Puzzle for Wantons

by Patrick Quentin

  It had been Lorraine’s.

  If things had gone as scheduled, Lorraine would have played those chips instead of Dorothy.

  That was the key. It opened a door to let in a blinding light

  Dorothy had died handling Lorraine’s roulette chips. Janet Laguno had been drowned wearing Lorraine’s swimming suit—that dazzling silver suit which had gleamed in the darkness making a perfect target for a murderer, that suit which Lorraine had discarded and given to Janet on the flimsiest of whims.

  And that wasn’t all. Fleur Wyckoff had almost died that afternoon in Lorraine’s station wagon. Fleur’s trip to Reno had been quite unpremeditated. No one, with the possible exception of Laguno, could have had the time to file through the brake cable after Fleur had decided to use the car.

  But earlier in the day Lorraine had announced to all of us that she was going to take the station wagon down to the airport to pick up Mr. Throckmorton. Later she had received a wire informing her that Mr. Throckmorton had lost his reservation on the plane, but only Iris and I had heard about that.

  If it hadn’t been for that telegram, Lorraine and not Fleur would have driven off in the station wagon—to her doom.

  There was sense now where there had been nonsense before—sense which had been hopelessly distorted by chance and the feather-pated irresponsibility of Lorraine’s character. My hunch had been right. The murders were nothing but an immense fraud—a fraud brought about by a bungling murderer and a sardonic Fate.

  Three traps had been set for Lorraine Pleygel. Each trap had caught the wrong woman.

  The danger which had swooped through the house, seemingly attacking at random, had from the beginning been danger for only one person—Lorraine.

  Mimi’s death bad still to be accounted for. That, surely, could not have been merely another unsuccessful attempt on Lorraine. But there was no time then for much coherent thought. I was plagued with anxiety for Lorraine.

  A murderer who had persisted so doggedly would never stop until his purpose was fulfilled. Three women were dead but the real victim was still alive. Craig had been closer than he realized to the truth when he said the murderer might strike again.

  Of course he would strike again. If he didn’t, this whole bloody trail would end in a cul-de-sac. And he had nothing to lose. Thanks to the confusion he had created, Lorraine’s death would appear to be just another wanton attack by the maniac.

  I swallowed what was left of my drink and jumped up. My hand, as I put down the glass, was shaking. With the dreadful urgency of a dream, I ran through the dark, deserted library and out into the hall. The great staircase loomed dimly ahead of me. I started up it, hoping and praying that the truth had not come to me too late. For over an hour now, Lorraine had been alone. For over an hour the murderer had had his opportunity to steal through the darkness to her room and …

  I reached the corridor which led away from the guest rooms to the wing which Lorraine kept for herself. My footsteps chattering against the bare boards sounded deafeningly loud but I didn’t care whom I awakened. I came to the end of the corridor. I reached Lorraine’s door. I knocked on it loudly. I knocked again. I called, “Lorraine—Lorraine—”

  No sound came from inside the room. Beads of perspiration sprouted on my forehead. I knocked again. I tried the door. It should have been locked but it wasn’t. It opened inward.

  The room was impenetrably dark. I stepped in and closed the door behind me. I tried to find a light.

  “Lorraine,” I said sharply. “Lorraine, wake up. It’s me—Peter.”

  I stopped then. For, trailing through the darkness, was a sickly sweet smell, a smell that no one could mistake.

  The smell of ether.

  Momentary paralysis gave place to wild activity. I started to stumble around blindly, searching for a lamp. At last I found one. I groped for the chain and tugged it. Blinking, I swung round so that I could see the huge, canopied bed.

  The stench of ether invaded my nostrils. I stared at the figure which lay under the luxurious white satin coverlet. The bedclothes were drawn up to the neck, and I could trace the contours of the body through the thick material.

  But I could not see the face.

  That was what made it so horrible. Lorraine’s face was invisible because a pillow had been thrown over it, completely smothering her sleeping head.

  “Lorraine—”

  I sprang to the bed. I picked up the pillow and tossed it away. What I saw under the pillow sent a cold shiver through me. I could see the outlines of her features, but I still could not see her face. Wrapped viciously tight around the head was a damp Turkish towel. And from the towel the smell of the ether came up to me in a blast, turning my knees to water.

  “Lorraine—”

  I touched the shoulder under the satin coverlet. Beneath my fingers the body lay stiff and rigid—with no life.

  I felt a moment of complete despair. So it had happened. Snatching his last, desperate opportunity, the murderer had crept into Lorraine’s room, wrapped the ether-soaked towel around her sleeping head, thrown the pillow on top as a double precaution, and had stolen away, leaving her to die.

  The wheel of murder had come full circle. Lorraine had finally been trapped.

  And I had been too late to save her.

  PART SIX

  IRIS

  XIX

  I stared down. The stiff lifelessness of the body under the bedclothes had convinced me that Lorraine Pleygel was dead. The fumes of ether were making me lightheaded. Fighting against dizziness, I unwrapped the saturated towel from the face and flung it across the room.

  Lorraine’s face shimmered in and out of focus against the crumpled sheet Something, however, was out of key. The eyes of a person who had been anaestheized and smothered would surely be shut. These eyes were open. And the cheeks would be pale or bluish. These cheeks were a rosy pink. Lorraine was lying there motionless as a corpse, but her red lips were fixed in the simpering smile of a store dummy.

  As the effect of the ether began to wear off, the truth burst upon me. I grabbed the bedclothes and tore them off the prostrate form.

  The figure which lay revealed was not wearing a nightdress. It was wearing a long, lime-green evening gown, and peeking out from beneath the wide skirts were the tips of lime-green evening slippers.

  I stared at the dress and then at the vivid, pop-eyed face. I laughed from sheer relief. What I saw made no sort of sense, but this time the nonsense was on our side.

  The murderer had crept into this room with his ether and his lethal intentions. He had come and gone, convinced that the day was his. But another colossal fraud had been perpetrated.

  He had not smothered the sleeping Lorraine. He had merely murdered Lorraine’s portrait doll.

  My mind started clicking out questions. Who had set this booby trap? Lorraine herself? Had she guessed what danger she was in and thought out this fantastic trick of substituting the doll for herself in the bed? It was the sort of lunatic thing she would do. But where was she now?

  I glanced around the room. There was nothing to give me a clue. I thought of Inspector Craig sleeping the sleep of the exhausted. I had enough information now to jolt him out of the deepest dreams. But I had not been listening when Lorraine allotted him a room. I did not know where to find him.

  Iris had been there at the time, however. She probably knew. I felt guilty about my wife, anyway. She had insisted she would stay awake until I brought her the news of my interview with Craig. Nothing, I knew, would induce her to go to sleep until her curiosity had been satisfied. By this time she must have learned all of Miss Millay’s Selected Poems by heart.

  I hurried out of that room with its bizarre sham corpse and through the dark corridors to the room formerly occupied by Janet Laguno, which I had chosen as a fortress for Iris. Following my own melodramatic instructions, I signalled with four taps on the door. Footsteps pattered inside. A key scraped in the lock and the door opened.

  The light from
inside the room silhouetted a woman’s figure at the door, wearing mad, candy-striped pyjamas. I stared in astonishment because the woman standing there was not my wife.

  She was Lorraine.

  “Oh, Peter, angel,” she said, “It’s you. Come in.”

  She drew me inside, closing the door behind us. I kept staring at her stupidly.

  “What on earth are you doing here, Lorraine?”

  “Iris was scared of being alone. She lugged me out of bed and dragged me in here to keep her company.”

  I took a suspicious glance around the room. “And where is she?”

  Lorraine shrugged the candy stripes. “Oh, wandering around somewhere.”

  “Wandering around!” Anxiety hit me like a blunt instrument. “But I made her promise—you mean, she’s wandering around this no-man’s-land alone?”

  “It’s all right, sugar-pie.” Lorraine lit a cigarette. “She’d been gone quite a while and I was beginning to get anxious. But she was back just a few moments ago. She said not to worry. She was with the Inspector.”

  “The Inspector?”

  “Yes, darling. I don’t know what it’s all about, but Iris said you weren’t to worry or go searching for her.”

  “She said that?” I muttered weakly.

  “Yes.” Lorraine watched me through cigarette smoke. “Darling, whatever’s the matter? You smell kind of medicinal and you look as if you’d just seen a corpse.”

  “I have,” I said. “Your corpse.”

  “My corpse?”

  “You were lying in bed in your own room, anaesthetized and smothered.”

  I told her what I had just discovered. The absurd lashes batted over incredulous eyes.

  “The doll? The doll from the trophy room? But, Peter, who put it in my bed?”

  “I don’t know,” I said, although I was beginning to have very definite ideas of my own.

  Lorraine’s puckish face was deadly serious. “So it’s become as mad as all that. Even trying to kill me!”

  “It isn’t a question of even trying to kill you, Lorraine. You are the one the murderer’s been after from the beginning.”

  I was worrying about Iris’ mysterious escapade with the Inspector, but I felt the time had come to tell Lorraine the truth. The sooner she realized the immense danger she was still in, the safer she would be. I explained the whole crazy pattern as it had unrolled itself to me. Things had moved too quickly for me to carry my deductions to their logical conclusion. Now, however, as I watched the remnants of colour fading from Lorraine’s cheeks, the solution seemed almost ludicrously obvious.

  Lorraine dropped onto the edge of one of the beds. When I finished, she was staring down at the carpet, her candy-striped shoulders sagging. In a thin voice she asked, “But who, Peter? Who’s been trying to do this to me?”

  This was not going to be pleasant. I said, “You’ve never made a will, have you?”

  “You know I haven’t. I’d decided to make one when Mr. Throckmorton arrived. I—”

  “That’s what I thought.” I put my hands on her shoulders to steady her. “When a married woman dies intestate, her entire estate goes to her husband.”

  She looked up, her face gaunt and white as linen.

  “Peter, it can’t be. No, no. You can’t mean—”

  She stopped as a knock sounded on the door. After a swift glance at me, she called, “Who is it?”

  “It’s me, baby.” Chuck Dawson’s voice sounded from the passage, gruff and urgent. “Can I come in?”

  Lorraine sat watching the door as if it were a snake. Slowly she forced her gaze back to me. I nodded.

  She called, “Come in.”

  Chuck strode in with a travesty of his normal swagger. His blond, cowboy face looked thin and bloodless. His eyes moved to me and then settled on his wife.

  “They told me you were here,” he said jerkily. “I came. That is—I wanted to make sure you were all right.”

  Lorraine was staring at him. “I’m all right. Only by a miracle though. Peter’s just come to tell me that someone tried to murder me tonight.”

  Chuck stiffened. “Murder you! It’s not possible!”

  “Someone crept into my room to put me under ether and smother me while I was asleep. Luckily Iris had asked me to come in here with her, and somehow the portrait doll got into my bed as a booby trap.” Her eyes still searched his face. “Chuck, don’t you know anything about it?”

  He dropped on the bed next to her. His hands went out to her. With a little shudder, she got up and moved to my side.

  “Chuck, don’t you know anything about it?” she repeated.

  Chuck Dawson looked like a broken man with no fight left in him. He did not speak.

  I was watching him all the time. Inspector Craig’s words had risen again in my memory. Maybe he’s the biggest fraud of them all. I thought of Chuck’s anomalous relationship with Mimi. I thought of his startling sale of the Club that afternoon. It seemed pitifully clear. This was something that might as well be gotten over once and for all.

  “Chuck,” I said.

  That was the first time I had spoken since his entrance. He started and said, “What?”

  “You sold your club in Reno this afternoon, didn’t you?”

  He glared at me. “Why ask? You know I did.”

  “And you sold it for cash?”

  “Yeah. It was a cash deal.”

  “Then where’s the money?”

  His eyes flickered. “I took it over to the bank, of course.”

  “That isn’t possible,” I said. “It was after three when Dorothy’s funeral was over. You sold the Club later than that. All the banks would have been closed.”

  A shiver ran through his big, athlete’s body. “I—that is—”

  I came in for the kill then. “Why don’t you admit it?” I said. “You didn’t sell the Club because you wanted to take Lorraine away. You sold the Club because you had to raise cash—a lot of cash—to pay someone who was blackmailing you.” I paused. “But in the last analysis, you figured it would be easier and cheaper to murder Mimi rather than pay her off, didn’t you?”

  Chuck sprang up from the bed. He seemed to tower over us both. I found myself wishing I had my service revolver in my pocket Lorraine grabbed my arm. Her nails dug into my flesh.

  “No.” Chuck’s face was grey as cigar ash. “No. That isn’t—”

  Once again, at a dramatic moment, the door opened. This time Iris came in, shutting the door behind her. She was wearing a navy blue housecoat which flared out from her hips. She looked very beautiful. She also looked secretive and self-consciously innocent.

  She gave me a smile and turned unconcernedly to Chuck. “I’m glad you got here,” she said. “The time has come to talk of many—oh, let’s skip the walrus.”

  “Where on earth have you been?” I said to her, still keeping a wary eye on Chuck.

  “Oh, just around,” said my wife meekly.

  “You promised not to leave this room.”

  “I know, darling.” Iris grimaced. “But the little woman got to thinking and the things I got to thinking about—well, I realized something had to be done, so I did it in spite of Inspector Craig’s aversion to the sleuthing female.”

  Lorraine was staring at her. “Iris, you put that doll in the bed, didn’t you? You saved my life. You knew there was danger for me so—”

  Iris perched herself on the edge of the low vanity and lit a cigarette. “I felt awfully silly doing it, my dear, but it all turned out for the best.”

  My wife was deliberately playing for effect. She knew we were drooling at the mouth to hear what she had to say, but the actress in her was taking delight in prolonging the suspense. I could have wrung her neck.

  She looked at me, puffing blue smoke. “It all started, Peter, because it suddenly occurred to me that the maniac wasn’t a maniac at all. He was a perfectly ordinary murderer who was having lousy luck.”

  “I know,” I said peevishly. “There’s
no need to be so Mrs. Raffles about it. I figured that out, too. I realized that each murder trap was intended for Lorraine and that the whole thing went sour through a series of accidents.”

  “Oh, no, dear, not through a series of accidents. I’d say there was an extremely good reason why each murder trap ganged agley.” My wife glanced challengingly at Chuck. “Wouldn’t you, Chuck?”

  He swung away from her without speaking and moved to the window, where he stood staring out into the darkness.

  At the risk of inflating my wife’s ego even further, I had to ask, “Just how did you figure out Lorraine was the real victim? From Dorothy’s death? I did. I realized Dorothy must have been killed by some sort of poisoned roulette chip.”

  Iris looked at me condescendingly. “Peter, how clever.” She rose and crossed to a highboy from which she took a small cigarette box. She brought the box to me, removing the lid. “I would never have been smart enough to figure out the roulette chip by deduction. I just—found it. Here it is. Careful. Don’t touch.”

  I stared into the interior of the cigarette box. Lying there was a henna five-dollar roulette chip. The trap which had killed Dorothy Flanders looked almost exactly the way I had imagined it would. A succession of six tiny needle points had been inserted into the cardboard side of the chip in a fan design. Their sharp points were just visible and smeared over them were still the vestiges of some sticky, reddish brown substance.

  The curare.

  I turned to gaze at my wife’s placid face. “Where in the name of heaven did you find this?”

  Iris put the lid back on the box and returned it to the top of the highboy. “Oh, it was around,” she said maddeningly. She came back to me. “But it wasn’t the chip that started me thinking, Peter. It was something you gave me. I’m surprised you didn’t notice it yourself.”

  She leaned over the bed and picked up a book from the bedside table. I recognized it as Mimi’s copy of Edna St. Vincent Millay.

  “You told me to read it, Peter,” she said. “I’m afraid I never got beyond the fly leaf.”