Читать книгу The Ebony Bed Murder - Rufus Gillmore - Страница 8

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Griffin Scott cautiously opened the door of Mrs. Kent’s bedroom. He glanced sharply up and down the hall. He shut the door and attempted to hasten District Attorney Hutchinson into action.

“A homicidal fiend has been at work here tonight. I hope you’ll realize that before he strikes again.”

“In a moment, I’ll prove that your young friend with the pretty face handled the revolver before the crime. When we put her behind bars, there’ll be no more danger here.” Hutchinson petulantly threw up another window. He made an irritated face at the rank-flavored cigar-end Sergeant Mullens nursed along to curse the entire night with. He lighted a fresh cigar himself and again patrolled the length of the spacious bedroom.

Scott lighted nervously one cigarette from another. “A fiend shrewd enough to plan how to slaughter a temperamental beauty without a scream would never leave us fingerprints of his own on the weapon, Randolph.” He shook his head as Hutchinson, drawing deep on his new cigar, strolled heedlessly by where he stood; then he warned again. “After first blood, beware of a fiend of that sort. If pursuit doesn’t make him desperate, he grows dangerously confident. And don’t forget, all the time he’s juggling the thought that the penalty for many murders can’t be greater than for the one he’s already got away with.”

With annoyed abruptness, Hutchinson stopped in front of Sergeant Mullens. “He won’t give us any peace, until you bring in the father. Order Haff to bring in the ex-undertaker who started Helen Brill Kent out after men.”

Jesse Brill, hairless, and so jowled his entire length that the mound-builders might have laid him out in terraces, waddled into the room. If he had lost the solemnity of the undertaker, he retained the affability. He shook hands all around. Clearly, he believed that the sire of an international beauty needed no high hat in his manner.

“Son, I’ll tell you all I know,” he promised, setting his overlapping figure in the chair Hutchinson nodded towards.

The proud father astonished me; he beamed on us jovially; he might have just had a daughter born, instead of one found tragically slain.

Hutchinson greeted his over-ready promise with his fishiest look of doubt. “Well then, what happened at the party here tonight?”

“Ah, this was my wonderful daughter’s birthday. We always celebrate Beauty’s birthday.”

Hutchinson frowned at him heavily. “You may, but don’t attempt to make me think she has celebrated one lately. What broke up the party here tonight?”

“Broke up the party? Nothing, by golly! We had a wonderful reunion, one and all. Everybody talking and friendly as could be. A grand time—” he tried apparently to look suddenly sad; he failed— “until Beauty had to leave us on account of her neuritis. Not one of us dreamed anything as terrible as this was going to happen.”

Hutchinson made a furious gesture. “Drop the pomp and pish. Who raised hell here? What was the row over?”

A look of cherubic surprise, then a glib answer. “Why, son, there wasn’t any row here. It was a real love feast.”

“We know better, but whom did your daughter fear here?”

Jesse Brill raised the ponderous arm of a Nero in his dotage. “No one. Son, like me, Beauty feared nobody.”

Hutchinson moaned. “When conceit was handed out, you must have been there with a moving van. You were in here when the body was found. Now! Did you see Dorothy Vroom pick up a revolver from the floor after that?”

Jesse Brill jumped; he had no ready answer; small watery eyes winked rapidly while he evidently thought quickly.

“Did you or didn’t you?”

“I see what you’re driving at.” His tone became wheedling. “But, son, Beauty shot herself.”

“We know she didn’t. Now, out with it. Did or didn’t you see Miss Vroom pick up the revolver after the murder?”

Sly old eyes met his without a tremor of flesh or spirit. “I wouldn’t want to say. Not right away now. This terrible thing has broken me all up. I don’t know whether I’m standing on my head or my heels tonight.”

At this obvious lie, Hutchinson sniffed, looked at us and then asked only a few more perfunctory questions.

“Did your daughter leave a will?”

The father became suddenly thoughtful in a furtive way that I could not at that time understand; then he replied with assurance.

“Of course, she did. Beauty was no fool.”

“I don’t suppose you even heard the shot?”

“Son, you know I didn’t. If I had, wouldn’t her fond father have been the first one in here?”

Hutchinson walked away in disgust and I studied with amazement this incredible father. Could he have killed his own daughter? Though he hoped to make us believe otherwise, her death appeared to mean nothing to him. He seemed untouched, without feeling, this father who had forced her out on her own before she was fifteen. It seemed useless to expect anything truthful or helpful from him, but Scott took over the task.

“Where were you at the time of the shot?”

Jesse Brill started at Scott’s severe tone. “Judge, I was in the bathroom with my son, Napoleon. He was washing his hands. The running water made such a loud noise that I couldn’t hear the shot.”

“What were you doing?”

The huge body wedged in too small a chair billowed uneasily. “Me? Oh, I was sitting on the edge of the tub, talking things over with Nappy.”

“What things?”

“Now, Judge, you can’t expect a man to remember little things like that—not after all I’ve gone through here tonight.”

“Rot!” Scott got up, glared at him. “Your daughter murdered and you talking such tosh to us. Where’s your feeling for your dead daughter?”

An elephantine figure squirmed—squirmed as much as possible in that cramping chair. “Feeling? I guess no one feels this loss more than I do.”

Two little dabs of crimson appeared on the jowled cheeks of his full-moon face. Scott moved sternly towards him.

“If no one feels her loss more than you do, she’s well out of this. And she supported you, didn’t she?”

Scott had succeeded in penetrating heavy armor of conceit. Now in self-defense out poured a freshet of words. In a tone no longer suave and secretive, but high-pitched and revealing.

“Maybe she did dole me out a little something, but when I wanted to start a good undertaking parlor here, and asked her just for the lend of the money—now, I’m not saying a word against Beauty; she was a queen of women, the Cleopatra of today all right!—but I leave it to you, was that asking much of a daughter you gave beauty and brains and ambition and the very breath of life to? Was it now?”

Mullens and Hutchinson broke into ribald and riotous laughter. I stared at this unfeeling monster of conceit with astonishment. He actually believed that he alone and unaided had created that paragon of beauty, suffered the pangs of labor, endowed her with her trim figure, her classic profile, and the sharp mind that had made the name of Helen Brill Kent known all around the world from Clarkston, Kentucky. I couldn’t help feeling that a creature, seemingly soft but really so hard, was capable of anything in the delirium of such a delusion.

He worked himself up free from his chair. He spluttered on blindly that the ingratitude and lack of feeling were hers, not his. Scott finally pushed him, still protesting, from the room.

Hutchinson choked off a fresh laugh. “Well, we can mark that baby elephant off. He’s too soft in the head for murder.”

Scott looked at him incredulously. “Only two men in the world have ever been hard enough to work Helen Brill Kent for money. He is one of them.”

“Oh, every hard woman has her one weak spot, but I saw I was just wasting my time trying to get the truth from that inflated parasite.” Hutchinson turned to Mullens. “Bring in his younger son, Napoleon. Nothing soft about that fellow.”

Napoleon Brill, youngest member of that beauty’s astonishing family, looked like a night-club rat. He was short and emaciated. His black hair was slicked down over a small head with sharp features. He wore a dinner-jacket, so spotted that it shrieked for the cleaner, with a wilted orchid in its lapel. His small crafty eyes wandered; the thin lips of a hardened racketeer snarled at us as he flung the door shut behind him.

“Hey! How many times do you think you’re going to put me through the wringer?”

“You wash clean and once will be enough.” Hutchinson motioned him to a chair and applied a grilling look and silence to him. “Now, who raised the hell at this party here tonight? What was the trouble?”

Napoleon Brill indifferently pulled up shiny trousers above thin knee caps before glancing up to reply. “Trouble? Who said there was any trouble? Anyone who said that was a lousy liar. This was just a family party. You ought to know how tame they are.”

“If that was true, why did your sister leave you all so early?”

The witness yawned openly. “Neuritis. If you’ve ever had it, maybe you’d understand.”

“Never mind what I understand. What was the fight here over?”

Small glittering eyes that had been roaming suspiciously everywhere darted to Hutchinson, stayed on him. “There wasn’t any fight here—and you can’t make one.”

“I don’t have to make one.” Hutchinson assumed a knowing and satisfied smile; but a little finger hanging at his side trembled with rage—rage pushed back; never would he, obviously, permit that little rat to excite and gloat over the anger of the District Attorney of New York County. “We can let that ride. We know all about that. But you tell me this. Did you see Dorothy Vroom pick up the revolver from the floor after you all came into this room?”

I held my breath and watched the man I believed most likely to have murdered Mrs. Kent. Would he seize this opportunity to fix suspicion elsewhere?

Napoleon Brill threw back his head and laughed—a wise, hard, cackling laugh that displayed bright dental gold and blackened silver, that ended sharply and left a look of cunning superiority on his thin face.

“So it’s murder now, is it? And Dorothy Vroom’s the goat? Hey! You heels must be in a tough spot for a sensational slap of news.”

Hutchinson managed to hold in anger that dyed his face crimson and that might have caused an older man a stroke of apoplexy; his voice shook with just the overflow.

“Answer my question.”

“Hell, that’s easy. There wasn’t any murder. Helen shot herself.”

“Did you see Miss Vroom pick it up or didn’t you?”

“I might have, and I might not have.”

I eased back in my chair. Hutchinson was finding it far from soft establishing that Dorothy Vroom handled the weapon before, not after, the murder. Doubtless, he believed that these two witnesses, like Captain Brill, were protecting her. To me, they seemed to be craftily protecting themselves.

Hutchinson sat down, crossed his legs, and hosed this insolent witness with a look of apparently careless contempt. He asked him only a couple of more questions; the answers he hardly appeared to listen to; he treated Napoleon Brill as if he judged him too insignificant to bother with.

“Probably you’re telling us also that Miss Vroom had nothing to do with the rumpus at the party tonight.”

The witness writhed and snarled under this treatment. “Hell, you turn my supper. There wasn’t any rumpus. Be someone else. Show a little common sense.”

Hutchinson smiled with obviously real satisfaction. “Of course, you heard the shot?”

“Wrong again. You’re not going to frame anyone by me. Helen shot herself. You’ll fish nothing out of me to fix up anything different.”

Hutchinson turned with elaborate good nature to Scott. “These crooks think they’re shielding her, lying as fast as they can think. I can’t be bothered with them tonight. Tomorrow they can tramp down to my office. What I’ll do to them then will be a plenty. Do you want to ask this little ten-minute egg any questions tonight?”

Scott did, it appeared. This hard witness without an apparent drop of respect or decency, he treated in a manner that for a time puzzled me. His manner with this little rat was humble, respectful; his tone sounded carefully polite, even soothing.

“Was I right, Mr. Brill, in understanding that you didn’t hear the shot?”

Napoleon Brill started and looked at him with suspicion for a moment; then his insolence vanished.

“Yes, I missed that.”

“Do you want to tell us where you were when the shot was fired?”

“Sure, I will. I’ve got nothing to hide. It was this way. I was in the bathroom with the old man. He had the water running full strength washing his hands, so I never heard the gun. I was sitting on the edge of the tub chinning with him.”

I felt my face twitch. The alibis of father and son failed to agree; each claimed to be the one sitting on the edge of the tub. I looked for Scott to catch him up, snarl that difference into an embarrassing tangle, spoil their alibi. Instead, after a moment’s thought, he went on as if he had failed to notice that variation.

“Do you happen to know whether your sister left a will?”

“That’s likely.” Brill reflected a moment, his face growing foxily sharper; then he added with confidence: “Sure, she did.”

“What makes you so sure now?”

“Oh, I remember her saying she did.”

“Can you remember when?”

“Oh, not so long ago.”

He was lying. I knew that he was; but Scott went on as ostensibly blind and respectful as ever.

“You were your sister’s favorite, weren’t you? How did she treat you—generously?”

Napoleon Brill smiled—a smile that on his sharp-featured face looked like the smile of a hyena—and for the first time let his tongue run free.

“If you ask me, Helen was tight. I had to deliver the goods for every copper she handed me, let me tell you. Listen! There was a swell chance for me to take over a raided night club up in Harlem and stow away a barrel of money, but do you think I could make her see it? Not on a mile-and-a-quarter track. She squeezed every cent until it howled with pain before handing it out to me, if you want the truth.”

Scott looked hastily away, doubtless to hide his disgust. “But she supported you, didn’t she?”

Napoleon Brill’s small eyes became suddenly sharp and vicious looking. “No, she didn’t. She never treated me the way she ought to treat a brother. What she threw my way wouldn’t have hired a lame errand boy these days.”

Scott gazed at Hutchinson as if to make certain that he perceived this man’s true attitude towards his murdered sister. Then with a gesture he indicated that he had no more questions.

Hutchinson nodded and swung around on the witness. “You’re a pretty smart Aleck, but you’ve botched up your father’s and your own alibi all right.”

Napoleon Brill sprang to his feet. “You don’t say? How’s that?”

“You didn’t rehearse him carefully enough. Your father said he was the one sitting on the edge of the tub. And now you claim you were the one sitting there.”

“Say, you give me a headache. You’ll make nothing out of that. First the old man washed his hands while I waited. Then I washed mine while he sat on the edge of the tub and chinned. If you can make anything out of that, you’re a smarter man than I think you are.”

I downed a groan at the ease with which he had wriggled out of that break in their alibis.

Hutchinson walked to the door, threw it open, and with a look of cool contempt motioned him out. Napoleon Brill left with a pleased smile curling his thin lips. The door closed, Hutchinson turned and published judgment on him.

“A smart Aleck! I’ll bring him down a peg or two tomorrow, but to my mind, he had nothing to do with the murder.”

Scott was on his feet. “Randolph! He had a grievance; his sister didn’t give him the money he felt entitled to. He claims he was in the bathroom right next door at the time of the shot. He straightened out the alibi that his father bungled but—that little rat could have planned this murder, could have killed his sister without turning a hair.”

Hutchinson shook his head. “Too insolent. He wouldn’t have dared being so damned impertinent, if he had a hand in this. Just a weak fool wisecracking a strong front.”

“Just two men have ever been hard enough to work Helen Brill Kent for money. This man was the other one.”

Hutchinson thumped a fist emphatically in the palm of his other hand. “Rot! Just a miserable little mouth-shooting parasite with a boutonniered spine. I’ll iron him out tomorrow, but his bold front shows he has nothing to fear. I doubt if he has an atom of fear that we suspect him.”

Scott moved circuitously to the door. He pulled it open.

In the hall outside, Napoleon Brill raised himself from keyhole-height. He brazenly patted down a disturbed petal of the wilted orchid in his buttonhole. Then coolly whistling a peppery snatch of jazz he disappeared down the hall.