Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 27, No. 3. Whole No. 148, March 1956

On the Day of the Rose Show by Q. Patrick[5]

Lieutenant Timothy Trant of the New York Homicide Bureau lounged in holiday idleness on the terrace of his sister Freda’s Connecticut home, watching a small scarlet plane buzz through the cloudless morning sky toward Poughkeepsie. Behind him, in the living room, he heard Freda’s voice as she picked up the ringing phone.

“Oh, hello, Mrs. Weiderbacker... A burlesque queen?... how perfectly terrible for you... no, I don’t blame you at all. And on the day of the rose show, too!...”

Trant knew that the local garden club rose show was taking place at Mrs. Weiderbacker’s that afternoon. He knew, too, that Mrs. Weiderbacker was going to read Freda’s Inaugural Address as a proxy since his sister, who had just been re-elected president, had been urged by her doctor to stay home and nurse a summer cold. But how the rich and formidable Mrs. Weiderbacker could have become tangled with a burlesque queen was a new and fascinating development.

“What, Mrs. Weiderbacker?” Freda’s telephone voice had shot up an octave. “The speech hasn’t arrived? But I mailed it yesterday. How scandalous... Oh, Daisy will? How sweet of her.”

Daisy Groves, Trant knew, was Freda’s dearest friend, the wife of Gordon Groves, Mrs. Weiderbacker’s long-suffering nephew who lived with her and managed her estate.

Freda appeared on the terrace and snatched up the carbon of her speech from the flagstones where Trant had dropped it. “Imagine! My speech never got to Mrs. Weiderbacker. Thank heavens, Daisy knows shorthand. She can take it down over the phone and type it up in time.”

She was back on the phone. “Hello, Daisy dear. Ready?”

Trant listened idly with pleasant fantasies of Mrs. Weiderbacker pitted against a burlesque queen, while his sister launched into her address. “Ladies of the garden club, your greatest friend is the rose...”

She gushed on toward an embarrassing middle section, linking contact spraying with democracy — a section he had begged her to cut out. To his relief, she did and soared into her peroration. “Ladies never forget what Oliver Wendell Holmes...”

Suddenly she gave a shrill scream.

“No!... Daisy, it isn’t possible! Murdered!” Trant jumped up as Freda rushed out onto the terrace.

“Timothy! Mrs. Weiderbacker’s just been shot. They found her in the music room!”

Within a few seconds they were both in Trant’s automobile, Freda’s cold forgotten in the excitement.

“That nephew!” panted Freda. “I always knew he was dangerous.”

“Gordon Groves? Daisy’s husband?”

Freda sniffed. “Of course not. Poor Gordon’s in bed with a broken leg. It’s Miles Groves, the other nephew. He’s been a parasite for years. This morning he showed up with some terrible burlesque woman. He’d just married her and calmly expected Mrs. Weiderbacker to welcome her with open arms. There was a dreadful scene. Mrs. Weiderbacker told me all about it on the phone. She was going to cut off his allowance and change her will. And now... oh, poor Mrs. Weiderbacker!”

So that was how the burlesque queen fitted into the pattern. And a very sinister pattern it seemed.

Soon they arrived at Mrs. Weiderbacker’s impressive tree-screened mansion. In the hallway, Daisy Groves, her pretty face red and swollen and her eyes wet, rushed toward Freda. The two women clutched each other. At that moment the local police drove up, and Trant identified himself to the tough, round-faced inspector.

An anxious, hovering butler took them both through the living room toward the music room. He had discovered the body. After Mrs. Weiderbacker had spoken to Freda and left Daisy in the hall on the phone, she had sent the butler to the tool shed for some garden twine. When he brought it to the music room a few minutes later, he had found her dead.

“You heard no shot?” barked the inspector.

“I heard a muffled report,” the butler said, “but I simply thought it was the backfire of an automobile.”

As the butler opened the music room door, Trant and the Inspector were almost suffocated by the surging scent of roses. On three long tables the rose show entries of all the local ladies blazed in resplendent glory — and on the carpet in front of them, large, stately, and formidable even in death, lay Mrs. Weiderbacker with a crimson stain on her chintzed bosom.

The Inspector picked up a gun. “Whose is this?”

“Mrs. Weiderbacker’s, sir. She kept it in the desk drawer.”

“Get everyone together.”

“But Mr. Gordon is in bed with a cast on his leg, sir. And Mr. Miles and the — er — young lady are still out for a walk.”

“Get them.”

There was a great deal of lumbering around and order-shouting. Trant stood looking at the open French windows through which anyone could have slipped in from the garden unobserved.

He glanced down again at Mrs. Weiderbacker. Then, with an odd expression, half dubious, half satisfied, he drew a particularly lush yellow rose from its arrangement and put it in his buttonhole.

Everyone was assembled in the living room — the butler near the door, Gordon Groves, dark and disturbed, on a sofa, a blanket over the plaster of his leg cast. Daisy calmer and pale-faced now, was close to Freda with a shorthand pad on her lap. By far the most conspicuous people present were the “parasite” nephew and the “burlesque queen.”

Miles Groves, a tall, blond, amiably handsome young man, stood by a table on which a small heap of ripe and unripe strawberries nestled in a handkerchief. At his side, more spectacular and perfumed than the rose show entries, was the redheaded Chloe Carmichael, the late Mrs. Weiderbacker’s new and controversial niece-in-law.

The Inspector had cumbersomely gathered the facts and was interpreting them. Already he had eliminated the butler, who had been in Mrs. Weiderbacker’s employ 30 years, Daisy, who had been taking down Freda’s speech over the phone, and Gordon, who had been immobilized upstairs. He was glaring now at Miles.

“So Mrs. Weiderbacker disapproved of your new wife. She threatened to stop your allowance and cut you out of her will.”

“That’s right,” said Miles calmly.

“How much was your allowance?”

“Ten thousand a year.”

“And your share of the estate at her death?”

“One-third.” It was Gordon who spoke from the couch. “I get two-thirds. Miles’s share is about a half million dollars.”

“Even so,” said the unruffled Miles, “I didn’t kill her. I expected her to cut me off. In fact, I was delighted. I was tired of living off her charity. I’m starting a new life.”

The Inspector snorted cynically. Chloe Carmichael broke in: “It’s true. He’s getting a job. And he didn’t kill her. He was out walking with me.”

“Prove it,” said the Inspector. “Prove he didn’t come sneaking back through the French windows and—”

“He didn’t,” blazed Chloe.

For the first time Lieutenant Trant spoke. Mildly he said to Miles: “What are those — strawberries?”

The “parasite” nephew looked sheepish. “Oh, I just saw them on the walk. Aunt was crazy about them. I thought I’d bring her a few to show the old thing there were no hard feelings.”

The Inspector snorted again.

Trant asked: “You didn’t see anyone or anything on your walk?”

“No one.” Miles shrugged. “We saw a plane — a little private plane.”

Trant alerted. “That plane passed over my sister’s house just a couple of minutes before the murder was discovered.”

“Yeah,” put in the Inspector. “Charlie Smith on his daily run to Poughkeepsie.”

Trant glanced at him. “Could you see that plane from this house?”

“Guess you couldn’t. Charlie always passes over Linkville way.”

“Linkville!” cried Chloe. “That’s where we were. I saw a sign.”

Trant spun around to Miles. “What color was the plane?”

“Green,” said Miles.

“No, no. It was red. It—” Chloe broke off, color flooding her cheeks.

It was then that the Inspector pounced. “Of course that plane’s red — bright, firehouse red. Tricked you, didn’t he? Smart! The girl went for the walk, saw the plane, told the guy about it in order to give him an alibi. But she forgot to mention the color. Okay, Groves.”

As the Inspector strode forward, Trant murmured to Miles: “Mr. Groves, would you please be good enough to hand me ten ripe strawberries from that heap?”

Puzzled, Miles selected ten of the little berries and held them out on his palm. Some were scarlet ripe; others were bright green and obviously unripe. Trant’s smile was almost a grin.

“I thought so when I first saw the berries. Miles Groves has red-green color blindness. A lot of men have it without even knowing it. The plane looked green to him. I guess that lets you out, Mr. Groves. You saw the plane all right.”

While the Inspector spluttered, Trant moved toward Gordon Groves. As he passed Daisy and Freda, he picked up Daisy’s shorthand pad and glanced at the neat Gregg. “Ladies of the garden club, your greatest friend is the rose.” Freda’s literary effort seemed embarrassingly out of place now.

“I imagine, Mr. Groves—” Trant was still glancing at the pad, but now he looked up quickly at Gordon — “that life with Mrs. Weiderbacker was none too easy. She was bossy, difficult, close-fisted, maybe? How much nicer it would have been to have a million dollars of your own. And what a temptation to kill her when there was a perfect fall guy in the house.”

Gordon Groves’s face was thunderous. “You suggest that I—?”

“Oh, not you. But your wife has the identical motive.” Trant twisted around to Daisy. “Very ingenious, Mrs. Groves.”

“Timothy!” It was Freda who leaped up. “How dare you accuse Daisy? All that time she was on the phone taking my dictation.”

“She was?” Trant read aloud from the middle of the pad. “One could almost compare contact spraying with democracy.” He turned to the butler. “Who picked up the mail today?”

“Er — I think, sir, it was Mrs. Groves.”

“Exactly.” Trant shook his head at his sister. “Your speech did arrive after all and it gave a clever murderess an ideal murder set-up. She took the speech from the mailman, copied it out in shorthand, pretended it hadn’t come, and then offered to take it down over the phone.

“A perfect alibi with the shorthand pad as fool-proof evidence. What a cinch to pretend to take dictation, to drop the receiver, to slip into the music room, shoot Mrs. Weiderbacker, and then to run back and pick up the dictation again.

“Too bad for her I made you cut out the contact-spraying paragraph. It was in the copy you mailed but not in the copy you dictated. That, I’m afraid, is going to be her noose.”

Daisy had jumped up now, white-faced and eagle-eyed.

“It’s a lie. I never went near the music room.”

“You’re sure, Mrs. Groves? When we arrived, your face was red and swollen; your eyes were running. It might, of course, have been due to natural grief, but then again...” Trant picked the full-blown yellow rose from his buttonhole and held it under Daisy’s nose. Almost immediately, she sneezed; her eyes started to run, her face to pinken.

“As I thought,” murmured Trant. “Not natural grief, but a violent case of rose-fever.”

He turned rather sadly to his sister. “I’m sorry to do this, Freda,” he said. “But next time you pick a best friend, I recommend someone a little less — cold-blooded.”

His glance at Chloe Carmichael was frankly appreciative. “A burlesque queen, for example.”