The April Robin Murders

Five

“She’s breathing a little tiny bit, but not much,” Handsome said. He’d already opened the room’s one window.

Bingo looked down at the floor. There was a wide, wet smear on the rug. In the middle of it a container of cleaning fluid lay on its side. He said dazedly, “Why would anybody be cleaning a rug at nine o’clock at night?” The sponge with which she’d been working lay beside her hand where she’d apparently dropped it.

“Maybe it was dirty,” Handsome said. “Maybe she wanted to leave the room nice and clean when she left.”

Bingo glanced around. There weren’t any signs of packing in the room. “Maybe she just felt like cleaning a rug,” he said, a little angrily. “We better get a doctor. Right away.”

“An ambulance, Bingo,” Handsome said. He’d been looking at the label on the bottle. “I read about this stuff in a magazine once. It said if you breathe in enough of it, you die quick.”

Bingo located an extension telephone in the kitchen. For some reason he hated to call the police. Not that he’d ever had any serious trouble with them himself, or ever expected to, but it went against his nature. Still it was the only way to get an ambulance in a hurry. He sighed, and made the call.

Handsome picked up the unconscious woman and carried her into the living room. “It’s all right moving her,” he told Bingo. “She doesn’t have any bones broken and she hasn’t been murdered.”

Bingo shuddered. He opened every door and window he could find, closed the door to the caretaker’s room tightly, and sat down on the other davenport to wait.

It seemed like a very long time before the ambulance arrived, and while they waited, Bingo stared unhappily at the caretaker. Her bony face, ill-tempered even in unconsciousness, was almost as gray as her faded cotton house-dress now, and her hair was limp and stringy around it. One of her shoes had fallen off.

“Handsome,” he said suddenly, “take a look and see if she stuck our note to her in one of her pockets.” He really didn’t mind approaching her himself, it was just that Handsome was closer.

Handsome searched. “Not here,” he reported.

“Probably in her room,” Bingo said. “We’d better look and see—”

But that was the moment when the ambulance got there. Bingo admitted two efficient-looking young men, who paid no attention to him except to ask, “Where’s the patient?”

Bingo pointed. One of the young men examined her and said, “Emergency Hospital.” The other one got her name, Pearl Durzy, and said, “How did it happen?”

Bingo nodded his head in the general direction of her room and said, “She was cleaning a rug.”

The attendant who had asked the questions went with Bingo for a quick look. He examined the spot on the rug, picked up the empty can and looked at it, and said, “Carbon tetrachloride. That stuff’s pure murder!”

Bingo winced at the word. But this had been pure accident. Even though it was an inauspicious beginning for life in the April Robin mansion, it wasn’t murder.

“She sure inhaled enough of it, too,” the young man said. He noticed a glass on the dresser, sniffed of it, too, and said, “Been drinking. Did she drink much?”

“Not that I know of,” Bingo said truthfully. Somehow he didn’t feel that this was the time to reveal that he’d never seen Pearl Durzy before this very afternoon.

The efficient young man asked Bingo a few more questions and then helped hustle the unconscious Pearl Durzy out, remarking that the cops would be by for the accident report, their own job being not to waste time with such chores, but to deliver the victim.

As the ambulance siren receded in the distance, Handsome said in a shocked voice, “I read an article about that stuff. It was part of a series during Home Safety Week. The rest of the column was about bathtubs and electrical appliances.”

“And what did it say?” Bingo asked wearily. It had been a long, full day and he was beginning to think wishfully of sleep. “Besides not trying to do acrobatics in the bathtub, or go sticking your finger onto live wires?”

“It said,” Handsome told him seriously, and just a bit reprovingly, “that if you have to use carbon tetrachloride to dry clean anything, you should do it outdoors. Or you should have a lot of doors and windows wide open.”

Bingo said, with a feeble attempt at flippancy, “Maybe she hadn’t happened to read the same article.” He frowned, thinking of the little caretaker’s room. The door tightly shut. One window, and it had been shut.

“And the whole bottle of it spilled on the floor,” Handsome said, as though he’d been following Bingo’s thought word for word.

Bingo was silent for a moment. Then he said, “We better look for that note, Handsome.” It had just been an unfortunate accident, but still, the note might call for a lot of tiresome and unnecessary explanations.

But before they could start looking, the squad car arrived in front of the April Robin mansion. Two uniformed officers came in; they, too, were efficient-looking young men. They were also friendly, especially so after Bingo had informed them that they were the owners of the property and had handed them a business card of the International Foto, Motion Picture and Television Corporation of America, which seemed to impress them.

The accident investigation was, to Bingo’s relief, short, matter of fact and routine, indeed, almost casual. The shorter of the two remarked that it was an unusual kind of an accident, but anything could happen, he’d seen some funny ones in his day. He wrote down the information that Bingo and Handsome had been out to dinner, that everything had been all right when they left — in fact, the housekeeper hadn’t even been in — that when they returned they’d noticed the odor — noticed, the cop had remarked, how could anyone miss it! — had investigated and immediately phoned for an ambulance. Which, the taller cop said approvingly, had been exactly the right thing to do.

Then Bingo led the way to the caretaker’s room, Handsome trailing along, and opened the door. One of the cops said, “Phew!” and the other said, “Try not to breathe much of this air!” and added, “And you better keep out of this room for a couple days.”

“That’s what the article said,” Handsome said.

The taller cop wheeled on him and said, “What article?”

“My partner happened to read an article about this stuff in a newspaper,” Bingo said. “And he happened to remember it.”

The two cops were willing to let it go at that. They began a very fast job of examining the little room, while Bingo watched anxiously from the door.

There was no sign of his note anywhere in the room.

“Looks like she might’ve got dizzy and tipped the whole bottle over,” the shorter cop theorized. “Then she was too dizzy to get up and get out.” The taller cop agreed that it might have happened that way very easily. Then they gathered up the empty cleaning-fluid can, and the glass from which Pearl Durzy had been drinking, and carried them out into the living room.

“Y’can smell that stuff way in here!” the tall cop said. “You guys better watch out you don’t breathe it in yourselves. Now, identification for this gal—?”

Bingo and Handsome looked at each other helplessly. “Her name’s Pearl Durzy,” Bingo said. “Caretaker here.”

The shorter cop called out, “Look in her purse.”

The tall cop make a quick trip back to the bedroom, returned, and said, “Can’t find one.”

“Hell,” his partner said, “all women got purses.”

The two of them made a quick search of the room, and came back looking frustrated. There had been a coin purse in the pocket of a gray coat in her closet, containing three bus tokens and a dime.

“Let somebody else worry about it,” the short cop said. “They can ask questions at the hospital when she comes to.” He paused. “If she comes to.”

Bingo said uncomfortably, “Can we find out how she is?”

“Sure,” the taller cop said sympathetically. “I mean, maybe.” He called the Emergency Hospital, put down the phone, shook his head and remarked that she was pretty bad. “Say!” he said, suddenly changing the subject and looking around. “Isn’t this the Lattimer place?”

“Was,” Bingo said. The warm feeling of pride began to come back. “Only we just bought it.”

“So this is what it looks like inside!” the cop said. He looked around with a kind of awe. “Could stand a little more furniture, though.”

“It’s in storage,” Bingo said. “Be moved in tomorrow or next day.” He added, with a studied air of carelessness, “This house used to belong to April Robin, the movie star. Why, it was built for her! You remember April Robin?”

The tall cop said, “April Robin! I was just a kid then, but—” And the shorter cop said, “Remember her! Oh boy, do I!”

A pair of swell guys, Bingo reflected after they had gone. For a brief moment his almost rapturous mood returned. He glanced again around the huge room, picturing the way it was going to look once the furniture had arrived. Then, with a jolt, his mind came back to Pearl Durzy.

“Handsome,” he said, “I didn’t see anything of that note when the cops were here. In her room, I mean. Or anywhere in her purse.”

“I didn’t either,” Handsome said. There was a faintly worried note in his voice. “Maybe we’d better take another look.”

They not only took another look, they searched the room. They looked in drawers, in boxes, in the pockets of the few dresses that hung in the wardrobe. At Handsome’s suggestion, they looked in all the wastebaskets.

“It simply isn’t here,” Bingo said at last. He had a feeling that he was hearing his own voice from somewhere very far away. “It isn’t here anywhere.”

They went back in the living room and sat down. Bingo lit a cigarette nervously.

“And if it isn’t here,” Bingo went on, inwardly shrinking from the implications of his own words, “somebody must have taken it away.”

They looked at each other for a moment. Then Handsome said miserably, “I said it was an accident, Bingo. I mean, I said she hadn’t been murdered, which amounts to the same thing. Because it looked like it was an accident.”

“It did to me, too,” Bingo said. “And to the cops.”

There was another unhappy silence. Then Handsome said, “She could’ve been knocked out first.”

After a while Bingo said, “It still could’ve been an accident. Why, any number of things could’ve happened to that note.”

“Sure, Bingo,” Handsome said reassuringly. Neither of them believed that for a minute. “Only, Bingo. Are you going to call up the cops and tell them about it?”

“I don’t know,” Bingo said. He thought it over. He foresaw that if he did, there would be a lot of troubles and complications, all of them wasting valuable time. On the other hand, murder — especially when it happened in his own house! Their own house.

He suddenly realized that it wasn’t murder yet, and began to feel much better. “We’ll wait,” he told Handsome. “She’s still alive, and by tomorrow she’ll most likely be better. In which case, she herself can tell what happened. If she isn’t, well—” He paused. “Tomorrow will be time enough. And it’s late and we’re tired.” He pounded the cushions of the davenport experimentally. A little bumpy, but he’d slept on much worse. “And I have a hunch we’d better get these lights off pretty soon. Because our next-door neighbor struck me as the type of dame who’d come right over to see what the ambulance and the police car were all about.”

Handsome began bringing over the blankets they’d picked up at an Army-Navy store, and unpacking pajamas. Before he’d gotten very far, there was a buzz at the door.

“What did I tell you?” Bingo said. He sighed. “Better answer it, though.” No point in insulting a new neighbor, especially a rich society widow.

The visitor who came into the room wasn’t Mrs. Waldo Hibbing, however. She was a tallish young woman with a bathing beauty type figure not at all concealed by dark green sharkskin slacks and a bright green, flame and white print blouse. She had long, smooth dark hair, not black, but close to it, coiled loosely on the back of her head, bright blue eyes which seemed to be shooting off sparks at the moment, and a slightly sulky bright red mouth. Bingo, having become a shade more skeptical during the course of the day, took a close look at her long, sooty eyelashes and decided that this set was real.

She stood in the center of the room, her fists on her hips, looking first at Handsome and then at Bingo, and then back again.

“I was driving by and saw the lights,” she said, “and I thought I’d better investigate. Who are you two guys, anyway, and what the hell are you doing here?”

“I’m Bingo Riggs,” Bingo said politely, “and this is my partner, Mr. Kusak.” He handed her a card of the International Foto, Motion Picture and Television Corporation of America. “And who are you, and won’t you have a chair?”

She had an arm of the davenport instead. “I’m Mrs. Julien Lattimer. And is this some kind of gag?”

Handsome said, “You’re not the Mrs. Lattimer that murdered her husband. She was littler, and blond.”

“No, I’m not,” she said, and smiled at him, the instinctive way that women smiled at Handsome. It was a slightly grim smile, though. “I’m the Mrs. Lattimer who divorced her husband. Adelle Lattimer. In fact, I’m the Mrs. Lattimer who’s going to inherit a quarter of everything he had in the world — as soon as I find his body.”

“You’re much better-looking than your picture,” Handsome said judiciously. “The one I saw, I mean. It was in the News. January 25, 1953. You had short hair.”

Adelle Lattimer looked at Bingo and said, “I don’t know what all this is about, but your partner fascinates me.”

“He fascinates a lot of people,” Bingo said. “It’s just that he remembers everything. He could probably tell you what horse won in the seventh on that day.”

“Not that day,” Handsome said. “January 25, 1953, was a Sunday and they weren’t running.”

“It would be more helpful,” she said, “if he could tell what horse was going to win in the seventh tomorrow. But I guess that’s asking too much. And all this is a lot of fun, but just what are you boys doing here?”

“We live here,” Bingo said stiffly.

She glanced around the room, observing its lack of furniture, and not overlooking the half-unpacked luggage and blankets. “You don’t look particularly settled and cozy,” she commented, “but I admit you do look moved in. And granted it’s none of my business — yet — just who told you that you could live here?”

“Nobody,” Bingo said, even more stiffly. “Nobody had to. Because we bought the house.” His hand started for his pocket, and the papers given him by Courtney Budlong. Then he changed his mind. He agreed heartily, but silently, with Adelle Lattimer that it was none of her business, and he intended to leave it that way.

She stared at him. “Is this another gag?”

“It’s no gag,” Bingo said. “We bought it from Mr. Julien Lattimer. Through Budlong and Dollinger in Beverly Hills.” There, that ought to hold her.

“But you can’t have bought it from Julien Lattimer,” she said, still staring at him. “He’s dead. He was murdered.”

“So you say,” Bingo said. “But a firm like Budlong and Dollinger knows what it’s doing.”

She nodded at that. “But damn it,” she said, “if the son of — if he isn’t dead, where the hell is he?” She looked accusingly at Bingo and Handsome as though they’d deliberately hidden him.

“Why should we know?” Bingo asked. “We just bought a house from him, that’s all.”

“You mean you didn’t see him?” she demanded.

“No, we didn’t see him,” Bingo said. “We saw Mr. Budlong, the real estate man.”

She scowled, and looked very lovely in spite of it. “It all sounds fishy to me. Very fishy.”

Before Bingo could say anything in return, Handsome broke in and said placatingly, “Why don’t you just check with Mr. Budlong? He’ll be able to explain everything to you, without any trouble.”

“Sure,” Bingo said. “He’ll be able to tell you all about Mr. Lattimer.” He started to add, “Dead or alive,” and decided against it.

“I’m going to do exactly that,” she said. “The very first thing in the morning, too.”

Bingo started to remind her that tomorrow was Consolidation Day, and decided against that, too. Let her find out about it for herself, even if it did put her to an inconvenience. It was Handsome, still placatingly and very amiably, who did remind her.

“Oh, hell,” she said. “I never can keep track of these California holidays.” She sniffed. “Consolidation Day! Silliest-sounding thing I ever heard of!”

“Maryland has a holiday named Repudiation Day,” Handsome said. “On November 23rd. I don’t know why. And Boston has Evacuation Day on March 17th, and I don’t know anything about that, either. So Consolidation Day doesn’t sound so funny. And there must be some reason for it, only I don’t know what it is.”

“And I don’t particularly care,” Adelle Lattimer said. She sounded a little more agreeable. “All right, I’ll see Mr. Budlong day after tomorrow and get this straightened out. I don’t suppose there’s a drink in the house?”

Handsome went to investigate the kitchen. Their guest relaxed a little. Suddenly she took a deep breath. “What smells funny?”

“Just a little dry-cleaning fluid,” Bingo said. “Got spilled out in the back room.” No point in telling her any more details about that, either.

Handsome came back with glasses and a quart of beer he’d found in the icebox. Adelle Lattimer lit a cigarette, settled down, and began to look comfortably at home. “You boys from New York?”

Bingo nodded and said, “We’ve only been here a few days, as a matter of fact. Decided to move the business out here. The headquarters, anyway.”

He was pleased to see that she looked suitably impressed. “Doing well?”

“Couldn’t be doing better,” he assured her. “Takes a little time to get settled, of course. We haven’t even decided on our office space yet — but we’re thinking of a nice little building of our own, somewhere on the Strip, or in Beverly Hills.” Well, he was thinking about it. It was one of the main topics of his thought these days. “A good place to live came first.” He cleared his throat. “I suppose you know this place used to belong to April Robin.” He wondered whether or not she’d lived in this house, as Mrs. Julien Lattimer.

She looked unimpressed, took a gulp of her beer, and said, “The hell you say.”

“You remember April Robin, of course,” Bingo said.

“I don’t remember her,” Adelle Lattimer said. “Sure, I know who she was. But after all, she was before my time.”

Bingo doubted that. He decided it was time to change the subject anyway. “You certainly seem anxious to find Mr. Lattimer,” he prodded her.

She put her glass down, hard. “Look. He’s worth money to me. If he’s alive, he owes me nearly twenty grand in back alimony. Nineteen thousand two hundred, to be exact. Dead, he’s worth a quarter of what he left, if you follow me.”

“I get the idea,” Bingo said.

“And it’s plenty,” she told him. “But being married to him for two years was worth it. Of all the dull, dreary little characters. Oh, he did have a certain charm when you first knew him. Sort of poetic, and serious. Looked poetic, too. Dark hair with a little gray. Graceful. You know the type. But after you got to really know the stodgy, penny-pinching, gloomy little bastard—” She paused and said, “I guess I shouldn’t speak bad of the dead.”

“If he is dead,” Handsome said.

“And if I can prove it,” she said. “Don’t think I haven’t tried to have him declared dead by the courts, because I’ve been doing practically nothing else. With no success. If his body doesn’t turn up, somewhere, sometime, I’ll have to sit out the seven years, I guess.”

“If we find it,” Bingo said, “we’ll be glad to let you know.”

“Do that,” she said. Then she looked at him suddenly, her bright blue eyes narrowing a little. “In fact, if you boys want to pick up a little extra loot for yourselves, you might spend your spare time looking around. If you’re going to live in this house, you might just stumble onto something, so to speak.”

“Not his body, I hope,” Bingo said. He said it lightly, but with an icy spot in his stomach.

She said, very seriously, “Look, if his body had been here, it would have been found. But there might be something to lead to where it is. The cops went over this place with an extra small-size fine-tooth comb. No dice. After she—” the tone of voice in which Adelle Lattimer said “she” left no doubt in Bingo’s mind as to whom she meant — “got cold feet and scrammed, they went over it again. And again no dice. Finally the court appointed a trustee to look after the place and the rest of the estate. The trustee had the place gone over with an even smaller fine-tooth comb than the cops used. No dice ever, anytime, for anybody.”

Bingo said, “And what makes you think we’ll be more successful than they were?”

“Well,” she said, “you live here. I tried to get a private dick in here on my own. No luck. First she was living here, and then her housekeeper stayed on as caretaker. Phony insurance inspectors — electrical repairmen — we couldn’t get anybody in. But you are in.” To Bingo’s relief, she didn’t ask questions about the caretaker.

“Naturally,” she said, “I don’t expect this for nothing. Anything you turn up that leads to finding his body — I’ll give you a cut of what I get.”

Bingo thought for a minute. “A quarter?”

“I was thinking more of five percent,” she said.

They discussed the figure back and forth for a while, plus the fact that even five percent of the at least hundred thousand dollars she stood to inherit was a considerable sum, and ended by agreeing on ten.

“He was a rich widower when I married him,” Adelle Lattimer said. “I think he married me because he thought he’d be more of one. Richer, I mean, not more of a widower. But I disappointed him. I own a nice little hat shop in Pacific Palisades, but that’s all. It’s just that I look and act rich, and that’s what fooled him. So we wrangled for a couple of years, and I got a smarter lawyer than he did, and quicker, and got my four hundred a month alimony, now long overdue, and my share in his will.” She smiled. “I’m a shrewd businesswoman, in my way.”

Distinctly one he wouldn’t care to have on the other side in a deal, Bingo thought. He said, “This — Lois that he married — was she rich?”

Adelle Lattimer shook her head and laughed. “I don’t think she had a dime. No, this time Julie was the sucker. He fell in love with her. I mean he really fell in love with her. She’s a pretty little thing. Not much sense, if she picked him. Unless she married him for his money, which is what probably happened.”

She poured the rest of the beer into her glass. “It’s to laugh, I mean it! Here this poetic-looking smoothie makes a thing out of marrying women with money. Finally, when he’s got it made, a cute little bleached-blond babe comes along and marries him for his dough, and ends up killing him for it. Well,” — she lifted her glass — “good luck, boys.” She finished her beer in a gulp, and rose. “If you find anything, I’m in the phone book.”

They showed her to the door and watched while she got into a convertible several inches longer and several shades brighter than theirs.

“Handsome,” Bingo said when she was gone, “how much did this guy leave?”

“There wasn’t any exact figure,” Handsome said. “It was about half a million bucks, though.”

Bingo sat down on the slightly lumpy davenport and did a little fast mental arithmetic. Adelle Lattimer would get a quarter of that, according to the will. And ten percent of that—

“But Julien Lattimer’s not dead,” he said suddenly. “He can’t be dead. Handsome, how could he sell us his house, if he was dead?”

“We’ll find out from Mr. Courtney Budlong,” Handsome said soothingly. He brought over Bingo’s mauve and lime-green striped pajamas, slippers and a blanket.

Bingo settled himself as comfortably as he could on the davenport and, for a moment, considered telling Handsome to leave on one of the lights. Then he decided to keep quiet and see if Handsome might not have the same idea. After all, a strange house in the dark — even if there wasn’t much furniture to trip over—

Handsome put a flashlight on the table by the davenport. Bingo sighed inwardly and let it go at that.

A little light came in from the windows off the balcony, just enough to make the room seem even more enormous, and more empty. Bingo pulled the blanket tight around his chin and tried to shut his eyes. There was still the odor from the caretaker’s room.

Suddenly he felt an almost overwhelming desire to wake Handsome, to pack everything and pile it into the convertible, and head for New York. He told himself firmly that they’d at last arrived in Hollywood, that they were going to get rich, that already they owned a house that belonged to April Robin, with a famous motion picture producer and a society widow for neighbors, and that they would make all kinds of valuable contacts through their friend Mr. Courtney Budlong. He thought of Ciro’s, of the Sunset Strip, of Hollywood and Vine. He tried to visualize a little office building in Beverly Hills, with their name in chromium letters like those on BUDLONG AND DOLLINGER. He still wanted to go back to New York.

He found himself even thinking wistfully of Eighth Avenue on a cold rainy day in March, or of West 34th Street in a July heat wave.

The future suddenly seemed filled with entirely too many problems. Not the least of them being that the April Robin mansion had probably seen at least one murder.

New York seemed so far away, so very far away.

Finally, with the feeling that daylight was about two ticks of the clock away, he slept.

A series of resounding buzzes at the door woke him. He sat up, rubbing his eyes, and realized that while daylight had gotten here all right, it hadn’t been here long. He looked at his watch. Seven in the morning. Who would be calling at seven in the morning?

Handsome had thrown on a bathrobe and gone to open the door. He came back with two men, an anxious look on his face. “It’s the police, Bingo,” he said.

Bingo grabbed his own bathrobe, thankful that it was the forest-green flannel one.

One of the men was tall and very thin, with the most deeply lined face Bingo had ever seen. It was also the saddest face he had ever seen, with a thin, mournful mouth and weary eyes. “I’m Perroni,” he said. “My partner’s Hendenfelder.”

Hendenfelder was also tall, but heavy-set. His face was round, pinkish and expressionless.

Handsome whisked the blankets away. The two plain-clothesmen sat down. Bingo just sat still and worried.

“Might’s well come straight to the point,” the one named Perroni said. “The Lattimer case is my baby. Been on it since he was reported missing. Found no proof he was murdered yet, but I will. Now you had a little trouble here last night.”

“The housekeeper tipped over a can of cleaning fluid,” Bingo said quickly. “Breathed in a lot of it. I hope she’s better.”

“She didn’t tip it over,” Perroni said, in his melancholy voice. “Somebody poured it out and put her nose down in it, after feeding her a drink loaded with knockout drops. And she isn’t better, she’s dead.”

Bingo sat holding his breath. In his heart, he’d known all along it was that way, but he’d refused to admit it.

“And also,” Perroni said. “What’s all this nonsense about you buying a house from a man that was murdered four years ago?”