by Maia Chance
“Maybe everyone is outside somewhere,” I said. “Let’s go around to the back.” We circled the house. “By the way, do we or do we not admit to Senator Morris that we broke into Breakerhead last night?”
“I would rather not discuss the matter with him,” Berta said.
“So we lie.”
At the back of the house, we found ourselves on a terrace with a long stone balustrade. Stairs led down to a lawn edged with pyramidal topiaries, and the lawn terminated in a cliff. Beyond, the sea sparkled indigo. Boats dotted the horizon.
“There is someone,” Berta said, pointing down at the lawn.
“That must be Gil.” A thin young man stood slump-shouldered at an easel, facing the sea and painting. “Let’s go ask him about his mother. Could be our only chance.”
Berta glanced back at the house. “But Senator Morris—?”
“He can hardly fault us for being friendly.”
We went down the steps and approached Gil.
Gil wore a seersucker suit and a straw boater hat. No mourning togs, then. He didn’t seem to notice us, I suppose because he was concentrating so fiercely on his painting. His tongue stuck out between his front teeth.
“Lovely painting,” I said. Then I looked at the painting. It wasn’t lovely.
“Oh. I didn’t hear you coming. When I paint, I am deaf to the world.” Gil lowered his brush. Blue eyes bulged in a long, weak-chinned face. “Who are you?”
“Mrs. Woodby, and this is Mrs. Lundgren. We’re here to meet your father, but I’m afraid no one answered our ring at the front door.”
“Oh, the servants are all off today—mourning Mummy—but Dad is home. He’s in his study, I suppose. The study is soundproofed, so he probably didn’t hear the bell.” Gil spoke in a wispy tenor.
Berta said, “I beg your pardon—did you say ‘soundproofed’?”
“You don’t know Dad very well, do you? He’s—how shall I put it?” Gil waved his paintbrush. “He’s paranoid and self-absorbed. Thinks everyone is out to get him. I suppose he told you that Mummy died because of something to do with him?”
Berta said, “He did mention that your poor dear mother—”
“Dear?” Gil tipped back his head and laughed so hard, the ribbon on his boater hat quivered. “Mummy was an alcoholic old hag. I’m pleased she’s gone. One parent dead, one to go. Once Dad pops off, I’ll live in comfort without having to jump through hoops for anyone.”
Sweet Jujyfruits. No love lost in this family.
Gil went on, “Mummy never did understand my art. As soon as I finished at Harvard two years ago, she never stopped hinting I should be cut off unless I joined the family business. Uncle Preston runs it now. Morris Water-Closets. He wishes to start me off in the mail room. That would simply crush my soul. At least Dad foots the bill, although with an endless litany of complaints and insults.”
“How does your father foot the bill, exactly?” I asked. Berta and I looked at Gil’s work in progress. A lumpy boat perched atop rows of pantomime waves. Two bloated seagulls dangled beside a lemon-shaped sun.
“For my trips to Europe, where I study painting.”
“I see,” I said.
“Do you study … modern art?” Berta asked.
“God, no.” Gil tucked his chin in disgust. “Loathe it. I’m a classicist, quite obviously.”
“And your mother thought you ought to be more, um, conventionally employed?” I asked.
“Yes. The only way I could get her off my back was to agree to marry Grace and endeavor to produce a few brats to carry on the Morris name. Mummy said Grace had the most tip-top birthing hips—although, of course, I adore Grace with every fiber of my being.”
“Mr. Morris,” I said, “have you any idea where Grace might be?”
“No! And oh gosh, I am so desperately worried about her! If something were to happen to her, if the wedding weren’t to go off … well, I’ll positively die.”
“The wedding is supposed to be in five days’ time,” I said, “so in all likelihood, it will be … delayed.”
“No. No.” Tears glistened in Gil’s eyes. “Grace will come back. She wouldn’t leave me at the altar. She is such a sweet little saint—except for that vile, wretched diary of hers.” Gil’s lips peeled back from his teeth. “She’s cuckoo about that thing. You haven’t seen it anywhere, have you?”
“No,” I said.
“What was she always writing in there? Why wasn’t it enough to talk to me? She’d tell me good night and slip away, and the next thing I knew, she’d be sitting on her bed and scribbling madly. Sometimes I thought she must be writing about me.”
Wait. Had Gil spied on Grace in her bedroom?
Gil looked over my shoulder. “Here’s one of Father’s trained apes come to fetch you.”
I turned. A man with slicked hair and a dark suit strode toward us, waving. “You the detective dames?” he called when he drew near.
“I suppose that could refer to us,” I said to the man.
“Then come with me. Senator Morris is waiting.”
* * *
Senator Winfield Morris’s study was done up in the usual green leather, mahogany, and those gold-embossed books you buy as a set. More eyebrow-raising were the gun cabinets flanking the fireplace. They were crammed full with what I was sure were tommy guns.
“Just like women,” Winfield called from his seat at a massive desk. “Late.” He grinned. “Buster,” he said to the man who’d fetched us, “stay.”
Buster shut the door and stood in front of it with a wide stance.
“Good morning, Senator,” I said. Berta and I stopped in front of Winfield’s desk.
Winfield looked us up and down, his beady eyes coming to rest on my bosom. “Glad to see you cleaned yourself up, Mrs. Woodby. I hate to see a pretty lady let herself go. When I saw you at Willow Acres yesterday—whew.”
I ached to whack Winfield with my handbag. But one doesn’t whack one’s sole client with handbags.
“Have a seat,” Winfield said.
Berta and I sat in the two chairs facing the desk.
Winfield steepled his hairy fingers. “Have you found the murderer?”
Was he kidding? “You must understand, Senator, that these things take time,” I said. “But we have a lead.” So far, Winfield had given no indication that he knew we’d been at Breakerhead last night. Maybe Van Hoogenband hadn’t told him. Better yet, maybe Van Hoogenband had never found our business card on the piano.
“A lead?” Winfield hunched forward over his desk.
“We discovered how the murderer managed to kill your wife.” I launched into a description of the vial of medicine we’d found behind the radiator in Muffy’s room, and how we figured that the murderer had swapped it out for a vial containing arsenic.
Winfield interrupted me. “I don’t care how they did it. Come on, girls. I’m not paying you to dig up all the cute little details. I want to know who, and I want to know now.”
Berta said, “Strictly speaking, Senator, you have not paid us a red cent.”
“Berta,” I whispered.
“That’s right,” Winfield said. “I haven’t. How about we keep it that way and I find someone else to collar Muffy’s killer?”
“That won’t be necessary,” I said quickly.
Berta cut me an annoyed look. “Senator Morris, we require an advance fee if we are to continue this investigation. We have expenses, and it is agency policy. Furthermore, I do not believe it is necessary to remind you that our agency provides a cushion of discretion and an understanding of New York society that other agencies simply cannot.”
I held my breath.
Winfield looked at Berta and me in turn with his unreadable eyes. At last he said, “Fine,” opened a desk drawer, and pulled out a stack of greenbacks as thick as my wrist. He counted some out while Berta and I watched, mesmerized. He slid the bills over. “One thousand okay?”
Holy moly.
“For now,” Berta sai
d briskly. Her handbag absorbed the cash.
“Now that that’s settled,” Winfield said, “any other leads—anything useful?”
“Well, we suspect that whoever leaked the story about the rum bottle in Muffy’s room to the Observer could be the murderer himself—or herself,” I said.
“How do you figure?”
“No one else besides the murderer, Mrs. Lundgren and me, one of the nurses, and Dr. Woodby were supposed to have seen Muffy’s room. Oh—and the police.”
“Well, that’s more like it,” Winfield said. “That sounds like a political saboteur. Slandering me to the papers, damn it! Get them. Now, listen, I can’t talk tomorrow. This is a busy time of year for me. Giving a speech at a beauty pageant tomorrow. For once, I’ll be with a bunch of gorgeous girls instead of smelly old men. Come by again the day after tomorrow, same time. I’ll be expecting progress. If not—” Winfield shrugged. “—well, I just might have to terminate. Got it?”
Terminate? My eyes flicked to the tommy guns. “I believe we do. But before we go, I have two questions. First, could I ask you again who you believe killed your wife?”
“I told you, that’s your job.”
“Your hunch could be helpful.”
“Fine. You want to know who did it? I’ll tell you. It was the anarchists.”
“The … anarchists?”
“Scummy Europeans invading the States with their red propaganda. They hate everything I stand for, everything all Hearthside politicians stand for. Mark my words, when you find out which one of those creeps at the health farm killed my wife, you’ll find a sleeper anarchist.”
Gil had been correct: Winfield was paranoid. “And another thing,” I said. “Could we look through Muffy’s things? We might unearth a clue.”
“I can’t see how you’d unearth a clue about a goddam anarchist in my dead wife’s things, but sure, fine, go right ahead. Buster will show you to her room.” Winfield twiddled his fingers, and Buster opened the study door.
Berta and I practically tripped over each other getting out of there.
14
Buster led Berta and me along corridors and up a back stair, and left us at Muffy’s bedroom door.
“See yourselves out,” he said.
Berta and I shut ourselves into the room. “Just how I pictured it,” I said. Blue chinoiserie wallpaper and dainty white furniture, headachy floral perfume emanating from the squashy carpet.
“It is very clean,” Berta said. “Muffy seemed such a disaster, I would have expected a bit more of a mess.” She began rifling through a dresser.
“I’m sure they have battalions of maids.”
“True.”
I went into the bathroom. Gold taps, veined marble, and a large perfume collection on mirrored trays. All spick-and-span. Another of Gil’s putrid paintings hung over the lavatory. It depicted either a castle at sunset or a gelatin salad.
I went back out into the bedroom and inspected the built-in bookshelves on either side of the fireplace. One side held a collection of romantic novels. I’d read a few of them myself, so I knew they were tales starring medieval knights, masked highwaymen, and passionate sheikhs. They weren’t highbrow, but they were just the ticket to see a neglected wife through a lonely evening. Sympathy for Muffy fluttered through me. I knew what being married to a bastard was like, and while it hadn’t driven me to a jugging problem, I certainly had eaten an unreasonable amount of buttercream icing over the years.
The bookcase on the other side of the fireplace held a few photograph albums, the New York Social Register, a Hare’s Hollow Country Club directory, and a few other volumes of that ilk. I paged through a photograph album. Babies, weddings, petulant children, dewy-eyed debutantes—including one of the young Muffy herself. A series of travel photos of European landmarks, ocean liner dining rooms, and palm-treed beaches in which Muffy posed with her brother, Hermie. I shut the album and replaced it on the shelf.
“Find anything interesting?” I asked Berta.
“Nothing. Shall we go?”
* * *
We motored away from the Morris house after I’d let Cedric loose for a surreptitious visit to the shrubbery.
“What did you make of Winfield’s notion that it’s the anarchists out to destroy him?” I asked Berta.
“Implausible. Any anarchist worth his or her salt would kill the senator himself, not his wife, and they would take credit for it, too. I tend to believe the senator is, as his son said, paranoid and self-absorbed.”
“Have you ever known any European anarchists, Berta?”
“Well, no, but I have read of them extensively in Elmo Bentley’s Secret Empire penny serial.”
“This anarchist business has gotten me thinking. Our murder suspects do have links to Europe. Hermie seems to have traveled all over the Continent with Muffy.”
“As a tourist, surely.”
“Could’ve been a cover.”
Berta snorted.
“Then there’s Raymond Hathorne,” I said. “Even though he’s Canadian, Mother and Lillian first met him on an ocean liner returning from Europe last month.”
“Your mother said he had been golfing in Scotland.”
“And Pete Schlump said how fond he is of France—remember?”
“Pete Schlump could not be an anarchist! The very idea.”
“Violet Wilbur said something about her magazine column being madly popular in France, too. Maybe it’s only a coincidence. But maybe Europe—anarchists or no—is mixed up in this somehow.”
* * *
When we reached Hare’s Hollow, we lunched at a fish and chips shanty, after which Berta carefully logged the cost in her expense book.
“It isn’t necessary to be so scrupulous,” I said. “It’s only lunch.”
“I wish to be professional. And I do wish you would keep track, too.”
I shrugged.
“Oh, by the by,” Berta said. She took the stack of money that Senator Morris had given us and counted out half for me. “Do not spend it all at once.”
We headed back to the Foghorn to await Ralph’s call. To my relief, the cute clerkette had been replaced by a fellow in a waistcoat.
At one o’clock on the dot, the call box telephone jangled. I picked it up.
“Lola Woodby.”
“Hi there, kid,” came Ralph’s voice, distant and crackly. “I have Miss Cotton’s address for you.”
“How did you manage it? That school secretary was as tough as shoe leather.”
“Oh, I figured out how to soften her up.”
I rolled my eyes. “What is the address?”
“Number eleven Rosebud Lane, Stony Brook.”
“Peachy.” Stony Brook was about thirty miles from Hare’s Hollow. “I owe you one, Mr. Oliver.”
“I’ll remember you said that, Mrs. Woodby.”
We disconnected at the same time.
* * *
I didn’t notice the black Chevrolet Touring Car tailing us until we were about five miles out of Hare’s Hollow. And really, for the number of twists and turns in the road, it wasn’t safe for a motorcar to follow me so closely.
“You should keep your eyes on the road, Mrs. Woodby,” Berta said, “rather than incessantly checking your makeup in the rearview mirror. Yes, your lipstick is bleeding, but you might fix it once we stop.”
“What?” My hand flew to my lips and I rubbed. “No—it’s, well, I think we’re being followed—no, don’t turn around!”
Berta turned around and glared out the rear window. “It is true.” She swiveled forward. “Do not be alarmed, but it is that lumbering fellow with the forehead scar from the Van Hoogenband house last night.”
“Mr. Egghead?” I yelled. My foot jabbed harder on the gas of its own volition.
“Surely that is not his name.” Berta clutched the dashboard as we sailed around a bend.
“Didn’t you see the scar straight across his head? He’s either had his head popped open like a ring box by a br
ain surgeon, or—”
“Calm yourself.”
“I’m calm,” I said through clenched teeth.
“Good. Because there is a second person with him.”
I shot a glance in the rearview mirror. “Are you sure that’s another person? It could be a dog.”
“It is a small person. Perhaps a child. I saw a hat. Oh dear. When you grimace in that fashion—”
“I’m trying to concentrate!”
“—I am able to see that some lipstick has found its way to your teeth.”
I wouldn’t look in the rearview mirror at my teeth. I wouldn’t.
I looked in the mirror. My mouth was a vampirish crimson mess. “It melted!”
“Mrs. Woodby, watch out for that guardrail!” Berta cried.
My eyes flew to the road just in time to see a guardrail hurtling toward us. I slammed on the brakes. We skidded.
SMASH!
My torso slammed against the steering wheel. Berta screamed. Mr. Egghead’s motorcar had rear-ended us, and it pushed us along like a snowplow for several yards before coming to a stop.
Berta was hanging on to the passenger door, and her hat had fallen over her eyes. “Go! Keep going!” she cried.
I hit the gas and we zigzagged before straightening out on the road. We rumbled around a bend.
“Is Cedric all right?” I half sobbed.
Berta twisted. “Yes.”
“Do you see them? Are they coming?”
“I do not know. Drive a bit more, and then find a secluded place to turn off.”
I zipped along, my nerves fizzing like dynamite fuses, and when I saw a hedge-lined turnout, I turned. The Duesy bumped on the narrow lane. Something rattled, Berta peeped, and branches screeched along my door. I braked hard and switched off the engine.
No noise but the sound of two ladies and one Pomeranian panting. Then, a motorcar engine.
In the rearview mirror, I watched Mr. Egghead’s Chevrolet sail past. I caught the briefest glimpse of a small woman in a cloche hat sitting in the passenger seat.
“It worked,” I said. “I can’t believe it. They didn’t see us.” I turned. “I’m so sorry, Berta. I don’t know what came over me.”