The Third Mystery

by James Holding

  Their departure—Madame Alcott to her chambers within, Lyle Dasher toward the adjoining Griptread Tires estate—left Lucille alone with the Pompey torso for the first moment since he had been introduced into the ménage yesterday evening by Madame Alcott and installed as a house guest.

  The moment was one of those strange ones that are so aptly referred to as being fraught with romance. Even the Florida semitropical flora conspired to set the scene. Mimosa perfume vied with the scent of frangipani, the flame stars of hibiscus vied with the clustering carmine rivulets of bougainvillea, while gardenias shot their meaty fragrance all over the florid lot.

  Conversation with the muted and the unlearned in lip reading failed, Lucille discovered, to lend itself to any chatty volleying of thoughts. With Herschel Pompey the job had to be accomplished in writing, for which task Mr. Galli had considerately supplied his fanfaron with a small loose-leaf notebook and a good ball-point pen of the type not balked by any chance smearings of the more expensive spread.

  Just the simple act of passing the notebook back and forth, with every attendant slender contact of a knuckle or a thumb, would give Lucille a gentle electric thrill. She neither pondered nor tried to dissect this minor phenomenon, although subconsciously she did appreciate that nothing like it had happened whenever Lyle Dasher handed her a canapé at cocktail time or a hot dog at a cookout.

  Several of the loose-leaf pages had been covered with questions and answers—all, to be painstakingly frank, of a harmless and insipid character—before one of Herschel’s written replies shot an arrow deep into the heart of Lucille’s emotional equilibrium.

  “Do you do much reading?” she had written.

  “Mostly poetry,” Herschel had written in reply. “Swinburne.”

  That did it. The smolder in Lucille’s chest kindled more warmly toward this modest, this spectacular chemical combination of flesh and bone and blood, now so sadly muted because of his gallant act in saving a child’s life. His avowed written penchant for the poet Swinburne stamped him irrevocably for Lucille as a kindred soul. From that dark, fate-shadowed moment, Herschel without a doubt was her boy.

  But since all exquisite interludes must sometime end, Lucille, having a late morning appointment at Halcyon’s Chez d’Or beauty trap to get her hair done, reluctantly left for the house to dress.

  Herschel did not accompany her. He remained seated at poolside, waiting until assured that no eyes—servants, yard boys, trespassing Lugosis, what-have-yous—were within spying view.

  He was a rather shaken young man. He had not affiliated himself with Mr. Galli’s dubious enterprises solely from any compulsion toward the fast buck. He had needed money, yes. Desperately and plenty of it, but not primarily for his own sake.

  Herschel had a younger sister Estelle over whom he had stood as a tough protector since their parents’ slightly alcoholic deaths five years ago, a sister whose tragic physical condition required an expensive operation or (in the patois of his social circle) else. This far from unusual type of situation is touched on simply to reveal that Herschel Pompey was not all bad, even though by every rational standard of ethical society he was plenty bad enough.

  The small ferment that was now shaking him was Lucille.

  The intimate quarter of an hour just spent in her company had established a realization that outwardly she not only resembled his tigerishly protected sister Estelle, but her fine insides reflected Estelle’s comparably fine ones.

  His Atlas shoulders shrugged the bothersome impression away. He rose and began a stroll, not toward the house but along a path that led into a tropical planting of palm trees, the trunks of which were curtained by the daisylike orange flowers of the Mexican flame vine.

  In the center of this secluded grove, on a clearing bordered with a tall hedging of hibiscus, stood a latticework gazebo that had been conceived by Grandfather Eustace as a handy trysting place for his lustier moments of private dalliance.

  Herschel went into the summerhouse’s emptiness and sat down at a marble-topped table. He snapped open the hasps of the notebook and removed the pages that were covered with Lucille’s jottings and his own.

  A voice coming from within the close-by hibiscus hedge spoke quietly in the morning stillness.

  “Put the pages under a cushion of the settee. I will get them later.”

  Herschel, hewing to the line of Mr. Galli’s previous briefing, did not turn his head in the direction from where the voice had come. He said, as quietly, “All right.”

  He stood and moved over to a rattan settee.

  “Anything usable?” the voice asked.

  “I think there is. She got on the Swinburne kick. When it’s pieced together and photostated it could read like hot stuff.”

  “Good. Plug a time clement next. Some specific hour. Some specific place suggestive of an assignation.”

  “All right.”

  “And this is important. Have a newspaper handy. Get her to write her comments on some current racket investigation. Work in some lead questions that will bring out an indignant reaction from her. Do you understand?”

  “Got you.”

  They exchanged a few more pertinent remarks before the voice said, “Now go back to the house.”

  Silence took over and Herschel stepped outside, muted again as the morning was mute. His eyes flicked casually on the general section of the hibiscus hedge from which the voice had come. Some leaves stirred in the breezeless air.

  It was awhile later, when Herschel was dressing for luncheon, that a doubt began to disturb him. Had the spot where the leaves had stirred in the hedge been the same spot from which the voice had come? In retrospect it seemed questionable.

  Of course the speaker could have moved…

  * * * *

  A few words about the Face.

  We can skip at once any childish notion that it was attached to a vampire. It belonged to a man named Woodberry Jones, a bachelor, twenty-seven years of age, a touch on the slipshod side (otherwise his features would not have been apparent among the bougainvillea when thus glimpsed by Lucille), and a fairly adept member of his provocative profession. Physically, Jones was a wiry little man, his general appearance verging on that of a jockey.

  His movements that morning, after the flash of his face caught by Lucille, had been mostly sedentary. He had crouched among a planting of orange-jessamine from where he had commanded a view of the terrace and the swimming pool.

  Jones had observed the quartet, later reduced to a duet, and finally to the solitary musings of Herschel Pompey. With the stealth of a red Indian, Jones had tailed Herschel to the gazebo, then had masked himself within the encircling hibiscus hedge.

  He had observed the placing of the carefully written-upon loose-leaf pages beneath a cushion of the rattan settee.

  He had heard the Voice.

  He had heard the supposedly deaf-and-dumb Herschel speak in reply.

  He had observed Herschel’s departure from the gazebo and his leisurely disappearance along the pathway to the house.

  He had started to pencil a notation on the inside surface of a match folder when a slender, whiplike cord of some peculiar nature circled his throat from behind and was viciously yanked tight.

  At the end of one minute and forty-seven seconds of agony Woodberry Jones was dead.

  Noon arrived on schedule and the day slid past it into what, in greetings, the true Floridian refers to as “good evening”—“good afternoon” apparently being non de rigueur.

  Lucille had had her hair modishly done, unhappily without any noticeable improvement in allure—the O’Cedar mop effect was then high style. Madame Alcott had conferred with Lyle Dasher on certain aspects of the Foundation’s plans, then had sped in a Bellington car (there were six) to arrange for Lucille’s TV interview for the following day. Herschel Pompey had boned up on his Swinburne and earmarked several inflammatory items in the paper for later use in edging Lucille toward her note-writing doom.

  And the body of Mr
. Woodberry Jones—now located at some distance from his point of earthly departure—lay still undiscovered.

  Twilight and the cocktail hour came.

  Because of Florida’s delirious insect night life this pleasant pause was held indoors in what Grandfather Eustace’s ultra-baroque architect, a Mr. Pittwit Simpson, had labeled the Granada Room.

  Hopper, the Bellington butler, billowed in and out serving paste canapés and a rum cocktail slider that was based on papaya juice and called Strike Three.

  Madame Alcott, in a multi-flounced frock of lilac cotton, sat regaling Lyle Dasher with a spicy anecdote concerning her final rendezvous with a now long-perished Swedish count at his hunting lodge in the Västernorrland.

  Lucille and Herschel Pompey were busy at their passed-notebook chatting. In comment on a newspaper item covering a revolution against a ruthless dictator in the Caribbean she was writing—under similar circumstances I would work toward over-throwing the government with no qualms about being called a traitor—when the wail of a siren pierced the room, coming from along the stretches of the coastal highway.

  The wail rose to a crescendo, then whined out.

  “Funny,” Lucille said. “That seemed to stop right at the gates.”

  “Beach patrol car,” Lyle said. “Probably just the usual drunk-driver mess.”

  The wail of a second siren rose to its crescendo and, in turn, whimpered out.

  “Hopper,” Lucille said.

  “Miss Bellington?”

  “Go down to the gates, please. See what it’s about.”

  Hopper left.

  He returned.

  He said, “It’s the dead body of a man, Miss Bellington. Probably tossed from a car into the boxthorn, a little north of the gates. That is the opinion of Officer Davis.”

  Lucille’s immediate reaction was strangely, intuitively, bougainvillea. Being a young woman of impulse, and perhaps impelled by a sense of responsibility over dead bodies recklessly tossed into the boxthorn on her property, she decided to inspect the scene.

  A description of Spot X shows us a pair of massive wrought-iron gates standing open between coquina posts, on either side of which extend a six-foot high Provencal fencing of cedar palings. Against this barrier is banked a planting of boxthorn to afford a decorative space between it and the coastal highway’s shoulder. Among this greenery lay the late Woodberry Jones.

  As noted by Hopper, the beach patrol car had contained Officer Charles Davis. Siren Number 2 had deposited Stuff Driscoll, the Sheriff’s chief criminal investigator.

  Stuff was a smooth apple of the neo-school of law enforcer. He was still young, personable, soundly grounded in the varied branches of criminology including the medico-legal, and was unobtrusively coated with a University Club veneer. He was on hand purely by chance—being en route from the Seahorse Towers Motel (where he was holed up in Halcyon on assignment) to a beach tavern dinner when the wail of Officer Davis’s siren had shifted him from a thoughtful consideration of prospective stone crabs into official gear.

  The site—the Bellington gates—of the body’s resting place gave Stuff a jolt of concern, inasmuch as his assignment in Halcyon was involved, sub rosa, with the B. Foundation. One look at the body’s face deepened his concern into mild shock—an effect not entirely lost on Officer Davis.

  “Know him?” Davis asked.

  “Yes,” Stuff said, after a thoughtful pause.

  “Rackets? Goon job, wouldn’t you say?”

  “No I wouldn’t. In fact he rates the VIC treatment complete.” This was a departmental family joke, the initials standing for Very Important Corpse.

  The law’s machinery prepared to mesh. But before the arrival of an assistant medical examiner and the bright-brain boys Lucille had taken a good look at Jones’s face.

  “That’s the one,” she said to Stuff, who stood at her side while Davis was using the patrol car telephone. “I had a weird feeling that he would be. Because of his eyes. I saw that man this morning. He was lurking in the bougainvillea.”

  Stuff’s lips tightened. He held his voice down. “Miss Bellington, don’t ask me to explain this at the moment, but please say nothing to anyone about recognizing this man—not a single word.”

  “I’m afraid I don’t understand.”

  “I know you don’t. Just go back to the house. I will join you there later. This much I can tell you now—the whole future of your Foundation might be jeopardized if you don’t keep silence, especially to reporters, about having spotted this man prowling your grounds.”

  * * * *

  The Bellington chef, Signor Alfred Friggoni, while not sporting a cordon bleu of royal blueness did at least deserve a ribbon of, say, the paler shade known as Alice.

  His main dish for the evening’s little dinner consisted of the burly claws of stone crabs expertly soused in boiling water and served with a sauce of drawn butter that breathed a scent of garlic while being prettily flecked with minced parsley. Now strange and improbable as the fact may seem, this entree, perfect and innocuous enough in its simplicity, was ultimately to trigger the solution to Mr. Jones’s garroted exit.

  Four people ate it—Lucille, Madame Alcott, Herschel Pompey and, dining en famille, Lyle Dasher. The upper echelon of the service staff also ate it, while the lower plateaus were fed with a casserole of yesterday’s beef.

  After the meal, Madame Alcott and Lyle Dasher retired to the Granada Room for brandy and backgammon, a contest that Herschel Pompey sat kibitzing in comely muteness.

  Lucille betook herself with a sheaf of notes concerning her forthcoming TV interview into the room which Mr. Pittwit Simpson had dubbed the Lisbon Den. Its casement windows were of leaded glass and a pair of them served as a doorway to the terrace.

  She sat at a desk, placed the notes on its flat Spanish-American surface, and then ignored them. She was worried. She had kept silence during the dinner hour, in line with Stuff Driscoll’s request. But what, she pondered, could the death of the stranger (as Mr. Driscoll had implied to the verge of melodrama) have to do with the fate of her Foundation?

  Lucille’s clouded eyes were drawn to the terrace door by a tapping on glass. She went over, opened it, and Stuff Driscoll stepped in. He apologized for the unconventional entrance, sat down on a cowhide fauteuil, and said, “You must have thought me a touch cockeyed out there by the gates, Miss Bellington. The reason lay in publicity. Bad publicity.”

  Something in Stuff’s manner gave Lucille the impression that he was handing her a slight slice of a runaround. “Bad publicity for the Foundation, Mr. Driscoll?”

  “Yes, but more particularly so for those affiliated with it.”

  As Lucille saw it, that would include the Governor. She said, “Even the Governor?”

  Stuff sidestepped into generalization. “Politics, Miss Bellington. Always a delicate matter of balance. And public opinion is never absent from the scales.”

  Lucille said with plenty of justification, “You are confusing me, Mr. Driscoll. I do wish you would be more direct.”

  There was nothing Stuff would have wished for more—to clarify for this amiable, kindly, filthily rich young woman the results of his past hour’s inspection of the Bellington grounds, a tour clandestinely engaged in while the occupants of Grandfather Eustace’s gaudy eyesore had discussed the claws of Chef Friggoni’s stone crabs.

  He would have liked to disclose to Miss Bellington the several faces of danger that had come to light during the inspection. Danger to her, to the Governor, and even to points higher and beyond.

  The body, it developed, had not been tossed from a car. It had been boosted over the Provencal cedar fencing and let fall into the boxthorn.

  According to an elastic estimate made by the assistant medical examiner, death had come about noon. Stuff had not needed the prowess of a Leatherstocking to backtrack through the tropical plantings and locate the point of origin where Jones had been choked to death. All indications established the fact that Jones, when attacked, had
been crouching in the hibiscus that circled the gazebo.

  The point was emphasized by a match folder and the stub of a pencil which presumably had fallen from Jones’s hands at the moment of assault—a fact that obviously had passed unnoticed by the attacker. An examination of the match folder had disclosed on the inner surface of its cover the beginning of a notation. Three letters to be exact, then the pencil point must have straggled off under the effect of shock.

  The three letters were Rev.

  In Stuff’s opinion they formed the beginning of the word Revels. The Revels Humane. It was a natural assumption for Stuff to reach inasmuch as he was perfectly aware of Jones’s assignment in Halcyon and, more pinpointedly, in the Bellington grounds.

  To explain: the Governor on the day of his first interview with Lucille concerning the Foundation had been in an amiably melting mood. The morning had offered a glorious extravaganza of Florida’s sunswept splendor. Breakfast at the mansion had included his favorite dish, Eggs Ponce de León—a southern confection involving celery, green peppers, mushrooms and, as a starter, eggs. Yesterday’s session of the legislature had slapped down the meager Republicans but good, and was slated to smack them down again today. In short, the climate of his mind was what P. T. Barnum would have considered “receptive.”

  As a result, he had gone overboard. Lucille’s Foundation seemed a natural for further embellishing the éclat of the state. Just as Boys Town had put that place on the philanthropic map, so would Lucille’s Foundation provide a similar nationwide benevolent publicity for Florida.

  “I am all for it,” he is reputed to have said. “I shall back you to the hilt.”

  However, the Governor was not a chump, otherwise he would never have become a governor. On its surface, the proposed Bellington Foundation was an admirable project; but having taken the impulsive plunge during several press interviews of backing it to the hilt, and with a thousand or more acres of tax-payers’ state-owned land involved, the Governor’s second thoughts advised him to hedge his bets. This was a habit that had lent itself considerably to his noteworthy political success.