Punch With Care

by Phoebe Atwood Taylor

  “I pried that out, too—strictly speaking, I sorted rather than pried. Louise has just the slightest tendency to run on—oh, you found that out? Briefly,” Cummings said, “Boone pulled a very fast and nasty one on the Douglasses years ago, when they were all young and writing for the radio, and she was Carrie Branch. Seems she not only wangled the job that Harold and Louise should have had, but she told such a pack of lies about ’em that they landed on their ears in the gutter—it was really nasty feline stuff, with claws, and spitting. Of course, it turned out to be a very good thing in the end for the Douglasses, because in their desperation, they invented Mother Gaston. And Mother Gaston is the modern equivalent of a gold mine.” He paused. “Er—would you know Mother Gaston?”

  “By now,” Asey said, “I feel like a member of her family. Whyn’t you tell me that was what they wrote?”

  “Because I didn’t know till this afternoon. They never confided it to me. Apparently they keep it very dark,” Cummings said. “Very secret. Like a bar sinister. But after Boone got them fired, and before Mother Gaston materialized, they had a period of very grim sledding. Early depression stuff—not enough to eat, and sickness, and Layne just a child. A lot of Harold’s bitterness, I gathered, stemmed from things like Layne’s having to go to a charity ward in a city hospital when she was sick. That sort of thing. It was the child’s deprivations that infuriated him.”

  “An’ yet,” Asey remarked, “he seemed to me less mad about what had happened in the past than just mad in the present at her, if you see what I’m drivin’ at.”

  “That’s my point,” Cummings said. “In her hysterical mood, Louise virtually admitted to me that she thought Harold had killed Boone, and when I commented that the motivation was a little tarnished with time, she said that the past hadn’t really goaded Llarold quite as much as what Boone was doing to Layne now.”

  “An’ what in time did she mean by that?”

  “Well,” Cummings said, “Layne is sold on Boone. It’s Boone, Boone, Boone, Boone this and Boone that. Louise didn’t say so in so many words, but I gathered that the Douglasses themselves play a very small second fiddle to Boone in Layne’s mind. Louise accepts it philosophically. Harold doesn’t. He reacts as if she actually were their own daughter, you see.”

  “As if she were their own—isn’t she their own?” Asey demanded.

  “Oh, no, she’s adopted. The child of friends of theirs who were killed in an automobile accident. I’m really rather surprised that you didn’t catch on to that,” Cummings said. “While they never go out of their way to make the distinction, they usually make it casually clear. Layne was seven or eight, I think, when they took her.” He took a big bite of “Baby Doll.”

  “Douglass didn’t—yes, come to think of it,” Asey said, “he never actually did refer to her as his daughter! He just said he was tryin’ to act like the perfect parent. An’ he begun with the measles when he told about seein’ her through things—an’ I remember wonderin’ why he slid over the early problems like teeth an’ colic. Huh! When I talked with him, Harold pretended nothin’ had happened outside of Mrs. Boone’s bein’ lost. But you say Louise thought he killed her. What do you think, doc?”

  “What goes for one of ’em,” Cummings said, “goes for the other. They both have perfectly good motives—revenge for the past, jealousy over Layne. But I found myself thinking of Mrs. Framingham—Aunt Mary, that is—as I followed that woman over here. Somehow she sounded like Aunt Mary. I mean, her footsteps did—oh, if only I’d been a Boy Scout in my youth, Asey!”

  “Did you aim to build a fire under her, or just wigwag to her?” Asey inquired.

  “I mean, I can’t even trail people properly! She was always just enough ahead of me so I couldn’t see her, and I didn’t dare gain on her too much and let her know I was following—and I was so sure she’d lead me to something! I don’t know why, but I assumed she’d go straight to that body!”

  “Why are you so positive that you followed a woman?” Asey asked.

  “Because it wasn’t a man!” Cummings retorted. “Of course, it’s occurred to me that Louise had only to go up the front stairs and come down the back stairs and march out to the Lulu Belle, herself, and—oh, so you’ve already figured that one out, have you?” he added as Asey made an exclamation of assent. “Maybe it wasn’t Aunt Mary. Maybe it was Louise! But I’m positive I followed a woman. I never stopped to look at the Pullman carpet after I discovered the body was gone, but if you say that the stains had been scrubbed off, that proves it was a woman!”

  Asey wanted to know why he felt that was any particular proof.

  “Oh, women always know exactly how to take out stains!” Cummings returned. “The average man doesn’t, or else he doesn’t think of ’em, or else he makes a terrible botch of the job if he tries. My wife pointed that out to me once. She said furthermore that men always use hot water, which only sets the stain deeper. And Louise had the time to get out there and scrub, and move the body. I dallied in the living room after she went upstairs—oh, damn it, Asey, what happened? How can we find that body? Why was Boone moved? W>hat are we going to do about it?”

  “How would kindly old Doctor Muldoon solve this one for wise old Mother Gaston?” Asey said in sepulchral tones. “Listen in tomorrow!”

  “That Muldoon! There’s a man I cordially detest!” Cummings said with feeling. “My wife’s always throwing him at me because the kindly old fool’s grateful patients are always giving sweet old Airs. Muldoon the prettiest diamonds—and my wife feels the discrepancy keenly. She implies that if 1 were only kindlier, more diamonds might fall her way! Hm. I’m sure that she or Jennie would know in a flash where that lovable old mush-mouth would go to find that body!”

  “I asked Jennie,” Asey remarked. “She suggested a secret room.”

  Cummings snorted his scorn at the suggestion.

  “Of course, a secret room! Oh, just the thing! Or I suppose we could always send away and get another body! Sherlock, who took it? Everyone was wandering around, apparently—and even if they weren’t actually wandering around here, they could get here—Harold could, for example, as you said. But what would anyone do with her body? Why hide it in a secret room or any other place?”

  “I been askin’ myself what anyone hopes to gain from it,” Asey said. “For no matter what anyone has done with it, we know that it exists, an’ we know where it was!”

  “What they hope to gain is obvious enough!” Cummings said. “Time! They’re stalling us!”

  “I wonder, doc. I been thinkin’ it over,” Asey said slowly. “I wonder if it’s turnin’ up some other place, as it will sooner or later, doesn’t just mean that someone’s tryin’ to get it away from here—I mean like away from the Douglass’s, or any connection with them. All the time Douglass talked to me about Mrs. Boone, I felt he was tryin’ awful hard to accent her bein’ a public figure, tryin’ somehow to shove her away from him, an’ Louise, an’ here!”

  “You’ve really had what amounts to a life history of Boone, haven’t you?” Cummings commented. “From me, as one of her public—although I’ll admit that much of my early enthusiasm has now waned—and from the Douglasses, who knew her when, and from Gerty, who gave you the college, or in-time note!”

  Asey said that the picture of Mrs. Boone was filling out.

  “Now, doc,” he continued, “s’pose we knew where the body was. S’pose things had progressed in what you might call a normal fashion. Just what different things would we be doin’ now? What different things would we have done? How different would things be now, d’you think?”

  “Why, everything would be completely different!” Cummings said without a moment’s hesitation. “There’d be cops all over, getting under foot and driving me bats, and there’d be a million photographers and reporters milling around in your hair, and I suppose old Senator Willard P. Boone would have rushed here with his beard waving in the breeze! All the town would be here, all the surrounding towns would be he
re, all their cousins, sisters, aunts—the place would be a damned madhouse, man alive, and you know it!”

  “Uh-huh. But what about the people? You think they’d have broken any bones failin’ over themselves to give us vital tidbits of information?” Asey asked.

  “Oh, they’d be on guard—getting information would be like pulling hens’ teeth, of course. We’ve had enough experience with this sort of thing to be sure that everyone would be just as difficult as possible!” Cummings conceded. “Humpf. I suppose I can’t say I wouldn’t still have spent the afternoon in the boat house, and I don’t know but what you still would have been peering into Aunt Mary’s inner tube, or chatting by mud holes with ex-Wacs. Humpf. I see what you’re driving at, Asey. Actually, we’ve been less stalled than distracted.”

  “That’s about what I figured,” Asey said. “In fact, when everything proceeds accordin’ to Hoyle, a murderer has a certain advantage—he can lots of times tell what you’re goin’ to do next, an’ prepare accordingly. But if I were the murderer in this particular business, I sort of think I’d be kind of on tenterhooks. I wouldn’t be sure how much had been found out, or what was known, or what anyone guessed. I wouldn’t know whether or not to start any counter-action, or even what to counter.”

  “You mean, Pollyanna, that you’re glad-glad-glad that we have no corpse?” Cummings asked acidly.

  “Nope, I’m not that glad. But I think we found out quite a lot,” Asey said. “I don’t think we’re stalled, an’ I don’t even see that we need to let ourselves get distracted. Let’s just s’pose you’ve called your ambulance an’ Halbert’s men have taken her away. Let’s draw a line across the page an’ start from there. Start back at noon—say from twelve to twelve-fifteen, until the time you an’ I came, around half past one. Durin’ that period, you got the Douglass family at their house—”

  “And we’ve got their motives. Check.”

  “You got Aunt Mary wanderin’ around in a beachwagon, an’ you got a fake flat—”

  “I can’t see any obvious motive for her killing Boone,” Cummings said. “Certainly Boone never did her out of a job, or forced her to any privation! But there’s admittedly something fishy about that flat tire business, and about her insisting to Louise that no murder possibly could have taken place! And remember—the woman I followed walked like her!”

  “Then,” Asey went on, “you got the project all over the lot. Take that ex-Wave. Take that fellow I got tied up back there. Jennie said he left our house early, before the rest of the bunch—I’m goin’ to look into him in just a minute. Then you got that Eric Manderson floatin’ around in the vicinity. You got this Miss Shearin’ phonin’ from somewhere an’ sayin’ everything’s okay. You got Gerty an’ Layne over on the beach—”

  “Layne really would be the perfect one, wouldn’t she?” Cummings interrupted thoughtfully. “I mean, the perfect murderer.”

  “Layne? Why?” Asey asked. “She seems to be the only real genuine pro-Boone person I’ve run across—outside of you, earlier!”

  “I know. But I can’t believe she doesn’t know that many of her childhood hardships were due to Boone. She certainly knows what Harold and Louise feel about Boone! And yet she seems to worship the woman—it could be one of those reversals, you know!”

  “What reversals?”

  “Oh, there’s a five-dollar word for it,” Cummings said. “Boils down to—well, for example, you work your fingers to the bone to prove you’re for something, when really you hate it to death and want to crunch it under your heel like a spider. Had a case of it in the paper last week. Wife stopped loving her husband, covered up by meeting him at the gate every night when he came home from the office, cooking his favorite dishes—just knocked herself out being the perfect little woman. People were awfully surprised when she killed him with the ice pick, but the psychologists understood it all at once. That sort of thing. Reversal.”

  “Sounds a bit complicated,” Asey said. “Seems to me it’d be easier to work out Layne by way of Jack Briggs—she wants him, but Boone has the Indian sign on him. I told you about that. Gerty’s contribution.”

  “But that’s so commonplace—love, revenge, all that!” Cummings complained. “My idea is—well, it’s different! Asey, know what I thought of all afternoon in that damned boat house?”

  “Food, phones, food, a word to describe a strange noise, food, phones, an’ how to get a light for your cigar,” Asey said promptly.

  “Your insinuation that I’m a slave to my stomach is libellous!” Cummings said. “Those were merely intermittent reflections—my real preoccupation was with that damned rhyme—d’you remember it?—‘Punch, conductor, punch with care—’ ”

  “ ‘Punch in the presence of the passen-jaire!’ ” Asey finished up. “Sure. I remember. I’ve thought of it every time I’ve thought of that green ticket with the diamond-shaped punch.”

  “Well, there’s more of it than that,” Cummings said. “A blue trip-slip for something, and a something-else-trip- slip for something else—I tell you, it’s driven me crazy! I’ve tom my memory apart!”

  “It’s a pink trip-slip,” Asey said. “At least, I think it’s pink! And for a—golly, I can’t recall it, either! A pink-trip-slip, a—”

  “Just you take my advice and put it out of your mind and never let yourself think of it again! ” Cummings said. “Once you get started, your thoughts start stuttering—was there a passen-jaire, d’you suppose, besides Boone?”

  “I been thinkin’ of the murderer as the passen-jaire all along,” Asey said. “Well, let’s stroll back an’ see this fellow that I got tied up. Maybe by now he’ll be a little chastened—”

  “And of course you’ve decided exactly how you’re going to justify this apparent mayhem on his person?” Cummings demanded. “And I mean justify, as explain without going into detail on the topic of murder?”

  Asey chuckled.

  “Fumble around in that glove compartment in front of you an’ pick me out a badge—”

  “Pick a card, just any card?” Cummings interrupted.

  “There’s one in particular that I want—an oval, gold-plated job named ‘Special Deputy’. It’s really very impressive.”

  “Don’t tell me,” Cummings said, “that you have some mad notion of playing quohaug inspector again! You never could get away with that twice!”

  “I wager I can,” Asey returned. “Remember we’re not dealin’ with natives, or with summer folks—this project crew is all outlanders. An’ I don’t know but on the whole we can find out about as much that way—don’t snort, doc! People be a lot more likely to discuss odds an’ ends with a quohaug inspector who’s askin’ about quohaugs they haven’t swiped than they will with someone who’s third degreein’ ’em about a murder they maybe committed! Hold it—that’s the badge I want! Then after Sonny Boy, I think we’ll look into Miss Shearing—she’s presumably stayin’ at some Inn in town—”

  “And presumably,” Cummings said with irony, “will be fascinated to the core by a visit from a quohaug inspector? No, Sherlock, you might make it with the kids, but I don’t think you can play quohaug with her!”

  Asey said that he didn’t know who had a better right to consult with her, in her capacity as leader of a project on Town Government, than a Special Deputy.

  “I can always give her the keys of the town,” he added. “Then after we find out a few items, includin’ what she actually said to Aunt Mary over the phone, we’ll come back here an’ see Aunt Mary—”

  “In your capacity as tire inspector, no doubt! You can’t get away with it! You—Asey, do you keep seeing lights over that way?” The doctor pointed over toward the lane junction.

  “You mean car lights? I’ve noticed some. Every now an’ then you can catch a glimpse of light from the Douglass’s, too, when the wind blows the branches just right. This is close to the house, doc!”

  “I’m not talking about car lights!” Cummings said impatiently. “I mean that—see? Ther
e it is again! Watch that way!”

  “Looks to me,” Asey said, “like one of them little pocket flashlights that’s like a fountain pen—”

  “Maybe,” Cummings began to sound excited, “maybe it’s that woman—my jailer—coming back to let me out! Look, the light is coming this way—oh, damn, they’ll see us!”

  “Nobody’s goin’ to notice this car that wasn’t expectin’ it to be here,” Asey said. “I parked with that in mind—stop bouncin’ up an’ down, doc! Wait—hey, don’t get out! Don’t—”

  “But we can’t see! We—”

  “Turn around an’ kneel on the seat—an’ shush! Just wait!”

  When the figure finally walked along the lane past the car, Cummings’s voice breathed in Asey’s ear.

  “That’s Layne Douglass!”

  9

  “THERE, SEE? I knew I was right about her!” Cummings’s whisper grew louder as the figure moved out of earshot. “She’s the one with the motives! She took Boone out of the Lulu Belle, and then she did something that caused that strange noise I heard, and then I fooled her by coming on the scene! She never would have guessed anyone was in the house then—no cars outside—and so she lured me away and over to the boat house, and then after locking me up, she went back and really hid the body—”

  “Not so loud, doc!” Asey reached down and took his flashlight from its clamp on the steering gear.

  “And now that it’s dark, she’s sneaking over to unlock that padlock! Probably she figures I’m asleep and won’t hear her, and if I should, she can rush off into the night—” Cummings got out of the roadster and at once stepped on a twig which snapped and sounded to both of them like the explosion of a blockbuster. “Oh, God, I’m sorry, Asey! No Boy Scout in me at all! I’m as contrite as—”

  “You better shush—an’ watch your step!”

  Asey spoke with such firmness that the doctor meekly obeyed, and kept silent as he followed Asey on tiptoe along the lane.

  The pair paused on the edge of the clearing by the boat house.