The Right Murder

by Craig Rice

  The doctor didn’t hear him. “Now I begin with simple questions.” He addressed the young man, who was beginning to droop a little. “Where are you?”

  There was a long silence.

  “Where are you?” the doctor demanded, a shade louder.

  Ross McLaurin looked at him and threw everything into confusion by answering, “Here I am. Where are you?”

  Dr. Hennessey decided to try another simple question. “What day of the week is it?”

  The young man was very thoughtful for a minute. “Sunday?” he suggested.

  Helene looked up at the dial. It registered “True.” “Well, damn it,” she said, “he thinks it’s Sunday. What day is it anyway, Friday?”

  “Monday,” Malone said.

  The doctor shook his head. “It’s Saturday.” He looked searchingly at Malone and then at the young man in the chair. “Are you in a doctor’s office?” he asked, eagle-eyed.

  Ross McLaurin mumbled something unintelligible.

  “I didn’t hear you,” the doctor said sternly. He repeated the question.

  The young man mumbled again. This time the words “home on the range” were faintly distinguishable.

  The doctor turned to Helene. “It’s difficult to get much out of him.”

  Helene nodded vigorously. “He’s not a very talkative person.”

  “I’m going to try a few trick psychological questions.” He fixed an eagle eye on his patient. “Tell me. How far can a dog run into the woods?”

  This time there was no response at all.

  “How far can a dog run into the woods?” the doctor demanded in a louder tone.

  Still no response.

  “Woods.” the doctor shouted desperately. “Dog!”

  Ross McLaurin looked up obediently and helpfully and barked.

  The doctor turned to Helene a little dubiously. “I’m afraid the patient is inebriated. We can’t go on with this.”

  “Oh yes we can,” Helene said firmly.

  “It isn’t scientific,” Dr. Hennessey objected.

  “No,” Jake murmured, “but it’s lots of fun.”

  So far the needle on the red and blue dial had only performed a faint tremolo.

  “Just ask him—just say one word,” Helene implored. “Tuesday.”

  The psycho-psychologist frowned. “I’ve already asked him that. He thinks it’s Sunday.”

  “No, no, no,” Jake put in. “Tuesday. It’s a name.”

  “Two Tuesdays in every week,” Helene added.

  In his corner Malone began singing, “Every day’ll be Tuesday by and by.”

  This time the look Dr. Leonardo Hennessey gave Malone was definitely fearful. Finally he drew a long breath and shouted, “Tuesday!” as though he were crying “Boo!”

  Nothing happened.

  “You see—” the doctor began, turning to Helene.

  “Try another name,” she suggested. “Try ‘Malone.’”

  Dr. Hennessey’s face was beginning to turn a deep cerise. He focused a hypnotic eye on his patient and yelped, “Malone!”

  Suddenly Ross McLaurin seemed like a man recalled to life. He lifted his head and looked up, his eyes bright.

  “That’s me!” he exclaimed triumphantly.

  Dr. Hennessey mopped his brow. He turned to the lawyer. “I don’t seem to be getting very far. Perhaps if you would ask him a few questions yourself—” His voice was a little hoarse.

  Malone said, “I’ll try,” very skeptically. He walked over to the young man and looked at him fixedly.

  “Tell me, Ross. Did you murder Gerald Tuesday?”

  For a moment there was silence. Everyone watched the patient, with varying degrees of anxiety. At last his lips began to move, slowly and rhythmically, and a faint sound came from them.

  “Count—the bullets—” the rest was indistinguishable.

  “But this was a stabbing,” Malone began. Helene hushed him.

  “Louder, Ross,” she said.

  The mumble grew louder, though not clearer. The listeners caught the words “Forty thousand million.”

  “There’s not that much money in the world,” Jake said disgustedly.

  “It’s a motive, anyway,” Helene murmured.

  Even Dr. Leonardo Hennessey began to look excited. He leaned over the patient, his eyes blazing.

  “Six weeks—in hell—” Ross McLaurin went on in a faint whisper. There were a few words lost, and then, “Five—devils—dark—”

  “Good God!” Helene said. Her face was very pale.

  They all leaned forward breathlessly to catch the patient’s next words.

  In a triumphant outburst the young man finished, “Boots—boots—boots—boots—movin’ up and down again! There’s no discharge in the war!”

  The needle on the dial swung far over to the side marked “True.” Ross McLaurin had remembered all of Kipling’s Boots.

  A few minutes later, in the taxicab, Jake turned to Helene.

  “Well,” he said solemnly, “I’ve heard of the patient making the doctor sick. But this is the first time I ever saw anyone drive a psycho-psychologist double nuts!”

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  “I am in a doctor’s office,” Jake said. “I am not in a doctor’s office.” The sound of his own voice wakened him. He was pleasantly reassured to find that he was in his own room and his own bed. It had been a very bad dream.

  He looked around the room, just to make sure.

  After the visit to Dr. Leonardo Hennessey, Helene and Ross McLaurin had been delivered back to Mona McClane’s. The task of digging out what the young man continued to forget to remember seemed hopeless. In addition, his prolonged disappearance was likely to cause embarrassing questions.

  Helene had still insisted on remaining at Mona McClane’s. On a little reflection Jake could see the wisdom of it, but he still didn’t like it. Here all the differences between them were made up, and so far he hadn’t managed anything more than a kiss in a taxicab, and a crowded taxicab at that.

  He was brooding over this when the telephone rang. It was Helene.

  “You ought to be asleep in bed,” he growled into the phone.

  “I’m awake and down in the lobby. It’s ten o’clock in the morning.”

  “Come on up.”

  “I don’t want to compromise you. Remember, we’re separated. Besides, there isn’t time. Mona—”

  “Mona won’t do. I like blondes.”

  “Jake, have you lost your mind?”

  “If I have, I left it at Dr. Hennessey’s. Are you coming up here?”

  “No.”

  He sighed into the telephone. “Then wait for me in the coffee shop. I’ll be right down.”

  He had one sock on by the time the receiver had settled on the hook.

  Helene was staring moodily into a cup of coffee. “I’ve seen people take longer dressing to leave a burning building.”

  “You sounded as if it was an emergency. Besides, I was in a hurry to see you again.” He waved to the waitress to bring more coffee. “I’m in a hurry to win that bet, so we won’t have to keep up this separation stuff. Helene, wouldn’t you like to drop up and just take a look at the apartment, to see if you still like it?”

  “I remember how it looks,” she said firmly, “and there isn’t time to get my hair combed again. Things are happening. Mona McClane and von Flanagan.”

  “An interesting combination. Have they eloped, shot each other, or what?”

  “He’s putting her on the pan. Malone phoned me. He’s meeting her there, and he suggested we come along.”

  “Cordial of him, but why?”

  She shrugged her shoulders. “Ask Malone. He said there was something he wanted to show us, afterward. I don’t know why von Flanagan’s picking Mona unless he found out the Tuesdays were people Mona knew and she’d been holding out on him.”

  “That might be it,” Jake said. “Let’s go over and find out.”

  They found von Flanagan in very
bad humor. He had been glaring at a collection of papers on his desk when they arrived. Now he glared at them instead. There was no sign of Mona McClane.

  “It’s bad enough when people commit murders and cause me a lot of trouble,” he said gloomily. “But then when they lie to me about it, I get sore.”

  “I don’t blame you,” Helene said amiably. “Who’s been lying to you now?”

  “I’m not sure, but I think everybody has.” He scowled heavily. “A nice, clean, straightforward shooting or knifing, I can understand. People are impetuous. Those things are bound to happen. But this sort of thing makes me mad.”

  “What sort of thing?” Jake asked.

  “This sort of thing,” the police officer repeated, pounding on his desk. “Like none of those people saying they knew that guy yesterday over in the morgue, when Mrs. McClane at least must have known him. It’s bad enough to have to be a cop. But when people go and do these things just to make it tough for me—” He paused and looked at Helene. “Now do you see why I want to quit this job and buy a little country newspaper some place and settle down?”

  “I’ve always understood,” she said sympathetically. “Have you picked out a paper yet?”

  He smiled at her gratefully. “I’ve got my eye on a couple. One’s in a little town in Iowa, population twelve hundred Name of the paper’s The Enterprise. Something about that name appeals to me.” He drew a long breath and quoted a glowing description of the newspaper’s standing in the community and its potential profits.

  Jake grunted. “If it’s such a swell newspaper, why does the owner want to sell it?”

  “He’s retiring from business to become chief of police,” von Flanagan told him.

  “Well,” Helene said, when she’d caught her breath, “poetic justice.”

  “Anyone who wants to be a policeman,” von Flanagan said, “is nuts, so probably this guy is poetic at that.”

  Malone arrived, his eyes pink and swollen from lack of sleep. “Mrs. McClane will be here in a minute. Who were you just saying was nuts?” He began shedding his overcoat.

  “Anyone who wants to be a policeman,” von Flanagan repeated. He looked complainingly at Malone. “Now you take this guy who was killed New Year’s Eve. If he was gonna be killed, why couldn’t he have had his passport on him, or a driver’s license, or even a calling card? No. Not a damn thing. So I have to go to all the trouble of finding out who he was. When I do find out, then what? More trouble.”

  Malone observed platitudinously, “Man is born to be the spark that flies upward to meet trouble half-way.”

  Before he could add any more details, Mona McClane arrived. She stood for just a moment framed in the doorway, looking around the room. Even Daniel von Flanagan seemed to feel that she didn’t belong there, as he sat looking at her admiringly. He was reflecting that if Mrs. von Flanagan ever got a look at that coat, she was going to become violently dissatisfied with last year’s mink.

  He had been saving up a furious, indignant, and possibly profane tirade on the subject of people who withheld important information from the police. Now he rose, looked polite and embarrassed; and said, “It’s very good of you to come here, Mrs. McClane,” in a tone he usually reserved for visitors from the mayor’s office.

  She smiled at him. “I was delighted to come.” She sounded as though she really meant it.

  Von Flanagan sat down at his desk and began to return to normal.

  “Mrs. McClane, who was that young man I took you to see over in the morgue yesterday?”

  Her odd-shaped, greenish eyes widened. “I haven’t the faintest idea. I told you, I never saw him before in my life.”

  Von Flanagan shook his head reprovingly. “Now, ma’am, you aren’t helping yourself or anybody else by sticking to that. I’m not insinuating I don’t believe you, y’understand, but this time I want you to tell me the truth.”

  “But it is the truth. I never did see him.”

  He sighed heavily. “All right, maybe you can do better with this one. How well did you know that guy who was murdered up at your house?”

  She looked faintly troubled. “I told you—not well. We had mutual friends—and I’d met him a few times. That’s all.”

  Von Flanagan scowled and said, “There couldn’t have been two guys named Gerald Tuesday.”

  Mona McClane said nothing.

  He tried something else. “How well do you know the rest of the mob staying up at your place?”

  “The Vennings—I knew when I was a little girl. But I hadn’t seen either of them for years until—oh, about a year ago, in India. Neither of them have been in this country for—ages and ages. Michael made a flying trip here in 1921, and that was the last.”

  “I know all that,” von Flanagan said wearily. “What I want to find out is—could either of the Vennings have known these two Tuesday guys?”

  She shrugged her narrow shoulders. “I don’t think so. Of course, I can’t be sure.”

  “How well did you know Ross McLaurin?”

  “I’ve known him all his life. I was a close friend of his mother. But I don’t think he’d ever heard of Gerald Tuesday—of either Gerald Tuesday.”

  “This young camera nut?”

  “Pendley? He’s a nice young man, just out of college, and no job yet.” She smiled faintly. “Though he stands a fair chance to inherit all the Venning money some day—if Michael lives to be fifty. And he’ll be fifty tomorrow, so—”

  “What’s all this?” Malone asked.

  “The Venning will,” Mona said, as though everyone knew all about it.

  Von Flanagan ignored that. “And this Allen girl. Did you know she was a phony?”

  “Look here,” Malone said suddenly. “What’s all this about? You’ve got a case, you’ve made an arrest. Aren’t you satisfied?”

  “Sure I’m satisfied. But I’m sore. I’m sore as hell. Pardon me, Mrs. McClane. But it’s bad enough to hold this job, without everybody making it tough for me by holding out information.” He was launched into his lecture.

  But the time he had finished, he evidently decided that nothing further would be learned from Mona McClane. Three minutes later Malone was ushering Jake and Helene into a taxicab.

  “Rosedale cemetery,” he told the driver.

  “Listen,” Jake said, “I’ve had enough of cemeteries, private or otherwise, to last me till I need one.”

  “And why—” Helene began.

  “I want to see it with my own eyes,” Malone said cryptically. “What’s more, I want witnesses along.”

  “See what?” she demanded.

  “You’ll find out when you get there.” He stared moodily out the window and refused to say another word.

  Jake sighed. The day was dreary, muddied snow was packed down on the streets, and a gloomy mist had produced a semidarkness that made forlorn rows of houses seem even dingier than they actually were. The way to Rosedale cemetery led through a monotonously depressing part of town. Jake wished he were anywhere else in the world.

  Rosedale cemetery stretched over a square mile or so, one side of it backed up against the elevated. The taxi stopped at a gate where Malone poked his head into the small attendant’s booth and bawled loudly for “Henry.”

  Henry proved to be a gnomelike little man, cheerfully garrulous, who greeted Malone like an old friend. Malone had, it appeared, managed the release of one of Henry’s kinfolk from jail at some time in the past. That was why, Henry explained, when he’d read in the papers that Malone was concerned in these Tuesday murders, he’d called up Malone to tell him about the tombstone.

  “What tombstone?” Jake asked crossly.

  Henry grinned, “You’ll see.”

  They followed him for a long way, between drifts of soot-encrusted snow, picking the way carefully between pools of slush. In a far corner of the cemetery Henry paused beside a gray stone that stood somewhat apart from the rest, looking as proud as though he were showing off a personal achievement.

  M
alone brushed the snow away from the stone, read it, and pointed to it silently:

  GERALD TUESDAY

  b. Oct. 12, 1892

  d. July 2, 1921

  “I ’membered it was there,” the old man cackled. “Know every stone in the place, like it was one of my own kin. Didn’t tell the p’lice though. Just Mr. Malone, because he’s my friend.”

  Malone hadn’t seemed to hear him. Suddenly he knelt down and began pawing at the snow that had drifted over the grave. Jake noticed then that the snow had an oddly rough, almost bumpy appearance. He watched Malone with growing excitement. Helene’s hand clutched his arm and held it tight.

  At last the little lawyer rose to his feet. “Somebody has been digging.” He turned to Henry. “I suppose it would be possible for someone to have come in here and dug around without being discovered.”

  Henry nodded. “There’s just one watchman here besides me at night, and most of the time he’s asleep, down at the other gate. This ain’t a place that would need much watching, ordinarily.”

  Malone stared silently at the snow-covered mound for a moment.

  Suddenly he reached for his wallet and took out a ten-dollar bill.

  “In that case, I suppose it might be possible for someone else to come in here—say, tonight—and do a little more digging—just to find out what happened here.”

  The gnomelike man’s eyes glittered. “If they was friends of yours, Mr. Malone, and they came in at the east gate, I’m sure nobody’d see a thing.” His withered old fingers closed over the bill. “I don’t suppose I should tell anybody else about this.”

  “Not a soul,” Malone told him.

  Not until they had reached the street again did the lawyer offer any comment. When he did speak, there was a kind of awe in his voice.

  “If that isn’t an achievement, then I don’t know one when I see it. To murder a man who’s been dead for more than twenty years.” He paused and added, “And what’s more—to do it twice!”

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  “There could have been three men named Gerald Tuesday, you know,” Helene said.

  Malone nodded. “There could,” he said gloomily, “but I don’t believe in Santa Claus, either.”

  They were sitting in a small north-side bar, drinking beer and worrying about their discovery. After half an hour and three beers, they hadn’t come to any conclusion.