Читать книгу The Ebony Bed Murder - Rufus Gillmore - Страница 4

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ON the night of the first shocking tragedy, I pushed the bell to Griffin Scott’s duplex apartment.

White-haired Wilson received me stiffly, but admitted me to Scott’s queer workshop. Scott got up, dashed towards me in a tart temper.

“I tried gently to suggest to you that I didn’t care to talk about the Lopez murder,” he said.

“Sorry. No one else knows the inside facts.”

Two nights before, I had finally located Griffin Scott here. He dodged all my questions, fascinated me into playing chess with him; while I was under his spell, he with neat questions learned all about me.

“I’ll make it plainer to you. You’re the first one to run me down here and I prefer my privacy.”

He stood, legs apart, his eyes bristling with such irritation that mine toured his odd workshop. Leather-upholstered settee and chairs by Sheraton. Books by foreign publishers of ungainly volumes. Refectory table by some tempted Italian monastery. But desk, files and other furniture, steel, and by Yawman & Erbe. The eager reaching-out-everywhere tastes of an advertising man—hard-boiled but a writer on the sky—of a star who had turned tracker of murderers, hunter of big game. Also an advertising star’s startling faculty for invention. From the ceiling, like settings in stage flies, dangled a Steinway baby grand, a carpenters’ bench and tool chest and a fully equipped chemical laboratory. He had but to push levers in a hall switchboard to transform this office into a study, into a workshop, into a laboratory. Wires and electric juice moved the furniture without the little exhibitions of bovine temperament of piano movers.

A doubt appeared to come over his manner from his irritated scrutiny of me. “Sit down,” he ordered. “You’ve discovered my real name, haven’t you?”

“Y-es,” I said after some doubt.

His wiry-looking average height settled down a little. Long nervous fingers slipped into cinnamon-colored hair frequently trimmed. Eyes a hard blue, deep set, always moving, and the clear-cut features of an advertising man grew suddenly thoughtful.

“That’s a wallop where it hurts. When I made my Gauguindive here, I kept my uptown apartment. Even my office doesn’t know this address.”

I began to squirm. “No one’ll ever get that out of me. Whether you make up your mind to come through on the Lopez murder or not, I’ll keep your secret.”

My eyes, or tone, or something seemed to bring him to me. Under dropped eyelids, he appeared for a moment to estimate my exact weight. Then he whisked to a steel file and lifted out something. Into my lap he dropped a heavy brown file-envelope marked Lopez Case.

I fumbled the bulky legal-wallet open. The notes proved a gold mine for a writer. For a long time I bent low over them seeing nothing else. Then I arrived at Scott’s first theory of a murder so fiendishly peculiar that the murderer was allowed to poison himself. From that longsighted analysis and deduction, my eyes leaped to the man sitting in the swivel-chair behind the desk. A face as grave as Lincoln’s, though I knew he was under thirty-five. He was a natural. A genius at this thing.

What a character! I burned to linger inside his dugout, to get to know him better. Couldn’t I make him a friend?

“Shaking down another crime there?”

“Crime!” He chuckled, as he straightened up a bit from an enormous portfolio leaning from his lap against the edge of his desk. “This is our first advertising campaign for a new client. Rushed to me by my agency, as always just before closing dates. It’s up to me to initial it tonight.”

What a break! My blunder brought my eager overtures to a troubled stop, even if he did take it humorously. I was through muddling across to him; but now he startled me by saying:

“Just about the brightest move of yours was strengthening your chess game.”

“Great jazz! How did you know?”

“When you came in here, your eyes jumped first to the chess cabinet. They said, when they got around to me, that you felt all geared up to trim me tonight.”

I stared at him a bit uneasily. Then I laughed at myself. Not the faintest idea in my noddle then what was coming to me from being placed here tonight with Griffin Scott. I merely felt all sort of oiled up by his growing warmth towards me. I would have made talk, but he looked busy, so I hunched once more over the mass of material on the Lopez murder.

A moment later, he slapped down the portfolio on the glass top of his broad desk.

“Crime was right. Just another clever campaign. I shall have to wade through all the data for a sounder idea tonight.” He threw himself back in his chair, lighted a cigarette. “Dogs aren’t clever—not until whipped into it. Babies don’t get that way, until we applaud ’em. This is a sick age when so many imagine a little part-time cleverness can pole-vault them onto a short-cut to the top. For the love of salt, there’s only one all-time clever class, and that’s the criminal class. Look at ’em. All scorning the beaten tracks; all mapping out short-cuts to what they want.”

He was making talk with me; I answered quickly. “But getting away with murder here.”

“Some murders. Too often the police catch only the corpse but—”

My laugh died as he cocked his head to listen. He spoke hastily and in a low voice.

“That’s Randolph Hutchinson, the district attorney, at the door but you stand by for a spot of chess. It’ll sharpen up me for a go at this advertising.”

Stand by? It would have taken a steam-shovel to root me out of there, with Scott growing friendlier, and with an official coming who had always sent out word to me from his inside office that he was too busy to see me just then. And Hutchinson—might he not be calling here tonight to discuss some baffling murder with Scott?

When Scott introduced me, Hutchinson gave me the usual political smile and hand-hug; but his dark handsome face showed irritation and he roamed around as if preferring to talk to Scott alone.

Scott caught his eye. “I’ve asked Gillmore to stick around for revenge. He writes about the black art of murder, and he’s been reading up on chess. While you, sword-swallower of the third degree,” he whirled his chair around, “rate chess as nothing higher than Spanish torture.”

The hand Hutchinson pointed at Scott shook humorously as he turned to me. “That young Airedale can smell thoughts cooking in your mind, and as for seeing ahead at that game, he’s one damned searchlight.”

“Anything interesting, Randolph?” Scott asked, as the telephone on his desk rang.

“Just calling to keep you friendly.” Hutchinson slumped into a chair and peeled tinfoil off a cigar. “This is my first open spot of rest today, and now—”

Scott held out the receiver to him. “For you. Nasty disposition my telephone has.”

Hutchinson got up with a groan. “One day with the rattlesnake buzzing away on my desk and you’d be biting people but—wait a minute. This must be something sour or they wouldn’t be calling me here. I’ll take it on the hall phone.”

He sauntered out of the office. Scott rolled up the Kirman hearthrug that covered his great chessboard painted upon the floor. If he could have had his way he would have played upon the Piazza San Marco.

We sat on the floor at opposite ends. Tonight I trusted to impress Scott by winning a game. I sprang a carefully memorized variation of the four knights’ opening. Useless! He switched into an answer not in the books, and I couldn’t hold my mind tightly on the game. My thoughts wandered to Hutchinson out in the hall, probably receiving inside news of some crime I’d have to get either highly tabloided or thoroughly expurgated in the morning newspapers.

My game was on the rocks, going to pieces. I looked up sharply. Hutchinson was coming back with faster steps. He dashed into the workshop, his dark face flushed with big news.

“Here’s a hot one. Helen Brill Kent’s killed herself.”

I fell back, incredulous. Arms propped me up against the floor. Why should that blue-eyed, golden-haired Lillie Langtry of our time end her own life? Princes at Biarritz had slipped their equerries to take her by storm. An infatuated shah had compelled a secretly swearing ambassador to lay a smoke Persian cat in its royal basket at her feet. Personages with commanding titles and fortunes had confidently attempted to play with her low-born affections, but this dazzling young Kentucky blonde’s specialty was marriage. And often she had married—often enough to make herself a celebrity the world around. Why should she cut short a career the newspapers made glamorous with descriptions of her jewels and reports of her marriages and mixing with royalty? I scrambled to my feet to learn. Scott, already up, was asking:

“Killed herself! Where?”

“In her Park Avenue apartment. They just found her sprawled over the extravagant ermine floor-rug in her room.”

The thought of that bold and uninhibited beauty lying there rasped the low strings of horror. Scott’s swift question stilled them.

“What did she use—poison?”

Hutchinson strutted a little, swelled up with the news. “No. Banged her damned fascinating little head off with her own pearl-handled revolver. What do you think of that? Killing herself when any one of her ex-husbands would gladly have done it for her.”

“But Helen Brill Kent! Mutilating the head that won her husbands and jewels. That’s all out of focus.”

Hutchinson spun around on him hotly. “What’s the use of disputing a fact? She’s done it.”

“You didn’t see her do it. Did anyone?”

“Of course not. Even that sensational publicity hound wouldn’t shoot herself in public.”

“Her letters—what reason did she give?”

“She didn’t give any reasons. She just went and did it cold.”

Scott, his head bent forward, walked thoughtfully to his desk. I watched him eagerly. He suspected this was murder. Always I had longed hungrily to be in on a big murder right from the start. That ambitious dare-devil had boldly capitalized her good looks; as she soared from a Broadway chorus to high places, the newspapers eagerly dramatized her rise, created a spectacular international beauty. If this should be murder, here loomed the murder of the century. If Griffin Scott would only go out on it and take me along!

Scott stood with one hand lying on the portfolio of advertising on his desk. He wrenched around towards us.

“Know anyone who’ll take my damned advertising agency off my hands?”

His morose tone made Hutchinson laugh. I gloomily watched him drop into the chair behind his desk. He threw a last questioning glance at the portfolio and turned reluctantly towards Hutchinson.

“Randolph, you’ll be down there and I won’t. Now, I wish you’d quiet a doubt that’s been kicking around in my mind for years. Husband Number Four—remember the smooth polite little Marquis? Well, he helped to sell her a bed he swore belonged once to La Pompadour. I don’t believe that. For years I’ve suspected he put something over on his new American wife then. Look it over like a good fellow. Let me know whether he succeeded in swindling that smart girl with a false antique, won’t you?”

Hutchinson poured on me a look of despairing astonishment. “Listen to him fussing about old furniture, when we’re all het up over the suicide of a modern Cleopatra, will you?”

Scott chuckled, like a master of infinitesimal calculus pleasingly accused of being human. My smile felt stiff, waxy. My climbing hopes had gone into a nose-dive, cracked up. Scott, interested as he obviously was, showed that other work kept him from entering this case. Unless Hutchinson now commandeered him, I should have to get details of this shocking tragedy from the newspapers.

Hutchinson glanced at his watch, lurched towards the door. “After midnight. And another delay on my way home. I’m off.”

My eyes dropped, fell on the ruins of my chess game with Scott littering the floor. If this should be murder, didn’t Scott realize how vitally he might be needed on the scene? Then his voice jerked up my head.

“Don’t disappoint yourself, Randolph.”

His sharp tone called me out on the edge of my chair. Hutchinson stood in the doorway, his spring overcoat on over only one shoulder, and he let it hang there.

“What’s on your mind?”

Scott sank back in his chair until its back supported his neck. He surveyed Hutchinson doubtfully.

“Only a suggestion. Don’t allow the police to hurry you out with that as suicide. Find her letters first. Perhaps she mailed them.”

Hutchinson marched resentfully nearer. “A bird with her high-flying past! What’s the matter with you tonight? Sure to blow her head off when remorse caught up with her.”

Scott’s blue eyes hardened, flashed sort of an electric bite on his over-serious young face.

“What! That fearless female Henry the Eighth? She shuffle off the stage of life like a pretzel peddler? See here, Randolph. What have you got against Helen Brill Kent?”

Hutchinson wrestled with exasperated jerks into the other arm of his overcoat. “I know all about that love-pirate. Stuyvesant, her third victim, is a distant connection of mine.” His fists closed; I saw them boring into overcoat pockets. “Look here, Griffin. With the little you know, how can you possibly be so cocksure? Now, get a load of this—”

A chair shrieked. Scott was at Hutchinson’s elbow, urging him along to the door.

“I can’t let prejudice make a goat of you tonight. Let’s get down there and see what has happened.”

I watched them argue all the way across the workshop, my face growing steadily longer. I felt overlooked, left out of it. But then I began to appreciate how seldom Scott, no matter how occupied by others, overlooked anyone. He turned in the doorway and called me.

I let the Lopez case lie where it slipped and ran after them. Could I have foreseen what it meant to be inside on a tragedy such as this right from the start, I couldn’t possibly have been quite so eager. I haven’t been so eager on others since.