Читать книгу The Ebony Bed Murder - Rufus Gillmore - Страница 5

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In District Attorney Hutchinson’s limousine, we speeded to the scene of Helen Brill Kent’s startling exit from life.

Many regarded that international beauty as a brave young woman, splendidly fearless of both men and divorce. Hutchinson snapped out the quite different judgment of many others.

On the back seat, he glanced cloudily past me at Griffin Scott; his exasperated tone flayed Helen Brill Kent; he might have been showing her up in court.

“Her father was the undertaker in a small Kentucky town. Even if he did set her like a snare behind the dry goods Emporium counter, she baited the snare and she pulled the noose. In less than a week, she noosed the town’s marriage-prize. See her tossing her golden fleece at the proprietor’s son and the next minute luring him back after her again with sidelong glances from her big blue eyes—whipsawing him into eloping with her? That infatuated boy’s neck she made the first rung of her ladder up to the rogue’s gallery of beautiful women.”

Scott moved restively. “Easy, Randolph. She couldn’t have been older than fifteen then.”

Hutchinson made a disgusted sound in his throat. “She was one sweet little adding machine, and you know it. Get the clicking calculation of her. She drops that infatuated hick inside of three months; she travels to New York on his money; she gets on public display in a chorus here before she’s sixteen. And what does she do then? Why, she scans the suckers, winging to that golden hair of hers like moths to a lighthouse. She picks another one. And then right on up, marrying every time she can to advantage; marrying money, then a title, marrying often enough to make herself known around the world. Five husbands if I’ve kept the count straight. And shaking off used husbands in the divorce courts as if they were fleas.”

Scott’s nervous white hand flashed up indignantly. “Don’t act so damned like a traded-in husband. The girl had nothing except her angelic looks. No education. No family to help her. No friends here. No money. Why, they say she walked off the ferry here carrying a battered old straw suitcase so empty that it looked positively famine-stricken. And yet with nothing except her face, her figure and a cool head, she—”

“If that isn’t you defending that scheming dip!” Into Hutchinson’s tone came the resentment of the punisher whose punishment has been questioned. “She went through life precisely like a pickpocket. She picked money, jewelry and husbands. She shucked out the money and jewelry. She tossed the husbands into the ashcan.”

Scott whirled around towards him; his blue eyes blazed. “You’d force a misogamist to speak up for her. Why treat her like an outlaw, when she never broke a law on your books? Why blame her for having no sentiment left, when you know the terrible family she sprang from? Wait a minute! Wait a minute, I’m not half through with you. Look here, Randolph. If you think she so infuriated five husbands, why so sure this is suicide? Why so positive that one of her maddened husbands hasn’t done—”

Another battle over this enigmatic woman, that would never arrive anywhere because the truth lay somewhere in between, ended abruptly. The car stopped before one of the older apartment houses on a corner of Park Avenue and a side street high up in the Fifties.

We forced our way out and through a subway mob of reporters and camera men. One sharp-faced leg-man hung on to Hutchinson, as a thistle hangs on to golf hose, all the way to the elevator. I stared back through its grilled door at the cool but determined swarm the news had mobilized. If a flash merely reporting the death of Helen Brill Kent mobilized that throng of reporters, what if Scott established this to be murder?

A world sensation! And I was to be in at the start!

Haff, a young detective swelling in his first important assignment, let us into Helen Brill Kent’s apartment. He swaggered ahead of us down a short front hall. A sharp turn to the left. Down a longer rear hall. Then we stepped softly into the bedroom in which the body had been found.

My eyes traveled fast around the largest room in the apartment. The closed door to the right probably led to her great bathroom. A dainty ciel-blue chaise longue said she liked the throne of Empire favorites. A small inlaid serpentine-front sideboard used as a desk spoke of her weakness for French antiques. Triple full-length folding mirrors hinted a vanity thoroughly businesslike.

Then my exploring eyes flew to the left. Here horror held them. They stayed hypnotized. On a sombre ebony bed lay a covered body. On an ermine floor-rug beside this bed glistened a ragged-edged pool of jellying blood. I felt touched with ice. Was this where it had happened? Where an amazingly eventful career had crashed?

We would learn now, if allowed to remain. Hurrying to us from the center of the large room came a stodgy and corpulent detective of forty-five, Detective-Sergeant Mullens, obviously demanding our reason for trespassing on his case. He appeared neckless; his squarish head was set on his thick shoulders like a snow-man’s; the puffed cheeks of his heavy face looked as fiery as though poisoned by ivy.

He shook hands warmly with Hutchinson, but coldly with Scott and quite indifferently with me, when Scott introduced me. Clearly he welcomed only one of us. I glanced in astonishment at Scott. He, I knew, had saved Sergeant Mullens from blundering badly on the Lopez case, but what now? Plainly the Sergeant hoped to scowl him off this case.

Scott, undisturbed, roamed calmly towards the bed, advising me to follow.

“Any objection to my looking around a bit?” he asked in a tone of idle curiosity.

“Go on,” Hutchinson answered instantly, but Mullens frowned at the world and made no reply.

Hutchinson questioned Mullens in a low tone. Scott drew a black satin coverlet embroidered in gold cautiously down off the torso of Helen Brill Kent.

I stared at her body and shuddered. In her admitted thirties, she still looked in her slim twenties, but death chilled her white skin into marble. Her hair still seemed flowing gold, but great empty blue eyes gazed up fixedly at the rose-tinted ceiling. Her features were classically perfect, but her chin sagged horribly in death. I began to feel queer in my middle section. I turned away hastily.

Over the foot of the bed lay her Novitzky negligee of silver tissue trimmed with ominous black fox. She wore a nightdress of flesh-colored crêpe de Chine hung with ivory Point d’Alençon lace. I couldn’t loosen my eyes from her face now that I was staring at it again, but I breathed easier when Scott bent forward and the great head of knowledge screened the gaping small head of beauty from my sight.

Hutchinson turned towards us a face bright with victory from his consultation with Mullens. He called out noisily to Scott:

“Not a letter here or in the mail—but—she shot herself through the mouth. Asking any surer evidence of suicide?”

Scott barely raised his head. “Talking, yawning or laughing, someone else might have shot her through the mouth. Any powder marks?”

It was Mullens who replied and his tone was ugly. “Sure there are powder marks. Where they ought to be. Inside her mouth.”

Without touching the body, Scott searched for them with his high-powered pocket-flashlight. I glanced over the bed about which he had kept a curiosity alive for years. It was a ghastly contraption of ebony ornately carved. Jutting out in low relief from the headboard, two cupids with untimely smiles winged their way, their hands outstretched but empty over the dead woman.

I touched Scott’s arm as he straightened up from the body. “This isn’t an authentic Pompadour bed, is it?”

“Never. That was the satinwood and figured-tapestry period in beds. The little Marquis helped to swindle her with this, just as I thought, but Helen Brill Kent was nobody’s continuous fool. Out she kicked that commission-making husband soon afterwards.”

Two of his long nimble fingers caught up feverishly the edge of a crêpe de Chine sheet. “Black sheets! A leaf from the book of Ninon de l’Enclos. But Ninon escaped a violent death and a marble slab in the mortuary.”

I repressed a shiver at the harder fortune of this modern beauty.

Scott studied several silvery hairs tipped with black that he discovered upon the coverlet, then glanced quickly beneath the bed. Under flashlight and jewelers’ microscope, he inspected the blood on the black pillow beyond the body and the hemorrhage on the ermine floor-rug. Then he moved past me to the night-stand beside the head of the bed.

“Ah, here’s an authentic piece. A true petit bureau, the sister of a Louis Quinze in the Louvre.”

He examined the rose-colored enamel water bottle and the empty revolver-case upon its old marble top. He bent close to a frosted and flower-hooded incandescent bulb attached to the center of the headboard of the bed. A beautifully designed gold chain to pull it on and off with hung down between the heads of the grinning cupids. He straightened up with a puzzled look on his severe face.

“Look. She tossed her negligee carelessly across the foot-board. She slipped into bed. You can see how her weight hollowed down the taut undersheet. What happened then—in the next few minutes? Her relaxed face tells us nothing—a dead face never does—when the light behind it goes out, no more memory than a mirror.”

But now Mullens’ voice jumped to a pitch that swung us around. He stood glaring at Hutchinson.

“Murder! With all the extra patrols on Park Avenue? With all the people inside here and out there, and the windows wide open, and no one hearin’ the least yip of a scream? Hell, someone’s makin’ you see cockeyed.” Hutchinson turned a pleased yet inquiring smile on Scott. “The Sergeant’s all set to give this out as suicide.”

Across the room leaped Scott. His manner was eager, imploring; imploring where I expected him to be commanding and peremptory, but I realized that he must know his way about here.

“Not yet, Sergeant. My word, no. Wait until we discover why—”

Mullens’ raised hand held up traffic of all other opinions until he laid down his. “It’s suicide. I’m tellin’ you. You’re in one tough jam tryin’ to make it anythin’ else. Listen. Here’s the pill that ploughed through that woman’s neck. I picked it up on the bed. Here’s the shell, off the floor near that ermine rug. Look ’em over, Mr. Hutchinson. Both .32s or I’ll go back on a beat in the sticks. And so’s this gun. Just one pill fired from it. And everyone here identifyin’ this pearl-handled toy as hers.”

Pressing three envelopes containing these into Hutchinson’s hands, he roared on before anyone could cut in.

“Now, that gun. Daytimes they kept it in the drawer of that night-stand side of her bed. Nights the maid put it out on top when she turned down the bed. Look at the empty case over there on the top now. There’s the position chalked on the floor where I picked up the gun. And try to rub this out—I’ve got her finger-prints on that gun of hers. That much picked up, I put Haff on the front door. I had all the people in here one at a time for a sweat. And you ain’t heard nothin’ yet.”

He stopped just for breath. No one could have stopped his noisy, deafening cataract of details.

“Now here’s the pusher. That skinny doll over there was feelin’ all shot. She’d eaten on six pounds that she couldn’t steam off. She was sufferin’ so from neuritis that she threatened to jump out the window—some days she couldn’t derrick the mornin’ coffee to her mouth. She’d sunk so much money in Wall Street lately that she was down close to her jewels. And then, on top of all that, along comes today. And it’s a jumpin’ off spot. It’s her birthday.”

Scott’s head twitched up from a listening pose. “Oh, Sergeant! You expect us to believe that any birthday look back could drive Helen Brill Kent to suicide?”

“You’re damned right it could. Have I got to tell you how women like her grouch on their birthdays after—”

“But you’re classing her wrong. She never looked back; she kept her eyes ahead every minute. Nothing weak or remorseful about that ambitious beauty.”

“Sez you, but you listen to me. She shot her coffee back to the kitchen three times this mornin’. Her temper got fiercer as night came along. Tonight she’s hurlin’ a birthday party to her family in her Rue-dee-Pay parlor here, but how long does she stick it out with them? One blue half-hour. She can’t stand it. Not a minute longer. So she sneaks away in here. She locks the door. Maybe she bends out one of the windows, but doesn’t like to mush up her looks. So she picks up the gun waitin’ for her right on that night-stand. And there she drops herself. On that ermine rug right side of her bed. I’m tellin’ you. This was an open-and-shut case of suicide—nothin’ but. She faced the gun and not one scream out of her.”

I blinked at Mullens. Could this be suicide after all? He made a strong case. I turned hastily to Scott.

He was lighting a cigarette. He paused, the cigarette on its way to his lips in one hand, the yellow-flaming lighter in the other. His tone was that of a diplomat feathering coming shock with satirical praise.

“A perfect pen-and-ink drawing, Sergeant; every detail, even the hungry flies on the toothsome tooth-paste inked in—only she wasn’t shot on that ermine rug. She met death in her ebony bed.”

Mullens’ eyes widened, but he shoved out his chin. “Sure, and that’s why, I s’pose, they found the body on the rug.”

Scott deliberately lighted his cigarette, then impatiently snapped the lighter shut as though choking off a flaming retort. “The higher degree of coagulation of the blood on the pillow tells us something, Sergeant. If we can learn how her body came on the floor, we may step out in the clear on this murder.”

“Murder! Didn’t you get it? I’ve got her finger-prints on her own gun.”

Scott whisked the cigarette from his lips; his eyes shone with zest. “And you expect the cunning genius who schemed this murder to sign his own name on it? Oh, Sergeant, you don’t appreciate an artist at murder.”

“An artist! If someone else croaked her, would he plant the gun as far away from her body on the floor as that?”

“Perhaps he didn’t. Where’s the smoke Persian cat that sleeps on the foot of that bed?”

“Shah? Hell, he’s in the parlor with the people found here. I s’pose you’ll be masterin’ the cat language now and claimin’ he removed the gun from her hand. And next you’ll be sayin’ that scared roll of fluff lifted the corpse from the bed to the floor.”

A stern young face with the stamp of taste upon it considered him critically. “Drowning—going down the last time clutching your straw. I suppose the only way to save you is to knock you senseless.”

“Savin’ me?” Mullens bellowed with laughter. “This time it’s you that’s way out over your head. This time I’m savin’ you.”

Scott struck the fireplace with his cigarette without turning. For the first time I saw him roused. His blue eyes sizzled.

“You act like an old hen. You scratch. You get one worm. You quit. You can’t get away with it. I won’t let you hustle this woman underground as a suicide. A murder that a Borgia might have planned! And you imagine I’ll let such a tantalizing puzzle slip through our hands.”

Mullens’ square face looked as if burning up. “I know my scullions. I’ve got my motive. I’ve got my weapon. I’ve got her finger-prints on it. I’ve got—”

“You’ve got so much that you saw what you wanted to see in one thing. Pull that out and your whole skyscraper collapses.”

“Is that so? Go on. Pull it out.”

Scott bent nearer; he launched a torpedo. “Sergeant, now how could she shoot herself without showing powder marks?”

“Who said she could? I told you—”

Scott groaned. “Don’t—for the love of salt, don’t try to tell me again those dark spots in her throat are powder marks. Put a strong light on them. Check up.”

Mullens’ eyes bulged; his jaw dropped as he evidently saw how a hasty mistake there would cave-in his entire theory. Then his jaw went up into a grin and he started towards the body.

“Come on. I’ll show you.”

“You look them over. I’ll prove those aren't powder marks by this man.” Scott nodded towards someone entering the room.

Mullens glanced at the entering Medical Examiner and then said hotly. “No, you don't. I’ll frame the questions for Doc.”

A hot fight one had to put up to force a new idea on Sergeant Mullens, I thought. Scott hastened away to Mrs. Kent’s desk as though now confident of the outcome, but so also appeared Mullens. He winked slowly at Hutchinson as much as to say, “Doc’ll show him where he gets off,” before hurrying to meet the Medical Examiner.

Medical Examiner Solovitch, short and paunchy, alert but not nervous, nodded to us all as he listened to some information Mullens gave him in a low tone. Then he shook his head and said:

“No, I can do the job better there.”

He went direct to the body. After a close survey, he began mechanically moving the head and members to determine the progress of rigor mortis at the joints. He studied his wrist watch a time and then asked without turning:

“Did this happen about ten tonight?”

Mullens again winked at Hutchinson. “We don't know. You tell us.”

“Well, call it between ten and eleven for as good a guess as you can expect me to make before an autopsy.”

While Scott roamed around, and Hutchinson and Mullens argued, and I gazed nervously out a window, Solovitch completed a more thorough examination. Then he turned towards us brushing his hands, and said in a brisk tone:

“Death caused by a shot through the mouth without injuring her teeth. The shot penetrated between the axis and atlas vertebrae of her spinal column. It fractured her spine at that point causing instantaneous death. Some hemorrhage on that pillow, but mostly internal. There’s an exit wound, so I suppose you have the bullet. No signs of a struggle; not an abrasion of the skin. Any questions?” Mullens’ manner put pressure on him as he took a step towards him. “I’ll tell you there’s questions. Someone’s tryin’ to crowd me to the curb. Take a squint at the blood on the ermine rug and on the pillow. You tell us, Doc, if she didn’t shoot herself on that rug.”

Solovitch examined both spots slowly and thoroughly while I waited anxiously for his decision. Then he turned, wiping his hands on a colored handkerchief.

“No. She was shot in bed there. The amount, character and condition of the hemorrhages indicate that beyond all question.”

Mullens swallowed and spoke with husky eagerness. “O.K., but Doc, you spotted those powder marks in her throat, didn’t you?”

Solovitch stared at him in amazement. “Powder marks?”

Mullens rushed to him. He seized the Medical Examiner by the elbow and pulled him to the body. They bent down. Mullens argued violently in a low determined tone. But Solovitch continued shaking his head.

It was murder! There were no powder marks.

The man who had kept Helen Brill Kent from being lowered into a suicide’s grave quietly resumed his examination of the shell, bullet and revolver that Hutchinson had placed in their envelopes upon the victim’s desk. Hutchinson, now looking troubled, watched every move of his with a new vigilance. Mullens kept his broad back towards us, not ready yet to show his face. Then at a nod of Solovitch’s to a low question, he sprang into action. He lurched across the room and pushed open the bathroom door.

“Come out here.”

At Mullens’ hoarse order, a short but wiry man of about forty-five, wearing the uniform of a captain of the Salvation Army, came into the room.

Mullens waved him towards the Medical Examiner and said: “Her brother, Cleveland Brill. He says he found her body on the floor and put it on the bed.”

His uniform startled me. This woman of the world with a brother a captain in the Salvation Army! Her hair was fine and golden, his a coarse red; her figure was slim and boneless, his gaunt, bony; her face was lineless and perfect, his was tightened by set purposes, gristled. Feeling and fervor seemed to be pushed back in his slightly bulging blue eyes. Solovitch addressed him with obviously assumed severity.

“What did you move this body for?”

Captain Brill answered him fearlessly in the vibrant tone of the street exhorter. “I moved her because I am a Christian and that was my Christian duty.”

“Next time you think of the law first, not your religion.”

“I shall always think first of my religion.”

Solovitch scanned his rigidly earnest face and, with a slight smile at us, ceased arguing with an unexpected zealot.

“Well, now you put the body right back precisely as you found it.”

Captain Brill hesitated a moment. Then with tight lips and out-starting eyes, he crossed the room to do as he was ordered. He hesitated again before he could bring himself to touch the body; he trembled visibly throughout the operation of moving it; and he scurried from the room as soon as permission was granted him. I watched him wondering. Did his dread and his haste to get away spring from natural human horror or guilt? I remember that at that time I couldn’t make up my mind.

The body now lay sprawled upon the floor beside the black bed in which Helen Brill Kent had expected to sleep. Her head, pointing towards the night-stand, covered the red stain upon the ermine rug. The chalked outline of the revolver appeared half way between her head and the nightstand. Far away from the position of the weapon, her right arm extended at a right angle from her body across the rug and bare floor. Her left arm stretched close beside her body.

The sight of this celebrated beauty dropped sprawling there threw a spell of horror on us. It was broken by Mullens. He evidently was a man singularly faithful to his own ideas. His voice sounded much meeker, but he shook his head doubtfully at Scott.

“It’s all off, I know, but she certainly looks as if she shot herself and flopped there.”

Scott jumped up; his voice was harsh; he gave him a fighting look. “Suicide is out. We’ve washed up.”

“All right by me, but at the same time—”

Hutchinson for the first time declared his change of mind; he interrupted Mullens with impatience.

“Now, why bring that up again? Let’s get on.”

Mullens made a wry mouth. “Sure thing. Any questions for Doc?”

He waited until Hutchinson asked a few general questions. Then muttering that he must order Haff to speed up the autopsy and phone for the fingerprint sharps, he accompanied Medical Examiner Solovitch from the room.

In a few minutes, he steamed back. He went direct to Hutchinson. “I s’pose you’ll want to look ’em over now.” Hutchinson squared broad shoulders.

“Who did you catch here?”

Mullens wiped a red face with a folded handkerchief.

“I’ve got six people penned in the parlor. Three men and three skirts. All there was at the party thrown here tonight.”

“Sergeant, which one of them did this?”

Mullens pulled an ear and looked thoughtful.

“I’ve been thinkin’ ’em over. My pick of them all would be Dorothy Vroom, the daughter of this beaut’s stage mother. She looked anxious. She asked too many questions. She acted hot to make out if I got this right as suicide but—” he counted her out with a surly fling of a thick wrist— “no use hopin’ to stick anything on her in front of you gents. Not one damned bit of use. She’s young and she looks like a Spanish dancer. You’d all fall for her looks.”

Hutchinson smiled at him broadly. “And you didn’t yourself, Sergeant?”

Mullens’ red face worked with anger. “No. And if I did, I’m sour on her now.”

It was then that Scott made his discovery. A finger across his lips drew us to him. Caution thinned his voice to a whisper.

“Someone’s trying to work a new eavesdropping stunt on you here, Sergeant. That inside telephone is wedged up.” Over his stooped back, we stared at the apartment’s room-to-room telephone resting upon a low shelf between the head of the bed and the night-stand. The small French handset lay deceptively across the cradle. Scott’s forefinger pointed out a tiny piece of dark paper. This wedged up the plunger. The weight of the handset failed to press that down. The line into this room had been cleverly kept open.

We straightened up startled. Which person here could be so anxious to overhear the decisions arrived at in this room? Who except the murderer?

Into Mullens’ smoky eyes came a glitter. He jostled out from among us.

Scott spoke to him quickly in a carrying whisper, his hands forming a megaphone. “Wait! I haven’t had time to—”

At the door, Mullens’ look thundered for silence.

A moment later, we peered over Mullens’ shoulders through a partly opened door into the bedroom across the hall.

This room was smaller. It was much less extravagantly furnished. The inside telephone, instead of being deftly tucked away out of sight, was here fastened flagrantly to the wall.

Over this leaned a young girl. A tall and slenderly rounded young girl, her hair glossily blue-black. She listened intently, almost she seemed hung by an ear to the receiver.

Mullens’ dull eyes glistened. He stepped inside. His voice broke through the silence, noisy with jubilee.

“Here! Drop that. You come and chew hard on some questions of mine now, young lady.”

A dark startled face of perhaps eighteen twisted around towards us. Shock powdered it with pallor. The small disc held at her ear slipped from her hand. It swung away, struck the plaster wall a harsh swat. For a moment, she stood staring at Mullens, her long lashes fluttering. Then her small head went back and she bravely battened down shock. Just as Mullens predicted, I found myself admiring Dorothy Vroom, but for something more than her looks. I liked the courage with which she stepped out of the room after Mullens.

Mullens’ manner said it. He had caught the girl he suspected.