him.

  Just beyond the car’s rear fender stood a white sign, almost standard billboard size, whose primary decoration was a gigantic, leering black skull that surmounted particularly gruesome crossbones.


  “MUD MEADOW”, the lettering below said. “KEEP AWAY. IT TOOK FOUR MINUTES FOR A COW TO DISAPPEAR ENTIRELY IN THIS HOLE IN 1943. YOU’LL GO QUICKER! YOU WEIGH LESS! KEEP AWAY!!!” It was signed with Douglass’s name.

  And just beyond the car’s front fender, with her back to him, was a brown-haired girl who seemed at first glance to be wearing a brief white woolly jacket, and absolutely nothing else.

  But Asey was less moved by her apparent state of near-nudity than by the fact that she was interestedly staring down into the muddy stretch of bog directly in front of her, rather as if she had been watching something disappear from sight.

  Asey’s eyes narrowed.

  Was she the Douglass’s daughter? From where he stood, she certainly didn’t look much like an instructor in a college, he thought. She looked more like a refugee from the first row of a musical comedy chorus!

  He’d soon find out who she was, and what she was doing here, and how she had managed to come into possession of his roadster!

  But even as he took a step forward, he stopped again.

  The girl had reached over into the car and pulled out a khaki-colored army blanket. Now she was folding it with such meticulousness that she seemed almost to be parodying the gestures of someone folding up a blanket.

  In spite of himself, Asey chuckled.

  Then, suddenly, as if she were tossing a basketball, she pitched the folded blanket into the mud hole.

  Apparently she now knew exactly what results to expect, because she didn’t bother to lean over and watch it disappear.

  Instead she swung around and took off the short white coat, revealing the sort of bathing suit outfit which Jennie was accustomed to refer to, with a good deal of tongue-clucking, as “those disgraceful baby clothes.” In Jennie’s opinion, not one woman in a million could get away with the things. This girl, Asey decided, was the one who could.

  After stretching herself luxuriously, she got into the roadster, sat back, and lighted a cigarette.

  That was not the nervous gesture of someone who had just re-disposed of a body, Asey thought. Nor was there, in her action of folding and of tossing away the blanket, any trace of frenzy, or of hurriedly ridding herself of incriminating evidence.

  On the other hand, you couldn’t brush away the truth. A blanket was a cover, and whoever had removed Mrs. Boone’s body from the Lulu Belle probably had taken the elementary precaution of covering it up with something!

  With her cigarette tilted in one corner of her mouth, the girl fumbled with both hands in the pockets of the white coat. Then she got out of the car and started hunting around in the bushes.

  Finally, behind the car, somewhere near the foot of Douglass’s skull and crossbones sign, she found what she’d been searching for.

  Asey felt shivers run up and down his spine as he watched her tie around her head the green scarf that Mrs. Boone had been wearing.

  5

  IT WAS A GREEN just different enough from most other greens, Asey thought, so that you couldn’t miss identifying it. He remembered commenting on the shade to Cummings back in the Lulu Belle when he first saw Carolyn Barton Boone. And again in the guest apartment over the garage, he’d noticed that her silk pyjamas and dressing gown were the same color. Without thinking much about it, he’d made a mental note that it was probably her favorite green as well as a part of her trademark, like the white suit.

  This, he decided, was the place for him to come in. Leaving the shadow of the pines, he strolled over toward the girl.

  At the sound of his footsteps, she turned her head quickly and smiled, and then her face fell. Asey wasn’t sure whether she actually had been expecting someone or not, but he experienced a vague feeling of being a disappointment to her.

  “Good afternoon,” he said pleasantly, and tried to recall who had recently made some comment about snapping black eyes. Cummings, maybe? Douglass?

  “Hello.” She wasn’t nervous or jumpy, but she was clearly on guard.

  “Nice car you got there,” Asey remarked.

  In her throaty voice, the girl agreed that it sure was.

  “Yours?”

  She hesitated for the fraction of a second before answering him. “Nope,” she said, “I’m just minding it for a friend of mine. He’s over in the woods there.”

  Perhaps she was more nervous than she appeared, Asey thought, if she felt it necessary to invent a nearby friend who could so conveniently be used as an excuse for the car. He couldn’t quite bring himself to believe that she might be improvising in the interests of her own personal safety!

  “I see.” He saw also that she had been dumping something into the mud hole. There were marks in the ruts where some heavy object had been dragged from the roadster. “I’m Asey Mayo,” he went on. “I wonder if you’ve seen Mrs. Boone around anywhere. I’m huntin’ her.”

  The girl suddenly turned as white as her bathing suit. “What’s the matter with her?” Her voice sounded harsh. “Is anything wrong?”

  “I’m just huntin’ for her,” Asey said with perfect truth. “The Douglasses can’t find her.”

  “Gee!” She leaned back against the seat, and her color began to return to normal. “Gee, you certainly scared the beje—you certainly had me scared! I know who you are, of course—gee, I thought for a minute she might have been hurt, or something like that. Say, I met your Cousin Jennie this morning. We was all of us to—I mean, all of the project went over to your house. I always seen—I’ve seen,” she corrected herself again, “you in the newsreels and all, and I always wanted to meet you in the flesh. Your cousin’s quick with the tongue, isn’t she?”

  “It was Jennie who mentioned the eyes—sure, I remember now! I bet you’re the ex-Wac!”

  She extended her hand. “Roger! ” she said. “I’m Gerty Rand. I used to be a sergeant.”

  “An’ now you’re a member,” Asey said quizzically, “of the Larrabee College Town Government Project, Section B, or Small Towns Division?”

  “Beats hell what the GI-bill did, doesn’t it?” She grinned from ear to ear. “Every now and then I pinch myself—when I don’t giggle too hard! Say, what makes with General Boone? What’s happened to her? She missed the beam somewhere?”

  Asey nodded. ‘‘That looks like one of her scarves you’re wearin’ around your head,” he remarked. “That’s her color green.”

  “It’s one of hers. She gave it to me,” the girl said simply.

  “Oh? I thought a scarf that particular green was sort of her special trademark, like,” Asey said.

  “Yeah, it is, but she gives ’em away. You know, it’s like a Good Conduct Badge at Larrabee,” Gerty explained. “She strews ’em around to key personnel when she’s in a good mood. I had a general was like that. The day his wife divorced him, he give the whole outfit Bronze Stars—oh, there I go! He gave Bronze Stars! Say, do you have trouble with your grammar?”

  “Wa-el,” Asey said with a chuckle, “bein’ a native Cape Codder, I can slip up as much as I like, an’ folks just set it down to the quaint an’ picturesque speech of the section. Away from the Cape, I try to put on as many ‘g’s’ as I can without gettin’ too twisted up. But I don’t know as I let grammar haunt me much.”

  “But boy, oh boy, can’t it!” Gerty shook her head. “You start in trying to do something about it, and honest to God, you don’t have another peaceful moment, never—I mean, ever! This college outfit—say,” she broke off suddenly, “say, listen, I got a problem, Mr. Mayo!”

  Asey restrained his impulse to remark that she probably had more than she ever dreamed of, and said instead that he had a problem, himself.

  “I keep lookin’ at those marks in the ruts—see ’em there, an’ there? An’ I keep askin’ myself what in the world you could have been shovin’ into Douglass’s mud hole here!”

  “Oh, that!” Gerty said. “That’s a part of the problem—gee, I don’t know where to begin! You see, Boone—no. No, I guess I hadn’t ought to start off with her, but I don’t know w
here else—”

  “What’s Mrs. Boone like, anyway?” Asey asked quickly, as she hesitated. “I heard an awful lot of different opinions about her.”

  “Well,” Gerty said, “well, on public relations, she’s tops. The girl’s solid there. Give her a bunch of reporters and ask her—oh, anything. Ask her like what she thinks about Russia, see? She’s right back at you—history of Russia in one little sentence, social and economic problems in another, peace of the world demands such-and-such, and while we may feel thus-and-so, why whoop-de-dee for the global good, and that’s just the sort of intelligent international citizenship, gentlemen, that Larrabee’s trying to instill into its undergraduates—what’re you laughing at?”

  “You,” Asey said. “Mostly that little gesture with your hand. I’ve seen Mrs. Boone use it in newsreels. Go on.”

  “Of course,” Gerty said, “she always lands up straddling the middle of the fence, but it sounds swell, and you can make a wonderful headline out of it, and everybody loves her to death.”

  The trouble with this girl, Asey thought, was that after she got you laughing, she froze the smile on your face with something unexpected, like throwing that blanket away a while back, or using a phrase like “loving her to death.”

  “An’ how about you?” he inquired. “What’re your feelin’s about her?”

  Gerty ignored his questions. “Yes, sir, on PR, Boone is there! A swell front-woman. Between you and me, though, Shearing’s the one that runs the college and keeps the joint buzzin’.”

  “Who’s he?”

  “She. She’s just Miss Shearing,” Gerty said. “She don’t seem to have any rank, but just you get something good and fouled up, and everybody says to go see Shearing. Not Boone. It’s always Shearing gets things back under control. Her father started Larrabee, and she was the head till somebody left the place a lot of dough, see, and the new board of directors stuck Boone in as president. Shearing came down here with us on the project,” she added, “but I think Boone sent her right back—for a pencil, or a piece of Kleenex, or something. Boone works the tar out of her. She’s really sort of a Chief of Staff. Does all the dirty work but never gets any credit.”