The Deadly Dove

by Rufus King

  “You always have been. Why?”

  “Stop jiggling that telephone, Stuyvesant. A man just yanked its cord from the connection.”

  “What man?”

  “I haven’t the remotest idea. I’ve written him off as the village idiot.”

  “Christine, if I ever get you out of this mess I am going to insist on your leaving this unlicensed sanitarium and living in your apartment in town.”

  Godfrey and Hugo came in, followed by Cordelia, and Hugo said to Christine: “I put him on the couch in your dressing room. Nothing could be done.”

  “Thank you, Hugo.”

  “He is covered with a sheet,” Godfrey boomed, while Cordelia added sadly, “And there are pennies on his eyes.”

  Stuyvesant was completely exasperated with all of them.

  He said: “I am very much tempted to wash my hands of this whole mess. All of you run counter to every established procedure set up for a death by violence with the serene indifference of people at a tea party—and not one of you is even remotely disturbed by the fact that a young woman may be in there freezing to death.”

  He pointed indignantly toward the quick freezer, and Christine said: “Stuyvesant, Lida can not be in there, because the door is locked. Even if she were, she wouldn’t freeze. I keep the thermostat set at twenty-five above for my furs.”

  “Freezing,” Stuyvesant insisted, “and smothering.”

  “Nonsense,” Hugo said sharply. “There is enough air in that space to maintain life for twenty-four hours.”

  “Oh it isn’t the cold,” Cordelia wailed, “it’s her being in there.”

  “Cordelia!” Hugo warned in a voice which only made her wail louder and then cover her mouth with her hands as she stared at him in fright.

  “Christine,” Stuyvesant said, “I demand that that door be smashed open at once.”

  “Stuyvesant, be calm. I shall settle this nonsense right now. There is a duplicate key in the desk.”

  Cordelia could not repress a groan, and Godfrey said severely: “Cordelia, Hugo has warned you to control yourself!”

  Christine rummaged in a desk drawer and produced a tagged key. Stuyvesant went over and took it from her.

  “Let me open the door,” he said. “She may be dead. Too.”

  “Thank you, Stuyvesant.”

  “You must prepare yourself for a possible further shock.”

  Stuyvesant, although expecting the worst, was unprepared for the moving heap of fur which hurtled itself at him as he opened the freezer door.

  “Help!” Lida shrieked through the sable cape which had slipped over her face in her virile intention to defend herself from the murderer’s return. “Help!”

  Stuyvesant said, “Good God!”

  Lida flew at this voice and started pounding its owner on the chest with flapping coat sleeves, screaming: “I won’t be murdered too! I won’t be!”

  “Christine, will you be good enough to control your grandniece?” Stuyvesant asked.

  “Be calm, Miss Belder,” Hugo said. “Everything is all right.”

  “Calm! Calm?”

  Cordelia ran to her and folded Lida in her arms. “There, there, darling. Everything is all right.”

  Lida burst into tears against Cordelia’s bosom while Stuyvesant, who still stood at the open freezer door, suddenly exploded: “Christine, no—my reason totters—here’s another one.”

  “Another what, Stuyvesant?”

  “Corpse, of course.”

  Lida lifted her head from Cordelia’s bosom.

  “It’s Laura Destin,” she said. “She’s been murdered.” Christine joined Stuyvesant at the freezer.

  “Do you remember my warning you that that woman had homicidal tendencies?” he asked her.

  “Oh, at least be logical, Stuyvesant. She’s the one who is dead. And I’m not.” Christine looked inside. “How changed she is. I never would have recognized her. Is it Laura? Surely there couldn’t be this difference in just a few years—”

  “Christine, you yourself change radically every time you re-dye your hair. Who killed her?”

  “There’s a cut above her lip,” Lida said, “where somebody struck her before they smashed her head in. It’s the kind of a cut that a ring might make.”

  “Ring?” Christine repeated sharply.

  “Yes, and the lipstick is all smeared.”

  “Ring—”

  “You wouldn’t,” Hugo suggested, “be thinking of that putrid atrocity which you gave to Alan, would you, Christine?”

  “Go and take a look, Hugo—see if there is any cosmetic caught in the prongs.” A splitting crash of thunder ripped the air. “Dear, I wish it wouldn’t do that!”

  Hugo went into Christine’s suite, and Cordelia said calmly: “It is the end of the storm. The sky will lighten shortly and the sun will come out again.”

  Stuyvesant pointed indignantly after Hugo. “That man,” he said, “will simply create further mischief and mess up evidence which should be kept intact. Christine, I shall take your car and go for the police.”

  “There are no chains,” Godfrey said. “You would go sliding backward down the hill. Telephone—if you insist on being a nuisance.”

  “I can’t telephone. There is no telephone.”

  “It’s right over there, Mr. Swain,” Cordelia said helpfully.

  “Oh no. Oh, indeed no. You may think it is, but it is not.”

  “Really, Stuyvesant,” Christine begged. “Please calm down.”

  Stuyvesant’s blood pressure spilled over and he yelled,

  “The village idiot came dancing by and traduced it,” as Hugo came back and joined them.

  Hugo said to Christine: “There is lipstick stuck in the prongs of Alan’s ring.” He turned sternly to Cordelia and added: “Do you hear that, Cordelia? The mystery of that woman’s death is solved.”

  “I always thought that Alan did it, Hugo.”

  “What is more,” Godfrey boomed, “his motive is plain. He killed her before she could harm Christine’s annuity and stuck her body in the freezer. We need think no more about it.”

  Lida was beginning to recover sufficiently by now to wonder just what, in this mad scene, was going on. She asked Hugo: “How did Mr. Admont come to let you examine his ring? Wasn’t he suspicious? Won’t he try to escape?”

  “Alan is dead, dear,” Christine said. “He was drawing a glass of water in my bathroom. There was a short circuit against the pipes, and the current killed him.”

  “Oh, Aunt Christine—how terrible!”

  “Tragic though it was,” Stuyvesant said pompously, “it may all have been for the best. We knew him for a fortune-hunting wastrel, and now we know him to have been a murderer.” He paused as above the sound of rain there was a knocking on a terrace door. “Christine, do not attempt to go near that door. As poor Charley’s earthly proxy, I feel compelled to see this thing through—in spite of all the warnings of my common sense.”

  Stuyvesant opened the terrace door, and Sergeant Asher came in.

  Handcuffed to Asher was the Dove.

  CHAPTER XXIII

  Lida took one look at the Dove.

  “That’s the man!” she cried, not without an amount of venom. “That’s the man who strangled me and threw me into the freezer.”

  “I have been wondering how you got there,” Godfrey muttered gloomily.

  “Sergeant,” Stuyvesant said, “thank goodness you have come.”

  “Sorry to trouble you again, Mrs. Admont,” Asher said, “but this man’s car smashed against a rock at the entrance to the Notch. He was semiconscious.”

  “He is semiconscious. He’s an idiot. Either local or otherwise. He ripped out my telephone.”

  Asher took Belle’s handbag from under his poncho.

  “He had a key with a tag on it stamped Belder Tor, and he had this handbag. The bag is empty, but I figured maybe one of you ladies would recognize it.”

  “It ought to have three five-hundred-dollar bill
s in it,” Lida said, “and a lipstick that’s part of the evidence, although maybe the bit that’s ground into the rug will be enough. It belongs to that dead woman, and that man took it before he choked me and threw me into the freezer with her.”

  Sergeant Asher, who was a step-by-step man, asked: “What dead woman?”

  “A Miss Laura Destin, Sergeant,” Hugo said patiently. “Mr. Admont murdered her.”

  “Where’s Admont? I’ll link him onto this bird.”

  “You can’t. He’s dead.”

  “Suicide?”

  “No. Faulty wiring.”

  Lida’s head felt perfectly clear by now. She pointed to the Dove and said: “I don’t believe it. I think that man did something to the wires. Aunt Christine, the first moment I saw him he was coming out of your rooms and he said he’d been ‘arranging’ something and then caught himself and changed it to ‘examining’ something.”

  “But why on earth would he, dear? I’ve never even met him.”

  Asher looked approvingly at Lida.

  “There were electrician’s pliers in his brief case and a pair of rubber gloves, to say nothing of a complete chemical outfit and odd bits of wire.” Asher gripped the Dove’s slender shoulder. “Talk!”

  The Dove looked at Asher gently and said: “I do not talk.”

  “On the contrary,” Christine insisted, “he does. Just as he had the infernal impertinence to yank out my telephone, he bewildered me with an abortive philosophical comment on the futility of the best-laid plans of rats and men.”

  “Rats!” Asher said reflectively.

  “The gentleman meant mice, Sergeant,” Cordelia explained calmly.

  For probably the first time in his life Sergeant Asher used a truly official and commanding voice: “Be still! All of you.” He even astonished himself.

  “Well, really, Sergeant!”

  “Mrs. Admont, a bit of second-story work such as lifting this bag or”—he looked sternly at Cordelia—“some careless absent-mindedness in regard to diamond clips could be handled lightly, but murder cannot be glossed over—not even for a landmark.”

  Stuyvesant felt this had gone far enough. He swung into his best judicial manner.

  “Sergeant Asher, nobody wants to gloss a murder—Mrs. Admont least of all. When you seized upon and emphasized the word ‘rats’ our minds were in complete accord. You are unquestionably as familiar with the late Mr. Admont’s earlier associations with that ex-gangster Joe Inbrun as I am.”

  “Nobody could help being who could read. They plugged it in all the accounts of the wedding. And I see your point, Mr. Swain. That fortune hunter contacted Inbrun, who sent this lug up to rig a murder trap to bump off his—his—”

  “Do be careful, Sergeant,” Christine said pleasantly. “Even a landmark does have its feelings.”

  “But why would poor Alan have fallen into the trap himself?” Cordelia asked.

  “Cordelia,” Godfrey shouted, “Hugo and I have told you to keep out of this!”

  “It is perfectly obvious,” Stuyvesant went on happily, “that Mr. Admont did not know what method or device this man would use. And there, Sergeant, is your case.”

  “There is also, Mr. Swain, this other corpse.”

  Christine said: “I still cannot believe that that woman was Laura Destin.”

  Godfrey shouted into the attack: “Suppose, at the greatest stretch of the imagination, she were not? She simply becomes a pitiful creature out of Alan’s miserable past who read about the wedding and came here to shake him down—under the threat of exposing him to Christine.”

  “How little she knew me.”

  “But she asked for Aunt Christine,” Lida said factually, “not Mr. Admont.”

  Godfrey glared at her balefully.

  “Then it was her purpose to sell her knowledge about Alan’s past, or else it was revenge of a woman scorned. Do not pester us with these petty details. The broad picture is plain. Alan came upon her and realized her purpose. So he killed her. And now let us say no more about her.”

  “What proof is there that he killed her?” Asher asked.

  “Her lipstick is on his ring from where he struck her across the mouth,” Lida said. “And I bet the weapon that gave her the blow on the head was that big flashlight he took upstairs with him last night. I bet there’ll be blood on it when you find it, and his fingerprints. Do come and let me show you about the lipstick, Sergeant.”

  “Bloodthirsty little wretch!” Godfrey muttered.

  Lida went to the freezer, and Asher followed, dragging along with him the Dove. Stuyvesant, Christine, and Hugo and Godfrey joined them in crowding before the freezer door.

  Cordelia sat placidly in an armchair. She noted vaguely that the Dove, while all the rest were looking into the freezer, had his back to them. It interested Cordelia to watch the gentle, kindly little man while disjointed sentences from the group overlapped each other: “Honestly, Stuyvesant, I do think that Godfrey is right. This is not Laura.”

  “Perhaps he is, Christine, but the structure of the case remains the same. The woman is some impossible adventuress whom that wretch killed. Nothing is of consequence beyond the fact we know he killed her.”

  And Lida was saying simultaneously: “There, Sergeant. You can see where she was first struck on the mouth and then hit on the head. You can compare the lipstick caught in Mr. Admont’s ring with that on her mouth, can’t you?” And Asher answered: “The B.C.I. boys will handle all that in their laboratory.”

  How interesting, Cordelia thought while the talk had been going on. She observed the Dove take a ring of keys from his pocket and thoughtfully segregate one of them. Then he unlocked his end of the handcuffs and drifted gently toward a terrace door.

  He bowed to Cordelia as he opened it and said: “Good day, madam.”

  “It is going to be a lovely day.”

  The Dove went, quietly shutting the terrace door, but Cordelia noticed before he did so that the rain had stopped.

  Asher said: “As for the Joe Inbrun connection, by the time we get through with this bird—” He lifted the dangling, empty handcuff and realized his prisoner had vanished. “Where is he?”

  “He just walked out the terrace door, Sergeant Asher,” Cordelia said.

  “Oh, he did, did he? Mrs. Admont, I’ll be back with the boys as soon as I nab that nut again. The case is plainly an open-and-shut one. We will clear up the formalities for you as quickly as we can.”

  “Thank you, Sergeant Asher. We are expecting guests.”

  Stuyvesant shut his eyes in resignation and murmured: “Charley, it’s no use!”

  “Which way did he go?” Asher asked Cordelia.

  “He went with the rain.”

  “If you’ll excuse me for saying so, Miss Banning, I’d lay off it for a while if I were you.”

  Asher went out onto the terrace, and the group broke away from the freezer door, which Stuyvesant partially closed.

  “Sergeant Asher thinks I’m tight,” Cordelia said, “but I’m not. Not the least little bit. I said that the storm was going to clear. The sun will break out any minute now. How good Providence is. How just!”

  Hugo looked at her sardonically.

  “The villains all getting their proper deserts?”

  “Yes, Hugo. And the innocent are once more at peace.”

  Stuyvesant announced decisively: “It is my considered professional opinion that Miss Banning is correct. There will be the formality of a double inquest—on the murderer and his victim. The New York police will handle any Joe Inbrun connection with the case, and this man who obviously is one of his tools. The thing is finished.” The sun broke out suddenly and the sky grew bright. An auto horn could be heard blowing a signal in Morse code.

  Lida was electrified with joy.

  “Barry—oh, listen everybody—that’s Barry’s signal. He’s spelling my name in Morse code.” Lida was suddenly stunned. “But this—Oh, Aunt Christine, what will they think!”

  �
�My dear Lida,” Stuyvesant said acidly, “if you imagine for one moment that your grandaunt is incapable of surmounting a mere matter of murder-plus-corpses, you are simply naïve. I assure you she will surmount not only them but Back Bay.”

  Christine gave him a fond look.

  “Dear Stuyvesant! Run out on the terrace, Lida, and wave to them to use this entrance here.”

  Lida ran out and stood on the terrace, shading her eyes in the sunshine, looking off toward the driveway for her first glimpse of the car.

  Christine at once became the efficient hostess. “Cordelia, do run up and see that the Vanbuskirks’ rooms are ready. Do you mind, dear?”

  “Of course I will, Christine.”

  “Just pull up the shades for now. The beds can wait until later.”

  “And I think while I’m upstairs I’ll just pick out some little gift that will be suitable for dear Barry. I think there’s a pair of cuff links.”

  Cordelia went up the turret stairs, and Hugo called after her: “Better throw in the keys.”

  “Godfrey,” Christine said, “do be an angel and do something about canapés and lunch.”

  “Christine, I will surpass even myself. What is that rancid dish so pleasing to Boston stomachs?”

  “Scrod.”

  “There is no scrod. It must be beans.”

  Godfrey hurried out, and Christine said to Hugo: “The cellaret, Hugo, do you mind? Just wheel it out and restock it, please.”

  Lida called in from the terrace: “I can see the car!” Hugo started wheeling the cellaret.

  “Tea, I suppose, Christine? In magnums?”

  “Dear Hugo! What a comfort you are.”

  “Barry—oh, dear, darling Barry!” Lida cried, and ran off toward the drive.

  Christine’s efficient eye looked around.

  “There is nothing so important when coming to a strange house as a good first impression,” she said. “Stuyvesant, shut that freezer door.”

  Christine walked out onto the terrace and stood there, the gracious hostess, while Stuyvesant, bushed, shut the freezer door.

  “Stuyvesant!” Christine called in to him.

  “Christine, what now?”

  “It’s Mr. Vanbuskirk—he’s absolutely stunning. He’s the image of Cordell Hull.”