Date for Murder (13 page)

Grant flushed. “Who told you that?”

“I heard, that’s all. You were stirring around after daylight, sometime.”

Grant looked at Leona’s door and grinned a little lopsidedly. “Chief, what would you do if you were next door to a woman as lovely as that and she left the door unlocked?”

The Chief grinned a little. “Yeah, I guess. But how come you pretended to be stiff afterward? How come you didn’t let Bayless wake you up?”

Grant shook his head. “I hadn’t slept it all off, Chief. When I went back to bed the second time I was still pretty wobbly. I don’t remember hearing your policeman trying to waken me.”

The Chief only grunted. The sound was noncommittal. He said, “When you did get up the first time, you went in there?” He jerked his head at the next room.

“I did.” Grant was grinning now while he lighted a cigaret. He seemed wholly unconcerned to what they might think.

“How long did you stay?”

The boy’s face tensed a little and he blew out his match with altogether too much studied casualness to suit Mark.

“I went right back to bed, Chief, Leona wasn’t in there.”

“Y
OU
know,” the Chief said, “this thing gets more mixed up all the time.” He leaned on one elbow and dolorously picked at a crisp salad. Occasionally he dropped his fork long enough to reach for a cup of coffee. “It’s the damnedest thing.”

Mark grinned in sympathy and put the finishing touches on a hamburger. “We’ve come a long way since this morning, Chief,” he reminded him. In the privacy of the booth at Mickey’s he leaned forward. “Let’s outline it and see what we have so far.

“Frank Manders went to bed at three o’clock. About ten to four Myra and I went off. At four o’clock, Grant Manders passed out and Clinton Jeffers took him upstairs.” He paused for the Chief to catch up. “Then they all went to bed. At five-thirty Link caused a stink that woke almost everybody up. At seven, Catrina came from her house and saw the French doors closing in the Major’s room. That almost puts the time between five-thirty and seven.”

“Yeah, it does. Only the way we got it figured them dates was in there since God knows when that night. He just happened to eat ‘em after he caused the ruckus.”

“Meaning,” Mark said, “that it didn’t apply to the motive for murder.”

“Not unless some guy went in there, substituted dates in front of his eyes and watched him eat ‘em, die and then hauled the body out.”

“That’s very probable,” Mark said. “Then at eight o’clock Idell got up and so did Leona. Ten minutes later Idell called me, and then she and Leona tried to revive Link. There was no water in his lungs, of course. I came at eight-thirty; you and Bayless at nine. Approximately at nine-thirty Catrina was burying her canary—and the murderer was out of the house. That was just before Bayless went to wake them up. At ten Henderson saw Catrina in the yard.”

The Chief grunted. “So there’s an alibi. At nine-thirty they was all still in bed.”

“Yes. All but Chunk Farman, Leona and Idell.”

“We know no dame could have hauled that body away anyway,” the Chief said. “So if one of them is mixed up in it, she must have had a confederate.”

“True,” Mark said. He grimaced when he thought of Idell willfully plotting a murder. It was much easier to imagine Leona doing that very thing.

“This Taylor dame,” the Chief said, as if he were reading Mark’s thoughts, “told me she heard practically everything that was going on. She don’t miss nothing. She lay in bed there, reading for a while and just thinking, the way I got it. She heard plenty, I guess. More’n she’s telling us.”

“Could she give you any times?” Mark asked.

The Chief grunted. “Said she didn’t look at her watch every time a door opened or closed. But she heard the ruckus at five-thirty and didn’t say a damned word. Didn’t even peek out to see what was going on. I’ll bet she had her ear glued to the door, though.”

“What else?’ Mark was using a sheet of the Chief’s notebook now, drawing a diagram of the hallway. He numbered each door and wrote names at the bottom of the sheet, putting the corresponding name and number together, and added the number of times each door had opened.

“She heard noises before five-thirty,” the Chief said. “From Jeffers’ room. Sounded like he was having a tough time getting to sleep, tossing around and what have you. He opened his French doors, too. Only what in hell he wanted with the outside air is more’n I can figure.”

“That was before five-thirty?” Mark asked.

“Yeah. Well, then she says she heard him open his outer door later, but she didn’t hear him walking down the hall, and he was tossing around then, so she guessed he just opened it to look out or something. She heard Farman’s door open about an hour after the ruckus, and he went somewhere.”

“You’re sure it was he and not his cousin?” Mark asked.

“She didn’t know for sure,” the Chief admitted. “Farman is pretty light and the rug in the hall is pretty thick. Well, after that, she heard doors popping all over. There was noises from Grant’s room like he was tossing. He’s to the right of her, next to Idell. And she heard Idell’s door open at eight. She heard doors from the other end of the hall in there, but she said she was too far away to catch where they were.”

“But she didn’t say where she was when Grant went in there?” Mark pointed out.

“Hell, no. Otherwise she was sure damned free with her information.”

“And all this time she didn’t get up once to see what all the trouble was about?”

The Chief laughed. “No. Says she poked her head out the first night to see what it was all about—seems they all roam around like a bunch of wild animals—and saw Link going into Maybelle Farman’s room. Decided it wasn’t none of her business then, I guess.”

Mark said, “Maybelle Farman!”

“Yeah. I asked Maybelle about it, before she went off with her headache. She said Leona was a cat.” He chuckled. “I guess that gave her the headache.”

Mark scratched his jaw. “Well,” he said, “look at it from the motive angle. There’s Chunk Farman. We have his love for Idell. How much of her trouble he knows we’re not sure. Then this about Link going into Maybelle’s room might have something to do with it.”

“You mean what the old guy said about Link thinking he would blackmail him with that letter?”

“Just that.”

“Hell, the guy’s the son of a bum; maybe he’s a bum, too.” The Chief’s round face twisted into a scowl. “I don’t like blackmailers.”

“Maybe somebody else didn’t too,” Mark grinned cheerfully. “By the way, did you search Link’s car for papers or anything?”

“Just routine check,” the Chief said. “The girl was driving. But we’re getting the guys that shot at her. Got the L. A. force on them. We figure they was local hoodlums from there, not Eastern torpedoes. The L. A. detective bureau said it sounded like Wop Conteri to them. They’re going to corral him for us.”

“Good enough,” Mark said, “but I’d search the car for anything Link might have put there. He didn’t keep it on him, if that means anything.”

“The New York police are going through his stuff there,” the Chief said.

“All right. So we have Chunk Farman. Motive; plenty of opportunity. He was dressed, his hair wet, and he went out around the time Catrina was killed. He said he went to see Maybelle. She could be an alibi for him easily enough. It looks good circumstantially.”

“Plenty good. I’m still thinking I’ll haul him in on suspicion.”

“All right, then there’s Grant Manders. He was either playing possum or really sleeping it of—the second time. He was up, and gave us a story about Leona not being in her room. That could be used to throw suspicion. He had opportunity both times, and he had plenty of motive if those debts mean anything. I hope we get a report on them.”

“You will.”

“There’s Clint Jeffers. He had opportunity the first time. He was in the john the second time, but nobody can prove it. He used to gamble with Link and lost money. He hated a cheater. If he’s the kind of guy that holds a grudge, then he might have fixed it if Link chiselled him out of very much dough.”

“Or Link might have been blackmailing him, huh? If he was the kind of guy to get blackmailed.”

Mark remembered what Myra had said about Clinton Jeffers and grinned. “He could be that kind of guy,” he admitted.

“The uncle had plenty of reason but not much chance with that cast on his leg. Not unless he hired somebody.”

“That’s right,” Mark conceded “That brings up the women. With the exception of the fact they might have had a confederate to do the rough work, any of them could have needled those dates.”

“All but Cartwright,” the Chief said.

Mark said, “Even her. What about her dawn stroll?”

The Chief grinned. “Yeah, little Myra went on the prowl, didn’t she.”

“You make it sound misleading,” Mark grinned. “I rather imagine she was heading toward Manders’. She told me she stopped a few hundred yards away from their western boundary.”

“I’ll bet she stopped a few hundred yards west,” the Chief grunted. “Not with that many men in that house, she didn’t.”

Mark said heavily, “So she went in, put poison in Link’s dates after waking him up to feed them to him, and then carried him over her shoulder to the pool.”

“Hell, the guy didn’t eat them dates until after five-thirty.”

“That was sheer luck,” Mark surmised. “They couldn’t have been put there when he was in his room—after the scene in the hallway.”

“You think the Queen did it, huh? She hated him.”

“I don’t know,” Mark said. “Anyone, of course. Certainly the Queen had motive and opportunity—but what about getting him to the pool?”

“That pool business has got me nutty,” the Chief said. “How would anybody know when he was dead, huh?”

“I imagine the murderer checked up,” Mark said. “Possibly he even went in there to find the letter Frank Manders claims Link stole. Then he decided to make things appear more obscure and pulled the pool trick.”

“Why there?”

“Maybe to hide the body. Last night Grant said the pool would be drained today. Perhaps the murderer figured no one would go into the pool until it had been drained. The extra hours that would give him might have been a help in one way or another.”

“That lets Myra out, huh?”

“Unless she can carry two hundred pounds down a stairway,” Mark said. “And then return home feeling like a new woman.”

“I’ll go see if her back’s busted tonight,” the Chief said disgustedly.

“Whose back is broken?” a snappy voice demanded. Mark looked into the grinning face of Dr. Nesbit.

“Sit down,” the Chief invited. “We’re catching up. This business has got me ready for the booby hatch.”

“I just came from Catrina,” the doctor said soberly. “A shame. She was attractive, too—in a certain way.”

“Drowned?” Mark asked.

“No, her skull was cracked before that. The beating she took killed her.”

The Chief coughed and devoted his attention to his food for a moment. He said finally, “We were talking about Cartwright when you came, Doc. Maybe you got some ideas.” He told the doctor of Frank Manders’ accusation and of Myra’s early morning walk into the desert. “This is like a consultation,” he said. “Private confidence.”

The doctor nodded soberly. His eyes were brightly on Mark’s face.

Mark asked, “How could the Major fake a suicide and make it look like a heart attack?”

The doctor signalled a waiter and ordered a beer and hamburger without onions. “Frankly, this makes me convinced of something I wasn’t quite sure of before. I know now, though, that Major Manders did commit suicide and very cleverly. I’m afraid I can’t tell you why.”

He went on, “For a month before he died he complained to me about pains around his heart. He wouldn’t take an examination but wanted only drugs. I gave him harmless pills of the type usually given to a hypochondriac. Without an examination I could tell nothing, and I didn’t want to harm him. When he complained about sleep I gave him a mild sedative. His own doctor in Riverside treated him, too, on the same basis. However, I found he was giving the Major a stronger drug than I.”

“So when the Major dropped off they didn’t even autopsy the body?” Mark said disgustedly.

“No,” Nesbit admitted. “His doctor had been ordered to come here, and the morning he arrived the Major was found dead in his room. It appeared similar to heart attack, I was told. I didn’t see him, unfortunately, but his own doctor made out a certificate of death immediately.” He held up his hand to the Chief. “Don’t jump at conclusions. The man is innocent. He simply believed in the Major’s complaint and was guileless enough to fall for the psychology of the thing and make out the certificate.

“I thought it oddly coincidental that the doctor would arrive in the morning and find the Major dead so soon after being called to come down, and quite as odd that the same day the Major’s brother would make a casual trip here and be in time to take the body home with him. He had it cremated at once.”

“So you figured it might have been fishy, huh?”

Nesbit smiled. “I did. Now I’m sure. If the Major wrote a letter to his brother, that was the reason Frank came here so soon. The Major did it all cleverly—to keep the stigma from the family name, I imagine.”

“So the Major’s been cremated, and where are we?” the Chief demanded.

“Up in the air, unless that letter tells us something.” Mark grimaced. “And if that letter was so all-fired important as to cause a suicide, then I doubt if it is still around. If we could get Frank to tell us what was in it, we might know more.”

The Chief laughed nastily. “Get that guy to tell us anything!”

Mark scratched his pipe stem against his chin. His blond hair was tousled and awry in the light, and his eyes were frankly worried.

“I wish you would put a bodyguard at the house tonight.”

“I got Henderson up there,” the Chief said. “He’s roosting right in that hallway where the stairs come up. Bayless is there now, and Henderson’ll go up at ten. I’ll get up there about eight tomorrow, or send Bayless again.”

“All right,” Mark said. Some of the worry disappeared from his eyes. He was thinking of Idell.

The Chief got up. “Let’s go over to the office and see if anything came in. Hell, I ain’t attending to business with all this fuss going on. I got plenty of paper work to keep me up tonight.” He looked a little haggard, just thinking about it.

The doctor nodded as they left. “Sorry I wasn’t more help.”

At the Chief’s office, Mark lowered himself in a hard chair and watched the Chief start in on a pile of reports and memorandums. The first thing the Chief did was to call Riverside. Mark saw it was already past eleven o’clock.

The Chief hung up with a grin on his face. “Them dates we dug up was the ones,” he said. “Every other one on both ends for maybe two rows was needled with that hypodermic. And they made a thorough check on the guy. Fixed his death, with our help, at around six. Not that it means a damned thing, though. It don’t do us no good.”

The telephone jangled through the room and the Chief reached out a pudgy hand. He spoke in a low voice.

“Yeah, this is him … Yeah … The hell! … Check on that, … Well, I’ll be—Okay, lady, sorry … Yeah, I got it. Thanks.” He hung up, his face flushed and his lips grinning ruefully.