The Case of the Turning Tide

Chapter 25

Duryea pushed back his chair from the table, reached in his pocket for a cigar.

“Heard anything from Gramps?” Milred asked.

He clipped off the end of the cigar and said, “He’s probably out prowling. I suppose the comparative respectability of associating with us has been a strain, and he doesn’t intend to let it interfere with his weekly prowling.”

“Don’t underestimate my grandfather,” she said. “From the gossip which used to percolate through the Wiggins family and which I was considered too young and unsophisticated to hear about, I gather that Gramps has established a seven-day-a-week prowling record.”

Duryea said, “I wish he’d taken me with him. That damn bathing-suit business puts me in a most embarrassing position. I can’t get over the way...”

“Oh, forget it, Frank,” she said. “You just let that girl get your goat. She knew she had it, and was deriving a great deal of enjoyment from hearing it bleat.”

“She was really in the right.”

“Bosh! She couldn’t have stopped Gramps with a line like that, and she knew it.”

“Well,” Duryea said, looking at his watch, “if we can get started before your estimable grandfather returns from what-ever adventure is holding him at the moment, we can get to see a movie which isn’t a mystery.”

She laughed. “That’s an invitation?”

“Definitely.”

“I’ll put on my things,” she said, then paused by his chair, bent over and placed her lips to his. When she straightened, Duryea said, “That takes my mind off the events of the afternoon very nicely, thank you.”

“That,” she observed archly as she swept across the room, “was one of my objectives.”

Duryea settled back in his chair, lit a cigar, and had entirely recovered his good humor by the time he and Milred were ensconced in loge seats.

He was rudely dragged back to the responsibilities of his job some fifteen minutes later when an usher tapped him on the shoulder. “You’re wanted on the telephone, Mr. Duryea. They say it’s important.”

“Excuse me a minute, dear.”

She said, “I’ll go with you, Frank, if it should be anything really important and you have to go, I’ll...”

“I’ll see that the seats are held,” the usher promised.

Duryea went to the telephone booth, closeted himself within it, and Milred could see his face show surprise, then angry indignation.

“What is it?” she asked, when he emerged.

“I think you’d better come with me,” he said. “It seems to concern you fully as much as it does me.”

“Will it take long?” she asked. “Can we get back to finish out the bill on the second show?”

“I don’t know,” he told her. “We have to go to the police station.”

Driving down to the police station, she waited at first for him to break his silence. When it appeared that he had no intention of doing so, she said, “What is it, Frank?”

“The police have made an arrest.”

“Well, I hope you’re going to get that murder case cleaned up now.”

“Oh, it’s not an arrest in the murder case. It’s one of those female impersonators.”

“Frank!”

“That’s right.”

“But will you kindly tell me why we should be dragged out of a movie you’ve been wanting to see all week, to go to the police station because they’ve arrested a female impersonator?”

Duryea pulled his car up in front of the city police station. “I think you’ll appreciate the reason in a very few moments,” he said.

He escorted her into the chief’s office. The chief of police, a twinkle in his eyes, said, “I’m sorry I disturbed you, Mr. Duryea, but this is such an unusual case, and he won’t say a thing about...”

“It’s all right,” Duryea said. “Bring him in.”

The chief nodded to a uniformed officer. A moment later, there were the sounds of shuffling in the corridor, then a figure clothed in a blanket was thrust into the room, and as the officer gave him the final push, peeled back the blanket.

Gramps Wiggins, for once in his life looking completely embarrassed, stood before them, clad only in a woman’s bathing suit of rubber, a very scanty and decidedly feminine costume consisting of one piece. Over the bathing suit a never-ending procession of pelicans skimmed the surface of breakers or dived into the blue depths of the ocean, while seals regarded the performance with cynical smiles.

Duryea said, “I’ll be damned!”

“Make it double,” Milred observed.

Gramps looked at them with agony in his face. “Somebody stole my clothes,” he said.

“He’d evidently undressed on the beach, put this thing on, and gone in for a swim,” the chief said. “When he came out, his clothes were gone. The officer found him wandering along the beach. In fact, he was quite a center of attraction. You know him?”

“I’m acquainted with him,” Duryea said.

“He insisted he was related to Mrs. Duryea, and...”

“We’ll borrow the blanket,” Duryea interrupted, “and take him along.”

“I didn’t give ’em no name,” Gramps said.

“It’s all right,” Duryea said. “Come on.”

They bustled him into the automobile, and Duryea started for home. Gramps, swathed in the blanket in the rear seat, leaned forward eagerly, the blanket oozing forth the sickly sweet odor of jail disinfectant as he moved. “Now listen, son,” he said, “I got this thing figgered out. I...”

Duryea, keeping his eyes on the road, said, “If it’s all the same to you, Gramps, just save it.”

“But listen, son, this thing makes sense. This all fits together now...”

“I think,” Duryea told him, “that hereafter the investigation will proceed along more conventional lines. I’d hate to play dirty pool with you, Gramps, but unless we reach an understanding right now, I’m going to call up the chief of police, tell him that you haven’t made any satisfactory explanation of your conduct, and have you put back in jail for impersonating a woman in public.”

Gramps shrilled, “All right, make a damned fool out o’ yourself if you want to! I’m tryin’ to tell you.”

“I know you are.”

“Well, damn it, I’m goin’ to tell you. If you hadn’t been so dumb, an’ let that girl get you so flustered and embarrassed, you’d have known that bathin’ suit o’ hers had never been in the water.”

For a moment, the effect of what Gramps Wiggins was saying didn’t dawn on the district attorney, then, when it did, he suddenly swerved the car over to the curb and slowed. “What’s that?” he asked.

Gramps said, “She had your goat so bad you couldn’t see anythin’, but I looked her over carefully.”

“I’ll say you did,” Milred said. “What with that rubber bathing suit and your inspection, Gramps, if she has any hidden charms...”

“You don’t get me,” Gramps said. “I hated like hell to do it, but I kept my eyes off those things. I was Iookin’ at the margins of the bathin’ suit. There’s kind of a hem around the top, sort of a thing that keeps the rubber from startin’ to tear, an’ if you’d noticed right smart, you’d have seen there was some figures written on that hem, up in the back of the hoot-nanny that goes around the...”

“The shoulder straps,” Milred said to her husband.

“Go ahead,” Duryea said.

“Well, those figgers looked like stock numbers to me, an’ I wondered if anyone’d sell a bathing suit with stock numbers written on it that wouldn’t come off. You wouldn’t think that’d be good sales policy because a person who buys a smart suit like that...”

“Go ahead,” Duryea said.

“So I went uptown. Sure enough, there was some of these same suits in the biggest department store. They’re a branch of a Los Angeles outfit, you know, an’ they said these suits had only been in about a week. I asked them if a woman had been in recently and bought one, an’ the woman in charge of the bathin’ suit department said she’d sold one that afternoon. The description fit that Harpler girl. Well, I didn’t say too much, but I bought myself a bathin’ suit that would fit me, then I decided I’d go down on the beach an’ try it out in salt water, just to see what would happen from one swim. You remember when Ted Shale saw that girl on the boat, she’d been swimming, an’ right afterwards she jumped in the water an’...”

“Yes, yes,” Duryea interrupted. “What happened? What happened to the figures on the margin?”

“I’ll be gol-darned if I know,” Gramps said indignantly. “Somebody stole my clothes, and while I was wanderin’ around lookin’ for them, everybody started givin’ me the merry ha-ha. Then a cop came up an’ took me to jail. I ain’t had a chance to get the damn thing off to take a look at it. The figures are on the back.”

Milred beamed across at her husband. “Home, James.” she said, “and don’t spare the horses. Drive right through the main part of town.”

Duryea slammed the car into speed.

“Us Wigginses always come through in a pinch,” Milred stated.

Duryea swung through the residential district at high speed, slid his car to a stop in front of his house. “Come on, Gramps,” he said, bundling the spare figure in the blanket and rushing him across the curb to the house.

The maid, hearing the sound of Duryea’s latchkey in the door, came bustling forward, only to stop in horrified amazement at the sight that greeted her eyes. The district attorney, standing in the hallway, stripped the blanket from Gramps’ bony shoulders. Gramps turned around, twisted his head, trying in vain to see down between his own shoulder blades. Duryea said, “Hold still... Here... My gosh, you’re right, Gramps! The figures were here, weren’t they?”

“Uh huh.”

“They’ve all run together now — just a little blur of ink. That’s an ink which dissolves in water, and...”

“There you are,” Gramps said triumphantly to Milred. “I knew that girl was concealin’ somethin’. She didn’t want Frank to make a close examination of that suit, an’ that was why she was puttin’ on that snooty act.”

Milred said, “But why, Gramps? Why’s the bathing suit so important?”

Gramps said, “That’s where you got me. I’m just an amateur. Frank’s the professional.”

Duryea’s eyes narrowed as he contemplated the problem.

“Go ahead, son,” Gramps said. “What is it? Was it this Harpler woman that was over at Catalina Island with him and...”

“No,” Duryea said. “It was Mrs. Right. It had to be. But it could have been Joan Harpler’s bathing suit. Then Mrs. Right must have been aboard the Albatross with Joan Harpler. Let’s see. The Albatross tied up around six o’clock Saturday after-noon. That would make it.”

“Make what?” Milred asked.

“Give Mrs. Right plenty of time to commit the murder, and then get back aboard the Albatross. Joan Harpler can well be an innocent accessory. Mrs. Right could have told her some story which would lull her suspicions — probably that she wanted to be where she could watch her husband and see who came aboard the Gypsy Queen. Miss Harpler probably went uptown to get provisions right after she tied up. Mrs. Right could have rowed over and killed her husband — and it was probably premeditated murder because she must have taken Arthur Right’s gun out of his bureau drawer and then fixed up this story about how he’d gone up to grab the gun.”

“Go ahead,” Milred said. “You’re doing fine.”

“You’re danged tootin’ he’s doin’ fine,” Gramps said proudly. “He’s goin’ places now! He’s just a whizzin’!”

“Well,” Duryea said, “as soon as the murder was discovered, Miss Harpler realized that it would take a lot of explaining to account for Mrs. Right being secretly present on her yacht, so she said absolutely nothing about that when she told me her story. She then went aboard the yacht, knowing that Mrs. Right would keep under cover. Probably in that starboard stateroom with the door locked. But Nita Moline realized someone else was aboard the yacht — perhaps the scent of some perfume, or perhaps she saw and recognized Mrs. Right’s compact on a dressing table, or some other clue.”

Gramps nodded vigorously. “Atta boy! Stay with it.”

“And so,” Duryea went on, “Miss Moline wanted to trap Mrs. Right aboard that yacht. So she asked Miss Harpler what seemed to be an innocent enough request that she be permitted to use the yacht to watch the Gypsy Queen and see who went aboard. And then, having planted Ted Shale aboard the yacht, she calmly went out to check up on Pearl Right.”

“But wait a minute,” Milred said. “Pearl Right was over at Catalina Island Sunday afternoon because Miss Moline talked with her on the telephone.”

“Certainly,” Duryea said. “That’s the point. As soon as Miss Moline went to telephone, Joan Harpler locked Shale in his stateroom, went over to the yacht club and did some telephoning of her own. Miss Harpler got Warren Hilbers over at Catalina, told him to jump in his speedboat, set a course for Santa Delbarra, run wide open, and meet her at sea. Then she went back to her yacht, cut loose her mooring, started the motor, and headed out toward Catalina. Hilbers had calm water, so he could send his speedboat at a fast clip. And Mrs. Right and her brother concocted an alibi after they got together. They did it very nicely — that little touch when Hilbers told me that his sister had been with him all the time, except for a few short intervals; and she conscientiously reminded him that there’d been a time when she was taking a nap in the cottage Saturday afternoon. That was positively artistic.”

“But how about the bathing suit?” Milred asked.

“Don’t you see? When the speedboat caught up to the Albatross, Mrs. Right had made a bundle of all of her clothes. She could toss them aboard, but she couldn’t very well jump aboard the speedboat from the deck of the Albatross — not without having the speedboat stand in so closely that it would bump against the yacht and waken Shale. So she put on Miss Harpler’s bathing suit and jumped overboard. Then Miss Harpler swung the yacht in a wide circle, and Hilbers picked up his sister, turned around and made tracks for Catalina.”

“If the killin’ was at six o’clock,” Gramps said, “then Stearne must actually have mailed that there oil letter.”

Duryea nodded.

The old man said, “By gum, that accounts for it.”

“What?”

“That young oil man marryin’ his secretary.”

Duryea thought for a moment, then smiled. “I think you’ve got something there,” he said to Gramps. “Well, I’m beaded for Los Angeles.”

“Oh, I’m going, too,” Milred said.

“Me, too,” Gramps shouted. “I’ll get some clothes on an’... Oh, my gosh a’mighty!”

“What’s the matter?” Duryea asked.

“The trailer’s plumb locked up,” Gramps said. “The key to the trailer was in my clothes they stole. An’ you can’t bust those locks because I’ve got some contraptions of my own on the thing, burglar alarms that go off, an’...”

“You can wear — no, you can’t,” Milred said, surveying the difference in stature between her husband and Gramps. “It looks as though you’re out of the race.”

“No, I ain’t neither out o’ no race,” he shrilled. “I’ll go in these here clothes...”

“Don’t be silly. You can’t do that. It would ruin Frank’s case, and you can’t wear Frank’s clothes. You’d drop out through a coat sleeve, or slip through a pant leg at the most exciting moment.”

“Well—”

“No,” Duryea said. “I’ve jeopardized the dignity of my official position enough as it is. I can hardly go to Los Angeles to call on a widow and accuse her of murdering her husband, taking along my wife’s grandfather, attired in a woman’s tight-fitting rubber bathing suit.”

“Well, by God,” Gramps sputtered. “Of all the ingrates, of all the...”

“Come on, Milred,” Duryea said, grabbing her arm.

“Listen, Frank, Gramps is entitled to...”

“I tell you, he can’t,” Duryea interrupted. “Seconds are precious. I’ve got to get down there in time to close this case before something happens. I’m starting right now.”

“Sorry, Gramps,” Milred said.

They dashed out of the door and down the steps, jumped in the car, and went tearing away down the boulevard. Gramps Wiggins, attired in his rubber bathing suit, stared after them with speechless indignation, then an idea struck him. “By gum,” he said, “I can’t get the trailer open ’cause I ain’t got no keys, but I can drive the car all right, because it ain’t locked.”

“What’s that?” the maid asked.

Gramps wrapped the blanket around his shoulders, said, “Nothin’,” and sprinted out of the door. A moment later, the motor on his rattletrap car roared and sputtered into life, loose connecting rods and slapping pistons setting up a cacophony of discordant protest.

Without waiting for the car to even warm up, Gramps slammed in the gear, jerked the trailer into a swift start, and went rattling out of the driveway, the homemade trailer bouncing and swaying as the old man urged his car into reckless speed.