I'll Sing at Your Funeral

by Hugh Pentecost

  Cain was puzzled. In the exotic setting of the studio the flighty and ridiculous woman he’d seen before had acquired dignity.

  “You have ideas?” Cain asked.

  She gave him a shrewd look. “You’re interested in getting to the bottom of this on Carol’s account, aren’t you?’

  “Lady, I scarcely know the girl,” Cain said.

  “I have a feeling that young woman may play quite a part in your future, Mr. Cain.”

  “Have you any messages from my dead grandfather?” asked Cain.

  “I’m quite serious,” said Mrs. Wilder. “But that doesn’t answer your question, does it?” From a lacquer box on the end table beside her she took a cigarette with a scarlet tip. “Mr. Cain, poison is a woman’s way.”

  “Of murder?”

  Mrs. Wilder closed her eyes. “What two men stood to lose the most if Bill had exposed either one … two men with women who would fight like tigresses to protect them?”

  Cain waited for her to elaborate.

  “Rosokov’s career at the opera would end if there was a public scandal … and I think Julie Rosokov would commit murder for him without batting an eyelash. It wouldn’t matter what he’d done, she’d be for him.”

  “And the other?”

  “Why, Margo, of course,” said Mrs. Wilder. “Involvement in the death of a pupil would close the doors of Arthur’s studio.”

  “Is this hot off the celestial ticker, Mrs. Wilder?”

  She opened her eyes to reprove him. “It’s just plain common sense,” she said. “Incidentally, Mr, Cain, off what you call the celestial ticker, I’ll give you some information. Either this month or next will both be propitious for your marriage to Carol. If you wait beyond next month, you should put it off till the following June.”

  “For God’s sake,” said Cain. “What I need is air!”

  “Mr. Cain,” said Mrs. Wilder, “if you were to go through my files you’d find that most of my clients have been with me a long time. I can’t have made too many mistakes and stayed in business.” She reached forward to crush out her cigarette in a lacquer ashtray. “As for handing you the murderer on a silver platter ... it happens that the courts will not accept the testimony of a numerologist as scientific evidence. So I would be foolish, don’t you think, to air any conclusions I might come to unless the murderer were safely in custody?”

  “How so?”

  “My dear Mr. Cain, I suspect my urge to live to a ripe old age is fully as strong as yours!”

  3

  Cain wanted to do some thinking. He ate lunch alone and went to a newsreel theater. As a result of his conversations with Edgar, Summers and Mrs. Wilder, he had a tidy rogue’s gallery to consider. Summers had Edgar’s vote; Royce looked to be Summers’ nominee; Mrs. Wilder chose Julie Rosokov and Margo. Then there was Emily’s conviction that the obvious was the most likely … Joe Egan. Cain played with each one of them, trying to fit them into the physical facts. Any of them could have poisoned the drink. Summers had made it and the others had all been along Carol’s path. Any of them could have planted the phial in Carol’s bag. He came at last to the conclusion that unless Bradley could locate the source of the poison it was still all guesswork.

  It was about three in the afternoon when Cain got back to the Stoddard house. It was empty of members of the family. Neither Emily nor Carol had returned since breakfast. Edgar, Richards thought, was in the garage.

  Cain decided he might as well go and talk with Edgar. He got his hat and went out the front door. There he came unexpectedly face to face with Ray Webster of the Globe.

  “Just coming to find you,” said Webster.

  “I still don’t speak English,” said Cain.

  “Well, let’s have a drink anyway,” said Webster.

  “Come on in,” said Cain.

  “If you don’t mind going to a dive over on Lexington,” Webster said, “I’ve left that phone number at the office. What’s new? After the initial statement of the fact, we’ve got nothing out of headquarters. Bradley seems to be playing possum.”

  “He’s the original possum,” said Cain. “Where’s your dive?”

  They walked across town to a Lexington Avenue taproom and sat down at a table in a cool dark corner. Cain had his rye and beer. Webster was still sticking to ginger ale.

  “Here’s to the broken-hearted debs of New York!” he said. “May they find a new idol before they perish of grief.”

  Cin’s eyes were suddenly grave. “Here’s to Bill Brackett,” he said. “A swell egg!”

  “Check!” said Webster. “How are the suspects taking it?”

  “Not as jittery as you might think,” said Cain.

  Webster didn’t press him for information. He had dug up the story of Cain’s bout with Joe Egan at the Tinsel Club and Cain gave him the straight dope on it since Webster’s story had some lurid angles that were definitely not so.

  Cain wasn’t sure how long they sat there … perhaps an hour. Then Webster was called to the phone. He came back a few minutes later, his face bright with excitement.

  “It’s all over,” he said.

  “What’s all over?”

  “Your murder case. The killer’s committed suicide. Summers, believe it or not, jumped down the elevator shaft in Carnegie Hall.”

  Cain sat staring at Webster. He felt a stab of pain. Somehow he didn’t want it that way. Not Summers.

  “Let’s go,” said Webster. “While we’re this close I’d like to get a statement from old lady Stoddard. She was Summers’ chief patron.”

  They walked west to the Stoddard house. Just as they were approaching it a taxi pulled up at the curb with a screech of brakes. A tall figure in a trench coat got out and paid the driver.He had started up the steps toward the front door before he saw Cain and Webster. He stopped.

  “Well, I hear your case is solved, Inspector?” Webster said.

  “Is it?” said Bradley.

  Cain was startled by the coldness of the inspector’s face.

  “Where have you been, Cain, since three o’clock?”

  “With Webster … having a couple of slugs in a bar down the street.”

  “You stay lucky!” said Bradley. “Come on. I want to talk to you.” He rang the bell. Then as Richards opened the door he said to Webster: “Not you!”

  “Have a heart,” Webster said.

  Instead Bradley signaled Richards and literally pushed Cain in ahead of him, leaving Webster on the sidewalk.

  “Is what I heard on the level?” Cain asked. “Summers killed himself?”

  “No!” said Bradley. “They picked him up out of the bottom of the elevator shaft all right. But get this, Cain. Summers’ eyes had been burned clean out of their sockets with sulfuric acid!”

  “Jesus Christ!” Cain said.

  “Somebody shifted the solution he’d been using to bathe his eyes. We can’t find the bottle now. He was alone in the studio when it happened … or so it seems!” Bradley emphasized that. “Most frightful agony you can imagine. He may have stumbled out to the elevator. Door accidentally open. And he fell.”

  Again Cain stared, speechless. There was, more to come.

  “That’s one theory. But there’s another. He was not alone. When he bathed his eyes he screamed for help and the murderer led him to the elevator. There’s a doctor in a nearby hotel.”

  “God,” said Cain. “You mean … ”

  “That Summers, his eyes burned out, was deliberately led to that elevator door … and pushed!”

  Chapter Thirteen

  1

  In the offices of New York’s police commissioner Cain glanced at his watch. It was seven hours since he and the thirteen other exhausted people in the room had heard the news of Summers’ death.

  Following an extensive questioning, separately and collectively, the commissioner had taken over the show. Bradley stood at a far window, shoulders hunched, pipe between his teeth, staring down at the lights of a rain-spattered street.

&n
bsp; Commissioner O’Hearn looked up from the papers on his desk. There was exasperation in the expression of his mouth.

  “I have had you brought here,” he said, “at Inspector Bradley’s request, to make an appeal. The result of the last hours would be comic if it weren’t heavy with menace for all of you. I have seen the worst of hardened criminals in the police line-up. I have talked with killers in the death house at Sing Sing. Until today I thought I had encountered every type of homicidal lunatic. But here in this room is someone who tops them all in cold-blooded vicious brutality. Yet none of you seems prepared to come clean!”

  “We can’t tell you what we don’t know, Commissioner,” Edgar said in a voice made querulous by fatigue.

  “I’m going to put the facts to you,” O’Hearn said. “To all of you … which means to the murderer. It will show him the weakness of our hand, but if it will only convince the rest of you of the danger you’re in as long as this person goes free, it will have served a purpose.”

  “I don’t think I can bear it! I don’t think I can bear another minute of it!” Mrs. Wilder’s voice rose.

  “You might have the decency to forego your theatrics, Naomi,” Margo Reed said without looking at the numerologist and in a tone so cold that Cain felt the hair rising on the back of his neck.

  “We’ve got the murderer,” said O’Hearn, “and yet we haven’t got him. He’s here, yet we can’t take hold of him. Are we to place you all under arrest until he cracks? I think not. I am pessimistic about his cracking … not the man who could sit by, watch Summers go into the lavatory to wash out his eyes with vitriol, and then calmly lead him to an elevator shaft and send him to his death. No person with that kind of nerve is going to crack. And he is sitting here … next to you, or you!”

  “And you’re certainly not going to frighten him with word pictures,” said Cain. He had been looking at Carol and seen the quivering of her lips and the way she was twisting and untwisting a handkerchief.

  “I doubt if anything could frighten this person, Mr. Cain. But I want the rest of these people to understand that.

  “If we assume that we are dealing with only one murderer, then we can eliminate Mr. Bartholomew Schenk and Chief Golden Wolf. They both can substantiate alibis for this afternoon, as can Mr. Cain. But the rest of you … ” O’Hearn shook his head. “Let’s go down the list.

  “Mrs. Stoddard was at the Red Cross most of the day. So busy she didn’t stop for lunch. Shortly before three she felt faint and went, alone, to a busy lunch counter in the Grand Central Station. No possible way of checking that. We’ve tried. Afterwards, she felt too distressed to go back to the Red Cross rooms. She had some letters to write and, preferring to avoid an encounter with anyone at home, she went to the writing room at the Biltmore to do her letters. No check is possible on that! She returned home shortly after five. That is her uncorroborated story and it contains no vestige of an alibi.”

  “But it is true,” said Emily. She still retained some of her crispness.

  “Miss Carol Stoddard,” O’Hearn continued, “met Brackett’s family when they arrived from the west, saw them settled in their hotel, helped them with arrangements for the funeral, and lunched with them. She left them shortly after two o’clock and went to a movie! A double bill at Loew’s Lexington. It was after five when the show was over and she went home in a taxi. No alibi for the critical time between three and four.

  “Edgar Stoddard was in his … er … recreation room in the garage. He was seen to go there after lunch by the butler. He was found there by Inspector Bradley. But we have only his word that he was there all afternoon.

  “Madame Rosokov has the same kind of alibi. She was at home, alone, in her apartment. It’s a walk-up with no hall boy or switchboard operator.”

  Rosokov interrupted in his deep booming voice. “I am controlling myself with a lot of trouble,” he said. “If you are hinting that it is Julie who is torturing and killing poor Arthur I should giving you a horsewhipping!”

  “I am saying,” said O’Hearn curtly, “that she has no alibi. Nor have you, Mr. Rosokov.”

  Rosokov shrugged his shoulders. “I am taking a walk,” he said. “I am walking ten, fifteen miles every afternoon. I am helping to keep in shape this way. Everybody is knowing this. Rosokov takes his walk, rain or shine, winter or summer. Sometimes I sing and people are looking at me.” He nodded complacently. “You will finding someone who was looking at me. People are not forgetting Rosokov when they are seeing him.”

  “Until that happens, however, you are not in the clear,” said O’Hearn. “There is, then, Joe Egan. He lives in a furnished room. He says he was taking a nap. It might be so. Which brings us to those of you who live in the building.” O’Hearn hesitated, stirring the papers in front of him.

  “Mrs. Wilder was in her studio. She had dismissed her secretary. According to her story, she was working. The elevator staff assures me she did not leave the building. But how are we to prove she didn’t walk down the one flight of stairs to Summers’ studio?”

  “Mr. Commissioner, you can’t do this. You can’t hint that I… ”

  “Please, Mrs. Wilder. Mr. Royce was in his office all afternoon, he says. But shortly before three he sent his secretary with some advertising material to the printers, so she can’t vouch for him either. That leaves Miss Reed and Mr. Cook.”

  The commissioner’s eyes rested on Margo’s deathlike face. “Miss Reed was in the studio when Summers was murdered by her own admission. She says she had taken a sedative and was asleep. The police surgeon assures us that she had taken a drug but there is no assurance that it was in sufficient quantity to make her sleep.”

  “My God!” Margo said, in a voice Cain wouldn’t have recognized unless he’d been looking at her. “I loved him! I would have given my life to save him.”

  “But still, it is not an alibi. And Mr. Cook … ”

  “I keep telling you,” Beany said. He was holding up a key for the commissioner to see. “What chance have I for any privacy in that studio! And how could I work with the atmosphere the way it was? But I have a friend who has given me a key to his studio down the hall. Is it my fault if he wasn’t there? It is my fault that no one saw me? If you’d go there, you’d find cigarette stubs, or something that would prove I spent hours there, reading.”

  “Maybe he left his crocheting,” Cain suggested.

  “Mister Cain, I resent your attitude,” Beany said.

  “Why, Mister Cook!” Cain said.

  “Oh, for God’s sake stop it,” said Bradley, turning sharply from the window. “You’ve heard these preposterous alibis. Here’s the rest. There were fingerprints on the phial that someone put in Mr. Cain’s pocket. Mr. Cain’s prints! In handling it he erased any others that may have been there. We have not been able to trace the purchase of either poison. Both may have been bought months … years ago, anywhere in the United States! So we have a case without physical clues. We think we know the motive for Brackett’s murder and we think Summers was on the point of telling his suspicions. He phoned me at headquarters and asked me to come to see him not three quarters of an hour before he died. That’s how I happened to be there so quickly … but not quickly enough.”

  Bradley looked around at them all and then banged his fist on the commissioner’s desk. “Don’t you see that you must talk now while you’re safe … while we can protect you?”

  Nothing.

  “We’re as much concerned with preventing another murder,” said O’Hearn, trying not to give way to temper, “as with anything else. For your own sakes, won’t you pass on anything you know gossip, rumor, whether you believe it to be true or not?”

  Still nothing.

  “Then you make it impossible for us to help you or properly protect you,” O’Hearn said. “You can go home now, and may God have mercy on you … and on us!”

  “Amen!” said Bradley bitterly.

  2

  In spite of his feeling that he shouldn’t be amused, Ca
in was reminded of a bunch of kids in school hurrying for recess after a bawling out by the principal. Almost before the commissioner finished, his office was deserted by everyone except Bradley and Cain himself.

  The commissioner leaned back in his chair. “It’s a lousy case, Bradley … lousy from start to finish.”

  “If it is finished!” said Bradley. Then he saw Cain. “What do you want?” He was in a nasty mood.

  “Something I thought you ought to know.”

  “The innocent bystander,” said Bradley. “I suppose you’re going to break down and tell me it was Carol Stoddard who put the poison bottle in your pocket.”

  Cain’s eyes widened. “You had that figured out?”

  “Yes, I had that figured out,” Bradley snapped. “About five seconds after you turned it over to me.”

  “Then why didn’t you put the heat on her?”

  “Who else would you be protecting? And who else had a chance to put it there … because I never swallowed that hooey about the thing being in your pocket all the time you were with me.”

  “And yet you didn’t suspect her of the poisoning?”

  “One thing you learn in this business, Cain, is that you can’t teach a French poodle to point like a bird dog. Carol Stoddard might have the spirit to kill a man for double-crossing her, but she wouldn’t do this kind of a job.”

  “Then it seems to me you’re in,” said Cain. “Apply the same reasoning to the rest of them and you should have your man.”

  “No luck,” Bradley said, beginning to cool off, “you and Miss Stoddard are the only transparently honest people in the whole outfit. Now, if that’s all you had to tell me, scram out of here. I’ve got a headache to nurse.”

  “It happens,” Cain said, “I wasn’t going to tell you that at all. But I’d like to ask a question. Was that on the level about Summers phoning you this afternoon?”

  “Right. Said he wanted to talk. Had some ideas.”

  “I was at the studio this morning and had a lesson,” Cain said. “Naturally we talked about Brackett’s death and who Lydia’s man might have been. We got around to Royce, and Summers froze. Wouldn’t talk. But I got the feeling that he had suddenly remembered something that made Royce fit the picture.”