Unhappy Hooligan

by Stuart Palmer

  “You mean that’s McFarley?” Howie Rook was mildly incredulous. “But why?”

  Parkman shrugged. “Okay, you like puzzles so well, you got yourself one. The man seems to have died by gunshot in his apartment sometime around eleven o’clock Wednesday evening, which was night before last. The wound is compatible with suicide according to the coroner’s physician. The windows were all closed and locked except one, presumably left slightly open for the convenience of the cat. There’s a six-inch ledge or cornice or whatever you want to call it that absolutely nobody but a cat or a human fly could have traversed; the apartment is on the top floor with a five-story drop to a cement driveway. No chance for much of any shenanigans; anybody driving by on that busy boulevard would have seen anything unusual that was going on outside that window. There’s a narrow transom over the hall door—it’s a real old-fashioned place—but it only opens up to ten or eleven inches and nothing but a monkey could have wormed itself in or out. Doors, front and rear, locked and bolted on the inside!”

  Howie Rook pricked up his ears. “Locked-room mysteries are usually for fiction and the pen of John Dickson Carr. But I could show you clippings—”

  “I’m sure you could,” cut in Chief Parkman hastily. “The gun was lying there right beside the body; it’s one of those nasty little Italian Beretta belly guns. Not registered to McFarley nor, as far as we can find out, to anybody else. Probably a war souvenir. But there was, I admit, no suicide note—and no known motive. That’s the catch.”

  Rook almost snorted. “There are plenty of recorded cases,” he said, “where suicides didn’t bother to leave a note. I think it’s around 45 per cent. And for a suicide motive, what about the wreck of his marriage?”

  “The marriage doesn’t seem to have been as completely wrecked as all that, if we can believe Mavis McFarley. As she will gladly tell you when I let her come in. Here, you might have a look at this.” The Chief held out another photograph, a wide-angle shot that took in most of the room where the dead man had lain.

  Rook studied it carefully. Beside the sprawled corpse in the foreground, there was a large portable cocktail bar bearing a container for ice cubes, numerous bottles and siphons, and so on and so forth. There were half a dozen highball glasses, painted with designs of fish and game birds, and fancy plates piled high with hors d’oeuvres and sandwiches. “From the look of all that,” Parkman said, “McFarley was expecting guests when he died. No sign of a struggle anywhere, except maybe that one flimsy occasional chair tipped over, and he could have bumped against that as he fell in his death throes—”

  “You say he was expecting guests?” interrupted Rook quietly. “In that grotesque make-up?”

  “It has been suggested that the man wanted to dramatize his suicide, a sort of Pagliacci complex. Maybe he chose to die as a clown, and a clown has to have an audience. So he invited in his friends, with the drinks all ready so they could drink a farewell toast to him. Only he forgot to leave the door unlocked before he shot himself.”

  “You don’t believe that yourself,” said Howie Rook firmly. “Anybody who would go to all that trouble wouldn’t forget to unlock the door, and while I’ll concede that a man might set up the drinks at a time like that, he’d hardly go to the trouble of making with the hors d’oeuvres.”

  “But what else? Anyway, if we’re right about the time of death, the man must have been lying there when his guests came and rang the bell and then went away.”

  “Guesswork?”

  “No. We know who they are—they came forward at once. People quite beyond suspicion. They were the Joe Martins and Dr. and Mrs. Bowen. Martin was McFarley’s former law partner and Bowen his M.D., all old friends. The two couples tell a straight story, that we’ve of course thoroughly checked; they say that they’d been invited to stop in after the opera for a drink and a surprise, but that they came and rang the bell and hammered on the door and even tried the knob and then went away. They alibi each other rather thoroughly; they were all seen at the opera and it didn’t let out until almost eleven. What do you make of it, Howie?”

  “Nothing much, as yet. The lights—were they still burning when the body was discovered next morning?”

  “No, they were off. Why?”

  “Because nobody likes to die in the dark. It was either murder, or it was suicide tricked up to look like murder. Only why the locked and bolted doors? And suicides who use a gun or knife almost invariably open the clothing first; I can’t tell you why. If it was murder, the killer we have to look for was somebody McFarley knew—or he wouldn’t have let him in at that late hour. They weren’t on intimate or friendly terms, or he’d have offered the caller a drink, with the bar so handy. None of the glasses had been used, had they?”

  Parkman shook his head.

  “Did anybody hear the shot?”

  “One couple in the apartment directly underneath thought that they may have heard something just before eleven, but they had their TV set turned to a crime-buster program so they’re not absolutely sure. The apartments across the hall were empty and being redecorated; nothing above but the roof.”

  “Any strangers seen coming in or out of the building about that time?”

  “Not that we know of. Nobody is at the desk in the lobby after 10 P.M. and the place has automatic elevators so that anybody could go up or down as they willed. There is the record of somebody in the building passing a woman in the lower hall who carried a paper bag full of tinkling glassware, presumably liquor—but we doubt that it had anything to do with McFarley, since he had a plentiful stock. The boys in one of our traffic-control cars report that they saw a man and a boy walking a dog along Cheshire Boulevard about that time; the man and boy might have seen something or noticed somebody but we haven’t been able to locate them as yet. Out in the Village almost everybody has a dog. But most certainly, as I told you, any human-fly stuff, or the use of a ladder or rope outside that open window, would have been noticed and reported. No, Howie. It all comes back to the fact that McFarley died alone inside a locked and bolted room, with the gun beside him. You can’t get around that.”

  Rook held up his hand. “I can show you clippings mentioning at least three different ways to fasten an inside bolt from the outside, though I admit that most of them require time and considerable mechanical ingenuity; they also leave noticeable pin-pricks on the wood of the door. Which your efficient young men would have noticed.”

  “There weren’t any,” said Parkman.

  “Well, are there any other tangible clues that we can guess about?”

  Parkman nodded, and opened his desk drawer. “There’s the gun, fired once. No obvious prints; there rarely are on a gun with a pebbled grip. Then there was this in his wallet, along with some eighty dollars in currency.” The Chief showed a paper napkin printed with a comic penguin and the name Polar Club, and bearing the perfect imprint of a woman’s mouth in bright geranium. “And last but not least, there was this on the floor near the door.” He took out an envelope and carefully dumped a thimbleful of something mottled and brownish onto a sheet of paper. “Recognize it, Howie?”

  Rook’s nose wrinkled. “Don’t know exactly. But I think I’ve smelled that particular smell somewhere, sometime. It must have been years ago, though.”

  “We know what it is. It’s elephant dung mixed with sawdust.”

  “Elephant dung!” gasped Howie Rook. “But—” He broke off suddenly as the door burst open and the woman he now knew to be Mavis McFarley plunged into the room; her lovely eyes wide and her rather remarkable bosoms heaving.

  “I’m sorry, Mr. Parkman,” she cried breathlessly. “But I simply can’t wait out there any longer. Surely you’ve had time enough to tell this gentleman all the details by now; you’ve had him in here for simply hours!”

  “Come in, Mrs. McFarley,” the Chief rather unnecessarily told her, and then he introduced them. Rook felt the solid impact of her personality: her gloved hand had a grip almost as strong as his own; her carefully p
ainted lips were tight. Never averse to meeting beautiful women, he said, “Delighted, I’m sure.”

  There were no further amenities. The woman had in her eyes the look of a gambler, and like a gambler she plunged. “Now that Mr. Parkman has told you everything, and shown you the evidence and the stuff, you’ve decided to help? Oh, I knew you would!”

  “Well—” began Howie Rook, feeling rather like a bird being charmed by a snake, and enjoying it too.

  “Because somebody has to do it. And the police say they haven’t any men to spare. Besides, policemen do so look like policemen, and think like policemen, don’t they?”

  “If at all,” murmured Rook, with a side glance at the Chief.

  “I’d do it myself in a minute. Only it’s impossible for a woman, you can see that. There may be some danger, but you look as if you could take care of yourself. I’ll pay almost anything—within reason of course.”

  She came closer, and he could see that beneath the long curling lashes her eyes were decidedly greenish; they were pleading, too. Rook felt himself weakening; he had always secretly admired—from a distance—beautiful blondes with green eyes. He also at the moment admired the money, having less than twenty dollars in the bank to last until his next pension check. Mavis smelled strongly of some exotic flower—perhaps, he thought, it was the night-blooming cereus in his landlady’s garden. Anyway, the situation was a sort of challenge, a promise of adventure, and he was at an age when he was beginning to think that all adventure had passed him by.

  “What in—what in the world do you want me to do?” he asked, not unreasonably.

  Green eyes widened. “Why, I want you to go be a clown in the circus, of course!”

  2

  Unmeaning now, to me

  As laughter was an hour ago,

  Or laces, or a traveling show.

  Or who died yesterday!

  —Emily Dickinson

  AFTER A WORKING LIFETIME on metropolitan newspapers, serving as everything from copy boy to obit writer to police reporter to city editor, Howie Rook was a man not easily flabbergasted, but now he stood flatfooted, not sure that he had heard aright. Mavis McFarley confidently slipped her slim arm through his, and edged him toward the door. “We’ve taken up enough of Mr. Parkman’s time,” she said sweetly but firmly. “Come along, and we’ll work out the details over a bite of lunch.”

  With a polite nod at the Chief, she led Rook out of the office; he went not unwillingly though he was uncomfortably aware of the wicked grin on Parkman’s face. “He thinks I am riding for a fall,” thought Rook. “But at least I will get a free meal out of it, and that’s something.” He was getting rather tired of crackers and liverwurst as a steady diet.

  Besides, he was a man who dearly loved puzzles, and this promised to be the goddamnedest puzzle in recent history.

  They went out together—but they were immediately waylaid in the anteroom. The plumply pretty teen-ager whom Rook had noticed earlier leaped from her chair. “Just a minute, Mavis!” she cried. “What are you trying to get by with now?”

  The temperature in the room was suddenly subzero. “Yes, Vonny?” said Mavis.

  “I have a right to know what’s going on!” the girl announced, “It’s my own father, remember? All this stuff in Mr. Parkman’s office…”

  “Vonny, this is Mr. Rook, who is going to do some investigating for us.”

  “A detective? Are you actually trying to set a private detective on me to try and prove that I murdered my own father?”

  “Perish forbid,” said Mavis calmly. “Mr. Rook is not a private detective, and I’m most certainly not trying to prove anything against you, Vonny dear.” She turned. “As you may have guessed, this is my former stepdaughter, Yvonne McFarley, otherwise known as Problem Child Number One.”

  “How do you do?” asked Rook politely, not thinking of anything else to say.

  The girl barely nodded, and did not extend her hand. “Well!” she exploded. “Of all people in the world, I’m certainly the one who has the right to know what’s cooking. I’m sick and tired of being left out in the cold. If my father committed suicide, I know who drove him to it, and if he was murdered I know who did it or who knows who did it! Mr. Cook or Rook or whatever your name is, I want to talk to you alone.”

  “I certainly have no objections,” Mavis said quickly. “I’ll be waiting down in the lobby. And while you two are having this cozy little chat, dear, why don’t you tell Mr. Rook about the time last summer at the Beach Club when you tried to brain your father with a champagne bottle?” She made a dignified if somewhat theatrical exit.

  Rook had long since had his fill of trying to cope with hysterical women, but resignedly he led the girl over to the divan and sat her down, out of earshot of the desk sergeant. “Understand, young lady, what my position is in all this. Your stepmother, or ex-stepmother, thinks that your father’s death wasn’t suicide, and that he was murdered. She has not accused you of anything; in fact she seems to think that it was done by somebody with the circus which just left town, and she has asked me to try and find out the facts. That’s all there is to it.”

  “But that isn’t all! You don’t understand. Mavis has you under her thumb, just as she has all men. This is my own father we’re talking about, and I’m the only one in the world who loved him and understood him at all! Oh, of course we fought—we were too much alike. Sometimes you can fight hardest with the people you love most. But if he was murdered—and I know he’d never take his own life—then she did it or she knows who did!”

  “You said that before,” said Rook mildly. He thought that somebody should turn her over his knee and deliver a sound spanking. “And what possible motive could she have had—answer me that.”

  “Motive? They used to fight like cats and dogs. And who is she to talk, a woman with a past like hers!”

  “So? Everybody has a past, especially any woman as attractive as Mavis. You yourself are probably working on a past of your own, young lady. So this vague sort of accusation is pointless, unless you have something concrete to contribute. Pin it down.”

  “She had boy friends,” Vonny said. “I don’t know just who, but I know in my heart she had boy friends. Of course, daddy did sort of neglect her, at least from her point of view. He was the studious type, and she—”

  “Not enough for a motive,” said Rook, judiciously.

  “She married him for his money!”

  “Which I understand was left to you. So that would seem to be out. Was he going to fight her about the divorce?”

  Vonny shook her head. “He never wanted a divorce, or even a legal separation like they had. He wanted her back, God knows why.”

  Rook thought he also understood why. “So, since we’ve gone this far, it’s time for you to put up or shut up, isn’t it? What possible motive could Mavis have had, answer me that!”

  “I—I—” The pretty roundish face was reddened with suppressed anger and frustration. “Never mind, Mr. Rook! Since you’re so good at finding out things, you can find that out too!”

  He had lost contact with her, for the moment at least. Rook was too old and wise a hand to batter his head against a stone wall. He gave the girl his telephone number and asked her to call him if she had anything pertinent to contribute to the investigation; then, since she seemed to have a burning desire to go in and give Chief Parkman a piece of her mind, he let her go argue with the desk sergeant and went swiftly out of the place and downstairs. “How,” said Howie Rook to himself, “do I get into these things? Better I should have stood in bed.”

  He found Mavis McFarley waiting, not too patiently, in the downstairs lobby. She greeted him with a smile, and they went out together to her flashy red convertible, parked in a no-parking zone, and then whipped out west on the boulevard almost as fast as the police car had traveled, even without benefit of siren. “Wunderkind had to put in her five cents, no?” asked Mavis, her bright hair wind-entangled.

  “About two cents,” said Roo
k. “She just wanted to get into the act.”

  “Exactly! She always did.” Mavis drove expertly, if erratically, cutting in and out of traffic and fighting for every light. “It was always that way when Mac and I were married. I tried to be friends with her for Mac’s sake. But she just wouldn’t have it. She never knew her own mother, but she definitely wasn’t going to have me for one.” Mavis turned the car into the parking lot at Carino’s. She was the type, Rook judged, who would never take a guest anywhere but to that famous and fabulously expensive restaurant. He himself would have preferred a simple drive-in or steak house. But they were ushered with some fanfare to a rear booth, and after the waiter arrived she ordered a filet béarnais for him and a simple fruit salad for herself. That over with, she fixed him with her glittering eye.

  “Now!” she said. “You can see why it’s necessary to start with the circus. The Big One, as you probably know, played here last week and the forepart of this, and is now doing stands down the Coast. I think they open at Vista Beach, an hour or so from here, on Monday. If you say yes, I’m pretty sure I can fix it for you with Mr. Timken, the road manager. He’s kind of a cold potato, but he’ll co-operate because he’ll be told to from higher-up. And nobody needs to know why you’re really there."

  “I’ll need to know,” pointed out Rook firmly.

  “But it’s so obvious! The white-face clown make-up that Mac was wearing when he died, and the bull dirt mixed with sawdust that was found on the floor of the apartment—they spell that out. Not that you need to have things spelled out for you; I’ve read your letters to the newspapers and some of your true-crime articles in the magazines, and I just know you’re a wonderful criminologist. That’s why I pulled all sorts of strings to get to the Police Commissioner so he’d have somebody get in touch with you and have you brought down so you could be shown all the clues and then introduce us. See?”