Home Sweet Homicide

by Craig Rice

  “Him!” April said. “Mr. Cherington? I mean—Colonel Chandler? Does he look as if he’d have that many gambling debts?”

  “Well, no,” Dinah admitted. “Heck, I don’t know what he did with it. But gosh! Mr. Cherington! That nice old guy!”

  “He’s not so old,” April said. “Look at his picture. He must have been just about fifty, five years ago.” Her eyes narrowed. “One thing he might have done with the money. Mrs. Sanford was blackmailing him.”

  “That makes sense,” Dinah said. She looked at the collection of papers and said, “Come on, April, we haven’t got all day.”

  Most of the pages of notes, the letters, the pictures and clippings had names written in blue ink across the top, in a small, cramped handwriting. April spotted one labeled “Desgranges” and grabbed at it.

  There was quite a little collection on Pierre Desgranges. It consisted of a series of letters signed simply “Joe,” addressed to “Dear Flora,” and full of such unimportant personal references as “How nice to hear from you again,” “How do you like California?” “Remember the wonderful Martinis at Raviel’s?” “Are you still happily married?” and “Will you ever forget the night we went to Coney Island?” They were written on the office stationery of a New York newspaper.

  It wasn’t difficult, though, to pick out the phrases that referred to Pierre Desgranges. Those phrases had been neatly underlined in blue ink.

  “… your mysterious artist answers the description of one Armand von Hoehne, who was smuggled into this country across the border a few years ago and has been looked for ever since. If he should be the man, it would not be surprising if he posed as a Frenchman. His mother was French, and he was brought up in Paris. We have quite a file on him up to the time he disappeared. Let me know what you find out, we might have a story.”

  In the next letter “… if this Desgranges is Von Hoehne, he isn’t hiding out for fear of the FBI. Enemy agents in this country have been looking for him since his disappearance, with orders to shoot him on sight. If this is the man, no wonder he’s grown a beard.”

  Then, “… yes Von Hoehne would be well supplied with money. It’s known that he carried his late mother’s jewels with him, when he fled from Europe….”

  And “… no, there isn’t any photograph of Von Hoehne. But there’s one identifying mark you might be on the watch for. He has a dueling scar on the left arm, a long, diagonal cut from his elbow to his wrist. Look, if it turned out this guy really is Von Hoehne, let me know right away. It would be a great break for the paper if we could find him first….”

  Finally, “… too bad it turns out your Pierre Desgranges isn’t Armand von Hoehne. It would have made a nice story. But if he doesn’t have the scar, there’s no doubt about it….”

  April put down the letters and said, “Dinah. He was trying to get into the Sanford house the day after she was murdered. And have you ever seen him with his sleeves rolled up?”

  “No,” Dinah said, “but—”

  “All right,” April said. “He is this Armand von Hoehne, and he is afraid enemy agents are going to murder him. She finds out about it. She finds out he has money.”

  “And finally he runs out of money,” Dinah said. “She says she’s going to expose him. So, he kills her.”

  “Gosh, Dinah,” April said. “He’d have known she must have had something in writing that would give him away. Or else he wouldn’t have tried to get in the house after the murder. If he’d murdered her, he’d have torn the house apart to find it and destroy it. Or he’d have burned down the house. There wouldn’t be any point in murdering her, if he couldn’t get rid of the evidence against him.”

  “I guess that’s right,” Dinah said thoughtfully. “And, anyway, I can’t picture Pierre Desgranges murdering anybody. That nice, gentle little guy!”

  “He has a dueling scar from his elbow to his wrist,” April reminded her.

  “You think he has,” Dinah said.

  “Leave it to me,” April said confidently. “I’ll find out.”

  “How?” Dinah demanded.

  “I don’t know yet,” April said. “But I’ll think of something.”

  Dinah put the Desgranges papers down on the bed. “I guess Mrs. Sanford was a blackmailer, all right.”

  “And you figured that out all by yourself!” April said. “What a brain!” For a moment she considered confessing to Dinah about her lucky guess, and about Rupert van Deusen. No, better not.

  “Well, my gosh,” Dinah said, “she’s lived right next door to us all this time, and everything.”

  “She had to live next door to somebody,” April said. “And quit getting sorry for her just because she was murdered. People are murdered every day. I looked it up once in the World Almanac for Mother, when she needed a statistic. In 1940 there were eight thousand, two hundred, and eight people got murdered in the United States alone, and think of all the rest of the world! Think of how many people that would be every day.”

  “I could figure it out,” Dinah said, “if I had a pencil and paper.”

  “Don’t bother,” April said hastily. “Just stop worrying about Mrs. Sanford. Remember what she was like?”

  “I do,” Dinah said She shuddered.

  “Remember when she chased us off when we went to ask her, very politely, if we could have some of her daffodils to put around Mother’s surprise birthday cake?”

  Dinah said, “Remember when she threatened to call the police when Archie went over on her lawn to catch Henderson?”

  “And she went around in those fancy hostess gowns all the time, and with that lily-look on her face. And Mother always swore that blonde hair was an expensive bleach job.”

  “Lots of women bleach their hair,” Dinah said. “And gosh, she was beautiful, even if she was sort of thin and sickly-looking.”

  “I bet Mr. Desgranges didn’t think she was beautiful,” April said. “Or Mr. Cherington. Or”—she pawed through the papers—“this guy.”

  “This guy” proved to be a harmless-appearing manager of a chain shoe store who owned a small bungalow, had a wife and three small children. Unfortunately, he had another wife back in Rock Island, Illinois. He’d married her when he was twenty-one and she was twenty-nine, they’d stayed married exactly six weeks. Since he hadn’t had any money for a divorce, or for alimony, and since she had a good job as waitress in a tavern, he’d simply left town and changed his name.

  There was also all the dope on a country doctor, a general practitioner, who’d falsified a death certificate so that the deceased’s elderly widow wouldn’t lose the tiny income from an insurance policy because of a suicide clause.

  There was a fat collection of indiscreet letters from a society matron whose pictures Dinah and April had seen more than once in the special sections of the Sunday Times, and who was deeply concerned that no one should ever know that her mother had been a chambermaid in a cheap Cincinnati hotel.

  There was information about a near-middle-aged English teacher in a highly proper girls’ school, who’d been picked up in a gambling squad raid on what she’d innocently believed to be a perfectly respectable restaurant.

  “She worked on the mass-production theory,” April said grimly. She turned over a page and said, “Now, here’s something!”

  It was a letter, in violet ink, on the stationery of an inexpensive Times Square hotel.

  DEAR FLO:

  You were strictly correct about this tip-off about this Holbrook buzzard. She’s his daughter all right, but as I make out the score, he’d suffer a fate worse than death rather than have any of the folks back home know she’s a chip off the family tree. He must be some kind of a nut because if I were him, believe me, Flo, I’d be proud of her. When she does that dance with the three peacock feathers and the string of beads, the cash customers rise up in a body and cheer, and if the money she makes every year was laid end to end it would ballast the whole Atlantic fleet. Of course people are funny, Flo, and maybe he objects about her b
eing married three times, but I always say, how is a person going to learn without making mistakes, or maybe he doesn’t like all the so-called unfavorable publicity she gets, but the way I feel about it is this, what the heck, if it stands them in line in front of the box office, it’s good publicity. Well, Flo, I hope this will fix it up so you can get this Holbrook individual to take care of your legal affairs for free, and believe me, Flo, thanks for the ten-spot, it came in very handy. Hoping you are well,

  VIVIENNE

  “Mr. Holbrook!” Dinah said. “Him! He has a daughter that dances with a bunch of peacock feathers and a string of beads—that respectable guy! Why, he bawled Archie out once for whistling on Sunday, when he was driving down the road from Mrs. Sanford’s place.”

  “You never know!” April said solemnly. She looked at the next letter, also written in violet ink on hotel stationery.

  DEAR FLO:

  Well, I did like you asked me to, and it worked out all right. I appealed to her because we once worked in the same show in Maryland and at that time she was just in the chorus and I was the star soprano, believe me. So when I got in to see her I said just what you told me, how her poor old daddy was very sick and might not get well, and I had a mutual friend with him who told me about him being sick, and how he pined for some kind of message from her, only it would have to be smuggled in to him and I would see that it would be delivered to him direct, and it didn’t have to be more than a few words. She fell for it right off, and bawled even, and she wrote the enclosed, including the envelope addressed to him, which you said had to be part of it. And thanks, Flo, for the C-note, which I really needed because I do have to get my teeth fixed, especially if that Hollywood job you suggested really materializes. Take care of yourself and let me know about the job.

  VIVIENNE

  Clipped to it there was an envelope addressed to “Mr. Henry Holbrook.” Inside, there was a note, written in haste.

  DEAREST, DEAREST DAD:

  I just heard you were sick. Please get well soon. Forgive me for all the trouble I’ve caused you. Really, someday I’ll make you proud of me. And I’ve never done anything that would make you ashamed of me and I never will, honest. And get well soon because someday I’ll be a star in a real play in a real theater and you’ll come on opening night and cheer for me. I love you so much.

  B

  The next letter in the collection was, again, in violet ink.

  DEAR FLO:

  I’m sorry about her not signing her right name to the letter, but how was I to know, and once she had put her name on it what was I to do? Don’t blame me, Flo, I’m doing the best I can to help out a pal. Well, anyway, I gave her the note you wrote in what looked like her daddy’s handwriting, requesting a professional picture of herself and autographed, and she really broke down and cried. So I picked out the picture while she was crying, and gave her the pen, and she signed it with her real name, and I enclose same. And, Flo, if you can help me out with the loan of a few dollars I will appreciate same, on account of I have had a lot of unexpected expenses in the last few weeks. Yrs. always.

  VIVIENNE

  April turned over the page, looked at the photograph clipped to it, whistled, and said, “What a babe!”

  The photograph was signed, “Harriet Holbrook.”

  “If Mr. Holbrook ever saw this,” Dinah gasped, “he’d practically die.”

  “He must have seen it,” April said. She was beginning to look a little mad. “He must have known that Mrs. Sanford had it. That’s why he was trying to break in the house, after she was murdered. Because he couldn’t let anybody know his daughter was a dancer who wore a few peacock feathers and a handful of glass beads.”

  “There’s more here,” Dinah said, lifting up the photograph.

  There were a half-dozen notes, the first few in violet ink, all in the same sprawling handwriting. They were all appeals for money.

  “… the dentist says I need a whole upper plate which is going to cost money, and you know I expect to have a job soon, so if you can loan me …”

  “… wonder if my last letter to you went astray as I have not had an answer from you. The teeth will have to wait, but I am three months behind in my rent, and the building manager has given me until next Thursday. If you can make me a little loan, Flo, for old time’s sake, can you send it airmail special, as this is Saturday …”

  The letters were uniform in one respect. None of them seemed to have been answered.

  The last one was written in pencil, on cheap, ruled paper.

  “… if you can wire me $25, care of the Salvation Army shelter at …”

  Finally there was one pitifully small clipping. It told of the suicide of Vivienne Dane, former musical-comedy star, in a tiny tenement room.

  Dinah slapped the collection down on the bed. She looked good and mad. “That woman! She made this Vivienne person do all her dirty work and stick her neck out, and she sent her”—she thumbed through the letters—“a total of a hundred and ten dollars and the promise of a Hollywood job which was probably phony. And then when she’d found out what she needed, she didn’t even answer the poor woman’s letters!”

  “Don’t lose your temper,” April said. “You’ll wake Mother.”

  “Well, my gosh!” Dinah said. “When I think about this Vivienne, and Mr. Holbrook, and Mr. Desgranges, and—”

  “Calm down,” April said. “We’ve got a lot more stuff here to look over.”

  Dinah sniffed once, and calmed down.

  April picked up the next item in the collection. It was an eight-by-ten shiny photograph that looked like a flashlight picture taken to the surprise of the subjects. Stapled to it were two newspaper clippings. April stared at the photograph and then said, “Uh-uh! Look, Dinah!”

  Dinah looked, gasped, and said, “Mr. Sanford!”

  “And a gorgeous girl!” April said.

  The scene was a stage-door alley. Wallie Sanford had on evening clothes. The girl had long, dark hair, and a lovely young face. She wore a long, pale formal, and a fur cape. They might have been any good-looking couple going out for an evening, save for the one fact that they both looked not only startled, but scared.

  Dinah turned to the clippings.

  WAS MYSTERIOUS “MR. SANDERSON”

  FINGER MAN IN LEMOE KIDNAPING?

  By Marian Ward

  Two days ago beautiful Bette LeMoe left the stage of the theater where she was starring to the sound of tumultuous applause. There were curtain calls, and she returned for them. Then she went to her dressing room and made herself beautiful for the young man who was waiting at the stage door.

  Her maid testifies she took particular pains with her dress and make-up, and seemed in a particularly happy frame of mind. She went out the stage door, humming happily to herself, and her “escort” greeted her affectionately.

  They walked down the alley to the sidewalk. Suddenly a car slid up to the curb. In full sight of a crowd of theater goers, an armed man forced Bette LeMoe into the car. Her “escort” disappeared into the crowd.

  Today I interviewed the maid who helped Bette LeMoe don her favorite dress, and the doorman who said “good night” to her when she left the theater, perhaps for the last time. Both of them mentioned the name of “Mr. Sanderson.”

  A “Mr. Sanderson” had called for Bette LeMoe a number of times, had sent her many gifts, and talked to her frequently on the telephone. There appears to be no doubt that it was this same “Mr. Sanderson” who accompanied her on that last walk down the stage-door alley….

  The clipping was torn off there. There was still the second one.

  WILLIAM SANDERSON SOUGHT

  IN BETTE LEMOE SLAYING

  By Marian Ward

  Police of five states searched today for William Sanderson, young real-estate salesman, believed to be involved in the kidnap-murder of Bette LeMoe.

  For several weeks prior to the kidnaping, Sanderson was known to have been a constant escort of Miss LeMoe, accompanying he
r to exclusive night spots and sending her costly gifts. Sanderson’s employer, Mr. J. L. Barker, when questioned, declared that Sanderson’s weekly earnings averaged less than forty dollars, yet there appeared to be no shortages in the Barker accounts. Inspector Joseph Donovan, in charge of the case, stated his belief that the money spent entertaining Miss LeMoe was advanced by the kidnap gang.

  Sanderson disappeared the night of the kidnaping and no trace of him has yet…

  “William Sanderson,” April said thoughtfully. “Wallace Sanford. He didn’t show much imagination in picking a name.”

  “What would you expect him to pick?” Dinah said. “Acidophilus McGillicuddy? Maybe all his clothes and stuff were initialed, and he had to find something to fit. And you aren’t showing much sense, if you ask me. Take a look at that by line.”

  April looked blank and said, “Huh?”

  “Marian Ward, you dope,” Dinah said.

  “Oh, my gosh,” April said. “Mother! That was her name when she was a reporter!”

  “And there’s something in here about her,” Dinah said grimly, beginning to paw through the papers.

  “Here it is,” April said, making a grab for it.

  It was another letter from the helpful Joe. Across the top of it was written, in blue ink, Carstairs.

  DEAR FLO:

  Yes, you’re right. The Marian Ward who covered the LeMoe kidnap case is the Marian Carstairs you met in California. She used the name Ward (her maiden name) when she went back to reporting after her husband’s death. He (Carstairs) was a great guy. I knew him. She was fired off the Express for an article she wrote two months after the LeMoe affair, charging the police department with “gross inefficiency” for not having found even a suspect in the case. The chief of police raised such a stink about the article that the paper fired her. Since then she’s taken to writing mystery novels under a collection of pen names. I’ve read a few of them, and they’re good stuff. Wonder why she doesn’t do one on the LeMoe kidnaping?

  When are you going to visit the big town again?

  YRS.