I didn’t speak. We were on far too dangerous ground. Bill Flanders stirred in the white porch chair. “I had it all figured out. I was going to kill her tonight, strangle her in her bed, and I was going to give myself up to the police. It was just something I had to do because I couldn’t live on any longer and not to do it. But it’s just like there’s some power, some power bigger’n us that takes things out of our hands. Because I never got a chance to kill her. She just up and died like that—from her weak heart.”
It was very hard after that, to believe that Bill Flanders had murdered his wife.
Warily I said, “You’re sure that she did die from a heart attack?”
His voice harsh as a buzz-saw, he said, “What d’you mean? You’re not saying you think I killed her after all?”
“Not that you killed her, Bill. Just that—”
“But Wyckoff looked at her. He’s a doctor. He knows. He—”
“What if Wyckoff hadn’t been telling the truth?”
“You mean about Dorothy having a weak heart? You’re crazy. Of course she had a weak heart. You heard me say so, didn’t you? Wyckoff told me about it weeks ago.” He laughed. “I should know. There’s been enough money paid out on it. Here—”
He was fumbling in his breast pocket. He pulled out a sheaf of papers. With a shaky hand, he lit a match and started leafing through them.
“These are some of the bills Dorothy never paid. I brought ’em with me just to keep me mad. There’s a couple from Wyckoff. Here, see for yourself.
He handed me three pieces of paper. Feeling rather dizzy, I lit a match myself. Each of the papers had Wyckoff’s letterhead at the top, and each of them was a bill for professional services, addressed to Mrs. Dorothy Flanders.
“And, if you don’t believe me, Lieutenant, you can look up Wyckoff’s files—”
Bill Flanders went on talking, but I didn’t listen. My whole murder theory rested on the fact that Dorothy hadn’t died of a heart attack.
Now, unless things were far more complicated than they seemed, she had died of just that.
Flanders and I stayed there on the porch. He wanted to talk some of the tangled nightmare things out of his mind. I was sorry for him, doubly sorry because I was feeling such a fool myself. The great peaks of the Sierras had started to loom through the dawn when I left him and went upstairs.
As I passed Dorothy’s room, I decided to give it another once over. After all, even if our murder theory had been given a body blow, at least the robbery had still to be explained. I opened the door, remembering the confusion as I had last seen it. Faint grey daylight from the window made it bright enough to see.
All the drawers in the highboy were closed. The dresses were hanging neatly in the closet. The suitcases stood in a tidy pile at the foot of the bed. There was not the slightest hint to show that the room had ever been searched.
No murder. And now—no robbery. That was too much for me.
I stole back to our room. Iris was still asleep. I slipped into the bed next to hers, trying not to feel like a gibbering lunatic.
I suppose I slept.
VI
“I’ve been thinking and thinking, my angels, really I have. And there’s only one thing to do and that’s not to think.” Lorraine Pleygel brandished that remark at us across the sun-splashed breakfast tables on the terrace. “Mr. Throckmorton would say we should all go about in long black veils. But then, Mr. Throckmorton’s from Boston and everything’s so depressing in Boston. After all, thinking and being morbid won’t help poor Dorothy. So let’s just go on having fun. I’m sure I’d want people to go on having fun if I died.”
Putting this typical piece of Pleygel philosophy into practice, Lorraine was wearing the most frivolous garment I had ever seen. It was a swimming suit built exclusively from dazzling silver scales. It made her look like a pedigree bull terrier disguised as a mermaid.
In spite of Lorraine there wasn’t much fun on that terrace. Iris and I, having thrashed out my experiences of the night before, were both subdued. David and Fleur Wyckoff, as usual, were sitting side by side, ignoring each other as completely as two strangers who had happened to pick adjacent seats on the subway. Bill Flanders, Janet Laguno, Lover French, and Mimi Burnett had not put in an appearance. Chuck, who had brought up the subject of Dorothy with a curt announcement that the funeral had been set for the next day, seemed to be in a disgruntled mood. In old denims and a red hunting shirt, he was striding up and down, glowering at the tranquil beauty of Lake Tahoe.
Only the Count Stefano Laguno appeared content with existence. He was wearing a loud sports coat and slacks, with a blue silk scarf knotted around his throat. He probably felt he looked Western. He didn’t. He looked like something shady in one of the less reputable resorts of the Riviera. He was watching everyone from sardonic black eyes and, at the same time, eating everything the hovering butler provided.
A few minutes later Lover and Mimi appeared from the living-room, hand in hand for a change. Lorraine’s half-brother and his fiancée did not add to the festivity. Lover shed the gloom of a professional mourner. And Mimi, in trailing grey, was girl grief itself, as if all the fairies at the bottom of her garden had died during the night.
“Lorraine dear.” She gave Lorraine’s brow a feathery kiss, while her sly eyes, trying to look soulful, darted around not missing a trick. “I know how all you poor things must be feeling. I didn’t sleep a wink. Neither did Lover, did you, Lover?”
Lover shook his head glumly. “Why, sure, Mimi.”
Having snuffed out whatever spark of gaiety there might have been, they settled down to breakfast.
“This morning,” said Lorraine suddenly, “we’ll all go dashing about Lake Tahoe in the speedboats. It’s divine, really it is. And then tonight there’ll be a moon. We’ll all go down the hill and swim in the hot springs. You haven’t been in my hot swimming pool. I can never make out why it’s hot. I mean, coming straight out of the ground like that. But it’s divine.” She beamed at Dr. Wyckoff and then at Fleur, as if, insanely, she still had reconciliation on her mind. “So romantic. Everybody says so. I adore it.”
It was at this moment that Janet Laguno erupted on to the terrace. Erupted was the only word. I had never seen so volcanic an entrance. In a twisted grey skirt and a screaming magenta sweater which made her face sallow as celery, she plunged out of the french windows, glaring down at us.
“I,” she announced, “am a woman of few, short words. I am about to say one short word and say it to my so-called husband.”
She whipped round to the Count, her pearl necklace swinging pendulum-wise across her magenta bosom.
“Rat,” she said. “Rat, rat rat!”
Stefano Laguno wiped an imaginary crumb from his mouth with his napkin. He gave his wife a languid smile.
“Good morning, my dear. I gather you didn’t sleep well last night.”
“Sleep! I’ll never sleep again, so long as I’m under the same roof with you.”
Janet Laguno started scrabbling through a large, scarlet market-bag sort of pocketbook, spilling compacts and cigarettes on the terrace. She produced a letter and flourished it.
“A letter,” she said, “written in the untutored hand of a man laughingly calling himself the Count Laguno.”
Stefano stared, his face suddenly flat and sharp as a trapped fox mask. He sprang from his chair, making a lunge for the letter. Janet pulled it away, and he sank back, looking foolish.
“As a child,” said Janet ominously, “I was praised for my recitations. I trust I haven’t lost the knack. Listen, while I read this masterpiece verbatim, correcting the spelling as I go. It is addressed to the happily deceased Mrs. Dorothy Flanders.”
In a voice dripping with mock sentiment, she began:
Dorothea, mia carissima,
Who have I been dreaming of all day? Need I say? You. I spent such a terrible evening pushing The Monster around the dance floor in some expensive, vulgar night club. Only the vision of
your wonderful, wonderful face kept me sane. Darling, I thought I was a cynic, world weary, woman weary. Always after a week or so, I have tossed a woman aside like a squeezed lemon. But I have met you—and what is cynicism? A word—something that means nothing. Beloved, I am in a dream, a dream of heaven. I planned a little present for you, but The Monster guards her jewels like a dragon. There are eyes in the back of her neck. You must not be impatient, my dove. I am poor now. But The Monster has left me everything, as you know. I mourn each night that she should be so healthy. Would that could be changed. Ah, mio tesoro, with The Monster out of the way, we could make our sweet music sing to eternity, you and I.
My precious, I kiss the pillows and think of you. Addio, Dorothea of my dreams.
Your loving
Pumpkin.
By the time that extraordinary reading was over, the Count was flushing to the thinning roots of his hair. I think it was the word “pumpkin,” delivered with all of Janet’s concentrated venom, which crumpled the last defence line of his poise. The others just sat around the tables, open-mouthed, staggered out of speech.
That letter, with its preposterous literary style, had staggered me, too. Although Iris and I had decided that some sort of relationship might have existed between the Count and the man-eating Dorothy, I had never imagined anything as sordid as this.
In the blade-sharp silence, Janet folded the letter back into its envelope. Crossing her arms over the magenta sweater, she watched her husband.
“The Monster!” she snapped. “Thank you, Stefano. I’m probably one of the few wives in history to appear in her husband’s love letters as—The Monster.”
The embarrassed colour was fading from the Count’s cheeks. Most of his insolent composure was back. “I’m sorry, my dear, if you find the title unattractive. You weren’t intended to read that letter, you know.”
“So I imagine. And for your information, Pumpkin, The Monster doesn’t have eyes in the back of her neck unless they’re myopic. I knew Dorothy was as rotten as an over-ripe cantaloupe. And, heaven knows, I have no illusions about you. But I never dreamed you’d been getting your rottennesses together.”
As usual when confronted with unpleasantness, Lorraine was trying to pretend it didn’t exist. She was fluttering around Janet.
“Angel, there must be some mistake. I mean, people just don’t write letters like that. Pumpkin! It’s a forgery. Your husband’s name isn’t pumpkin. Where did you find it anyway?”
“It was pushed under my door when I woke up this morning. Some kind friend must have thought it would make good pre-breakfast reading. But it’s certainly in my husband’s fine Italian hand. So who cares where it came from?”
I cared. Dorothy was the type who would have kept compromising letters, just the way she had snitched Lorraine’s five-dollar chips, against a rainy day. Almost certainly the person who ransacked her room the night before had found that awkward document and, either from malice or for some other purpose, had slipped it under Janet’s door.
Janet was staring at the Count again. “When I left for Reno, I was prepared to divorce you, Stefano, lick my wounds and call it a day. Things are very different now. That letter hints that you were playing with the idea of murdering me and living on the proceeds with your burly blonde. ‘I mourn each night that she should be so healthy,’ indeed! Of course, I know it was just a phrase, you’d never have had the courage to go through with anything. But, not having been married to you, the police won’t know that. And I’m going to call them immediately. A little rugged prison life would do you the world of good.”
The Count smiled back at her almost blandly. “I doubt whether you or anyone in this house will call the police, my dear.”
I perked up. Janet said, “And why not?”
“Really, Janet, don’t be stupid. That’s one thing you seldom are.” The Count found a cigarette and lit it with exasperating elegance. “I had been hoping not to bring up an unpleasant subject. But your attitude leaves me no alternative. If you call the police, I shall have no compunction in letting them know that Dorothy Flanders was murdered last night. Then all the good work put in by Wyckoff and the rest of you will go for nothing.”
That was by far the most electrifying remark of that very electrified breakfast. I darted a look at Iris. Here was our murder theory coming back on us like a boomerang. Wyckoff sprang to his feet, his face gaunt as a ghost’s. Mimi, all angel child, cowered into the protective plumpness of Lover’s arm. A spurt of chatter flared and faded. Chuck Dawson swung from the terrace and barked:
“Dorothy murdered? Are you out of your head?”
“Now, now, don’t get alarmed.” The Count flicked ash into the saucer of his coffee cup. “So long as Janet doesn’t dabble in criminology, there’s nothing to be afraid of. That most indiscreet letter was written by me. I admit it. I haven’t any idea how it came into my wife’s possession, but that’s neither here nor there. What is both here and there is that Janet omitted to mention the date. It was written over a month ago. I’m afraid my ardour for Mrs. Flanders was not of a very long duration. In fact, at the end I was distressingly bored with her. So you see, in my quiet little way, I was as glad to be rid of her as the rest of you.”
So the Count’s squeezed-lemon policy had caught up with Dorothy. I made a mental note of that although there were so many more things to be noted. Fleur Wyckoff was staring at her husband. She looked so pale that I thought she was going to faint. Wyckoff himself didn’t look any too steady.
“I would like to know, Count,” he said quietly, “if you are accusing me of deliberately falsifying the death certificate. I have given it as my diagnosis that Mrs. Flanders died from a heart attack.”
Stefano Laguno showed his slightly yellowed teeth. “It didn’t look like a heart attack to me, Doctor Wyckoff. Of course, I’m not a highly paid specialist like you. But in my misspent youth I lived for a while up the Amazon, on a very soggy and unappetizing jungle rubber plantation. I have seen a man die from curare poisoning. I had no chance to examine Mrs. Flanders last night. I scarcely saw her at all. But I would be interested in your opinion of death by curare.”
I was clinging to the arms of my chair. Lorraine gave a gasp. “Curare!”
Wyckoff didn’t say anything.
The Count went on, “Of course, I have no idea who killed her or why or how. I haven’t the slightest idea why you, Wyckoff, should have decided to hush it up, or why several other people have been so eager to help you. I’m not even interested enough to find out. I have made my point clear, I believe. If my wife behaves herself, I shall take no action whatsoever. If my wife, through most unladylike spite, tries to make trouble for me—” he shrugged “—I shall make trouble for you.”
Though he lacked all other virtues, Count Stefano Laguno was at least frank. And his frankness seemed to have been too much for everyone except his wife.
Janet had been listening with astounded fury.
Suddenly she said, “Don’t be fooled by him, anyone. It’s all a preposterous sham. He knows I could have him jailed for attempted robbery, and, probably, for conspir acy to murder too. He’s just faking all this to scare me. He hasn’t a jot of evidence.”
“Of course I have no evidence, Janet, my dear.” The Count turned in his chair to give her the benefit of his most Continental smile. “But there’s one simple way to prove me right, isn’t there? All I have to do is to express my suspicions to the police. An autopsy would do the rest.”
He was looking once more at Wyckoff who was gazing back at him with a steadiness which showed either confidence or immense control.
“And are you going to demand an atuopsy, Count?”
“Nonsense.” It was Janet who broke in. “Don’t let him trick you, David.”
“There’s something else.” The Count Laguno was playing with the fringe of the tablecloth. “Once they find out that Dorothy was murdered, they will start looking for motives. When they see that letter, Janet, my dear, you will have t
he best motive of all. Spurned wife kills rival in fit of jealous rage.”
Janet’s face was stained scarlet, a shade that clashed with the magenta sweater. “Spurned wife—” she spluttered.
“Think about it, my dear.” The Count put down his napkin and rose. “I have a feeling you’re going to be sensible.”
He gave Lorraine a formal bow and strolled away from the terrace.
VII
After her husband’s departure, Janet stood speechless for a moment. Then she glared at Lorraine. “Well, my dear, it boils down to this. Either you throw Stefano out of your house or I pack up and go back to Reno. Reconciliation, indeed! Someone should take your divine ideas, tie them in pink ribbons, and give them away to the poor.”
With that, she flounced away down the terrace in the opposite direction from Laguno.
Lorraine was staring at the french window through which the Count had disappeared. “What a simply horrible man!” She turned to Wyckoff, her pug face crinkled with earnestness. “David, darling, of course Janet was right. I mean all that absurd talk about murder—he just made that up to try to keep her from calling the police, didn’t he?”
David Wyckoff shoulders were hunched. He looked much older now than his forty years. In the face of the evidence I still had to believe Flanders’ story that Wyckoff had been treating his wife. But a new thought had come. Perhaps Dorothy had had a weak heart and, even so, had been poisoned with curare.
No one moved as we waited for Wyckoff to reply.
Without looking up, he said, “You heard him, Lorraine. And last night you heard me. It’s my word against his.”
Lorraine, easily reassured, was all smiles. “Then there’s nothing to worry about. I knew there wasn’t. And that frightful man—I suppose Janet’s right. But then he is a guest. I mean, you can’t just invite people to your house and then throw them out. I’ll have to talk to Janet. Oh, if only Mr. Throckmorton would hurry up and come. And—but let’s forget it all for a while, children.” There she was whooping us up again. “I’ve had picnic lunches and things prepared. We can all go off in the speedboats over to the California side of the Lake. That’s what we’ll do. Have a lovely long day in the sun.”
Puzzle for Wantons Page 6