Puzzle for Wantons

by Patrick Quentin

  “Here, honey.” I threw it to my wife. “Something nice and feminine for you to read.”

  Iris caught the book. She read the title. “Edna St. Vincent Millay,” she cooed. “How divine! There’s nothing like poetry to nourish the soul.”

  “Exactly,” I said.

  Iris could bear it no longer then. She hurled the book down on the bed and flung the nightdress after it in frustrated fury.

  “Damn Edna St. Vincent Millay,” she said. “Damn Inspector Craig and his misogyny. Oh, damn the single standard!”

  XVIII

  When I joined the Inspector in the little yellow room, the fire was still crackling in the hearth. The atmosphere was incongruously peaceful. The police doctor was with Craig, and they were examining the reddish brown smear on Dorothy’s glove.

  “Doc Brown here’s been comparing this stain with the curare, Lieutenant,” Craig said. “He’s inclined to think the stain was made by the stuff on the darts. Of course it’ll have to be analysed before we can be sure.” He sighed. “They’ll be analysing the darts, too. And we’ll have to get an exhumation order for Mrs. Flanders. There’s a lot of things to be done before we can get really started.”

  He told me his men had removed Mimi’s body and, having done all that could be done that night, had left. They would be back early in the morning to examine the wrecked station wagon. After a few moments the doctor departed, and Craig and I were alone.

  The Inspector looked exhausted. He sat a few moments, staring into the fire. Then he filled his pipe and lit it. His lips drooped dispiritedly around the pipe stem.

  “Well, Lieutenant, I don’t rightly know why I asked you to stay up. I guess I’ve heard about everything I’m likely to hear from the others. They talked my head off, all of them. Not that it helped me straighten anything out.” He stared at me rather wintrily. “We know Miss Burnet was murdered. I guess we’ve got to accept the fact that Mrs. Flanders and Mrs. Laguno were murdered, too, but that’s as far as it goes. Frankly I’ve got no more idea of what’s back of this business than I had before I even heard about it.”

  I wasn’t surprised to learn that Inspector Craig was as confused as I. Most murder cases provide too little to go on. This one provided much too much—too many bodies, too many motives.

  “It’s crazy,” mused Craig. “Almost all of ’em have a motive for one or other of the murders. Some have a motive for a couple of them. But there isn’t any one person, so far as I can see, who could possibly have wanted to kill Mrs. Flanders, Mrs. Laguno, and Miss Burnett—let alone attack Mrs. Wyckoff into the bargain.”

  “Precisely,” I said, which wasn’t helpful.

  “Now it might make sense,” said Craig, “if Flanders had killed his wife and Laguno had killed his wife and Wyckoff had tried to kill his wife and either French or Dawson or Miss Pleygel had killed Miss Burnett. But”—he flung out his hands—“four murders and four different murderers! Who ever heard of four murderers under one roof. Don’t they say that there’s only one potential murderer in about three million people?”

  Inspector Craig leaned forward and pushed the dying logs into place with a poker. That domestic gesture made him seem more human. He turned to me with a grimace.

  “There’s only one way to figure, Lieutenant. Somebody’s killed three women and tried to kill a fourth. He can’t have any real motive. I mean any real, sane motive.” He puffed ferociously on the pipe. “There we are. This thing just can’t be sane. There’s someone in this house with a bug in his brain. All these women except Miss Burnett were wives planning to divorce their husbands. And Miss Burnett, so far as I can see, was double-crossing her fiancé, which kind of puts her in the same category. Someone’s crazy, and that person’s killing off women who don’t stick by their men. I’m no psychologist or whatever you call them but I must admit I never heard of anyone nutty in just that way. However”—he shrugged again—“what else is there to believe, Lieutenant? Just tell me. What else is there to believe?”

  I stared back at him. “It’s enough to give Freud high blood-pressure.”

  The Inspector’s mouth moved in a fleeting smile. “You’ve been around, Lieutenant. I guess you never came across anything as crazy as this.”

  “Compared with the Plegyel mansion, the St. Valentine’s massacre was a taffy pull.”

  Craig seemed lost in thought. “And yet, Lieutenant, what gets me is that the murderer has to be one of the people I talked to tonight. All the time I was talking to them, I was saying to myself, ‘One of you people’s got to be bats, insane, a maniac.’ But”—he took the pipe out of his mouth and pointed it at me—“they all seemed sane enough to me. All of them, maybe, except Flanders. He’s just been discharged from the marines, he told me. He seemed kind of jittery, embittered. I guess you can never be sure with a guy like that, poor devil. Shell-shocked, war neurosis—”

  “I agree,” I said. “When he got here, Flanders was one jump ahead of a breakdown. You could tell that. And yet my wife and I’ve decided Flanders is the one we could definitely eliminate. Before Janet Laguno was killed in the swimming pool, the lights were fused. It’s much too much of a coincidence for the lights to have fused accidentally. Someone must deliberately have fused them. Anyone could have done that except Flanders. At the time, he was in the pool with my wife and myself.”

  “Maybe he had a confederate,” said the Inspector.

  “There you go tripping yourself up. That’s just the point. If the murderer’s a maniac, he couldn’t have had a confederate. A murderer killing in cold blood can have confederates. But not a motiveless maniac.”

  “I guess so.” Craig looked sombre. “But the others, apart from Flanders—do any of them strike you as the kind of person who’d go berserk and kill women just for the fun of it?”

  “They don’t,” I admitted.

  “That’s the point. In my day I’ve seen a couple of homicidal maniacs. By and large, homicidal maniacs don’t look like ordinary citizens. That’s my experience. I don’t go for this Jekyll-and-Hyde storybook stuff. It’s the bunk.”

  “Okay,” I said. “You don’t think there’s any sane motive for the murders and you don’t think any of the suspects is a maniac. So what do you believe?”

  He grinned weakly. “There you’ve got me, Lieutenant. I just don’t know.” His dogged face went solemn again. “I can tell you one thing. I’ve met up with a lot of characters in my time, Lieutenant. I know a fraud when I see one and it strikes me there’s plenty of frauds right in this house. That Count, he’s phony as they come. And Wyckoff—he gave me lot of glib talk about why he’d diagnosed Mrs. Flanders’ death as heart failure. I didn’t altogether go for it. I’m not saying he’s not a good doctor, but I think he may well be pretty much of a fraud, too. And, from what I’ve picked up, this Miss Burnett and this Mrs. Flanders—they were both frauds from way back. For a wealthy, prominent woman, I don’t think much of Miss Pleygel’s taste in friends.”

  He paused. “And, on top of it all, she’s married secretly to Chuck Dawson! Dawson’s been around these parts some years. Everyone seems to know him. Most of ’em like him, too. But I doubt whether you could find one person in Nevada who knows exactly who he is or where he comes from. Maybe he’s the biggest fraud of them all.”

  “So what?” I asked. “So they’re all a bunch of frauds. What does that prove?”

  “There you go again. So far as I can see, it proves just exactly nothing.” The Inspector knocked out his pipe and slipped it into his pocket. “But there’s one thing I’m sure about, Lieutenant. I wish I wasn’t.” His gaze moved sombrely from the fire to my face. “Three murders—almost four murders—have been committed in three days. Since I can’t figure out any reason why the whole thing started, I can’t figure out any reason why it should stop.” He gave a sardonic laugh, “I’ll be in bad enough with the D.A. already for letting things get this far. If anything else happens, it’ll be almost as tough for me as for the next victim.”

  Tha
t brought my own anxiety to the surface again. “Don’t think I’m not worried, too, Inspector. You’ve only got a reputation to lose. I’ve got a wife.” Impulsively I added, “I wonder if you’d give me a break.”

  “What is it?”

  “I’m supposed to be on leave. I’m due to report back to my ship in ten days. Inspector, you don’t suspect me or my wife, do you?”

  Craig looked shocked. “Holy mackerel, no. You—or Iris Duluth? She’s my favourite movie actress.”

  “Then let us clear out of this place tomorrow, will you? I want a chance to be alone with my wife somewhere where she isn’t liable to end up with a knife in her back. Will you do that? Will you let us go? We’ll keep you posted, of course. You’ll always know where to find us.” Inspector Craig was watching me. Suddenly he grinned. “That’s the least I can do for the Navy,” he said.

  I felt relief pouring through me. I grabbed his hand and shook it. “Thanks, Inspector. That’s big of you.”

  He was still grinning. “Think you’ll be able to get your wife to look at it your way? From what I’ve seen of her, she’s a determined young lady and she seems to have her mind fixed on figuring out these murders.”

  “Don’t worry,” I said. “I can always carry her off over my shoulder if need be.”

  The Inspector glanced at his watch and rose. “Well, I guess we’re not going to get anywhere tonight. I’m all in. I’m hitting the hay.” He paused. “By the way, before you walk out on me, Lieutenant, I wish you could give me a lead. You know these people much better than I do.”

  “From the start,” I said, “my wife and I’ve figured out only one lead, and that’s to concentrate on how Mrs. Flanders was killed. Anyone could have drowned Mrs. Laguno in the pool; anybody could have crept out and bashed Miss Burnett on the head in the garage; but Mrs. Flanders was killed in some fancy way. If only you could figure out how it was done, there’s a good chance you might be able to pin it on some one person. Once you did that, half the battle would be won.”

  The Inspector didn’t seem to think much of that lead. He grunted. “Well, I guess we’ll know more about that after the autopsy and the analyses. Maybe you’ve got something, though.” He yawned and started for the door. “Coming up?”

  Now that I knew Iris and I would be able to pack up and go as soon as morning came, I felt like a man released. All sense of urgency left me. There was a whisky decanter on a side table. I was in the mood for a nightcap.

  “No, Inspector,” I said. “I think I’ll stick around just for a while longer. Maybe I’ll get an inspiration.”

  “Let’s hope so.” Inspector Craig reached the door, opened it, murmured, “Good night,” and closed the door behind him.

  I poured mysef a drink and went back to the fire, relaxing in my chair, trying to think of a place where a man could take a movie-star wife without the local populace bringing out the brass band.

  I slipped into a reverie thinking out all the nice things Iris and I could do to make up for the unappetizing days of murder and malice we had spent under Lorraine’s roof. After a while, however, the unpleasant realities of the moment pushed the rosy dreams of the future out of my mind, and I found myself back struggling with the problem which, after only a few hours, seemed to have defeated Inspector Craig.

  The Inspector’s voice trailed through my thoughts. It strikes me there’s plenty of frauds in this house. That statement was far more accurate than he knew. Lorraine’s house party was a fraud’s convention.

  “I wouldn’t wonder,” I reflected gloomily, “if the murderer isn’t the biggest fraud of them all.”

  That thought had been idle enough. But, as I mulled it over, I sat up straight in my chair. Taken all together, the murders did seem motiveless. But what if they were deliberately motiveless? What if that chain of random murders had been a colossal fraud? What if someone with a sound and solid reason for murdering one of those women had deliberately killed the others to create the illusion of a homicidal maniac and thereby camouflage his own motive?

  The idea fascinated me. I was all set to rush upstairs and present it to the Inspector. But, as common sense took the place of enthusiasm, I found myself losing confidence. My theory was logical enough as a theory. But did it bear up in real life? Could anybody be as inhuman as that—inhuman enough to kill three innocent women purely as a smoke screen?

  Lorraine’s friends were frauds, but surely none of them could be as monstrous as that.

  I subsided into my original state of frustration, but that flight of fancy had whetted my deductive appetite. For want of a better lead, I started to chew on the one I had given the Inspector—the problem of how Dorothy Flanders had been killed.

  The police doctor thought that the stain on the finger of Dorothy’s glove had been made by the arrow poison. If he was right, Iris’ theory about its merely being dye from one of the henna roulette chips was wrong. As those two reflections merged in my mind, I had my second inspiration in so many minutes. Iris’ experiment with the chip and the wet towel had brought to our attention something which should have been obvious from the start—that the colour of the roulette chips was the same as the colour of the curare.

  In other words, if curare had been smeared on one of those five-dollar roulette chips, the person handling the chip would not have noticed that anything was wrong.

  This elementary deduction seemed to lift a veil. With sudden clarity I saw exactly how Dorothy Flanders must have been killed. And, as I saw it, it seemed impossible that I shouldn’t have realized it before.

  Someone had made a crude poison trap out of a roulette chip. I could only guess at its exact construction, but it would have needed no particular expenditure of time or ingenuity. It would be simple, for example, to thrust a couple of broken-off needle points, smeared with curare, into the side of a chip. The curare, merging with the colour of the chip, would make the tiny points all but invisible. It would have been simple, too, for anyone in our party to have slipped a poisoned chip on to Dorothy’s pile at the roulette table. A roulette player invariably handles and straightens his pile of chips before playing. Under normal circumstances, Dorothy would have pricked her finger and died right there in Chuck’s Club. Under normal circumstances, there would probably have been no mystery whatsoever about the manner of her death.

  But the circumstances had not been normal, for one very good reason. Dorothy had been wearing her long leather gloves when she played. The smear on the finger showed where she had touched the curare, but, as Iris had already deduced, the leather of the gloves had been too tough for a needle to penetrate. If it hadn’t been for her greed, Dorothy woud probably have been alive to this day and some wretched little croupier at Chuck’s Club would have been the victim. But Dorothy had been greedy. She had bundled half her chips into her pocketbook without cashing them in. Among those chips had been the poisoned one.

  The smallest details of that night came back to me with extraordinary vividness as I continued my excited reconstruction. When the sandwich had been brought to her in the Del Monte, Dorothy had peeled off her gloves. She had opened her pocketbook to put them away. She had noticed me glance into the pocketbook and, in her embarrassment at having me discover she had snitched the chips, she jammed the gloves in with unwonted violence. I even remembered how she had tugged her hand out of the bag as if she had been stung. I had never thought that gesture suspicious simply because I had attributed its nervous violence to the awkwardness of the situation.

  But now its significance was only too clear. When she jammed her gloves into the pocketbook, her finger had jabbed against the poisoned chip which had been lying edge-wise with the others in the bag. The remains of the curare, expedited by Dorothy’s heart condition, had succeeded at the Del Monte where it had failed at Chuck’s Club. Iris and I had been right in believing the pocketbook had been a poison trap. Our only error had been in supposing that the murderer had deliberately framed it as such.

  The murderer had intended to kill
Dorothy at Chuck’s Club. It had been as simple as that. The confusion which surrounded the crime had been due, not to deviousness on the part of the murderer, but to the sheer accident of Dorothy’s behaviour. True, the murderer must have managed to sneak the poisoned chip out of Dorothy’s pocketbook after the murder. But that had not been part of his original plan. He had merely adapted himself to a situation beyond his control.

  The more I thought about it, the surer I became that I had stumbled on the truth. Rather dejectedly, however, I realized that my discovery did nothing to narrow the sphere of suspicion. Everyone had been milling around the roulette table during the few moments before Dorothy played. Any member of the party had the chance to slip the poisoned chip on to Dorothy’s pile.

  A third thought came then which had so much punch to it that I found my brain reeling. A poisoned roulette chip would have been easy enough to put together, but it certainly could not have been manufactured on the spur of the moment. The needle points, or whatever had been used, had to be obtained. The dart with the curare had to be stolen from the trophy room. In other words that lethal instrument must definitely have been made by the murderer before we left Lorraine’s house for Reno, and he must have taken it to Chuck’s Club with the deliberate intention of killing Dorothy at the roulette table. It seemed strange enough to me that anyone should have chosen so public and precarious a method of murder. But something was far stranger than that.

  Although the murderer must have constructed the poison trap earlier in the evening, no one knew, before we left for Reno, that Dorothy was going to play roulette. She had said nothing about it; she hadn’t even expressed the remotest interest in the game. In fact, it had been an accident that she had played the chips at all.

  Dorothy Flanders had played roulette simply because Lorraine, who bought the chips, had decided at the last minute not to play. The pile of chips into which the poison trap had been slipped had not been Dorothy’s pile of chips.