Home Sweet Homicide

by Craig Rice

  “Don’t bother me,” Dinah said. “There were two shots. Mrs. Sanford was standing—there. From the way she fell, the shot must have come from somewhere over there.” She pointed in the direction of the blue sofa at the far end of the room. “Then there was another shot, from the dining room.”

  “Why?” April asked.

  “I don’t know,” Dinah said. “I’m trying to think. Maybe the murderer missed on the first shot and then tried again.”

  “Those two shots sounded pretty close together,” April reminded her, “and it’s a long way from the blue sofa to the dining room. And just as far from the dining-room door to the blue sofa. Of course, if you were on skis—”

  Dinah stared at her. “There were two. Two of them.”

  “We heard two shots,” April said. “We heard two cars driving away. So there must have been two murderers. Only, one of them missed.” She looked speculatively at the room, her eyes narrowing. “The point is, which one.”

  Dinah looked puzzled. “I don’t get it.”

  “All right,” April said. “You flunked first-grade arithmetic, too. Listen. Two shots, two bullets. One bullet hit Mrs. Sanford, the other one hit Uncle Herbert’s picture in the eye. They must have come from two different guns, unless they were fired by Superman and he made it from the blue sofa to the dining room, or vice-reverse, in one bound. So, it works out. See? All you need are the two bullets, and the two guns, and the two angles of fire, and the fingerprints.”

  “None of which we have,” Dinah said gloomily. “And even if we had all that stuff, we wouldn’t know who owned the guns, or where they stood, or whose fingerprints they were. Let’s go home and wash the dishes.”

  “Don’t be a discouragist,” April said. She looked speculatively up at Uncle Herbert’s left eye. “Maybe if I stood on a chair—”

  There were footsteps, running footsteps, up the driveway. The girls looked at each other, and then looked around for a place to hide.

  “The stairway,” April breathed.

  They dived up it, pausing, listening, on the landing.

  “In a pinch,” Dinah whispered reassuringly, “there’s always the trellis.”

  “Ssssssssssssh!” April hissed.

  The uniformed cop ran quickly into the house, Archie right at his heels. He grabbed the phone, dialed headquarters, and identified himself as “McCafferty speaking.” He was a very young, very pink-cheeked, and, at the moment, very excited cop.

  “Don’ forget to tell ’em about the bushes being all broke down,” Archie said, looking around to see where Dinah and April were, “and all the—”

  “This is McCafferty,” the young cop said desperately, “put me through quick, operator.”

  “—and the bloodstains all over,” Archie said, “and the knife stuck in the tree trunk—”

  McCafferty said, “Just a minute,” into the phone, put his hand over the mouthpiece, and said to Archie, “What knife?”

  “Stuck in the tree trunk,” Archie repeated. “Just where the guy must of fell down.” He looked small, scared, and pale. “Didn’ you see it?”

  “No,” the young cop said, “but—” Just then he connected with headquarters. Slightly breathless, he reported that he’d found the scene of what must have been a homicide. Near the scene of the Sanford murder, and within easy driving distance of the deserted swimming pool where Frankie Riley’s body had been found.

  While he was telephoning, April managed to catch Archie’s eye from their hiding place on the staircase. She gave him a signal that meant, “Get him out of here!” Archie gave back a signal—three fingers against his lower lip—that meant “O-kuk, just watch me!”

  McCafferty hung up the phone. April retreated six inches up the stairs. Archie said, innocent-eyed, “Why didn’ya tell ’em about the body?”

  “Huh?” the cop said. “What body?”

  “Down there,” Archie said, pointing vaguely. “In the bushes. Down where I showed you.” He drew a long breath and said, “Riddled with bullets.”

  McCafferty stared at Archie. He picked up the phone again and called for a squad car. Then he fled out through the kitchen and raced across the lawn in the direction Archie pointed out to him.

  “Dinah, get me a kitchen knife,” April said. She began pulling a chair toward Uncle Herbert’s picture. “Skee-make-you-it-appy.”

  Dinah ran into the kitchen, rummaged through the cutlery drawers, her hands shaking, and came back with the first knife she found. When she returned, April, on a chair, was already prying at the bullet in Uncle Herbert’s portrait’s eye.

  April glanced at the knife and said, “Why didn’t you just bring a crowbar?”

  “It’s—” Dinah gulped. “My gosh. Hurry up.”

  “Don’t rush me,” April said. “Sometimes these operations take hours.” She pried out the bullet, tucked it into her blouse pocket, and anchored it with a crumpled piece of Kleenex. Then she looked critically at the portrait. “He looks awfully silly with only one eye. And besides, maybe we ought to give the police something to worry about.”

  There was a bowl of slightly faded geraniums on the library table. April selected one, and tucked it neatly into Uncle Herbert’s left eye. Then she turned to Dinah. “Let’s wash the fingerprints off that knife,” she suggested. “And then—well, the police might as well earn their salary doing something.”

  Dinah stared at her, said, “My gosh, what— Oh, all right!” She washed off the knife while April ran upstairs to find a lipstick.

  “Don’t touch it with your hands,” April said. “Use a kitchen towel. There, that’s right.” She wrote on the blade, in big red letters: A WARNING! Then, holding it cautiously in the towel, she stood it on the mantel, pointed toward the geranium. “Now,” she said, “let’s get out of here. Fast.”

  They went out through the back door and across the kitchen garden. There were sounds of heavy feet tramping through the bushes in front of the Sanford villa. From a great distance came the faint unhappy sound of a siren. The minute they’d crossed into their own territory, April put a finger in her mouth and gave the coyote call. A moment later Archie raced up the steps to join them.

  “Archie,” April said, “get some of the Mob here. Quick.”

  “Phone?” Archie asked.

  “No. Emergency call.”

  “O-kuk,” Archie said. He put two fingers in his mouth and gave a series of whistles, some long, some short. In a moment there were answering whistles. “They’ll be here,” Archie reported.

  The siren was growing louder. But the Mob arrived ahead of the squad car. Most of it, at least. April looked them over, dirty dungarees, torn jerseys, butch haircuts. They all looked more or less alike, and they all looked like Archie. She explained to them just what they should do.

  The Mob caught on quick. They and the young Carstairs moved around to the back of the house, getting there just as the siren died away and the squad car stopped near the front of the house.

  Dinah poured soap flakes and hot water into a dishpan, April whisked the dishes from the table to the sink and picked up a dishtowel. Archie and the Mob hastily began a game of marbles in the back yard.

  It was about three minutes before heavy footsteps and angry voices were heard on the walk beside the house. “—tell you,” Bill Smith’s voice was saying, hot with anger, “that was where I fell over some infernal device rigged up by—”

  “But those bushes were all broke down,” McCafferty’s voice said.

  “I broke them down,” Bill Smith said. “I fell on them.”

  The young policeman’s voice sounded hurt. “But it looked as if—and this boy said—”

  Sergeant O’Hare’s heavy baritone said, “Look, McCafferty, when you’ve raised nine—”

  By that time Bill Smith was pounding on the back-porch door. The two girls went out, Dinah with sudsy hands, April holding a plate and a dishtowel.

  “Good morning!” April chirruped. “We were just thinking about you. Won’t you com
e in and have a cup of coffee?”

  “No, thanks,” Bill Smith said. He looked as mad as hops.

  “Look. I want you to tell me—”

  “Psst.” Sergeant O’Hare said, in a perfectly audible whisper. “Let me handle this. After all, I—” He cleared his throat and said, “Well, good morning, little lady!”

  “Captain O’Hare!” April said brightly. “How nice! How are you?”

  “Just Sergeant,” O’Hare said. “I’m fine. How are you?”

  “Oh, fine,” April said. “You’re looking well.”

  “You’re looking well yourself,” the sergeant said.

  “Listen,” Bill Smith whispered, “if I wanted to go to a vaudeville show—”

  O’Hare gave him a nudge, and said, “Little lady, I have a very important question to ask you, and I know you’ll tell me the truth because it won’t get anybody in trouble, and it’ll help us.”

  April stared at him, wide-eyed.

  “Tell me, little lady,” Sergeant O’Hare said in his gentlest voice, “where has your little brother been for the last hour?”

  “Archie?” April said. She looked surprised and bewildered. She almost dropped the dishtowel. Then she said, innocently, convincingly, and perfectly truthfully, “Helping us.” She went on polishing the plate.

  Bill Smith shoved the sergeant aside and said, “Helping you what?”

  Dinah took over, making the most of her sudsy hands and the wet dishcloth she still held. “I know we hadn’t ought to ask him to, because he’s a boy and shouldn’t do housework, but my gosh, there’s such a lot to do, with carrying out dishes, and emptying the garbage pail and burning the wastepaper and taking out the tin cans and putting ant powder on the back-porch floor.”

  Bill Smith glared at her and then at the worried McCafferty. “You couldn’t have been having a bad dream,” he said coldly.

  McCafferty shook his head. “I tell ya,” he said unhappily, “I was watching the premises and mindin’ my own business, and this kid come up all excited and hollerin’ there’d been a murder, and what was I to do?”

  “Investigate it, of course,” April said.

  Bill Smith looked at her and said, “Will you kindly keep out of this?”

  “And here were these bushes all broke down and everything. And then while I was telephoning, he tole me about a knife stuck in a tree trunk, and a body riddled wit’ bullets. So what was I to do? I done like it tells, in the Manual, I moved fast.”

  “If you ever fall for anything like this again,” Bill Smith said, “you’ll move fast back into the traffic squad.” He looked at April and Dinah. “Where’s your brother?”

  The girls looked at him blankly. Dinah looked into the back yard, where the Mob was playing marbles. “He was right around here a minute ago.”

  April said loudly enough for her voice to be heard in the back yard. “He might be down in the basement cleaning out the fireplace ashes. Or he might have gone down to the store after the potatoes. Or maybe—”

  Archie, outside, got the hint. He gave a signal to the Mob, and dived into the basement.

  “Never mind,” Bill Smith said. “You’re sure he’s been busy helping you?”

  “Every minute since breakfast,” Dinah said truthfully.

  Bill Smith sighed and turned to the anxious McCafferty.

  “Maybe it was one of these kids—” He led the way into the back yard, O’Hare and McCafferty right behind him, and Dinah and April watching and listening from the back porch.

  McCafferty stood looking for a moment and then said unhappily, “They all look alike to me. It might of been him.” He pointed to Slukey.

  Bill Smith fixed a stern eye on Slukey and said, “Was it you?”

  “It wathn’t me,” Slukey said. He’d recently lost a tooth in honorable combat, and the result was a definite lisp. “An’ bethideth, th’ window wath cracked a’ready before I t’rowed the rock.”

  “That don’t sound like him,” McCafferty said. He looked hard at the Admiral.

  “Where have you been for the last hour,” Bill Smith said.

  The Admiral turned white and refused to talk. Finally O’Hare coaxed him into the seclusion of the back porch, where he broke down and confessed. He didn’t have no sisters, and his mother didn’t have no maid, and somebody had to wash them dishes, only if the Mob should find out—

  Sergeant O’Hare promised him solemnly the Mob would never find out.

  Goony had been on an errand for his grandmother. Pinhead had been mowing Mrs. Cherington’s lawn. Flashlight had been practising his piano lesson. Wormly had been watering the garden. All the Mob seemed to have good, solid, incontestable alibis. Finally Washboard, youngest and smallest of the Mob, staved off questioning by demanding to know, “Are you really p’licemen? Kin I have yer autographs?”

  “They all look alike to me,” McCafferty repeated.

  “Forget it,” Bill Smith said wearily, “and come on. We’ve got work to do.”

  They took a few steps along the kitchen walk. Then Archie came puffing up the back cellar stairs, clutching a bushel basket half full of wood ashes. The ashes were blowing out of the basket; his face and hair were covered with them. “H’lo,” Archie panted cheerfully. He spotted Sergeant O’Hare, remembered the attempt that had been made to trick him into giving away a secret, and decided to settle an old score. He set the basket down hard just in front of the sergeant. The ashes promptly rose up in a cloud and turned the sergeant’s neat blue suit to a dusty gray.

  “Yipes!” Archie said. “Awful sorry.” He pushed past the sergeant, waved at the Mob, and said, “H’ya!”

  Wormly caught the hint. “How much longer you gonna stay down in that there cellar?”

  “Aw heck,” Archie said, “the whole place is fulla ashes. It’s gonna take ’nother coupla hours.” He didn’t mention that the former couple of hours had been spent a week before. The statement still seemed to him to come within the confines of truth.

  “Gug-o-squared-dud gug-u-yum,” April called softly from the back porch.

  Sergeant O’Hare grabbed Archie by the collar and dragged him over to Policeman McCafferty. “Is this the guy?” he demanded.

  McCafferty looked thoughtfully at the ash-smeared face, the mussed-up hair, and the jersey Archie had resurrected from the salvage box in the basement. “No,” he said at last. “Don’t look the least bit like this guy.”

  “Well, c’mon,” Sergeant O’Hare said. “We got no time to fool around with this stuff. Don’t pay no attention to kids’ tricks. B’lieve me, I’ve raised nine of my own, and I know.” He led the hapless McCafferty down the path toward the Sanford villa.

  “I wonder how the first of the nine turned out,” April murmured. “After all—”

  Dinah giggled. Then she signaled to the Mob and to Archie. “Hey, you kids. There’s a whole quart of ice cream left over from the party, and half a maple cake. Only you have to eat it on the back porch.”

  The entire Mob was settled on the back porch in five seconds flat.

  “It’s worth it,” Dinah explained to April, after she’d ladled out the ice cream. “Archie would probably have gone to jail or something.”

  “Good ole Mob,” April said, flinging a dishtowel over the rack. “Wow-e-lul-squared, cash-hash-u-mum, let’s go up and pry into the late Mrs. Sanford’s private life, before more hash-e-lul-squared breaks loose.”

  Dinah rinsed out the dishcloth and spread it carefully over the edge of the sink. “And,” she said thoughtfully, “when the cops happen to look at Uncle Herbert’s left eye—it will!”

  Chapter Thirteen

  They closed the door to their room and dumped the contents of the big Manila envelope on Dinah’s bed—letters, papers, documents, newspaper clippings. April picked up one of the clippings at random and glanced at it. “Dinah! Look! This picture—”

  It was a picture of a handsome middle-aged man in uniform. A headline above it read

  FOUND GUILTY BY

&nb
sp; MILITARY COURT

  The name under the picture was Colonel Charles Chandler.

  “I don’t get it,” Dinah said. “Who’s Colonel Charles Chandler?”

  “Look at the picture again,” April said. “Imagine it has white hair and a little beard.”

  Dinah looked and imagined. “My gosh,” she said. “It’s Mr. Cherington!”

  “Carleton Cherington III,” April said solemnly.

  Dinah stared at her. “That don’t make sense. What’d he do?”

  April skimmed hastily through the article. “He stole a lot of money. Fifteen thousand dollars. It was five years ago, about, according to the date on the clipping. He managed to make it look at first as if the safe in the quartermaster’s office had been burgled, but then they found out it was him, only they never found the money. So the military court run him out of the army.”

  She turned to another clipping stapled to the first one. “He was arrested and sent to jail. For four years. There’s a lot of personal junk about him, how he went to West Point and was a hero in the World War, and his father was an officer in the army, and stuff.”

  “Four years!” Dinah said. “But they’ve been living here about three years!”

  “Wait a minute, can’t you?” April said. She turned to the third and last of the clippings—a very small one. “He got a parole.”

  “Oh,” Dinah said. “And then they came here and changed their names. They certainly picked a nice fancy one.”

  “Mrs. Carleton Cherington III,” April mouthed. “Bet you she picked it out. Just the same,” she added, “she stuck with him. Wonder what he did with the money.”

  “Spent it, I suppose,” Dinah said.

  “On what?” April said scornfully. “Just use what we like to be polite and call your brain. They came here right after he was paroled. They certainly haven’t spent the money. I bet they don’t spend two thousand dollars a year. That’s a dinky little house, she never buys any new clothes, they don’t even have a cleaning woman once a week, and all the entertainment they have is raising prize roses.”

  “Maybe,” Dinah said, “he used it to pay gambling debts.”