“Well, yes. I’ve sometimes felt Alec sounded a little too unctuous when he praised me. But that’s not the point. Never mind how he felt about me; why did he go crazy and try to kill Jim?”
Using all the suavity he could command, Honest Zack turned to the gentleman mentioned.
“If you’ll play this one, Franz Josef, that should wind it up.”
“Having visited the newspaper office on Wednesday morning,” Jim said, “I also visited it on Thursday morning. I still had no suspicion of Alec Laird, who was all cooperation. He began by talking about Charley Emerson. When he had refused to let Charley handle the story of the murder, he said, Charley was out of his office ‘in a flash.’ In all innocence I asked, ‘Can anybody go out of here in a flash?’
“It wasn’t until later that afternoon, when I recalled how Mathilde Laird and her son seemed to have gone in a flash on Wednesday, that I understood something besides the identity of the murderer. The murderer thought I had been referring to that miraculous exit; he thought I was on to him, and very briefly he showed it. So he first sent two shady characters to take care of me…”
“Some very shady characters,” interjected Lieutenant Trowbridge, “have been known to hang around Alec Laird, as I mentioned to Franz Josef Thursday afternoon. But, being as he owned a newspaper and would have a lot of panhandlers after him, nobody thought anything of it. Franz Josef only told one person where he was having lunch: he told the managing editor…”
“…who also told me,” Jim supplied, “that he and Alec and the city editor were having a conference before lunch. As we now know, Bart Perkins told Alec Laird, who tried to set me up for his rifleman. When that failed…
“When that failed,” Jim continued, “I knew he’d try again. He couldn’t have realized how little actual evidence there was against him. Even finding the bullet-hole under the work-bench in the way-through wouldn’t have implicated the master-mind. He thought only that I must have discovered his game; as, by that time, I actually had. He would try again, and do it himself.
“The trap was set. Lieutenant Trowbridge dropped in at his office very late Thursday afternoon. Alec learned I should be driving out here alone that night, and at what time. I had something on my mind, said Honest Zack, which I wanted to tell the police first thing Friday morning. And that did it.
“Once more, of course, his dupes were Peter and Raoul. They hadn’t the least idea what he meant to do. He said he doubted that even a new Cadillac could overtake a 1910 Chadwick in first-class condition; he made it a challenge. They realized some hinge had slipped in his brain only when he pulled out his own .38 revolver and fired at me point-blank. There’s good stuff in both Peter and Raoul; it was a relief to hear from the lieutenant that no charge of any kind will be made against either. But that is the end.”
“No, it is not the end!” protested Jill. “What about Flossie Yates and her part in it? We were promised that, weren’t we?”
Lieutenant Trowbridge uttered a reminiscent chuckle.
“I tried my damnedest to break Flossie. She wavered once or twice. But no attack quite worked until I challenged her claim to be a respectable married woman. She went up in the air like the Wright brothers, and out came her marriage lines.”
“The real thing?”
Honest Zack looked wise.
“Alec Laird and Florence Yates,” he said, “were secretly married by a justice of the peace in Shreveport fifteen years ago, when Alec was twenty-five and Flossie several years younger. That’s a decade before he married Miss Sylvia de Vere of Charleston. You don’t need to guess who bought Flossie that fine house on the Esplanade. It’s going to cause all kinds of a hullabaloo when the lawyers try to settle up Alec’s estate, but that’s no business of mine, thank God. In stories, you know, any holier-than-thou character always turns out to be a hypocrite leading a double life. Alec Laird’s been leading a double life for fifteen years or better; I’m glad to see it can turn out that way in things that really happen.”
After a long silence, when much might have been said but wasn’t, Jill rose to her feet.
“Jim,” she suggested, “would you care to take me for a little stroll in the grounds? It’s not late, you know.”
By way of the porte cochère on the south side, by way of the gravel drive leading east, they emerged into a warm, fragrant night with no mist under the moon. Jill, face rapt, walked a little way before she put her hand on his left arm.
“You know, Jim…”
“Yes, my dear?”
“You saw through the whole thing and solved it before anybody else had an inkling! Really, Jim, I’m so proud of you I can almost forgive you for risking your life every time you get the chance!”
“And I’m so proud of you for being you,” he assured her, “I’ve been singing loud hosannahs all day long. But, although everybody’s happy, there’s a practical point to settle. Constance and Clay are to be married as soon as possible. When do you and I go to the altar?”
“Oh, Jim, need we? I’d love to be your wife; you know that. But isn’t it too hasty? Shouldn’t there be a sort of trial run while we discover whether we’re suited to each other?”
“If we don’t know now how completely suited we are, when in God’s name are we ever going to learn it? Thursday night, after the kafuffle was over, both you and Constance asked me to stay here until morning. What you and I discovered about each other, in the course of a nuit enchantée…!”
“Though I’ve already proved I’m absolutely shameless and indecent where you’re concerned,” Jill cried out, “couldn’t you at least pretend otherwise? Can’t you leave me one shred of modesty at all? Still! You might stay here tonight, if you wouldn’t hate it. Towards morning, when other matters are off our minds, we could always discuss marriage again.”
“Every generation, Jill, has a grouse against the preceding generation. At the moment we’re young and full of beans. But one day, before too many rolling years have whitened our heads, we’re going to be oldsters ourselves. What will they say of us?”
“They’ll say,” she replied happily, “we were prudish and (what’s the new word?) inhibited. That’s it! They’ll say we were so prudish and inhibited we couldn’t have enjoyed ourselves at all! That’s what they always say, isn’t it?”
NOTES FOR THE CURIOUS
1
NEW YORK
SINCE THE HOUSE OF Harper has published my own books for forty years—I handed the manuscript of a first novel to the late Eugene F. Saxton in summer, 1929—the reader may be assured that background details of the old building in Franklin Square are as accurate as they can be made from study of two books called The House of Harper, one by Eugene Exman (1967) and one by J. Henry Harper (1912), as well as from the personal reminiscences of a lady, Mrs. Frances Zajic, who worked there and remembers it well.
In the library at the present Harper office, 49 East 33rd Street, I was able to read through a bound volume of the Weekly for the entire year 1912. Most of the political remarks attributed to Colonel Harvey in Chapter 1 will be found in his editorial comment during that three-cornered presidential campaign. Though he does not say editorially that he considered Governor Wilson guilty of the blackest ingratitude, his subsequent conduct, when he became as strong a Republican as he had previously been a Democrat, shows this to have been the case. And the new Cadillac with the self-starter gets considerable advertising from January onwards.
This story does not linger in Manhattan. But the various volumes of Valentine’s Manual of Old New York (new series, edited by Henry Collins Brown, 1916-1926) supply facts and dates about the Pennsylvania Station, the Public Library, and the Woolworth Building, which last-named did not officially open until 1913.
And the New York-Atlanta-New Orleans Limited, number 37, was a real train; its schedule may be looked up in the Railway Guide for October, 1912.
2
WASHINGTON
Nor does the story linger here. Background and atmosphere come in part
from my own very vivid childhood memories, verified wherever possible by research; my father was elected to Congress in that same year 1912.
The Congressional Apartments did very much exist, as described and on the site assigned. Among the tenants were Representative W. N. Carr of Pennsylvania, his wife, and their small but noisy son. Visiting Washington many years afterwards, I was not surprised to discover that the apartment house had long disappeared. But with something of a shock I found the present Supreme Court very close to the same site.
The toy streetcars of that date were a reality, too. They had no overhead trolley even then; all wires ran underground. Whenever the car rounded a curve, after dark, its lights would go out and then flash on again.
Union Station and the Library of Congress remain pretty much unchanged.
3
NEW ORLEANS
To enumerate the multitudinous books on the Crescent City would be merely to repeat a list set down at the end of my previous novel, Papa Là-bas. But again I am happy to acknowledge the invaluable assistance so generously given by Miss Margaret Ruckert, of New Orleans, who shares my fondness both for antiquarian research and for detective stories.
Miss Ruckert chose the route, beside the Old Basin Canal, by which Jim Blake and others are made to drive from Rampart Street to Bayou St. John; the canal no longer exists. Miss Ruckert also provided the name of the actual high school Lieutenant Trowbridge would have attended, as well as the name of the real (and unopposed) candidate for Congress from the second Congressional District of Louisiana. The latter was Mr. Henry Garland Dupré who remained so long in office that one lady, then very young, thought he must have been elected for life.
All motorcars which appear in these pages will be found in the text and the color photographs of a work both fascinating and exhaustive, Ralph Stein’s The Treasury of the Automobile (New York: Golden Press, 1966). And, though I can point to no baseball-pitching machine in New Orleans, then or later, I once faced such a contraption in my own home town.
4
THE GRUNEWALD HOTEL
This hostelry, now the Roosevelt, has undergone such changes that a visitor from 1912 would be unlikely to recognize his surroundings. But elderly connoisseurs still recall it with affectionate nostalgia.
The lobby and the Cave are described from picture postcard views preserved at the New Orleans Public Library. Thanks must go to my daughter Bonita, of Appleton-Century-Crofts, who found these views and photographed them for me in their original color. Vive le soleil d’antan! As with the St. Charles, still happily functioning as the Sheraton Charles, the Grunewald's spirit has never died.
5
THE PEOPLE
Apart from Colonel George Harvey, and a few others mentioned only in the background, no character in this book ever existed; let me hope it will not be suggested that none ever could exist. A lunatic in Milwaukee really did wound Theodore Roosevelt on October 14, 1912. All the rest is moonshine.
But, though these people are imaginary, every writer’s characters must be put together from scraps and patches of persons he has actually known. Both Jim Blake and Clay Blake may be found among your friends as well as mine. During a quarter century’s residence in England I have met actresses who suggested Constance Lambert, together with one or two young ladies not unreminiscent of Jill. Neither you nor I may ever have come face to face with a murderer, but on the fringe of our lives may well lurk some potential Alec Laird.
The two criminal cases cited by Jim in Chapter 7—Kate Townsend hacked to pieces in her brothel, and the death by chloroform of little Juliette Deitsh—were genuine cases célèbres of their time. One or the other is mentioned in almost every book on New Orleans, and both will be found admirably detailed in Robert Tallant’s Ready to Hang.
6
THE COUNT OF MONTE CARLO
Should any reader feel surprised to find Jim Blake writing a novel of espionage in 1911, I had better point out that both William Le Queux (1864-1927) and E. Phillips Oppenheim (1866-1946) preceded him. Already Conan Doyle, with short stories of Sherlock Holmes’s adventures in espionage and counterespionage, had been at the same game at a still earlier date.
About the Author
John Dickson Carr (1906–1977) was one of the most popular authors of Golden Age British-style detective novels. Born in Pennsylvania and the son of a US congressman, Carr graduated from Haverford College in 1929. Soon thereafter, he moved to England where he married an Englishwoman and began his mystery-writing career. In 1948, he returned to the US as an internationally known author. Carr received the Mystery Writers of America’s highest honor, the Grand Master Award, and was one of the few Americans ever admitted into the prestigious, but almost exclusively British, Detection Club.
All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 1969 by John Dickson Carr
Cover design by Jason Gabbert
978-1-4804-7277-8
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The Ghosts' High Noon Page 27