Puzzle for Wantons

by Patrick Quentin

  She handed me the book.

  “Chuck,” she said softly, “turn round. You’ve got to listen.”

  Very slowly Chuck Dawson moved from the window. He stood sullenly, staring down at his blunt hands.

  “I asked you to come here and talk to us, Chuck, because there’s no point in your trying to hide things any more. You see, I guessed you sold the Club to get money to pay off a blackmailer. I guessed, too, that Mimi was the one who was blackmailing you. But I couldn’t understand what your relationship with her was until I read the inscription in that book.”

  Feeling mildly crazy, I opened the book. An inscription had been written there in a round, clumsy hand. I read:

  To Mimi Dawson, my darling wife,

  from Chuck.

  “Yes, Chuck,” Iris was saying. “That’s why she was blackmailing you, isn’t it? And that’s why she was murdered. Mimi Burnett never intended to marry Lover. She was just using him as an admission ticket to this house. She came here because she was your wife.”

  XX

  I could hardly believe my ears. A dozen different explanations had occurred to me for Mimi’s relationship to Chuck, but I had never dreamed of marriage. Neither, it seemed, had Lorraine. Her piquant face was crumbled with undiluted astonishment.

  “You were married to Mimi, Chuck? But why—why didn’t you ever tell me?”

  Chuck avoided her gaze. Iris moved across to her side.

  “Lorraine,” she said, “I’m only telling you this because the whole tawdry thing has to come out into the open now. You’ve got to believe that. Chuck couldn’t let you know about Mimi because”—she turned to Chuck, her lips tight—“because he’s still married to her. They were never divorced.”

  “Never divorced!” Lorraine echoed the words like a child repeating a phrase it had never heard before. “You mean we’re not really married?” Her voice dropped to a whisper. “It’s bigamy?”

  It was painful to see Chuck’s face. He took a fumbling step towards her. “I couldn’t tell you. I—oh, God, I swear it’s true. When I married you, I never knew it.”

  Iris cut in crisply. “Surely, if you’re planning to marry someone it’s a good idea to find out first whether or not you’re already married to someone else.”

  “What d’you know about it?” Chuck turned on her with a spurt of anger. “If only you’d listen to me instead of throwing accusations at me.” His gaze moved back to Lorraine. “I’m going to tell you the truth, baby. Will you listen? Give me a chance?”

  Lorraine gave a frigid nod. The Adam’s apple was working convulsively in Chuck’s throat.

  “Yeah, I married Mimi,” he said. “We were married seven years ago back in the East. We were both pretty young—and we just didn’t make a go of it. A couple of years ago we split up. She had some sort of ambition to be an actress. She went off to Hollywood and I drifted out here to Nevada. We didn’t get a divorce. We didn’t bother. We just both of us agreed to give the other a divorce if either of us ever wanted to get married again.”

  He paused, wetted his lips. “I more or less settled in Reno, bought a small ranch, built up a kind of reputation for myself. Didn’t make much money, but I had the right contacts. I was going along perfectly okay. Then—then sometime last year, Lorraine, I met you.”

  Lorraine stood stiff and silent.

  “Oh, I know.” Chuck’s voice was bitter. “I know what you’re going to say, that you’re one of the richest girls in the world and that I just saw a good prospect. Say it if you like. Think it. I’ve given up caring any more what anybody thinks about me. But from the first day I saw you I was crazy about you. I couldn’t believe it when you seemed to have fallen for me, too. Then that day—Lorraine, you remember. Out at Pyramid Lake. I asked you to marry me and you said you would.”

  Lorraine, Iris, and I were watching him in a strange, neutral silence.

  “I almost told you then that I was married already, that I’d have to get a divorce first, but”—he shrugged—“I didn’t. That’s all. I just couldn’t believe you’d really said yes. I was so scared that something, anything, might make you change your mind. So I kept quiet. I didn’t say anything. But that night when I went home, I wrote to Mimi. I told her I’d fallen in love with you and asked her to give me the divorce as we’d agreed.”

  He hesitated. “She wrote back. It was a nice letter. She said sure, she’d give me a divorce but she wanted to be the one to get it. She’d go to Las Vegas right away, she said, and get it if I put up the money for the expenses. She hadn’t been doing too well and didn’t have the cash. Of course I was glad to give her the money. I’d saved a little, not much, but enough. I mailed it and she went off to Vegas.”

  He was watching Lorraine still. “You remember I insisted on our not getting married right away. I was waiting the six weeks for Mimi’s divorce. And then, when the time was up, Mimi wrote me from Vegas that the divorce had gone through. I wrote back at once thanking her and telling her you and I were getting married the next day. And we did. We flew down to Mexico.” His voice went husky. “Thank heaven, we decided to keep it secret.”

  “I might have guessed,” he said, “that there was a snag in it. But I’d trusted Mimi. It never occurred to me that she’d do me dirt. When she called and said the divorce was okay, I took her word for it. I didn’t bother to confirm it Then, a week after you and I were married, Mimi showed up in Reno at my place. She didn’t pull her punches. She came right out and told me that she’d never divorced me at all. She tricked me into committing bigamy. She’d gotten herself the neatest racket in the world. Now I was married to Lorraine Pleygel, she said, money meant nothing to me. She’d started the proceedings in Vegas, she’d established residence. She would be able to get the divorce any day she wanted it. She was willing to keep quiet and get the divorce as soon as I or Lorraine gave her one hundred thousand dollars in cash. If I didn’t play ball, she was going to the press and have the whole story spread over the front pages by suing me for bigamy.”

  His hands went out in a helpless gesture. “She had me just where she wanted me. The bigamy suit wouldn’t just have affected me; it would have thrown Lorraine’s name into every scandal sheet in the country. What could I do? I knew when I was licked. I promised that somehow I’d raise the money for her.”

  Lorraine’s pale lips half parted as if she were going to speak, but she didn’t say anything.

  Chuck went on. “Don’t you understand, Lorraine? I couldn’t possibly have gone to you and asked you to buy me off from Mimi for one hundred thousand dollars. You didn’t even know of her existence, let alone that I was married to her. It—well, I was sure if ever you heard about it, you’d be through with me for ever. Somehow I had to raise that money on my own hook. That’s why I asked you to finance the Club. I’ve always had a flair for that kind of thing. I had the right contacts. I thought I had a chance to raise the hundred grand and still pay you back your original investment. I took crazy chances. Gambled everything on making a success of the Club. Nothing else mattered to me expect to raise that dough for Mimi because until then I knew that neither of us had a chance for happiness.”

  I broke in. “But even with a big-time gambling club, clearing a hundred thousand dollar profit isn’t child’s play. As the months went by, I suppose Mimi got impatient. That’s why she hitched herself on to poor Lover. She used him so she could get into this house and keep a constant threat over your head.”

  Chuck did not reply. He was still staring hollow-eyed at Lorraine.

  Iris spoke then. Softly she said, “And things came to a crisis this week, didn’t they, Chuck, because Mr. Throckmorton was coming. Lorraine was going to tell him about the secret marriage. You knew Mr. Throckmorton, as Lorraine’s guardian and a hardheaded lawyer, would try to find out everything he could about you. There was a big risk of his finding out the marriage was bigamous. You realized you had to get Mimi back to Vegas to complete the divorce so you could marry Lorraine again before Mr. Throckmorton
came. You were ready to promise Mimi anything, but she was through with promises then. She demanded hard cash, every cent you had. That’s why you had to sell the Club. Mimi was planning to go to Vegas tonight and get the divorce tomorrow, wasn’t she? And she was taking with her in that suitcase every cent in the world that you owned.”

  Chuck passed a hand across his forehead. “What’s the use?” he muttered. “You seem to know everything, anyway.”

  “So you were going to pay Mimi off?” Lorraine’s voice was small and bleak, the voice of a woman who has seen everything crumble to dust and ashes. “Then, at the last minute, you killed her instead. That doesn’t seem so terrible to me. Any woman who could do a thing like that deserves to die. But—but that isn’t all, is it? Two other women had been killed before that. They had been killed because they had fallen into traps set for me. You say you loved me. And yet, just because you were in a hole and needed money to save yourself, you were willing to try to kill me twice. Love!” A laugh was wrenched out of her. “That’s the sort of love I got. A murderer’s love.”

  Chuck seemed too dazed to take in what she was saying.

  “Go on,” said Lorraine. “Why don’t you admit it and get it over with? Why don’t you admit you killed Dorothy and Janet—as well as Mimi?”

  Chuck took a step towards her. “Lorraine—”

  Iris was watching Lorraine, too. There was an enigmatic smile on her lips.

  “Oh, no, Lorraine dear,” she said. “That isn’t true. That isn’t the way it happened at all.”

  Lorraine swung round to her. “Iris, what are you saying? What do you mean?”

  “Peter said that it was sheer accident which saved you from those murder traps. He’s not right. You’re alive now simply because all the time somebody was doing everything humanly possible to keep you safe. Think, Lorraine. Who pulled you away from the roulette table just before you started to play those chips? Who kidded you out of wearing that silver swimming suit?”

  She took Lorraine’s arms and stared straight into her face. “You should be very proud to have Chuck. He did a lot of terrible things but he did them because he thought it was the only way to save your life, not to mention your reputation. If it wasn’t for Chuck, you’d have been dead days ago.”

  Iris smiled at Chuck radiantly. “I’m sorry I was so rude. I didn’t realize you’d been tricked into the bigamy. I see it all now and I, for one, believe you.”

  We were all watching her in expectant silence. A confused flush spread over Chuck’s face.

  “I know why you’ve been holding back,” said my wife, “but don’t you see? You’ve got to tell the truth now. You’ve got to tell them who the murderer really is.”

  XXI

  Things had been racing so quickly that I felt as if I had been left at the post. We were all watching Chuck. Lorraine, when she had accused him of the murders, had looked like a woman signing her own death warrant. Now there was a glimmer of hope in her eyes. Iris seemed completely self-assured, but I had a shrewd suspicion that she did not know as much as she wanted Chuck to think she did.

  “Well, Chuck,” she said firmly, “go on. Tell us. It’s better coming from you.”

  “I guess it is.” Chuck ran an uneasy hand around the collar of his cowboy shirt. It was almost as if he were trying to loosen an invisible lasso. “It’s going to be hard to explain. Iris is right. I’ve done a lot of terrible things. I’ve protected a murderer whose guts I hate. I’ve lied. I’ve even put Lorraine into appalling danger although I never realized it at the time. If I hadn’t been a coward, I guess I’d have gone to the police right away and faced the music. But I was a coward—a coward because I was scared of losing Lorraine.”

  His gaze moved starkly to Lorraine. “What I did, I did partly to save my own skin. That’s true. If I’d acted any other way, I’d be under arrest now, probably as a murder accessory, certainly as a charlatan who’d exploited Lorraine Pleygel through a fake marriage. But that’s only a small thing. Mostly, I was thinking of you, trying not to lose you, trying to save you from scandal because I love you.”

  He gave a shrug. “The laugh’s on me in the end. When you’ve heard what I did, you’ll be through with me, anyway—even if you aren’t already.”

  Lorraine said quietly, “Tell us everything, Chuck. Don’t hold anything back.”

  “I guess it’s easiest to begin with Mimi. After I’d promised her the hundred grand, she stayed on in Vegas, got some sort of a job there in a night club. But she didn’t like waiting. As the months went by and I didn’t come across, she started getting suspicious. She’d have come to Reno on her own hook to make trouble, but something better turned up.”

  “The something better,” put in Iris, “was Lover?”

  “Yeah. She met him at the night club. She knew who he was, of course, and she realized it’d be a cinch if she could use him to get herself invited to Lorraine’s where she could be right on the spot and really put the screws on me. She’d always been attractive to older men. She went into her fragile little poetry-lover act. He fell for it hook, line, and sinker. After a couple of days, he was so nuts about her he’d asked her to marry him.”

  He paused. “She hadn’t figured on doing that good a job, but, as Lover’s fiancée, she was in an ideal position. The very day she arrived her, she got me alone and told me that if I didn’t give her the dough right away she’d have a showdown with Lorraine and blackmail it out of her. I was desperate. The Club was running very well and I was in sight of being able to raise the hundred grand without Lorraine’s ever knowing. I pleaded with Mimi. I even handed her a couple of thousand to keep her happy. Finally, I managed to make her promise me a little more time.”

  He looked down at his big hands. They weren’t very steady. “About a week later Lorraine dragged those women in from Reno and had her crazy idea of reconciling them to their husbands. What happened next I didn’t know about at the time. Mimi told me later. But it seems that after dinner the first night the husbands were here, when we were all getting ready to go to Reno, Mimi went to Lover’s room. She’d run out of cigarettes and she knew he always kept some in the top drawer of his bureau. He wasn’t there. She went to the drawer and opened it. Inside, lying next to the cigarettes, was a woman’s compact. She was always inquisitive. She thought it was queer his having a woman’s compact She picked it up and opened it.”

  Chuck Dawson nodded towards the cigarette box which stood on the top of the highboy. “Inside the compact, she found the roulette chip, fixed with the needles and the poison and everything.”

  Lorraine gave a gasp. “Then it was Lover!”

  At last, after days of perplexity, I knew the name of the murderer. For some moments, while Chuck was talking, I had anticipated this and realized how wide of the mark my own half-digested accusation of Chuck had been. But, absurdly enough, instead of feeling embarrassment or shock, I merely found myself thinking how fantastic it was that we should all still refer to Walter French by Mimi’s repulsive nickname.

  “Lover!” Chuck gave a harsh laugh. “A hell of a name that turned out to be. Mimi couldn’t make head or tail of the chip, of course. She was standing there with the compact open in her hand when Lover came in. He grabbed it away from her, shut it and slipped it in his pocket. He watched her in a funny way. Then he said, ‘Well, I was planning to keep you out of this for a while. But now you’ve seen the chip, I think it’s better for you to know.’ She still didn’t get it, and he started to explain. Until then she’d always thought of him as a sentimental, bumbling old fool, but the story he told was more cold-blooded and cynical than anything she’d ever heard.”

  He went on. “In the first place, he told Mimi quite calmly that he’d found out she was legally married to me. Mimi had always been careless about her things. She’d kept that book of poems I’d given her when we were first married, and Lover had found it and read the inscription the way Iris did tonight. On the sly, he’d put private detectives on her track in Vegas and th
ey’d ferreted out the whole story. She thought her game was up. But, instead of threatening to expose her, he started to praise her. He loved her all the more, he said, for being an ambitious girl who knew how to take care of her own interests. All his life, he said, he’d been humiliated by being poor while his half sister was one of the richest girls in the world. He’d decided it was time for him to take care of his own interests, too. He’d thought out a plan which would make them both rich, which would make any scheme of hers look like chicken feed.”

  Chuck fumbled a cigarette out of his pocket. “He told her what the roulette chip was then, told her he was planning to murder Lorraine with it that night. She hadn’t made a will. Her marriage to me was bigamous which could easily be proved. If she died before I could legalize the marriage, her whole fortune would go to Lover as her nearest living relative. When everything had blown over, he would marry Mimi, and they would be in clover for the rest of their lives.”

  His voice was grim now. “The set-up was ideal for murder. Lorraine had filled the house with husbands and wives who were at each other’s throats. All of them would be crowded around the roulette table. No one, Lover said, could ever trace the chip back to him, and there was a big chance of the police’s supposing that the chip had been intended for one of the wives by one of the husbands and that Lorraine had been killed by mistake. Whatever happened, there’d be so much confusion that his chance of going undetected was immense.”

  He went on. “When Lover’d finished, he gave a laugh and said, ‘I’m glad I’ve told you. You’re here to blackmail Chuck. Blackmail isn’t very different from murder. I can count on your not going to the police. One has to take care of one’s interests, I want you. Now that you know the plan, you’ll have to stick by me once Lorraine is dead, because to all intents and purposes you’ll be an accessory before the fact.’”

  It was a story callous enough to make the blood freeze in your veins.