Say Yes to Murder, Todhunter Ballard [affordable ebook reader .TXT] 📗

the girl and Mary Morris, but he didn’t see any way out of it. He waited while Jean thanked Nancy effusively, and then took her out to Sam’s coupe.

In the drive across town he cleared his throat three times before he managed to say: “Look, Jean. That act we put on for Spellman was O. K. We had to have a good reason for my being at your place, but now that it’s coming out in the open we don’t have to go on with the monkeyshines.”

“Oh!” she whispered, and her eyes got big. “I’m sorry! Did I?… Is it you and Miss Hobbs?”

For some reason the words made him angry. “It doesn’t have to be anyone, does it?” he almost yelled.

“No,” she said in a small voice. “I’ve made you mad, haven’t I? And that is the last thing in the world I would want to do—make you angry—after all you’ve gone through for me.”

He was afraid she was going to cry and braked the car sharply. Someone behind them stepped on the horn, and Bill looked around, annoyed. The traffic was heavy, and he was forced to speed up. A motor cop passed them going the other way, and he felt a peculiar prickly sensation at the roots of his hair.

I’m getting to be a hardened criminal, he thought. I’m getting to the point where I jump at the sight of a cop.

He turned cautiously into the street where Mary lived, half expecting a horde of cops and reporters around the house. He was vastly relieved when they got safely inside without interruption.

The maid met them in the hall and uttered a little glad cry when she saw the girl; “Oh, Miss Jean! You’ve come. I am so glad.”

The girl nodded. “I’m sorry I couldn’t come sooner, but I couldn’t. How is Grandmother?”

“Better,” said the maid. “I’m sure she’s better. She’s got to be! But that damn fool nurse won’t let me go near her—me who’s looked after her for forty years.”

Jean patted the woman’s shoulder. “I’m sure the nurse is taking very good care of her.”

The maid sniffed. “Well, maybe,” she agreed grudgingly, “but after all she’s not show business. People in show business aren’t like other folks, Miss Jean, and they’ve got to be treated differently.”

The girl looked at Lennox. He said: “Ask the nurse if we can see her, will you, Rita?”

“She’s quaint;” Jean remarked as the maid disappeared.

Lennox looked around sharply, then smiled. “Very,” he said. “She’s always seemed that way to me. Years ago in Chicago she used to do her best to keep me out of Mary’s dressing room. She thought I tired her.”

The girl looked at him, startled. “You knew Mar… my grandmother in Chicago?”

His smile was a warm memory. “Very well. I thought she was swell then—and still do.”

“And you don’t think I’ve been a very good granddaughter?”

For an instant their eyes locked, and he sensed a hostility in hers that he hadn’t noticed before. “Well,” he told her slowly, “it’s none of my business, but frankly I don’t. I happen to know that she established this home in the hope that you would share it with her.”

“That’s true,” Jean admitted in a low voice. “But what you don’t understand is that I’m ah individual, Bill. I have my own life to lead. Some of the things I want to do might have worried her. It’s better for both of us that we live apart. In that way we escape any friction.”

Before he could remonstrate the maid returned and motioned them to follow. Mary Morris was not alone. There was a man beside the window who turned as they came in, and Lennox saw that it was the old piano-player.

Mary said, “You know Eddie Strong, don’t you, Bill? Jean, honey, this is an old friend of mine from Chicago. He knew you when you were a baby.”

Strong seemed to be ill at ease. He stood there pulling nervously at the fingers of his white cotton gloves, his eyes, hooded by the shaggy graying brows, never leaving the girl’s face.

“You were a pretty kid,” he told her. “You still are.”

“Thanks,” said Jean Jeffries.

“I see,” said the old actress, turning her attention to the girl, “that you’ve managed to get your name in the papers.”

The girl was subdued. “Yes, Grandmother.”

“Grandmother, nonsense! What the devil has got into you? It’s those pesky European schools. You used to call me Mary before you went away.”

“All right, Mary.”

“Education,” said Mary Morris to the room at large, “is a great mistake. Look at her.”

Lennox did. He saw a faint line of color come up in the girl’s dark cheeks, but she managed to laugh. Mary Morris sighed. “I suppose,” she said, “we expect too much. We hope our children and grandchildren won’t make the mistakes we made, but they always do. She’s not bad looking, Willie, and she’ll have a lot of money when I die.”

Lennox said: “You’re talking too much, and your words don’t make sense. We’ve got to go. We’ve stayed too long already.”

“Can I bum another lift?” It was Strong.

Lennox said, “Sure,” his mind on other things. Dammit, everyone insisted on linking him with Jean Jeffries. He was glad of the piano-player’s company in the car. At least he would not be alone with the girl.

As he turned the coupe toward Wilshire, Strong said: “I saw in the noon editions that the cops had picked you up. Was it serious?”

Lennox shrugged. “Not very. I’m out on bail because I happen to have had an alibi for the time that Heyworth was killed.”

Strong said out of long experience: “Alibis are good things to have when you need them, the trouble is that you seldom have one when you need it most. How’d Mary seem to you?”

Lennox shrugged. “Not good, not bad. I think with some rest that she’ll be O.K.”

“I hope so,” Strong told him. “If I thought that anyone was trying to put anything over on the old girl, I’d fix them—good. You can drop me at the corner of Fairfax if you will.”

When he had left the car the girl said: “Funny old duck. Mary seems to have picked up every stray that she came across in her life.”

Lennox nodded, his eyes on the traffic-filled boulevard. “They don’t make many like Mary. We should do everything we can to please her.”

“Like marrying,” the girl suggested.

3.

Sam Marx said nervously, “It’s about time.”

Lennox paid no attention. He looked around the lawyer’s office to find it crowded. Spellman and Young were both there, so was Bernard Austin, standing at the window, looking down at the lighted street lamps along Broadway.

The building was old, built around a U-shaped entrance hall which ran up five floors to a skylight at the top. The halls were balconies, and the elevators mounted in open cages to the top of the structure. It was characteristic of Marx that he would choose such a place. There were no shining mahogany or expensive rugs in his office, and the glass in the entrance door bore the single inscription:

“Sam Marx, Lawyer.”

Bernard Austin was an entirely different type. A big man, soft from good living and no exercise, he was the senior partner in a firm that had specialized for years in handling business for show people.

He seldom appeared in court and never in a criminal case.

Lennox was surprised when he stepped in and adroitly parried every question Spellman or Young put to the girl. He had ability and native shrewdness, plus an easy good fellowship that kept the deputy district attorney and the detective captain at arm’s length. He pointed out that it had not been his client who had removed the body from the apartment. He added that his client had discovered the body so shortly before the arrival of Lennox that she had no time to report her find to the police.

She was a young, inexperienced girl, most of whose formative years had been spent in school in France. American ways were strange to her. What would they have done had they been in her shoes? Probably exactly what she did—trust Lennox’ judgment and let him handle the whole affair.

Halfway through the questioning Sam Marx signaled Lennox, and they strolled out into the balcony-like hall and stood at the grilled-iron railing looking down at the entrance far below.

“That guy will have you in the gas chamber yet,” the little lawyer predicted sourly.

“He’s doing a good job,” Lennox said. “I fully expect Young and Spellman to come out of there crying on each other’s shoulders.”

“Sure,” said Marx, “he’s doing a good job for her, but he certainly is twisting the knife around between your shoulder blades. It won’t be long before they decide that it wasn’t in her apartment that the body was found.”

Lennox sounded unconcerned. “That’s for you to worry about.”

The lawyer shook his head. “This time I think I’ll let them gas you and have it over with. A fine life I have—getting you out of one jam after another. And for what?”

“I pay, don’t I?”

“Sometimes—when I catch up with you before the bartender does. Why don’t you marry that Hobbs girl, settle down on a hillside lot, and raise eight kids?”

Lennox changed the subject. “This is some building. A swell location for a Karloff picture. Can’t you see Boris chasing his victims around and around these balconies?”

Marx told him to shut up. “I work a lot at night—by myself,” he added. “I’m scared as it is, and you aren’t helping.” He broke off as there was a general exodus of police from the office behind them.

Spellman stopped to say to Lennox: “Remember, you’re out on bail. Don’t decide that the studio could use you in Sydney or Santos.”

He watched them crowd into the rickety cage. “If I had a nasty mind, I could almost hope the cable would break.” He turned and led the way back into his dingy office.

Austin was telling the girl: “Now there is nothing to worry about, my dear. Everything is under control. Of course they don’t wish you to leave the jurisdiction of the court, and you will probably be followed, but since you aren’t intending to go any place it won’t matter.”

“You were wonderful,” she said, and it shocked Lennox that she used the same warm tone she had employed in thanking him.

Austin expanded under the praise. “If I do say so, I think I handled that rather well for one who is unused to dealing with police officials. Now don’t worry just because you were unfortunate enough to become involved in this chain of circumstances. I’ve handled your grandmother’s affairs for years, and I think you can safely leave yourself in my hands.”

After the shaky elevator had absorbed them, Marx said with deep disgust: “And they call me a shyster. That guy is so smooth he could slide on sandpaper. I wouldn’t trust him to watch your dog, even if I didn’t like the dog.”

“Professional jealousy.”

“That,” said Sam Marx, “is something I don’t have to suffer from because I am the best lawyer in the United States. Now get out of here, and if you love me, the next body you find turn over to Spellman before it gets cold.”

4.

Not until his cab had almost reached Hollywood did Lennox remember the date he had with himself to get drunk. It’s getting bad, he thought, when an important engagement like that could slip his mind. But still it wasn’t too late to do something about it.

At the corner of Western the headlines caught his eye, and he thrust a nickel through