The Third Mystery

by James Holding

  Elinor had put her left hand on her husband’s knee in an affectionate gesture and he had automatically covered it gently with his own brown hand. Now her dark-blue eyes seemed perplexed.

  “I thought you had told them, Rick. You must have.”

  And then Rick remembered and was suddenly embarrassed by his persistence. Certainly he had told them. Lieutenant Legett had made him account for every moment of the fatal day. During the all-night questioning he had gone over his movements at least twice beginning from the time he’d climbed out of bed.

  “I’m sorry, Elinor,” he said. “I’d forgotten. Of course I told them. What did they say?”

  “They asked if I had posed for a portrait and when I said yes they wanted to know what time I’d come and when I’d left and if anything had happened during that time.” She withdrew her hand and picked at the scarf as she dropped her glance. “They wanted to know if you’d been having trouble with Frieda.”

  She looked up at him and when he stayed silent she said: “I told them I knew you were separated but that it happened quite a while ago.”

  “Did they ask about Nancy?”

  “Yes. And I told them I didn’t know anything about her. I said I’d never met her.”

  “Thanks,” Rick said.

  “Well, it was the truth.… Wasn’t it, Nancy?”

  Nancy smiled at the older woman and spoke softly. “Of course, Mrs. Farrell.”

  Rick stood up, watching Farrell’s handsome face and well-set-up figure as he also rose. He was remembering the apartment on Eighth Street now and the things he had found there, the janitor’s description of Frieda’s latest boy friend, the other things he had heard. Later there would be time to tell Farrell that he had given his name to the coroner as a possible suspect but he did not want to say anything in front of Elinor, who, it seemed to him, had already suffered more than her share.

  He heard her thank him for bringing the portrait and made the proper replies. He did not look at Farrell again but walked with Nancy to the door and let her say goodbye.

  Inbound trains were infrequent at this hour, but because Rick intended to come back to the country that night he drove to Stamford and parked his car near the station. When they were seated and the train was under way, Nancy, who had said very little, mentioned the portrait.

  “I really do think it’s good,” she said and squeezed his arm. “I suppose you always have to flatter a subject a little.”

  “Women you do. Did you think I overdid it?”

  “Not really. She is a handsome woman but I thought her face seemed a little prettier—or maybe softer—than it really was. I don’t wonder she was pleased. Or does that sound meowish?”

  Rick chuckled at the expression but he knew Nancy was right. It bothered him, too, that he, who was supposed to be good at likenesses, should have missed this time but all he said was that he hoped Elinor would keep right on staying pleased until he got his check. Then, remembering something more important, he turned in his seat and snapped his fingers.

  “Hey, baby, you never did tell me what you thought of Stuart Gorton’s novel.”

  “No,” said Nancy, her young face sobering. “I thought it was bad. Too bad, I think.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean he just is not that bad a writer. There must have been some reason—”

  “What do you know about him?”

  “Personally, not very much. He’s about your age and a bachelor and I understand he’s been writing ever since he got out of school. He tried a lot of things—some pulp stories and fact pieces, and radio while it still paid well. He did two or three original paperbacks and a couple of plays he couldn’t sell. Then he caught on with Chase & Company with a story the dollar book club took and since men he’s been selling regularly.”

  She puckered her smooth brow as she concentrated and said: “I mean he doesn’t have big sales but he sells pretty well, especially to the lending libraries, and he does two books a year. Mostly love stories,” she added, “with melodramatic overtones and enough sex to be reasonably spicy.

  “Actually Troubled Seas is not a bad story. It’s a professional job. The plot and the narration and description are good. It’s only the dialogue that’s so ridiculous and I think he made it that way deliberately. If the whole job was a stinker that would be one thing, but I think he wrote it that way so that when Frieda turned it down all he would have to do to make an adequate story would be to re-dialogue it.”

  “You mean, he wanted it turned down?” Rick hunched around with his elbow on the back of the seat. “Why?”

  “To break a contract. I think he was mad at Frieda and he owed the firm a book and he made up his mind not to give them a story they would publish.”

  “But—Frieda accepted it. You saw her letter.”

  “I know and I think she did it for spite. I think she saw through his scheme and decided to make him squirm,”

  “The way he was carrying on last night,” Rick said, “she succeeded. The guy was practically frantic.”

  “Because he was so pleased with his cuteness he never expected an acceptance. Actually it was a pretty childish move.”

  “For whom?”

  “For both Gorton and Frieda but especially for him. If he’d thought about it with any sense he would have realized he didn’t have to be panicky. He had a right to make changes even if Frieda accepted the manuscript. She could make it expensive for him—”

  She stopped. She turned so she was facing him, her green eyes amused. “All right, darling. I’ll try to simplify it.”

  “Okay,” Rick said. “Gorton wrote a lousy story so Frieda would turn it down. Instead she accepted it. Take it from there.”

  “He owed the firm a book. He could not publish elsewhere or sign with anyone else until he delivered that book—or unless it was turned down, which would terminate the contract. Frieda accepted it, though I’m not sure why she wanted to spite him.”

  Remembering that Gorton had been the one who used to come to the Eighth Street apartment, but never for long, Rick thought he could name at least one reason but he did not want to suggest that Gorton might have been a rejected and embittered suitor. He wanted the rest of Nancy’s explanation and listened when it came.

  “Anyway,” she said, “Brainard & Eastman would normally have the book set up. They would have to furnish galley proofs. A writer is entitled to make all the changes he wants but once a story is in type it’s a very expensive luxury and the writer has to pay for half of the changes above a small minimum sum. Some contracts make the writer pay it all and that’s why a pro tries to get his manuscript right before he submits it.”

  Had Gorton realized this the night before, when he broke into the Eighth Street place to steal his story back?

  This was what Rick asked himself. Why had Gorton been so frantic about it twenty-four hours after Frieda was dead? To remove a possible motive? Could he have been so angry the previous night that, given the opportunity, he had strangled Frieda? Rick did not ask Nancy to answer such questions but he wanted to see Gorton, and he wanted to know more about Clyde Eastman. When he spoke of this Nancy came up with some information that suggested an even more timely motive for the publisher.

  “I don’t know too much about Frieda’s personal relations with Eastman,” she said. “But I knew the firm was in trouble, and not just financial trouble either.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “It was Monday morning,” she said. “I’d come over to get an okay on some copy and I was sitting outside Frieda’s office. Her secretary was out somewhere and I was all alone when Eastman came storming in, and I mean storming. His face was livid. I don’t think he even saw me and when he went into Frieda’s office he was so mad he forgot to shut the door. He started yelling and she yelled back and for a minute I didn’t know what it was all about. Then I knew why he was so angry. Frieda was getting ready to get out.”

  “Get out?”

  “She knew the firm
was nearly bankrupt and she had signed three of the best writers on their list to personal contracts.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “These writers were producers—bread-and-butter writers who had been with the firm and apparently Frieda had talked them into signing contracts with her. From what I could get she’d fined up a temporary job as an associate editor with some other publisher and was going to take these writers with her as part of her new deal.”

  “And leave Eastman holding the sack.”

  “Exactly.”

  “He’d have a bankrupt firm minus the three best writers and she’d have a new job. How did it end?”

  “I don’t know,” Nancy said, “because about then the secretary came back and heard the row and closed the door.” She put her hand on his knee. “And there’s one thing more I’ve been meaning to tell you. It’s about Tom Ashley.”

  “Ashley?” Rick frowned at the quick digression. “What about him?” he said, and then he was listening with mounting concern while Nancy told him about the car starting up while she had waited in the darkened kitchen after she had found Frieda.

  Because her description of her feelings and the sounds she had heard were so vivid, he could visualize the picture for himself even as he understood that the car she had heard start up need not have been Ashley’s.

  Tom Ashley had had an affair with Frieda at one time. He had remembered some shirts that he had left in the Eighth Street apartment, had been so worried that they might be traced to him that he had come for them the night before, apparently entering with a key he still had.

  He recalled the story Ashley had told the police as to his whereabouts on the fatal night—the dinner, the solitary parking of his car along the shore front while he thought about a story, his insistence that he had not been home since he left to get dinner. His house had been dark when Rick and Nancy had come home; it was still dark when Rick had stormed from the house after his fight with Frieda, the garage empty—

  “You’re sure there was no light in Tom’s house?”

  “Positive.”

  “You didn’t see any car lights?”

  “I only heard the sound of it.”

  “Someone else could have parked a car behind his house.” He paused as he remembered the country road that cut vertically off the highway and made a boundary for Ashley’s property. From that road an old lane led to the back of the house and apparently served as a means of access many years ago. “But whoever it was would have to be familiar with that old road. He’d have to be sure that Tom didn’t come back at the wrong time.… Did you tell the police that first night?”

  She shook her head. “I didn’t remember. I was too busy trying to give them the facts they wanted; before that I was too scared. And I didn’t actually see anything, Rick. I couldn’t be positive that—”

  “Okay, baby,” he said. “I’m glad you told me. I want to talk to Tom tonight when I get back. I’ve got plenty of questions in mind. Maybe he can answer them and “maybe not.”

  Chapter 13

  When Rick had put Nancy in a cab at Grand Central he found a telephone booth and called Sam Crombie’s office. When he had identified himself to the operator, the hoarse and now familiar voice answered almost at once.

  “Glad you called,” Crombie said. “How’d it go with the coroner?”

  “All right. I guess I’m okay until he finishes his report. What about you?”

  “We’ve been working. I’ve had a couple of men going over Stuart Gorton’s neighborhood and we’ve got a couple of things on Monday night.”

  “Good.”

  “He don’t own a car but he uses a Drive-Yourself a couple of times a week and we located the garage. He took a car out Monday evening at six fifteen and brought it back at eleven thirty. He put one hundred and twelve miles on it, which is enough to put him in your neighborhood. Also, he had a girl with him.”

  “Oh?”

  “A busty redhead is the way the garage man described her. Young. He didn’t know her name but he’d heard Gorton call her Fran.… So we start working the little bars in his area because if he drinks at all it figures he’ll have a couple he uses pretty regularly. Well, we found one and they knew him and the girl. Name of Frances Keenan. But nobody’s sure where she lives and she ain’t in the phone book but we can probably find her if we need her.”

  “What about Eastman?”

  “I’m waiting for a report now but we know he was out of town on Monday night.”

  “He lives near Westport; he was probably home.”

  “We’ll find out when—if we can.”

  “Austin Farrell?”

  “The man who’s in the country checking Eastman will follow up with Farrell.” Crombie chuckled softly. “This is going to cost you, you know that?”

  “I’ll do another illustration,” Rick said dryly.

  “Yeah,” said Crombie and chuckled again. “Do that. You going to see Gorton? You want me along?”

  “I can’t afford you on an overtime basis. I’ll give it a whirl on my own.”

  Stuart Gorton lived in a three-room apartment off Amsterdam Avenue and when he opened the door and found Rick standing there his mouth sagged slightly before twisting into a petulant expression. His pale eyes were hostile behind the wide-framed glasses, but in that moment of hesitation Rick kept moving and Gorton had no choice but to fall back or assume a blocking position.

  Once inside Rick glanced over the disordered room, his eyes focusing finally on the desk by the window, the typewriter and stand, the pages of typescript that were scattered on the desk and had overflowed into the wastebasket. By the time he was ready for Gorton he saw that the writer was still holding the open door and now he said, his voice peevish:

  “Look, Sheridan, I don’t know what you want but it will have to wait I’m busy.”

  “It won’t take long,” Rick said and then, because he knew he had to attack if he was to get any cooperation at all, he said: “I just thought I’d give you a chance to rehearse your story.”

  “What story?”

  “The one you’re going to have to tell the police.”

  “What?”

  Rick waited, and for a second or so Gorton looked like a man squinting into the sun. When he had control of his face he shut the door and made another attempt.

  “Balls.”

  Rick just looked at him, nothing changing in his face. “I had a session with the coroner in Bridgeport,” he said. “I gave him your name along with some others.”

  “My name? For what? Why?”

  “As a possible suspect with a motive for murder.”

  Gorton took a breath and his initial defiance leaked quickly out of him.

  “You must be kidding.” He hesitated hopefully and when that brought no reaction he managed a weak grin. “I didn’t mean to get tough,” he said by way of apology. “But I really have been working.… You are kidding, aren’t you?”

  “No,” Rick said. “If you want me to I’ll sit down and spell it out for you.”

  He eased down in the nearest chair and watched Gorton walk over to his desk. He took a cigarette from a pack and lit it absently. He flopped down on the divan, a very worried little man in wrinkled cord slacks and brightly figured sport shirt that was unbuttoned down to his navel. He jackknifed one leg and hooked an arm around his knee and by then he was ready to argue.

  “Go ahead,” he said. “Spell it.”

  “I found out why that manuscript was so important to you. You thought you could break your contract with it and when Frieda fooled you, you got a little hysterical, didn’t you?”

  “So?”

  “You hated her,” Rick said, knowing he would have to play the rest of it by ear. “She wanted to sign you up for Brainard & Eastman and she not only was a pretty attractive woman but she knew how to handle men. She flattered you. She gave you a lot of time. She let you take her out. She even let you see her now and then at that hideout of hers—but never all night. Sh
e kept you dangling and she got your name on the contract and then gave you a gentle brush.”

  He hesitated while he tried to evaluate the writer’s resentful gaze and then continued stubbornly.

  “Maybe that wasn’t so bad. Guys get brushed off by women all the time. But then you must have found out she’d had an affair earlier with Tom Ashley. You also knew that Austin Farrell had been seeing a lot of her lately and maybe you could imagine the rest of it. Anyway you hated her enough to try that childish stunt with your new book and when she crossed you up for spite you flipped. You worked yourself up into a murderous rage and you went to the country Monday night—”

  “You’re out of your mind. I went to the country, sure. But I was with someone.”

  “Yeah?” Rick said, knowing this was true but not wanting to give up. “Are you sure that alibi will stand up in court?”

  The unexpected hum of the door buzzer saved him and then, by one of those miracles of coincidence that are so much a part of life’s pattern, he got a break that made his trip worth while. His chair was at one side of the door and when Gorton opened it the girl who came in did not see him at first.

  She looked to be about twenty-two and her dark-red hair was cut in a short page-boy bob. The cotton dress she wore had been rather snugly fashioned and now, with the heat of her body working on the fabric, the garment had a form-fitting quality that was something to see. The legs were well shaped, the hips firm and substantial, and there could be no doubt about the full-breasted torso. By whatever standard the term busty would be proper.

  “Hi, honey,” she said. “They closed the office an hour early on account of the heat. Is there any beer in the—”

  She stopped as she caught sight of Rick. “Oops,” she said, as one hand flew to her mouth. Then she giggled. “I didn’t know you had company.”

  By that time Rick was on his feet and grinning at the girl’s exuberance. “Hello,” he said, playing it cozy. “Are you Frances Keenan?”

  “Why, yes.” The girl gave him a moment of open-eyed and approving inspection. “How did you know?”

  “I’ve heard a lot about you,” Rick lied and kept the grin going. “You were out in the country with Stuart Monday night, weren’t you?”