The Cape Cod Mystery, page 21
part #1 of Asey Mayo Cape Cod Mystery Series
“Where are you going now? Do you want me to come with you?”
Asey smiled. “Well, I’m goin’ home to go to bed.”
“But aren’t you going to do anything more?”
“Miss Prue, I spent Friday night out in a mahog’ny boat in the bay an’ I ran around till past midnight yesterday. An’ I didn’t get much sleep last night, what with lookin’ after Schonbrun an’ this bunged-up head of mine. I’m goin’ to get a little sleep before I do one more thing. Like the feller in the poem, ‘I’m weary an’ overwrought with too much toil an’ too much care distraught.’ Yup, I’m goin’ to go to bed.”
“But Asey!”
“Can’t help it none. I ain’t no six-day bicycle racer. I got to sleep once in a while.”
I followed him out to the roadster. “What are you going to do about the bath house and your mystery there?”
“Oh, yes. Well, I got to go there, an’ you better cajole your people inside somewheres where they won’t see me till I got what I’m after. Ain’t no sense in givin’ everything away now.”
“I think you’re inconsiderate and heartless,” I said, “to go off in this manner. We haven’t got anywhere and you were so sure you’d find out everything by to-morrow. And what are you after at the bath house?”
“Forget all about it, Miss Prue. I said I’d get this fixed up by to-morrer, an’ to-morrer ain’t here yet. Sufficient unto the day is the deed thereof. You put everything right out of your mind an’ go get some sleep too. Your eyes is got as many hollers around them as mine has. You an’ me ain’t so young we can afford to run like a top all the time. You just run along an’ c’mpose your mind. We’ll get there. But even Napoleon had to sleep.”
I stalked back into the house without replying. My suggestion of bridge was sufficient to bring Emma and Betsey and Dot off the porch into the living-room.
“It’s funny,” Betsey remarked as she set up the table, “the way that key disappeared, I mean. I don’t see where it could have gone to.”
“Doubtless Asey will find it,” Emma suggested.
I looked at her curiously. “What makes you think so?” I asked.
“I don’t know, except that he is the logical one to find it if it’s lost. I don’t see, Prudence, how you’re going to get along without him after all this is finished.”
“Maybe he’ll get to be a permanent fixture,” Betsey suggested, rolling her eyes at me.
I sniffed. “We have one semi-permanent fixture,” I retorted, “now ensconced in a freight car, who seems quite sufficient for the needs of all concerned.”
My niece had the grace to keep silent.
“It’s too bad that the poor boy’s suffering,” Emma remarked. “But I do think it’s lovely about the doctor. Fancy his temper after being boxed up for the night. He’ll undoubtedly write it up for a medical journal under the heading of The Relationship of Heat and Criminology. I’ll wager it’s warmish up there. It’ll be conversational material for months to come.”
“Don’t talk about it,” said Betsey. “It’s hard enough for me to try to play this hand with you two anyway, without your bringing up this awful business.”
“I’m sorry.” Emma gathered in the trick that set Betsey down. “But it’s really rather blotting other subjects out, you know.”
“Down three.” Betsey tossed her hand on to the table. “Hereafter you play in silence.”
Emma’s run of luck continued, and she and I all but whitewashed the two girls. At ten o’clock Betsey announced that she had had enough.
“You confirmed gamblers are impossible. You use rules that were discarded before I was born and you never do the same thing twice running. I can’t understand it.”
“Don’t try to,” said Emma consolingly. “Your aunt and I have played together too long to have your newfangled rules and regulations upset the even tenor of our way in the least. We’ll waive your losses if you’ll get us some food.”
“Come along,” said Dot. “If we don’t I’ll have to foot it back to New York, absolutely on my two feet.”
We went out on the porch to wait for them.
“Tell me,” Emma asked, “this is more serious for Bill than we have thought, isn’t it?”
“Asey seems to think so,” I answered. “I suppose it is. Have you seen the papers? They’re calling Bill a millionaire roisterer and demanding action. It’s really remarkable how the American people love to drag a rich man through the courts and I think they revel particularly when he’s indicted for murder. They’ve brought out all the details of Jimmy’s yacht and that party he and Bill gave to the English manufacturers two years ago, and all about their uncle Phineas’ divorces and everything else. I’m waiting with bated breath for them to start in on Betsey and me. I can’t see how we’ve managed to escape so far unless it’s because Cousin John Whitsby is putting his veto on the subject.”
“If Bill is taken up to-morrow he’ll be put in jail, won’t he?”
“Yes. I hope Jimmy has attended to lawyers as Asey told him. This is rather a mess, Emma.”
“Grim. Very grim. Were you ever in jail, Prudence?”
“Certainly not,” I said in a horrified tone.
“I didn’t mean it that way. Were you ever in one? That is, did you ever go through one?”
“Once when I was a child with my father. I don’t remember much about it except that I cried and it was smelly. Why?”
“I went through one once with Henry Edward. It was grim, Prudence, very grim indeed. Bars and bare concrete and an odor of carbolic acid and disinfectant and too much humanity in one place. I don’t wonder that there are prison riots.”
“Possibly Bill won’t have to go at all. Asey still seems to think that he can get him off.”
“I hope so. Prudence, that harbor is beautiful. You don’t know how I’ve loved being here these last few days in spite of all that’s happened. I’ve been very lonely up there in Boston.”
“You miss him, don’t you?”
She nodded without turning around. “Yes. You know, Prudence, people called Henry Edward eccentric and I suppose he was. Most ministers know more about the next world than they do of this, but he was different. He believed firmly and thoroughly that religion had more to do with the present than with any possible future. He tried to help people and he gave as much attention to a common bum from the gutter as he did to the soul needs of his richest parishioner. His methods of aiding people were what startled every one so. But he did what he set out to do.”
I realized suddenly that I had never heard Emma talk like this in all the years I had known her. She rather prided herself on not being serious if she could help it.
“I didn’t think it was possible,” she continued, “to miss any one as much as I miss him. I can’t understand how people say that time dulls memory and all that sort of thing. Time only makes it worse. In some ways, Prudence, you’re very lucky. You have Betsey to look after and worry about and suggest wearing rubbers to and I haven’t even a cat. But then, I don’t suppose that there’s any use in running on about it.”
Dot and Betsey came back with a heaped-up tray. We left it an unsightly mess of paper napkins and empty plates in no time at all.
“I’m going to bed,” Emma announced. “If we are to have the final analysis at six to-morrow, I think it’s high time we all got some sleep.”
Betsey agreed and the two of them went up-stairs. Dot announced that she wasn’t the least bit sleepy. “Besides,” she added, “I can’t see that a few hours one way or another will make much difference when one has to get up at that ungodly hour. I shall be half-asleep anyhow and it won’t make me any less yawny if I go to bed now or at five-thirty.”
She lighted a cigarette. “Miss Prudence, what do you think that man has up his sleeve?”
“Asey? I haven’t the faintest notion. You know, Dot, this thing isn’t going the way it ought to go. We’ve followed up everything that can be followed and it’s been just so much time wasted. The more that is explained, the less involved people become. Just the same, I can’t imagine why that man has gone home to bed at this crucial moment. Either he knows a lot more than he has condescended to tell me, or else he’s putting up a tremendous bluff.”
“It is peculiar. You don’t think, do you, that he’s going to land on me?”
“My dear child!”
“I know, but you’ve got to admit that if any one really is in deep, it’s me. After all, I was the last person to see him alive.”
“You couldn’t have been,” I told her. “If that was the case you’d be the murderer. You say you left him alive and Schonbrun says he was dead when he came back the second time. I’ll admit it doesn’t look any too good for you, but there must have been some one who came after you and before the brother.”
“Asey seems so sure that the brother didn’t do it.”
“I know he does. Though I feel he’s scarcely the person whose word I should take about anything.”
“This business of Betsey,” Dot said. “I mean, Betsey and Sanborn and the man who overheard them. That’s going to get you all mixed up in this. That doctor is going to make trouble for you. It may have been a frightfully brainy notion of Asey’s to trick Sullivan into arresting him, but it’s not going to help you any. When that dull sheriff comes to his senses and realizes what an ass he’s been, I’m afraid he’s going to land on you and Bets.”
“I’ve been thinking of that. Ramon Barradio is not what you might call a trustworthy person and I don’t think that his word would stand in court, but the fact is there. Dot, I give you my word that I am so confused that I feel you or Betsey or I might have done this in an absent-minded moment. I’m beginning to see why John and Maida got divorced over a matter like that book. In an affair like this you lose all sense of values. You don’t want to suspect the ones you know and like, but after everything else has failed, you come back and wonder.”
“I know. I found myself feeling you were the guilty one this afternoon when the doctor and Sullivan were powwowing. I knew you weren’t, but I just did.”
“The more I think of it,” I said, “the more it seems that Schonbrun was right. His brother ought to have been done away with long ago. I wonder if it wouldn’t be best to let Bill take the consequences and see if he couldn’t get off all right.”
“It would if the doctor hadn’t got this fixed idea about you. Think if I’d ever married that man and then found out about all this. I suppose I was an utter idiot not to have known that there was something wrong somewhere but you really don’t expect to find such men around.”
“Particularly when they wear such elegant clothes. I know what you mean.”
Emma clumped down the stairs. “Are you still worrying about this business? Your chum Mr. Mayo, Prudence, has promised to get the guilty one, and I should think that was enough for you. I have some letters to go. Where can I put ’em?”
“On the desk,” I told her. “There’s a collection there already. And I do wish you’d stop twitting me about Asey Mayo.”
“I’m sorry,” she said in a tone that had no sorrow in it. “But you must admit that you’ve laid yourself open to being twitted, haven’t you, now?”
“Not at all,” I answered with some dignity. “Just because I seem to have been thrown into his company through sheer force of circumstance is no reason why you should—”
“Should twit you. I see, Prudence, I see. Rest assured that I shall say no more about the situation. But it would make a lovely romance, wouldn’t it?” She laughed and clumped up to her room.
Dot snickered.
“And as for you and your noises,” I said to her firmly, “you can go to bed.”
Dot crushed out her cigarette and kissed me. “We’re all horrid and nasty and batty as hedgehogs. All right. I’ll go up and annoy Bets. You’d better come to bed yourself soon. You need sleep as much as the rest of us.”
And she dashed up-stairs.
I picked up Ginger and held him in my lap. It is a habit of mine whenever I have any particularly serious thinking to do. Some women, like Emma, prefer to knit and others do fancy work or puzzles; still others, more modern possibly, like Betsey and Dot, prefer a cigarette. But there is something very comforting about holding a warm purring cat.
I tried for the millionth time to get things settled in my mind. We had found out that the people with motives for killing Sanborn were legion. Kurth, Maida, Dot, Betsey, Bill, Schonbrun, all had reasons. Then there was Maida’s friend Alice, the girl who had committed suicide. Perhaps she had friends or a family or some one who had found out about her and attempted revenge. There was the man of the sardine factory. There was the doctor Kurth had told us about and the other unknown doctor whom he had suggested. All of the motives were varied and none of them was weak.
I myself was not exempt from the list of suspects. Olga had an alibi if her friend Inga had not been primed beforehand, which Asey and I both doubted. As Dot had insinuated, even Asey himself might have done it. I recalled his suggestion that Sullivan’s billy might have been used to kill Sanborn.
There was the problem of the weapon. We were not even certain exactly what blunt instrument had been used. A blunt instrument: I looked around the room. A lamp, a smoking stand, a gold club, the footstool,—there was no end to the blunt instruments in sight.
We didn’t know whether a man or a woman had done the murder. As Asey said, not many of the latter knew about rabbit punches and jiu-jitsu or the vulnerability of the part of the head where Sanborn had been killed. On the other hand, had Schonbrun seen that flash of white, and had it been a woman? Or was it, as Betsey suggested, a man with white trousers?
We had no finger-prints, no foot-prints, no clues of strands of red hair, like my friend Wyncheon Woodruff in the now discarded Lipstick Murderer. There were no cigarette stubs strewn around, no cigar ashes of a peculiar type; though I doubted very much if they would have told us anything had we found them. There were no buttons clutched in dead fingers, no strange initials, no anonymous letters to wonder about. What we had found we had followed through. But, I thought despairingly, we might as well have left the entire matter to chance.
We knew that Sanborn had been killed between four-thirty or a little after, and a quarter past five. We knew of six visits that had been paid him by five different people who had come there from the time he left us at the cottage till I found him at night. But was Asey right? Was there a mysterious sixth person who had swooped out of the blue close on Dot’s heels and fled as quickly as he or she had come? Who was it? Could it possibly have been the doctor? Had Asey really been tricking Sullivan into thinking the doctor was guilty?
I picked up the bridge score and the stubby pencil and tried to diagram the matter. Bill, Betsey, Dot, Kurth, Maida, Schonbrun, Olga, Emma and myself were the ones most intimately connected with the affair. Much as I wanted to think otherwise it seemed to me that one of us must have committed the murder. That was the first circle about Sanborn. Then there were the more remote possibilities, unknowns whose motive must have been revenge for the deaths or the havoc that Sanborn had caused. Then there was still a third and limitless circle from which the murderer might have come.
I checked all the names in the first circle save Dot, Schonbrun, Maida and Kurth. It seemed clear to me that the others were exempt. Had one of these whose alibis had not been proved done it? Was it one from the second circle, out for revenge, or was it some one whose existence we had not known of, some one still farther afield?
Ginger uncurled himself from my lap. He yawned majestically as though to say that he for one had had quite enough pondering for a time. I let him jump down, crumpled my diagram into a ball and tossed it into the fireplace.
The next time any one was murdered in my vicinity, I thought sleepily, there was one spinster lady who was not going to concern herself with amateur detecting.
CHAPTER XIX
ASEY AND THE BLESSED HOPE
The glaring sunrise woke me early Monday morning. I could hear the faint chugging of the fisher boats as they started out to the grounds. Outside the cottage the beach grass was heavy with dew and the meadows beyond were still thick with mist.
I watched the purples and the oranges of the horizon change and melt as the sun came creeping up. The twinkling morning star faded away with the garish color. The curtain of the window next mine rattled and Emma’s head was thrust out.
“Gorgeous, isn’t it?” she remarked. “But a little thundery, like Mr. Kipling.”
I agreed that it was. “It’s a source of constant wonder to me,” I added, “that Cape Codders can be quite so bleak with all the glorious sunrises and sunsets put on for their special benefit.”
She laughed. “I never thought of that. Maybe we should start an ‘up for sunrise’ movement. Ugh. I’m withdrawing. It’s a beautiful sight but the air is chilly.” She closed the window.
I drew my kimono more closely around my shoulders and perched precariously on the sill. Out by the wharf a school of small fish were churning the water and above them circled a flock of gulls. I thought of the diagram I had made the night before and watched them closely to see if I might glean some omen from them. I didn’t.
The milk truck jounced along the beach road and I heard the empty bottles clinking. Ginger clamored to be let out. I opened the door and in two seconds he was galloping away to the meadows. Olga banged a dish in the kitchen. I dressed and went downstairs. The others followed me.
Breakfast was a silent meal. All of us were tired and nervous and expectant. No soldier ever waited for a signal to go over the top with more impatience and more misgivings than we awaited the coming of six o’clock.
Ten minutes before the hour Kurth and Maida arrived with Schonbrun in tow. Promptly at six Bill’s roadster drew up in front of the door with Asey at the wheel.
He greeted us with a yawn and requested a cup of coffee.
“I thought you told me that you were going home to get some sleep,” I remarked severely. “From your looks I’d say you hadn’t had forty winks. And you slept in your clothes while you had those, didn’t you?”
