I'll Sing at Your Funeral

by Hugh Pentecost

  I’ll Sing at Your Funeral

  Hugh Pentecost

  An Inspector Luke Bradley mystery

  Published by Bold Venture Press at Smashwords

  www.boldventurepress.com

  Cover design: Rich Harvey

  I’ll Sing at Your Funeral by Hugh Pentecost

  Copyright 1942 by Judson Philips. Copyright renewed 1970.

  By arrangement with the Proprietor. All Rights Reserved.

  This book is available in print at most online retailers.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means without express permission of the publisher and copyright holder.

  All persons, places and events in this book are fictitious. Any resemblance to any actual persons, places or events is purely coincidental.

  Smashwords Edition License Notes

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  Table of Contents

  Edition notes

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  About the Author

  Other Books by This Author

  Connect with Bold Venture Press

  Edition notes

  I’ll Sing At Your Funeral is the third mystery novel featuring Inspector Luke Bradley and Sergeant Rube Snyder. The action centers around Patrick Cain, a promising singer swept up by a matronly woman with a long list of discarded ingénues. Cain’s singing lessons are explored with humorous authenticity.

  Judson P. Philips (the author behind the Hugh Pentecost pen name) was raised in a similar environment. Philips’ father was an opera singer and voice instructor, like the Arthur Summers character. (See Once a Pulp Man: The Secret Life of Judson P. Philips as Hugh Pentecost by Audrey Parente, Bold Venture Press, 2016).

  Educator, reviewer and author William Lyon Phelps wrote: “I’ll Sing At Your Funeral … while rather unnecessarily larded with terrific profanity, is a very exciting story, and the hero, Pat Cain, is unlike anyone else I have recently met. This is a tale filled with action, and where there are a considerable number of murders; the whole thing reaching a grand climax in the last chapter.” (The Rotarian, May 1942, “Billy Phelps Speaking” column)

  The Popular Library paperback edition (1942) was the source for this edition.

  Chapter One

  1

  Standing in the Stoddards’ entrance hall on Park Avenue, Cain took off his hat. It was that kind of house: The hall itself was bigger than any room Cain had ever seen in a private house. The oil paintings and tapestries on the walls, the mosaic-tiled floor, the gothic windows, belonged, he thought, in a museum. The stairway, winding to the second floor, would have accommodated a brewery team without scratching the walls or the wrought-iron balustrade.

  “Take your things, sir?” It was the second time, patiently, that the gray-haired man servant had reached for Cain’s raincoat and battered suitcase.

  “Take ’em where?” Cain said.

  “Why, to your room, sir.”

  Cain’s right arm was in a black silk sling. He was holding hat, coat, and bag awkwardly in his left hand. “What can I lose?” he said.

  “This way, sir.”

  Cain followed the man up the stairs to the second floor.

  “I’m sorry we have to walk, sir,” the man said, “but there’s something wrong with the lift.”

  “Lift?”

  “The elevator, sir.”

  “For God’s sake,” Cain said. “How do you get to know the house detective?”

  “Mrs. Stoddard employs a night watchman from the Holmes Protective Agency sir.”

  “Skip it,” said Cain.

  They walked along a broad hallway, also lined with pictures, to the door of a room. There the servant stood aside.

  The room was large and sunny. Its walls were rough gray plaster; there were more oil paintings, a four-poster canopy bed, a fireplace with a pair of leather armchairs beside it.

  “You mean this is where I hang out?” Cain asked.

  “Yes, sir. Your dressing room and bath are through that door.”

  Cain shook his head. “I’m disappointed,” he said.

  “Disappointed, sir?”

  “There are no dancing girls,” Cain said. He produced a cigarette from his coat pocket, snapped a kitchen match into flame with his thumb-nail,

  “Mr. Stoddard asked that you come to see him when you had freshened up. You’ll find him, in the garage, sir.”

  “The garage?”

  “Next door on the side street, sir.”

  “Okay,” said Cain. “I didn’t know there was a Mr. Stoddard.”

  “Oh, yes, sir. I believe Miss Carol is to take you to the studio for a three o’clock appointment, sir.”

  “That’ll be the old lady’s daughter,” Cain said.

  “Miss Carol is Mrs. Stoddard’s daughter,” the man said

  stonily. “Dinner is at seven-thirty, sir. I’ll send Claude to help you dress.”

  “Claude?”

  “Mr. Stoddard’s valet, sir. It’s just family for dinner, so a black tie will be quite in order.”

  Cain laughed. “Listen, chum, I have on my suit. The only thing I can change out of this into is a pair of overalls and a Stillson wrench.”

  “That’s rather a problem, sir, isn’t it?”

  “Is it?” Cain said. “By the way, what’s your name?”

  “Richards, sir.”

  “You’re the head man?”

  “I’m the butler, sir.”

  “How come they call you by your last name and this valet guy by his first? Is that what’s known as class consciousness?”

  “Claude,” said Richards, looking pained, “has some unpronounceable foreign surname. It seemed simpler to employ his Christian name. Will you require me for anything else now, sir?”

  “No, thanks,” Cain said. “But I’d like to let you and Claude in on a secret, Richards. I’ve been dressing and undressing all by myself ever since I was three.”

  There was no flicker of response in Richards’ eyes. “Your arm, sir,” he said. “You won’t forget to call on Mr. Stoddard? You’re expected, sir.”

  “I won’t forget,” said Cain.

  Alone, he walked through the dressing room and into the bath. It was done in black marble with chromium trim. He saw his first sunken bathtub outside the movies. There was a separate shower, with frosted glass panels. The built-in cabinet over the wash basin already contained the stock for a small drug store.

  Cain looked at himself in the full-length mirror which was set into the door … six feet two of black Irishman, lean and hard. He shook his head once more.

  “What the hell have you got yourself in for, chum?” he said.

  2

  Following Richards’ instructions, Cain walked up the alley between the Stoddard house and a side street neighbor into a small courtyard. The wide front doors of the garag
e, which looked to Cain more like a stable, were closed and so was the small entrance door next them. Incongruously, out of one of the windows an old-fashioned stove pipe protruded and smoke was dribbling from under its rain cap.

  Cain went to the entrance door and tried it. It was locked, but from inside he heard a faint, tuneless whistling. He knocked.

  After a moment a bolt was slid back and the door opened. An old man with rumpled white hair and a wrinkled, puckish face stood there. He wore overalls, held a corncob pipe in one hand and a tin of saddle soap in the other.

  “What do you want?” the man said.

  “I’m looking for Mr. Edgar Stoddard.”

  “Well?” said the old man.

  “Mr. Stoddard? I’m Patrick Cain.”

  “Oh. Come in,” said Stoddard. “Shut the door behind you.”

  Cain looked around him, bewildered. He was in a hot narrow room, pungent with the odor of leather and soap. Two windows overlooked the yard, but they had evidently not been washed for years and permitted only a dingy light. From iron hooks in the walls hung sets of harness. There were also saddles and bridles on racks. A rail across the far wall was draped with folded horse blankets, striped red, yellow, and green.

  The cause of the heat was a pot-bellied stove, resting on a square sheet of tin in the corner, a half-empty coal scuttle standing by. The stove pipe twisted along the ceiling and went out through a specially-constructed vent in one of the window panes.

  Through the glass top of a door Cain could see into the main part of this alleged garage. There were no signs of automobiles or that there had ever been automobiles housed here. There were several carriages … a handsome Victoria glossy with patent leather, a closed barouche, a high-wheeled dog cart, and a surrey with a fringed top. There were four box stalls at the rear, but there were no horses in the stalls.

  Cain was aware of Stoddard’s blue eyes watching him. Then the old man took the corncob out of his mouth, turned his head, and spat in the general direction of the stove. His aim was bad.

  “Damn!” he said cheerfully.

  Cain remembered having heard that lots of wealthy blue-blooded families had crosses of this type to bear, usually referred to as “Uncle Henry who is not quite right.”

  “Horses out for an airing?” Cain asked.

  “There aren’t any horses,” said Stoddard. “You can’t have everything.”

  “That’s a fact,” said Cain.

  “Get settled in the house?” Stoddard asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Find it cozy?”

  “Brother,” said Cain, “that word fits the house to a T!”

  The old man chuckled. “Care for rye whisky?”

  “With or without a beer chaser,” Cain said.

  “Help yourself.” Stoddard waved toward an opened pint of Old Hickory and a soiled tumbler on the window ledge. Cain helped himself.

  Stoddard went back to polishing a bridle, suspended on a bale hook in the center of the room. He frowned at an imaginary speck on the head band. “You know,” he said, “I’m tone deaf.”

  “What does that make me?” said Cain. He tossed off the whisky and instantly made a note of the fact that it was certainly not what the label proclaimed it to be. It was the best rye Cain had ever tasted.

  “You’re a singer,” said Stoddard. “I just wanted you to know I won’t be able to appreciate your talents.”

  “I’m not a singer,” Cain said. “I’m an electric welder in a shipyard.”

  “That’s what fascinates Emily,” Stoddard said. “My wife … in case you didn’t know her first name. She thinks of you as a diamond in the rough. By the way, people call you Pat?”

  “Right.”

  “My friends,” said the old man, “call me Ed.”

  Cain grinned. “Do I rate?”

  “Maybe,” said Stoddard, “after I find out how Emily got her hooks into you.”

  Cain went through the one-handed maneuver of lighting a cigarette, squinting at Edgar Stoddard through the smoke. “Why don’t you say what you mean?” he said. “How did I get my hooks into Emily?”

  “Because I know Emily. Go on.”

  Cain laughed. “All right,” he said. “I was hanging around the canteen at the shipyard. One of the boys was banging the piano and I was singing. I’ve always liked to sing. Mrs. Stoddard …”

  “I know those facts,” Stoddard interrupted. “Emily was distributing ear-muffs, or something, for the Ladies’ Aid Society. She heard you. Glorious baritone voice. Good appearance with a little grooming. Close quote. You had hurt your hand.”

  “Welding torch blew up,” said Cain. “They wanted to amputate. I wouldn’t let ’em, so they saved it ... after a fashion. In six months they’ll know whether I’ll ever be able to use it again.”

  The old man rubbed vigorously at the curb chain on the bridle. “I’m interested in what goes on inside your head. How did you happen to fall for Emily? You don’t quite seem the type.”

  “You wouldn’t understand my kind of guy,” Cain said.

  “Try me.”

  “To begin with, I’ve always been a sucker for the underdog. Enough of a sucker to fight in the Spanish civil war. Either you’ll call that fat-headed or you’ll accuse me of being a communist.”

  “I doubt it,” said Stoddard.

  “Well, I got shot in the foot of all places. Now that there’s a real war going on they can’t use me. So, I went to work in the shipyards. Something I could do that counted. Then this.” He tapped the hand in the black sling. “That was strike two, and maybe strike three.”

  “Tough luck,” said Stoddard. “Hand me that sponge, will you?”

  “I was going wacky,” said Cain, passing the sponge, “not able to do a damn thing and healthy as an ox at the same time. When Mrs. Stoddard heard me singing that afternoon she talked me deaf, dumb and blind. Suppose my hand didn’t heal properly, what was I going to do? I didn’t have a quick answer to that.”

  “Nobody ever has a quick answer for Emily,” Stoddard said.

  “I see what you mean,” said Cain dryly. “She said why didn’t I make something of my voice? If my hand came out wrong, I’d have a career. She’d foot the bills for as long as the voice teacher she picked out thought it was a good investment. Then if I went into singing as a business I could pay her back.”

  “So you saw a soft spot and jumped in.”

  Cain felt his face getting hot. “We’re all in this war up to our ears,” he said. “The first thing you can do is fight. If you can’t fight, you do some kind of defense work. If you can’t do that” — he shrugged his shoulders — “you give. You give money … if you’ve got it … and time. I figured singing might be a way I could still ante up in the pot so I thought why not take Mrs. Stoddard’s money?”

  “My money,” said Stoddard placidly.

  Cain frowned. “Hell, I figured she was the one with the dough.”

  “Strangely enough,” said Stoddard, “it’s mine. Made it all myself. Beef. Emily spends it.”

  Cain put out his cigarette in the top of an old coffee can which was part of Stoddard’s stage set. “In that case I’m scramming out of here,” he said. “You don’t like music, so why should it cost you?”

  “Hold your horses,” said Stoddard. He spat at the stove again. This time there was a fine sizzling sound as his aim was true. He beamed at Cain. “You’re not the first protégé Emily’s brought into the house. But you’re the first one who hasn’t babbled about his art with a capital A. You’ve got the kind of reasons I like.” Then he grinned. “And, Pat, you’re the first one who hasn’t thought I was crazy.”

  “There’s nothing crazy about you,” Cain said, “Ed.”

  The old man didn’t seem to notice the name. “This room. Sign of senility. That’s what Emily thinks. As a matter of fact, I started out in life working in a livery stable. It was the only real fun I ever had. That’s why I had this place fixed up here.”

  “It makes sense to m
e,” said Cain.

  “I ran off to go to war, too,” Stoddard said. “Spanish American. But I never got to fight. They set me to training mules. That took me out west. Ranch eventually … cattle … money. No, take Emily up on her proposition. It’ll get me a little peace and maybe you’ll be good for her and for Carol.”

  “You mean it?”

  “Of course I mean it, Pat.”

  They were interrupted by an impatient rapping on the door. A girl’s voice called out, “Edgar! Where’s that baboon of mother’s? I can’t wait around all day for him.”

  Edgar Stoddard knocked out his pipe in the coffee tin. “My daughter,” he said. “Before you’re through with this, Pat, you may be tempted to upend her for a good old-fashioned paddling.”

  “If I do I’ll restrain myself,” Cain grinned.

  “On the contrary, go to it,” said Stoddard, unlocking the door, “with my blessing!”

  3

  Carol Stoddard was a recognizable type, seen often in the Sunday rotogravure and society sections. She had the same kind of super-grooming as her mother without looking quite so lacquered.

  She stood in the doorway, pulling on a pair of gloves. Cain, who had decidedly earthy standards, saw that she needed no dressmaker’s magic to emphasize her charm. Her mouth was a little petulant, but as she gave Cain an appraising glance, he recognized Edgar Stoddard’s shrewd blue eyes.

  “So there you are,” she said. She dug a cigarette case from her bag and took out a cigarette. There was a lighter attachment on the case. She smoked in nervous puffs, as though her one object in life was to get through with it as quickly as possible.

  “I see you’ve found Edgar,” she said.

  “I have,” said Cain.

  “Then you know the worst,” she said.

  “I’ve been led to believe that still lay ahead,” Cain said.

  “Edgar is such a louse about me,” she said. “Well, let’s get going.”

  Cain glanced at Stoddard. The conversation seemed to please him.

  “Look,” said Cain. “I could introduce myself to this voice teacher without your help, in spite of the general impression that I’m not competent to dress myself or walk around the streets alone.”