Punch With Care

by Phoebe Atwood Taylor

  “Mean you don’t get it?” Asey said. “Wa-el, think, Dr. Muldoon, think! How does an electric clock get to be three an’ a half minutes slow? How d’you stop one of ’em?”

  “You stop the electricity, I suppose!” Cummings retorted. “Good God, I don’t know how you stop ’em! My primary preoccupation has always been to keep the damn things going. I never tried stopping one. I—look, you’ve got Shearing and the murder weapon, and a dandy motive, and—”

  “Only Boone bettered her career, don’t forget.”

  “Well, you’ve got this ass Eric wandering around—”

  “But Boone was more important to him alive,” Asey said, “than dead. He isn’t any body’s secretary now!”

  “What about that Stinky fellow? Suppose,” Cummings said, “that Boone’s offer of a job made him sore. Suppose he resented the insinuation that he was the Eric type. Suppose Boone even blackmailed him a bit—you take that job, or you get booted out of Larrabee. Or, in view of the Gerty angle, you take the job, or I harry Gerty!”

  “The Gerty angle’s most likely,” Asey said. “An’ don’t forget Sylvester. After all, he knew about that room! He didn’t like Boone. He—”

  “Bah!” Cummings interrupted. “Stop kidding me! And that Briggs—didn’t he tell you he was on the beach all afternoon? Well, I’ve been thinking—he couldn’t have been there all the time, and still have got my lighter! If the lighter’d been there on the stump all afternoon, you’d have noticed it when you came. He was lying about that!”

  “Uh-huh,” Asey said. “I know it. I think he came back at least once. I think—”

  “Look here,” Cummings said, “we can’t sit and play quohaug inspector with two corpses sitting out there at the point! I’m going to call Halbert!”

  “Hurry up about it,” Asey said, “because we’re goin’ to need him! This is goin’ to take quite a lot of stage managin’, doc, an’ I think that the quicker we get to it, the better. People get a taste of bashin’ their fellow men, an’ it goes to their heads. You can’t tell where they’ll stop. I keep thinkin’,” he added gravely, “if I’d managed to get hold of Aunt Mary sooner, I might’ve saved her—but on the other hand, no matter what I found out or didn’t find out from her, I couldn’t have kept her from goin’ into that room if she’d wanted to go, an’ I’d never have known about the secret room, or found out what’d happened to her if I hadn’t gone through that wringer with Sylvester first—call Halbert, doc.”

  “Look here!” Cummings paused with his hand on the phone, “d’you mean you know who’s responsible for this?”

  “Sure,” Asey said. “I know. Only I want to prove it quick before anything else happens. Halbert can’t do it quick enough. We can.”

  “And while we’re proving it, as you so humorously phrase it,” Cummings said, “what’s to prevent someone from taking both those corpses away?”

  “Wa-el,” Asey said, “Sylvester, for one thing. He’s parked on a stump beyond the station with a loaded shotgun. He looked on Aunt Mary as one of his best friends, an’ I don’t think he’s goin’ to permit anyone to do any serious body-movin’, like over to that mud hole! An’ I think he’ll know if anyone tries to fix that clock. His orders are just to watch, an’ only to shoot as a last resort—but I don’t think anyone’s goin’ to try any tricks. Nobody needs to, with the set-up they got. But Sylvester’s there, an’ then Jennie’s coupe is actin’ as a road block across the lane off the main road. In a nutshell, I’m not worryin’ about losin’ any more bodies!”

  “I suppose,” Cummings picked up the phone, “that we stage manage so that at a given signal—hullo, this Sophie? Cummings speaking. Can you get me Halbert, the cop who replaced Hanson—what? He is? Well, put him on!” He turned to Asey. “Halbert’s in town. Just came into the phone office. Hello! What?” A grin spread over his face as he listened. “Okay, I’ll tell him. By the merest coincidence, he’s here in my office. Halbert, we have a little surprise for you—several of ’em, in fact. Yes, suppose you come over, right away!”

  “What’s he doin’ in town?” Asey asked as the doctor hung up.

  “Seems he was just passing through,” Cummings, said, “when he was virtually annihilated by a jet-propelled roadster driven by a man with a yachting cap. He recognized you. He’s struggled with his conscience, and he was about to call me to ask if I’d tactfully request you to slow down just a little. Said very deferentially he wouldn’t dream of bothering you himself, but he thought maybe a tactful word from me might—humpf! You’ve got that young man thoroughly overawed at the start, which is probably just as well! 7’d rather have suspected he’d go screaming after you with drawn gun—what about this stage-managing, now? I suppose that at a given signal, the railroad starts up, the water tower falls down, the secret room bursts open, and you, dear Superman, swoop down from the starry heavens and pounce on our victim—whoever the hell our victim is!”

  “No, kindly old Doctor Muldoon,” Asey said. “No! But—wa-el, almost! Our victim’s now so doggone sure everything’s all set, I think a little harryin’ might work out as the quickest way to wind this up. I even think that just suggestin’ that we already know everything will do it. An’ thanks for remindin’ me of the water tower, doc. That’s where they are, I’m sure. Now, with some cooperation from Halbert an’ some of his boys—”

  As the station clock struck two, the Douglass’s old water tower toppled to the ground with a crash that amazed Asey and Cummings, even though they’d been standing in the pine woods waiting for it.

  “That got ’em all right!” Cummings pointed toward the house. “Knocked ’em out of bed—and why not! It nearly knocked me off my feet! See the lights go on! Hall, downstairs, kitchen—there goes Douglass, rushing out! There go Louise and Layne—let’s move over nearer. I want to hear what they’re saying!”

  While the flashlights of the Douglass family played excitedly about the debris of the tower, Asey and the doctor edged as near as they dared.

  Louise, her voice shrill with excitement, was ascribing the tower’s downfall to the project.

  “Over it like flies all afternoon—certainly a miracle it didn’t topple with them on it! For the—Harold! Look! Look what’s tied on this piece of railing! With a red ribbon bow tied on them! What on earth are those rubber bathing shoes doing there! With their soles all cut—how utterly strange! They’re quite new-looking otherwise! Now why would any of those project children tie red ribbons—”

  “The red ribbon bow,” Cummings said in Asey’s ear, “was a stroke of genius, and I congratulate you for thinking of it! If I’d put my murdering shoes away for ever on a deserted, abandoned water tower, and they suddenly had them turn up at my feet with a red ribbon bow on ’em! Wow!”

  “What’s keepin’ that cop of Halbert’s?” Asey muttered. “As soon as Sylvester an’ Stinky jerked that tower down, he was to count to—oho, there he goes!”

  “How Aunt Mary could sleep through this! I’m sure now that she’s getting deaf—oh, look! Look!” Louise’s voice rose to a scream. “Harold, look! The Lulu Belle—is it on fire? It’s all lighted up! Layne! Harold! Quick—look at it!”

  The Douglasses stared toward the Pullman, and then Harold started to run toward it.

  But suddenly he stopped short.

  Louise, racing along behind him, stopped and clutched at his arm.

  “Harold! The side of the house—look, it’s opening!”

  Asey and Cummings could hear her easily even from where they stood.

  “Harold, what can—Layne, come look here! It’s a door! Where did she go, Harold, to get a fire extinguisher from the barn? She’s gone—”

  Cummings turned on his heel.

  “And there,” he said to Asey, at the sound of a car starting, “there Layne goes! She grabbed those shoes—notice that? Rushed to her car—no keys. Beachwagon—no keys. Your roadster—keys! Complete state of panic. She should’ve remembered seeing you take the keys out this evening, and know it�
��s a trap! Does the little fool think we’re going to let her streak away?”

  “If she does,” Asey said, “she’ll soon find it’s parade speed into the arms of Halbert himself, around the curve in the lane! Huh, I s’pose it’s nicer that the Douglasses don’t have to witness that scene—not after Aunt Mary! The cop who opened that door is just shooin’ ’em out of the room, see? I guess, doc, you’d better take ’em over now. I’m goin’ home. You an’ Halbert can—”

  “Asey, you can’t leave me here to tell ’em! I can’t do it! ” Cummings protested.

  “You told it to me,” Asey said. “Or most of it, anyway. You set me to thinkin’ of her. Begin with that stuff about reversal, doc—how sometimes when you seem to be workin’ so hard adorin’ someone, you sometimes really hate ’em. Go on about roots—Layne hadn’t any. She didn’t understand ’em. She didn’t begin to understand about Aunt Della’s things. They know that. She never belonged—anywhere, or to anybody. Go on to how Boone was usin’ her to get Jack Briggs as a secretary, an’ how it tore Layne apart—because if Boone got him, she lost Jack, an’ if Boone didn’t, she lost Boone. Tell ’em how Boone used her—”

  “That’s another thing they certainly know!”

  “Uh-huh, but I doubt if they know it all. Tell ’em what Shearing an’ Gerty told us a while ago—how Layne wrote all her speeches an’ articles, an’ how Boone just took ’em over for her own. Explain—”

  “What do you think was the last straw?” Cummings interrupted. “I mean, the thing that goaded her to it?”

  “I concur with Gerty,” Asey said. “She must have overheard Boone makin’ that date with Jack Briggs for the beach, when the project came this mornin’. Explain about Aunt Mary—but they won’t need any more explanations than that, doc!”

  “Except one, maybe,” Cummings said slowly. “That Aunt Mary was getting deaf. She knew it. Made a date to see me about it next week—I’d completely forgotten till I noticed her name on my date book in the office tonight, when I was hanging around for you. That’s why she botched Shearing’s message. Probably it’s how Layne caught her tonight—Aunt Mary didn’t hear her. Okay, I’ll do what I can! Where’s Jennie?”

  “I told her to stick by that cop with the floodlights, over by the Lulu Belle,” Asey said, “but there she is, pokin’ her nose into the secret room! Jennie! Hey, we’re leavin’ now!”

  “I suppose,” Cummings said, “I really have the easier job. I’ve only got to explain motivation to the Douglasses, and commiserate. You’ve got to clear up every last question in Jennie’s mind!”

  But Jennie never spoke on the trip home until Asey was swinging the old roadster up the oystershell driveway of his own house.

  “I can’t hold in any longer!” she said as the car came to a stop. “I saw her there in the lane with Halbert, as we went past! She wasn’t repenting any, was she? Spitting like a cat—ugh! Asey, if she was with Gerty all the time, how could she have done it?”

  “Layne swam out to the raft, an’ beyond that out to the moored boats,” Asey said. “Gerty thought she saw her all the time, but she only saw Layne’s bathin’ cap. Layne knew Gerty wasn’t much of a swimmer, an’ wouldn’t be venturin’ out that far. ,So she draped her cap on one of the boats, swam around that far point, an’ hopped across the rocks back to the Douglass’s. Remember I told you how surprised the doc was to find the boat house so near the Douglass’s? An’ then Sylvester ran on about his short-cuttin’—”

  “But it’s a long way to the outer beach!”

  “Uh-huh, Briggs an’ Gerty both got lost. But Layne knew—look, Jennie, if you go up an’ down three fingers of your hand, say, that’s a long way. Cut across the knuckles, an’ it isn’t. See? Layne went to the beach, swam out, an’ was back at the house there inside of five or six minutes. She knew Douglass was takin’ Mrs. Boone for a ride on the train, so she slipped into the station—”

  “What was all that business of seeing that nobody touched the station clock? And it’s being three and a half minutes slow?”

  “How d’you stop an electric clock?” Asey asked with a laugh. “Why is our hall clock sometimes slow?”

  Jennie said she wished he wouldn’t harp on that old hall clock. “I have to unplug it to use the vacuum in that socket, and I try to remember to set it ahead when I plug it back, but I do sometimes forget, and it’s slow—oh!” she said. “You mean someone pulled the plug out for three and a half minutes—but they certainly weren’t cleaning!”

  “Nope, but you got the principle of the thing,” Asey said. “Layne hid in the station, an’ accidentally pulled the plug out—tripped over it, we think—as she slipped out an’ into the Lulu Belle after Mrs. Boone. After killin’ her, she slipped back into the station again—I think she was duckin’ Douglass, who was by then huntin’ Mrs. Boone. She saw what she’d done, an’ put the plug back in. She hadn’t the time or the chance to stand up on one of the settees an’ put the clock ahead—an’ she probably wouldn’t have known exactly how long she’d been gone, anyway.”

  “But what did that three and a half minutes matter?”

  “Only that Sylvester, goin’ back to town, set his watch by that clock, an’ set it three an’ a half minutes slow,” Asey said, “an’ told the world about it! An’ it kept botherin’ me. I kept workin’ back, an’ finally got it—three an’ a half minutes seemed to me about as long as the whole business would take anyone!”

  “I’m sure it bothered me,” Jennie said, “when it lost me the Question, but I’d never dream of connecting it with any of this—what did Layne do then, go back to the beach?”

  “Uh-huh. Took her cap, swam back to shore, chatted with Gerty, ate lunch, lay in the sun. Later she took her sketch pad an’ pencil in a waterproof case an’ swam out to the boats again—to sketch from out there, she said. Only she didn’t.”

  “Seems funny Gerty didn’t ask to see what she’d been drawing!” Jennie said. “I would have!”

  “Gerty did, an’ Layne showed her—how was Gerty to know it was an old sketch she’d done long ago?”

  “How did you know?” Jennie demanded.

  “What Gerty described,” Asey said, “an’ what she drew for me from memory, was the shore line before the hurricane hit—steeples, an’ big trees, an’ a wharf. Wa-el, durin’ that so-called sketchin’ period, Layne came back to the house again. I think she only wanted to see what was goin’ on, an’ then she meant to pop back to the beach again. But when she got to the house, there didn’t seem to be a soul around—no car on the turntable, no sign of anyone. I think she concluded they’d missed finding Boone entirely, an’ had probably gone off uptown on errands, as they always did after lunch. I think she acted on impulse when she put that body into the secret room. Took her only a few minutes, includin’ scrubbin’ that carpet, as I figured—”

  “Where’d she get water?” Jennie interrupted. “And why’d she put her there, where Aunt Mary’d been sure to find her?”

  “There’s a tap by the station,” Asey said, “an’ Aunt Mary wouldn’t necessarily have found her, an’ not necessarily at once. Certainly the body wouldn’t be found there as quick as in the Lulu Belle! But she made that noise with the door, an’ Cummings heard, an’ went out.”

  “How’d Layne know about the room, anyway?”

  “She’d either spotted it herself, or else seen Aunt Mary comin’ or goin’, an’ just decided not to say anything to spoil Aunt Mary’s fun. Anyway, she lured the doc down to the boat house—”

  “What about that business of the flat tire?” Jennie broke in.

  “I meant to ask Layne about that,” Asey said, “but as you saw, she wasn’t in a mood to answer questions. I don’t know when or how she happened on the beachwagon. Probably after shuttin’ the doc up. Probably she got a glimpse of Aunt Mary, who was huntin’ around for Boone. I suspect Layne mistrusted her as bein’ the sharpest one about, an’ thought it’d be a good thing if she was kept busy with a flat tire instead of comin’ to
the beach, or pokin’ her nose around too much. That was the point of it. Could be, of course, that she meant all along to implicate Aunt Mary if she could.”

  “Nice way to treat your own family, I must say!”

  “But it wasn’t her own family, an’ she didn’t waste much affection on ’em. That’s all Layne did,” Asey said, “till she put that vase behind Shearing’s tub. I been broodin’ about what impelled her to start counter-actin’, an’ though I’ll probably never know, I think Cummings asked her too many questions when she drove him back from the boat house. I think he tipped her off we were at work on things. She had to take Briggs up later, an’ that’s when she did the plantin’—he said she left him in the village, an’ she must’ve gone right on to the inn.”

  “Why’d she plant it on Miss Shearing?”

  “Why not? Next to Aunt Mary,” Asey said, “she was a good, likely suspect!”

  “I heard Harold Douglass tell that cop Aunt Mary’d come from the movies and gone straight to bed—you think she sneaked down to that room instead?”

  Asey nodded. “I think Aunt Mary suspected something. I’m sure something was bothering her, anyway, for her to go call on Shearing. Maybe she wanted to check on that telephone call, or on Boone’s whereabouts—I wondered why the Douglasses wasn’t more bothered about where she was, an’ then I decided probably Layne was responsible for that. Probably kept sayin’ what she said to the doc an’ me, a lot of stuff about not wantin’ ever to bother dear Carolyn when she was busy with her schedule. Now, let’s get in an’ get to bed! I’m—”

  “Those shoes!” Jennie said.

  “Oh. Well, I thought about the only clue would be her shoes—she couldn’t have short-cutted over those barnacly rocks in her bare feet, an’ she couldn’t have worn much else on ’em but bathing shoes. I honestly never expected to find ’em, but when Cummings quipped about the water tower, why I went up—an’ there they were! You can’t burn rubber shoes up without lettin’ folks know, an’ in that gardenin’ family, I s’pose she’d have hesitated to bury ’em—Jennie, that’s all!”