Murder by Latitude

by Rufus King

  “Please, please, my poor little woman,” Captain Sohme was saying, and, “Valcour, make her drink some water. She is going crazy on our hands.”

  “Mrs. Poole!” Valcour’s voice was a whip.

  “I’ll buy you a new ship…a whole new ship and not a nasty dirty little stinking damn—”

  “God in heaven, Valcour, don’t do that!”

  The palm of Valcour’s hand still tingled from sharp contact with Mrs. Poole’s livid cheek. The slap threw her slightly off balance, and he held her steadily with a firm arm placed around her shoulders. She stared at him in complete astonishment, her lower lip hanging loosely, and wet tears dribbling into it uglily.

  “Mrs. Poole!”

  “So silly of me,” she said. Her eyes, for a moment, stopped being stupid-looking. She looked at Captain Sohme. “If anything could be done, I know that you would do it,” she said.

  “Anything—anything.” He looked helplessly at Valcour. What (his shrug wanted to know) is there that can be done for the dead?

  “I know that you’re going to alter your course, Captain”—her voice, right away, was beginning to get excited again—“and go at once to the lanes used by liners, and that you’ll stop one and get a doctor and—”

  “But he is dead.” (You poor, poor thing!)

  He was afraid that she was going to start yelling again, and scream things at him at the top of her voice, and then Valcour would have to slap her harder, and what with the amount of hell that there already was to pay, he didn’t think that he could stand it. It was disorderly, this racket in the presence, as they were, of death—of so very much, much death—

  “Mrs. Poole!” He shook her slightly.

  “Mr. Valcour?”

  “Will you permit Captain Sohme to take you to Miss Sidderby’s cabin? She will stay with you there.”

  “I see no reason for leaving.”

  “Yes, yes, dear little lady, you will come with me.

  “There are certain things, Mrs. Poole—”

  “Things?”

  “An examination—”

  “But certainly I have the right to help?” She was holding herself suspiciously well in control. “Am I to understand that no attempt is to be made to apply restoratives? Artificial respiration? Is my husband supposed to be dead of disease?” Her laugh ripped the gray-misted room like breaking glass. She went to the bunk and yanked the toweling bathrobe completely from the body. “Show me a wound,” she said. Her fingertips lightly brushed a coppered shoulder, and her voice was barely audible. “I think he’s cold.” She was cold, too. The sweat on her forehead was cold, and her eyes were dizzy in pools of sickness. The gray cheerless cabin became bright with red worms of fire, its door opened, and Mrs. Sanford was washing in towards her like colorless refuse on a drab ebb tide…

  * * * *

  Cable from port authorities at Bermuda to Commissioner of the New York Police Department:

  LOCAL FACTORS MERCANTILE TRANSPORT LINE APPROXIMATE PRESENT NORMAL POSITION SS EASTERN BAY AS WITHIN 50 MILES RADIUS OF LATITUDE 35 DEGREES NORTH LONGITUDE 64 DEGREES 30 MINUTES WEST STOP NO TR POSITION REPORTS RECEIVED NOON BY RADIO PLACE ANY VESSEL WITHIN ONE HUNDRED MILES OF SS EASTERN BAYS PROBLEMATIC POSITION STOP A GENERAL CQ INQUIRY RADIOED UPON RECEIPT YOUR LATEST CABLE ELICITED FACT BELGIAN FREIGHTER SS HALDIER BELIEVES SHE PASSED WITHIN 50 MILES SS EASTERN BAYS PROBLEMATIC POSITION ABOUT TEN THIRTY THIS MORNING STOP WE IMMEDIATELY REQUESTED THAT SS HALDIER ATTEMPT ESTABLISHING RADIO COMMUNICATION WITH SS EASTERN BAY ON CHANCE THAT SS EASTERN BAYS REGULAR WIRELESS SET OUT OF COMMISSION BUT THAT HER EMERGENCY SET COMMA CAPABLE OF COVERING SHORT DISTANCES COMMA MIGHT BE OPERATIVE STOP ATTEMPT A FAILURE STOP REALIZED FUTILITY OF REQUESTING SS HALDIER TO TURN BACK AND ATTEMPT OVERTAKING SS EASTERN BAY AS SPEED OF BOTH VESSELS COMPARATIVE EVEN HAD WE BEEN ABLE TO CONVINCE MASTER OF SS HALDIER OF URGENCY OF CASE STOP WE DO NOT BELIEVE NORMAL COURSE OF SS EASTERN BAY WILL BRING HER IN CONTACT WITH ANY VESSEL UNTIL STRIKING MORE NORTHERN LATITUDES STOP WILL AWAIT FURTHER SUGGESTIONS AND REITERATE OUR SERVICES REMAIN COMPLETELY AT YOUR DISPOSAL

  CHAPTER 25

  LAT. 35° 8' NORTH, LONG. 64° 29' WEST

  “I do not understand at all, Valcour, why you fixed it so that Mrs. Poole was not taken to the Sanfords’ cabin. Miss Sidderby is herself on the edge of her nerves—and to go put her in charge of a woman as far shot as Mrs. Poole is—”

  Captain Sohme, his great hands shoved deeply into his trouser pockets, pressed his shoulder blades back on the again closed and bolted door of the Pooles’ cabin.

  “Taking care of Mrs. Poole will be the best thing in the world for Miss Sidderby’s nerves, Captain.” Valcour continued with his examination of young Poole. The lack of any wound or abrasion on the body disturbed him deeply.

  “Maybe you are right, Valcour.” Captain Sohme kept his kindly, simple eyes in a fixed stare through one of the gray-misted ports and wondered why, even so, he could see so clearly (just as if he were looking at Valcour) what was going on over there on the bunk. “He was a well-built lad,” he said.

  “Very.” …Why was there no wound? Why were there present none of the symptoms of death from strangulation? From suffocation? Could it after all have been a death from natural causes? But, if so, why had there been beneath the lobes of young Poole’s ears those traces of moist soap?… “Do you keep any poisons in your medicine chest, Captain?”

  “I thank God no.” And that, Captain Sohme’s look said, will put a crimp in any attempt on your part, Valcour, to make this out another case of murder. “Salts, castor oil, nux-vomica, bandages, liniments: harmless—everything harmless.”

  That trace of moist soap beneath the ears—Valcour went over to the basin. He stared at its well-wiped cleanliness, its dryness. He touched, in its dish, a cake of soap. The soap was moist. He reached down and picked up the topmost of the soiled towels from their container. He took it over to one of the ports, where the gray dreary light shone somewhat more strongly, and examined it.

  “This towel has been used to wipe off a soapy skin that had not been rinsed,” he said. “It is still very damp, and has been used recently.”

  Captain Sohme said doggedly, “There is no blood on it, is there, Valcour?”

  “No.”

  “There is, on the body of the poor lad, no wound? You did not find anything like that?”

  “I found moist soap beneath the lobes of his ears.”

  “You are straining gnats, man—gnats.”

  “Young Poole was killed, Captain.”

  “How?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Listen, my friend”—Captain Sohme placed both his big hands on Valcour’s shoulders—“I must talk seriously with you, if only to preserve my own reason. You do not mind?”

  “No, Captain.”

  “All of my life, Valcour, I have been a man of the sea—ever since that day when I ran away from my parents’ home in Christiania have I followed the sea. I tell you this, not to spin yarns, but to make you feel that when I say things at sea are so-and-so, you will believe me; just as I believe you when you say to me that things on land are so-and-so. You think I talk too much?”

  Valcour’s eyes were gravely serious. “Not at all, Captain.”

  “Well then, let us take a sailorman and watch him while he is ashore. I do not mean along the waterfront where he remains among his kind, and where the atmosphere continues to be shiplike, but put him, we will say, on board a train that is going for a long, long passage—from New York to ’Frisco. That is about five days, is it not?”

  “About five days.”

  “You, Valcour, as a landsman, are on board that train and observe this seaman. He is not like a stranger in a strange land. No, he is like a man who finds himself on a different planet.”

  Valcour, a little confused, tested the mild triumph in Captain Sohme’s tone. “Yes, Captain?”

  “And so it is with landsmen when they become voyagers at sea. They do not understand it. I do not refer to the
silly mechanisms and business of seamanship, nor do I speak of the oddities of life on shipboard. I speak of greater profundities than those things, of forces which we, who have lived with them all our lives, quite blindly accept—and the reasons for which we will never know anything about at all.”

  “I’m beginning to see your drift: a ship vanishes—was not the Cyclops a case in point?—there is no trace of her, no sign—ever—why?” Valcour smiled a little. “You attribute it to your ‘forces’?”

  “Yes, yes, that is it exactly, Valcour.”

  “And to bring the theory up to date, we have young Poole here—a perfectly healthy physical animal who washes his face, lies down in bed, and dies. Your ‘forces’?”

  “You are smiling at me, Valcour.”

  “I am bitterly in earnest, Captain.”

  “You are land-bound, you are obsessed with your profession, in everything you see crime—everything. Dear God alive, man, let us look into this business sanely. I am not stupid, and I am not too stubborn, and I do not mean to be rude to you, but what can I think? We have two deaths: Gans, who was a dyspeptic and always sickly, he has an attack of acute indigestion and his face is mottled up with the pain of it and he dies. Are you enough of a doctor, Valcour, to state expertly that the symptoms shown by Gans’ body could not have been caused by acute indigestion just as well as by strangulation?”

  “No, Captain.”

  “Good. We then have Miss Sidderby. She is shocked, poor little lady, by coming upon the body, she at once imagines running feet (and maybe they were only his running feet, running in blindness from his pain), and then you see things through professional glasses—you find a bit of meaningless paper which might very well have been all that was left of a sheet which, in his agony, he clutched and twisted and which was blown away—and it is no longer acute indigestion, it is murder. You say the motive was to prevent a wireless message from being delivered to you. Why, then, was not the set smashed? How was this murderer to know that others on board could not operate it?”

  “Gans might have told him, Captain.” They were at him again—those tenuous fingers of fog and shrouding.

  “So far we have nothing but conjecture, man. Take, now, this young lad Poole, here. You can see for yourself that he is the athletic type, and that his muscles are overdeveloped. What happens? He has a dilated heart. I will grant you even that he washes his face. While he does so he has a heart attack and lies down until he is relieved. He is not relieved. He is dead.”

  “Do you think he would have wiped the basin clean, rubbed the unrinsed soap from his face and hands, and thrown the towel into its proper container while in the middle of this heart attack, Captain?”

  “Such things are often automatic, Valcour. The very fact that he did not rinse the soap off shows his haste—his confusion.”

  Valcour shrugged. He had himself frequently noticed the automatic manner in which many men wiped out the basins in pullman-car washrooms when they had finished with the towels.

  Captain Sohme was speaking again: “And against these plain and understandable facts, Valcour, what have you to advance? That an unmailed letter, addressed to one of Mrs. Poole’s former names, was found near the body of a murdered man in New York City a couple of weeks ago I”

  “That murdered man was Mrs. Poole’s first husband, Captain.”

  “So? Then why could not that letter have been written by him?”

  Valcour kept his tone impartial through this wretched fog. “It was printed. Even so, our handwriting specialists concluded that the letters had not been printed by him. I am not myself expert enough in that line to explain to you how, but they have both the knowledge and the apparatus for determining such things. You are arguing against your true beliefs, Captain. There are too many coincidental circumstances to have me believe that your ‘forces,’ either natural or otherwise, are responsible for having stricken these two men dead.”

  Captain Sohme sank heavily into a chair. “Well then, God help me, Valcour, but I do not know.”

  “I suppose there is no way of keeping the body until we reach port? There ought to be an autopsy to test for poison.”

  Captain Sohme grimaced. “You know what the body of that poor lad would be like at the end of eight days,” he said. “We are not equipped with any artificial refrigeration.”

  “Then the burial must take place soon?”

  “Such things, at sea, can never take place too soon, and I do not like to think of the effect of it upon that poor little woman.”

  Valcour felt somewhat callous about this. He was beginning to feel things about Mrs. Poole. “Well, it’s her fifth,” he said.

  “That does not matter. I have found that a grief is never lessened from repetition, and that death, each fresh and dreadful time it comes, is always sad. You have finished in here?”

  Valcour shrugged. “My hands are bound by the sea,” he said. “There is nothing at all in here that I can do. After lunch, I would like to start a semi-formal investigation among some of the passengers, basing it on Gans’s death. You do not mind?”

  “I have ceased to mind anything, Valcour, any more.” Captain Sohme was lethargic. He stood up. He looked at Ted Poole’s young body. “Our stock of spare canvas is getting low,” he said.

  CHAPTER 26

  LAT. 35° 10' NORTH, LONG. 64° 28' WEST

  Valcour walked aft along the deserted boat deck. Some of his fellow passengers were at lunch, some were in their cabins, and one—his lids were lowered with pity—was dead. The sky and sea were a gray vault drab with drizzle, and drizzle thinly damped his tired, cold skin, and the ship was a faintly throbbing little body, stolidly throbbing in the exact center of its saucerful of water, stolidly carrying its human freight of unhappiness to Nova Scotia’s barren and unhappy shores.

  There was a rope around his wrists and his legs were bound, while the man he was after did smart killings before his blindfolded eyes—the man who might be the girl Toody, or else the husband of Toody’s aunt who might, in turn, be Mrs. Sanford—and young Gans was dead and the wireless was out of commission, and young Ted Poole was dead, and now Mrs. Poole, with her singular efficiency, would have to go and draw up another will.

  His eyes grew sharply speculative. Where was the connection? Between the will and its beneficiary’s death? Between the will and the man Toody, who was a girl, and her aunt who was (was she?) Mrs. Sanford? He leaned against the deck’s wet after-railing, and stared along the ship’s pale indolent wake. There was nothing clear-cut about this gibberish, and the person who was at the bottom of it was clever, and the motive for it all was strange, and the end of it was not yet.

  Mrs. Poole was the end of it—that he would gamble on—its beginnings and its end. Mrs. Poole, who was so good and kind, and who could buy anything with her riches, up to and including the well-built body of a handsome young man. Well (Valcour’s smile was very grim), she had his body. And her heart, which was a capacious rubber ball, and which, with grief, was falling, falling, falling, would hit the bottom of her small capacity and then bounce up again into the gravitationless strata of infatuations… Lunch, he told himself savagely, must go on (even if life didn’t), and he went back along the wet quiet deck, and went below into the dining saloon, and to his place at the table, and sat down.

  “Everything’s cold, sir,” said the steward.

  “Isn’t it,” said Valcour.

  He took in the table. Captain Sohme was not there, Mrs. Poole was not there, the Misses Sidderby were not there, and the steward, from some distorted notion of respect, had removed the cutlery from Ted Poole’s place. Valcour thought absently of lilies, and stared at the limp, damp, typewritten menu, and said, “Tea—that could be hot, couldn’t it?”

  “Yes, sir. It could.”

  “Some cool braised beef, chilled vegetables, and that will be all.”

  The steward smiled weakly. “People were so late in coming to lunch, sir, and everything has been so upset. Dinner will be quite hot, si
r.”

  Mrs. Sanford, with eyes that were very thinly syruped indeed, stared down the table at him, and her hand mechanically carried soup in a spoon from a plate to her lips, which opened mechanically, sucked in the soup, closed again, and waited for more. Her husband beside her (Miss Sidderby’s description of his “face like a horse” struck Valcour as singularly apt) kept time with his own spoonfuls of soup, with the difference that his lips did not suck it in; they received it simply as an opening through which things were dripped, they closed, and that was the end of it; there was nothing further to indicate that the soup had been swallowed at all. Stickney, Force, and Wright were souping, too—inanimately, lifelessly—and Mr. Dumarque, in his somewhat isolated seat, was quietly smiling above clasped hands, quite soupless, and quite obviously content.

  Mr. Stickney, who was always hungry, finished with his soup first. “Well, Valcour,” he said, and his voice was a gunshot in the stillness, “which of us is it to be this time?” His look was heavy with belligerence.

  “There is some doubt as to the nature of the causes of Mr. Poole’s death, Mr. Stickney,” Valcour said. “Captain Sohme inclines to the belief that it was brought on by a heart attack, caused by a dilated heart.”

  Mr. Dumarque, in the thick stillness, continued to smile enigmatically above his white clasped hands. “So soothing,” he said.

  Mr. Stickney picked him up. “Soothing?”

  “Yes, Mr. Stickney; for us.”

  “I don’t get you.” Mr. Stickney liked his statements plain.

  “It is soothing to know,” said Mr. Dumarque with polite distinctness, “that when the next one of us is killed, his death will be the result of natural causes.”

  Mrs. Sanford’s spoon was checked in mid-air, and her lips, which had parted to suck in the soup, stayed open. Some drops of soup dribbled back into the plate. “You are a wicked man,” she said.

  “My dear, my dear!” Mr. Sanford relinquished his spoon and started right in to twitter.