Say Yes to Murder, Todhunter Ballard [affordable ebook reader .TXT] 📗
- Author: Todhunter Ballard
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She was surprised. So was the other girl. He could sense tension in the room behind him. It could explode and bring the play to a close. He had to work fast. He bent down, putting his arms around the girl and pulling her up toward him.
His big body blotted her out as far as the watchers were concerned. Her lips were cold and unresponsive as a little child’s, sexless and uninteresting, but his left hand had reached the pocket of his topcoat and found the gun.
He straightened suddenly and pushed her away from him. She went staggering backward across the room, tripping over the tails of the coat, and fell heavily. But she was out of the line of fire.
He pivoted on his heel and shot Boren. The bullet caught the apartment-house manager directly in the stomach. Lennox knew that he couldn’t have possibly done it again.
But he did not miss now. The heavy bullet doubled the apartment man up like a folding jackknife, and he sat down with both arms wrapped around his belly. He sat there looking bewildered and very hurt, then his features twisted as pain came into them. The gun slipped, from his fingers and he fell sideways onto the carpet.
Lennox turned as the girl made for the door. She almost reached it. He couldn’t bring himself to shoot at her back. Then the door came open, and Lennox had a confused glimpse of Spellman’s red face.
The detective captain said: “Wait, Miss Jeffries. I’ve got to arrest you for the murder of your grandmother. The maid just talked.” He seized her arm and got long fingernail marks down across his cheeks. It was all he and Stobert could do to subdue her.
Lennox wasn’t paying much attention. He was staring at Nancy Hobbs as if she had been an apparition.
Spellman finally got the girl under control and managed to hold her while Stobert clicked the cuffs into place. Then he shoved her roughly forward to face Lennox. “O. K., pal. Talk your girl friend out of this one. Convince me that Jean Jeffries didn’t kill Mary Morris.”
Lennox shook his head. Tired as he was, he couldn’t help a feeling of elation. “That isn’t Jean Jeffries, Floyd. This is.” He crossed the room and helped the topcoated girl up from where he had flung her. “Hurt, kid?”
She shook her head uncertainly. “I’m all right.”
They were all staring at her, open-mouthed. Lennox said to Stobert. “There’s a guy down in the basement, a guy wearing white gloves. If you’ll bring him up, he can give you more details than I can. He’s the guy who broke this thing.”
Stobert disappeared, and while they waited Lennox said to Nancy Hobbs, “So you followed, after all. How’d you get out of that closet?”
She gave him a twisted smile. “Jake heard me yelling. He wasn’t too drunk to open the door. I called the cops and told them to dash out to Mary Morris’. Then I got my car and went out, too. We must have gotten there right after you left. The maid talked, so we guessed you’d come over here. The only light burning in the building was in this apartment so we figured this must be the place.”
“You should have a badge,” he told her, and broke off as Stobert came in, pushing the professor before him. “This the guy?”
Strong looked around, dazed. When he saw Boren’s body, he relaxed a little. “So they got him?”
Lennox nodded. “And her. Who is she, Ed?”
Strong said: “Her name is Delia West. She used to be a muscle dancer on the carnival circuit, I found her picture in an old Billboard.”
Lennox said, “Have you still got that passport?”
Strong glanced at him sharply, then drew a leather booklet from his pocket and handed it over. Lennox relayed it to Spellman. “That should prove this girl’s identity.”
The detective captain took it without comment.
Lennox said: “Tell them about it, Ed. Tell them how you found the doped girl in Madam Honia’s, how we bailed her out, and what you did with her.”
Strong cleared his throat. He was very nervous. “There’s not much to tell. I was over at Honia’s the other night and I happened to see this kid. She was doped, which made me look at her close. She’s the spitting image of what Mary Morris was forty years ago.
“I guessed something was wrong then so I went over to see Tina Kingstone. I used to know her in Chicago. I put on the pressure and she talked. She told me that Boren had snatched this kid off the boat when she came back from France and that they had substituted this muscle dancer in her place. The Kingstone dame was wise. Somehow, she’d gotten hold of the passport. I made her give it to me. I was going to show Mary, but first I wanted to get the doped kid away from Honia’s.
“But before I could do a thing, Heyworth got himself killed, and then Kingstone. That scared me. I got drunk, and while I was drunk I went back to Honia’s to have another look at the doped kid. The joint was raided. Lennox bailed us out. He took the doped girl out to Miss Hobbs and I got her from there.
“I started to take her over to Mary’s, but when I got there, I saw this fake Jean Jeffries coming out. It scared me so I drove the girl down to the beach and kept her out in the open until the dope wore off. At night, I started to take her back to my place, but there were a couple of Inky Kreach’s men waiting. They got her, but I managed to slip away in the darkness.
“I saw a paper, saw Mary Morris was dead and that the maid claimed that no one had been there. I knew she was lying for I’d seen this muscle dancer going in myself. So I hunted up Lennox. We went over there and then came here.”
Spellman said, “That’s pretty confused, but it should do for now. What gets me is why Boren kept the doped gal alive. It would have been much easier to kill her.”
Lennox told him: “I think I can explain that. You see, he didn’t trust Delia.” He looked toward the handcuffed girl. “As long as the real Jean was alive, he could always have traded her to the grandmother for dough if Delia got out of line.”
Delia West spat at him. Suddenly she reached out her manacled hands and grabbed Stobert’s gun. She brought it up, pointed directly at Lennox. But the professor was closer. He jumped forward, just in time to receive the bullet in his thin chest.
Stobert had gone into action. His beefy hand caught the side of the girl’s head and knocked her sideways. “Jeeze,” he said as he knelt and retrieved his gun, “imagine me hitting a dame that looks like that.”
It took all of three hours to get everything straightened out downtown. When Lennox finally left the Hall of Justice he found Nancy still waiting for him in her car.
“Get in,” she said. “You can tell me about it while I am driving you home.”
He yawned elaborately. “Home? Bed? But first I have to stop at the studio. I just talked to Spurck on the phone, and there are certain things I have to explain.”
She said: “You’re a fool. You’re a sucker for punishment. After the way they treated you, I’d never go near that studio again. But, Bill, tell me about things. There are a lot of angles that I don’t get. How did Boren manage to substitute the girl?”
“Boren was Mary Morris’ ex-manager,” Lennox explained. “I didn’t recognize him with the beard and the eyeglasses until you made that crack about Mary fighting with her manager. He knew a lot about her affairs and Jean remembered him, so when he met her at the boat she didn’t know that anything was wrong.
“Apparently he’d bribed a waiter at Austin’s hotel to slip something into the food which made the attorney ill so Austin did not meet! the ship. Delia West, posing as Jean, came to the hotel, and Austin had no reason to suspect anything.
“I got suspicious when I recognized Boren finally. It seemed more than a coincidence that the girl was living at an apartment house owned by Mary’s ex-manager, so I wired the theatrical papers and the big bookers all over the country, asking if they knew a dancer who recited Chaucer when she was drunk. The answer came back—Delia West.”
“But Heyworth, and Tina Kingstone. It doesn’t make sense.”
Lennox sighed. “I suppose that I’ve got to tell you,” he admitted. “And I suppose that it doesn’t matter now, but neither Boren nor the West girl killed Heyworth and Kingstone. The professor did; he’s dead, protecting me, and I’d just as soon that the cops never found out.”
“The professor killed Heyworth…” She almost ran into a streetcar. “Bill, you’re nuts. What makes you think so?”
He drew the picture which he had taken from Strong’s trunk out of his pocket. “You can’t see very well without a glass, but those knives he’s holding have peculiar handles. They’re carved in a design. I’ve never seen anything like them save once. The handle of the knife which killed Heyworth was carved in a like manner.
“But that isn’t all. The professor had that passport. He claimed that Tina Kingstone gave it to him. But something was taken from her stocking on the night that she was murdered, and I think it was the passport.”
“Now, Bill, listen…”
He cut her short. “Here’s what happened, I think. I’m only guessing, and we’ll never know exactly what happened, because only Strong could tell us and he’s dead.
“I think that on the night Heyworth was killed, Strong was in the Beverly Derby and saw Jean Jeffries go out with Heyworth. At that time, he thought that the girl was actually Mary Morris’ granddaughter, and he didn’t approve of her playing around with Heyworth.
“He followed them. Now I’m still guessing, but what Delia West just told the police seems to bear me out. It seems that Tina Kingstone had known Delia West in the east, and she recognized her, here in Hollywood. Naturally she wanted to know what was going on, and when she found out she declared herself in on the play. She stole the passport and kept it, just to make certain that Boren and the West girl didn’t forget to pay her off when the clean-up came at the time of Mary’s death.
“That wasn’t so bad, but Kingstone got tight one night when she was out with Heyworth and blabbed the whole works. He wanted a cut. He threatened to tell Mary the whole thing. Kingstone told Boren and the West girl that, if they could get Heyworth to come to the apartment, she would handle him, so West saw him in the Derby and got him the message. He took Kitty Foster home and then went to West’s apartment. She left him alone with Kingstone. In the morning, when she found the body, both she and Boren assumed that Kingstone had killed him and didn’t worry too much until Kingstone was murdered that night. Then they got scared. Each thought that the other had done the killing.
“They moved the doped girl over to Madam Honia’s in case the police searched the whole apartment house.”
“But…”
Lennox said:
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