Читать книгу The Ebony Bed Murder - Rufus Gillmore - Страница 6

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Sergeant Mullens fussed back ahead of Dorothy Vroom into the room in which Helen Brill Kent had been murdered. He turned; and now his smoky eyes glinted with sweetened suspicion.

“Come in. If you had nothin’ to do with this, the body wouldn’t give you the shakes.”

At sight of the body gruesomely re-sprawled upon the floor, Dorothy Vroom had stopped horrified outside the door. A shudder shook her. At the Sergeant’s crowing insinuation, long black lashes leaped high and curled out. She straightened her tall slender figure, but she remained outside.

Scott darted past her and threw the black satin coverlet over the body.

“Thank you—lots.” She walked gamely into the room.

District Attorney Hutchinson and I followed her. Someone closed the door.

She stood, an arm along the top of a high-backed chair, her dark young face pale, but apparently steeled for an expected collision. Mullens, barrel-bodied, blustered up to her. He poked his huge square face close up to her small oval one.

“Now! Why did you shoot her?”

“Don’t be so devastating. If you’re trying to be funny—”

Mullens cleared away that notion with an ugly sweep of an arm. “Why did you do it?”

She started; a wild and desperate look came into her brown eyes. “Then you don’t think it’s suicide?”

“I’m askin’, not answerin’ questions.” He turned his broad back on her; he looked at us; his look said, “Get that? Remember how eager I told you she was to have me take this for suicide?” Then he whirled around and slapped a hard cynical look on her.

“Hot—ain’t you—to have this called suicide?”

Color painted her face with resentment, but she moved back a step. “You’re positively medieval. I simply asked you what you decided.”

“Huh!” He looked her over with disgust. “All right, then why did you wedge up the phone in here?”

I expected her to quibble; instead she answered frankly. “Isn’t that obvious enough? You wouldn’t tell us a thing. I was curious. I wanted to learn whether you considered it suicide. Wouldn’t you, if you lived where this happened?”

His inability to break her with his close face and bullying goading manner evidently exasperated him. He snapped at her viciously.

“Who’s askin’ the questions? Snap out of that. What did you hear listenin’ in?”

“Not a word. It was tantalizing. I heard only a murmur. I kept hoping it would clear up.”

He snorted. “And you think I’m that mush-headed? I’m askin’ you for the last time. What did you hear?”

“I told you. Nothing.”

Her coolness appeared suddenly to drive him mad. “Who do you think you are?” He gripped her slender shoulder fiercely with a heavy mottled hand. “You come across with the truth. Or I’ll shake it out of you.”

She gasped. She tore away his fingers with both hands. She stood glaring at him, quivering with indignation, too choked by feeling apparently to speak, but her outraged glare said plenty.

He shoved his face right up into hers again. “You heard me? I’ll shake it out of you.”

Her lips came together tightly. They seemed to close a hatch and smother down fire. With an air of restraint, she put a trifle more distance between them. Her chilling look and silence made it icy.

Once more her coolness seemed to madden him. He flung out a hand for her shoulder.

She stepped aside; her coolness vanished; her voice vibrated with rage. “Don’t be so poisonous. You keep your loathsome hands off me.”

Her girlish chin was raised: velvety brown eyes flashed black; an olive face paled with a rush of fearless reckless spirit ready for anything. The hand clenched behind her hip might have held a dagger.

Mullens’ heavy face brightened; obviously he delighted in having discovered the sensitive point at which to break her. His big hands twitched, apparently itching to lay hold of her again. But now I saw Scott deliberately drop upon a bare spot on the floor the wedged telephone handset he had been busily inspecting.

At this shell-like clatter, Mullens spun around and Scott shook his stern head slightly. Mullens scowled, but a questioning glance at Hutchinson got him nothing. He grudgingly took Scott’s advice. He shot more questions at Dorothy Vroom, but he kept his hands off her. He kept them off, although her changed attitude now shut his hands up frequently into fists. There she stood now, silent, distant as the horizon. There was no getting another word out of her. Finally, Mullens threw up his hands and passed her with a black look to Hutchinson.

“You want to question her?”

Hutchinson also now shook his head slightly. Clearly, his manner advised Mullens to let the enraged girl go and get over the fierce resentment his first grip in third-degreeing had roused in her.

At Mullens’ air-sawing growl of dismissal, she went swiftly, but with her head high. I opened the door for her. Her flashing black eyes changed to a surprised soft brown velvet as she thanked me. Then Mullens aired his grievance.

“Just one good soft-gloved sock and I’d have had the whole story but—” His knocking look rapped each one of us— “you all have to fall for her high-steppin’ looks and ways. Oh, hell!”

Scott looked disgusted. “Sergeant, you showed just about as much tact with her as a pair of boxing gloves.”

Hutchinson defended himself with a crisp gesture of annoyance. “Wait. I’ll question her hard enough, but not until I know more about this.”

“Yeah,” Mullens’ lips twisted sourly, “and that young spitfire’ll freeze up the minute you get her where you want her. Tellin’ me she heard nothin’!”

“She didn’t.” Scott’s quiet tone had a punch behind it. “If you’d waited until I looked over this telephone I could have told you she overheard nothing. From this big room, not one word. Not unless someone talked within three feet of this transmitter. It’s the ordinary mouthpiece, not more highly sensitized; no amplifiers connected with it.”

I warmed at his effort to secure justice for Dorothy Vroom, never imagining then that his earlier work with Mullens enabled him to see the hard luck coming to the one Mullens first cleated his suspicion on. To me, the notion that so frank a young girl could possibly have committed murder seemed simply idiotic, yet Mullens’ angry reply thrust cold facts into my mind not to be disregarded.

“We caught her red-handed listenin’ in, didn’t we? And you saw how hot she was to have this called suicide, didn’t you?”

“Oh, Sergeant!” Scott squelched an argument with an irritated rush at him. “Here’s a cunning masterpiece of cold-blooded murder—plotted out, perfected to the last detail—full of blind spots, not one clew, simply crowded with sweet problems—and you choking the first strangely acting bystander up against the wall for all the answers. You just don’t seem to get it. Take the corsets off your mind. Take a deep breath. Look about. Now, shut up! It’s my turn to talk. And your turn to do a little looking around here. Her bedroom door spring-locked; no other way into this fifth-floor room, except by aeroplane. No powder marks; no struggle, and who won’t fight some for life? Not one scream, yet Mrs. Kent faced the weapon and she was no dumb cluck. No window in line with the trajectory of the shot. Nothing but the body. Sweet, baffling, fascinating problems! For us to solve. The fiend who plotted this murder isn’t going to hand us the answers—or any lead to them. Let’s go. What about the famous Kent jewels?”

Scott may have edged his way in on this case, but he certainly was making himself felt now. I gazed at him with awe. Mullens looked rebuked, mastered for a short time. Hutchinson acted suddenly troubled, spoke quickly to Mullens.

“That’s right! Where’s all this female Henry the Eighth’s loot?”

Mullens groaned. “I’d forget them, now wouldn’t I?” He slid open an invisible panel in the south wall, aimed a thick finger at the combination of the wall-safe inside. “They’re all in there O.K. That’s the first thing I had old Lady Vroom, her stage mother, make sure of. But that’s all Wall Street left her.”

Scott tried the door of the safe, found it locked, walked away shaking his head. “Then Wall Street didn’t pick her as clean as usual? She managed to keep the war medals of her beauty, did she? Better see they’re moved to a safer place, Sergeant. You know her unbelievable family. One might have slaughtered her to save that much.”

“Not a chance. No one here knows a thing about her gamblin’ in stocks, except Mrs. Vroom, and she begged me to keep it quiet.”

Scott turned around sharply, walked back towards him. “Well, that’s something to think of. Why should she want that kept quiet?”

Mullens freed himself of domination with a humorous grin. “It hurt her, Mrs. Vroom said, to see money that came so hard to Helen Brill Kent go so easy.”

Scott chuckled. “It does seem to hurt others often more than it does the loser, doesn’t it?” He studied Mullens a moment, and then asked impatiently. “But who’s here? Who was found here to get after on this riddle?”

“The corpse’s father, her two brothers and her daughter, the whole damned family, and Mrs. Vroom and that young snip of a daughter of hers, Dorothy Vroom. But what makes you think this is any riddle?”

“Oh, you’ll see soon enough. It won’t be long now. When they rushed in here, they found that bed-light burning, didn’t they?”

Mullens’ eyes opened wide. “That’s right. Now, how did you guess that?”

“She wasn’t shot in her sleep. Her eyes are open. And they found that chandelier lighted, too, didn’t they?” Mullens’ big mouth fell open; he stared at Scott with disturbed amazement. “Now, who in hell told you that was lighted—after that woman had opened windows and climbed into bed?”

“Oh, it’s much too soon to tell you why I think that, Sergeant.” Scott surveyed the spacious room’s great wrought-iron chandelier that sprouted a garden of tulip-shaped yellow bulbs and nodded his head. “Yes, that matches up,” he said to himself.

Mullens soured at being left out of something. “I guess I can see as far ahead as anyone.” He muttered to himself a moment and then addressed the world. “It makes me sick the way some people jump in on a case and pretend to know everything when they haven’t one damned lead.”

“Lead? You want a real lead?” Scott’s eyes blazed at him. “Why the spring lock on a bedroom door?”

Hutchinson jumped; he looked sharply towards the door to the hall. “Is there a spring lock on that door?”

“Sure, but what of it?” Mullens confidently waved it out of the pattern. “With her queer family, you yourself would clap on an extra lock to keep them nuts from droolin’ in on you all the time.”

At this disdainful treatment of his offered lead, Scott’s manner sharpened for another set-to with him. The war of differing opinions common in the early stages of a real mystery appeared about to break out again. But now, two finger-print specialists from Police Headquarters, one carrying a camera and equipment, popped briskly into the room, and Scott dashed impatiently to Hutchinson to ask:

“Can’t we get a look at this apartment and the people here while these men are working?”

Hutchinson nodded. He waited until Mullens tipped off the finger-print experts and then made the suggestion to him.

Mullens nodded grumpily. As we all started towards the door, I saw Scott attempt to slip him a secret suggestion. In a carefully lowered tone, he said something quickly meant for the Sergeant’s ear alone. But Mullens jerked away petulantly and made it public.

“Yeah? You question them, too, do you?” He swung around testily to the finger-print sharps prowling around the big room. “While you’re about it, take the fingerprints of the corpse. And squirt some powder over the print I showed you on the gun. Someone here’s hipped with the idea that isn’t the victim’s John Hancock on the weapon.”

Mullens must have been rattled not to think of that, I thought. Wondering whose finger-prints would be found on that weapon, I followed the others from the room.

Mullens and Hutchinson led the way.

Lights burned in every room and hall to drive away shadows, but over the apartment hung the creeping hush that follows unexpected death. This was a normal Park Avenue apartment, but baffling, cold-blooded murder devilled it for me with unseen but watching evil spirits. And soon Helen Brill Kent’s incredible family and others involved were to make this a haunt of horror. I tagged along behind three men whose experience had apparently calloused them to all that.

We looked first around the smaller bedroom opposite assigned to Mrs. Vroom, Helen Brill Kent’s stage-mother, and to Dorothy Vroom. Then around the still smaller bedroom beyond on the right, belonging to Miss Ethel Cushing, Mrs. Kent’s only daughter. Mullens grunted out information and kept a jealous eye upon Scott, who merely wandered around each room. The first door upon the left in this longer rear hall swung into the pantry. Through its glass panel, we glanced at a cook and two maids in the kitchen beyond. They apparently awaited rebelliously permission to go to bed.

We turned to enter the dining room opposite. Sounds of a scuffle at the front of the apartment startled us.

We rushed up the front hall. Detective Haff, lean but cocky, shouldered the wide front door shut against outside force. With his back against it, he turned and jubilantly saluted Mullens.

“Another fresh reporter?” Mullens asked him.

The youngest detective of the Homicide Bureau, strutted confidentially nearer.

“That bunch of sweetness in there,” he nodded towards the living room, “Miss Vroom they tell me her name is, must’ve phoned out to her boy-friend. He’s outside and marked up some, and outside he stays.”

Mullens spoke out the corner of a mouth that showed a pleased grin. “That’s the stuff, Haff. Sock him or anyone else tryin’ to barge in here to her. We have our doubts about that young lady.”

“Is that so?” Astonishment for a moment seemed to darken Haff’s pleased look. “Well, she’s too good for that college cut-up anyway. And now you’ve passed the order—” he held up a bony hand and clenched it slowly with menace.

Could Dorothy Vroom’s frankness and spirit and good looks have misled me utterly regarding her? Was it possible that young girl did have something to do with the murder? And now that she realized that we recognized this as murder had guilt urged her to telephone outside for help? Startled by this unhappy doubt, I stared at Haff. And there behind him, Dorothy Vroom appeared in the wide entrance to the living room.

Her dark young face looked deeply troubled; her brown eyes anxious, as she asked Haff:

“Wasn’t that someone for me?”

He smiled all over her. “Oh, no. You just leave it to me to tip you, if anyone calls for you, lady.” He turned and winked at us.

She gazed at his back doubtfully. “You really will?”

“I sure will.”

Still looking doubtfully back, she disappeared into the living room.

I sincerely hoped that my doubt of her was misplaced. But as I followed the others back to the rear hall, Hutchinson and Mullens looked at each other in a way that indicated growing assurance of her guilt.

Through the last door on the right in the rear hall, Mullens preceded us into the dining room. From this room, as the accompanying plan shows, a broad connecting entrance afforded us a view of all people found here tonight and held.

From this dark dining room, we studied six people in the brilliantly lighted living room. Which one of these amazingly different types had murdered Helen Brill Kent? Huddled together in three chairs at the far end of a modern French salon, three men sat in whispering conference. Captain Brill of the Salvation Army sat stiffly erect in the middle. His elephantine father and his emaciated, dinner-jacketed, crafty-looking younger brother, Napoleon Brill, leaned towards him, elbows on knees, and appeared to be questioning him sharply but in guarded tones. I had a feeling that they were cunningly extracting from him everything he had learned while in the room with us where the murder had been committed.

Far away from them, at the end of the living room near us, sat the three women in dejected silence. Gaunt and dark Mrs. Vroom, the victim’s stage-mother, stared crumpled into space from a gilded armchair. On a stool against one knee sat her daughter Dorothy. One hand held her mother’s tightly, but she glanced frequently and anxiously towards the entrance. On a window-seat to their left sat Ethel Cushing with plump legs stretched out before her. I gazed at her with quick curiosity. People wondered how so beautiful a woman as Helen Brill Kent could have had such a homely daughter. Her large round face brooded over an open book. Alert on its haunches upon the white mantel at this end of the living room, in vigilant isolation from all these human beings, sat the smoke Persian cat named Shah. Gleaming orange eyes, earlier fixed upon the people in the living room, now sharply watched us in the dark dining room.

Which one a murderer? I scanned six strangely different human beings without being able to pick out the killer. Had Scott singled him out? No, his eyes travelled from one to another. But with such a depth of interest that I soon had to touch his elbow. District Attorney Hutchinson and Sergeant Mullens were moving on. Mullens stopped before the glass panel in the pantry door opposite, pointed through it into the adjoining kitchen and suggested to Hutchinson:

“Better let me send those three servants up to bed. The cook’s evidently been sopping up Jersey lightning. She looks lighted to the pent-house and they don’t know a damned thing. They were out to a cinema together; they showed me their seat stubs.”

We passed through the pantry into the small kitchen. A jug-shaped cook with glazed eyes and two trimly attired older maids, lolling around the kitchen table, glanced at us eagerly. Hutchinson asked them a few perfunctory questions, then waved them away upstairs to bed. We watched them scramble to the back-door like women to a bargain counter, but Scott’s keen eyes had spied something.

“One minute!” he called. “The spring lock on this door—isn’t this new?”

In the narrow back hall, the flushed-faced cook lurched around towards him. “New? Sure, it’s new. New as the water on my knee since I came to work in this sweatshop.”

Scott chuckled. “And how long is that? I mean how long has this lock been on here?”

“Two months, your honor. Sez she, ever since the last cook walked off in a huff with her key to the old lock. Sez I, don’t you believe a word of that two-faced slut.”

“Come along, Kittie. The gentleman is through with you.” The two maids dragged their excited companion up the stairway that mounted around the service elevator.

Scott closed the kitchen door. He bent over the new spring lock on the back door of the apartment with an interest it failed to arouse in Hutchinson and Mullens.

Hutchinson smiled skeptically at Mullens. “A couple of cooks that could have killed Mrs. Kent for saying their coffee was bad.”

Mullens grinned. “That’s it. If words was bullets, only one man, woman or child would be alive today.”

They moved on. Scott and I followed them back into the room in which murder had happened. The fingerprint specialists had completed their work, leaving an odor of burned powder. Mullens listened to their report. He swung around to Hutchinson, his eyes burning with excitement.

“What do you know about this? We may have a pinch right in reach. Those ain’t Mrs. Kent’s prints on the gun. The professor here says her right thumb shows tented arches. And the print on that gun shows meetin’ whorls. I’m slippin’ into the parlor with these sharps. I’ll get the thumb-prints of those six people. If one of them shows meetin’ whorls, this case, someone thinks so damned hard, will be right in the bag.”

Could Scott be wrong? I whipped around for a look at him, as Mullens called the two finger-print men and tramped from the room ahead of them. Scott idly started to follow them. He carelessly gave up that purpose at sight of the two white-jacketed men coming into the room bearing a stretcher.

As these men rose from dropping the stretcher beside the body of Helen Brill Kent, Scott slipped each a folded bill and evidently whispered a suggestion. The men nodded and disappeared into the bathroom. They reappeared bringing a towel and a tiny wad of cotton batting. A sagging jaw, they tied up with a towel passed under the chin and knotted over golden hair; the cotton batting they gently inserted in nostrils. Then, after a glance at Scott for approval, they moved the body with exaggerated tenderness from the floor to their stretcher and covered it. A moment later, they bore out of her luxurious room the body of an international beauty destined now to meet the knife of autopsy.

Hutchinson, who had watched all this with a faintly superior smile of amusement on his strong face, said something to Scott too quickly for me to catch.

Scott moved away without replying, as if caught at an action he would have preferred to keep secret.

And then Mullens, flaunting a number of finger-prints and a smiting manner, whiffed gustily into the room.

“You made me take my hands off her,” he said. “All right, but now I’ve got ’em right on her throat. You see these? Dorothy Vroom’s finger-prints smack on the gun that croaked Mrs. Kent.”

I felt knocked limp and faint.