Home Sweet Homicide

by Craig Rice

  April said, “Well, you ought to know.”

  He grinned at her, and said, “My young friend, I know when I’ve been outbluffed. Now, let’s talk sense. Because I’ve read all of your mother’s books, and admired them, and because I believe in heredity, I think you can talk sense. So, why did you tell poor Sergeant O’Hare that wonderful story about Rupert van Deusen? I bet you a buck you won’t tell me the truth.”

  “Let’s see the buck,” April said.

  He shed a dollar bill out of his pocket. “Go on. Why?”

  “Because he’s a dope,” April said, “who thought he could bribe my little brother into giving him some information about the case. I thought that was a very dirty trick, and I decided to get even with him, and Mother has a character named Rupert van Deusen in a book that hasn’t been published yet. There. Give me the buck.”

  “I lose,” he said.

  April tucked it into her pocket. “Now,” she said, “I bet you won’t tell me why you took advantage of that story. I bet—nine million dollars you won’t.”

  “Let’s see the nine million dollars,” he said.

  April fished through her pockets, said, “Darn! I left my wallet in my other suit!”

  He didn’t laugh. He said, very gravely, “I’ll take an I. O. U.” Then he said, in a different, serious tone, “I’ll tell you why I took advantage of that story. Because I had a very good reason for finding out what really did happen. And I still have that reason, and I still want to find out.” He smiled at April. “Look, I have a perfect alibi. I couldn’t have murdered Mrs, Sanford. And I’m not a policeman, and I’m not a reporter. I’m just a class-C screen writer on his day off.”

  April looked skeptical and said, “What pictures have you written?”

  “My current one,” he said, “is The Masked Mummy. Have you seen it?”

  “I have,” April said. “It was awful.” She was disappointed. She’d hoped to find out his real name from remembering screen credits. “Well, just what did you want to find out, Mr.—van Deusen?”

  He leaned over the wheel and looked at her, his tanned face serious. “Look, kid. You and your sister and brother were almost witnesses to the murder. You heard the shots. You fixed the time of the crime.”

  “Dinah had gone into the kitchen to see if it was time to put on the potatoes,” April began.

  He groaned. “I’ve been all over that before. I’m getting pretty bored with those potatoes. I read the whole thing in the papers, remember. You saw Polly—you saw the girl who found the body. Didn’t you?”

  April said, “Oh, you must mean Polly Walker! Yes, we saw her. We were there when she discovered the body.”

  “You were—there?”

  “Well,” she said, “we were on the premises. We could see through the window.”

  “Look. Tell me. How did she act? How did she seem to react? Have you seen her since? Had you ever seen her at the Sanford place before? Had you ever seen her there when—Mrs. Sanford was away?”

  April’s eyes widened. He wasn’t smiling now, and there was white under his tan. He looked—frightened. He looked—desperate. She leaned on the car, arms folded, and smiled at him. “Take off them long white whiskers,” she said. “I know you. You’re Cleve, aren’t you!”

  “Yes,” he said automatically. “Cleve Callahan.” Then “How do you know my name?”

  “Because,” April said, “Polly Walker sat in her roadster right on this very street, and bawled like a baby, and said, ‘Cleve—Cleve.’ ”

  He reached over in a sudden movement and grabbed her wrist. “Are you sure? Sure? It’s important—it’s—terribly important.”

  April winced. His fingers were like steel springs. “Of course I’m sure,” she said angrily. “None of Mrs. Carstairs’ children are deaf.” She jerked her wrist away.

  “If I could believe it,” he said, looking at the steering wheel. “If I could believe it. But—Wallace Sanford—”

  “Stop muttering in your beard,” April said sharply. “Are you in love with Polly Walker?”

  “Am I—” He looked up at her. There was something about his face that made her think of Jenkins the cat, when he came in the kitchen just before dinnertime and sat by the kitchen table, looking hungry and sad.

  “If you are,” April said, “you’d better do something about it. Because she’s in love with you.”

  “Yes,” he said, “but you don’t seem to understand. Wallace Sanford—”

  “Forget Wallace Sanford for a minute,” April said sternly, “and listen to me. I know now why you took advantage of that Rupert van Deusen business.”

  “You couldn’t,” he said. “How could you?”

  “Feminine intuition,” April said, hoping to awe him. “Look. If Polly Walker had murdered Mrs. Sanford, what would you do?”

  “Protect her,” he said unhappily, “of course.”

  April nodded. “You’d find some way of getting into the case, and you’d do everything you could to keep the police from finding out she’d done it. You’d nose around and ask questions, and you’d try to search the house in case there was any evidence she’d left lying around. What’s more, you’d do it without letting her find out—ever. And, since you do think she murdered Mrs. Sanford—”

  He stared, up at her and said, “I—”

  “Don’t just sit there and look silly,” April said. Her voice sounded almost cross. “Has Polly Walker got a gun?”

  He nodded, dumbly.

  “What kind? This is important.”

  “It’s—it’s a thirty-two.”

  April sighed. “It’s a cinch your mother wasn’t as smart as my mother, or else you’re all wrong about that heredity gag. Because Mrs. Sanford was shot with a forty-five.”

  He stared at her. “Are you—positive?”

  “Posilutely absotive,” April said. “We found that out from the police.”

  He groaned, leaned over the steering wheel, and said, “Oh—Polly!”

  “I’m getting pretty sick of this,” April said. “First she sits in her car and says, ‘Oh, Cleve,’ and then you sit in your car and yap about ‘Oh, Polly’! It gives me a pain. You’d better get together with her and tell her what you’ve been doing, and ask her all the questions you want to ask.”

  “I want to,” he said, “I’ve tried to. But she won’t see me. She won’t come to the door when I ring the bell. She won’t talk on the telephone when I call her. I sent her letters—telegrams—they came back unopened.”

  “You don’t look like the mouselike type,” April said. “And if you’d examined those letters, you’d probably have found out they were opened with a warm knife and then resealed. Now, you listen to me.”

  She opened the car door, hopped in beside him, and for the next fifteen minutes gave him advice which might have surprised Dorothy Dix. Advice which led to some concrete suggestions, to which he added a few ideas of his own.

  Finally he grinned at her and said, “Are all your mother’s children geniuses?”

  “One way or another,” April said airily. “And speaking of my mother’s children, there’s Dinah coming up the street. I’ll go and meet her, if you don’t mind. And you’d better scram. Because I can keep secrets, but Dinah can’t.”

  He opened the door for her, started the car, waved at her cheerfully, and roared on up the street. April walked slowly down the walk toward Dinah, thinking it over. By the time they met, her face was positively glowing.

  “Love,” she said. “It’s wonderful!”

  Dinah glared at her. “What are you talking about? Who are you in love with?”

  “Nobody,” April said. “But he’s in love, and how! Rupert van Deusen.”

  “My gosh,” Dinah exploded, “are you crazy, all of a sudden? We figured that out this morning. But Bette LeMoe’s dead.”

  “He probably never even heard of Bette LeMoe,” April said dreamily. “He’s in love with Polly Walker.”

  Dinah sat down on the bottom front step. �
��Maybe I’m crazy. Maybe it’s the heat.”

  “Nobody’s crazy,” April said. “Except him. He’s crazy about her. Isn’t it beautiful? And what’s more, I won a dollar from him.”

  “My sister,” Dinah said, shaking her head sadly.

  April sat down beside her. “His real name is Cleve Callahan. He’s a screen writer. He wrote that awful picture we saw—The Masked Mummy. He’s in love with Polly Walker and, what’s more, I bet he gets her.”

  “Cleve,” Dinah murmured reminiscently. “But. But, April. What’s this Rupert van Deusen business?”

  April drew a long breath. “It turns out that someone, in an attempt to confuse the police, invented that Rupert van Deusen story. There was no Rupert van Deusen. This someone must have gotten the name—out of a book or something. Well, this man is in love with Polly Walker, and he pretended he was Rupert van Deusen, so he could make like a detective. Because he was afraid she might have murdered Mrs. Sanford and he wanted to protect her, but now he knows that she didn’t, so now everything’s all right, and they’ll probably get married.” That, she decided, was enough to tell Dinah, right now.

  “Gee!” breathed Dinah.

  “And I’ve got a buck I won from him in a bet,” April added. “Let’s go down to the market and bring back some cokes.” She rose and said, “And on the way you can tell me how you made out with Mr. Desgranges.”

  “Well,” Dinah said, “it was like this.”

  Dinah had a feeling for details. They’d walked the two blocks to the market, bought the cokes, and were almost back to the house before she got to the facts she’d figured out after leaving Pierre Desgranges, Armand von Hoehne, or Peter Desmond, there on the beach.

  April started. If she’d been carrying the bag of cokes, instead of Dinah, she probably would have dropped them. “Dinah!” she said, “that’s the phoniest-sounding story I ever heard. And you fell for it.”

  “It sounds phony now,” Dinah said. “It didn’t, when he was telling it to me.”

  “There’s regular guards on the beach,” April said. “All the time. You should have remembered that.” She paused. “Maybe his story was true, in reverse. Maybe it’s that the guards wouldn’t pay any attention to a funny French painter.”

  “April!” Dinah said. Then she gasped. “We ought to do something. We ought to do something, right away.”

  “We will,” April said grimly. They carried the cokes into the kitchen, opened two, and put the rest in the icebox. “We could watch him, and maybe catch him spying, or signaling, or something.”

  “That might take a long time,” Dinah objected, “and it wouldn’t be easy. One of us would have to be away from the house all the time, and how would we explain to Mother? Besides, there’s school and everything.” She frowned. “We’ll tell Mother. Then she’ll tell the police. And she’ll get the credit for catching a spy, and all the publicity.”

  “Not bad,” April agreed. “Only. We’ll just tell her about him. Not about any of the other things. Unless it turns out he murdered Mrs. Sanford.”

  They listened for a moment. The typewriter was going hard, upstairs. “I’ll make some iced tea,” Dinah said, “and we’ll take it up to her.”

  They climbed the stairs a few minutes later with an artfully arranged tray of iced tea and cookies. April tapped on the door and opened it; Dinah carried in the tray. Mother stopped typing for a minute and looked up.

  “How nice!” she said brightly. She still had on the house coat, and she hadn’t bothered to pin up her back hair. “I was just beginning to get hungry and thirsty.”

  “Don’t forget,” Dinah said severely, “you’re between books, and tomorrow you get your hair done, and a manicure.

  “And a facial,” April added.

  “I know it,” Mother said, almost apologetically. “I was just putting down a few notes while they were in my mind.” She took a big gulp of the iced tea and said, “Delicious.” She picked up a cookie, glanced through the last page lying on her desk, glanced at the page still in the typewriter, and added a few words.

  “Mother,” April said. “Mr. Desgranges, the painter, isn’t a painter at all, he’s a spy. And his name isn’t Desgranges at all, it’s Armand von Hoehne, only he claims it’s really Peter Desmond, but it probably isn’t that either.” She caught her breath and said, “So you’d better call the police and tell them he’s a spy.”

  “Of course,” Mother said. “Just a minute, dear.” She xx-ed out two words, and typed three in their place.

  “He told me he was a secret agent, but I don’t believe it now,” Dinah said, “because there are guards on the beach, and because it was too damp and foggy that day to go swimming.”

  “Naturally,” Mother said. “You mustn’t go swimming unless it’s warm and sunny.” She took the paper out of the typewriter and added, “I’d rather you swam in the club pool, anyway.”

  “Mother,” Dinah said, “you’ve got to do something about it right away. Call up the FBI” She paused. “Mother! Pay attention!”

  Mother put a new piece of paper in the typewriter and typed “page eleven” on the top of it. “I’m listening, dear,” she said cheerfully. She turned over the pile of manuscript and began looking at something on about page three.

  “He might be sinking a ship or something right this minute,” Dinah said.

  Mother typed two words, looked up, smiled, and said, “Some other time, kids. Do you mind?”

  April drew a long breath and said, “Not a bit.” She motioned Dinah to the door. “Sorry we interrupted you.”

  “No bother,” Mother said. “Thanks for the tea.” She began to type faster. Just as they opened the door she stopped, looked up, and said, “Did you say you were going to watch Mr. Desgranges paint? How nice!”

  “We changed our minds,” April said.

  Out in the hall, Dinah said, “She didn’t hear one word we said.”

  “She’s having an inspiration,” April said. “We can’t bother her. It’s up to us. We’ll do the telephoning.”

  Dinah looked worried. “How are you going to manage without explaining about our finding the letters in Mrs. Sanford’s house, and everything?”

  “Leave that to me,” April said.

  There was a slight debate as to whether they could call J. Edgar Hoover, the FBI., the police department, or President Roosevelt. Finally they settled for Bill Smith.

  April called the police, was referred to three or four people, and finally was told that Bill Smith was at home. She insisted that the call was important, but the police telephone operator refused to give his private phone number.

  “Maybe it’s in the phone book,” Dinah said hopefully.

  There were five William Smiths in the phone book, but none of them turned out to be the right one.

  Then April had an inspiration and called Sergeant O’Hare, who was in the phone book. She explained that she had an important message from her mother to give Bill Smith. The good sergeant, scenting possible romance, gave her the phone number.

  Finally she got Bill Smith on the phone and told him who she was.

  There was immediate anxiety in his pleasant voice. “Is everything all right? Has anything happened? Your mother—”

  “Nothing’s happened yet,” April said, “but we’re afraid something will. That’s why we called you up. Listen.”

  She began a carefully expurgated story of Pierre Desgranges, Armand von Hoehne, Pete Desmond. Halfway through it Bill Smith said hastily, “Wait a minute. I want to write this down.”

  Then she had to begin again, from the beginning. She and Dinah had found out Pierre Desgranges was really named Armand von Hoehne. She related, in detail, the story he had told Dinah when she’d faced him with it. Then she added what she and Dinah had figured out.

  “You’re a wonder!” Bill Smith said.

  April beamed at the telephone. If he’d said, “You’re a bright little girl,” she’d have hung up on him.

  “One thing more,” Bil
l Smith said. “How did you find out his name was really Von Hoehne?”

  This was the tough one. April answered it carefully and deliberately. “We found out from Mrs. Sanford.” There. That wasn’t telling a lie; on the other hand, it wasn’t giving away anything.

  “How did she find out?”

  “I don’t know,” April said. “And now, she can’t tell.”

  There was a brief silence on the other end of the line. Then, “Listen, April. Think very carefully. Did Mrs. Sanford ever tell you anything about anyone else?”

  “No,” April said. “No, she never did.” That was perfectly truthful, too.

  “You certainly handled that nicely,” Dinah said admiringly, after she’d hung up.

  “Nothing to it,” April said loftily. “Let’s go make a sandwich. I’m hungry.”

  “Me too,” Dinah said. “We’ll make a sandwich, and then start fixing the chicken for dinner.”

  April was spreading jam on top of cream cheese on top of peanut butter when Archie burst through the doorway. He looked breathless, hot, pink-faced, and very dirty. He saw the array of jars on the kitchen table, said, “Yipes!” and grabbed for a knife and a piece of bread.

  “Wash your hands first,” Dinah said.

  “Aw, heck,” Archie said. “This is good clean dirt.” He washed his hands and went back to inventing a new kind of sandwich. “Hey, y’know what?”

  “We know a lot of things,” April said, “but we don’t know what.”

  “Dinah got a present,” Archie said, reaching for a dill pickle. “And I’m a detecative. Are we gonna have chicken for dinner?”

  “A present?” Dinah said.

  “Yeah. It’s out on the back porch, wrapped up in brown paper. An’, y’know what?”

  Dinah dashed out on the back porch, returned with a large package.

  “Y’know what?” Archie repeated.

  “Shush-u-tut u-pup,” Dinah said, tearing off the paper. “Oh, April!”

  It was the painting Mr. Desgranges had been working on that afternoon, still unfinished, and smelling to high heaven of turpentine. But it was signed—initialed, at least—in one corner. P. D. And a card stuck in the back of it said, “To my charming little friend Dinah Carstairs.”