Ellery Queen’s Double Dozen

Helen Nielsen Death Scene

Leo was a cool, calculating opportunist. He was also a handsome devil, with nerve and vitality... all of which make a dangerous combination for a lonely and susceptible woman...

The woman who had driven in with the black Duesenberg fascinated Leo Manfred. She stood well, as if she might be a model or a dancer. Her ankles were arched and her calves firm. Leo wriggled out from under the car he was working on in order to examine her more closely.

She was dressed all in white — white hat with a wide, schoolgirl brim; white dress, fitted enough to make her body beckon him further; white shoes with high, spiked heels.

But it was more than the way she dressed and the way she stood. There was something strange about her, almost mysterious, and mystery didn’t go well in the grease-and-grime society of Wagner’s Garage. Leo got to his feet.

Carl Wagner, who was half again Leo’s thirty years, and far more interested in the motor he’d uncovered than in any woman, blocked the view of her face. But her voice, when she spoke, was soft and resonant.

“Mr. Wagner,” she said, “can you tell me when my automobile will be ready?”

Automobile — not car. Leo’s active mind took note.

By this time Wagner was peering under the hood with the enthusiasm of a picnicker who had just opened a boxed banquet.

“It’s a big motor, Miss Revere,” he answered, “and every cylinder has to be synchronized. Your father’s always been very particular about that.”

“My father—” She hesitated. There was the ghost of a smile. It couldn’t be seen, but it was felt — the way some perfumes, Leo reflected, are felt. “My father is very particular, Mr. Wagner. But it’s such a warm day, and I don’t feel like shopping.”

Carl Wagner wasted neither words nor time. The fingers of one hand went poking into the pocket of his coveralls and dug up a set of keys at the same instant that he glanced up and saw Leo.

“My helper will take you home,” he said. “You can tell your father that we’ll deliver the car just as soon as it’s ready.”

If Leo Manfred had believed in fate, he would have thought this was it; but Leo believed in Leo Manfred and a thing called opportunity.

Women were Leo’s specialty. He possessed a small black book containing the telephone numbers of more than 57 varieties; but no one listed in his book was anything like the passenger who occupied the back seat of the boss’s new Pontiac as it nosed up into the hills above the boulevard.

Leo tried to catch her face in the rear-view mirror. She never looked at him. She stared out of the window or fussed with her purse. Her face was always half lost beneath the shadow of the hat. She seemed shy, and shyness was a refreshing challenge.

At her direction, the Pontiac wound higher and higher, beyond one new real estate development after another, until, at the crest of a long private driveway, it came to a stop at the entrance of a huge house. Architecturally, the house was a combination of Mediterranean and late Moorish, with several touches of early Hollywood. Not being architecturally inclined, Leo didn’t recognize this; but he did recognize that it must have cost a pretty penny when it was built, and that the gardener toiling over a pasture-sized lawn couldn’t have been supplied by the Department of Parks and Beaches.

And yet, there was a shabbiness about the place — a kind of weariness, a kind of nostalgia, that struck home as Leo escorted his passenger to the door.

“I know this house!” he exclaimed. “I’ve seen pictures of it. It has a name—” And then he stared at the woman in white, who had been given a name by Carl Wagner. “Revere,” he remembered aloud. “Gordon Revere.”

“Gavin Revere,” she corrected.

“Gavin Revere,” Leo repeated. “That’s it! This is the house that the big film director Gavin Revere built for his bride, Monica Parrish. It’s called—”

The woman in white had taken a key out of her purse.

“Mon-Vere,” she said.

Leo watched her insert the key into the lock of the massive door and then, suddenly, the answer to the mystery broke over him.

“If you’re Miss Revere,” he said, “then you must be the daughter of Monica Parrish. No wonder I couldn’t take my eyes off you.”

“Couldn’t you?”

She turned toward him, briefly, before entering the house. Out of her purse she took a dollar bill and offered it; but Leo had glimpsed more than a stretch of long, drab hall behind her. Much more.

“I couldn’t take money,” he protested, “not from you. Your mother was an idol of mine. I used to beg dimes from my uncle — I was an orphan — to go to the movies whenever a Monica Parrish was playing.”

Leo allowed a note of reverence to creep into his voice.

“When you were a very small boy, I suppose,” Miss Revere said.

“Eleven or twelve,” Leo answered. “I never missed a film your mother and father made—”

The door closed before Leo could say more; and the last thing he saw was that almost smile under the shadow of the hat.

Back at the garage, Carl Wagner had questions to answer.

“Why didn’t you tell me who she was?” Leo demanded. “You knew.”

Wagner knew motors. The singing cylinders of the Duesenberg were to him what a paycheck and a beautiful woman, in the order named, were to Leo Manfred. He pulled his head out from under the raised hood and reminisced dreamily.

“I remember the first time Gavin Revere drove this car in for an oil change,” he mused. “It was three weeks old, and not one more scratch on it now than there was then.”

“What ever happened to him?” Leo persisted.

“Polo,” Wagner said. “There was a time when everybody who was anybody had to play polo. Revere wasn’t made for it. Cracked his spine and ended up in a wheel chair. He was in and out of hospitals for a couple of years before he tried a comeback. By that time everything had changed. He made a couple of flops and retired.”

“And Monica Parrish?”

“Like Siamese twins,” Wagner said. “Their careers were tied together. Revere went down, Parrish went down. I think she finally got a divorce and married a Count Somebody — or maybe she was the one who went into that Hindu religion. What does it matter? Stars rise and stars fall, Leo, but a good motor...”

Twelve cylinders of delight for Carl Wagner; but for Leo Manfred a sweet thought growing in the fertile soil of his rich, black mind.

“I’ll take the car back when it’s ready,” he said.

And then Wagner gave him one long stare and a piece of advice that wasn’t going to be heeded.

“Leo,” he said, “stick to those numbers in your little black book.”

For a man like Leo Manfred, time was short. He had a long way to travel to get where he wanted to go, and no qualms about the means of transportation. When he drove the Duesenberg up into the hills, he observed more carefully the new developments along the way. The hills were being whittled down, leveled off, terraced and turned into neat pocket-estates as fast as the tractors could make new roads and the trucks haul away surplus dirt. Each estate sold for $25,000 to $35,000, exclusive of buildings, and he would have needed an adding machine to calculate how much the vast grounds of Mon-Vere would bring on the open market.

As for the house itself — he considered that as he nosed the machine up the steep driveway. It might have some value as a museum or a landmark — Mon-Vere Estates, with the famous old house in the center. But who cared about relics any more? Raze the house and there would be room for more estates. It didn’t occur to Leo that he might be premature in his thinking.

He had showered and changed into his new imported sports shirt; he was wearing his narrowest trousers, and had carefully groomed his mop of near-black hair. He was, as the rear-view mirror reassured him, a handsome devil, and the daughter of Gavin Revere, in spite of a somewhat ethereal quality, was a woman — and unless all his instincts, which were usually sound, had failed him, a lonely woman. Celebrities reared their children carefully, as if they might be contaminated by the common herd, which made them all the more susceptible to anyone with nerve and vitality.

When Leo rang the bell of the old house, it was the woman in white who answered the door, smiling graciously and holding out her hand for the keys. Leo had other plans. Wagner insisted that the car be in perfect order, he told her. She would have to take a test drive around the grounds. His job was at stake — he might get fired if he didn’t obey the boss’s orders.

With that, she consented, and while they drove Leo was able to communicate more of his awe and respect and to make a closer evaluation of the property, which was even larger than he had hoped. Not until they returned and were preparing to enter the garage did he manage to flood the motor and stall the car.

“It must be the carburetor,” he said. “I’ll have a look.”

Adjusting the carburetor gave him additional time and an opportunity to get his hands dirty. They were in that condition when a man’s voice called out from the patio near the garage.

“Monica? What’s wrong? Who is that man?”

Gavin Revere was a commanding figure, even in a wheel chair. A handsome man with a mane of pure white hair, clear eyes, and strong features. The woman in white responded to his call like an obedient child.

When the occasion demanded, Leo could wear humility with the grace of his imported sports shirt. He approached Revere in an attitude of deep respect. Mr. Revere’s car had to be in perfect condition. Would he care to have his chair rolled closer so that he could hear the motor? Would he like to take a test drive? Had he really put more than 90,000 miles on that machine himself?

Revere’s eyes brightened, and hostility and suspicion drained away. For a time, then, he went reminiscing through the past, talking fluently while Leo studied the reserved Monica Revere at an ever decreasing distance. When talk wore thin, there was only the excuse of his soiled hands. The servants were on vacation, he was told, and the water in their quarters had been shut off. The gardener, then, had been a day man.

Leo was shown to a guest bath inside the house — ornate, dated, and noisy. A few minutes inside the building was all he needed to reassure himself that his initial reaction to the front hall had been correct: the place was a gigantic white elephant built before income taxes and the high cost of living. An aging house, an aging car — props for an old man’s memories.

Down the hall from the bathroom he found even more interesting props. One huge room was a kind of gallery. The walls were hung with stills from old Revere-Parrish films — love scenes, action scenes, close-ups of Monica Parrish. Beauty was still there — not quite lost behind too much make-up; but the whole display reeked of an out-dated past culminating in a shrine-like exhibition of an agonized death scene — exaggerated to the point of the ridiculous — beneath which, standing on a marble pedestal, stood a gleaming Oscar.

Absorbed, Leo became only gradually aware of a presence behind him. He turned. The afternoon light was beginning to fade and against it, half shadow and half substance, stood Monica Revere.

“I thought I might find you here,” she said. She looked toward the death scene with something like reverence in her eyes. “This was his greatest one,” she said. “He comes here often to remember.”

“He” was pronounced as if in reference to a deity.

“He created her,” Leo said.

“Yes,” she answered softly.

“And now both of them are destroying you.”

It was the only way to approach her. In a matter of moments she would have shown him graciously to the door. It was better to be thrown out trying, he thought. She was suddenly at the edge of anger.

“Burying you,” Leo added quickly. “Your youth, your beauty—”

“No, please,” she protested.

Leo took her by the shoulders. “Yes, please,” he said firmly. “Why do you think I came back? Wagner could have sent someone else. But today I saw a woman come into that garage such as I’d never seen before. A lovely, lonely woman—”

She tried to pull away, but Leo’s arms were strong. He pulled her closer and found her mouth. She struggled free and glanced back over her shoulder toward the hall.

“What are you afraid of?” he asked. “Hasn’t he ever allowed you to be kissed?”

She seemed bewildered.

“You don’t understand,” she said.

“Don’t I? How long do you think it takes for me to see the truth? A twenty-five-year-old car, a thirty-year-old house, servants on ‘vacation.’ No, don’t deny it. I’ve got to tell you the truth about yourself. You’re living in a mausoleum. Look at this room! Look at that stupid shrine!”

“Stupid!” she gasped.

“Stupid,” Leo repeated. “A silly piece of metal and an old photograph of an overdone act by a defunct ham. Monica, listen. Don’t you hear my heart beating?” He pulled her close again. “That’s the sound of life, Monica — all the life that’s waiting for you outside these walls. Monica—”

There was a moment when she could have either screamed or melted in his arms. The moment hovered — and then she melted. It was some time before she spoke again.

“What is your name?” she murmured.

“Later,” Leo said. “Details come later.”

The swiftness of his conquest didn’t surprise Leo. Monica Revere had been sheltered enough to make her ripe for a man who could recognize and grasp opportunity.

The courtship proved easier than he dared hope. At first they met, somewhat furtively, at small, out-of-the-way places where Monica liked to sit in a half-dark booth or at candlelit tables. She shunned popular clubs and bright lights, and this modesty Leo found both refreshing and economical.

Then, at his suggestion, further trouble developed with the Duesenberg, necessitating trips to Mon-Vere where he toiled over the motor while Gavin Revere, from his wheel chair watched, directed, and reminisced. In due time Leo learned that Revere was firmly entrenched at Mon-Vere. “I will leave,” he said, “in a hearse and not before” — which, when Leo pondered on it, seemed a splendid suggestion.

A man in a wheel chair. The situation posed interesting possibilities, particularly when the grounds on which he used the chair were situated so high above the city — so remote, so rugged, and so neglected. The gardener had been only for the frontage. Further inspection of the property revealed a sad state of disrepair in the rear, including the patio where Revere was so fond of sunning himself and which overlooked a sheer drop of at least 200 feet to a superhighway someone had thoughtfully constructed below. Testing the area with an old croquet ball found in the garage, Leo discovered a definite slope toward the drop and only a very low and shaky stucco wall as an obstacle.

Turning from a minute study of this shaky wall, Leo found Monica, mere yards away, watching him from under the shadow of a wide-brimmed straw hat. He rose to the occasion instantly.

“I hoped you would follow me,” he said. “I had to see you alone. This can’t go on, Monica. I can’t go on seeing you, hearing you, touching you — but never possessing you. I want to marry you, Monica — I want to marry you now.”

Leo had a special way of illustrating “now” that always left a woman somewhat dazed. Monica Revere was no exception. She clung to him submissively and promised to speak with Gavin Revere as soon as she could.

Two days later, Leo was summoned to a command performance in the gallery of Mon-Vere. The hallowed stills surrounded him; the gleaming Oscar and the grotesque death scene formed a background for Gavin Revere’s wheel chair. Monica stood discreetly in the shadows. She had pleaded the case well. Marriage was agreeable to Gavin Revere — with one condition.

“You see around us the mementos of a faded glory,” Revere said. “I know it seems foolish to you, but, aside from the sentimental value, these relics indicate that Monica has lived well. I had hoped to see to it that she always would; but since my accident I am no longer considered a good insurance risk. I must be certain that Monica is protected when I leave this world, and a sick man can’t do that. If you are healthy enough to pass the physical examination and obtain a life insurance policy for $50,000, taken out with Monica Revere named as beneficiary. I will give my consent to the marriage. Not otherwise.

“You may apply at any company you desire,” he added, “provided, of course, that it is a reputable one. Monica, dear, isn’t our old friend, Jeremy Hodges, a representative for Pacific Coast Mutual? See if his card is in my desk.”

The card was in the desk.

“I’ll call him and make the appointment, if you wish,” Revere concluded, “but if you do go to Hodges, please, for the sake of an old man’s pride, say nothing of why you are doing this. I don’t want it gossiped around that Gavin Revere is reduced to making deals.”

His voice broke. He was further gone than Leo had expected — which would make everything so much easier. Leo accepted the card and waited while the appointment was made on the phone. It was a small thing for Leo to do — to humor an old man not long for this world.

While he waited, Leo mentally calculated the value of the huge ceiling beams and hardwood paneling, which would have to come out before the wreckers disposed of Gavin Revere’s faded glory.

Being as perfect a physical specimen as nature would allow, Leo had no difficulty getting insurance. Revere was satisfied. The marriage date was set, and nothing remained except discussion of plans for a simple ceremony and honeymoon.

One bright afternoon on the patio, Leo and Monica, her face shaded by another large-brimmed hat, and Gavin Revere in his wheel chair, discussed the details. As Revere talked, recalling his own honeymoon in Honolulu, Monica steered him about. The air was warm, but a strong breeze came in from the open end of the area where the paving sloped gently toward the precipice.

At one point, Monica took her hands from the chair to catch at her hat, and the chair rolled almost a foot closer to the edge before she recaptured it. Leo controlled his emotion. It could have happened then, without any action on his part. The thought pierced his mind that she might have seen more than she pretended to see the day she found him at the low wall. Could it be that she too wanted Gavin Revere out of the way?

Monica had now reached the end of the patio and swung the chair about.

“Volcanic peaks,” Revere intoned, “rising like jagged fingers pointing Godward from the fertile, tropical Paradise...”

Monica, wearied, sank to rest on the shelf of the low wall. Leo wanted to cry out.

“A veritable Eden for young lovers,” Gavin mused. “I remember it well...”

Unnoticed by Monica, who was busy arranging the folds of her skirt, the old wall had cracked under her weight and was beginning to bow outward toward the sheer drop. Leo moved forward quickly. This was all wrong — Monica was his deed to Mon-Vere. All those magnificent estates were poised on the edge of oblivion.

The crack widened.

“Look out—”

The last words of Leo Manfred ended in a kind of eerie wail, for, in lunging forward, he managed somehow — probably because Gavin Revere, as if on cue, chose that instant to grasp the wheels of the chair and push himself about — to collide with the chair and thereby lose his balance at the very edge of the crumbling wall.

At the same instant, Monica rose to her feet to catch at her wind-snatched hat, and Leo had a blurred view of her turning toward him as he hurtled past in his headlong lunge into eternity.

At such moments, time stands as still as the horrible photos in Gavin Revere’s gallery of faded glory, and in one awful moment Leo saw what he had been too self-centered to see previously — Monica Revere’s face without a hat and without shadows. She smiled in a serene, satisfied sort of way, and in some detached manner of self-observation he was quite certain that his own agonized features were an exact duplication of the face in the death scene.

Leo Manfred was never able to make an accurate measurement; but it was well over 200 feet to the busy superhighway below.

In policies of high amounts, the Pacific Coast Mutual always conducted a thorough investigation. Jeremy Hodges, being an old friend, was extremely helpful. The young man, he reported, had been insistent that Monica Revere be named his sole beneficiary; he had refused to say why. “It’s a personal matter,” he had stated. “What difference does it make?” It had made no difference to Hodges, when such a high commission was at stake.

“It’s very touching,” Gavin Revere said. “We had known the young man such a short time. He came to deliver my automobile from the garage. He seemed quite taken with Monica.”

Monica stood beside the statuette, next to the enlarged still of the death scene. She smiled softly.

“He told me that he was a great fan of Monica Parrish when he was a little boy,” she said.

Jeremy handed the insurance check to Gavin and then gallantly kissed Monica’s hand.

“We are all fans... and little boys... in the presence of Monica Parrish,” he said. “How do you do it, my dear? What is your secret? The years have taken their toll of Gavin, as they have of me, but they never seem to touch you at all.”

It was a sweet lie. The years had touched her — about the eyes, which she liked to keep shaded, and the mouth, which sometimes went hard — as it did when Jeremy left and Gavin examined the check.

“A great tragedy,” he mused. “But as you explained to me at rehearsal, my dear, it really was his own idea. And we can use the money. I’ve been thinking of trying to find a good script.”

Monica Parrish hardly listened. Gavin could have his dreams; she had her revenge. Her head rose proudly.

“All the critics agreed,” she said. “I was magnificent in the death scene.”