The Mammoth Book Of Roaring Twenties Whodunnits Part 61

"Where were you at the time it happened?" Sheriff Lens asked.

"I don't know when it happened," he answered evasively. "You think he was killed in the air or on the ground?"

"He had to be alive to land the plane," I pointed out.

"Yeah. Well, I was over in the back of the hangar, making sure the kids stayed away from my plane."

"Anybody see you?"

"I suppose not," he admitted. "But then n.o.body seen me kill Ross either."

"Did you kill him?" I asked.

"I told you I didn't. You don't listen good."

"Aren't you supposed to be the clown of this outfit? You're not very friendly for a clown."

"Got nothing to be friendly about, with the boss dead."

I went back outside with Sheriff Lens. "I don't like that fellow," I told him.

"Neither do I, Doc, but that don't prove he killed anyone. We still don't know how it was done." He thought for a moment. "But I got an idea. Maybe there was some sort of mechanical gadget that stabbed him when he sat down in the pilot's seat."

"You're forgetting he took off, flew a dangerous stunt almost touching that Jennie's wingtip, and then landed again. He couldn't have done any of that with a knife in him."

"I guess not," the sheriff agreed glumly. "But what about this guy Verdun? If he was a clown wouldn't he be foolin' with the kids instead of tryin' to chase them away from his plane?"

"A good point," I admitted. "But if he's lying about where he was at the time of the murder " I stopped, suddenly remembering an earlier conversation. "Let's find Zealand."

The owner of the flying school was in the hangar with Bonnie, seated opposite her and holding her hands. They broke apart as we entered. "h.e.l.lo, Sam. Bonnie and I were just having a chat."

"So I see. Art, before the killing you asked to see Winslow alone and I heard you say you didn't know what you were getting into when you booked his crew. What was that about?"

Zealand shifted uneasily. "This morning I got a phone call from a friend in Ohio. He told me Winslow and his crew got drunk and smashed up a town out there. Winslow and his wife spent the night in jail."

"His wife?"

"Sure. He and Mavis were married."

Bonnie Pratt flushed deeply and turned away. "Did you know this?" I asked her.

"Art was just telling me. I didn't know it before."

"So there's our motive," I said. "The oldest motive there is."

"Maybe we got a motive, Doc," Sheriff Lens said, "but we still don't have the killer. And you've ruled out every way Winslow could have been stabbed in that locked c.o.c.kpit."

"Every way but one, Sheriff." I glanced out the hangar door and spotted Tommy Verdun walking quickly across the field toward his plane. "Come on!" I shouted.

I ran out, calling to Verdun, but he broke into a run, perhaps sensing my suspicions. "Try to head him off," I called to the sheriff.

His long white duster billowed out behind him as he ran, and it seemed to slow him down. Finally I was close enough to grab the coattail and I yanked him to the ground. Then the sheriff and I were on top of him.

"So he's our killer," Sheriff Lens said, reaching for his handcuffs.

"No, Sheriff, you don't understand," I said, "Didn't it seem strange to you that Mavis's plane landed at the far end of the field after her act, when the crowd was up here?" I pulled upen Tommy's duster to show the white blouse and knickers underneath. The long blond wig was stuffed in his pocket. "Mavis wasn't on that plane. Tommy walked on that wing in her place while Mavis was in the c.o.c.kpit of the Tin Goose killing her husband."

I told it all once, after the sheriff had arrested Mavis and taken down her statement. I stood in the center of the empty hangar feeling a bit like a lecturer, and said, "It was really quite simple so simple I nearly missed it. After I battered in that c.o.c.kpit door and sent Bonnie and Art for the sheriff, I bent to examine the body and Mavis suddenly appeared behind me in the doorway. Because I thought she'd been on the wing of that other plane, I never asked what she was doing there, or how she'd made it from the far end of the field so fast. I accepted her presence without even wondering how she'd gotten on the plane ahead of Sheriff Lens."

"How did she get on board?' Bonnie asked. "I didn't see her outside."

"Of course not, because she was on the plane all the time, hidden in the c.o.c.kpit. Winslow didn't shout for help when he found her there because he never expected she'd kill him. She'd probably had Verdun take her place on other occasions. Winslow told us Verdun sometimes dressed up like a woman for his act, and at that distance the crowd could only see the long blonde hair and the outfit Mavis always wore."

"But why did she hide in the c.o.c.kpit?"

"To confront her husband with the fact that he'd spent the night with Bonnie. Isn't that right, Mavis?"

She shifted on her chair. "He was always doing it," she answered dully. "I told him I'd kill him if he didn't stop."

"So you hid in the c.o.c.kpit and confronted him. You probably argued during the flight, with the noise of the plane covering your voices. You stepped behind his seat and brought the knife up into his side. Then you took over the co-pilot's controls and landed the plane yourself. When I broke the latch and pushed in the door, you simply stood flat against the wall behind it where I couldn't see you. When I bent over you stepped into the doorway as if you'd just come on board."

"I'll be d.a.m.ned," Sheriff Lens muttered.

"It wouldn't have worked if Zealand or Bonnie had remained on board, but you were improvising. It was your only chance."

"But Renker and Verdun musta known she did it," the sheriff said.

"They strongly suspected it, of course. But they'd already lost one star act and if they turned her in they'd have no jobs."

Verdun shook his head. "I didn't know what she was plannin' when I took her place. I'd done it before as a joke. I didn't know she'd kill him."

The crowd had all gone home by the time we finished, except for April and Vera. They were standing out by the Tin Goose, waiting for us to finish. I was sorry April hadn't gotten the plane ride I'd planned for her.

" And that was the story," Dr Sam Hawthorne concluded. "It was the last flying circus that ever came to Northmont. The era of the barnstormer was just about over. It ended about as quickly as it began. It ended that day for Ross Winslow, one of the great ones.

"In the fall of that same year my folks visited me in Northmont to see how their son the doctor was getting along. It was during hunting season, and their visit was almost spoiled by an impossible killing during a deer hunt.

"But that's for next time."

I'll Never Play Detective Again CORNELL WOOLRICH.

Cornell Woolrich (1903I968) is so closely a.s.sociated with nerve-racking suspense, such as The Bride Wore Black (1940), The Night Has a Thousand Eyes (1945, as George Hopley) and the story that formed the basis of the film Rear Window (1954), "It Had to be Murder", that it's easy to forget that he started out as an imitator of F. Scott Fitzgerald with several Jazz-Age novels. He remained a frustrated jazz-age writer for some while. His biographer, Francis M. Nevins, speculates in First You Dream, then You Die, that the following story may well have been written in the 1920s and failed to sell, so was rewritten when Woolrich established his pulp market. The version reprinted here first appeared in Black Mask in May 1937, so there are a few post-I920s references (see if you can spot them) but otherwise the story is pure Roaring 1920s.

I sat there with my top-hat over one eye, listening to him whistle like a canary off-key while he struggled with his white tie. His engagement to Marcia had just broken in all the papers, and her people were throwing a party at the Park-Ashley to celebrate it.

"Give up," I kidded as he fumbled his tie for the fifth time, "you'll never get those two ends to meet."

The telephone started-in again. "Another reporter?" he groaned.

But she didn't sound like it when I got over there. "Tommy darling, is it really true? Let me be the first to-"

I doused it against my shirt-front and wagged him over. "Somebody wants Tommy darling. Just wait'll I tell Marcia this."

I could joke about it because he wasn't that kind at all. We'd been rooming together ever since the days when we only had one dress-suit between the two of us, and whoever happened to wear it, the other guy had to stay home in bed.

I went in to get a spare collar; parties like those last all night. When I came back he'd hung up already.

"I'd have been just as pleased without her good wishes," he told me, going down in the elevator. "That was that Fortescue gal just then."

She'd developed rather a bad case of it the year before, before he met Marcia. The minute he found out about it, he started to dodge and duck and go into reverse; her nature was too explosive to have around the house. She'd even tried to have him beaten up by gangsters, probably so she could nurse him back to health, only he fractured the jaw of one and chased the other to the corner of First Avenue and Fifty-fourth Street, where he lost him in the traffic. Tom couldn't prove it was she, of course, but he'd had his suspicions. After that she'd given up the job as hopeless and we hadn't heard any more of her until tonight.

"Funny thing about it," he went on, while we were waiting at the door for a taxi, "is the big change in her all of a sudden, saying maybe it was all for the best. Wonder how much of it she really meant?"

In the cab he suddenly snapped his fingers. "Forgot all about it! I should have sent Marcia some flowers."

We stopped by at a florist and he went in. I waited where I was.

"Where are they?" I asked when he came back empty-handed.

"He's rushing them down there by special messenger. Some of the swellest red roses you ever saw, kind they call American Beauties. She must be tired of orchids by now."

It was a three-ringed circus when we got there. The Park-Ashley was seething with debs, sub-debs, post-debs, Princeton and Dartmouth undergrads, dowagers, men-about-town, the whole social zoo. The party was supposed to be on the second floor but it was spilling over in every direction.

Tom and I hired a room together to change collars in later on, before breakfast. We had a highball apiece to see us through the first eighty dances, then we went downstairs and reported for duty. We found Marcia standing next to her mother on the receiving line.

"Almost thought you were going to renege on your own party," she smiled.

"Did you get my flowers?" he asked under his breath, like a fellow in love will.

She looked blank for a minute, then began to laugh. "You must have forgotten to put a card in, in your excitement! Whole carloads of them have been coming all evening."

"I bet I find 'em!" a crystalline voice piped up. Marcia's kid sister was standing there, eyes alight with excitement. "I know his taste."

"Red roses," I said behind the back of my hand, to help her along. She turned and ran outside.

Tom began to dance with Marcia, and just as I was girding up my armor to step into the fray, the kid came darting back again. "I see you found them all right," I said. One was pinned to her dress and she was holding a smaller one, a bud, in her hand.

"Here, this one's for you." She reached for my lapel and drew the long stem through the b.u.t.tonhole, then snapped it off short. "Ow!" she complained, and put her thumb to her lips for a second.

"See, that's what you get!" I grinned.

We started to dance, but before we were halfway around the room she was leaning against me in a funny sort of way all at once, as if she were tired out. I put my hand to her chin, tilted her head back, and looked into her face. Her eyes were just drooping closed. "Tired," she murmured. "d.i.c.k, I can hardly stand up any more "

Suddenly she crumpled and would have toppled over if my arm hadn't been around her waist. I managed to half-carry and half-lead her over to the door, and no one noticed; it looked like one of those crazy new dance-steps. As soon as I got her outside I picked her up from the floor altogether and made for the nearest elevator with her. She weighed less than nothing, just somebody's baby sister.

"What do you feel, kid?" I breathed, "What hurts you? Old Man d.i.c.k'll take care of you."

She opened her eyes just enough to show two slivers of white, like crescent moons. "Old Man d.i.c.k 'n' Little Girl Jean," she sighed. Then she sort of pa.s.sed out altogether. The elevator-slide opened and I snapped, "Hurry up, take me up to wherever their suite is! And get hold of a doctor!"

The Planters seemed to have taken a whole floor for the occasion. I stumbled through three rooms with her before I got to anything with a bed in it. Flowers everywhere; they were all going to be distributed to hospitals in the morning. A pert-looking number with a lace handkerchief c.o.c.ked over one eye was sitting reading Ballyhoo, legs crossed way up to here.

"C'mon, get your thrills later," I ordered. "Help me with Miss Planter."

She squeaked like a mechanical mouse and got the expensive covers at half-mast.

A distinguished-looking man with a silver goatee miraculously found his way in to where we were without a road-map; shoving a bridge-hand into his breast-pocket. He swept aside his dinner-tails and sat down beside her. "Turn the other way," he said to me and began to undo the shoulder-straps of her dress. Something fell across one of my patent-leathers as he tossed it aside, a huge cabbagy red rose; I kicked it out of the way. "This child is dead," he said, in the same tone of voice he would have said "Three spades." The French maid squeaked again, then covered her mouth.

I picked up the pale-green telephone and asked them to page Tommy Nye in the ballroom. I acted as hard as a callus on a mailman's foot but I was crying away inside of me; too much Princeton won't let you show what you feel. There was a long wait and the music from down-stairs came over the wire clear as a bell and out into the room, almost like a radio tuned very soft that d.a.m.ned waltz of Coward's, Nevermore. Her first party and her last, she'd never dance again. I made a face and m.u.f.fled the thing against my shirt-front. "Tom," I said when he got on, "better take Marcia and her mother back to their house, give them any excuse at all, only don't let them come up here "

"What's up?" he said worriedly.

"The kid just died up here. Don't let it get around, you can break it to them when you get them home. Get back as quick as you can, will you?" He hung up without a word, I couldn't tell how he was taking it; but then how would anyone take a thing like that? I told the maid to take the Planters' wraps down to them, and then go home with them; she was too frilly for a death-chamber.

That society doctor, meanwhile, had gotten in my hair. He'd telephoned in his notification to the authorities all right, and exerted himself to the extent of tipping one of the pale-green sheets over the poor youngster's mouth. But the next thing I knew he was back at the phone again, had some other suite on the wire, and was bidding in his hand in the game that was awaiting his return. I'd seen some cold-blooded things in my time but that topped them all; I suppose he thought I wasn't listening. " in that case my partner and I will double," he was saying, "you can begin leading, I'll be right down."

"Let me help you get there even quicker!" I blazed, and hurtled him through the three adjacent rooms with one hand at the back of his neck and the other at the opposite end of him. He stumbled when I let go of him, and by the time he had recovered and turned to puff himself up like a pouter pigeon, I had slammed the door in his face.

I paced back and forth for half an hour amidst the chrysanthemums, gardenias and sweet peas while the medical examiner was busy in the inner room with her. A policeman with hay-fever was sneezing his life away at the outside door. And down below they were still dancing, I suppose, and drinking fizz all over the place. Tom showed up very pale around the gills. "G.o.d, what a ghastly experience! They both went all to pieces, had my hands full " The inner door opened and the examiner came out and went by without a word or would have but Tom got in front of him and blocked his way. "What's the score?" he asked in a husky voice. Behind him the other two showed up who had come in with him; I hadn't identified them yet, all this was new to me. But they weren't leaving yet, far from it. I could tell by the way they strolled out and took in everything; they were there for the night and maybe then some. The examiner tried to side-step Tom, but the latter wouldn't let him, snagged him by the lapel. "I'm engaged to her sister I have a right to know the whole thing was too sudden what's it all about?"

One of the two watching us spoke up, in a slow drawl dripping with some sort of hidden meaning. "Funny you should say that, about it was too sudden. You seem to be ahead of us. How come you know it wasn't all jake, when we haven't told you yet? You a mind-reader by any chance?" His eyes never left Tom's face.

"Anyone would say the same thing she was only seventeen to drop that suddenly " Tom broke off. "Who are you, by the way?"

"Homicide squad, by the way," the drawl came back. He snapped off a bud from a sheaf of long-stemmed La Frances and drew it through his b.u.t.tonhole. We both of us sort of tensed at that. That word, ominous-sounding. He nodded to the examiner. "Go ahead, tell him, if he wants to know so bad. Then maybe after that it'll be our turn, he'll tell us one or two little things."

"Tell, h.e.l.l," snapped the examiner, "I don't get paid for overtime."

"Poetic, aren't you," I murmured. "You really should be rhyming couplets for tombstones."

"She was killed in a poetic way too," he tossed back just before he closed the door after him, "like this was medieval Italy. Killed by a rose. A rose whose stem was sprayed with something deadly, a rose whose thorns were impregnated with it whatever it was. She p.r.i.c.ked herself on it separating it from its mates. The ball of her thumb tells the story. We're having an autopsy "

"That ain't all we're having, either," observed the more truculent of the two detectives. He scanned the cardboard lid of a box he'd brought out with him, then asked for The Fernery, Incorporated, on the wire. "Every floral piece in these three rooms has a card stuck in it except the bunch that red rose came from. We're having a talk with the florist delivered 'em " I gave Tom a look, but he was staring down at the floor, I couldn't catch his eye. I hadn't seen him select them, but the kid had claimed she'd found them, and Marcia had said something about his having forgotten to send a card with them; it sounded an awful lot like his. The horticulturist who'd grown them must have made some ghastly slip-up, sent them on to the florist without realizing that death lurked along their stems But then why didn't Tom speak up, I wondered, save them the trouble of checking with the florist? It would only look worse if they got the information that way. What did he have to hide? He had had nothing to do with it, an accident like that could have happened to anyone. But then maybe he didn't realize even yet that they were the ones he'd sent.

I cleared my throat, said "Sounds a lot like the ones ." And then looked at him, to let him finish it himself.

He wouldn't meet my eyes, kept staring down at his feet.

Meanwhile the detective had gotten through to The Fernery and it was too late to do it the easy way. "Evans, Homicide Squad," he snapped. "You the manager? You deliver two dozen American Beauty roses to Miss Marcia Planter at the Park-Ashley Hotel this evening? That ain't what I asked you, I didn't ask if you delivered 'em personally or sent 'em by messenger! What I wanna know is, did they come from your shop? Well, who ordered 'em? . . . Didn't write out any card, eh? Well, would you know him if you saw him again?" His eyes flicked over at Tom and back again, as he put the question.

I shrugged violently at him, gestured with both hands, meaning in pantomime, "Why don't you tell him, what are you standing there mum like that for?" He just looked at me and smiled a little, with the left half of his mouth.

The d.i.c.k, Evans, hung up. "Any objections to accompanying us and the flowers up to the shop for a couple of minutes, Mr Nye?" But it wasn't exactly a question, it was an order.

Tom saluted with one finger at his brow, turned toward the door without saying a word.

"Me, either," I said.

"Who's the echo?" the second detective wanted to know. "Ain't it about time we were finding out?"