The April Robin Murders

Four

“Golly, Bingo,” Handsome said, almost apologetically. “I didn’t know it was that Lattimer. There’s a lot of Lattimers. And the eastern papers didn’t carry any pictures of the house, and the stories didn’t give its address. So that’s why I didn’t know.”

“What Lattimer?” Bingo asked crossly, lifting out one of the lighter suitcases.

“Why,” Handsome said, “the one that was murdered by his wife.”

Bingo let go of his suitcase and turned around. “Just how is that again?”

“He was murdered by his wife,” Handsome said. “Anyway, that was what everybody figured. Only he isn’t legally dead.” He took hold of one end of the wardrobe trunk. “It’s a very funny story, Bingo. Queer, I mean.”

The sky was almost dark now; the April Robin mansion loomed up in front of them forbiddingly, without a single light showing. Bingo looked up at it a little apprehensively.

“Tell me all about it later,” he said hoarsely. “Let’s get these things in and go get some dinner.” He told himself encouragingly that the hollow feeling in his stomach was due entirely to the hours that had passed since their late breakfast.

He took hold of the front end of the wardrobe trunk and marched up to the big, ornate wooden door. He took out his keys and then stood for a moment, holding them in his hand. For as long as he could remember, he’d dreamed of just this, unlocking his own door — their own door, of course — with his own — their own — key. Now he had a fleeting sense that he might be unlocking a chamber of horrors.

“Everything all right, Bingo?” Handsome asked anxiously.

“It’s dark here,” Bingo said. He unlocked the door and flung it open bravely. Then he opened the door that led into the main room.

Seen now in the semidarkness, it seemed to be twice as large as it had by daylight. Large and cavernous. He remembered a newsreel he’d seen of Mammoth Cave, only it had been better lighted. He had a curious feeling that any minute now, a horde of bats would come zooming out of nowhere.

“There’s a light switch here some place,” Handsome said. A moment later the two floor lamps near the davenports created a little island of furniture and light in what was still an abyss of shadows. Another switch clicked, and a half dozen wall brackets, designed to imitate candles in antique holders, added their yellowish glow. They only served to make the small furnished island in front of the fireplace seem more isolated and small.

Bingo glanced up to where, seemingly a vast distance above them, a wrought-iron chandelier held more imitation candles, a lot of them. “I wonder what turns that on.”

Apparently nothing did. Handsome tried every switch in sight, unsuccessfully. “Maybe it’s out of bulbs,” he said helpfully.

“Probably,” Bingo said. He wondered how anyone would ever replace the bulbs in that chandelier without borrowing a ladder from the fire department. “Turn off those side things, we don’t need them.” And they dispelled the one spot of homelike coziness the room had.

“We won’t unpack,” Bingo said, as they deposited the last suitcase inside the door. “We’ll wait till after we go out and eat.” He paused and then said, “I wonder if that caretaker is around. Because right now would be a good time to tell her to go.” One thing was certain, he didn’t want to come back, later when it was really dark, and find that baleful, malicious face glaring at him. Especially, he didn’t want to sleep under the same roof with it.

They stood for a minute, listening. There wasn’t a sound in the big house, anywhere. In the vast cavern of the living room, the little island of furniture and floor lamps seemed very small and defenseless. Suddenly Bingo felt an impulse to throw their belongings back in the car, return to the Skylight Motel and, in the morning, look up Mr. Courtney Budlong and tell him the deal was off. Even if they couldn’t get their down payment back! For one moment the impulse even included going back to New York, not tomorrow morning, but right away.

“I’ll go look for her, Bingo,” Handsome offered.

Bingo shook his head and squared his shoulders. “We’ll both go.”

They found their way to the caretaker’s room, turning on lights all the way. Bingo knocked on the door, lightly at first, and then louder. There was no answer. He reminded himself sternly that they owned the house now, and pushed open the door. The room was empty.

“She must have gone somewhere,” Bingo said, hoping the relief didn’t show in his voice. “So we’ll leave a note for her.”

He ripped a leaf from his address book, considered the matter for a moment, and then wrote:

There, that settled that. A load had been lifted from his mind. All at once the whole house seemed better and brighter. And to think that he’d been considering — even very briefly — giving up this wonderful deal! He must have been out of his mind!

“We’ll leave the lights on,” he told Handsome. “It’ll be really dark by the time we get back.”

“It’s really dark now,” Handsome said. “It gets dark out here right away when the sun goes down. Bingo, this Mr. Lattimer—”

Bingo slammed the car door shut and said, “Let’s find a place to eat, first. And then talk.”

He thought about all the restaurants described in the “Where to Go” section of the guidebook, especially those marked with (*), which translated into “a favorite with the stars.” They could afford to go to any one of them. And perhaps they owed it to themselves, as the new owners of the April Robin mansion.

But that would mean going back into the house, opening suitcases, changing clothes. Suddenly he felt entirely too tired. Tired, and still strangely unsettled. Tomorrow night would be time enough. He finally said, “Let’s find a hamburger stand.”

Handsome found several that were only slightly less ornate than the Chinese Theatre. They passed those up in favor of one on Wilshire Boulevard, a pleasant circular affair. Bingo relaxed, settled down, and felt at home at last.

“All right,” he said. “You told me this Mr. Lattimer was murdered, but he wasn’t dead.”

“He hasn’t been murdered long enough,” Handsome said. “So he isn’t legally dead, I mean.” He added, “You don’t need to worry about the house, Bingo, because he wasn’t murdered there so far as anyone knows. Account of, the police kept going over and going over and going over the house trying to find out about his being murdered and trying to find where the money was.”

Bingo sighed. “Start from the beginning.” He took a bite of his hamburger and decided it tasted wonderful.

“I don’t know a lot. Because the eastern papers didn’t carry much,” Handsome said apologetically, seeming to apologize as much for the eastern papers as for himself.

His name had been Julien Lattimer, and although he appeared to be only in his early fifties, he was a retired businessman. And with a lot of money. He’d been married five times, his fifth and final wife being named Lois.

“The News ran a picture of his five wives,” Handsome said. “Not very good pictures, though. Three of them died, and the fourth one got a divorce, and the police — and I guess everybody — think the fifth one murdered him, except nobody ever could find his body, or the money.”

“Looks like he was good at making money, but no good at picking women,” Bingo said. “But not everybody knows how.”

Three years before, the Lattimers had bought the mansion at 113 Damascus Drive, and as far as anyone knew, lived there happily. But according to theory, Lois, who was younger, and tending toward the glamorous in looks, had married him for his money. He had been, according to the stories, just a bit crotchety and hard to get along with. While she had been friendly. A little too friendly, especially with a handsome young would-be actor whose name had never come into the story, and who had remained throughout as an unsubstantiated rumor but still a possible motive.

Then one day early in 1953 — Handsome hadn’t seen that story and wasn’t too sure of the date — Julien Lattimer’s ex-wife Adelle had turned up and asked the police to find either Julien Lattimer or his body, and she suspected it would be the latter. He’d skipped three months of alimony payments, so, after vain attempts to reach him by telephone, she’d gone ringing his doorbell. She was met by Lois, the current Mrs. Lattimer, who told a story about his having gone away on a business trip. That had been two months before and, inquiring in the various places Julien Lattimer usually frequented, Lois could find no one who had seen him or heard from him.

Adelle produced a will, made, she said, at the time of the divorce settlement, leaving her one quarter of everything he had in the world. She was dead-set that he’d been murdered, probably buried in the cellar, and she demanded that the police find his body, and immediately.

Bingo gulped his coffee and said, “The cellar of our house?”

“The cellar of our house,” Handsome said, nodding. “Only they never found any body. Not in the house or anywhere else. And nobody would’ve asked any more questions, except for some funny things. This Lois wife told a bunch of mixed-up things. Like, the night after which she never saw him again, he’d gone to the drugstore to get her some cigarettes. Now wouldn’t you think, Bingo, very rich people in a big house like that, wouldn’t run out of cigarettes?”

Bingo nodded. “Or if they did, they’d call up and order some. Or send the housekeeper or something.”

“Of course,” Handsome said, “he could’ve just wanted some fresh air. Only he didn’t take his car. And the drugstore was almost two miles away.”

“He maybe wanted a walk in addition to the fresh air,” Bingo said.

“Maybe,” Handsome said. “Only, he never did come back. And this Lois wife didn’t do anything about it.”

“Maybe she found she had cigarettes after all,” Bingo said, “or maybe she thought he’d gone to buy them at the factory.”

Handsome didn’t smile. “Then she said, she hadn’t worried and she hadn’t told the police, because he was a very moody guy, and sometimes he would go away for months at a time and not say anything to her or anybody else about it. Then she sort of changed her mind, and said that he had gone away on a business trip but it was all very secret and he hadn’t wanted anybody to know about it and told her not to tell anybody, and furthermore he hadn’t even told her where he was going and she hadn’t heard from him, but she wasn’t worried.”

Bingo stirred his coffee and said, “But that doesn’t mean he was murdered. Or that she murdered him.”

Handsome said, “When the police went all over the house, they didn’t find that he’d taken any clothes with him out of his closet. Or his razor.”

“He could have had other clothes,” Bingo said. “And two razors.” He preferred not to think of Julien Lattimer as being murdered, even if he had been moody, crotchety and hard to get along with.

“Well,” Handsome said, “there was the money.”

“How much?” Bingo asked.

“Fifty thousand dollars,” Handsome said. “I guess to people like the Lattimers it would be merely fifty thousand dollars.” He paused. “But not to most people.”

Only a few days after Julien Lattimer had gone out for cigarettes and never come back, Lois Lattimer had gone to the safety deposit box to which both the Lattimers had had access, and emptied it of securities which she had promptly converted into cash, fifty thousand dollars’ worth of it. During the following months she’d cleaned out the joint checking account.

“So,” Handsome said, scowling a little, “she must’ve figured that some questions might be asked sometime and she had to have some money to make a getaway, and that’s exactly what happened, and nobody’s even seen her since. She just got in her car and drove away, and the car turned up a coupla months later parked on a side street in El Centro but nobody in El Centro had seen anybody looking like her, and for a long time it would look like she’d turned up some place or been some place, all the way from Vancouver to some place in Guatemala, and even once in Hawaii, only it turned out either it wasn’t her or else she’d gone already.”

She’d done a nice job of getting away, Bingo thought.

“And after she’d disappeared, then the police really went to work to find poor Mr. Lattimer’s body, only they never did. There was one story about, maybe she’d put his body in her car and hid it some place way up in the hills where nobody would ever find it. Only then somebody else wrote another story about, she couldn’t’ve very well done that because while poor Mr. Lattimer hadn’t been a very big man, she was a little bitty woman and not very strong, so she couldn’t’ve put his body in her car, and then taken it out and buried it without she had help. Which she could’ve had, of course, if she really did have a boy friend.”

Or the housekeeper, now caretaker, might have helped, Bingo thought. She looked capable of that, or anything. And it could account for the nasty look she’d given them when they were looking through the house. Suddenly he resolved that they would get her out of the house that night if they had to carry her forcibly. He finished his coffee, paid the check and said, “Let’s go home.”

Murdered Lattimer or no murdered Lattimer, it was home to them now! What had happened to the Lattimers was a common-place story. Rich, middle-aged husband with a mean disposition, young and probably pretty and full-of-fun wife. She must have been pretty or he wouldn’t have married her; it had been Bingo’s experience that rich men married girls who either were pretty or were rich themselves. And in time she’d murdered him, done a good job of hiding his body and then gotten panicky and run away. A dull business, he told himself, and nothing that would ever need to bother Handsome and himself.

As they came up the driveway he could see a light showing in what he figured was the housekeeper’s room.

“I hope she’s packing,” he said grimly. “Because if she isn’t, she soon will be.”

He looked up at the forbiddingly big and darkened mansion, reminded himself that it had been built for April Robin, and immediately saw it as beautiful again. Poor Mr. Lattimer, no longer alive to enjoy living in a movie star’s mansion.

That was when the thought struck him. He caught his breath and said, “Handsome! Mr. Lattimer—”

“I know,” Handsome said. “I thought of it, too. Just now.”

“He can’t be dead,” Bingo said, “because he signed those papers this afternoon.”

Both were silent for a moment.

“It didn’t have to be this afternoon, Bingo,” Handsome said. “He could have signed those papers and left them with Mr. Courtney Budlong for when he sold the house.”

Bingo nodded slowly. The papers could have been prepared any time. He remembered that their names, the amount paid and the date had been written in Courtney Budlong’s hand.

“He maybe even could’ve decided he was going to sell the house, and fixed up those papers with Mr. Courtney Budlong before he was murdered,” Handsome said.

“And maybe she didn’t want him to, and that’s why he was murdered,” Bingo added. In that case would they still be properly legal papers? He hadn’t the least idea. But certainly Courtney Budlong would have known if they were or not, and if they were satisfactory to him, that made everything all right.

He walked slowly into the living room and over to the davenport, rehearsing what they would say to the caretaker. What was her name? He recalled Courtney Budlong mentioning it.

Handsome remembered. It was Pearl. Suddenly Handsome sniffed the air. “You smell anything, Bingo?”

Bingo sniffed, and nodded. “Smells like dry cleaning.” He scowled. “She’s supposed to be packing, not dry cleaning.”

He followed Handsome in the direction of the caretaker’s room. So far the only thing he’d thought of to say to her was “Scat!”

The odor grew stronger as they went through the back hall; by the time they reached the door, it was almost overwhelming. Bingo began to feel an unpleasant presentiment that something was terribly wrong.

Handsome didn’t stop to knock. He shoved the door open, fast.

The caretaker was sprawled on the floor, face down.

As he stared at her, the only thought that flashed through Bingo’s mind was that only that afternoon he’d promised Handsome that they were never going to be involved in any more murders in the future!