Too Many Bodies

Chapter Three Drink and Be Merry...

Taking one of the candleholders from my hand, Sedalia walked majestically through her front room and out into the hall. After setting the candle on the telephone stand, she consulted the phone book, placed the receiver to her ear and reached a finger toward the dial. Then she frowned, moved her finger to the rest instead and clicked the bar up and down.

Lowering my candle slightly, I peered at the floor. “Your killer has been smarter than you anticipated a second time,” I remarked dryly. “The cord’s cut.”

Some of Sedalia’s smug assurance faded. “Quick! Downstairs to the lobby booths! We’ll both start phoning and still make it.”

Rapidly she moved down the hall to the front door. I waited where I was, knowing what she would find because I had heard the key turn as the intruder went out.

“It’s locked!” she called, a note of urgency appearing in her voice.

Turning, she cupped her hand in front of the candle flame to keep it from blowing out and raced back to her apartment door. She disappeared in the direction of the kitchen, reappeared again a moment later.

“The back door, too! And the key’s gone.” She stared at me, suppressed rage in her expression. Then her eyes widened. “Your kit! Get it fast and get one of these doors open.”

I shook my head. “Sorry. You may recall I installed those locks myself as a special precaution against murderers because of your peculiar affinity for getting them mad at you. I can get them open, but it will take me the best part of an hour.”

“Take the hinges off!”

I shook my head again. “They are center-hung. You can’t get at them from either side unless the door is open. And the doors are three inches of solid oak. It would even take too long to chop through with a fire axe, which we don’t possess anyway. I thought of everything when I made those doors safe.”

“Everything but this!” she yelled at me. I have never seen Sedalia so frustrated.

“It wasn’t I who left the doors unlocked,” I reminded her. “And has it occurred to you the killer may be sitting right outside the front door waiting for you to get it open and barge out? I don’t know what you’re going to do, Sedalia, but I’m going to throw the inside bolts on both doors, see if I can fix the lights, and go back to bed. I’ll open the doors in the morning.”

For a long time Sedalia simply glared at me. Then her sense of humor suddenly came to her rescue and she burst out with a roar of laughter. She was still chuckling when she walked into her bedroom and slammed the door.

It took me some time to track down the trouble with the lights. After replacing a fuse in the box over the kitchen door only to have it promptly blow, I began checking light sockets. Finally I discovered the killer had inserted a penny in one of the lamp sockets in the hall. I removed it, replaced the fuse a second time and went back to bed.

I slept until eight, prepared breakfast and served it to Sedalia in bed, then went to work on the locks. By nine-thirty I had both doors open, had called the phone company from the downstairs lobby and had received a promise the phone would be fixed by noon.

At ten Inspector Stephen Home arrived.

“What’s wrong with your phone?” was the first thing he asked.

“Sedalia underestimated a murderer,” I told him, and explained what had happened.

The inspector frowned. “That explains all the phone calls I got at home this morning. Got me out of bed. Supposed to be off on Sundays, you know.”

Striding into Sedalia’s front room, he stared at her, the frown still marring the normal placidity of his face. Sedalia looked up with an expression of supreme innocence and offered him a drink.

“At ten in the morning?” he asked. “Sedalia, what put such a crazy idea in your head?”

She raised her eyebrows. “Crazy? If it weren’t for Hank’s silly locks, it would have worked, and then you’d think I was brilliant.”

“Still think you’re brilliant,” he said shortly. “Always did. But you can’t go setting yourself up like a target. And you’ve got to stop using Henry as a burglar. With his record, they’d send him up for life if he ever got caught.”

“Oh posh! I’d take the rap for him.”

The inspector shook his head wearily. There was a time when he would have given Sedalia a tart lecture on lawbreaking being just as wrong when your motives were pure as it was when you indulged in it for personal gain, but that time was as far in the past as my ability to be surprised. As a policeman he could never condone some of Sedalia’s unorthodox methods, but as a realist he knew the only way he could change her was to throw her in jail. If he was ever tempted to that length, he never showed it, but his restraint may well have stemmed from practical considerations as much as sentiment. Without overpowering evidence, it would have been difficult to jail a woman who called the governor, the mayor, the police commissioner and nearly every judge in the state by his first name.

Changing the subject, Home said all five suspects had phoned him that morning after getting nothing but busy signals from Sedalia’s phone. Irene Chambers, Monica Madigan and Gerald Rawlins had been merely curious as to what the notes meant, which of course the inspector was unable to tell them, but Alvin Christopher had been angry, and Jerome Straight wanted to sue Sedalia.

“Couldn’t simply have had Henry drop them in the mail boxes, I suppose?” he concluded.

“I wanted them to see the notes last night,” Sedalia said, as though that excused everything. “On what grounds does Straight think he can sue me?”

“Couldn’t quite make out. Defamation of character, maybe. Called him a murderer, didn’t you?”

Sedalia shook her head? “I simply informed a number of people a murderer was invited to call at the pm today. The cards made no mention of who the murderer was. Incidently, Steve, you’ll be here at three too, won’t you?”

He stared at her. “You mean you really think he’ll come?”

“Oh yes. Not as an overt murderer, of course. But as soon as the phone is fixed, I’ll have Hank phone all those who got cards and tell them the invitation stands whether they ever killed anyone or not.”

“Why?”

“Why gather them together? Self-defense, Steve. Now that my original plot failed, I want to assure the murderer it was only a trap, and I have no actual knowledge of his identity. I don’t mind being a target for one night, but I don’t want to spend all my time peering around corners.”

The inspector changed the subject again. “Traced the knife to Adrian Thorpe. Bought in a sporting goods store on Seventh about three on Friday afternoon. Just a few hours before the second murder. Clerk can’t remember what the buyer looked like, but knives with six-inch blades have to be registered. Buyer gave his name as Adrian Thorpe.”

I said, “So it was suicide after all!”

Both the inspector and Sedalia looked at me.

“Anybody can give a name,” the inspector said briefly. “Hardly think anyone would have tried to shoot Sedalia if Thorpe was a suicide.”

“We might find out which one of our suspects own guns,” Sedalia said thoughtfully. “The killer wouldn’t have been able to go out and buy one in the middle of the night, so he must have already owned the one he tried out on me.”

I said, “He’s not one of our five then. I don’t know much about guns, but I know an automatic when I see one, and that’s what our killer pointed at me. There is a-shotgun at Alvin Christopher’s house, a revolver at Jerome Straight’s, and no weapons whatever in the hotel rooms of the other three.”

“Could be carrying it with him,” Home commented. For the third time he changed the subject. “You have any luck with your phone calls, Sedalia?”

“Some. I’ll tell you about it at three. I didn’t learn anything very startling.”

“What phone calls were those?” I asked, surprised.

Sedalia said, “Some I made yesterday afternoon while you were looking for a baggage stub. Our local police don’t seem to have a phone.”

The inspector’s face reddened. “We just don’t waste taxpayers’ money.” He turned to me. “We wired for the same information she phoned about. Not in the habit of making private citizens run up their phone bills to gather police information, but the woman’s too impatient to wait for a telegraphed answer. If I made a long-distance call every time Sedalia suggested it, be out of a job in a month.”

“Who have you been phoning long distance?” I asked Sedalia.

“You’ll learn about it at three,” she said laconically.

Under the circumstances, Sedalia’s Sunday afternoon party would have been a strained and uncomfortable affair even if she not had insisted I prepare a bowl of what she calls “Pale Dynamite”. The recipe, in the event you ever wish to throw a drunken orgy, calls for two quarts of grain alcohol, cleverly disguised in two quarts of grapefruit juice, one gallon of sparkling water, a half pint of lemon juice, sugar to taste and the usual lemon rinds and cherries dumped in to dress up the bowl.

The resulting punch has a most innocuous taste, hardly seeming to contain any alcohol at all. But if you are adept at arithmetic, you can figure out from the formula its strength is roughly equivalent to one-hundred proof whiskey cut half-and-half with soda. The above quantity is sufficient to render eight normal drinkers unconscious.

As there were eight persons present, this would have been just the right amount, except that Sedalia and I both knew what was in the punch, and Inspector Stephen Home began to suspect after the second glass. Consequently only our five suspects eventually became thoroughly drunk, and the inspector merely grew gently wobbly.

The insidious thing about Pale Dynamite is that you can drink two or three glasses before you begin to feel any effect at all. After that you do not have to drink any more, for you already have in your stomach enough alcohol to constitute a full day’s supply for an alcoholic. As straight alcohol is absorbed into the blood stream much more rapidly than liquor, you naturally become drunk more rapidly. Before you realize you have underestimated the potency of the punch, it is much too late to do anything except relax and enjoy your stupor.

I served it in our largest punch cups, and by the second round the party noticably lost its sense of strain. Up to then Sedalia played the chattering hostess, keeping the conversation on a small talk level and furnishing most of it herself, which failed to cover the obvious fact that no one else was much interested in small talk. But as I circled the room to pour the third round, she got down to business.

As it happened, this timing was perfect, for though not a person in the room was more than mildly stimulated at the moment, each glass of punch carried the equivalent wallop of three normal highballs, and within thirty minutes all our guests except the inspector were destined to be thoroughly intoxicated. On the third round I got refusals from no one except Inspector Home, who frowned thoughtfully at the punch bowl as he shook his head.

“In a way this is a business meeting as well as a social gathering,” Sedalia said when I had completed replenishing glasses. “As you probably all understand by now, if Hank made himself clear over the phone, the rather unorthodox invitations I sent out were designed to make the murderer of Mrs. Chambers and Mr. Thorpe panic. And as you also know, he did panic, attempting to kill me last night because he thought I knew his identity.”

“He?” Alvin Christopher asked.

She waved one hand impatiently at the assistant district attorney. “Or she. As Hank has so frequently pointed out to me that I’m bored with the subject, the English language should contain some personal pronoun like ‘hiser’ to cover inclusive use of both sexes at the same time.” She paused, then went on with a strange note of emphasis in her voice. “While my trap failed to catch the murderer, it did settle one thing. It-removed all doubt that the killer might be someone other than one of the five of you who received cards.”

A small stir went around the room and the guests glanced at each other with a kind of surreptitious fascination. The assistant district attorney weaved erect angrily.

“Do I understand you include me as a suspect?” he demanded.

Sedalia grinned at him. “You were with the group who discovered the body, and Mrs. Chambers had invited you to the meeting. You must have had some kind of connection with her, or you wouldn’t have been invited.”

“Before she phoned and invited me, I never heard of the woman,” Christopher said hotly. “As a matter of fact I didn’t even know there was to be a meeting. I assumed she wanted legal advice and it would be a private conference between the two of us.”

“Relax,” Sedalia said. “I haven’t accused you of anything.” She looked around at the group. “I really got you together for two reasons. The first is that I don’t care to be a target for a killer, and I want the murderer to know I have no idea which of you five he is.”

Monica Madigan drained her third glass. “Three of us have pretty iron-clad alibis. We could hardly have killed Aunt Agatha if we weren’t even in town.”

Sedalia nodded agreeably. “Alibis can be manufactured. If it was a premeditated murder, it would be strange for the killer not to have an alibi.”

“Just how would I get hold of the stub of a ticket which was used on the four-thirty train from Kansas City if I weren’t on the train?” Monica demanded.

“Any number of ways. You might have arrived much earlier, killed your aunt and then gone to the station to meet the four-thirty train. Perhaps you knew someone coming in on the train, and contrived to get his stub, or perhaps you sized up the male passengers getting off, approached one and asked for his used stub with the explanation it was on a bet of some kind. Or perhaps you simply saw someone throw away the stub and picked it up.”

“I never heard anything so silly in my life!” Irene Chambers inserted.

“I’m not saying any such thing actually happened,” Sedalia said. “I’m simply pointing out alibis can be manufactured.”

Gerald Rawlins rose to carry his empty glass toward the punch bowl, staggered slightly, looked surprised and set the glass down instead of holding it out to me for a refill. He returned to his chair walking rather carefully.

“It would be difficult to blow my alibi up in the same way you blew up Monica’s,” he said. “The airlines keep a passenger list.”

Jerome Straight suddenly put in, “You remarked it would be strange for the killer not to have an alibi. I haven’t, so that let’s me out.”

Sedalia exploded this self-interested reasoning. “I said if the murder were premeditated. In some ways this one has all the earmarks of a spur-of-the-moment crime.”

Without amplifying this remark, she changed the subject. “The second reason I gathered you all together was to see if we could get a little light on information I got by long-distance phone yesterday. I made calls to people I know in Dallas, Kansas City and Chicago.”

Who these people were she did not divulge, but I knew one of them was a mayor, one a circuit judge and one a police commissioner. Sedalia’s network of influential friends throughout the country gave her sources of information almost superior to those available to the police.

“I learned some interesting things,” Sedalia went on. “For one thing, Mrs. Madigan, I learned you did not divorce your ‘stinker of a no-good husband,’ as you termed him. He divorced you. I won’t publicly disclose the grounds, but you remarked to your lawyer if your aunt ever heard the full story, she would cut yon out of her will permanently.”

Monica flushed. “My lawyer had no business violating a client’s confidence.”

“No,” Sedalia agreed. “But what people tell often depends on who asks them. Anyway, that seems to give you an excellent motive.”

Monica shrugged. “You’ll have a hell of a time proving I wasn’t on that four-thirty train, because I was.”

Sedalia turned to Irene Chambers. “Apparently you were in no immediate danger of having your inheritance reduced, Miss Chambers. But it seems you have bad luck at roulette. I understand a character named Farewell Gus has given you just thirty days to raise the twelve thousand dollars you owe him.”

Irene’s expression was astonished. “How... how did you learn that?”

“Chicago’s mayor is one of my closest friends. Apparently he put the whole police force to work digging up your history. In case you’re interested, it took them two hours to learn everything you’ve done in the past ten years. Very efficient police department you have in Chicago.”

“Apparently,” Irene said. She finished her drink with a defiant gesture. “You’ll have as much trouble proving I wasn’t on the three pm train from Chicago as you have proving Monica wasn’t on the other one.”

Rising from her chair, she started to cross the room to where I stood next to the punch bowl. But after two steps a peculiar expression grew on her face. Carefully, she turned around, set her cup on an end table and resumed her seat.

“In Dallas I learned something too,” Sedalia said, glancing at Gerald Rawlins. “Nothing nearly as sensational, but rather interesting. The auditing firm which went over the books of Fibrolux Plastics confirms the hundred-thousand dollar shortage and traced it to Adrian Thorpe, but they didn’t report it to you. They reported it to a company official named Jonathan Toomey. Unfortunately, my informant can’t reach Mr. Toomey until tomorrow.”

Gerald waved one hand impatiently. “Jonothan is first vice president. Naturally they’d report it to the senior executive after Ad. Jonathan relayed the information to me.”

Sedalia shook her head. “That isn’t the reason they gave. They said they would have dealt with the company treasurer except they couldn’t understand how he had missed the shortage himself. It was pretty obvious.”

Gerald’s normally red face turned even redder. “A polite way of saying I didn’t keep the books too efficiently, eh? Not too polite at that.” Then he shrugged. “All right. So I’m a figurehead treasurer, and I don’t look at the company books twice a year. Ad himself supervised the bookkeeping department, while I played golf, if you want to know. Aunt Aggie insisted I work for the company, but she also refused to let me have any responsibility. So I said the hell with it, and let Ad run things.”

“About the way I got the picture,” Sedalia said.