The April Robin Murders

by Craig Rice

  “And after she’d disappeared, then the police really went to work to find poor Mr. Lattimer’s body, only they never did. There was one story about, maybe she’d put his body in her car and hid it some place way up in the hills where nobody would ever find it. Only then somebody else wrote another story about, she couldn’t’ve very well done that because while poor Mr. Lattimer hadn’t been a very big man, she was a little bitty woman and not very strong, so she couldn’t’ve put his body in her car, and then taken it out and buried it without she had help. Which she could’ve had, of course, if she really did have a boy friend.”

  Or the housekeeper, now caretaker, might have helped, Bingo thought. She looked capable of that, or anything. And it could account for the nasty look she’d given them when they were looking through the house. Suddenly he resolved that they would get her out of the house that night if they had to carry her forcibly. He finished his coffee, paid the check and said, “Let’s go home.”

  Murdered Lattimer or no murdered Lattimer, it was home to them now! What had happened to the Lattimers was a common-place story. Rich, middle-aged husband with a mean disposition, young and probably pretty and full-of-fun wife. She must have been pretty or he wouldn’t have married her; it had been Bingo’s experience that rich men married girls who either were pretty or were rich themselves. And in time she’d murdered him, done a good job of hiding his body and then gotten panicky and run away. A dull business, he told himself, and nothing that would ever need to bother Handsome and himself.

  As they came up the driveway he could see a light showing in what he figured was the housekeeper’s room.

  “I hope she’s packing,” he said grimly. “Because if she isn’t, she soon will be.”

  He looked up at the forbiddingly big and darkened mansion, reminded himself that it had been built for April Robin, and immediately saw it as beautiful again. Poor Mr. Lattimer, no longer alive to enjoy living in a movie star’s mansion.

  That was when the thought struck him. He caught his breath and said, “Handsome! Mr. Lattimer—”

  “I know,” Handsome said. “I thought of it, too. Just now.”

  “He can’t be dead,” Bingo said, “because he signed those papers this afternoon.”

  Both were silent for a moment.

  “It didn’t have to be this afternoon, Bingo,” Handsome said. “He could have signed those papers and left them with Mr. Courtney Budlong for when he sold the house.”

  Bingo nodded slowly. The papers could have been prepared any time. He remembered that their names, the amount paid and the date had been written in Courtney Budlong’s hand.

  “He maybe even could’ve decided he was going to sell the house, and fixed up those papers with Mr. Courtney Budlong before he was murdered,” Handsome said.

  “And maybe she didn’t want him to, and that’s why he was murdered,” Bingo added. In that case would they still be properly legal papers? He hadn’t the least idea. But certainly Courtney Budlong would have known if they were or not, and if they were satisfactory to him, that made everything all right.

  He walked slowly into the living room and over to the davenport, rehearsing what they would say to the caretaker. What was her name? He recalled Courtney Budlong mentioning it.

  Handsome remembered. It was Pearl. Suddenly Handsome sniffed the air. “You smell anything, Bingo?”

  Bingo sniffed, and nodded. “Smells like dry cleaning.” He scowled. “She’s supposed to be packing, not dry cleaning.”

  He followed Handsome in the direction of the caretaker’s room. So far the only thing he’d thought of to say to her was “Scat!”

  The odor grew stronger as they went through the back hall; by the time they reached the door, it was almost overwhelming. Bingo began to feel an unpleasant presentiment that something was terribly wrong.

  Handsome didn’t stop to knock. He shoved the door open, fast.

  The caretaker was sprawled on the floor, face down.

  As he stared at her, the only thought that flashed through Bingo’s mind was that only that afternoon he’d promised Handsome that they were never going to be involved in any more murders in the future!

  five

  “She’s breathing a little tiny bit, but not much,” Handsome said. He’d already opened the room’s one window.

  Bingo looked down at the floor. There was a wide, wet smear on the rug. In the middle of it a container of cleaning fluid lay on its side. He said dazedly, “Why would anybody be cleaning a rug at nine o’clock at night?” The sponge with which she’d been working lay beside her hand where she’d apparently dropped it.

  “Maybe it was dirty,” Handsome said. “Maybe she wanted to leave the room nice and clean when she left.”

  Bingo glanced around. There weren’t any signs of packing in the room. “Maybe she just felt like cleaning a rug,” he said, a little angrily. “We better get a doctor. Right away.”

  “An ambulance, Bingo,” Handsome said. He’d been looking at the label on the bottle. “I read about this stuff in a magazine once. It said if you breathe in enough of it, you die quick.”

  Bingo located an extension telephone in the kitchen. For some reason he hated to call the police. Not that he’d ever had any serious trouble with them himself, or ever expected to, but it went against his nature. Still it was the only way to get an ambulance in a hurry. He sighed, and made the call.

  Handsome picked up the unconscious woman and carried her into the living room. “It’s all right moving her,” he told Bingo. “She doesn’t have any bones broken and she hasn’t been murdered.”

  Bingo shuddered. He opened every door and window he could find, closed the door to the caretaker’s room tightly, and sat down on the other davenport to wait.

  It seemed like a very long time before the ambulance arrived, and while they waited, Bingo stared unhappily at the caretaker. Her bony face, ill-tempered even in unconsciousness, was almost as gray as her faded cotton house-dress now, and her hair was limp and stringy around it. One of her shoes had fallen off.

  “Handsome,” he said suddenly, “take a look and see if she stuck our note to her in one of her pockets.” He really didn’t mind approaching her himself, it was just that Handsome was closer.

  Handsome searched. “Not here,” he reported.

  “Probably in her room,” Bingo said. “We’d better look and see—”

  But that was the moment when the ambulance got there. Bingo admitted two efficient-looking young men, who paid no attention to him except to ask, “Where’s the patient?”

  Bingo pointed. One of the young men examined her and said, “Emergency Hospital.” The other one got her name, Pearl Durzy, and said, “How did it happen?”

  Bingo nodded his head in the general direction of her room and said, “She was cleaning a rug.”

  The attendant who had asked the questions went with Bingo for a quick look. He examined the spot on the rug, picked up the empty can and looked at it, and said, “Carbon tetrachloride. That stuff’s pure murder!”

  Bingo winced at the word. But this had been pure accident. Even though it was an inauspicious beginning for life in the April Robin mansion, it wasn’t murder.

  “She sure inhaled enough of it, too,” the young man said. He noticed a glass on the dresser, sniffed of it, too, and said, “Been drinking. Did she drink much?”

  “Not that I know of,” Bingo said truthfully. Somehow he didn’t feel that this was the time to reveal that he’d never seen Pearl Durzy before this very afternoon.

  The efficient young man asked Bingo a few more questions and then helped hustle the unconscious Pearl Durzy out, remarking that the cops would be by for the accident report, their own job being not to waste time with such chores, but to deliver the victim.

  As the ambulance siren receded in the distance, Handsome said in a shocked voice, “I read an article about that stuff. It was part of a series during Home Safety Week. The rest of the column was about bathtubs and electrical appliances.�
��

  “And what did it say?” Bingo asked wearily. It had been a long, full day and he was beginning to think wishfully of sleep. “Besides not trying to do acrobatics in the bathtub, or go sticking your finger onto live wires?”

  “It said,” Handsome told him seriously, and just a bit reprovingly, “that if you have to use carbon tetrachloride to dry clean anything, you should do it outdoors. Or you should have a lot of doors and windows wide open.”

  Bingo said, with a feeble attempt at flippancy, “Maybe she hadn’t happened to read the same article.” He frowned, thinking of the little caretaker’s room. The door tightly shut. One window, and it had been shut.

  “And the whole bottle of it spilled on the floor,” Handsome said, as though he’d been following Bingo’s thought word for word.

  Bingo was silent for a moment. Then he said, “We better look for that note, Handsome.” It had just been an unfortunate accident, but still, the note might call for a lot of tiresome and unnecessary explanations.

  But before they could start looking, the squad car arrived in front of the April Robin mansion. Two uniformed officers came in; they, too, were efficient-looking young men. They were also friendly, especially so after Bingo had informed them that they were the owners of the property and had handed them a business card of the International Foto, Motion Picture and Television Corporation of America, which seemed to impress them.

  The accident investigation was, to Bingo’s relief, short, matter of fact and routine, indeed, almost casual. The shorter of the two remarked that it was an unusual kind of an accident, but anything could happen, he’d seen some funny ones in his day. He wrote down the information that Bingo and Handsome had been out to dinner, that everything had been all right when they left—in fact, the housekeeper hadn’t even been in—that when they returned they’d noticed the odor—noticed, the cop had remarked, how could anyone miss it!—had investigated and immediately phoned for an ambulance. Which, the taller cop said approvingly, had been exactly the right thing to do.

  Then Bingo led the way to the caretaker’s room, Handsome trailing along, and opened the door. One of the cops said, “Phew!” and the other said, “Try not to breathe much of this air!” and added, “And you better keep out of this room for a couple days.”

  “That’s what the article said,” Handsome said.

  The taller cop wheeled on him and said, “What article?”

  “My partner happened to read an article about this stuff in a newspaper,” Bingo said. “And he happened to remember it.”

  The two cops were willing to let it go at that. They began a very fast job of examining the little room, while Bingo watched anxiously from the door.

  There was no sign of his note anywhere in the room.

  “Looks like she might’ve got dizzy and tipped the whole bottle over,” the shorter cop theorized. “Then she was too dizzy to get up and get out.” The taller cop agreed that it might have happened that way very easily. Then they gathered up the empty cleaning-fluid can, and the glass from which Pearl Durzy had been drinking, and carried them out into the living room.

  “Y’can smell that stuff way in here!” the tall cop said. “You guys better watch out you don’t breathe it in yourselves. Now, identification for this gal—?”

  Bingo and Handsome looked at each other helplessly. “Her name’s Pearl Durzy,” Bingo said. “Caretaker here.”

  The shorter cop called out, “Look in her purse.”

  The tall cop make a quick trip back to the bedroom, returned, and said, “Can’t find one.”

  “Hell,” his partner said, “all women got purses.”

  The two of them made a quick search of the room, and came back looking frustrated. There had been a coin purse in the pocket of a gray coat in her closet, containing three bus tokens and a dime.

  “Let somebody else worry about it,” the short cop said. “They can ask questions at the hospital when she comes to.” He paused. “If she comes to.”

  Bingo said uncomfortably, “Can we find out how she is?”

  “Sure,” the taller cop said sympathetically. “I mean, maybe.” He called the Emergency Hospital, put down the phone, shook his head and remarked that she was pretty bad. “Say!” he said, suddenly changing the subject and looking around. “Isn’t this the Lattimer place?”

  “Was,” Bingo said. The warm feeling of pride began to come back. “Only we just bought it.”

  “So this is what it looks like inside!” the cop said. He looked around with a kind of awe. “Could stand a little more furniture, though.”

  “It’s in storage,” Bingo said. “Be moved in tomorrow or next day.” He added, with a studied air of carelessness, “This house used to belong to April Robin, the movie star. Why, it was built for her! You remember April Robin?”

  The tall cop said, “April Robin! I was just a kid then, but—” And the shorter cop said, “Remember her! Oh boy, do I!”

  A pair of swell guys, Bingo reflected after they had gone. For a brief moment his almost rapturous mood returned. He glanced again around the huge room, picturing the way it was going to look once the furniture had arrived. Then, with a jolt, his mind came back to Pearl Durzy.

  “Handsome,” he said, “I didn’t see anything of that note when the cops were here. In her room, I mean. Or anywhere in her purse.”

  “I didn’t either,” Handsome said. There was a faintly worried note in his voice. “Maybe we’d better take another look.”

  They not only took another look, they searched the room. They looked in drawers, in boxes, in the pockets of the few dresses that hung in the wardrobe. At Handsome’s suggestion, they looked in all the wastebaskets.

  “It simply isn’t here,” Bingo said at last. He had a feeling that he was hearing his own voice from somewhere very far away. “It isn’t here anywhere.”

  They went back in the living room and sat down. Bingo lit a cigarette nervously.

  “And if it isn’t here,” Bingo went on, inwardly shrinking from the implications of his own words, “somebody must have taken it away.”

  They looked at each other for a moment. Then Handsome said miserably, “I said it was an accident, Bingo. I mean, I said she hadn’t been murdered, which amounts to the same thing. Because it looked like it was an accident.”

  “It did to me, too,” Bingo said. “And to the cops.”

  There was another unhappy silence. Then Handsome said, “She could’ve been knocked out first.”

  After a while Bingo said, “It still could’ve been an accident. Why, any number of things could’ve happened to that note.”

  “Sure, Bingo,” Handsome said reassuringly. Neither of them believed that for a minute. “Only, Bingo. Are you going to call up the cops and tell them about it?”

  “I don’t know,” Bingo said. He thought it over. He foresaw that if he did, there would be a lot of troubles and complications, all of them wasting valuable time. On the other hand, murder—especially when it happened in his own house! Their own house.

  He suddenly realized that it wasn’t murder yet, and began to feel much better. “We’ll wait,” he told Handsome. “She’s still alive, and by tomorrow she’ll most likely be better. In which case, she herself can tell what happened. If she isn’t, well—” He paused. “Tomorrow will be time enough. And it’s late and we’re tired.” He pounded the cushions of the davenport experimentally. A little bumpy, but he’d slept on much worse. “And I have a hunch we’d better get these lights off pretty soon. Because our next-door neighbor struck me as the type of dame who’d come right over to see what the ambulance and the police car were all about.”

  Handsome began bringing over the blankets they’d picked up at an Army-Navy store, and unpacking pajamas. Before he’d gotten very far, there was a buzz at the door.

  “What did I tell you?” Bingo said. He sighed. “Better answer it, though.” No point in insulting a new neighbor, especially a rich society widow.

  The visitor who came into t
he room wasn’t Mrs. Waldo Hibbing, however. She was a tallish young woman with a bathing beauty type figure not at all concealed by dark green sharkskin slacks and a bright green, flame and white print blouse. She had long, smooth dark hair, not black, but close to it, coiled loosely on the back of her head, bright blue eyes which seemed to be shooting off sparks at the moment, and a slightly sulky bright red mouth. Bingo, having become a shade more skeptical during the course of the day, took a close look at her long, sooty eyelashes and decided that this set was real.

  She stood in the center of the room, her fists on her hips, looking first at Handsome and then at Bingo, and then back again.

  “I was driving by and saw the lights,” she said, “and I thought I’d better investigate. Who are you two guys, anyway, and what the hell are you doing here?”

  “I’m Bingo Riggs,” Bingo said politely, “and this is my partner, Mr. Kusak.” He handed her a card of the International Foto, Motion Picture and Television Corporation of America. “And who are you, and won’t you have a chair?”

  She had an arm of the davenport instead. “I’m Mrs. Julien Lattimer. And is this some kind of gag?”

  Handsome said, “You’re not the Mrs. Lattimer that murdered her husband. She was littler, and blond.”

  “No, I’m not,” she said, and smiled at him, the instinctive way that women smiled at Handsome. It was a slightly grim smile, though. “I’m the Mrs. Lattimer who divorced her husband. Adelle Lattimer. In fact, I’m the Mrs. Lattimer who’s going to inherit a quarter of everything he had in the world—as soon as I find his body.”

  “You’re much better-looking than your picture,” Handsome said judiciously. “The one I saw, I mean. It was in the News. January 25, 1953. You had short hair.”

  Adelle Lattimer looked at Bingo and said, “I don’t know what all this is about, but your partner fascinates me.”

  “He fascinates a lot of people,” Bingo said. “It’s just that he remembers everything. He could probably tell you what horse won in the seventh on that day.”

  “Not that day,” Handsome said. “January 25, 1953, was a Sunday and they weren’t running.”