Say Yes to Murder - Todhunter Ballard (book club recommendations .TXT) 📗

here yet, but I don’t need a doctor…”

“Phooey! Doctors! For a hundred dollars they can’t tell you what is wrong. But then, they ain’t been in this business, twenty-three years like me. Positively, I’m telling you, it’s temperament—nothing but temperament.”

Bill shook his head. “I wish it were, Sol. But Mary’s too good a trouper to pull a stunt like this.”

The tone Lennox used caught Spurck’s attention and quieted him a little. He sank heavily into a chair and twisted at the arm nervously with his short fingers.

“It ain’t that I’m hard-hearted,” he protested like a misunderstood child, “but the New York office is driving me screwy, y’understand. I wish those schlemiels were out here once. I wish they could see what we run into. Not only is Mary sick, but Heyworth got himself killed. Or maybe you heard.”

Before Lennox could admit he had, the doctor entered and hurried over toward the inner room. Spurck and Lennox watched him with the nervousness of newborn fathers. Neither wanted to speak. Heyworth’s death was forgotten for the moment, so was the unfinished picture. Mary Morris and her health meant more to them than any picture they might ever make.

The doctor was in the room for almost an hour. When he appeared, Lennox said anxiously: “How is she, Doctor?”

The man fumbled with his bag. He was small and round-headed, with a pink and white skin and an appearance of having been thoroughly scrubbed.

“To tell you the exact truth, I don’t know. She seems to have had some kind of a shock. She won’t tell me what’s the matter, but she’s in a highly nervous condition. I tried to give her a sedative. Sleep, I think, would do her more good than anything else. But she won’t take anything.”

“It’s all right for me to see her, isn’t it?”

“Well…” he agreed half-grudgingly. “But be very careful that you don’t excite her. I’m sending over a nurse at once.”

Spurck had come to his feet and was moving forward, but Lennox stopped him with a look. He opened the connecting door and slid through, nodding to the maid who turned as he entered the room.

2.

Mary Morris lay on the studio couch, her eyes closed, her delicate body covered by a brightly colored afghan. Her eyes opened languidly when Lennox knelt on the floor at her side. “Hello, Willie.”

He grinned. It was her pet name for him. No one else had ever dared call him that—not even his own mother. He reached under the woolen cover and took one of the thin, heavily veined hands in both his own. It was like holding a piece of ice.

“Hello, trouper!”

Two tears, put there by sheer weakness, forced their way under her eyelids and trickled down through the greasepaint which still covered her cheeks. “I can’t be ill tonight, Willie. I’ve got things to do.”

“The picture can wait,” he told her. “It will have to wait. Maybe Moyer can shoot around you for a couple of days while you get some strength back.”

She roused herself, tried to sit up, but he restrained her. “To hell with the picture. This is a personal thing, Willie—and damned important. Do you understand? I’ve got to get up.”

“You can’t.” His voice was finality itself. “Stop acting like a screwy dame and let me run the show. What is it you have to do?’

Her eyes were on his, probing, studying them in an effort to make up her mind. “A letter…” she finally said hesitantly. “I’ve lost a letter, Willie.”

Lennox drew the sheet of paper from his pocket and folded the old fingers around it. “No, you haven’t, honey.”

She stared at it, relief replacing the worry in her eyes, then she looked at the maid and whispered to Bill: “Tell her to leave.”

Mary Morris settled back with a sigh. “I must trust you, Willie. I’ve got no one else I can trust, and I can’t do anything myself. After seventy years you wouldn’t think this old carcass would fail me, would you?”

“There, there,” Lennox consoled. “What do you want done?”

She told him, and he frowned deeply as she talked. When she had finished she lay back on the couch exhausted, and he was more than glad to welcome the nurse the doctor had sent.

3.

Nancy Hobbs was sitting at his desk as William Lennox entered his own office. It was a small room, neatly furnished, with none of the flash of most studio offices.

The girl looked as if she belonged there. To Lennox it was always a relief to see her. The warm skin, the friendly, understanding eyes. She kidded him, yes, she even mocked him now and then, but there was none of the personal bitterness which underlay most Hollywood repartee.

He said, “I thought that you had gone home to bed.”

She told him, “I got the flash about Mary Morris’ collapse and came over. What happened, Bill? I’ve talked to Spurck’s secretary, but they won’t release a thing.”

He sat down heavily on the corner of the desk. He was very tired and he needed a drink badly. There was a bottle in the second drawer and he pulled it out, his eyes questioning the girl. She shook her head.

“No, Bill. It’s past my bedtime now.”

He half-filled the glass from the water cooler, and took it neat. The smokiness came up into his nose, stinging it a little, the Scotch made a warm, comforting ball in the pit of his stomach. “I needed that,” he said, and put the bottle back into its place.

“What is it, Bill?” Her eyes were on his face, noting the tired, sagging lines with more than a mother’s interest.

“Jean Jeffries,” he told her, and laughed without any mirth. “Everywhere I turn, I seem to cross her tracks.”

“I wish,” said Nancy Hobbs, using the tone of one who voices the impossible, “I wish that you had not gotten mixed up in this.”

Lennox wished the same thing, but stubborn pride would not let him admit it to this girl. Instead he said, “This is not for publication, chum,” and drew the sheet of notepaper from his pocket, putting it into her hand.

Dear Miss Morris,

Maybe you don’t know me, but plenty of people in this town do and can tell you who I am. Your granddaughter is in trouble—bad trouble. I’d come to see you, but I’m afraid. If you could come to my apartment tonight it would be best. I’ll fix the lower door so it won’t lock. Wear old clothes and come to the above address. It’s apartment 504. Whatever you do, don’t show this to your granddaughter.

Tina Kingstone

Nancy Hobbs was frowning when she handed the letter back to Lennox. “What has Tina to do with Jean Jeffries? She’s nothing but a two-timing little tramp.”

Lennox shook his head. “She’s more important than that,” he said, slowly. “She’s a tramp, all right, but she’s managed to make herself an important one. Don’t forget, Heyworth is one of the men who paid her rent, and notice her address. She lives in the same building that Jean Jeffries does.”

Nancy caught her breath. “Bill, I wish that you hadn’t gotten mixed up in this. You think that Tina saw something… that she…”

Lennox’ face looked like a tight mask. “Maybe it was Tina who called Spellman this afternoon. I thought that it was Kitty Foster, showing her jealous claws, but now I’m not sure. Tina could have seen Jake and me take Heyworth out in that box.”

Nancy’s concern grew. “What are you going to do?”

“What can I do?” He sounded angry. “I’ll go over there. If Tina’s wound up for a little blackmail, she’s got to be unwound.” He pulled out the top drawer and found the .38 police special.

The girl gave up. “O.K.,” she said. “My car’s across the street. Come on, I’ll drive you over.”

He didn’t try to dissuade her. He had a vivid memory of a rainy Chicago night, when this girl had climbed into a second-story window and gotten a murderer’s signed statement while half the city’s police battered at the front entrance. In silence they went out to the car. In silence they drove to the apartment house, but he would not let her come in.

“You’ve got a kind face,” he said. “Seeing it, Tina might not believe me when I threaten to torture her. I’m going to get as tough as Bogart and twice as vicious.”

She looked at him a long moment, then she laughed. She, too, was governed by a troubling sense of humor. That was their common meeting point, the cord which seemed to hold them together.

“You’re miscast,” she said. “You couldn’t play a villain realistically. You’re like a small boy, throwing out his chest and yelling, ‘I am tough.’”

“Is that so?” He was out of the car. “For two cents I’d tell you to come up and watch. I might even throw some acid in her pretty face, if I had some acid.”

He was still offended as he turned and left the car, but riding upward in the little elevator, his sense of humor came back, and he was grinning as he paused before the door of 504.

The door was slightly ajar. He knocked, his knuckles making a sharp loud sound in the quiet which gripped all the house. Nothing happened, and he knocked again, the grin fading from his face. Surely Kingstone would be there. She had made the appointment herself.

No sound reached him from within. He hesitated, then pushed gently on the panel. The door swung inward and he stepped carefully inside, knowing full well that this could be a trap. The room was a duplicate of Jean Jeffries’ apartment, but he was not interested in the room.

His eyes were focused on the girl who lay quiet on the thick nap of the rug. Never again would her name figure in a divorce action; never again would her slim slippers tap madly on some hotel dance floor.

She was beautiful in death. The harsh lines which had formed about her pretty mouth were washed away. She looked as she probably had when she left high school some ten years before.

Lennox bent above the body, noting the crimson patch staining the multicolored dress. The skirt was torn on the left side, exposing the short metal zipper at the side of the silk panty and the rolled top of her silk stocking. Runs threaded down from the stocking top to the calf and the slender ankle. There was a little chain around her ankle glittering through the thin mesh of the hose.

Lennox looked at the runs, his eyes narrowed and deepened to a black-blue with thought. Even in the privacy of her apartment Tina would never have worn such stockings; rather—far rather—she would have worn no stockings at all.

He straightened thoughtfully. His mind, released from the shock of finding her, was busy. There had been something concealed in that stocking—something the murderer had wanted. It had been taken hurriedly, violently, so violently that the runs had been left as mute evidence.

He looked slowly about the room, and his eyes came to rest on the period desk at one end. He crossed to it and went through the collection of old envelopes he found. Most were bills; a few private letters. He did not know what he was looking for. He did not know that Tina Kingstone had written down anything about Mary Morris, but he had to look.

There was nothing in the desk, and he turned away, his eyes again on the body, as if she might rise and give him the answer he sought. But she did not move, and his eyes shifted to the door as