Say Yes to Murder, Todhunter Ballard [affordable ebook reader .TXT] 📗
- Author: Todhunter Ballard
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“Nuts? What did she say?”
Lennox chuckled as if he were enjoying the joke on himself. “That’s the point. She didn’t say a word. The cab we were riding got tangled up with a hit-and-run driver and pushed itself against a light pole. The cabman lit running, so I drove the hack myself with the dame in the back seat. At least I thought she was. When I got where I was going she wasn’t.”
“You mean she got out?” Jean Jeffries asked a little incredulously.
Lennox said: “Your guess is as good as mine. What about some lunch?”
“Then you aren’t sore?”
“Sore?” he said, and sounded surprised. “Why?”
Jean said: “After the way Mr. Austin talked about you last night when he was trying to clear me. He put you right in the soup.”
“Don’t let that worry you,” Lennox told her. “Forget it. How about dinner?”
She said, “Yes, at seven,” and rang off. With a sigh Lennox called casting and got Ed Strong’s address. Then he left the apartment and was driven across town in a cab.
Strong wasn’t home, but the large lady who ran the boarding place let Lennox see the room in exchange for a dollar.
“He often stays out all night,” she volunteered, “and such an old man, too.”
The room wasn’t locked, and Lennox pushed open the door and stepped in. There wasn’t much to see—a thin-mattressed bed, a worn dresser, two chairs, and a trunk. The trunk was unlocked and he pried ruthlessly into the contents. His search netted a collection of well-worn clothes and a bunch of pictures.
He carried the pictures over to the window for better light and stood frowning down at them. They were all old, probably going back forty years. They showed a younger Strong in various poses, at a piano, in front of a vaudeville theater, dressed in top hat and tails about to throw a knife at a pretty girl standing before a backboard.
Lennox examined the picture, trying to find something familiar in the girl’s features, then he thrust it into his pocket and carried the rest of the collection back to the trunk.
In the lower hall, he called the landlady and left a message for Strong to get in touch with him as soon as the professor came in. He’d expected to hear from Strong long before this. The man’s continued absence bothered him. Who was the doped girl and what in the devil was he supposed to do with her?
He thought about it all the time that his cab took to reach Hollywood Boulevard. From a drugstore he called Nancy Hobbs. “How’s my little guest?”
“She’s gone, Bill. The nurse came down about an hour ago, and when she went back upstairs the girl had vanished.”
Lennox swore under his breath. “And that’s not all.” Nancy was still excited. “There’s a man watching the house from across the street. I didn’t notice him until just before I answered the phone.”
He said: “Take it easy. Don’t worry.” He said it with more confidence than he felt. “I’ll have Jake come over and stay.” He hung up and called the studio, only to learn that Jake didn’t work there any more. That made Lennox mad. It was all right to fire him, but to can Jake for moving a body was carrying the joke into the realm of the ridiculous.
He finally reached Jake at home and told him to go over to Nancy’s and see that nothing happened to her. Then he made the rounds of a dozen agencies, going through their files of old photographs. He also sent off a dozen wires, telling them to reply to the Boulevard telegraph office.
That done, he had lunch at the Derby with an old-time booking agent who used to work out of Chicago. “Remember Ed Strong?” he asked. “Used to play the piano and do a knife routine?” The man nodded and Lennox went on. “Who was his partner?”
The ex-booker shook his head. “You got me, Bill. That was a long time ago. The only reason I remember is because Strong was good with the knives. But the trouble was that he’d rather play the piano.”
Lennox thanked him and paid for the lunch. He seemed to be in a dead-end street. He couldn’t find Ed Strong to question him. The doped girl was gone, and no one else knew the answers. Yes! He snapped his fingers. There was one other person who might know. He wondered as he got a cab why he had not thought of her before. Mary Morris had known Ed Strong for a lot of years, more probably than either cared to remember.
Lennox got out of his cab and turned around to stare at the cars parked in the circular driveway. Spurck’s limousine was there, but there were also the doctor’s car and an ambulance.
He frowned and hurried up the steps. Was Mary worse? What had happened? He punched the bell after trying the door and finding it locked.
It seemed a long time before the maid answered, and when she opened the door he saw that she was crying. He caught her shoulders and almost shook her. “What’s happened?”
“It’s Mary,” she choked. “Dead.”
Lennox pushed her gently aside and stepped into the house, hurrying down the hall. Sol Spurck turned around as he entered the long sunken living room, and for a moment neither spoke.
Spurck jerked his thumb toward the bedroom. “In there.”
Bill went in. The doctor stood at the far side of the room talking to the white-capped nurse. The woman’s face was red and angry looking. The doctor turned as Lennox came in and asked:
“What was it? Her heart?”
The doctor shook his head. “I wish it had been. I’m not sure, but I think…” He stopped for a moment as if to choose his words. “We’ve already called the coroner and the police,” he added significantly.
Lennox said sharply: “Can’t you tell me what happened?”
The doctor cleared his throat. He was one of those fussy men who hate to put anything directly into words. “I mean,” he said slowly, “that I can’t sign the death certificate. I think she died from an overdose of sleeping powder. An autopsy will be necessary to be certain.”
Behind Lennox, Spurck groaned, “Another murder!”
Spellman and two officers in the uniform of the Beverly police shoved their way into the room. Lennox looked at the big homicide man.
“What are you doing here? This isn’t your territory.”
Spellman said: “The news of her death came in on our teletype, and. I just came on out I think this must have something to do with those other murders.”
Lennox didn’t feel like talking about it; he felt terrible. The maid was in the hallway crying openly. Bill went over and put a hand on her shoulder.
“Take it easy, Rita. Tears don’t help.”
She tried ineffectively to wipe her eyes with one corner of her white apron. “Mary knew she was going to die, Bill.”
“Nonsense!” he said sharply. “Your imagination is running away with you.”
The woman shook her head stubbornly. “That’s why she wrote you that letter.”
Lennox stiffened. “What letter?”
Rita went into the big kitchen and returned with a white envelope which she handed to him. Bill took it and turned it over slowly. “When did she write it?”
“This morning. She made me promise that if anything happened to her I would get it to you.”
The envelope was not sealed. Lennox pulled out the folded sheet Suddenly he said: “So you read it?”
He could see the words of denial form on her lips, but she did not utter them. Instead she said: “Yes, I read it.”
He unfolded the note. The writing was a weak scrawl, not the precise script that he remembered. It read:
Dear Bill,
I have a hunch I’m washed up. I’ve always played my hunches, so I’m playing this one. If anything happens to me, I want you to look out for Jean.
She’s wild—maybe it’s my fault; maybe it’s just the blood she has. I suppose there’s no use looking for the reason. I did the best I could for her, and I apparently didn’t do a very good job. Maybe you can do a better one.
Mary
Lennox folded it and slipped it into his pocket quickly as Spellman came out of the bedroom followed by the two Beverly officers.
“The Doc is right, I guess,” the big man said shortly. “We can’t figure whether the nurse made a mistake or whether…” His voice trailed off suggestively.
“Whether what?”
Spellman fidgeted Uncomfortably. “Well… She was pretty old and kind of tired and…”
“Not Mary,” Lennox cut in. “Mary was a fighter. She’d never quit, Floyd. She wasn’t the quitting kind. Remember that theater fire in St: Louis when she held the audience in their seats while the firemen got the blocked exits cleared?”
“This is different,” the homicide man grumbled. “Sometimes a person will bump themselves off when they have all the courage in the world. It takes courage to do a thing like that. Heck, I couldn’t!”
“And neither could Mary. She was an extrovert, too,” Lennox told him. “If she died from an overdose of sleeping medicine, it was either an accident, or…”
“You mean maybe the nurse killed her?”
“Why should the nurse want to kill her?”
Spellman said: “That was exactly what I was going to ask you. We’ve checked up on her record. The doctor swears she’s O.K., and as far as we’ve been able to find out so far she never had any contact with Mary Morris or anyone close to her before being called on this case.”
“O.K.,” said Lennox and turned around just as Jean Jeffries appeared in the front doorway.
She saw Lennox before anyone else. “My grandmother… How is she, Bill?”
He asked, almost brusquely: “What are you doing here?”
She was uncertain. “I… Why, someone called me and told me to come out here at once.”
“I called,” said Spellman.
Lennox walked over to the girl’s side and put one arm around her shoulder. “It’s all right, honey. Take it easy.”
She stiffened in the circle of his arm. “Take what easy? What’s the matter?”
“Mary’s dead,” he said, and his voice sounded foreign even to his own ears.
“Dead!” It was as if she did not understand, as if she could not comprehend the meaning of his words. “Not Mary…” She looked from one to the other as if hoping someone would tell her she had heard wrong.
“How did she die?” The words were little more than a whisper.
“We’re not sure,” he told her, “but the doctor wants to investigate further.”
“You mean an autopsy? I won’t have it.” Suddenly she was crying, her little nose dug deep into the rough tweed of his shoulder. “I won’t have her… at the morgue.”
“Easy, honey, easy,” he said, and looked around for help. Only the maid Rita answered the appeal.
She took the girl into her arms. They clung together—two women with a common grief.
Lennox watched them, then looked at Spellman. Bill’s lips formed the words: “Make the questioning easy.”
Spellman was not entirely without heart. He nodded to show that he understood, then he, Rita and Jean disappeared into the kitchen, accompanied by one of the Beverly officers.
They had no more than vanished when there were steps on the porch and Bernard Austin appeared in the doorway. The attorney was out of breath as if he had been running.
He said to no one in particular: “I wasn’t in my office when the call came. They had to track me all over town. What happened?”
Lennox gave him
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